EP293 - Intelligent MSP Operations – AI, Automation and Observability at Scale – The MSP Insights Panel Discussion

IAN: In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, we've got another super treat for you. We have got another MSP Insights Round Table Discussion. This one's about intelligent MSP operations, AI automation, and observability at scale.

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 another super treat for you. We've got an amazing panel discussion, one that I hosted a couple of weeks ago now for the MSP Insights team. And this one's all around intelligent MSP operations, AI automation, and observability at scale. So much conversations going on around AI, how we're going to use it, how are your clients using it, who's at risk? Is everybody at risk? What's going on? Is the world going to end? And all of this kind of great stuff. But this panel discussion was incredible and you need to hear about it. We've got three experts. We've got Joe Burns, we have got Fiona Challis, and we've got Nick Horner. All these people are actively using AI to develop and grow their own businesses and their MSPs. So you do want, not want to miss this one at all. It's a great show. You're going to love it. I'm going to hand over to the main audio. Enjoy it.

IAN: So good morning and welcome to this month's MSP Insights Roundtable. We've got a real treat for you today. We're talking about the subject that is just on everybody's tip of their tongue every single day, if not minute of the year. It's AI automation and also observability at scale. Sorry, easy for me to say. This insights session is brought by the MSP Growth Hub here, helping you get your MSP to a million, or if you're already there, helping you get to five and faster. And we've got three superb experts for you today. So without further ado, let's introduce those. Fiona Challis please introduce who are you, what do you do, and who do you help?

FIONA: So, well, Fiona Challis and my business is AI Enabled Growth, and I help MSPs to make the transition into a managed AI provider and add a whole new managed AI revenue line to their business in 90 days.

IAN: Fantastic. Thank you very much, Fiona. Thanks a lot. Joe, same question for you.

JOE: Not as polished as Fiona, clearly, but, so Joe. I've got two hats. I've been running an MSP called Reformed since 2019. Co-founded that business back in 2019 and previously to that, I did start an MSP back in 2005, which we sold in 2016. Reason for that context is I've got another business called MSP Blueprint.

I use all my experience over the last 20-plus years of running MSPs and scaling an MSP to help other MSPs to do the same. And I also have a consultancy hat for things like automation in and implementation in Halo.

IAN: Cool. And you- And some people would call you mad because you've come all the way back round and you're doing it all over again. And then you're helping MSPs as well. That just goes to show what a great place the channel is, right or how mad you are, one or the other. I think it's probably a blend of both Joe, I think, isn't it, to be to be fair. Lovely. Thank you very much for that. So wealth of experience there. And last but not least, Nick.

NICK: Hi, I'm Nick Horner. My company is SL Networks. We're a MSP that operates mostly in the Southeast and London to a global client audience. We are currently we have started and we're quite far down the trail of actually changing from an MSP into more of a MIP or AIP, depends on which terminology's finally going to win the day. But yeah, embracing the whole AI and automation.

IAN: Lovely stuff. Thanks very much. You know, AI, automation, a lot of people are confusing the two between them. I'm not technical, so I'm not going to get involved in that argument there, but I know that we're going to touch on it today. A lot of people are selling automation when it's actually, they're selling it as AI when it's not, it's just good old-fashioned automation. But the wonderful thing is, for us, is that this is starting to get the conversation going on asking people to be, getting people to be curious about how can we use technology to help us become more efficient? How can we use technology to help us become safer? And in today's session, we've got some really great questions and topics that we're going to be running through and getting everybody's experiences on that. So you do not want to miss this. Make sure you are here for the full session. First off I'm going to come to you first, Joe. So you've got the both hats here. So we've got the running the MSP and then also supporting MSPs as well. How can MSPs use AI and automation to improve their operational efficiency without increasing complexity? And I'll just frame that a little bit more because we see Shiny balls everywhere. Four or five years ago, you'd go to the events and it'd be stacked full of security vendors. New, old, experienced, some knew what they were doing, et cetera, et cetera. Now you go to events and it's full of everybody selling AI. But, from your point of view, how can MSPs improve their business and also how do they know which route to follow? Because it's a tricky world, right?

JOE: Yeah. Is. Obviously, there's a lot IT companies, MSPs have always been have always been guilty of shiny thing syndrome. Yeah. The squirrel situation and looking at new tools, and obviously we've got way more now than ever and new things coming out all the time. So in terms of from my own experience, in terms of what we've done in Reform to help drive that business efficiency, that operational maturity and efficiency, is that we have looked internally at the things that we do frequently. So we look at what exercises we do, what things do we repeat, and tasks do we repeat. What is the potential room for human error in, or what do we tend to get wrong? And we have evaluated that quite a lot. We ask our team and we work with a team to find out what they don't particularly like doing as well, because that forms part of it.

IAN: Key.

JOE: Yeah. And then we look at that and we go, "Can we automate?" So generally we make a decision. We look at how much time we're spending on something, and whether it's something that people actually enjoy doing, and then we look at do we need to improve this by can we automate it? If we can automate it, great. If not, can we document it better so that we can do it quicker? Or can we delegate it? Can we get an, can we get a tool or can we pass this to somebody else so we don't need to do it? We look at every kind of task and analyse that to see which is best, and then we look at what we automate. To give a very quick example of something that we have automated using AI in the mix as well, is that we've, we started quite a while ago doing auto triage, AI triage in our service desk. Again, it's quite common now for people to start picking that up and doing it, but it was one of the things we did quite early on because we noticed it's something that people tend to get wrong. They categorise it wrong, they rush and they pick the wrong thing, which leads to bad data. And also even though it doesn't take too long to do, we have to do it over and over again every single day. So we looked quite early on at that's a task we can take away from people, make it quick, make it easy, people don't like doing it anyway. So that's how we address it. We look at what can we help our team to, to do better without them spending time on it.

