Every Deployment Makes the Next One Smarter: Neel Shah on Building Forge

Neel Shah helps deploy Forge, Shield’s AI operating system for MSPs. He joins us to discuss growing up around IT, what modernizing a legacy industry taught him, and how every deployment makes the next one smarter.  

Tell us a bit about yourself. What shaped the path that brought you here?  

I was born in the Bay Area to parents who work in technology. Some of my earliest memories are of my dad explaining an escalation policy or L3 support process at the dining table. Apparently, I repeated the whole thing afterward.

When I was six, my family moved to India. I grew up there, attending boarding school for a few years before going to university in San Diego, and then returning to the Bay Area. Growing up in different cultures made me appreciate how people can approach the same problems through very different lenses.

I had always imagined building something together with a few close friends from boarding school. That eventually became Ethica AI, an AI-native title insurance agency that reached tens of thousands of real estate agents nationally.  

What did building Ethica AI teach you about how legacy industries actually change?  

At Ethica, we wanted to transform “strip-mall businesses”: the many small, fragmented companies traditional technology firms often overlook. They are hard to understand and even harder to change, which is precisely what made them interesting.

Title insurance is a strong example. Its practices were established nearly a century ago, yet attempts to disintermediate real estate agents with technology have repeatedly failed. The industry depends on relationships, trust, and local knowledge. Those local nuances were the business.

We built around that core insight, working directly with real estate agents and strengthening their role. This grounded us in how the industry actually worked and how change could realistically take hold. We also missed plenty. Early on, we built a couple of workflows because they seemed helpful from the outside looking in, but almost nobody touched it. We had solved a problem the industry did not have. Those misses taught us more than the wins.

Technology can only take you so far. You need to know your customers better than anyone else does. This helps you develop a strong intuition for the problem. You have to be close to the work to understand why certain processes exist and what they solve for.

It’s about a commitment to the problem, not just confidence in the technology. We used to say that you have to “eat the glass.”  

How has that experience shaped the way you build and deploy Forge?

It shaped almost everything about the way I work at Shield. A product is valuable only if it changes what happens inside the business.

With Forge, we begin by working alongside technicians and operators, deeply studying the processes and context of each partner MSP, including institutional knowledge that may never have been formally documented. We translate that knowledge into a system that reflects how each team actually operates.

We never assume a process is unnecessary. Workflows that look inefficient from the outside often address a real constraint; we understand them before changing anything. This helps us improve and evolve processes in a collaborative and effective way.

How has Forge evolved as you have deployed it across Shield’s partner companies?

We built Forge to absorb repetitive tasks that create sprawl, expand backlogs, and consume technicians’ attention. Deploying it in live environments has helped us develop a clearer view of the agentic operating system we wanted to build.  

Forge is already handling the majority of tickets today, including complex, multistep ones that require coordination across people and systems. This creates more room for strategic work that only people can handle: things like important meetings and calls with customers, ambiguous situations that require expert judgment, or work that needs on-site support. In those cases, Forge supports by giving technicians the context they need to be well prepared and resolve the last mile. 

The central question is how much agency to give the system based on task, risk, and reliability. We set that boundary deliberately in collaboration with each partner MSP.

The next phase is broadening that coverage and using the capacity it unlocks to get ahead of issues, shorten response times, and free technicians for more consultative and proactive work with customers.

The MSP market is filling up with AI products that promise automation without changing how the business really operates. Where do those efforts fall short, and what does Shield do differently?

We all know that adding AI and truly changing how a business operates are very different things. A tool can automate isolated tasks, but if it is deployed from outside the workflow, it rarely has enough context or operational grounding. Technology has to be built with the people who understand the work to create durable change.  

Our engineering team works alongside technicians, operators, and MSP leaders. We learn how work moves through the business, where judgment matters, and what customer trust depends on; then we shape Forge around those realities. The goal goes way beyond ticket deflection. It is to help MSPs move from reactive service delivery toward a proactive strategic partnership, with every deployment strengthening what the network can learn and build next.

How do you build trust with more skeptical technicians and MSP leaders? What creates the “aha” moment?

Each deployment is a trust-building exercise. At first, Forge can feel like a junior technician that requires close review. As it handles increasingly complex work consistently and in a way that reflects how the team operates, those guardrails can gradually loosen.

At some of our MSPs today, technicians have seen Forge handle a wide range of work fully autonomously, from one-off password resets to onboarding and offboarding tickets that require weeks of coordination. That is usually when the conversation shifts from “Can this create value?” to “What else can we trust it to own?”

This takes time, because an organization’s comfort with AI has to grow alongside the technology’s reliability. Change can be uncomfortable for experts who have spent years building the processes that support their customers. Our role is to make what is technically possible approachable and useful for MSPs.

What does deploying Forge across a diverse network of MSPs allow you to learn and build?

Every deployment makes the next one smarter. Across the Shield network, MSPs vary significantly in size, customer bases, service models, and operational maturity. A five-technician company with 30 customers faces different constraints from one with 50 technicians and 300 customers.

The same is true across verticals. One MSP is focused on the dental industry, where the underlying technology directly supports patient care, scheduling, imaging, and billing. Another serves a concentration of customers in oil and gas, where the environment is shaped by a very specific set of operational, and regulatory, requirements.

That range forces discipline. We separate what is specific to one business from patterns that exist across the industry. One deployment teaches us how to handle a class of tickets; another improves how we structure approvals or surface context. Those patterns compound, even when the exact implementation does not carry over.

That is the power of Shield’s model: respond to each MSP’s needs while building a shared body of knowledge shaped by the owners, leaders, and technicians working alongside us. We go further together.

Your earliest memories include your dad explaining an escalation policy at the dinner table. What does it feel like to be working on this now?

It feels strange and meaningful. I grew up hearing about these problems before I understood them, and now I spend my time trying to solve them.

The industry is going to change, quickly, and I feel lucky to make sure that change works in service of people who built it.

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