EP257 – Don’t Believe the AI Hype with Fiona Challis and Ian Luckett

IAN: In this episode of the IT Experts podcast, we're going to tell you don't believe that AI hype.

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: So good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. Today we've got a cracker of the show. We've got the one and only Fiona Challis back in the house. Good morning, Fiona. How you doing?

FIONA: Hello, Ian. Nice to be back.

IAN: Oh my word. It's like a bouncing ball. Just coming back over and over again to add...

FIONA: You can't take the girl over the channel Ian.

IAN: You can't. You certainly can't do that. So we got a really great show for you today. We're going to hear about what Fiona's up to now, which is super, super excited. But the one thing that we are not going to do is we are not going to go into the hype of AI. We are going to help you cut through the chaff, cut through the shiny balls, and you're going to learn what some of the most successful MSPs who are seriously nailing business growth and opportunities using AI and Fiona's going to help us do that. Now many of you may know Fiona, as the queen of sales in the MSP channel, but now she's the queen of AI. That's what she said when she booked this call, and I'm not quite sure if she wants to be known as that, but Fiona's new business, AI enabled growth is going to help us just do exactly what I just said. So Fiona let us know what's going on in your world right now. Why are we talking, what's happened in the last, kind of, like six months to to get to this really exciting place?

FIONA: Yeah. Perfect. Firstly, thank you for having me back you, I think this is my third time on your podcast. It's in Indeed.

IAN: Yeah.

FIONA: I'll take you back a little bit further. I'll take you back maybe the last couple of years because for anyone who's known me in the industry, you'll know I took a little bit of a. Step back to focus on additional projects for the last couple of years. One of them was working with female entrepreneurs and helping them to enable AI in their business.

But the other one was working with my long-term client, TD Synex and HPE and Nvidia, who mostly everybody will know who they are in this podcast. And for the last couple of years I've been helping those guys to create their partner training to launch the Nvidia HPE AI enabled solutions. So that's what I've been doing the last couple of years is creating all of the partner enablement training, teaching them how to sell AI, teaching them how to talk about AI, how to position it. So that's what got me all into the AI space. But traditionally, when you're working with Nvidia and HPE, their solutions are very enterprise focused. So you're dealing really with resellers forge, selling to the enterprise client base, not the SMB client base, and their solutions, like the cheapest one to get started within is like 140 k and that's like a sandbox solution, that's not even a full blown AI solution. Yeah. But it was really when Chat GPT came out and, I started to use AI in my own business, but I really seen it as something that, this is not just for enterprise clients anymore. Yeah. This is supercharging an SMB business for business.

That's like you and me, small businesses. Yeah. I'm now a one woman business operating like a 20 woman business. Yeah. Yeah. So that's really what got me excited about AI. Because I use it in my own business. I use it with female entrepreneurs. And then I ended up coming back into the MSP space because I've seen so many of them were struggling to adopt ai and that's really what brought me back in.

IAN: They're struggling to adopt it, Fi, because so many people are just like using it. It's clickbait. It's every single event that you go to, virtually 90% of us, I had to use AI to do this, had to use AI to do that, had to AI to do this, and yet when I met up with Fiona a couple of weeks ago and we were having a coffee, she said most MSPs aren't actually even ready for any form of AI because their processes aren't straight and that goes killed it. And it was like a really boring conversation. But it's true, isn't it? The myth around AI is you can't just plug it in and solve your problems in your business. Talk to me about this whole most MSPs right now, today and going to help you get ready and focus on the things that you need to do so you can then get supercharged. But why is AI just something that MSPs today need to actually ignore.

FIONA: I'm going to disagree that they need to ignore it because ignoring it is actually the worst thing that they can do. So I'm not going to work that part. I just realize what I said.

IAN: You know what I mean? Ignore going down the shiny ball syndrome. I need that product. I need this product. I need that product. That's what I was aiming at.

