EP248 – Why You Must NEVER Use AI In Your MSP! with Jamie Claret & Ian Luckett

IAN: In this episode of the IT Experts podcast, we share with you why you should never, ever use AI in your MSP.

INTRO: Welcome to the IT Experts podcast, the only podcast to help MSPs scale to 1 million, and if already there, get to five and go faster at the end of the day. Isn't it all about building a business that works for you rather than you for it? I hope you enjoy the show.

IAN: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the IT Experts podcast, and yes, what a statement why you should never ever use AI in your MSP. We're going to explain a little bit about that comment in a moment, but today's show is going to be a very interesting one because Jamie's now got a dig himself out of the hole that I've just dug. Welcome to the show, Jamie Claret, who's the CEO from autonomy. How you doing today, Jamie?

JAMIE: Very good, Ian. Very good. Thank you. Yes.

IAN: Excellent stuff. So today we are going to talk about why you should never use AI in your MSP. However, what we're actually going to be talking about is why you should never use AI in isolation in your MSP, because there's other areas as well, Jamie, that we're going to be talking about today. Automation. Very misunderstood. Is AI or is it automation? Then we've got intelligent automation and Jamie's going to help us today to knit it all together, to help you to build that most, profitable, efficient MSP you possibly can. So there you go, the click baits out of the way is going to be an incredible show. He's probably going to talk about a load of stuff that I know nothing about, but it's going to be amazing anyway, so that's great. But we love Jamie. He's been in our environment in the MSP Growth hub environment offering value to our clients, and now he's here on the pod, so that's incredible. Jamie, before we get cracking can you just explain to everybody what is, who are you, what do you do, and who'd you help?

JAMIE: Okay, so my name's Jamie. I am the owner of two businesses actually. So I'm in a relatively unique position in that I'm the owner or dual owner of A MSP. So I've had that for about 25 years. Nice. We've built that to the point where it doesn't really need us on an everyday basis so I think we've done okay with that. And about four or five years ago, I had the hair-brained idea of you, of setting up another company. Don't ask me why, but I did. And because I saw the future, I thought, because being an MSP, you see what's going on and what's happening, and we automated a load of stuff within our business using some intelligent automation. And I had an epiphany. I was like, my God, why is everyone not doing this? And so using the knowledge of what I know about MSPs and MRR and that kind of model and management, I thought if we could build something like that for automation and AI then I think we've got a good business. So that's what I've done.

IAN: Fantastic. And how do you help businesses right now? What does the model look like and what you do?

JAMIE: Yeah, so there's two areas really where we help. One is where people are flummox confused as we all are. There's so much going on, they don't know what to do, don't know where to start. So for that, we do a lot of education. We do needs analysis, we do roadmaps, that type of thing. Yeah. And for clients where they've got a good idea about what they want to start automating or using intelligent automation for we do full everything. So discovery all the way through to mapping their processes, through to building, through to testing, through to management and yeah. And making sure it runs efficiently and well.

IAN: Amazing. Is that across business? Across sector?

JAMIE: Yeah. So I'd love to say that we've done what everyone tells you to do, which is, go deep and niche. And we haven't, no, because the, and I guess a lot of MSPs would say the same thing. What we do applies for pretty much all businesses. What I would say is that we do tend to start in the finance part of the business because that's where there's a lot of repetitive stuff going on and a lot of kind of people heavy work. And for some reason we seem to have ended up with a lot of construction, manufacturing, production, logistics, those kinds of businesses. Yeah.

IAN: Interesting. Lots of moving parts and lots of established processes. I'm guessing that exactly the we're going through a bit of a phase of that in the Growth Hub at the moment where we've got this, it's a bit of an unwritten rule. If you've got to think about something, then how can we help using AI to help us to speed up thinking? And to help other people think in the same, in the similar sort of ways. Now, that doesn't mean that we want to just employ a lot of robots, by the way, just in case anybody's not piling in on that one. But what it enables you to do is then elevate your thinking to a more strategic level, which means that you can then push the business. Further forwards faster. I must stop saying that I was tied tongue, there you go, I can't even bloody say it. Time the tongue up. That's it. I always,

JAMIE: I think that though, I think we're reaching an interesting point with that, with, because I'm the same, probably like everyone we're using whatever prefer ChatGPT, copilot, whatever, and it helps you elevate yourself to that more strategic level. But I think it also is having some counter effect. Yeah. Which is, it's actually giving us more work to do the lovely way that at the end it says, would you like to think about this? Or Would you like me to do that? Yeah. And you go, oh yeah, there's an idea that I hadn't thought of. Yeah. And the problem is, think we should all be working on our businesses, not in our businesses. Yeah. But I worry that we might be moving too on too far onto our businesses. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? It's a distraction. It's a distraction.