IAN: Lovely. And you mentioned the P word, which is the most important thing because... Which is process, by the way, before I lead you down to a merry dance of your brains can start thinking, "What on earth is he going to say next?" So many people, particularly I'll refer to my son who thinks that AI or used to think that AI's just going to fix stuff. AI will help smooth the process, but you need to have the process in place to start with. And, some of the conversations we've personally had at the Growth Hub with Fiona has been like, "You got to map the whole process out." Which we kind of know, but it's not until you do the exercise, you go, "Wow, what are we kind of like doing?" And then looking at how the systems can do that. So thanks for that. Nick, so from another MSP's point of view what are you seeing of the, of some of the quick wins that you've had with improving that efficiency, without it getting super, super complicated?

NICK: I think it's when talking to the clients and sitting down with them to start to identify the processes where they feel there's going to be some bottlenecks within that is, is to start, is actually we found to start quite small. Start to develop it fairly small. On the other side of the scale, we actually had one where the client came to us and said they wanted us to. They had a very manual process with regards to an HR an HR part of the business. So we did- they didn't want us to scope it. We just had to sit with them, and without having that scope, we found that the actual systems changed and changed. And as we put in bits of automation, it was the client then realising the value of that automation, and then realising that actually their process had changed within their own mind, and then made them realise what additional work that they could do, and bolted on. So without having that predefined, for without going into defining that scope really well, and keeping it small, you will get a scope creep. And what started off with this was potentially a small, quite a small automation project, has actually ballooned into something where it's gone so far down the line we might have to re-engineer it because of all the additionals that they want to bolt onto. So that is really key. And what Joe was saying is actually really understand what is there and go through it. And that's what we’re finding with our clients. And by doing just the small parts of automation, and even attaching an agent onto that, the end user is getting quite a good experience with that. But then keeping that consultancy going with them and understanding their journey, and making sure that they can keep coming back to you and saying, "Can we do this? Can we do that?" You start to process you start to map out the much bigger part of the actual-

IAN: Yeah.

NICK: Departmental flows as well, and then it becomes a very different discussion.

IAN: Interesting. Just want to dig into what you just what you mentioned there, is that you've done it in you introduce it in such a way that the client then goes, "Yeah, but what about this, and what about that, and what about this?" Yeah. So they're engaged in it. If you go into an end client and you do AI, there's a chance that they're going to think you're going to be doing one thing, they're going to be doing another thing. But you're taking them on that journey, aren't you, as you go through, and you're obviously learning yourselves how that's working. But how important is it that when you work with those, that, when you introduce AI properly into a client environment, that they're on board? Do you get them really involved in all the scoping, or do you just go off and then deliver it back to them and say, "Hey, look what I've managed to build. Isn't this great?" What does that look like for you?

NICK: No we definitely get them on board as much as possible. There's a lot of ske- skepticism out there with regard to AI anyway, and there's obviously a lot of fear within it as well, saying if I'm going to tell you what my processes are, what's going to happen to my job? So there's quite a lot of hand-holding to say that we're actually here to enhance your job and make you make you become more efficient, which will then potentially uplift your wherever your status is within the organisation. So it's really important to get that steering committee right and to get that user interaction within it. But a lot of this, and I draw quite a lot of similarities in terms of, like, when we used to do a lot of software projects as well, and if you don't get that user acceptance within the project, you might develop something, and if the users aren't going to use it the FD's going to turn around and go all these efficiencies that you were supposed to be saving me actually haven't happened and it becomes a dead duck. So you have to get them in- involved into that. And to get them to actually accept it and use it, you have to get their buy-in. And if you get their input, they feel that they are they are putting into that project.

IAN: Yeah.

NICK: Which is really helping them with their departmental work process that they have. So they become almost a sponsor of it, even though, it's still the CFO who's going to turn around and say, "Yeah, you're married to the project." But their buy-in is critical. Absolutely critical.

IAN: No, brilliant. Thank you. Thank you for that. Fiona, just coming to Fiona. So for those who have either been living under a rock or have just transported to Earth previously Fiona was I think I dubbed you the MSP sales queen. Providing value through helping, various programs for helping MSPs to sell. So now you've seen this opportunity around the for MSPs, and you're helping some of our clients to basically to sell differently, right? Because that's what they're doing. They're different value proposition. It's a different conversation, and they've had a security conversation and scared the pants off people, and you've either bought it or you haven't. Which is a bit like an insurance company. But AI, Copilot, plugging it all in isn't for every business, is it? Because we talk about operational efficiency, but how can an MSP help their prospect or their customer understand if they're actually efficient or not without completely destroying their kind of business? You've got some great tools and methodology around that. What does that look like, Fiona?

FIONA: Yeah. So in terms of helping your clients to become AI-enabled, the best way you can actually help them is to become AI-enabled yourself first to go through the same process that you're going to take your clients through. So the way- that we do it is we always assess the actual MSP's business first, because they should be their own customer zero. We check the operational efficiency of the business. We check the readiness of the business to go towards AI. And honestly, there is not one MSP that we have taken through this assessment that passed and got five out of five. In fact, most MSPs, they got a score of maybe two or three. So if one is really bad, you've got really bad processes not even documented, and you're not ready for AI. And five is you're optimised and ready. Honestly, most of them score between a two and a three, so it's a really good exercise to go through. Something Joe touched on earlier is, most MSPs, when we start working with them in, they actually have not got the processes documented.