FIONA: Yeah, so definitely stay away from shiny objects Syndrome because you can go down a bloody rabbit hole and get stuck there for years if you want to. But what I would say is AI always starts internally first. So look in your own house first, get your own house in order first before you even start to talk about AI with anything else. So what I do, Ian, is I work with MSPs and kind of four areas of the business to see if they are AI ready first, because the key thing is you need to really assess your own business to see, can we actually use AI? Where can we use automation? Where can we use AI? And then start to put an AI roadmap in place. So we look at the service and the operations desk. That's normally the quickest win, to be honest, because most of them are, firefighting all of the time and desks. Now with AI, you can take a lot of that firefighting away. But you do still have to have workflows in pro and processes in place you have to have some things in place to make sure you can even utilize AI there because it's garbage in, garbage out. If you don't have the right data, if you don't have the right workflows and processes, you're not going to get the output that you want to get. Looking at your service desk and operations, then looking at your sales operations to see where AI can be enabled there because you can really supercharge your sales now, which is brilliant. The same for marketing we look at that and say, where can you have AI enabled there? And then your client offerings. So look at those kind of four quadrants, service operations, sales, marketing, and your client offerings. And then look at how AI can be enabled in all four of those quadrants and see where you're most ready to get started and start with one area, but then create the roadmap for the whole two years ahead. And do it bit by bit, because other words, priorities will keep changing, the business is still growing. You have to have the plan, you have to have the roadmap in place, and then pick quick wins every 30 to 60 or 90 days. Pick a quick win that you can then implement and put in place as you go. Bit by bit.

IAN: Can we break these down a little bit?

FIONA: Yeah.

IAN: Cause what I'd love to do is, we've just done exactly what I didn't want to do. We haven't, because we're going to pull ourselves out of it which is come to this session and do this bit on AI. So let's talk about the service desk for a minute, and let's talk about, putting AI into the service desk.

Number one, the top of the block, you've gotta have a good end-to-end or a working end-to-end process that you want to, speed up and enhance and add extra value and add extra efficiencies to it. But how does an MSP even know where to start with? And I know this is something that you do with what products? To speed that up, do they, because there's literally just hundreds and hundreds isn't there, that are all focused towards the service desk. They've got all their vendors and their PSAs and the RMMs and all the other bits and people which have got AI built into them, which is good because it's helping those products. Be better. But what does putting AI into a service desk actually mean?

FIONA: There's a fine line. So if we talk about the service desk, and this is where a lot of MSPs get confused and it's very easy to get confused with it, by the way, there's a very fine line between automation and AI, so there are a lot of things on the service desk that can very easily be automated, even with the vendors that you're currently working with. But a lot of MSPs and don't have the stuff that could be automated, even automated. So your first line of call is, let's look at what you've currently got in place. Let's look at who you're currently using and let's look at what could be automated straight away, which will alleviate some of that pressure and the time pressure, but also stop some of the firefighting that's happening on the surface desk. But then you're also looking at tier one tickets in particular. So a lot of those ones can automatically then be managed by AI, whether it's an AI chat bot that you have. What most prefer to use now is like an AI voice agent. So you have a voice agent where as soon as the first call comes into the service desk, the voice agent will qualify the client. They'll do the ticket triaging for them, and they'll automatically then triage the ticket through to the right person that it needs to go through to even just by doing that in, you can see of around 50% of your tier one tickets giving time back for them to focus on more higher value tasks.

IAN: And I know that there's loads and loads of different, products and I think that's something that you do is that you help the MSP work out what product's, the right thing at the right time.

FIONA: Yeah.

IAN: So we don't really need to go into the detail that, because I think we'll be here even longer than we need to be. I think what you've just said there is when you've identified, you've got the process and you've identified the areas where you could enable AI to speed up those tickets or speed up this identification or analysis of this task or whatever it might be, because it is bringing in another tool. And we were having a conversation with our clients the other day where they were talking about different RMMs. And which one should I use? This, it was with a trusted supplier. And then the other guy's going, yeah, it is going to be more expensive, but this works better than that. And I just feel so sorry for these MSPs sometimes because it's like yeah, but it's like a third of the price. And this other guy was going, yeah, but it doesn't work as well. And the guy in my right hand, if you're watching on video he'd gone through this in so much detail and analysis on exactly, kind of like where you are looking at the functionality of it. And he didn't care that this other product was three times cheaper because they'd done a price drop and all sorts of other, he says, but it doesn't work. How do they, how do you help them with this sort of conundrum of, yeah, go on this is what you want. because it's cheap and it does what the other ones do. But unless you go and spend time, and we know MSPs are busy in looking at all the different products, you're never going to know, are you? It's just a mindblown.

