649 Aportio: The AI-Powered Email and Alert Management Game-Changer for MSPs

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The podcast you are about to hear is a vendor profile episode for PitchIt, an annual startup competition and accelerator program organized by IT Nation, a ConnectWise community. This year, 26 companies from seven different countries have been selected to participate. Companies go through a 16-week business transformation course led by industry experts and ConnectWise leaders. 

After the 16 weeks, each company will be required to complete a virtual pitch. From that, judges will select three finalists to present their pitch live at IT Nation Connect in November. The first place winner receives $70,000, second place winner receives $30,000, third place, a set of steak knives.

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This episode is presented by Thread, last year's PitchIt winner. Thread's mission is to help IT service providers deliver service magic. Visit them at itbusinesspodcast.com slash Thread.

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Hello, friends. Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, a show for IT professionals and managed service providers where we help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. We are now into the swing of it. 

PitchIt 2024 has begun, and we are now into our series of vendor spotlights. And right now, I have joining me, Scott Green with Aportio Technologies, and they are an IT service management startup. And basically, they help bring AI into a lot of what we do in our tickets. 

So, Scott, welcome to the show. Thank you. I was a little vague on how I said that because I wanted you to actually do the correct description. 

So, tell us a little bit about Aportio Technologies. Sure. Look, fundamentally, we help service desk agents sing to their customers.

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When you say singing, you might be wondering, what are you talking about? And service desk agents have the toughest job. They are the heartbeat of every service provider, and they're often the least paid. Sometimes not. 

Sometimes it's a CE as well. But they take the gnarliest questions from customers, and as part of that, they make or break reputations. But they also suffer from churn. 

The service desk is a stepping stone to what people really want to do next, or alternatively, they're just waiting for the next coffee break. And then there's Joe. Now, Joe was a service agent that worked with me a couple of years ago when I was CEO of an MSP.

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And, yeah, the thing about Joe was that at a particular time, I think he dealt with a customer who was really anxious or really kind of upset. And it got to the point where they couldn't reason with them. And so he started to sing a lullaby. 

And the customer kind of stopped mid-ramp and said, what are you doing? And Joe said, well, you know, I couldn't reason with you. I couldn't get through any other way. So I thought maybe singing to you would help. 

And it transformed the conversation. Now, what's that got to do with AI? Well, Joe needs time to show his talents. And in order to do that, we need to take away mundane tasks. 

We need to help him do things faster. We need to give him more time to sing. And Aportio provides an AI plugin for email and alert management that automatically categorizes requests, prioritizes them, and pre-assigns actions and standardizes that process across all customers so that it speeds up the ability to onboard new customers. 

But most importantly, it gives Joe time to think. And if he needs to, to sing. And having been doing this for the last five years, we're new to the U.S. market, but we're really ready to help U.S. agents sing like Joe. 

All right. So I was going to ask you about the fact that you had been around for a while, but you just came to the U.S., was it the end of 2023? Yep. Expanding to North America and getting a 50% increase in New Zealand. 

So your company started in New Zealand and Australia, right? Correct, yeah. I mean, I'm a very proud Kiwi. We built the platform and our early stage customers were in New Zealand and Australia. 

It was a great proving ground for what we're doing. But we've kind of slowly increasing our footprint in other markets as well. So we now have customers across New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the USA. 

All right. So help me understand a little bit about the management because it looks like your product kind of manages tickets using an email system. And I need to ask the question, is this something where if you don't have a ticketing system and you just do support by email, it'll manage it? Or does it work with existing PSAs where it will intercept the tickets coming in by email? Yeah, I mean, we work as a plugin to a number of existing PSAs. 

And some of those systems already have inbuilt solutions that kind of basically manage email. But to us, it's kind of like a lounge bar pianist with a limited repertoire. Alternatively, there's some tools at the very high end of the market that, again, deal with that problem. 

But they're a high-performing band. And when they turn up for a show, they demand a purpose-built stage and a separate background room for their afterparty. And what we're doing is providing a simple plugin that leverages AI, that doesn't require change at the back end and complete re-platforming. 

And it doesn't have you trying to convince customers that they think they like country and western, but they really love punk. We're not trying to change customers to get them to use channels that they're not used to. People use and love email. 

And we're fine with people using other tools as well. But the answer is not to try and convince them that they shouldn't use this. We want to provide a slick experience across the email channel. 

All right. So, we're talking about an agent, you said. Now, is the name of the system still called Inbox Agent? Yep. 

Okay. So, exactly how it sounds and simplifies ticket logging. So, in terms of the AI aspect, you mentioned that it would kind of take away the mundane tasks. 

So, I see from a lot of the descriptions, you know, it obviously could filter out, you know, unnecessary alerts, junk mail. How much work is required by us, the MSP, to kind of set up what those parameters are to assist the in cataloging those emails? Sure. So, out of the box, we already strip unnecessary noise out of emails, disclaimers, signature files, you know, obscure URLs, images. 

So, you know, that goes, that's just out of the box. We also have a standardized categorization approach using our AI models. So, our service providers can either embrace that or they can map our categorization to their standard categorization models. 

So, we can, if you like, mimic their current structure. And then from there, that base level is enough to get them started. So, we can turn on the service and a service provider can be up and running in a matter of hours. 

You know, the tuning of the service is really where it starts to supersede. Yeah, and that's when the service provider can use our self-service rules feature to start looking at the most common types of requests that come in, you know, look at recurring patterns that they see, and then tune the rules to perform very specific actions around those common use cases for their business. So, there's things that are common to all MSPs, but every MSP has their own quirks as well, and that's what our service is designed to let them go there and tune it to their special needs.