IAN: Oh, yeah.

FIONA: So the very first thing to do is actually learn how to document the processes yourself. And then we take you through an assessment. And really what we're looking for is what is the repetitive task? So Joe touched on that one earlier. We're also looking for what's resource heavy what's rule-based, what's role-based to certain roles in the business. What's going to generate revenue for the business. So we're looking for particular tasks and flows and processes that we know AI and automation can help them with. But you have to identify them first before you're able to bring AI in. So as an example, with MSPs one of the first AI agents, because we build the agents and we se- we help the MSPs to sell it as well.

But we have all of the MSPs install any agent we build for them in their own business first. So as an example, with the MSPs a lot of them were contact switching. Their engineers were switching between lots of different systems all the time looking for the same data. They were searching for multiple different knowledge sources using Halo, Ninja IT Glue. They're constantly jumping and searching and swapped, and they were wasting so much time on the service desk. So one of the first things that we put in is what we call an AI service desk agent and knowledge-based agents that pull all of the tools that they've got together. So we're not introducing any more shiny tools or platforms we're orchestrating the tools they've already got and making them work more efficiently together by strapping an agent at the front end of it, and the agent goes off and does all the work and brings everything back to the service engineer. And using that, we've been able to save up to 10 hours, in some cases even more, 10 hours a week per engineer.

So become your own customer, zero, document your processes. Once you know them, you'll be so shocked at it. You're literally going to look at it and go, "I can't believe we've been working this way for years."

IAN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, really interesting. So next question, I'm going to come to you Nick, first for this. We're going to talk about, intelligent and observable MSP environments. The reason, or not the reason, the benefit of AI and automation is so that you can service more customers with what you've got in a better fashion. So it's something that you probably would've thought of years ago as this isn't possible. But however, we've got security, on the up, you know- If we're using this to automate, the bad guys are using it to do things much, much quicker than we even think they are, so we've got to consider that security. We've got to consider, the customer service levels and how our customers are feeling, particularly, as kind of Joe mentioned there, the first step, in, in many journeys now where a customer enacts, interacts with your MSP is going to be through AI and a triage system. So that's great because it helps you to serve more customers quicker, but what are they saying? Are they getting a good experience? Are they liking it? From an observable point of view of building these systems here and, having that intelligence with AI as well, how can we make sure that we're keeping a track of everything that's kind of going on? What does, how does that show up in your thinking?

NICK: Yeah, interesting question. So if you... are we referencing particularly just the clients or my own internal systems at Amazon, at Manuelco?

IAN: It's just how as you're building this out, we want to make sure we've got this real-time visibility, through your dashboards or your check-ins or whatever's happening with your team. So it's look it's how are we using this now to give us that intelligent information so we can see what's going on, in our environment.

NICK: So I think it, and I think just to touch on what Fiona was saying particularly when she was talking about the knowledge agent that they've developed, in terms of where you have lots of pools of data all over the place. So there was always, okay, so you'd have something in a in the office the Microsoft 365 back end of it. You've got your Purview, you've got your Azure, you've got your potentially whatever antivirus. If you're not using, if you're not using the Microsoft one, you might have Bitdefender or something like that. Then you've got your PSA, you've got your automation in terms of your RMM as well, and so how do you make sure all of these things are actually giving you what you want to do? And back in the old days, you'd have to go onto each individual one, and they would all have a dashboard. And that kind of did evolve into where you would have certain companies out there, like GlassArmour, I'll just throw that one out, for example, where you could API and pull these bits into in terms of doing all of that. But again, everything was, again, external to your environment, and I think that is really key. So you are then now trusting a third party with potentially quite sensitive data.

IAN: Yeah.

NICK: Particularly if you're looking at generating reports which then need to go back to a client. So you can it will be almost their entire infrastructure would be held within third parties, and then another third party to collate all of that. Your AI can now do all of that for you within your instance, and you can use various types of artificial intelligence as well. The change in terms of you just using one AI say, for instance, Copilot, and then having to use Claude but it was external is now changed. So where you can bring these AIs into your own environment or within the client's environment and generate whatever they want from that. But equally, the generation of those dashboards and those reports, once you've set up the automation and the processes and getting all the information together, it is lightning fast.

IAN: Yeah.

NICK: It is so incredibly quick. That is your real, your efficiencies come out of what can we produce for our clients that is not only is it secure and within their environment, but is very accurate, and we can change it very easily. It's very adaptable. Whereas back in the old days, you'd have, you'd probably need to get a specific programmer to come in, or somebody who's got a lot of Power BI- expertise or then possibly some via SQL to try and pull all this information together AI will just do all of that for you And you can present that to the client. So immediately the efficiencies, that box gets ticked almost immediately. The security box, you start to narrow down your landscape which is, which makes it really interesting as well. So you are, you're moving in the right direction with that. And I think those two parts are really key. It's a huge win.

IAN: Brilliant stuff. Thank you. Thank you for that, Nick. And so Joe, thinking this, the best thing about AI is it helps you to remove the thinking, it helps you to become more curious in asking questions about what's going on. On both sides of your business, obviously you've got the automation and making sure that things are working quicker and more efficiently. But when you're sitting there at 30,000 foot view from a business owner and kind of like coaching clients as well how does that kind of show up in your world as some of the top priorities for that observable environment?