IAN: Yeah. And you do. I hear younger people saying, using ChatGPT as a counselor. Yeah. Yeah. And back in the day when it, and we joke about it, but it's bloody happening, right? Oh. And when it,

JAMIE: I was using it today in that way, I was absolutely using it today in that way.

IAN: How can I get on this podcast and last with this guy?

JAMIE: That was it.

IAN: But yeah, very interesting point. But but look, AI, right? Yeah. It's clickbait. Everybody's talking about it. Everybody thinks they're using it. Most people aren't actually using it. Most systems that say that they've got AI built into them, haven't got AI built into them at all. They've actually just realized that if I use the word AI, so let's just de myth some and debunk some of the buzzwords. So there's three things we've got here. Yeah. We've got, there's AI, there's automation, and then there's intelligent automation. Yeah. Jamie, let's just talk. Give us your whats and all. Yeah. How do we need to be approaching these buzzwords and these things in business across the board.

JAMIE: Okay. So I'll use language which any MSP owner will understand because they would've heard this every single day of their working life, right? So when one of your clients is an MSP says, there's a problem with my hard drive. What they mean is the computer. They don't mean the hard drive. Now we as techies or engineers or whatever, think a hard drive is a separate thing. It's memory and processes and things like that, but it's become part of the vernacular that the hard drive is the thing. Yeah. And in exactly the same way, AI has become the hard drive. If you want, I can you AI this. Can we, I get asked that all the time. Can you AI this or, we've got this problem, can AI resolve this problem? So that's the first thing. The second thing to remember is the, and I have a great big slide in my presentation that says this AI is automation. It's as simple as that. AI is automation, right? It can be dressed up any way you want, it can chat to you, it can sing to you, it can be a therapist and all those kinds. But effectively, you think, if you think about it at a deep level, it is automating parts of your life, even when you're just talking to it, it's automating bits and pieces. So the way that I describe this is that AI is the brain, and it's a brain in a jar. And we've all seen those kind of science fictions, this great big brain and wire coming out of it.

IAN: Yeah. Yeah.

JAMIE: That is what AI is, and now it's got a pair of eyes stuck to it and a pair of ears stuck to the side of it. So you can tell it things and you can show it things and do those things, but it's not interacting at this moment with your other things. So the way that I describe then, automation is automation of the hands, the things that actually do something. Think about a factory. People are using their hands to do things and now there's robotics to do things. When you plug those two things together, when you plug the brain into the hands together like we do as humans, yeah, you end up with intelligent automation and that's the ability to use the power of that magnificent brain in a jar and actually get it to go and do things. And it's, I think it's important to think about that in the context of a system a business, and the processes within that business because. I haven't yet met a business, however great the sales pitches from all of the PSA software or the RMM software. I've never met a company. In fact, in any sector that uses just one piece of software and it does everything, it's impossible. It doesn't happen, they'll still spreadsheets, there's PowerPoints, there's, I don't know, whatever. There's bits and pieces. So the brain and the hands can interact with all of those different pieces and in effect, it's replicating what we as humans do at those. In those different systems and on those different systems.

IAN: And that's so simple to understand. And once we then apply that, we can then start to see, and it doesn't matter if people want to start saying they're selling AI, they're selling AI, it doesn't really matter if the product or the solution solves your problem. It doesn't matter what it's called.

JAMIE: Exactly.

IAN: And it's a little bit like the Atkins diet, isn't it? Back in the day it was just eat salad and steak and you'll lose a load of weight. Yeah. I don't really care. If I want to lose some weight, I don't care if it's the Atkins diet of his Weight Watchers or any of these, or any of these other things, but it's about understanding the terminology. But I think the thing that's really important is that, it's around adapting though, isn't it? And using this, using the technology to adapt. And, in the early days when God, in the early days, I'm just I'm not thinking, I'm talking like 18 months ago, like this is in...

JAMIE: The early days of AI.

