I’ve been thinking a lot about utilization lately, from a place of genuine curiosity.

As someone who works alongside MSPs, Pro AV, and Security companies (but didn’t cut my teeth inside traditional MSP), I find myself asking: why is utilization still the primary lens we use to measure performance?

And no, this isn’t just me procrastinating working on a utilization report for one of my clients, even though I very much am.

With AI, automation, better documentation, and smarter workflows, ticket time is compressing. Tasks that used to take 30 minutes now take three. Processes that required manual follow-up are happening automatically.

So when that happens… what does this do to the reports we have been looking at for the past ten years?

For years, hiring and planning have been based on capacity: 40 hours per week, 80–85% billable utilization, a set number of hours against agreements. Time became the cleanest proxy for productivity. It’s measurable. It’s comparable. It’s reportable.

But is that still the case?

If a ticket is resolved in three minutes instead of thirty, that’s operationally impressive. Yet on a utilization report, it can look like underperformance. That tension is fascinating to me.

One vendor shared recently that AI tools were saving so much technician time that some team members suddenly had too much availability. The reaction wasn’t celebration - it was concern.

Which has me asking, if a technician closes 30 tickets in a day, maintains strong CSAT, documents cleanly, and avoids escalations - does it matter whether they logged five hours or eight? At the end of the day, all the customer is experiencing is the outcome - they have no idea (nor do they care) how much time it took a tech to resolve.

Could it be that we don’t have better metrics or tools to track and forecast with?

Imagine a leadership dashboard that still includes utilization, but places equal weight on metrics like ticket closure velocity, trending issue index, prevented incidents, automation rate, and customer satisfaction.

For the company that has techs with too much free time on their hands - what about looking at ticket trending data?

See what Types of tickets are on the rise, and appoint one Tech as a champion or owner of those tickets?

They could gather more data, find a proactive way to solve the issues, and further improve customer satisfaction.

This could be a way to move to a more proactive resolution, using AI to analyze trends before they become landslide issues.

Now imagine the leadership conversation shifting from “Why are your hours down?” to “What recurring issue were you able eliminate this month?”

Now, I know utilization reporting isn’t going away anytime soon. But it does feel like we may be approaching an inflection point.

Time used to be the constraint. Increasingly, data quality, visualizing outputs and pattern recognition are the constraint.

So maybe the real question isn’t whether hours are up or down, maybe it’s something else. What are you finding in your organization? What new metrics are you leaning on more heavily or developing in your own teams?