JOE: Yeah. So we touched on earlier about, touched on how we kind of make decisions about what we look to automate and what we look to change, and that's based on, we look, we start with reporting to be brutally honest. So we look at reporting, how much time, how much repetition is happening with the things that we are doing at the moment. I think MSPs are in this, they're in this space unlike lots of industries. I feel like MSPs are quite mature business models generally, right? Because we've, for ages we have been tracking things. We track time accurately mostly. If you've got a PSA in place, you've got these systems in place, then as an MSP, you're actually doing things that are quite a high level of maturity from a business perspective. You understand every bit of work that we're doing for clients, and we document, should be documenting properly. And so there's a lot that we do really well. I think that coming to Nick's point about helping clients and Fiona's point about we're the case example, the thing is we are generally already at a higher level of maturity than a lot of sectors that we work with. So we go in, I'll give you an example because we work with a lot of law firms. And you go into a law firm and they have case management systems very much like we have a PSA system, but what I've noticed with law firms is anything before something hits a case management system is awful. They don't understand inquiry management. They don't track anything properly. They're wasting loads of time managing inquiries- quite often ignoring potential clients to the point that once it's in case management system, they do it by, by the book. But everything before that gets forgotten about. And so when I'm talking to law firms about what they should be doing to improve their efficiency, we often look at it and say, what are some of the tasks you do on a regular basis? And we find out what their inquiry management's and we find that partners are doing loads of work to handle an inquiry that's unbillable time, very much like an MSP. You're doing activities that might not be, adding any value to the client or getting any revenue in. And and I'm like, you're spending all this time doing activities that do not generate any funds or don't add any value to the client. Stop doing them. You need to make that process so much quicker, so much easier, and stop wasting time on admin. But as I say, we, as an MSP, we're in a good position because we have very good reporting. We have very good data, and we look at our data, and we look at what we're doing, how much repetition is there, how much time are we spending on it. We map that to cost in our PSA, so we know exactly how much a particular activity costs us per month for us to do it. And then what that leads us to is let's tackle the most expensive things first. Let's look at what we're wasting cost on in, as an internal team, and look at what we can do about that. But the beauty of good data is that means if we do add an automation, or even if we the documentation is done better, if we go low tech, even if we just improve the documentation, the good thing we've got is point of time data references, so we can say, "This is how long it took and how much it cost us prior to the change, and then this is what it looked like a few months after." So we've done that with tools where we've switched one mail filtering for, to another. We've made a conscious decision, maybe paid a bit more for a different tool but because we felt that we were wasting time on the existing tool. And this gives us data points and observability as to was that a good decision? Has it led to the result we wanted? How much cost reduction have we had as a result of making that change? So that's how we're doing it on a regular basis.

IAN: Yeah. Okay. Very interesting indeed. Okay, we're going to move on to the the fabulous word that I know that Fiona's going to absolutely lap up on this one. ROI, right? We're embarking on, doing something different, some new systems. I don't know what it is, but I'm going to start to guess that the average business is now going to start to be spending between probably £200, £300 a month on different subscriptions, whether it's Chat, Copilot, Claude, whatever it might be. That's all going up. That wasn't going to be, that wasn't here a year ago. People are spending time not delivering managed services that they were a year ago, and they're now, some people could say, playing around with tech again. Are they delivering ROI? So we're talking about getting your stall in order first in your own MSP. In your view, what's the first place that they should tackle to introduce, AI and automation to get the return of investment of all those subscriptions and all of that time, and all of the stuff that they're doing back in the business? What does that look like for you?

FIONA: In their own business or in their clients'?

IAN: I'm going to say in their own business, and then I'm going to come to clients when I talk to Nick. So there you go, I've teased you up already.

FIONA: So to get the ROI in your own business, it still comes back to the very first thing of, being your own customer zero, do it in your own business first. But really important, to get the ROI, you need to measure the baseline first of all. Yeah. So you need to know how long or how long are we taking every day to do these repetitive or role-based or rule-based tasks, workflows, processes.

Take the baseline measure so you know how long it takes. Then once you implement automation and AI, you're taking the benchmark again, and you're literally looking at, we have saved X amount of time per automation or per agent that we've put into the business. Then what we do is we teach MSPs, and we show them how to do this with their clients as well, is you take the average hourly salary of what that person is getting paid. You look at the total number of hours that have been saved over the year, multiplied by the average hourly salary of that person. All of a sudden, what you've got is a recoverable revenue capacity that you have just unlocked in that business. All that operational time, all of that operational revenue capacity, and you will be amazed, Ian, at how much you will unlock in the business.

On a small, let's say, 30 user 30 business MSP, we've been able to unlock over 400K worth of revenue, operational capacity revenue, in the business in a year just by putting in the knowledge agent.

IAN: And giving better service to the end customer.

FIONA: And this is where the second part of the ROI comes in because there's two layers to it.

There's the revenue it's giving you in your own business but the knock-on effect of what your clients get. So for example one of the MSPs we work with in Scotland, they were really good at tracking the baseline from when they first started to what happened after they implemented the service desk agent. And within literally three months of using it, their ticket resolution time was way faster, their net promoter score went up, their customer satisfaction score went up. So the clients were getting a way better experience, and then they were able to use that as a case study to say, "We've already started to use AI and automation in our business." "This is the results that we got." "We'd like to show you how to do the same in your business." They're now selling that service desk agent and knowledge agent. They're now selling that into their own client base, but using the ROI results in their own business as the lever to start the conversation. And that part is so important, especially when you get to selling AI to your clients. And I get madly passionate about this one, so you're right, Ian. Because your clients do not buy AI. They're buying the outcome of what AI is doing for them. And, oh, you mentioned security, you mentioned governance and everything earlier as well.