IAN: Back in the days when I was, when I had hair i'll tell you in the in the last couple of years it was right, I'm going to get all my tickets resolved from my I'm going to build AI into my help desk and I'm going to get it to make these decisions and I'm going to get it to do this and get it to do that. Yeah. And you it's like the adoption curve, isn't it? You've got everyone in my confident to start with them. And let's just bump that in.

But what do you mean when you talk about, we need to have this MSP wake up call into the technology, because it is incredible. It's not going away. It's very clever and I think, we've got to adopt it, but we've got to know what it is. Otherwise, we are going to end up just like buying a load of stuff that's not actually going to do anything different than what. Your CRM or your RM you...

JAMIE: Yeah, yeah.

IAN: In the last five years. So what does adapting look like for this modern MSP? So

JAMIE: I have two takes on this, and actually just before I talk about that, I always laugh about CRMs because again, being in MSP for the last 25 years, I'm not quite yet. Sure that I've ever come across a company, a client that having spent tens of thousands on their CRM has actually really ever got the value back for that.

IAN: Yes. Agreed.

JAMIE: Not because CRMs are bad and actually this is, you could overlay this analogy into what we're talking about, right? Which is. What the cust, what the client has done when they're buying this CRM or what they've not done is understood how they work and what their systems are. And they've just bought a dream, signed on the dotted line and then wondering why it still doesn't solve all their problems. So going back to the context of why they must adapt or die. There's two elements to that, one is you must adapt internally as an MSP.

IAN: Yeah.

JAMIE: You could, you can fight it, you say we don't need any AI, we don't need any automation or anything like that in our business, we're going to carry on as we do.

That's, and that's fine. If that's what you want to do, that's absolutely fine. Yeah. And maybe there might be some advantage to that in the future because, you're keeping it very human. You're keeping that very personal relationship and I think that's important. However. I think you've got to remember that your competitors will be doing that, will be using automation. So that means that if a selling point view is how quickly you respond to your SLA or your tickets, your competitor will respond quicker. Are your competitors getting a better service? Maybe they are because the AI is able to look at patterns in their tickets and start to make recommendations, so you can either adapt or not adapt and then just watch all this other stuff happen. The analogy I always think of is Tesla, whether you like them or not. They've really shaken up the motor industry. They've dragged them along into EVs and all this kind of stuff. And it's the same in our industry. It's always evolving and it's, the question is, do you want to be part of that? So that's one element of adapt or die, actually, what I consider to be the more important part is what are you doing for your clients, because you are I cite MSPs and accountants as. Not only being very similar accountancy firms, but they are the most trusted advisors of their clients. They hold all the secrets, all the passwords, all the, they understand all the systems, how they'll work, get you out trouble if there's a problem. They're very there. There's a big parallel between them and because you are such a trusted advisor, the very first person that they're going to go and speak to, if they have a question about AI, if they're worried about it, that is going to be you because you are you, you're sitting under this massive great IT umbrella. So if they come to you if they come to you and say, can you help us with, explain this stuff to us and help us implement it? And you go, do you know what, sorry, that's, it's like web development, that's not our thing, that's not our thing. Then they'll go and find someone that will do that. And I suspect that there will be a convergence between MSPs and and automation and AI. And very soon that automation company will be saying to them do you know what? We can actually look after the IT as well. And they'll be like, oh, okay. So I think that's, to me, actually, that's the bigger of the two. Either you've got to be delivering this already to your clients or if you are not, you should be at least speaking to them about and trying to find out what it is that they want because they're just as confused as you are.

IAN: Yeah. And they're trying to work out, is this a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Is it a security risk? Where are we actually putting all our information? Everyone's all been excited about going and chucking stuff into ChatGPT, but I haven't met anybody yet who's still read the full Apple terms and conditions Every time they update your phone, they do it.

JAMIE: They do it every time we get out.

