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The Get Technician Context tool feeds a dispatch agent a structured, pre-computed snapshot of your technicians — who’s working today, when, how loaded they are, and who has the right expertise — so it can make a good assignment decision quickly without re-deriving any of it from raw PSA endpoints. It works for ticket-triggered runs and for scheduled (ticketless) sweeps; specifying the technician pool via the ticket’s company or board team requires a ticket, while passing an explicit list of technicians works in either mode.
Auto-injected for any workflow whose PSA integration has its scheduling-equivalent permission group enabled at Read+ (ConnectWise Schedule Entries, Autotask Service Calls, Halo Appointments, ServiceNow Users and Groups). You’ll see it in the toolbox automatically — no need to toggle it on manually. It pairs with the agent’s Dispatch Decision Framework skill, which the agent loads to interpret the context.

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What It Does

It returns, per technician:
  • Calendar — weekday working hours (days flagged “Not working” when off), timezone, holidays, today’s existing appointments
  • Workload — open ticket count, recent assignment volume
  • Expertise — the technician’s profile plus PSA-configured skills (ConnectWise and Autotask; plus ConnectWise certifications), prior work on similar tickets, the relevant configuration items or technologies
  • Recent Neo assignments — which tickets the agent recently dispatched to each technician, with timestamps, so it can round-robin fairly across the team and avoid handing consecutive tickets to the same person
  • Teams availability (optional) — from your own M365 tenant: each technician’s live presence (Available / Away / Busy / In a call / Offline / out-of-office), so the agent won’t hand work starting now to someone who’s away or on a break; plus their shift rota (upcoming Microsoft Teams Shifts), so the agent can prefer whoever is actually rostered on — now or for a future slot
The agent uses this to choose an assignee (or to decide the ticket should be escalated or left unassigned), then acts via the PSA API — for example setting the ticket’s owner or adding a schedule entry.
Teams availability is fetched only when the agent asks for it. Presence is a current-moment signal (who can take this now); shifts are the rota (who is scheduled on, now and for future slots). Both require the Microsoft Teams — Technician Mapping & Availability integration connected and technicians mapped to their Microsoft user; shifts also read the Teams you selected when mapping (your service-desk Teams). When a piece isn’t available, the agent falls back to PSA calendar availability. It’s the same signal as the Dispatch Ticket action’s “Teams availability” setting, surfaced for agentic dispatch.

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Why It Matters

Each PSA exposes “is this engineer working today” through a different chain of endpoints with non-obvious field names (e.g. ConnectWise’s mondayStartTime / sundayEndTime on schedule/calendars/{id}, Autotask’s InternalLocationWithBusinessHours + per-resource overrides, Halo’s api/Workday). Asking the agent to reconstruct that on the fly is brittle: a misspelled field name or a missing day attribute leads to silent guesses (“probably Mon–Fri 09:00–17:00”) and engineers scheduled outside working hours. Get Technician Context is the canonical answer to working-hours / availability questions. Custom instructions that reference “engineer’s working hours” or “calendar working days” should let the agent reach for this tool, not derive it from primitives.

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How to Use

  1. Build a dispatch workflow (or start from a dispatch recipe)
  2. The tool is auto-enabled when your PSA scheduling perm is on — no extra toggle needed
  3. In custom instructions, describe your routing rules — preferred boards, escalation thresholds, who handles what. Reference “engineer’s working hours” / “calendar working days” naturally; the agent will fetch them via this tool
  4. Review assignments in Event History before turning off technician approval
The richer your PSA data — skills on technician records, accurate schedules, configuration items on tickets — the better the agent’s dispatch decisions. This tool only surfaces what your PSA (and connected calendars) already know.