FIONA: Yeah. This is the whole thing, and the way we look at tools and everything, Ian has to really has to start to change because it's not even about the cost of the tool. It's not about which one's cheaper, which one's more expensive. It's about which one is going to give you more capacity back into the business. Which one is going to improve your client experience? Which one's going to improve your employees experience on the service desk and which one is going to give the overall better experience because the money that you're paying extra for this more expensive tool, it's going to save you maybe 50% of your time on the service desk. So think about it that way. How much time is it going to save me? Because money, you can get back time, you can't. So if you focus on how much time it's going to save you, that's what you really need to be looking at. And it's the same with all of AI. And it's not about the money as such. It's about the use case. It's about what are you actually trying to achieve, what's the business outcome here of what you're trying to achieve? You're trying to cut back service desk, tier one tickets by 50%. You're trying to monitor everything that the patterns, the routine things that customers are always complaining about or always calling your service desk about. Using that information, using that intelligence to create things like training videos, self-help things. You're trying to use AI to alleviate the pressure of your desk, not to put more on it.

IAN: I absolutely love that. Love that. So that was the service and operations. How does this show up in the sales space? Because normally, for many MSPs, it's a call comes in, referral comes in. If they're lucky, they might have followed your training previously on sales and actually start getting a fresh flow of leads coming in. If they're unlucky, then it'll still be referrals. They're coming in there. What sort of functionality around the AI can be supporting the sales function?

FIONA: Yeah, so this is where I get really excited on it...

IAN: I bet you do.

FIONA: Because the one thing that MSPs hate, nearly every single one of them, they all bloody hate sales and marketing. And I was at the network group the last couple of days and we were just talking about this, that the beauty of AI now, you all hate doing sales and marketing, but now AI can do it for you if you learn how to use it.

IAN: It's like a friend.

FIONA: So it's like result, yes. You can finally get rid of sales and marketing.

IAN: No, you can't.

FIONA: So well, you can put it on supercharge and really the way I like to look at it is, if you use AI properly now with both sales and marketing. It means that you can only spend your time speaking with qualified prospects who are ready to spend money, who are serious about investing in managed services. You don't have to do all the other stuff beforehand. And that's where it can really help you.

IAN: And I guess this is the same very much as in the operation space, isn't it? If you haven't got a connected CRM that's automated with proper lead scoring and all of that kind of stuff with integrated either telemarketing team or whatever it might be, then that's your first protocol. And then how can you then improve that with AI? Again, you are not going to be able to find a tool that's going to plug into an empty pipeline with a leaking marketing system, and all of a sudden you're going to get little green shoots popping up all over the place. It doesn't work like that, does it?

FIONA: Yeah. You do need to have good data because the output is only as good as the data that you've got internally. But there is still so much in that AI can do, and even with MSPs, I see some of them spend an absolute fortune on lead gen. You see it? I see it. A fortune on lead gen, and they have all of this leads activity going on, and then these leads ring into the MSP and half the time the phone's not even being picked up. They've just wasted all this money on lead gen and they're not even there to take the phone calls. One of the first things to do is to put an Ai SDR agent in place so that all of the calls that come into the business, they're answered straight away. So no lead goes unturned. And you can very easily do that with a voice enabled SDR agent that is trained in your voice. It's trained in your brand. It basically speaks as you, even as the owner of the business, you can use your own voice, everything. So all of your calls are filtered. So no call goes unanswered, then it's qualified for you. If it is a qualified prospect, we will then either pre-book a call straight into your calendar for you so that you've got a qualified call in the calendar or if they're not ready yet, we'll direct them to towards something else. Maybe it's a white paper, maybe it's a webinar, and maybe it's something else that you've done. But the way to look at this now, and this is why I love the voice agents, is you could literally put a campaign today. Let's say somebody's seeing a campaign of yours tomorrow, you are closed. Your business Saturday and Sunday is closed. If you had a voice as to your agent that person called, they could be pre-booking calls all weekend. Whilst you're right, enjoying yourself. You come in Monday morning, you've got calls already booked in your diary, and they're qualified.