IAN: I've just let the cat out, the bag of shock horror. And I think, there is an element of the higher level security. You know, one minute, all the MSPs are talking about, it's not an if, but when you're going to get compromised from a security point of view, MSPs are a tough target, which, or the high target as we know around the security side of things. And then all of a sudden we've got this shiny ball on the left hand screen. We're putting all the information about my customer into it. We're doing all that. And just because I've ticked a box that says I don't want it to learn. Is that really doing that? Because you put all these privacy controls in place and then all of a sudden you're sitting there chatting about to your father-in-law about green flip flops one night, and then the next morning you've got these bloody adverts come up for green. That's hang on a minute, that's really to it. And it only takes it to be helpful to you once for you to go, which, that's not something that I'm important in, but the thing I, what you just were just mentioning there about, you'll resolve those tickets quicker is having a is adopting that mindset where you can think at a different level. So for example, we were creating some content the other day I was creating some content scripts and shaking it up a little bit. So keep an eye out for that. And we got, I said what's the Top 10 podcast? Obviously we hadn't recorded this one then, so yeah. But what was the Top 10 podcast in the last year? So Gail put together that, and I were like, right now I want to pick the best bits out of those podcasts and talk about those subjects. And it's oh God, I went right? So I just threw it into chat and I just said, ask Gail to do, throw it into chat and just say what are the top three best conversational points in this? And what was very interesting actually so this is like testing, can you do that? Is it possible for you to do that? And first of all, it came back and it was a bit crap. It didn't, and I thought you could do a better job than that. So I changed the model. I don't know what that means. I changed the model to a deeper learning model and my God, it came out with something completely different. So that was really interesting. And I think, if we're not careful this. What's the one thing that we're calling AI? It's probably got, millions and millions of different variances and ways to use it, but coming back to you can't, AI I don't think won't enhance a poor process or a process that's not there.

JAMIE: It just, there's a, something I've seen before, which I like, which is something like AI will just make a ship process even faster. So something along those lines. It's true. Now what's really interesting from our point of view is that, so we see this a lot and I'm not saying our clients have bad processes. They don't, we tend to deal in the mid markets. So hundreds plus staff, that kind of thing. And you would expect that they would be pretty slick on their processes and their documented procedures and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, it's an absolute shocker In the, I've the people that work in my team, they're all ex corporate. They're used to this kind of very professional world and things like this, and they can't, they said, Jamie, I can't believe it. This is a whopping great big company. And we asked them for some documented, I don't know, standard operating procedures. There's nothing. There's nothing. And these, now that's, there's nothing wrong with that. That's just how businesses grow and evolve. But, if you just lay, so what a lot of these companies have done in the past and people we speak to is they've gone out and they bought the new shiny thing, the AI or the automation. And then again, like the CRM, they're thinking, oh, it hasn't really solved our problem. And that's because the root of the problem, and this applies to MSPs and it applies to their clients, is the root of the problem actually isn't about AI or automation, it's about what is this process doing? Why are you doing it?

IAN: Yeah.

JAMIE: And can it, first of all, before you even spend anything on it, is can it be improved, first of all? It's been done this way for 20 years. Why are you doing it this way? Always, because that's how we've always done it. So the very first step that anyone should take when they're looking to improve their MSP or to help their clients is, document the process, draw it out. Do a workflow diagram and understand, because at that stage it could be that just part of it needs to be automated or use AI for, it doesn't need the whole, you don't try to, there's many ways to skin a cat and sometimes you just need to start with one little bit.

IAN: Where do they start then? So yes, we'll break the process down and I always say just go and get the good old fashioned post-it notes and a wall and append. And start it and draw it on the wall. And then bring in other people who also operate this process and go, that's not right, because Steve doesn't give it to me and Jill doesn't do this and that, get it all on the wall and go, is that what we do? And then we go, yes it is. We go right now, what could we be doing better with, or things like that. But what are some of the processes that are quick wins for MSPs too, to start off with, is it that as you said, you generally head for the finance bit first. Because that's where there's like a lot of mess. Is it, what would you recommend the MSP looks at first?

JAMIE: So there's a matrix that's very well known, very well used in the in the world of automation. And it's the kind of the complexity to the business benefit. So if you imagine an X and Y. And on the X axis, is it the X was get confused.

IAN: The one going up is the...

JAMIE: Yeah, the one going up. Keep it simple. The one going up on the left hand side is business benefits. So it's, let's say it's 10, 10 is the maximum business benefit. And zero is nothing. And on the right hand side is complexity. So zero to 10, 10 being very complex. Now what you are looking for to start with is, and this is generic, so it doesn't matter what, whether it's finance, whether it's within the ticketing, whatever. You are looking for a process. So let's say you've mapped out with the post-it notes, you're looking for a process that sits within kind of zero to medium business win. And low complexity. Because that is where you should start. These are the quick wins or the low hanging fruit as we refer to them. This is where you should start. Unfortunately, what most people try and do is start with the probably mediocre business benefit and the most complex thing that they can think of and then they try and throw everything at it and it doesn't work. So that's one way to measure it. Another way you can look at it is that we have a gains what's called the gains methodology that we've created. This is breaking down a process into its kind of four or five component parts, and the main ones being the G-A-I-N of gains. So if you think of the, within a process, there's a gathering process. So let's say, tickets, someone's going in and getting those tickets, and then they're putting them somewhere into the ticketing system. Then you've got the kind of the action. So deciding what to do with them, triaging them that's slightly more complex than gathering them. You've then got the I, which is the intelligence. So this is how you resolve this problem. So that's very complex. That's AI. And then lastly, you might have the end, which is the notify, how you tell the customer what you've done with the ticket. Most people start on the I. They're like how can we just plug AI straight into this? Which is the worst place to start. The best place to start is in the G or the N, the gathering or the notifying. How can we just automate putting the triaging of the tickets, for example?

