"Customer Zero": How TransformITive Made Lexful Its Knowledge Layer

Joe Markert has a rule about selling technology: you can't credibly sell what you haven't adopted yourself. As CEO of TransformITive, an AI-first MSP, he calls it being "customer zero," and it shaped every tool decision the company has made over the past two years, including documentation.

His Director of Client Services, Adam Scior, is the one living that decision every day. Between the two of them, you get the full picture: why an AI-first firm rebuilt its stack around Lexful, and what that actually changes in the day-to-day work.

A partner built around transformation, not tickets

TransformITive works alongside internal IT teams for clients in the 75 to 300 seat range, with a heavy concentration in legal and architecture. The job is helping those organizations accelerate transformation and adopt new technology, with AI now at the tip of the spear.

That mission is where "customer zero" comes from. "How can you possibly sell, support, and enable a company to adopt something you haven't adopted and don't fully understand?" Markert asks. "It's about proving we're not just here to sell another SKU. We show how we use it on a daily basis."

Two years ago, when Copilot landed, TransformITive made a decision: shift the entire tech stack toward tools that were adopting AI first, and retire the tech debt that couldn't keep up. "It forced us to question, what is this tool for? Why are we using it, and what is its real job?" Markert says. When he was invited to be an early design partner in Lexful, "there was no way I was not going to be involved."

The view from 26 years of documentation

Scior has been in IT since 1999 and has run documentation at three MSPs, supporting, by his count, some 5,000 companies along the way. He's used everything from overloaded Excel sheets to SharePoint-plus-ServiceNow to more than a decade on IT Glue. His summary of the switch is blunt: "Lexful does what IT Glue does, and it has AI capabilities built right into it. Immediately I can do things with Lexful that I just cannot do with IT Glue, and they will never be able to do unless they completely rebuild their entire platform."

"There is searching functionality, but it's a proper AI agent," he says. "A person doesn't need to know where the information is. They don't need to know if this is a configuration item or an asset. They can just ask questions."

What that means in practice

TransformITive is in the middle of moving clients off Meraki equipment onto Ubiquiti. Scior decided to see if Lexful could shortcut the prep. "I said, show me all the Meraki equipment for this client and produce a statement of work I would need to replace that equipment," he says. "Ten, fifteen seconds later, it kicked out the whole list and a statement of work. The only thing I had to do was add in the Ubiquiti equipment I wanted to suggest." One of those SOWs went to a client, the client agreed, and a tech was booked on site the following Tuesday.

The old way? "I would go into the Meraki portal, go to the client, copy and paste or export a sheet, adjust the sheet, then go find a statement of work template and fill it in." Same story for fleet questions. When he asked Lexful how many Windows 10 computers were left to replace, it listed the stragglers across every client, and even surfaced machines that had been offline for months and needed to be cleared out of Ninja, one of TransformITive's integrations. "I'd normally go into Ninja, adjust my filters, export to Excel, and analyze it. Even at a half hour, Lexful did it in thirty seconds."

Scior is deliberately allergic to inflated AI claims. "It's always how AI is going to save you fifty hours a week. No. Can it save me a few hours a week? It definitely will, and it already has," he says. "If I can get a half hour here and save an hour over there, that's all I need for this to be useful."

The new-hire test

Scior is famously systematic; his teams have described him as a robot because every client is organized exactly the same way. That discipline is what made legacy search tolerable. "The way we use IT Glue is click, click, click. You go to the client, click the category, click what you're looking for, because we know the search can be sketchy," he says.

Then a new hire, not yet trained on the Adam system, couldn't find something in IT Glue. "He went to Lexful and just asked, and Lexful pulled it right up." That's the point Scior keeps coming back to for less-organized MSPs: "If you're a company that already feels like you're struggling with these things, welcome to paradise. Lexful will help you get over not being great at it."

Migration: one zip file, under an hour

Scior ran the cutover himself. "The Lexful team gave me a script. I exported my documentation to a single IT Glue zip file, a few gigs in size, and ran the script. It finished in less than an hour," he says. "It matched everything right up, all the categories: configuration items, assets, networking. I have yet to find a mistake."

Because TransformITive's clients also work inside IT Glue, the team is running both platforms during the transition and re-syncing the export as clients make changes. That mirrors Markert's philosophy on adoption: let people cross over at their own pace. "Everybody learns differently," Markert says. "Just like transitioning a client from one platform to another, you're respecting each of your team members' ability to make that transition. Of course, at some point as a business owner, you've got to cut over. We can't live in two platforms forever."

Their advice on the fear factor: just get started

Markert hears the fear, uncertainty, and doubt around AI firsthand. His answer is that the fear comes from not knowing. "The best way to learn AI is to start using it," he says. "You're going to ask it a question. It's going to give you an answer. It's going to suggest other things you could do. And in that process, you're going to learn."

Scior's version of the same advice has fewer syllables. Asked what he'd say to an MSP content to keep documentation as a storage bin, he doesn't hedge: "They're wasting their time. You can get everything you're used to with your existing documentation platform, except you also have this extra power behind it. It'd be like trying to run a race and deciding to tie your shoes together first. Why would you pick anything else?"

What they tell other MSPs

Asked what he'd say to another MSP weighing the decision, Markert doesn't hesitate. "Lexful is one that I immediately reach for off the shelf. If they're not already using it, we're going to definitely suggest it," he says. "It's the single source of truth for what we do. It's the system of record."

Scior puts the same recommendation in lunch-money terms. "For ten dollars you can have dinner, or for ten dollars you can have dinner and dessert," he says. "Lexful is the dessert."