Forge: Building for IT Services from the Inside Out

Today, we're revealing Forge, our AI operating system for IT services.

Available through a Shield partnership, Forge unifies a provider’s systems and operating knowledge to help teams resolve more tickets, deepen customer relationships, seamlessly deliver projects, and extend their own expertise.

Our engineers work onsite with technicians and operators across the country, understanding the problems each provider wants to solve and what’s blocking them. Forge is shaped around the workflows IT teams actually run.

Providers are already building on each other’s expertise. One shared runbook has run nearly 300 times at another Shield provider. As our network grows, we’re beginning to see an IT services learning loop in action.

Forge is the technological expression of our IT providers’ collective wisdom. Every Shield company benefits from it, helps improve it, and benefits from those improvements.

We want to help each provider become a truly world-class version of itself.

Lessons from the Field

Building alongside our companies has taught us a few things about where IT is headed:

1. Expert capacity is the scarcest resource in IT services

It is a golden age for people who can deeply understand a customer’s needs and translate them across business and technology to solve their biggest challenges.

These experts work across Shield’s companies. Our engineers build tools that create room for them to do what they do best: help customers tackle their toughest problems and prepare for what’s next.

At Texas-based NetAscendant, growth was constrained by hiring in a tight labor market. Founders Jack and Dan estimate that Forge helped unlock 25% more capacity. Their service desk lead is handling a harder mix of tickets, while a junior technician is taking on work one or two levels above their previous capability. Jack and Dan are now working to bring AI to their customers.

2. AI must be built from the inside out to change the business

We have to earn the right to have an opinion about how a leader works with their customers and runs their business.

Our engineers spend weeks alongside operators and technicians. The people actually doing the work can tell you why a process works the way it does, and what it means for customers. Testing changes inside workflows teaches us where our assumptions fail, when AI is additive, when deterministic software will suffice, and where the solution should be operational.

As we’ve progressed, we keep encountering the same question: what should a business do with the capacity that technology creates?

At New Jersey-based Exigent Technologies, Forge helped cut the ticket backlog by 80%. With this newfound bandwidth, engineers are now able to spend more time with customers, get to the root cause of every ticket, and work on more proactive updates.

Helping providers decide what to do with that capacity is the most exciting aspect of our work.

3. IT providers are the trust and technology layer for the SMB economy

A business owner relies on their IT provider to decide what technology to use and how to think about major changes.

It is a sacred relationship. One that comes with years of accumulated knowledge and trust. It is also earned. Every problem solved well lays the foundation for taking on even tougher problems.

Small and mid-sized businesses need a partner who understands where AI is headed and where it fits in their specific business. That understanding needs to shape the technology too.

Forge lets providers embed their accumulated customer knowledge into the platform so it can deliver the standard of service that customers have come to trust.

At New York-based LISS Technologies, Forge is handling routine tickets with customer satisfaction on par with their human technicians. Technicians are now able to spend more time managing service and handling mission-critical challenges that require their judgment.

IT providers will be the technologists that help the SMB economy harness AI.

Meet Forge

Forge is one shared foundation that brings together a provider’s tools, knowledge, workflows, and operating context.

Create Capacity

Helpdesk’s AI Engineer can handle tickets from intake to resolution. It completes eligible work autonomously, and hands work off to experts when their judgment is needed based on guardrails set by technicians. When the technician is driving, Forge provides in-depth context and next steps.

50% of actionable helpdesk tickets are resolved by Forge. 92% of those resolutions don’t involve human approval or logged technician time.

Projects features an AI Project Engineer that supports the entire project lifecycle, from scoping through completion. The in-depth context embedded in Forge makes this a powerful organizing layer for all work.

Projects is built to help teams deliver work on time and in budget.

Support Customers

Account Strategy keeps teams informed and helps them be more proactive with their customers. Its AI Account Manager synthesizes service history, open opportunities, and account risks to suggest and execute proactive actions. For example, a recent phishing attack alongside overdue training could prompt a technician to reach out before another incident happens.

Teams using AI Account Manager are engaging 10% more customers since it launched in July.

Amplify Your Expertise

Build with Forge allows teams to build custom skills, agents, and runbooks for their business. A technician’s knowledge can become a repeatable solution for others to use.

Our providers have deployed more than 150 agents and 750 skills in production, tackling tasks such as ticket resolution, proactive compliance, and quarterly business review preparation. In a recent 30-day period, these agents averaged nearly 4,000 runs a day.

The Road Ahead

We’re still learning what’s possible when IT providers take on more of their customers’ most complex challenges. Many already advise on decisions that go far beyond IT, and we want to make more room for them to do that work. 

Shield is an experiment machine for our providers. Our engineers and operators test new approaches to serving customers and share what they learn constantly. Software is the start, but the work extends to organizational development and culture.

Simply put, this is human-computer teaming. Computers assemble context across systems and spot patterns. Highly skilled humans bring their customer knowledge, judgment, and deep trust. We believe better technology makes operational expertise even more valuable.

The leaders we’ve partnered with are just getting started. They have a lot of ideas, and we’re ready to bring them to life.

If this resonates with you, let’s talk about what we could build together, and what Forge could enable for your business.