"We Were Done an Hour Ago": How an AI-First MSP Rebuilt Its Documentation on Lexful

Most MSPs are still deciding whether to touch AI at all. In a recent peer group meeting, the estimate was that only about a quarter of them are even looking at it. Steven Saehrig is not in that quarter. As President of Descent IT, he built the company to be AI-first from the ground up, and when it came time to pick a documentation platform, he wanted one that thought the same way.

An MSP built for the clients the industry underserves

Descent IT was founded to serve a part of the market most MSPs consider underserved, the clients they wouldn't typically call their target profile. In practice that means two groups: small startups, often one to thirty employees, who need enterprise-grade IT without the enterprise overhead; and co-managed clients who already have a help desk or on-site staff but need specialized experience layered on top.

Both are notoriously hard to serve profitably. AI is what makes it work. "AI is number one, security is number two, and they go hand in hand," Saehrig says. The automation MSPs have always wanted finally became practical. "Something that would have taken months before now takes days to implement, or a day, or less than a day."

The old documentation system worked against the team

Before Lexful, documentation was a tax on everyone. "It was not easy to find stuff," Saehrig says. "I had to spend hours training people on the naming convention, how to search it, where to look, how things are structured. There was training just to use a platform that should be very easy to use."

So when Descent IT evaluated the switch, Saehrig didn't decide alone. He put his whole team into Lexful and asked them the one question that mattered: why should we go? The answer was unanimous and simple. "I type in what I want and I get the result that's relevant to what I'm looking for, without spending a ton of time," he says. "It was a big cultural win. Their vibe was: a system that actually works for me."

The second reason was architectural. An AI-first MSP needs a documentation layer that AI can actually use. "Now I don't have to think about a documentation system that AI can use and then a documentation system for people," Saehrig says. "I just have one documentation platform that they both use." With API and MCP access, that single platform plugs straight into Descent IT's agentic workflows, pulling relevant client information directly into ticketing instead of living in a silo.

The migration he worried about took a day

The one thing that gave Saehrig pause was the cutover. It turned out to be the easiest part of the whole process. "I was more worried about it than the actual reality," he says. "My team was like, 'Steve, you're making this way harder than it needs to be. We import the data, Lexful does their thing, it's ready to go.' I'm asking, 'Are we done yet?' They said, 'We were done an hour ago.'"

Documentation that gets created because it's finally easy

The real payoff shows up in how documentation gets made. Descent IT now generates it by asking. The team drafts documents from email through a chatbot, or simply prompts Lexful directly, and it produces consistent, templatized output every time.

Saehrig has done it live, on customer calls. "A CIO told me he needed a BCDR template. I shared my screen, asked Lexful for a BCDR template for that client, and it drafted the whole thing right there with him. He said, 'I can use that.'"

The clearest example came during a network upgrade. Saehrig had his AI assistant scan the network, identify the switches he'd just replaced, find the old devices in Lexful, deactivate them, and document the new ones, automatically. "Something I'd planned two hours to document took me three minutes," he says. "I had a whole bunch of extra time left with the client to just chat."

For an admitted reluctant documenter, that's the unlock. "I'm the worst documenter," Saehrig admits. "But Lexful makes it so easy there's no more excuse. It's not me thinking about how I'm going to do this document. It's just do the document."

The co-managed clients feel it too

Because Descent IT runs co-managed engagements, its clients live in the same system, and they noticed the difference immediately. "They love it," Saehrig says. The stream of "where's this password, do we have a document on this?" questions went away. "They're just going in there and documenting it themselves."

One client used Lexful to build SOC 2 policy templates from Descent IT's own. "He copied my templates, built his own compliant SOC 2 documentation in ten minutes, tagged what's in production versus future development, all inside fifteen minutes," Saehrig says. And because the client's documentation now lives in the shared platform, it's instantly available to Descent IT's agents too. "It's a win-win for all of us."

Build versus buy, settled

Plenty of technical MSP owners are tempted to build their own AI documentation system. Saehrig considered it and decided against it. "I don't want to spend cycles building something I can buy at a better price than building it," he says. "I could spend thousands building it, or spend thousands using it and providing value to my customer." Descent IT still builds plenty with AI, just not this. "You guys are the experts. You're building the platform that meets my needs. Why should I build it?"

The bottom line

Saehrig's case for AI documentation comes down to one line. "Documentation is the thing all of our teams use every single day," he says. "If the documentation system doesn't make it easy, techs won't do it. They'll say they will, but they won't. If time is money, why am I not looking at things that make my time more efficient and effective? That's the ultimate reason you should be looking at Lexful."