Partner Blog | Agentic support: Why AI-powered operations are becoming a competitive core for CSP partners

As customer environments evolve, Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) support teams are facing the challenge of managing increasingly complex scenarios. A single incident might involve various elements such as identity, security, data, Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and AI workloads, making it tricky to pinpoint the root cause. Each time responsibility shifts between teams, it consumes valuable time and diverts engineering resources away from more impactful tasks like adoption and architecture.

Research from Microsoft highlights how Frontier Firms, those that have successfully integrated AI into their operations, are yielding around three times the returns compared to businesses that lag in adoption.¹ For CSP partners, enhancing support functions presents a golden opportunity to apply this model in your business, allowing for scalable capabilities throughout the customer lifecycle.

Support agents can play a key role by assisting in triage, collecting diagnostics, implementing approved remediation processes, and compiling consolidated case information for engineers when expert intervention is necessary. This shift can significantly increase the workload a support team can manage and allows technical talent to focus their energy on high-priority tasks.

This article marks the beginning of a four-part series designed to help you establish a customer success operating system in the CSP sector. We’ll kick off with a discussion on AI-powered support operations, followed by insights on engaging with partners and Microsoft, an exploration of logical workload growth, and lastly, a comprehensive execution roadmap.

The potential for CSP services is on the rise. According to Omdia, partner services and opportunities linked to generative and agentic AI could reach a staggering $276 billion^* by 2030.²

To seize a larger share of this opportunity, it’s crucial to stay engaged well beyond the initial sale. Customers look for partners who can seamlessly navigate interconnected workloads, swiftly resolve issues, and promote ongoing technology adoption.

Managing traditional tiered support becomes increasingly difficult as customer environments grow. A problem originating in one product might require insights from identity, infrastructure, security, data, or other services. When cases are transferred between various individuals and teams, it can lead to lost context, with skilled engineers spending time on problems that could have been addressed more promptly.

Support teams often identify customer adoption issues before they become apparent during renewal discussions. Frequent tickets, configuration challenges, and minimal usage rates can highlight where customers struggle to derive value from their purchases.

By streamlining support operations, you can protect engineering resources and create more space for activities such as adoption, optimisation, and advisory services.

Agentic support goes well beyond basic chatbots for answering queries. It empowers agents to carry out multi-step workflows that include gathering diagnostic data, pinpointing probable causes, taking approved remedial actions, and escalating issues when human insight is necessary.

At the service desk, this capability can be developed in stages:

1. Human with assistant: AI aids service professionals by assisting in triage, retrieving knowledge, summarising information, and recommending actions.
2. Human-agent teams: Agents handle specific tasks while humans oversee exceptions and more significant decisions.
3. Human-led, agent-operated: Agents manage larger parts of a workflow under defined controls, involving humans as needed.

This approach is anticipated to scale rapidly as more organisations incorporate agentic AI into their operational frameworks.

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