The managed service provider (MSP) model has long relied on remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools to keep customer environments running. Typically, alerts are fired, tickets are raised, and engineers respond. But according to Thrive COO Scott Steele, that reactive approach is increasingly at odds with how users expect IT to work.
Instead, the fast-growing MSP is building its entire service delivery model around ServiceNow, using automation, AI, and digital employee experience (DEX) technology to identify and resolve issues before users ever raise a ticket.
“In the MSP space, the customer almost always has to reach out of their environment to engage with you. That creates friction. What DEX allows us to do is be embedded into their environment and have an active view of what’s happening,” said Steele.
“RMM has a lot of information flowing back and then flowing back into the environment. Very ‘let’s look at your screen and troubleshoot with you’. That can be very intrusive for the customer.”
DEX, by contrast, provides continuous insight into endpoint health and user experience.
ServiceNow as the “Backplane”
What may also set Thrive apart from many MSPs is its decision to anchor everything in ServiceNow.
“ServiceNow is the backplane for us,” said Steele. “I don’t want my engineers working in multiple environments. As much as possible, I want them working in ServiceNow.”
DEX data, alerts, and remediation workflows are all integrated directly into the ServiceNow workspace. Steele likens the effect on engineers to augmentation rather than replacement.
“It’s almost like putting an exoskeleton on. They’re bigger, faster, stronger. It just makes their lives easier and allows them to solve problems faster for customers.”
This approach also enables the MSP to capture real-time experience and sentiment data from end users.
“The experience scoring of our users is equally as important,” said Steele. “The sentiment they have around how they’re using technology allows us to be prescriptive and make sure we’re delivering the right outcomes.”
Automation With Outcomes in Mind
AI is central to Thrive’s ServiceNow strategy, but Steele is careful to draw a distinction between hype and impact.
“Automation is the outcome. AI is not the outcome,” he said. “AI is the toolset that allows you to get to the outcome.”
That philosophy has driven significant automation across the company’s operations. In the past year alone, the company automated more than 755,000 tasks and handled approximately 840,000 alerts without human intervention.
Rather than positioning automation as a cost-cutting exercise, Steele views AI as a way to improve the day-to-day experience of its own engineers as much as that of its customers.
“It was [ServiceNow CEO Bill] McDermott who said, ‘we’re just taking away the soul-crushing work of our people.’ And we think about it the same way,” he said. “We’re taking away the soul-crushing work. Our employees are still our most valuable asset. This helps our customers, our employees, and the company overall.”
A Differentiated MSP Model
From the technology partner side, Mark Banfield, CRO at DEX specialist TeamViewer, argues that many providers are still constrained by labour-intensive operating models, where growth depends on hiring more engineers.
“Most MSPs use RMM platforms, and I would say most of those approaches are still fairly reactive,” said Banfield. “What Thrive is doing is going all in on autonomy.”
By integrating TeamViewer’s DEX capabilities natively into ServiceNow, Thrive can proactively identify and fix issues before users notice them – or, when users do call, give ServiceNow agents immediate context about what is happening on the device.
“That means we improve the way ServiceNow can provide remote support,” said Banfield. “It reduces mean time to resolution because the agent already knows what the issue is.”
The Future: Invisible IT?
Looking ahead, Steele points to integrations with collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, AI-driven first responses, and automated voice interactions as ways to further reduce friction.
“We want to get closer to our customers, solve problems faster, and make it easier to do business with us,” he said.
At the same time, Steele is conscious that not every customer wants the same experience.
“Some customers don’t want AI trying to solve something first, so we give them the choice.”
Final Thoughts
For the ServiceNow ecosystem, the approach offers an example of how MSPs can evolve beyond reactive RMM models. Said Banfield: “No one wants to raise a ticket and wait six hours. Users just want things to work.”
If Thrive’s bet pays off, ServiceNow, rather than traditional RMM, may increasingly become the control plane through which that expectation is delivered.