IAN: Yeah.

JAMIE: That would immediately give you a win. It's not that complex. It's something you could do relatively easily and if that works, then you can build on that. But most people are trying to start right at the top end and failing miserably.

IAN: It's just trying to bite more than they can chew, aren't they really? And it's just and I suppose not understanding, it's a little bit like, isn't it the what you mentioned at the top of the show, which was you go to ChatGPT for a thing. I want you to research this, and I've got to the bottom, i've got my thing. I'm really happy with that Now I can now go and apply that quicker into a plan or deploy a project quicker, or educate someone quicker or whatever it might be. But you've now gone, oh, but Ian, would you like to do this as well? It's no, that's not bad idea actually. It's. We've all been there where you've just you started off a conversation and, hour and a half late you're still chatting to ChatGPT about something, but you've created something absolutely incredible. But that wasn't the bloody plan that I wanted to create that at 10 o'clock at night just before I went to bed. And now my head's buzzing because it's so exciting about, and then you have a terrible night's sleep and you wonder what the hell's going on.

STUART'S INTERRUPT: Hey, Stuart here. Got a quick message for everyone that's listening. If you've decided that you want to grow your MSP but you're not sure what support you need, then you must check out our ultimate MSP Growth Guide. It's designed to help you compare all of the support that's out there in the channel for you and help you shortcut your decision making so you get the right support to help you get the right results to grow your MSP. But alternatively, if you'd like to come and see us in action, then why not come to one of our events? Simply click on the link in the show notes and we'll see you very soon. Now back to the show.

IAN: Cheers, Stuart!

But anyway, people, let's talk about people. And upskilling, we hear a lot of things about, how recruitment is hard and also that, with not necessarily directly related, we've there's this potential regulation coming in to make sure that we've got quality MSPs only listening to this podcast, but, operating and, all the time we're hearing that clients are winning new clients because of poor service levels and things like that. However, as working environments change and, automation and AI is coming in. There's a word on the street, a rumor in the mill that, the lower level one task though, sorry, a level one engineers types of are potentially going to disappear. And that could become, automated and chat botted and all of that kind of great stuff. How do you suggest MSPs blend this together with a retention strategy? because you still need people to operate the hands, right? And to put the hand into the bits and I always use the analogy of AI is great because it's like a cake. You put quality ingredients in it and the right amount, and you're going to get an amazing cake. You put too much baking powder and not enough flour. It's going to end up being a right old damp squid. But how do we, approach that from a people point of view?

JAMIE: So I go back to the methodology. So the methodology is gains with an S. And the S is what I call the special source. And the special source is humans. It's what makes us human. And I think that at the moment we're on a bit of a pendulum swing away from humanity if you want. You're on a bit of a swing, which is I'm paying, I don't know what, 25 grand, 30 grand for a first line engineer, I've got five of them. Oh, maybe I could get rid of that whole layer, triage it, have an AI voice on the phone and chat bot and all the rest of it. And I think we have to ask ourselves. Is that real? Is that going to work? Because I think there's a lot of people jumping on that bandwidth there. A lot of people trying to sell that kind of stuff. In my humble opinion, and I do believe in humans. I don't think that's going to work. I just had an experience recently. I had something to do with a bank, actually. It was something to do with the credit agency and I was trying to do something and it was all automated. And it was effing terrible, right? It was, we've all been there. It doesn't matter how good the AI thinks it is, how clever it can be. I actually want to speak to a human. And I think we will continue to want to speak to humans and I'll give you one analogy. I gave a talk once for it was a group of niche law firms. So you know, any of your clients who've dealt with solicitors I'm sure will know what a pleasure they are to deal with as an MSP.