IAN: I heard that term the other day actually. I was listening to Marcus Sheridan's, endless customers, and it's the digital human, isn't it? It's the digital human is going to be the thing that's going to take over the chat box and all of this sort of stuff. And I think it's a really exciting space and I'm just waiting.

FIONA: I honestly, I think it's so exciting. It's like it's just taken away. The biggest pain that MSPs have, which is the sales and marketing. It's taken all of that away. All you have to do now is say, how many new appointments do you want to have in your diary per week? And we work backwards from there, and we fill your diary with those qualified appointments using AI.

IAN: I'm just waiting for the right moment to pitch it to Stewart to create a Stewart AI on the website. He doesn't know about it yet and I, hopefully he won't listen to this show, but, it'll be quite fun...

FIONA: It'll be really fun. And I was telling you before we started at the network group this week, we created a digital version of David Chulo.

IAN: Yes.

FIONA: So for those of you who do not know. We have a David Chulo AI agent now, and we had everybody asking her questions and it actually does really seriously sound like them.

IAN: You need to get me a copy of that. I don't know how you even do that. I sound like such a darlic. Don't know, send me a copy of, send me a link to that AI agent, or whatever it might be.

STUART'S INTERRUPT: If scaling your MSP is your goal, but you're not sure which road to take, then you'll really want to get hold of the MSP growth guide. It's the shortcut. Most MSPs wish they had much earlier on to work out what the right support is for them. Even better, if you like meeting up in person, why not come to join us at one of our live events? See the system, meet the people, get inspired, get to kick the tires and see exactly what we get up to at the Growth Hub. So. Details are on the show notes below. Go have a look, click and come and join us and we look forward to seeing you another time, but let's get back to the show.

IAN: Thanks, Stuart. Fiona, what are the most successful MSPs doing right now that are nailing the whole AI adoption thing? Because this is about getting ahead of the curve, but with the right tools at the right time in the right business, isn't it? But what are you seeing where people are getting some really great success?

FIONA: Yeah, so if we look at those kind of four quadrants again on the service desk, they are utilizing AI to alleviate the pressure. So they're removing the firefighting, they're removing the pressure, so they're increasing the capacity of their people and providing a better experience for customers and employees. On the sales and marketing side, they've really embraced AI. Now they're using AI SDRs, they're using AI analyst agents to go the whole way through their database to find all the hidden revenue all the missed opportunities. We had one client in and we found 617,000 pounds worth of business just sitting inside their existing database don't even talk about new lead generation yet. The money was sitting inside the database. But it's one of those things like if you had the time to go through and research your whole internal database, you would, but you never have time, do you? It's one of those, if we have time, we'll get around to it. But now you don't need to because AI can do it for you. So they're doing it kind of twofold. They're using AI to really go through their existing client base to find those hidden revenue opportunities to find the upsell, the cross sell opportunities. Then for lead gen, they're really tapping into the power of AI to generate more qualified leads, but also getting hyper personalized, because the beauty now of AI is you can actually use it to get really hyper personalized messages. Even before this call, I was speaking with an MSP who uses HubSpot. And I was teaching them how to use the AI functionality within HubSpot to send hyper personalized messages to every single one of their clients. So they're tapping into all of the AI enabled features and functionality, even within their existing tools. And then also bringing in the additional ones like the SDO agents, the analyst agents, bringing all of that into supercharge, basically sales and marketing. And then the last one is their client offerings. They are selling AI solutions. They are setting themselves up as that managed AI provider rather than just a managed service provider.

