How GadellNet Freed Its Coordination Team From 100+ Triage Calls a Week by Making Chat the Front Door to IT Support

GadellNet is a mid-size MSP based in St. Louis, with additional offices in Indianapolis and Denver, providing IT support, consulting, and cybersecurity services to more than 350 clients. Part of the Lyra family of MSPs, GadellNet has built its brand around a service experience that feels personal rather than transactional, with a coordination team and pod-based engineering structure designed to keep the human element at the front of every interaction.

"Your IT service provider can wind up being like the dentist. People call you when they're having a bad day. Nobody wants to schedule the meeting. They understand the necessity, but we wanted to move beyond that mindset and make the experience better."

— Kurt Beard, Continuous Improvement Specialist, GadellNet

GadellNet's coordination team is the first voice a client hears when something breaks. For years, that meant the team spent most of its day on inbound calls, listening to a problem, typing it into ConnectWise, and routing it to the right engineer. The work was essential, but it was also the ceiling on what the team could do. Every minute spent transcribing a ticket was a minute not spent scheduling a deployment, confirming an on-site visit, or checking in on a client after a rough week.

The Core Problem: Manual triage was consuming the capacity of a team whose empathy was better deployed somewhere else.

"The coordination team does an incredible job with our clients on the phone. If anyone practices our core values and our empathy, it's that team. But with the average phone call taking 10 minutes and 150-200 calls a week, that's significant."

— Kurt Beard, Continuous Improvement Specialist, GadellNet

The team had also hit a ceiling on the chat tools available in the MSP market. The native chat options in their PSA felt dated, and GadellNet wanted their client-facing service to reflect a modern IT brand, not a 2008 help desk.

Operationally, that meant:

• Coordination staff tied up on inbound calls instead of higher-value outbound work
• Tickets entering the queue without consistent structure, categorization, or priority
• Engineers pulled into repetitive work like adding users to distribution lists when higher-skill problems were waiting
• No modern, branded chat experience to offer clients who wanted a faster way to ask for help

Thread was deployed as GadellNet's branded AI service desk layer, connecting Microsoft Teams to ConnectWise Manage and handling intake, triage, and categorization before a ticket ever touched a human queue.

GadellNet branded the bot "Fred the Threadbot" and built the rollout around client choice. Clients can start a conversation with Fred, let the bot gather the necessary context, and either stay in chat or hand off to a technician at any point. If a client prefers to skip the bot entirely, they can, and Fred stops talking. The design treats chat as an option, not a gate.

Inside the service desk, Thread's Triage Agent reads each incoming ticket, applies categorization and priority, and routes it to the right pod. Thread's Copilot generates a summary title for every ticket so engineers can scan a queue without parsing raw text. Sentiment and effort scores run at the end of each conversation, giving GadellNet a weekly feedback loop for tuning how Fred responds.

The 2024 Partner of the Year award recognized GadellNet for building an entire service brand around chat powered by Thread, including the creative marketing rollout and the client event built around spools of thread. The 2025 Triage Innovation Award recognized the operational outcome: AI triage had moved from an internal efficiency tool to a visible, trusted part of the customer experience.

"We started our journey with Thread looking for a chat tool. The other chat tools in our industry are not modern. We needed something that made us look like a company in 2025, not 2008."

— Kurt Beard, Continuous Improvement Specialist, GadellNet

Today, Thread runs across three layers of GadellNet's service delivery: the client-facing chat experience in Microsoft Teams, the Triage Agent that processes every incoming ticket, and the Contact Intelligence panel that gives technicians context about the person on the other end of the conversation before they reply.

"I use Inbox for basically everything ticket-related now — time entries, assignment, research through Magic. Going back to past tickets and pulling context through Magic has been really great for troubleshooting." — Trenton Girkins, Service Desk Engineer, GadellNet

Chat is the most visible layer. Around 30% of GadellNet's tickets now come in through Thread, with Microsoft Teams as the primary channel. Fred handles intake, collects detail, and closes roughly 15% of those tickets without escalation. The rest arrive in ConnectWise with structured context, a generated title, and a priority already applied.