IAN: They'll not be listening to this show.

JAMIE: No, I'll go for it. I'll go for it. And I don't know if, again, an experience I had, particularly with our MSP, is that whenever I used to go and visit a client or a prospect who was a lawyer they would say to me do you deal with lawyers? And I'd always say some lawyers, they go, oh, because you know that we are different, right? So that's, they say without faith. So the first funny thing was, is that when I went to do this. Talk at this niche law firm thing. Someone walked up to me and I was waiting for it, and they said, how'd you deal? Do you deal with lot? And I said, yeah, a few. And they go, because we're different. And I was like okay. Within 30 seconds this has happened. But I did my talk. He is very well received. And this guy comes up to me afterwards very typical, highfaluting successful guy in, in the criminal law. And he said to me, he puts his arm around me and he says, Jamie, he says, brilliant talk. Brilliant. He says, AI is brilliant. He says, but it will never take my job. And I said, why is that? And he said, because when you know, someone has me on retention or whatever, and they get a knock at the door at midnight from the police saying, you've got to come down to the police cell. He says, I go up to them, I meet them at the police cell, and I put my arm around their shoulder and I say. Don't worry. Now. That's an extreme analogy. I know as MSPs, maybe we're not at that. Yeah, I think we're at that level. They may not think we're at that level, but how many times have your clients as MSPs had something really horrible go wrong? Whether it's a virus, whether it's ransomware, whether it's something dodgy, whatever it is. They confide in you and they trust you. As I said, they trust you with your, their secrets. So let's say we're in that same situation. Let's say they've just had some ransomware. Their entire company is on the hook for God knows how many bitcoins. What do they want? Do they want to go and pick up? And it says, hello there, Ian, how can we help you? Of course they don't. They want someone that's going to either drive around there or pick up the phone and say, don't worry. We'll sort this out. I think that is really important.

IAN: Yeah I totally agree with you. And I had a similar experience to that with a bank that I just joined, which was all app, it was, but all app, and it was like you were giving me something, I needed to talk to someone and it just said, contact us. And I thought, oh. God, here we go into the chat bot. And it said, call me, I pressed the button. This weird phone app came on my phone. You know the one where you talk to people, that old one and literally three rings, someone phone, someone picked the phone up. It was amazing. And that, and I think what we mustn't lose face on here is exactly what you just explained. There is the experience. We will pay lots of different prices for cars, holidays, clothes, meals out, and everything like that. When you sit there, and I just use a personal experience when I'm sitting above the helicopters in the shard, drinking a glass of wine with my wife looking down, I'm not paying 60 quid...

JAMIE: For a of wine...

IAN: Bottle Of wine.

JAMIE: Yeah, exactly.

IAN: I'm paying 60 quid for the experience and I want it to be good, but likewise, I could go down the road and I could spend a similar sort of money and it'll be cold and dark and someone's banging and fixing and I have a bad experience. And I think that it's the human that's creates the experience, isn't it? And it's that kind of side of it. So how do we help the team not be I guess like fearful of some of this change and help them upskill by using it as well. Is it just a case of putting them on a ChatGPT course?

JAMIE: No, I don't think so. First of all, I would have that conversation with them. I would tell them, I would use the, like your example there. I would use those examples and make them realize they're human and they're valued. I think that's really important.

IAN: And they're different.

JAMIE: And they're different. They're d and they're all unique in their own unique ways. Yeah. So I think that's important. I think there... look, we can't deny that there will be areas where there will be reductions in staff. I think that's a reality. However, what I see is most of our client, in fact, I'd say all of our clients don't want to reduce headcount. They want to increase productivity the people that they've got, that's the first thing. The second thing is the people that are really going far and the clients that we deal with are the curious ones. So the, if you've got a team member and they're really curious about, I don't know, Zapier or agents in ChatGPT, go for it. Let them give them the space if you can, or give them a project or let them suggest a little project they can do to do it, because those are going to be the front runners, yeah. Just look back to the days of when the internet and email and stuff started out. Yeah. There was always the kind of one that was playing around with it and look where they're now, that, that's I would encourage that. And then, and I guess if you can make your company a company that, it wants to embrace this stuff. You are always going to have blockers. There's always going to be people in the business that are fearful of it, who are don't want to change and things like that. And as I'm a massive advocate of EOS and traction. And people have got to believe in the values of the business and the purpose of the business. And if they're not coming along, if that's changed now because of AI and automation then they're not necessarily right for the business and maybe they'll find a better job doing something they enjoy more that doesn't evolve any of that stuff.