IAN: So let's dig into that because what we've spoken about so far is great and it's amazing and a lot of, it's quite visionary, but most of the MSPs are sitting here probably thinking, oh my God, I've got like a year's worth of work to do to get myself set up. Yes, go and get on with that right now. Don't worry about all these all the tools and the bits and pieces. Go and get your operations mature and go and get your marketing working and all of those kind of great stuff. But yeah, let's talk about client offerings. So let's specifically talk about copilot, most people, as you said, are probably not using copilot in their own businesses properly, but they're just selling the licenses and that's the first step. But you're actually just selling a license, aren't you? What's the opportunity for copilot around MSPs? First of all, Fiona, let's just dive into what are you seeing where MSPs are missing? The copilot opportunity within their own business themselves, because co-pilot can actually help them fix a lot of the first 21 minutes of this podcast, aren't it?

FIONA: Exactly.

IAN: Hey, that, better luck.

FIONA: First of all, I say, when I came back to teach AI in the industry, I didn't think I would be teaching people how to sell a copilot. So let's just throw that out to start with.

IAN: Yeah. Yeah.

FIONA: I thought I would be helping them to become completely AI enabled, helping their customers to become AI enabled. But I interviewed like over 50 MSPs across the U and I found that actually only 10% of them in it's tiny, only 10% of them were truly AI enabled, and were selling things like AI strategic advice and consultancy and advisory sessions and actually helping their clients to become AI enabled. The other 90% weren't even selling copilot.

IAN: Wow.

FIONA: So the reason I had to then start teaching how to sell a copilot is because I had to meet the market with where it is. And I, to be honest, I didn't expect MSPs to be that far behind with AI because really you should be leading the way with AI. But I literally had to pull the whole way back to basics to meet people where they are today, and that was teaching them how to sell copilot, because most of them, they've got a ton of Microsoft 365 customers, so they have a really good client base. You have to meet that client base where they are as well. They're already using Microsoft 365. They're asking about AI, they're asking about copilot, but what's happening is, some of the clients are saying, can you just give me a co-pilot license? I just want to have a dabble around with it and see what it does.

IAN: Yeah.

FIONA: And the MSPs them the license. Number one, they're not making any money from selling the license. They probably make 40 pound over a year or something in profit per license, but without showing the client how to actually adopt it and how to use it, then they don't use it. So it just becomes another tool that sits there and doesn't get used, and then they don't see the value, so they don't expand.

IAN: So what should they be doing?

FIONA: Number one is adopt it internally, just like you said at the start. So the very first thing to do is adopt it internally and become your own best use case. So you know, because when you're selling copilot, you're not selling copilot, you're selling the transformation. That customers get when they use it. So you're selling the use case, whether it's saving time, whether it's increasing productivity, whether it's increasing revenue, increasing experience. So use it yourself internally first and have a team of, even one or two champions, copilot champions internally, so that they can actually demonstrate to clients. We are using it internally and we have just saved ourselves. 20 hours a week just by using these functionalities within it.

IAN: Amazing. Amazing. And I think that's the bit it's right in front of your face. And then when once you then start talking to the client about it, it then becomes also a security issue, doesn't it? So you can then start racking everything else around it.

FIONA: And this is the whole thing, a lot of MSPs, I speak to the same with you Ian and they're so security conscious, but then I'm saying, so why are you selling a copilot license without teaching people how to use it? Because you're actually given a security risk to your clients if you're not showing them how to use AI We, there's some clients that are using Copilot, then they're using chat GPT, then they're using Claude. They have no idea of where all that data's going. So it's a security risk by not teaching your clients how to actually really use AI. So I would say start with that first. Adopt it internally first so that you can begin to experience it yourself. And you can do that whilst you're teaching clients at the same time, you can say, let's do this together. And that's what some of the MSPs in my courses are now doing. They're saying, let's do it together.

IAN: So when you say teaching them, are you, do we need, does the MSP now to now need to employ someone who's going to start coaching our clients? Their clients on how to use it? Because that sounds like hard work and not very profitable.