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All right. So, I'll be honest with you and with the listeners that I do not have a PSA. So, this is something where I would use it straightly with my email provider in doing that.

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But, in terms of comparing Inbox Agent with some of the other more advanced systems in the industry that say they would do that for us, what makes Inbox Agent unique? Sure. So, basically, the things that make it unique are, firstly, that we've designed it with the MSP in mind. So, you know, we've built features that are based on being a really simple plug-in, and we're assuming that they already have a PSA. 

So, we plug into the popular ones. We deal with both user emails and alerts, so it's not just about user emails. We can deal with system-generated alerts as well. 

The pre-trained model that we have has a very high degree of accuracy, so we get it right out of the box more times than not. And the AI-based categorization means that we can create actions to solve problems easier and faster than most systems we've seen. And the richness of what we do really deals with either very simple, but right through to really complex use cases. 

So, yeah, this tool is the first step, but it's a critical step that lets other automation tools sing as well. Okay. Now, I know that you mentioned earlier that, you know, you had an MSP, you were CEO for a while. 

How much of this grew out of your experience there in terms of, you know, is this kind of what you did and you've just, you know, branched it out to its own company, or what's the origin story? Yeah, the origin is, I mean, I've spent 40 years largely in the MSP land growing a business from 5 to 275 agents or 275 staff when we sold that business, and then I was running a larger MSP that we grew from 350 to 650 people. So, you know, I've kind of had the opportunity to work across a pretty broad spectrum of MSP requirements. Yeah, basically, I didn't create the service or me and my team didn't create the service while there. 

We saw the problem. We saw that actually being a large incumbent actually stops innovation. It doesn't actually fuel it. 

So, kind of, it was stepping away from that MSP enterprise space that let me really focus on designing and building the solution that we have now. So, obviously, you didn't see a solution already out in the industry. Can you point to maybe a couple of other things that would set you aside from, you know, all of the ones, because there's a ton of AI helpers coming out now. 

To be honest, I don't know all of them, but in terms of, you know, the inbox agent, you know, we talked about, you know, making life easier for the service desk personnel. Obviously, getting rid of the noise certainly helps with alert fatigue in that sense, but what about in terms of triggering like responses and stuff like that? Do you go that extra step in making yourself different? Yeah, sure. So, we certainly see that, you know, our value proposition is that we've been doing this for a while now. 

So, this isn't kind of, you know, spur of the moment, gosh, generative AI is here. It helps us do these things better. Let's build a product. 

We've got a product that's been in market for well over five years, so it's proven and it's feature rich, and we're now augmenting that existing platform even more with some of the generative AI capability that, you know, people are talking about on market extensively now. So, kind of just trying to add bolts on some, you know, auto-generated answers or some suggestions for an agent. Yeah, like we can do that just like everyone else can, but they only really make sense when you're actually able to plug them into a process that is already well and truly secure and proven around bringing customer requests through seamlessly into the platform. 

If you give junk to AI models, you'll get junk back out, so the cleaning is really important. The analytics around the side of it, so that the dashboards that help inform where they can really focus their next efforts and then triggering with our rules and workflows, triggering actions in a really discrete way that sort of says, hey, you know, when it's a new customer request, we want to deal with it this way and we want this action to happen, but when it's a repeat call, we want this to happen, and if they're unhappy, we actually want to trigger this activity as well, and those different activities, we can trigger all of those across either a single backing system or across multiple backing systems, so this is a platform that integrates extensively with different tools. It's proven, it's secure, it's scalable, it's across three regions in AWS currently, and we'll add more as we need to, so we're not talking about a bright shiny kind of new tool. 

It's proven, but it's scaling out as well. All right, so let me ask the weird, odd question of how has life been in marketing this to MSPs in the US as opposed to, you know, New Zealand and Australia? Look, in some regards, it's actually a heck of a lot easier because I think, you know, New Zealand has a reputation and Australia as well, you know, it's a long way from the large population bases, so we've had to innovate and be creative and kind of do things on the smell of an oily rag for hundreds of years, and that permeates the way people look at these sorts of technologies. Gosh, you know, gee, if we did this, we could do that, and, you know, can we do it ourselves? You go to bigger markets like the US and they go, oh, great, I haven't got time to do it myself, you know, I can see that this problem needs to be solved, I can see that you can solve the problem, hey, let's give it a go, and so in that sense, it's just been a really pleasant surprise that, you know, you're talking to, in some cases, much bigger organizations than others, so very, very similar in size, but they're just kind of much less inclined to try and do it themselves because they realize that the game you're playing is a much bigger one.

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All right, well, folks, if you are listening on any of the apps, you should see in the show notes links to apportio.com, and you can go ahead and get a peek at what they've got to offer and contact them for more information, but we'll be seeing them on the trail to pitch it, and I will see you, Scott, at both of the IT nations and wish you luck in this year's pitch a competition, and, you know, I know you're rooting for first place, and if you had to settle for something like second, not as much money, but, of course, third, do you know what you're getting for third place? Yeah, I've hit a rumor, steak nice. Steak nice, okay. I just want to see if people were paying attention and all of that, but nonetheless, I wish you the best, of course, rooting for you guys to get first place because you get a nice check with that and certainly help to, you know, catapult you guys into this U.S. market that you've been doing now for the last few months. 

So, Scott, thank you very much. Thank you. All right, folks, that's going to do it, and we'll be back with more episodes of the IT Business Podcast. 

Check out the website, itbusinesspodcast.com, and check out the other Pitch It vendor profiles for 2024. We will see you soon, and until then, Holla!