Behind the scenes, the coordination team has been redeployed. Instead of fielding every inbound call, they now run outbound work: scheduling on-site visits, coordinating deployments, and checking in on clients after difficult tickets. The team's empathy hasn't been automated away; it's been moved to the interactions where it compounds.

"The coordination team went from typing the words clients were telling them to scheduling deployments, on-site visits, and higher-impact work. We still get the empathy. We just get it on the outgoing calls now."

— Kurt Beard, Continuous Improvement Specialist, GadellNet

Day in the Life

A GadellNet client opens Microsoft Teams to report that Outlook won't send email. Fred the Threadbot starts the conversation, asks two clarifying questions, and suggests switching to Outlook.com as a workaround while a ticket is created. The client is back to sending email in under three minutes. In the background, Thread's Triage Agent categorizes the ticket, applies a priority based on the client's tier and the issue type, generates a descriptive title, and routes it to the correct engineering pod in ConnectWise. A technician picks it up with full context already in place, reaches out, and resolves the underlying Outlook issue later that afternoon. No one on the coordination team typed a word of it.

GadellNet Redirected a Week's Worth of Coordination Time to Higher-Impact Work Every Week

The headline number is the triage volume: 11,226 AI-run triage sessions across 2025, scaling from zero in January to 4,624 in December alone. Each of those sessions represents a ticket that would have required a human to read, categorize, and route it. Stacked against 100 to 150 inbound phone calls deflected per week at roughly 10 minutes per call, GadellNet reclaimed somewhere between 16 and 25 hours of coordination capacity every week, consistently, across 2025.

Chat adoption confirms the pattern. Chat tickets grew from 3,957 in 2024 to 18,265 in 2025, a 362% increase as clients moved to the new intake experience. Teams is the dominant channel. Fred resolves 15% of chat conversations without escalation, and the remaining 85% arrive in ConnectWise already structured.

Automation stats reinforce the scale. In 2025, GadellNet ran 348,472 AI categorizations, 88,233 AI prioritizations, and 65,200 AI-generated ticket titles. The triage growth is accelerating in 2026, with Q1 triage sessions already exceeding the first five months of 2025 combined.

"I love Thread for the speed. It just feels faster and easier than ConnectWise. I can click through tickets without each one opening its own window. Small thing, but it adds up over a day." — Trenton Girkins, Service Desk Engineer, GadellNet

"Death to the repetitive ticket. Let our engineers go engineer. I love our engineers, but I don't need a system engineer adding an email address to a distribution list."

— Kurt Beard, Continuous Improvement Specialist, GadellNet

Did Thread reduce inbound phone volume? Yes. GadellNet deflected 100 to 150 phone calls per week, redirecting the coordination team to scheduling and outbound client work.

Did Thread scale AI triage into a production workflow? Yes. The Triage Agent went from zero runs in January 2025 to 4,624 runs in December 2025, with 11,226 total sessions across the year and continued acceleration into 2026.

Did Thread increase chat adoption? Yes. Chat tickets grew 362% year over year as clients adopted Fred the Threadbot as the primary way to ask for help.

For GadellNet, the point was never automation for its own sake. The coordination team has always been the heart of the service experience, and the question was whether their time was being spent where it mattered most. By making chat the front door and letting Thread's Triage Agent handle the work of reading, categorizing, and routing, GadellNet redirected the human parts of the job to the interactions that actually require a person: the outbound call to confirm an on-site, the follow-up after a hard week, the conversation with a client who is in full panic mode because payroll won't print. The service feels more human now because the humans are doing human work.

Takeaway: GadellNet shows that MSPs running ConnectWise Manage can deflect inbound call volume, scale AI triage into a production workflow, and redeploy their coordination teams to higher-value client work by making Thread the branded front door to their service desk, without replacing their PSA or retraining their engineers.