Approvals are here to stay.
For a long time MSPs have tried to implement a change control process, ensuring that the proper requests are getting approved by the right people before a change happens. For businesses that have to be compliant, this is non-negotiable. For the others, it takes one bad incident of giving access to the wrong person for it to be a new line in a standard operating procedures. And as AI continues to gain popularity with IT service requests, approvals are going to become more important than ever.
As AI agents collect more details to fully-triage requests, they develop a deeper understanding of what customers are asking, and they are building the ability to automatically fix it. But the request still needs an approval to move forward, creating an unnecessary bottleneck and delay for resolution—not because the approval isn’t needed, but because a human has to pull up the list of approvers, send the right contact the approval request, wait for it to be approved, then resolve the request.
We believe that the power of modern communication channels and AI have unlocked automated approvals—and not in the near future, but now.
Our goal is ****that any request that needs an approval will automatically get it from the right contact before it goes to a technician or automation platform.
We are by MSPs, for MSPs. And as MSPs, one area we know that has significantly lacked cleaning is the list of approvers for customers for different requests. And there was no reason to normalize it. We can put it in a document and file it in IT Glue or SharePoint or wherever you can dream. Because there were no better options—until now.
The core component to getting automated approvals with is Contact Types. You can manually trigger approvals on a per individual basis, but that will require your technicians to look it up every time. With Thread, setting up the right contacts types for each type of request will enable you to automate all different types of requests and significantly reduce friction and wait-times for your customers.
Automated Approval Contact Types:
At minimum, you should have a general approver that can handle the majority of requests. Then depending on the maturity of your customer, typically dictated either by the size of the company or by any regulations, you should look to create the other 3 contact types.
Once you have your contact types and approvers sorted out, assign the contacts in your PSA to the corresponding contact type.
Start with a few companies that have strict approval needs, then choose the top requests that need approvals, and set up your Intents in Admin >> Magic AI >> Magic Agents.
Automated Approval Intent Example: Hardware purchase request
Intent: A request to acquire new equipment such as computers, monitors, chargers, phones, etc., either for oneself or on behalf of another user.
Information needed: Full name, email address, equipment type, equipment quantity, equipment specifications, reason needed, delivery location, urgency of request, any additional special requests.
Needs approval? Yes → General approver.
This means every time a customer reaches out to ask for buy hardware, the Agent will ask what hardware are they ordering, and then automatically reach out to the appropriate contacts to get approval! The AI will work to get either an approval or a rejection. Once it gets that answer, it will have a service request that is ready to work. That means when a technician gets the request, they can confidently just perform the task.
Or even more amazing - you can trigger an automation to place the order!
Technicians can also access automated approvals with a quick slash command /approvals to pull up the Request Approvals modal, where they can simply select a specific contact or Contact Type to send it off!
MSPs are rapidly adopting AI to complete more and more of the menial, time-sucking work that is required to document a ticket. (Many vendors out there are calling this “auto-triage” when it’s really just automated tagging. More on the difference between automated triage and agentic triage like Thread has here.)
Automated approvals with AI agents are simply the next step in removing unnecessary, human-centered delays. The AI isn’t approving the request but rather pinging the exact right person for approvals within seconds rather than minutes or hours.
Ready to move your MSP’s approval process into the modern century? Book a demo of our AI Service Desk platform for a glimpse into the future of your profitable, efficient, delightful service desk.