Challenge
About 200 tickets arrived each day, most of them generated by device alerts. Email-connector tickets arrived as P3 Medium, creating after-hours noise and forcing the team to manually sort priorities. Team members were also using external AI tools for responding to tickets and calls, raising a data protection concern.
Solution
CW AI Agents™ review tickets across the alert, customer help desk, IT and field services, and quote-request boards. They classify, prioritize, categorize, surface relevant context and documentation, and keep AI-assisted work inside the ConnectWise Platform™.
Results
Informational alerts are now prioritized appropriately, documentation is easier to use in the ticket workflow, new hires ramp up with less shadowing, and CTS is taking on more clients without adding staff. The team also eliminated external use of ChatGPT for those workflows, helping to protect company and customer data.
From “what’s burning hottest” to informed prioritization
Community Technology Services (CTS) supports both the property management companies that rely on it for business IT and the communities those companies manage. Because much of that work involves physical systems, most tickets are generated by devices rather than by people seeking help. Ben Phillips estimates that the company receives about 200 tickets per day, with roughly 180 of them tied to alerts.
The old process put too much judgment work on the team. Alerts, help desk requests, IT and field services work, and quote requests all had to be sorted manually across boards.
“Our ticket intake process was informal. Prioritization depended on who saw the ticket first and which fire was burning the hottest. We needed a better way to identify what needed to be addressed first.” - Ben Phillips, Community Technology Services
CW AI Agents across every board, not just the help desk
CW AI Agents now review tickets across the service boards and apply priority, type, and subtype. That reach matters because CTS is not using AI only in a traditional help desk queue. The agents also review device alerts, field services, IT work, and quote-request boards.
“[CW] AI Agents review and enrich every ticket across all of our boards. They help us understand what’s needed and handle the prioritization for us.” - Ben Phillips, Community Technology Services
That categorization has also improved visibility. CTS can now see more clearly what is causing problems across the board and can use that view in customer reporting.
Additionally, for voicemail-generated tickets, the agents help derive context from messages that were not always clear enough for a technician to act on quickly.
The clearest early outcome: quieter nights
The alert board created the most visible pain. Because tickets from the email connector arrived as P3 Medium, they could trigger the overnight and weekend on-call alert even when they were informational. Phillips estimates that about 70% of alert-board volume is informational. The team still reviews those alerts, but CW AI Agents help prioritize them to reflect the work required.
Our teams used to get woken up overnight for things that were non-issues. Now, being on call feels more manageable because they’re only seeing the issues we actually need to address.
During business hours, the same change moved technicians away from repetitive triage: deciding whether an alert was real, what priority it deserved, and where it belonged. That gave the team more room to do work Phillips described as more challenging and more interesting.
Documentation that shows up when technicians need it
The year before adopting CW AI Agents, CTS invested heavily in documentation. That work mattered because every customer site is different. The challenge was adoption: the documentation existed, but the team did not consistently open it while working on tickets.
The ConnectWise AI Assistant™ changed the path to that knowledge. Relevant customer or device documentation can surface within the ticket, reducing the need to leave the workflow to search for it in another system.
“ConnectWise AI Agents’ integration with our existing knowledge base has made a real difference for our technicians. Relevant customer and device documentation is surfaced right in the ticket, so they don’t have to stop and search for it.” - Ben Phillips, Community Technology Services
Recurring issues are where the value is easiest to see. If a system goes down multiple times, the prior ticket and the technician who handled it are already visible. Management is reinforcing that habit by documenting issues as they are discovered and sharing new articles with the team.
Faster ramp and knowledge that stays with the business
CTS adopted CW AI Agents during a period of turnover in the IT team. Phillips credits the new hires’ existing familiarity with ConnectWise as part of the ramp-up, but he said that having CW AI Agents pull together ticket context, documentation, and prior history helped new team members become useful to clients sooner.
“New team members are ramping up faster and more practically. They don’t have to shadow every request or triage decision to understand how we work. With the context right there, they can start making an impact sooner.” - Ben Phillips, Community Technology Services
AI inside the platform instead of outside the workflow
Before ConnectWise offered its own AI experience, team members used ChatGPT to support their responses to tickets and calls. Moving that work into the CW Platform™ allowed CTS to reduce its use of external AI and address a security concern Phillips had from the beginning.
Before this, our team was using ChatGPT for responses and call transcripts. Now we can keep that work inside ConnectWise. It’s easy for our team to access, and our data stays protected in the ConnectWise environment, along with our clients’ data.
Resolution notes clients can understand
Field service technicians are not sitting in a ticket queue all day. They can enter the work completed at a site and use the assistant to draft a resolution. That resolution appears not only in the ticket workflow but also on customer invoices.
“Our customer base isn’t technical, so we trained our agents to translate our work for our target vertical: property managers. Updates are written in a language they can understand, without our team having to rethink every word.” - Ben Phillips, Community Technology Services
Growing without growing headcount
Efficiency is a stated company goal for CTS, and CW AI Agents is one of the initiatives the company has adopted to support it. The outcome is best framed operationally: CTS is onboarding more clients while keeping the same team and avoiding overload.
We’re continuing to grow our customer base without increasing headcount, and our team isn’t burning the candle at both ends. They’re able to keep pace with the growth.
Looking ahead
Phillips is candid that CTS is still learning how to use ConnectWise AI Agents more fully. His wish list points toward greater autonomy: merging duplicate tickets, closing tickets where appropriate, triggering workflows, and extending agent support into opportunities and more areas of the ConnectWise Platform.
“The nice thing about the standard operating procedures is that we can update them a little at a time. That helps the agent get better, and it helps us keep improving how we work.” - Ben Phillips, Community Technology Services
Key takeaways
- Prioritization creates human impact: When every alert is treated as medium priority, the cost shows up after hours. CTS shows how AI-assisted priority setting can reduce noise while keeping real issues visible.
- Documentation has to meet the technician in the workflow: CTS had already invested in documentation. The adoption lift came when the relevant documentation surfaced in the ticket, rather than requiring a separate search.
- AI can preserve working knowledge during team change: During turnover, ConnectWise AI Agents helped newer technicians access prior context, recurring-issue history, and client-specific information with less shadowing.
- Platform-native AI can reduce shadow-tool risk: Moving ticket-response and transcript work into ConnectWise helped CTS reduce external AI use and keep company and customer data in the operating platform.
- Client-facing language matters: Agent-drafted resolutions helped field-service work become clearer on tickets and invoices for property managers who need plain-language explanations.
- Scale claims need proof of discipline: CTS is adding clients without adding headcount.
- Agentic automation and assistive AI show different value: Prioritization reduced alert noise, while the ConnectWise AI Assistant helped technicians use documentation and create clearer client-facing resolutions.
