IT Support Tiers: What Tier 1, 2 and 3 Do in the AI Era

IT support tiers usually come in three levels that your own techs work. Tier 1 is the first person assigned a ticket, and they work your most common, documented problems. Tier 2 takes the tickets tier 1 can’t close. Tier 3 handles the hardest escalations and builds the tools and standards the other two run on. Plenty of shops also call self-service and automation tier 0. AI tools will move work between those tiers, and tier 1 will be doing different things than it does today. Here’s what each tier does, what changes as the tools get better and what it means for how you grow your MSP.

What are the levels of IT support?

Most charts run from tier 0, which is self-service, through tier 3, and some add a tier 4 for outside support. Inside your shop, each step up costs you more per hour, so every ticket should land on the cheapest level that can close it.

There’s no set definition of what tier 1 does. Unpack it and it’s really just the first person to get assigned a ticket, and that’s it. What they work is whatever your most common ticket happens to be this year, and that keeps moving.

Why do MSPs split support into tiers?

If you took a month off, which client would notice first?

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To keep your expensive people off your most common work. Tier 1 works the tickets you’ve documented, standardized and trained your team to handle. Because you set them up to succeed, a tier 1 can be someone greener in the industry, which means you pay them less than your experienced techs. Put a higher-paid tech on your most common tickets and you’ll spend a lot more for the same fix.

Think about what tier 1 used to do. They soldered capacitors onto motherboards. They changed login names on the mail server and changed somebody’s last name in the directory. Self-service and the cloud made those tickets less common. Technology automated that work away. Tier 1 got new problems to handle.

So when someone tells you tier 1 is going away, what they mean is tier 1 is going to be doing different things. Can we pick better words, please? I’m tired of hearing it at conferences and in people’s marketing. I’ve made the longer case in what AI means for MSPs, so I’ll keep this part short.

What does tier 1 do once AI handles the common tickets?

The work that still needs a person. As AI tools get better, your tier 1s might do more QA on what the robots did, approve the changes the robots aren’t allowed to make on their own and recognize the problems nobody documented that a robot can’t make a decision on. (We all have perfect documentation, so that one won’t come up much.) Some of the job might be pure conversation.

I know what some of you are thinking. “Kyle, mine works. The password resets close themselves now.” Great, I get it. Some tools will make today’s common tickets go away. People reach for a human for other reasons, too. Sometimes the robot could make the fix and doesn’t have the authority to. Sometimes the user just doesn’t want to talk to a robot.

Here’s one I’m making up, but every MSP has this customer. The managing partner at a law firm has to print something for a case in a few hours, it’s an hour’s drive to get there, and the printer won’t work. He works your process. The robot relentlessly tries to fix the problem, the same way, over and over, and it never thinks to ask how long it has. By the time he reaches a person he’s frustrated, he’s short and he won’t give you half of what he already told the robot.

That’s a hospitality job. Your tier 1 has to calm him down and give him the confidence that he finally has someone who can get it done. Then they find the path the scripts missed. Can we set him up on a different printer the robot didn’t think to use? Is there a print shop downstairs that serves the whole building, and can I call ahead so it’s ready when he walks in?

It’s the scene in Apollo 13 where they dump a box of parts on the table and the job is to make it fit using nothing but that. By then he doesn’t want the robot anymore. He wants a person.

So make a list of the things your customers don’t want to work with a robot on. A lot of tier 1’s next job description is on that list.

Where do your tier 2 techs come from?

From tier 1. You either develop your tier 2s or you steal them from another MSP, and stealing means overpaying.

There’s research on what that costs. Matthew Bidwell studied personnel data from the US investment banking arm of one financial services company and published it in 2011 as “Paying More to Get Less” in Administrative Science Quarterly. Outside hires started on about 18% more pay than the people promoted into similar jobs. The promoted people performed significantly better for their first two years. My read: they already understood the business.

A tier 2 you hire away from another MSP comes with that shop’s habits. They used to do it differently, so you spend time teaching them to stop doing it the old way and start doing it yours. That’s development too, and you’re paying a premium for the privilege. They still have to build the people skills on top of it.