Yes, that is super, super important, and it is part of the process, definitely. But I keep saying to loads of MSPs, "Stop ruining the AI vibe by leading with security and governance." Because, yes, it's important, but quite frankly, your clients don't care about it. They just want the shiny outcome that AI is going to transform their business. Yes. So we lead with the AI outcome, and we lead with the ROI. We bake security and governance into the whole package, like an AI accelerator package. And then the management of those agents is managed by the MSP. This is really important. Clients don't have the skills, guys.

They do not have the skills to know how to have the security and governance skills to effectively manage those agents. So the way that we work with MSPs is we teach them to manage the AI, to own the IP of the AI, so the client never actually even gets to see it. They manage it, and they have the security and governance skills that actually most AI consultants and companies actually don't have, which is another reason I think Joe touched on earlier as well, which is why MSPs should be leading the AI era. It's why I choose to work with MSPs for AI. I always call you the unicorns of the AI industry because actually you've got an amazing skill set and an amazing business model that can be mirrored into your client's business. You've got the AI knowledge now. You're able to build stuff. You know the process as you're managing their network. You've got security. You've got governance. You've literally got the full skill set for safe, secure deployment of AI that every client is begging for. And you're massively differentiated from any other AI company out there because you're able to actually get it to work because you're building it on solid foundations with clean data, which means the AI delivers a better ROI.

IAN: Brilliant stuff.

FIONA: It doesn't deliver an ROI without all of that work being done first.

IAN: That's great Fiona.

JOE: Sorry. Yeah. Before you go to Nick and I love to be controversial on webinars.

IAN: Go for it. Let's do it.

JOE: Because I think it makes it.

IAN: Let's mix it up.

JOE: So I want to agree and disagree with a couple of points Fiona just made. So the point I agree with, and I didn't touch on, was about customer feedback, customer feedback, MPS and all that. Because it's all well and good introducing these things, but if the net effect is less customer satisfaction that is not a positive thing to do.

FIONA: Yeah.

JOE: Yeah. You shouldn't be driving these things to save you costs and then losing customers be as a result of it. So that's important. That's what I agree. The disagree is the and I partly agree. On the compliance point, people that our clients don't care about compliance generally I'd agree in the most part. But be with us working with law firms, and we've done a load of Copilot webinars, and we've surveyed our clients in particular in law firms, and the biggest question they have by a mile in law firms is compliance. They are absolutely terrified of touching AI in law firms because they just are, they hear all the stories, they're hearing from the court cases. They do not want to touch it because they think it's taut and that it will ruin their business. So...

FIONA: Yeah.

JOE: Obviously depending on the industry, I think it, it changes. But for us, law firms, they want the compliance question answered first before anything else.

FIONA: Yeah, no, and I completely agree on that. And to be honest, I'm not saying that other organisations or any sector, I'm not saying that they shouldn't look at the compliance part. They do look at the compliance part when it's managed by a managed service provider who's a managed AI provider. So the security and governance part's really important.

But the way to look at it, Joe, and this is how we explain it to clients as well, when we put AI into your business, we also have to put in, let's say, an in-flight black box that goes with any AI. Because when we put AI into your business, you're giving it the autonomy to take action. So we do need to track it. We need to record everything it's doing. We need to make sure it's governed. We need to make sure you've an audit trail. We need to make sure it's aware of the governance and the compliance and the regulations that you need to abide by. So we deploy the agent with that in mind. And actually at our event last week one of the MSPs actually showed a compliance agent that he's created to help people like lawyers become more compliant.

And we also had, do you know Kim Simmonds from Law 365? So she was with us at the event as well, and she was actually showing how they're securely putting AI into law firms. So yes, the compliance for those guys is super, super hard, which is why they should go with an MSP, because we know how to do it with compliance. But it has to be baked into it, not leading with it.

IAN: Thanks, guys. Now that-

FIONA: Does that make sense?

IAN: That's a great conversation there. Nick, I remember when we first met it was about how do we grow the business? Generally, most people say, "Oh, we'll just put some more sales in it." Sales is not normally a happy place for most MSPs. Talking about sales is probably even worse, even though they love a nice technical conversation. So I'm going to ask you, I want you to share with us about how you've changed the conversation with your prospects and your clients around rather than just providing technical, you're, how are you demonstrating that you're adding value to them and you're, through whether it be account management or new sales, using this. How are you demonstrating to stand out from the crowd? Because that's, this is the massive opportunity to step you up against, up and above, all the other MSPs who are not listening to this, basically.

But It's not a happy place for many MSPs. How have you handled that? And Fiona sits there wonderfully and eloquently just delivers this beautiful, one of our clients, Rob, would say absolutely beautiful set of words. But when I go to use it, it comes out all mum- mumbo jumbo and all of that sort of stuff. What does this look like for you in reality, Nick? Let's put some reality to this.