FIONA: No, it's actually not hardwork You get to do that so when you're using it yourself, you have to learn how to use it yourself. Like I'm literally having to teach MSP Z and how to use copilot. Even how to send out recordings and actions after the call. How to set up agents, how to get it working for you, but it, when you actually know how to use it, it's super quick. That's the whole power of AI. Everything is so much quicker. So it's just getting into a routine. It's getting familiar with what it's able to do for you, and then using it on a daily basis. And yes, teaching your clients how to do it, but before you're even teaching them how to do it, you have to take that step back and see if they're even ready for it. So you need to do a readiness assessment. That's the second thing that you need to create, is a readiness assessment to see if they're ready for AI, or if they're ready for copilot, because it's other words, the same thing will happen in, you might sell them a copilot license and then they'll think, oh, it doesn't do what I want it to do.

IAN: Yeah.

FIONA: But it's not doing that because they don't have the right setup.

IAN: Yeah. Yeah. Does that then become a difficult conversation where, who's going to go and sort the backend of their offices out? Because that's not the MSP's job, is it?

FIONA: No, it's actually a really good sales opportunity. The MSPs I'm working with now, we've created a readiness assessment. So they go in and they assess the clients on different pillars throughout the whole business, and then we identify where they're not ready. So let's say their date is not up to scratch. You might then sell data remediation packages. You might sell them a workflow optimization. We've some MSPs that are literally selling the readiness assessment for between 1,503 grand. They're selling the actual one day readiness assessment. Then they're selling a remediation package for maybe 10 K to get the customer's data and workflows and everything ready first, and then they're selling in copilot and then packaging everything. So it's a sales opportunity.

IAN: Okay. But it sounds a bit hard work, right? I'm hearing MSPs now going, yeah, that's all very well and good. That's great, but who's going to be doing the selling? Is this where this AI champion that you were talking about will lead on some of this sort of stuff and organize that or how does that work? Because you then gotta go and start creating new packages. Most MSPs are pretty much covered up with their own packages themselves. We've then got, do we need then bringing more people? How do we know that they know what they're... do you know what I mean? Even my head's starting to go on this one.

FIONA: You're confusing yourself, Ian.

IAN: You're right. You're absolutely right. Help un confuse me.

FIONA: If you just see it as, you have, let's say an A-I-S-D-R agent, so they'll find the clients who are interested in copilot. So you know, even if you look at your entire client base or you want to do new business lead generation, let's first of all, find clients who are actively showing buy-in signals of looking for co-pilot, or an AI solution. So you're only talking to qualified prospects, so you're already saving time. Then when you go into those prospects, we have a seven stage sales process, and every single part of it is another sales opportunity for you to layer another layer of AI or security or a service stack on top of it. Yeah. So instead of selling a license for let's say $30 a user per month, we're actually selling a package that's $300 per month.

IAN: Yeah.

FIONA: So you're 10 x in your profit because we're selling a full solution stack. And the whole, what the top 10% of MSPs Ian are doing is this process is so easy because it's a seven step process that you just follow as you go through it. And it takes away the old of the whole overwhelm of what do we do? How do we do it?

IAN: And I think the thing that you've just said there that's will certainly help is, it's hard work selling managed services to businesses.

FIONA: Yeah.

IAN: It's even harder selling it to businesses that don't get tech. So if you go to the ones that want to embrace tech and embrace technology, then you're going to get an easier sale. Everybody knows that. It's like night and day. However, now the most important thing for people that know that they need to embrace AI and they come towards you, they're, you are not doing selling. You are almost working together. A common goal to fix this technical problem, aren't you? That's where I was confused myself, which I'm very good at doing. That was I think that's just really crystallized that point there about who this is for, because like we said at the beginning of the show. This isn't for every MSP. This also isn't for every one of your clients and every one of your prospects.

