Lansweeper

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Rich: [00:00:00] Alright, rich Freeman on the show floor here at ConnectWise IT Nation emea. I was sifting through the the day’s press releases this morning. I came across one from Land Sweeper. They had just published some very interesting research about AI in the managed services market, and I discovered that the Land Sleeper executive quoted in that press release.

Christina Klein is actually here at the conference. She was speaking today. You are the the VP of Global Channels. I would love to get into that research a little bit with you. Sure. A lot of interesting statistics in there. On the one hand, not so surprising to me that so many of the MSPs you surveyed said that AI is going to be a very important part of their business and strategy going forward.

But actually 90 percent of the MSPs you spoke to said that and 63. 6 percent called it very important. So I was expecting big numbers, maybe not 90 percent big. What about you?

Christina: I think because it is one of the core ways that you can increase operational efficiency and ultimately increase profitability is by leveraging more tech like AI.

There’s huge interest right now. Obviously there’s huge interest from a lot of it organizations trying to figure out how to use this more accessible technology. It’s been around for a long time. But with, chat, GBT co pilot, a lot of meta, a lot of tools coming out now from major software providers.

It has made it easier for people to adopt the technology without necessarily having to have the skillset and understanding of how to write the code on the backend themselves. In the MSQ world, it’s all about, EBITDA and profit margin. How are we going to increase our services revenue so we can increase our profitability?

And the only way to do that is to create greater operational efficiency. I think AI really enables that.

Rich: Now, it is easier to adopt this technology, as you say, except one of the other findings in the report was that 41. 5 percent of the MSPs you surveyed were, I believe, at the 25 percent or beyond mark in terms of actually adopting it.

Does that reflect that this is a time consuming process, or are they running into roadblocks?

Christina: I think the majority are struggling with where to apply it first, as most MSPs are smaller businesses, a lot of people wear a lot of hats and trying to figure out where to most effectively take advantage of this technology and how to prioritize that is one of the things that most people struggle with.

In fact, I was just talking to an MSP here in my booth about that exact thing. He knows he wants to adopt it, but they haven’t been able to put together a strategy yet because there’s just so many scenarios or options, right? Where do you start? Our research shows that most people that have started are starting with kind of the low hanging fruit, if you will, which is those it help desk tickets trying to in customer service delivery, et cetera.

We at Lansweeper use a AI driven chat bot, like a lot of companies have started to do on our website to be able to give real time. Reactions and responses to people but how you actually integrate it into more of a complex work streams that are going to really help generate that efficiency.

Take a lot more time and thought, take the an investment in the technology, not the free tools that are available. And also take some level of subject matter expertise, which a lot of MSPs don’t necessarily have in house. So I think those are key roadblocks to driving the adoption but the interest is there.

And I think as more and more products become easier to use and easier to implement, we’ll see higher adoption rates in the NSPs.

Rich: Yeah, IT monitoring and ticketing were the two top sort of use cases, top of mind. And like you said, hanging fruit, it makes sense. Are there additional use cases that you would encourage MSPs to be thinking about a little bit more?

Christina: I think there’s a wide variety of ways that it can be implemented. And And Lansweeper, for example the automation component, right? Figuring out the most efficient way to build workflow automation. So that we were just talking about an example where a rogue device gets identified at 10pm at night on the network, right?

How are we going to find out about that? Who’s going to learn about that? When are we going to find out about it? And is it going to be before it’s too late? Being able to leverage AI in a scenario where you’re building it into the work stream about these if then scenarios, I believe is a very easy way to adopt the technology, again, without having to do tremendous investment in external resources.

Rich: Where does AI play in the Lansweeper platform today? Where is it on the roadmap? How are you using it?

Christina: Yeah, that’s a great question. Lansweeper has been around for over 20 years. As [00:05:00] such, we’ve scanned hundreds of millions of technology assets over those years. And that aggregated data lives in our data warehouse and data lake.

We’ve learned over the last year, we’ve been building a few machine learning and a I wait different ways to access that data in aggregate so that we can bring real quality insights and benchmark data, for example, to our customers using the platform, for example, say you’re a retailer and you want to know how how you compare to other retailers in the industry when it comes to Your IT asset management or the costs that you’re spending, for example, on IT assets.

We can pull that aggregated data out of our data warehouse using AI, surface that information. We’re playing with it. It’s still new for us as well. But we are already seeing ways to bring it to market in the platform that we’ve created.

Rich: So stepping away from AI for one last question. We’re at a ConnectWise event.

Where does land sweeper, where does your solution play in relation to the ConnectWise stack?

Christina: Sure. Land sweeper is a IT asset data discovery and inventory platform, right? We de develop ways for you to leverage that data across your entire tech stack. So we make all of the.

Asset data that we collect available to integrate into other ISV solutions, including ConnectWise PSA. So our integration with ConnectWise will be launching early this summer. And it’s our first out of the box integration that’s going to be available. But our data is going to be able to augment our PSA solution, provide a deeper level of asset information, accuracy, syncing across the tool itself in order to make sure that there’s consistency from one view to another.

Rich: Will you be plugging into the ConnectWise ASIO platform?

Christina: Potentially, in the future. Yeah, we’re starting with the PSA as that’s the most requested. solution from our current community, but it’s just the start for us with our relationship with connect twice.

Rich: All right. Christina Klein. Lucky timing for me that we were both in the same place the day this research was published.

I appreciate you taking some time out to talk with me.

Christina: Thank you. I appreciate your time too. Have a good rest of your show.

Rich: You too. Thank you.

Christina: Bye.