NICK: I think what I'd like to do is actually just touch back on what Joe said in terms of the what an MSP is and actually how mature we are as businesses. But also the level of which we operate our business. And I think that a lot of MSPs have achieved that, that operational efficiencies within that, and the fact that they know how to analyse data. So we naturally are always looking at processes because we need to deliver that to our clients. We need to show them value every single day, because out, back in the old days, it was very much what do you do for me again? Oh, you fix our IT, but we fix it so well, so now we don't talk to you anymore. So we have to find ways to actually demonstrate that. And by demonstrating that, we need to understand what we are doing and how do we show that to the clients. And in terms of what the client's going to read, they're not going to be really interested in saying you closed 300 calls there last week, and then 300 calls there this week, and then only 100 calls there that week. For them, that's not demonstrating an efficiency. It just means we haven't worked as hard that week as we have over the other weeks, and he's going to look for a discount on week three, essentially. So we've got to show them all of that. So understanding that operational maturity gives MSPs a really good opportunity of something that we've been sat on for a very long time. And maybe some of us, without realising it, we are actually very good business consultants. We can go in and actually help you analyse your business because that is our logical that's the way we're made up from a logical perspective. So for us to go in, we might be approaching a 30-user organisation, and in a 30-user organisation, they've all got the same departments. So there's going to be a definitely an admin department, there's going to be a sales and marketing department, there's going to be a finance department.

And just those three alone, we can probably sit within that. And when I say a department, it might just be one or two people. And then the person running the business as we all know this from an MSP owner's perspective, is that sometimes you just end up wanting to do all the techy stuff without stepping back and making sure that your foundation is in the right place.

So if you are an operationally mature MSP and you understand all of those, to actually lift up what you've got and apply it to a different organisation is actually quite simple, to be honest. We have that knowledge already. So going in and identifying three simple parts of a business, of which all businesses will have the same departments Yeah They might just run them slightly differently, and saying, "We probably know better ways to run those departments than the client themselves," because we have got such a crossover of different clients that we're running for anyway.

And we, through our own analytics, by looking at our PSAs and our tickets coming in, we can analyse that and go, there's a lot of how-to questions on this one, and there's a lot of, I can't do this, and it's regular and it's consistent. There it is. There is your operational inefficiency. So we can take that to our clients and actually point that out to them, and that's the starter for the conversation.

IAN: Yeah.

NICK: And once you have that starter, that's your door opener.

IAN: Brilliant. Great.

NICK: So from where we are already by doing our quarterly business reviews and our reporting coming off it, that is our upsell opportunity to go in.

IAN: And add that value. And yeah, that's lovely to hear, and it's just a different angle, rather than just trying to sell them, yeah, we're going to fix your computers and we're going to se- sort your WIFI out and maybe put a new

NICK: Yeah, We're just going to give you some more RAM or do your hard drive.

IAN: That's right. And you're... Yeah, RAM. God Yeah ... I haven't heard that word for a few years. Can you still get that? Is it still a thing, invented that.

NICK: It's going to be a while.

JOE: Ian, before you ask me a question, before you ask me -

IAN: Yeah.

JOE: Another question can I just follow that up?

IAN: Course you can.

JOE: So there's a couple of things that's just made me think of. One is absolutely, Nick, we know we actually, if we're good businesses, and hopefully we are, if we're good businesses, we are doing things that our clients need help with, not just IT. And Fiona will like this, but I, the interesting thing is we talk about operational maturity, we talk about operational efficiency, and for anyone that's a fan of Daniel Priestley as much as I am Daniel Priestley talks about demand and supply tension, right?

Demand and supply tension sets the price. Okay? Economics 101. But, and he talks about the fact that we are often working on the operational side of the business. We're often working on the capacity side of the business. All the things that actually we've been talking about today are capacity-side benefits. We're increasing capacity, which is great because that also means reducing costs. However, the bits, as you alluded to, Ian, is that MSPs absolutely do not do properly is sales and marketing, right? So my fear for MSPs is you put loads of effort into capacity expansion and zero effort into sales and marketing. And then what that will lead to is actually reducing your own prices because you're just going, "Actually, we've got way more capacity now, but we don't win any new clients. We've still got the same number of clients as before, and we're not driving new clients. We're not driving growth in any clients." So one of the things that I would talk about from an AI perspective and automation is don't just focus on your operational side of the business. Also focus on, how can we drive more efficiency, better results, get more done on the sales and marketing side using the same techniques and the same technology, because it's there to be had as well.

IAN: That's a really good point. And now you're knocking me off flow. So Fiona, I'm going to come to that to you in a minute, but I'm going to come back to you, Joe, because part, Still on it again. So it's around... it's great to hear that you're working in a niche with the lawyers and you're helping them do that. Now, how does this kind of show up with the lawyers in terms of giving them that confidence and giving them the, what are those conversations looking or how have those conversations changed now to give them that confidence that their compliance is going to be much safer and more secure and more visible and all of that kind of thing?

What does that look like?

JOE: Yeah. So o- obviously from our perspective, what we're hearing from law firms a lot is that compliance conversation. It's how do we know this is safe? We've heard stories about AI hallucinations. People in courts have been, questioned by judges because they've said something wrong that they got from AI, and there's a lot of stories that are going in that's making there a lot of fear in the law sector- in terms of using and embracing AI. Like anything really, in terms of defeating those reservations is to demonstrate and prove. We've got to show what we can do. We've got to show how we can get these things to work. They're hearing stories that are isolated stories where people have used the free version of ChatGPT, not they've got everything set up and structured in the right way. So we have to demystify it and bring it back to reality. But again, just to queue up the, Fiona, on the sales side of it is that's law firms, and we do get compliance questions for law firms. But as Nick was saying about us helping other clients, we are getting our clients asking us to help with their sales engine We're asking clients to help. How do they set up their sales engine? How do they set up their CRM? How do they how can they use AI and automation to get more leads? We've got people asking us that question now as well which is interesting.