FIONA: Exactly. But for the ones that you know, do want to start on the AI journey, you need to get yourself ready to start having this conversation with those clients of yours. Because if you are not having the conversation with them, somebody else will be. Even yesterday I was speaking to a teacher who works in a school. And they've got copilot licenses, but they don't know how to use it. And I said why don't you ask your MSP to teach you how to use it? And she said, oh, we did ask them. They said they didn't have anything to teach us how to use it. And I met your kidden. So they've sold a license. The client is saying, we are willing to pay a thousands for somebody to teach us how to use this and adopt it internally into the school. But our MSP doesn't know how to do it. So they asked me if I could teach them how to use copilot. So if you're not talking to your clients about how to actually use it and implement it in their business, somebody else will. And if they see you're not doing it, they will actively go and look for somebody who is. So get your process in place. Starting with your adoption internally first. That's definitely the first thing to do, because then you'll know how to use it yourself. Get your readiness assessments in place. Start selling that, because even just by selling the readiness assessment, you're starting the AI conversation. But the third step in is the adoption. So put together like a 30 day pilot where in that 30 days you are showing them how to use copilot how to get a use case. The co the whole thing with AI is get a use case. Get a quick win in the first 30 to 90 days and then when they see how powerful it is, becaus AI is it, if you see it, you believe it. Get them a really good win in the first 30 to 90 days. Then you go to the next stage, which is accelerate, and then that's when you start to accelerate it with leaderboards, with prompt, Aons, we've set up leaderboards, gamification, prompt packs for your clients. These are all really fun things to sell as well. But that's another stack that you're selling on top of it. So really accelerating how they're using it in the business, showing how the transformation is happening. And remember that is what you're selling. You're not selling a license, you're selling the transformation that businesses get, and the beauty is, and you, I don't know if you use copilot yourself and your own business.

IAN: I'm a chat GPT person. I'm my, all our clients just take the mickey out of me because we're using chat obvious mainly because around the marketing side of things. But I am aware they go, no, you should use copilot. You should use copilot. But we're invested in chat at the moment.

FIONA: Yeah. I use chat GPT as well, some of the clients. And then MSPs work with, they're restricted, so they can only use copilot, but we all know secretly they're still using chat GPT. But when you do actually see copilot in action, you, it is actually so good in at saving them time, productivity, performance, experience. Even yesterday we set an agent up. Within 10 minutes we sent agents up. Copilot and when you're able to show your clients that they are blown away by it, it completely transforms their business. So that's just remember that when you're selling a license, you're selling the longer term transformation, but put it in step by step and get the result. Your client will love you for it.

IAN: Absolutely amazing. Fiona, that has been an amazing show. I think we have pretty much covered everything we wanted to cover, which has been really great. If people want to get in contact with you to find out a little bit more about what you're doing and how you can help them, how do they do that?

FIONA: Yeah, so either follow me on LinkedIn, I do lots of articles on AI and how you can become AI enabled in your business or get in touch with me to join the copilot challenge. So we have a seven week challenge that we take MSPs through copilot to AI, and we take you through the whole seven steps so that you can sell copilot, but not as a license, as a full AI solution stack. And we take you through it all step by step, but see it as a done with you and a done for you program because we actually give you everything. We give you the readiness assessment like a custom one that you could implement straight away and sell it straight away. You get your adoption packs, you get your 90 day acceleration pack, you get prompt, aons you get leaderboards. It's a whole done for you just sell all of this to your clients so you start to protect that client base.

IAN: That sounded like an absolute shameless plug. Is that what it was?

FIONA: Completely. If my mouth is opening, I'm always selling. And so you should be, and any MSSP that says, she's always selling that Fiona Cha, when I would say so should you be?

IAN: Absolutely. And do you know what? That's the end of the show. Fiona, it's been wonderful talking to you again. Thank you very much. That very interesting indeed. Takeaways for me is that this is such a big opportunity. It is an opportunity for everybody, but please be focused and listen very carefully. If it's not ready for you yet, just invest that time and get in the back office sorted out. Because it'll still be here waiting for you when you get back. And all the other products will have evolved and everything like that for when you get back. So thank you very much, Fiona. Good luck.

FIONA: Very welcome. Thank you for having me.

IAN: No problem at all. And all the very best of luck with what you guys are up to. Lovely stuff. See you soon. Take care.

FIONA: See you soon.

IAN: See you on the next

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.