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Is Friday the First AI-Powered MSP?
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The First AI-Powered MSP?
One of my biggest predictions for 2024 is the development of autonomous IT. Just three months into the year, and I can already say I’m correct. In fact, I found an organization that’s been working on it since 2017: Cluster Networks, the company behind the world’s first AI-driven MSP.
I had to learn more, so I welcomed Cluster’s CEO and founder TJ Carwall onto a bonus episode of the Business of Tech. From an overview of Friday’s capabilities to details about how it works to Carwall’s predictions for the future of AI-driven MSPs, here’s what we got into.
Friday AI: What it Is + Where it Came From
Two years after launching Cluster Networks, Karwal and his team were growing quickly. Too quickly. They were supporting several thousand locations around the US, which forced them to a crossroads between big growth and efficient scale. Rather than look externally to hire support engineers – the usual tactic in their San Francisco community – they decided to build inward. Friday AI was born, and it allowed them to scale to several thousand more locations without a huge cost footprint, all with just three guys.
So what exactly does Friday AI do? In essence, Friday AI is an appliance that is plugged into a premise, intakes all of the management aspects, and learns your environment.
“It sets a baseline of normalcy. What are all my devices? How are they communicating in my environment? Which maybe destinations are they speaking to out on the internet in the wild? Once it understands the environment, it goes into supporting it. And if it sees any anomalies in your environment, like a device failing or a POS terminal not being led to process transactions where it used to, Friday jumps in, creates a support ticket, and sends it in,” said Karwal. “But it can also do something that we’ve been actually really excited about from the beginning. It takes the actionable next steps to resolve the problem itself.”
The whole point of Friday AI is to allow IT teams to scale. So when the Cluster team decided to create it, the main objective was to avoid making another tool that has to be managed.
How Friday AI Works
If you’re dying to know how it works, Karwal broke it down into two phases.
First is the environment discovery phase:
“You plug it in the appliance. If it’s a DHCP-enabled environment where it can get an IP address on the network, it starts drawing some simple logic – here’s my local subnet, let’s do a quick scan, etc. And it not only listens to pinging and layers the information, but it also listens to what we hear in the broadcast domain – ARF information, DHCP requests, ultimately learning the MAC addresses and the devices that are in the environment, and then goes from there.”
Second, Friday AI starts communicating with other network devices to figure out how to speak to them. It draws conclusions and learns the environment from that respect, like identifying the destinations that some of the devices need to hit to be functional.
Wondering what type of large language model powers Friday AI? I asked Karwal the same thing, and he explained that no LLM is involved (yet). Instead, they take a data crunch from what they call their ‘machine learning algorithms’ and draw conclusions and set baselines on that.
In his own words:
“We’re ultimately taking very simple data. We’re not even looking at payloads or what data is being transmitted. We’re just looking at, for example, network overhead, source and destination information, what network ports a device is communicating at in the environment, how much bandwidth, round trip time, HTTP gets header information – things of that nature. And once we learn devices are in the environment, Friday can ultimately create traffic and simulate that by bouncing it off a device, depending on what ports it’s listening to. And based on the variables that I described, we can ultimately draw conclusions.”
Friday’s Focus + Limits
That admittedly sounds like magic, so I asked for clarification on Friday AI’s limits.
Karwal explained that because the tool’s primary focus is to remove an organization’s level-one IT support, it excels at tackling reactive work over proactive work. So when there’s a wifi problem, a printer problem, etc, Friday AI helps cut out the part where customers have to pick up the phone and fill out a ticket. It gathers information to answer the ‘why did this happen’ question with a series of checks.
Of course, there’s still a proactive element here. It tells customers when something is wrong and that further support is on the way while gathering intel for IT teams. The result is time saved on administrative work they’d rather spend fixing the actual problem.
Integrating with MSPs
Let’s break this down more practically. There will always be a need for IT services (we all know that Janet in accounting needs help printing), but how does Friday AI tangibly get involved?
Karwal walked me through two ways.
First, monitoring. If a printer goes offline, Friday will notice that a terminal can’t reach it and notify both IT and Janet.
Second, incident response flow. If you set up your Friday to have a predetermined response system, it won’t just tell you when something goes offline. It will automatically perform a series of steps to try and remedy that problem. If it succeeds, it’ll notify Janet that her printer is back up.
That led me to my next question: is Friday independent? How does it work in an ecosystem?
Luckily, Karwal’s response is exactly what you’d want to hear:
“Friday is all about the integration. We’re not going to go create a whole new security appliance or RMM tool that people have to install on their servers. We’re going to integrate with the existing infrastructure of APIs. If there’s a command line that’s actually accessible, Friday can actually create an SSH command line session to that device and pull console output. It can even web scrape information from a local dashboard if it needs to,” he said.
As for the type of environment where Friday does best, Karwal said its bread and butter is lean IT across multiple distributed sites, like schools, hotels, and retail chains. As for licensing, it’s typically licensed per site per month, and users are allowed to put their logo on the Friday dashboard.
With this business model, Friday is working with several MSPs currently, and Karwal is in talks to add about ten more to the customer base.
What’s Next for Friday AI
Before wrapping up, Karwal highlighted again that Friday AI’s entire objective is to help MSPs scale further – not replace their jobs. He’s been surprised to find that so many IT support models haven’t changed since the 90s, so again, he just wants to make life easier:
“We want to take a lot more of the headache and the footprint out of just managing IT in an environment,” he said.
As with everything else in AI, this is only the beginning. There’s a lot left to improve, and I’ll be tracking Friday and related tools quite closely.
If you’d like to learn more about Karwal and his work, you can reach out at [email protected].
My inbox is also always open, so feel free to connect and share your latest stories, insights, questions, and more.
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