3 min Applications

Kaseya adds Cooper Bots to successful Cooper AI portfolio

Kaseya adds Cooper Bots to successful Cooper AI portfolio

Automation is the name of the game to help MSPs serve their customers better and more efficiently, acoording to Kaseya’s Fred Voccola. The company today at DattoCon announced Cooper Bots to help with this.

Kaseya introduced Cooper AI in 2021. Despite its somewhat jolly appearance by choosing a dog as its mascot (CEO Fred Voccola’s dog), this was a serious move for the company. The first product to use the Cooper AI Engine, Cooper Insights, is an AI assistant that enables users to make the most of Kaseya’s IT Complete platform. The analogy to Microsoft’s Clippy is an easy one. There is a big difference, however, we hear during a conversation we had with Voccola. “The first thing you did with Clippy was turn it off, Cooper Insights is actually used,” he points out. Users actually adopt 40 percent of the suggestions it makes. That makes it a success.

Cooper Bots

Insights into how to best use Kaseya IT Complete isn’t enough. This shows what is possible, but does not really directly lighten the burden of an MSP. For that, Kaseya today introduces Cooper Bots. These bots also use the Cooper AI Engine. They do what we have come to expect from bots from the world of RPA. They automate repetitive tasks. According to Voccola, MSPs spend 80 percent of their time doing these repetitive tasks, which only make up 20 percent of the tasks they have to do. If they can solve this imbalance, MSPs can focus more on other things. Things that add more to the bottom line of an MSP than manually rotating passwords, creating accounts and so on.

Voccola emphasizes that Cooper Bots don’t have to function completely autonomously. You can also deploy them in such a way that there is always a human doing a review before the bot goes into production. He also further emphasizes that Kaseya can build these bots very quickly. That’s right, Kaseya builds the bots, the MSP does not do that. The MSP can obviously do the exact configuration, but Kaseya builds them. They can create the bots so quickly because the entire software stack (IT Complete) is the company’s own. Kaseya offers the Cooper Bots as free additional functionality within IT Complete. Voccola further promises that the Cooper Bots are extremely easy to use. You don’t have to be a developer to get started with them.

At first glance, Cooper Bots is another step down the path of practical AI applications for Kaseya. Whether this new addition will be as successful as Cooper Insights will depend largely on how well they work. We have no insight into that at this point. Based on the success of Cooper Insights, we have no reason to believe at this time that it will be problematic. In any case, the gains MSPs can make with Cooper Bots are substantial, at least in theory. Whether MSPs actually want to automate workflows extensively also remains to be seen. If it means that their sales and profits can increase, it seems logical to us that they will at least try it.

Also read: As business booms, MSPs need to become more efficient