Retail already tried taking the person out of the front of the line. Dollar General had pulled self-checkout out of 12,000 of its more than 20,000 stores by May 2024, and its CEO called shrink, the inventory a store loses, “the most significant headwind in our business.” Self-checkout wasn’t the only reason for the shrink. Here’s my take: the cashiers had been discouraging theft without anyone putting it in their job description, so removing them meant paying for more security guards or more equipment. That cashier had a second job that nobody wrote down.

Your tier 1 has one too: becoming your next tier 2.

What changes for tier 2 and tier 3?

Knowing the fix off the top of your head matters less, and the soft skills matter more. Tier 1s are going to get more room to use AI to solve problems quickly, and green people will use it because they don’t know any better. They’ll fix the things the robot can’t, and the things that need human eyes on them.

So if you’re a tier 2 or a tier 3 reading this, it’s time for a come-to-Jesus conversation with yourself. If you don’t learn to use AI and pick up some new skills, the luxuries of the job go away. You won’t get to be the person who quietly crushes tickets and never has to call the customer when the hard stuff gets escalated to you. The definition of hard might change. Hard might mean the relationship, the solution design or the sale.

I learned what a tool does to tier 3 the expensive way. In the early days of remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools, the MSP I was running bought one on the promise that it would replace a tier 1. Sound familiar?

I had to hire a tier 3 to build it. I needed a vendor manager to make sure we got the best price on it every year. My team had to learn the tool, and then learn how to make it useful, which meant picking up skills like PowerShell.

A year or two in, we’d only used 10% of the features, and I still hadn’t let that tier 1 go. The extra work landed on the tier 3, and because he was focused on the tool, I needed another person to take his tickets. None of us had the nerve to let the tier 1 go, and we ended up with a tool and an extra employee.

Today’s tools are way better than that one was. The tool is still the cheap part. It’s the reorg that’s expensive.

How many people does a help desk need once AI takes the common tickets?

Fewer people working tickets, plus one person running the robots and one building them.

ConnectWise’s CEO, Manny Rivelo, said this about small shops in June 2026: “When you’re a small MSP, and you have 14 technicians, we could reduce your ticket count, but you can’t repurpose a body.” His point was that bigger shops get more out of these tools. On the body, I agree with him.

Say you’ve got eight on your help desk today. With the robots, maybe you need four on tickets. Then you need one running the robots and one building them. That’s six people where you had eight, so two names come off your roster. Hire the person who runs the robots before those two leave and you’re right back where I was: a tool and an extra employee.

If your whole shop is five people, or under 10, you don’t have a tier 1 to sacrifice anyway. Treat AI as a capacity tool, something you buy so you don’t have to hire the next person. Your salary-to-revenue ratio should get easier to improve. You’ve also added a cost without adding revenue, so you still have to grow into it.

If you’re bigger, you’ll have to let someone go, or not replace someone when they leave.

Either way, ask the vendor and yourself the same question: which name comes off my payroll? With AI, the savings are people. Either a name comes off the payroll or you don’t hire the next one. If neither happens, there are no savings.

Then count what the switch costs, because it isn’t free. You have to migrate, learn the tool and train everyone on it, build standards around it and deploy it to every customer. You have to back up what you need before you shut the old tool down, fight with the vendors and run the proof of concept before you ever buy. Every one of those costs your people hours, and even a tool that saves you $500 a month could take you four years to pay back.

Back at Sierra Pacific Group, my consulting firm, we had a calculator for exactly this when an MSP wanted to switch its RMM or its professional services automation (PSA) tool. I built a new version of it.

What should you decide before the robots free up the hours?

What the hours are for. Tier 1 isn’t going away. It’s the first person in line, and what they work keeps changing. The robots will take the most common tickets of today. They won’t build a relationship with your customer.

Everybody agrees you have to do something about AI, and nobody can tell me what. So you go to your peer group to ask what everyone else is doing, and everyone else is at the peer group asking what you’re doing. The robots are going to free up hours. Somebody has to decide what those hours are for: fewer people, or more customers with the same number of people. You don’t have to be the first MSP to buy the tool. You can’t afford to be the last one to decide what the hours are for, either.

Start with one question this week: what’s the most common ticket your tier 1s work today that didn’t even exist five years ago? Whatever it is, that’s tier 1’s job now, and it’s what your next tier 2 is learning on. Then go back to the MSP growth guide and decide which seats the hours go to.