IAN: Just before we wrap up let's have a chat about the future of the MSP. At, from what we see most MSPs are doing not the ones in the MSP Growth hub, you must understand of course, doing a terrible job at selling or demonstrating the value of cybersecurity, data security to the world. And on the back of that, they're selling scared and people aren't really getting it. And they don't think they need it until they crash the car sort of thing.

JAMIE: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

IAN: And then so what I'm getting at is there's enough stuff going on with security, let alone, I'll tell you what we should do. Let's do a little bit of automation as well, yeah, so now you've got MSPs go, oh, I'm going to start doing a bit of building in some, whether it's NA NL or a bit of dynamic or whatever it might be. Like stuff in here. I'll see if you've got down on the notes here. A term, I haven't obviously read this very much before we've start this change today, an MASP managed automated animation service provider can't even say it. I've got to put You just made that up, haven't you? I did, yeah, I did, write that one up. You know what's the future of the MSP with all of this. Potential efficiencies and this is just a big old shiny ball that we know what happens when MSPs get a shiny ball. Yeah. It all normally goes a little bit. Pete Tong.

JAMIE: Yeah. Okay. So I think the security thing's interesting because I have a foot in both camps. I think the security thing's interesting, right? The security thing. You can see people glaze over and automatically put the barriers up when you start talking to them about security. That's, it is what it's and it doesn't matter how to try and sell it, whether it's pain, whether it's insurance, whatever it might be. The one thing that I found very liberating with autonomy is that people's eyes light up when you go and speak to them about automation AI, it is a totally different experience, and it's quite liberating. I go to places now and they actually want to speak to me, they actually...

IAN: I should try it.

JAMIE: They actually want to speak to you. They're interested, they're curious. They are, they've tried some bits and pieces themselves, so to, this is why I started the business. This is, to me, this is a right area, it's not going away. Absolutely not going away. So yes, it's shiny definitely, but if you can cut through that shine, shininess, and distraction. One of the things I found, I belong, as you can imagine, to loads of different groups to do with AI and things like that. It's very easy to get distracted. Yes, and actually about six months, a year ago, I made the decision we know what lane we're in, we know what we're doing, we know we do it really well. I'm going, see what's going on. But I'm just sticking to what we do because there's so many in the line again. There's so many people getting distracted. So if an MSP wants to get into this world and start doing it, I would say pick one thing. Find one thing that you know you can do well, maybe try internally first, then try and say it to your clients, do that. And then of course, and I would say this, the other option as well is to partner with a company that does this type of thing. Because maybe you don't want to learn how to do it, you don't want to have a whole new skill set. You don't want to retrain people. Then there's companies like ours and other companies that could help you deliver that to people.

IAN: It's an exciting time though, isn't it?

JAMIE: Very.

IAN: Jamie, brilliant show. Thank you very much. I think we could have talked for a lot longer than we did but we haven't got everybody's ears for that length of time. What's the top three things? What's the summary takeaways where MSPs need to take away from this show?

JAMIE: Yeah, so I think the first thing has got to be the brain and the hands, it is all mushed together at the moment. It's all a hard drive and all this kind of thing. It's not, it's the AI is the brain, the hands of the automation. And when you put those two things together that's where the magic happens. When you are looking at your business, think about what's using intelligence and what's kind of processing what's manually doing something. So I think that would be the first thing.

IAN: Lovely.

JAMIE: The second takeaway is understand your processes. Now that's a very broad term, but you explained it perfectly, which is, just pick one part of your business. Let's say triage in tickets, get whoever's involved in that, what we would call SMEs, subject matter experts. Get them involved in a room. Give yourself an hour, get some post-it notes and say let's map out exactly what happens. And then on the back of that, don't forget to ask yourself the question, what happens when this doesn't happen or what happens when someone doesn't fill out this? But these are the edge cases, the exceptions, and you'll end up this big tree of post-it notes and immediately you are going to be further ahead than 90% of other businesses because now you're starting to understand your business. And then I think the last thing to bring it all together is one of the talks that I do is called the cup of tea problem. And I'll explain it now because quickly it makes sense. Ian, how do you make a cup of tea?

IAN: Oh, this is the scone of the scone, the cream on top and the cream underneath, isn't it? No. I'll boil the kettle. I'll put tea bag in the cup. I'll then, to most people's disgust...