IAN: Yeah. And that, and there you go. And now I'm just going to hand it to you straight on a pla- a plate, Fiona. Because this is where you're coming from. This is your playground, sales and marketing. So look, we're going to help these MSPs become efficient and more secure, right? But, when do you start talking to them about drip-feed? When we're talking to our clients about building their new client runway, as we call it 18 months it can take to get things up and running because of, basically because of activity and consistency, to be quite frank. So it's not necessarily the tools, it's just doing. But how can tools like AI help you be consistent and help with the doing in an area that you just clearly don't love?

FIONA: So first of all, I have good news for any MSP who listens to this. I know you hate sales and marketing, but here's the good news. It's never been so bloody easy in your entire life with AI and automation because it can do the selling for you.

IAN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

FIONA: So coming back to what Joe's point, I love, what you said about Daniel Priestley point and about the demand and supply. And what we're seeing in the market now, which is why it's so easy for MSPs to make sales now, is we're seeing that actually most of the demand for AI and automation is actually coming from the end users. So it's being driven by end users asking the MSP we know we should be looking at agents or, "We've been told we should look at AI. Can you help us?" Yeah. So the demand for AI and automation is really high and driven from end users at the minute. Where we have a supply issue is we've such a painfully low number of MSPs who are ready to meet that demand.

So what I'm trying to do at the moment is to increase that number of MSPs who are ready to meet the demand by showing them how to work with AI and automation and to sell in AI. But here's the other thing about AI You're not selling AI. You're not selling managed services. You're not fixing IT anymore.

It's a completely different conversation, but it's right up your alley. It's right up your street because when you're actually selling AI, guys, you're solving business problems. And to go back into what Nick and Joe both said, MSPs are naturally brilliant people at solving business problems. They are brilliant people at mapping out workflows, about knowing how everything works.

These are brilliant. It's a skill set you naturally already have, which makes sales and marketing way, way easier now. Easier for any time in the MSP industry. So all you have to do is start having business conversations around solving business problems. Stop selling. Stop the selling. You don't need to.

Open up the conversation around what are the day-to-day practical business problems that you have today that we can help you to solve. So as an example, one of the, approach as I teach the guys in our 12-month program is, most clients, when you look at them, most end user clients, the demand is here. They want AI. But actually, when you get to speak to them, what generally starts to happen is they don't know where to start, they don't know how to identify the bottlenecks, they don't know how to identify the pain in the business, and they really need somebody just to guide them through it and to guide them through that business conversation.

So you literally just say to them, "If I can show you a way to get 5 to 10 hours back per week per employee in your business, would you give me 30 minutes of your time for an AI discovery call?" And we have a discovery call, and all we do is say, "Tell us about your business. Tell us about the most repetitive workflows, tasks, and processes that you have within the business. Let's start by naming the top three." So we name the top three, then we look at the bottlenecks and we pull them out of the business, and then we look at the experiences that are broken in the business, what they're trying to improve, what they're trying to fix, and then we look at the revenue that they want to have as the ROI.

So there's three things, coming back to a point Joe made earlier about MSPs just focusing on the capacity side of AI. What I find is there's three really good things you should be looking to get from AI. Capacity is the quickest win. Definitely get the capacity back into your business. But once you get that back, then focus on experience, whether it's improving- client experience, employee experience. For example, Ian, we're working with you on client onboarding.

IAN: Yeah.

FIONA: To make that process easier, and revenue. So revenue, capacity, experience. That's the three things that we should be looking at and helping you as the MSP, but also your clients to get. Because you're right, when you save them the capacity back, what are they going to do with all the time?

IAN: Yeah.

FIONA: You're going to focus on higher value activities that will give a better experience, and that will generate more revenue. Yeah. So there's no need to be scared of sales and marketing anymore. Number one, it's a conversation now, just a business conversation.

And even things like your lead gen, your marketing, we've already created AI agents that do that. We've got an agent called Jen, who's a lead gen agent, and she sits on the front end of your website, and she does all of the generation for you. She books the appointments for you. So by the time the client actually gets on the phone with you, they're ready to start having a business conversation not a sales pitch.

IAN: Absolutely. And it's yeah, you make it sound very easy, but then you've explained clearly about, shifting that conversation, which is absolutely what's needed.

FIONA: Just workflows. A- AI is workflows. You're getting a workflow mapped out, and you're making it easier and faster with AI. And MSPs know how to map processes and workflows.

JOE: And an example of what you just said there, Fiona, about talking to the clients, finding out, finding their problems, having a quick discovery call. We had one literally last week with, again, it was a law firm.

FIONA: Yeah.

JOE: A law firm that said that every single week they take court they take documents from the magistrate- magistrate's court with a list of people who are going to be in court next week.

They have to analyse that and go into the case management system and look through that list of, that PDF list to work out who of their clients are going to be in court next week, to check that they've booked an appointment with them. They spend three to four hours doing that. Wow ... one person does it every week.

So we built an agent in 15 minutes to basically do that-

FIONA: Yeah.

JOE: Activity for them. And went, "There you go." And they've gone straight away. They've, we're like, "Now we've proven that. Do you think-

FIONA: Yeah.

JOE: There's other things we could do in your business?" And they're like, "Yeah, absolutely."

FIONA: Yeah.

IAN: Brilliant.

FIONA: And that's exactly the way to do it. Sometimes it's just those, small business problems that are actually, it's happening every day in that lawyer's business. All you need to do is fix one small practical problem, and then the floodgates open. What else can we do? Can we automate that? Can AI do the work for us? But getting the quick win with one small agent first, exactly what Joe has done, is perfect.

