How Vision Technology Group Grew Chat Volume 50% in a Month with Thread and introduced an AI Agent Named Ace

Vision Technology Group (VTG) is a managed services provider based in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley that has provided managed IT, cybersecurity, cloud, and VoIP services since 2004. Its clients span manufacturing, education, healthcare, state and local government, legal, finance, construction, and nonprofits. Service Desk Manager Randall Curry, who started at VTG as its dispatcher, leads the service desk for a team of about 15 technicians supporting roughly 130 managed clients from ConnectWise Manage. When VTG brought in AI for the first time, Randall made sure the team understood the reason before the rollout began.

"I know we're making a big change, but this is how it can improve what we're doing: faster, easier, better service." — Randall Curry, Service Desk Manager, Vision Technology Group

Every ticket had to be read and sorted by hand before anyone could start working it.

"When all of our tickets came in with no AI, you had to read every ticket, figure out if it's important, what board it goes to, whether to change the title, whether we have to transfer it." — Randall Curry, Service Desk Manager, Vision Technology Group

 

• One dispatcher was the first stop for tickets from every channel
• Titles, categories, and priorities were set manually and inconsistently
• Inconsistent categorization made it hard to report on what clients actually needed
• The dispatcher had no bandwidth left for higher-value work

VTG started its AI journey by targeting the dispatch workload first.

Thread was deployed as VTG's AI service desk layer, connecting Microsoft Teams to ConnectWise Manage and automating ticket titling, categorization, prioritization, and first-line triage.

VTG onboarded with Thread in August 2025. It turned on Thread's assistive AI on the Help Desk board first, so every ticket arriving by chat, email, or phone now gets a clean title, a category, and a priority before it's dispatched. Recap writes the closing summary on every finished ticket. Workflow rules move tickets automatically the moment they touch a board, something VTG couldn't do in real time inside ConnectWise alone.

On the client side, VTG built its own chat persona. Instead of a generic support bot, clients chat with Ace, a small superhero character with a VTG-specific personality that lives in the VTG app inside Microsoft Teams.

"We've branded our own chat to be VTG-specific, its own character, its own personality. Our clients get to chat in with Ace, a little superhero. It's solving some pretty low-level tickets, which is pretty amazing." — Randall Curry, Service Desk Manager, Vision Technology Group

Ace collects the details a technician needs, attempts troubleshooting on simple issues, and closes some tickets on its own. Once Ace replaced the standard VTG icon, chat usage climbed.

Most of VTG's technicians now work out of Thread's Inbox, set up in swarm mode with their own pods. Remote technicians log almost all of their time entries there. They type notes as they work, click once, and Thread turns those notes into a time entry. Technicians also use Chat with Magic to ask questions about a ticket, and Randall has started adding reference details to Thread so technicians can ask Magic for them instead of digging back through ConnectWise.

Technician feedback has centered on context. By the time a technician opens a ticket, the AI has already asked the client the obvious questions, and Recap writes the summary when the work is done.

Randall treated client education the same way he treated internal training. Technicians are the first people clients talk to, so they need to be able to explain what Ace is and why it helps.

"If you don't know how it works, if you can't show the value, they're never going to use it. Being fluent in what it's doing, how it functions, and why it actually provides value is a big thing." — Randall Curry, Service Desk Manager, Vision Technology Group

Randall also attends Thread's weekly AI Service Unleashed enablement sessions and partner calls, where he picks up ideas from other MSPs that he brings back to VTG's configuration.

Day in the Life

A staff member at a client office opens the VTG app in Microsoft Teams and tells Ace her printer won't connect. Ace asks a couple of clarifying questions and offers to walk her through a fix. When the printer comes back online, Ace closes the ticket. If it hadn't, the ticket would have reached VTG's Help Desk board already titled, categorized, and prioritized, and a workflow rule would have moved it into the right queue. The technician who picks it up works the issue in Inbox, types notes as he goes, and creates the time entry with one click. When the ticket closes, Recap writes the summary.

Vision Technology Group Achieved 50% Month-over-Month Chat Growth

In September 2026, VTG's chat volume grew 50% month over month, and chat's share of all incoming tickets rose from about 9% to about 13%. VTG hadn't yet run a dedicated campaign to move clients to chat. Its target is for 40% of tickets to arrive through chat, and the team plans to make every VTG client a chat user.

Behind the scenes, the AI work adds up. In roughly the first three months after go-live, Thread produced about 2,000 ticket recaps, technicians used Chat with Magic about 200 times, and 57 time entries were written with AI. Today Thread's AI runs on 185 client companies, chat is deployed to 72, and VTG is active on eight Thread solutions. Voice AI was added in September 2026.

The biggest change is in dispatch. With AI handling titles, categories, and priorities, VTG's dispatcher spends less time sorting tickets, and more accurate categorization has given Randall cleaner data to report on and to build new automations from.

"If I could free up some of his time, I could certainly use him in other places of the business." — Randall Curry, Service Desk Manager, Vision Technology Group, on VTG's dispatcher

Did Thread increase chat adoption? Yes. VTG's chat volume grew 50% month over month in September 2026, and chat rose from about 9% to 13% of all tickets without a dedicated client campaign.

Did Thread reduce manual work for the dispatcher? Yes. Every ticket now arrives titled, categorized, and prioritized by AI, and workflow rules move tickets automatically when they hit a board.

Did VTG need prior AI experience? No. VTG had never used AI before Thread and now runs eight Thread solutions.

VTG came to Thread with no AI experience and a clear goal: stop making a person read and sort every ticket. A year later, AI handles that first pass, technicians open tickets with the context already gathered, and clients reach support through a character they recognize instead of a generic inbox. The results come from how the rollout was led: Randall made sure both his technicians and VTG's clients understood what the AI does and why. With chat growing before any formal push, VTG is aiming to free its dispatcher for higher-value work.

Takeaway: Vision Technology Group shows that MSPs using ConnectWise Manage can grow chat adoption and take manual sorting off dispatch by deploying Thread as their AI service desk layer, without replacing their existing tools or retraining their team.