JAMIE: Put the milk in.

IAN: No, I won't. No, I don't. No I get the tea where I need it to be. I'll stab the tea bag for a couple of minutes, pull it out, whack in enough tea that I think Stuart won't be upset with, and get on with my day.

JAMIE: Okay. Okay. So pretty straightforward, right?

IAN: Yes.

JAMIE: Pretty straightforward if not controversial...

IAN: Sugar to taste.

JAMIE: Sugar to taste. So the reason we talk about this is that if I was to ask you, what would you do if the teabag broke?

IAN: I'll probably throw it away and make, get another one.

JAMIE: Okay. And let's say Kettle doesn't turn on?

IAN: I'd microwave it.

JAMIE: Microwave it, right?

IAN: Which just awful things to do.

JAMIE: We won't tell Stuart, don't worry. The reason we call this the cup of tea problem is that you as a human, and it's really important to think as a human, right? You know what to do in all these situations. Yes. I could say what happen if you've moved the mug? What happens if someone, what's green tea or whatever, all these different, is a human. And what we are doing at the moment is we're assuming and we're being sold, that AI knows all of that stuff too. And the reality is, it doesn't. So if you don't tell an AI or automation what to do, if the tea bag breaks, it will just carry on making the cup of tea with a broken tea bag, right?

IAN: Yeah.

JAMIE: Or if the kettle doesn't boil, you'll have a cold mug of tea because it doesn't know what to do. So once you've gone through these first two steps, you've understood the hands and the brain, you've worked out your triage process. Think of it now as if you're trying to explain it in that way. So imagine you're trying to explain that same process to a toddler who's never made a cup of tea before or triaged a first line ticket support. Maybe they're better, I don't know, but think of it like that and then it will give you a different lens through which to view kind of what to automate. And it could be, and you made a good point at the end there, about sugar to taste right. A lot of people will try and automate the entire making of the cup of tea. Actually, it might just be that you automate, boil the kettle, put it in the mug, and put a tea bag in. The people can put their own milk and sugar in. You don't need to automate that. You're not going to get that much gain from that. So that will be my third and final.

IAN: That is brilliant. And I'm glad you didn't mention that at the beginning, because this show would've been easy two hours long, because I was going to go on my rant then about the fact that, casting dispersion on every single person younger than me. We are going to lose logic.

JAMIE: Yeah. Yeah.

IAN: People don't logically know how to do something because they just ask the question and it's really easy just to, you don't even have to type into it now. But let's not get into that because that will just rattle through...

JAMIE: Having part two the follow up podcast...

IAN: Part. Yeah. Do you know what Yeah. How, what, you don't need Logic in your MSP, another click bait in title there. Jamie, it's been cracking show. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you ever so much. Love the insights. And I love being, you know, being part of these conversations where you can see this technology forming, in front of your eyes. If people want to continue the conversation with you, Jamie, how do they get in contact with you?

JAMIE: Yeah, probably the two simplest ways is via LinkedIn, just Jamie Claret, LinkedIn slash Jamie Claret will get you there or go to our website, automate.io, which I was very pleased to see on one. The first person I spoke to when I set up the business and I was spelling out the domain name, they said, oh. Auto nom mate. I said yes. That's it. Auto nom mate. Do io. So go visit auto nom mate io

IAN: auto nom, mate. I've heard worse. I've heard worse.

JAMIE: Yeah.

IAN: You'll be all right with that one. You'll be all right with that one. Jamie, all the best of luck.

JAMIE: Thank you very much

IAN: with Autom and also the MSP and yeah, and also sharing the word about how not and how to make a cup of tea. Fantastic. Lovely.

JAMIE: Cheers.

IAN: Take care. You look after yourself. See you all soon. Take care.

OUTRO: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Just before you go, and if you're curious about how this episode links with the ability to scale your MSP to a million or, or if you are already there, accelerate to five, then we want to invite you to come and take the MSP Mastery quiz, and in just three minutes, you're going to get 360 degrees scan of your business where you can identify the one or two tactics that can help you find more time engage in, align your people and help generate more leads in your MSP. It's really simple. Just click on the link in the show notes and if you have enjoyed this episode, we'd love to get some feedback from you by means of a rating review on Spotify or iTunes, or your podcast platform of choice. We really appreciate every single one of them. Now, you can go and enjoy the rest of your day and we look forward to catching up and connecting with you soon. All the best day.