For MSPs, the odds of completing projects on time and on budget are stacked against them. Even with skilled teams and careful planning, probability and human error often derail schedules, drain profitability, and damage customer trust. That’s the reality Mike Psenka, CEO and co-founder of Moovila, set out to solve.
Founded in 2016, Moovila is an AI-powered project and resource management platform designed specifically for MSPs, giving them the tools to beat the probability problem. In this interview, Psenka shares how MSPs can flip the odds of project success in their favor, why agentic AI will reshape the industry, and how Moovila’s newest offerings aim to future-proof project management. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Key Takeaways:
- The odds are stacked against you to get projects done on time—and it’s hurting both your bottom line and your reputation with customers.
- The rise of agentic AI is coming; Psenka thinks MSPs will need to reevaluate how they price and add value to their stack.
- Two new offerings from Moovila will help MSPs bridge this gap and move into the next phrase.
MSP Success: You’ve said that probability hurts structured work. What do you mean by that?
Psenka: Think about the birthday paradox—if you have 23 people in a room, there’s a 50% chance that two people share the same birthday. If there’s 60 people, there’s a 99% chance. It might not make sense, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the truth; it’s probability.
That same probability problem gets in the way of projects and work. People assume their projects and structured work are going to go well. After all, they have capable people; they get their work done most of the time. But the math behind it says [the probability is] really bad. To give an example, if you have a project with 40 tasks in a dependent chain, and everyone responsible for the work gets their tasks done on time 90% of the time, the probability that the project will get done on time is 1.5%. It’s tiny. It’s terrible. And MSPs don’t just have one project going at a time.
That’s when we [at Moovila] realized that we have to think about work differently. Work should be programmed, not just managed. We should think about work like a programming language.
MSP Success: What’s at the heart of your company, when it comes to the MSP community?
Psenka: Well there’s the tech side of it, but also just our involvement in the community. We’re going to be contributing content and best practices and how-to’s in the platform, because this community, more than any other market, is one where direct competitors help each other. It’s really kind of rare. It’s a different feel. Healthcare providers [also have] a strong motivation to share and help each other. But in other businesses like finance and mentoring, you don’t see this [desire to] help and give each other information the way MSPs do.
MSP Success: And what’s different about Moovila compared to other work management software vendors?
Psenka: At the heart of our platform, we have a discrete math engine with AI components that essentially automates project management. The engine also looks at project management like it’s a programming language, so we can debug the projects.
We have an AI agent that helps automatically remediate the project, so a less experienced project coordinator engineer can operate at a much higher level of competency and capability. As one MSP described it, it’s like those bumpers at the bowling alley that prevent you from rolling a gutter ball. Another MSP has described it as an RMM for projects.
MSP Success: What benefits and competitive advantages do your clients get?
Psenka: It goes in the realm of efficiencies, cost reduction, and improved CSAT scores. Our customers can significantly increase the volume of projects that they manage, but the same number of people drastically increases the accuracy of those timelines. That has multiple benefits.
One is scheduling efficiency and the reduction of scheduling churn. Not only is [rescheduling due to missed deadlines] inefficient because you could lose billable time for the engineer, but it also puts strain on the system because of switching costs. So improved accuracy improves margins for engineers’ utilization and reduces their stress.
The other really big thing is it helps with [our clients’] credibility with the customers. [They] know about changes [to deadlines] early, as opposed to the customer calling and yelling about why [they] didn’t get something done that [they were] not even aware was late. Because our platform automatically monitors the projects for them and alerts them to problems, they can solve those problems ahead of time.
MSP Success: There’s a major shift coming in the industry in regards to agentic AI. What are your thoughts on what’s coming next for MSPs?
Psenka: What’s going to be interesting to me is how many MSPs will transform their business to align around products and services that will be sustainable. There are going to be other things that the MSPs are going to be able to automate internally, to lower their costs, but they don’t want to shrink as a business. They want to grow as a business.
So, what kinds of products and services are they going to be able to layer on to grow as a business? We know MSPs are going to be able to continue to do structured work—that isn’t going to be automated. There’s so much excitement around LLMs [right now] and they’re able to take on a lot of tasks and functions, but they sort of suck at structured work.
Then, are [MSPs] going to grow and scale [structured work]? Because once again, a lot of atomic tasks will get automated and become efficient, so the price points will go down as time goes on.
I would say there’ll be a transformation of what MSPs are offering their customers in the next 2–5 years. [There’ll be] a durable catalog of services that continue for the next 2–5 years, as opposed to [offerings] going away [suddenly]. I think in the next year or two, [MSPs are going to find] that X just went away or they can’t charge what they used to because so-and-so is charging 20% less now, because they’ve automated it.
MSP Success: I’d love to hear how Moovila is preparing for the change. What’s coming next from you?
Psenka: We have a new level of functionality coming out called Project Mentor Plus. This is essentially the interactive LMS within the platform, which educates [users] and helps them digitally transform how they’re managing projects, structured work, and scheduling. That’s paired with something else called Project Hub, which is a community-based content sharing platform that will allow MSPs and organizations not only to share their templates and best practices internally, but across the community. Those two things are really going to help MSPs of all sizes manage better, have a more consistent process, and get best practices from industry leaders about how to execute.
[Our] roadmap is full with those two; there’ll be more around project and resource management and financial management automations enhancing the integrations further.
We’ve started piloting Project Hub on a limited basis, and we’ll continue to roll that pilot process out over the next several months. By late fall/winter, we should hope to see those things out for general release.
If you missed the last episode in our Executive Series, read how D&H’s approach fuels partner growth here.