IAN: We love it. We are running into the clock now, and I just want to ask everybody just quick three points. We're going to come to a summary at the end, just like the biggest takeaways. But just before we do that measuring success. So Nick, Joe, and Fiona, just super quick.

Nick, how are you measuring success of introducing AI either into your business or to your clients? Just give us a couple of points on the things that you're saying this and this. What does that look like for you?

NICK: In terms of measuring success, I think it's always looking at what the outcome is. We've had engineers that would put in automations all over the place and there would still not be the outcome that we thought it was going to be. So it's very much in terms of based on outcomes. And I think then taking that externally to the clients, and I think that possibly the sales and the way those communications actually start to happen is at a senior level and you're talking about what is the outcome of potentially starting this. That's your kind of umbrella conversation. And then when you say we can deliver certain outcomes if we're looking at certain types of efficiencies then that's a really good hook for MSPs to go in with as well. So looking at outcome-based sales essentially. And I think that is a real key driver for any organisation.

IAN: Okay. Thanks for that. Fiona, how should MSPs be measuring their success deploying this?

FIONA: In terms of how we measure success, it's slightly different because we're helping MSPs to actually create the AI and automation to then sell into their business. So we measure success by how quickly we can help the MSPs, like Nick to start building up what we call an AI factory. An AI factory that's full of AI agents and automations that solve real business problems, day-to-day business problems for their clients, and then we deploy them safely into the client's environment. So we measure success on how quickly we can get them out to deployment. Right now it takes about 90 days. By the time you build all of that up, you get it into your clients, and then you're tracking it and you're measuring it and you're managing the AI that you put in. That's the most important thing because we want to build up a whole managed AI recurring revenue line where you're managing AI, you're not selling AI. You're managing the entire AI line.

IAN: Brilliant.

FIONA: So for us, at the end of the 12 months, our success will be how much managed AI recurring revenue have you generated.

IAN: Fantastic. Love it. Love it.

FIONA: And locked in with IP into your clients.

IAN: Ooh, don't forget that bit because that's a whole another-

FIONA: Don't forget the IP part.

IAN: That's a whole another conversation in itself. We'll probably won't-

FIONA: So many MSPs are just doing great work and building all this stuff-

IAN: Yeah.

FIONA: And just giving it away to their clients. I know. And I'm like, "What are you doing?"

IAN: I know. I know. You wouldn't believe the amount of times I've tried to steer this conversation away from that, and it keeps coming back. And I'm going "How do you charge for that? We're not going to go into that today."

FIONA: Own the IP.

IAN: We- that's it. We'll go somewhere else. Measuring success for you, Joe, how does that show up?

JOE: So I think the key metrics for us are similar to any other point. It's our client NPS. It's our employee NPS. It's basically working out what's the satisfaction of our people, what's the satisfaction of our clients because that's what it's all about effectively is trying to improve experience. But then, as I say, we've got more granular levels that we can drill into to see how individual things are changing. But the KPIs for us is experience across the board.

IAN: No that's brilliant. Look, thank you very much. We'll just come to some final thoughts in a minute. Thanks very much for that and also for the MSP Growth Hub for making this MSP Insights happen today. Final thoughts, Nick. What's the big takeaway in under 30 seconds for the audience today?

NICK: Takeaway for the audience is certainly embrace it. I think it's a way to go forward. I think that if you are going to ignore it, you may end up having some issues. It's a fast-moving landscape, and I think if you stay ahead of the curve with regards to what you're doing internally will allow you to take that externally as well. And I think it's going to be on a fairly decent growth trajectory as well.

IAN: Great stuff. Thank you very much. Joe?

JOE: So mine there's the one I said, which I'm going to remind everyone on, which is to focus on sales, not just capacity.

IAN: Yeah. Great.

JOE: So it's all well and good creating these products, creating the services, create extra capacity, but if you can't sell it, then it's pretty worthless. So that's important. And I just want to just reiterate Fiona's last point about IP. Just that's really important as well.

IAN: Yeah. Lovely stuff. Thank you very much. And Fiona, final thoughts for you.

FIONA: I would say final thoughts is stop overthinking it. Stop doing the training. Stop getting theory. Stop learning about it. At one point, you just have to put one foot in front of the other, take the first step, and the next step will appear, and get the right guide to help you do it.

IAN: And go back to the beginning of this episode and start listening to the steps that we've just talked to.

FIONA: Yes.

IAN: Amazing. Thank you very much. Loving the interaction and the challenging on the questions and a great session. So thanks once again. We will look forward to catching up with all the MSPs on the next Channel Insights Round Table. But for now, Joe, Nick, and Fiona, brilliant session. Really appreciate it. Look forward to catching up with you all soon.

So I hope you enjoyed that MSP Insights Round Table. It was absolutely, they're always full of golden nuggets. Go onto YouTube and have a look out for the rest of them. There are other recordings on there available from these great sessions that we do. I hope you enjoy. You look after yourself, and I look forward to seeing you on the next podcast. Take care.

NEXT WEEK TEASER:  Okay, next week's episode of The IT Experts Podcast, I've got some real fun. If you hate marketing, I'm going to be sharing with you the real reason that your MSP marketing is not working. So if you've tried it and it's failed, and you tried it again and it's failed, and you got angry about it because it's failed, and it just keeps failing, listen to next week's show. You're going to absolutely love it. We're going to get you on track, and we're going to start to get you some leads in your MSP. Look forward to catching up with you next week.

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're 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 a 360 degree scan of your business, where you can identify the one or two tactics that can help you find more time, engage and 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 now.