Episode 28: AI Ain’t Just Software
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Erick and Rich discuss Pax8’s ambitious new online marketplace and how to turn lost deals into future sales. Then Dave McQuarrie, chief commercial officer at HP Inc., joins in to explore often underappreciated AI-related revenue streams for MSPs in PCs and print (yes, print!). And finally, one last thing: how interacting with an AI chatbot version of you in the future can talk you out of dumb mistakes today.
Discussed in this episode:
Pax8 Unveils Next Generation Marketplace Experience
There’s a Red-Hot SMB Market Opportunity in…Print?!?
Transcript:
Rich: [00:00:00] And three, two, one blast off, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode of the MSP chat podcast. Your weekly visit with two talking heads, talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need. To make it big and manage services. My name is Rich Freeman. I’m the chief content officer and channel analyst at ChannelMaster, the organization responsible for this show.
I’m joined virtually side by side, although we’ve been physically side by side, most of this week by your other co host ChannelMaster’s chief strategist, Erick Simpson, Erick, how you doing?
Erick: I’m doing great, Rich. Yes. We’ve been side by side here in Denver, Colorado, and boy, what what a whirlwind event it’s been.
So it’s and I’m definitely got a lot of followups to do. Got a lot of thinking to do lots of news this week. I know, our top story you’re going to cover why don’t you share with everybody where we’ve been and what we’ve seen. Yeah. And
Rich: very quickly before I do, I will just preview, cause this is a big action packed show we’ve got here for folks, Erick, cause our interview segment this week is with the.
Global chief commercial officer of HP, Dave Macquarie. And we’re going to have a very interesting conversation with him about opportunities in AI that you might not be considering and in areas like hardware and print. So stick around for that, but yeah, you and I have been. In Denver at PAX 8 BEYOND, this is the second annual PAX 8 partner event.
Over 2, 500 people here total, including over 1, 600 MSPs, which is an amazing turnout. And do you want to dive into our story of the week here, Erick? Because it’s all about what PAX 8 was announcing at the show.
Erick: Yeah, I was keying it up for you. And it has been an amazing event.
I was very impressed with not only, how many partners were here, but I ran into partners, rich that I had not seen in years that I don’t see at other events that came to this event. So there’s something special going on here.
Rich: Yeah I really agree. And you could feel it in the energy level.
I was struck at various times. And mentioned to some of the folks I saw at the show that, for years people have been saying. Distribution isn’t relevant anymore in this marketplace who needs distribution and just come to this event and look around and tell me distribution is irrelevant.
You got 1600 MSPs flying in from around the country and probably beyond to be here because they’re very excited. about this particular distributor. So let’s let’s dive in now. This is like I said, it’s the second annual PAX 8 BEYOND. Last year, the first annual of BEYOND PAX 8 spent a lot of time previewing essentially this next generation marketplace that they’ve been building.
At that point, it it was mostly vision. The big news this week is that they’ve got a Feature complete, ready to go version of that product that by the time people by the time people are seeing or listening to this, it’s probably out there. June 17th is when the early access version of this new marketplace becomes available to Pax 8 partners.
And to explain why this marketplace is interesting and important, I’m going to do something that I know the PAX 8 people are going to hate. I’m going to reference Ingram Micro. Because last year Ingram Micro introduced a platform called Xvantage. And this was aimed specifically at their partners.
And the idea was that at a time here in the 21st century, when you can do more or less anything you want on your phone, order a meal buy a television schedule a vacation. Why is it that you’ve got to pick up a phone and call an account rep at Ingram micro to order something, check on a delivery status and so on.
And so they created this very sophisticated AI inflected tool that allows you to do anything you want to do with Ingram on your own. Instead of having to call an account manager, you still have access to an account manager when you want one. You’re not dependent on that phone relationship.
And what Pax 8 is doing with this new marketplace is very similar. The big there are advantage like aspects to the marketplace, but the big thing Pax 8’s doing that Ingram, to my knowledge, hasn’t yet. Is create a self serve storefront kind of experience for the end user. So disadvantage is about the relationship between the partner and Ingram.
There’s a big piece of this marketplace. That’s about the relationship between the end user and the MSP with PAX 8 behind all of that, and that’s the storefront technology that they’ve built into it. And the thinking is very much the same. Particularly as you look at Gen Z buyers, people who are going to be more and more influential, have more and more control over budget going forward.
There’s tons of research. Jay McBain from Canalys presented some of it on stage here at the show. Those folks would really rather not interact with a human. During a purchasing process, if they don’t have to, and [00:05:00] they certainly want to delay any interaction that’s required as long as possible, do their own research, make some of their own decisions.
If they’ve got questions, they need to speak with someone, then get in touch with someone. And that’s what the storefront is designed to let them do. And it allows the MSP to be part of that process. So you can create it. Lots and lots of these different storefronts, one for each one of your different customers.
You can customize each one to their particular industry, their particular interests. They are self serving, doing their, the same research that they might do via Google on their own, but they’re doing it through you as their partner. If they’re ready to go ahead and purchase, they can purchase.
You’re going to collect a piece of that they’re buying through you as well as Pax8. But obviously they can get in touch with you as well if they want to speak with you. Now, a year ago, when Pax8 introduced this functionality they got a lot of pushback from MSPs who said, I don’t know if I want my customers placing orders.
And I also don’t know if I’m comfortable with the idea of leaving them You know, making their experience of working with me a self serve experience. I believe very much in customer service. And that’s something that I personally need to be a part of. I want them to see me helping them. And Pax8 could have just backed off at that point and, and said, okay, that’s the feedback we’re going to act on that.
But I give them credit. They dug in their heels a little bit. They said, you really need this self serve store storefront functionality, but we’ll respond to the feedback by modifying a little bit. So for anyone in the audience who’s thinking, I don’t know if I want my To have that storefront.
There’s functionality now in the version that is shipping within days that basically gives you a lot of granular configurability. So you can determine which customers can and can’t self order. You can determine which users within those customers have that authority. You can limit which.
products or product categories that they have access to. So you can control where you do and don’t provide that functionality. And along a similar vein, this is a little bit more Xvantage. One of the big features they talked about a lot on stage, Erick, is this new Opportunity Explorer.
They call it, which is where they draw on anonymous data from all of their different partners about what end users are buying and end users are using to help recommend cross sell and upsell opportunities to you that you may be overlooking. And this is something that you could do, obviously, in a phone conversation 8 account rep.
But during the demo on stage yesterday, Libby McElhaney, the chief product officer of Pax8, who is more than anyone else responsible for the marketplace was saying, think of this as a sort of digital account manager based on everything we know from our account managers and our customers and our data, the system will be making these recommendations to you so that you can act on that data self serve.
So again another example, basically, of Pax8 Catching up to where all of us are in the world, maybe taking a step ahead of certainly where distribution is in the world right now. And creating the kind of experience that users, whether they’re MSPs or end users increasingly want the ability to control and do business and run the business on their own time at their own leisure without giving up first of all, a piece of that business or access to people when and where they’re needed.
Erick: Rich, I’m, I’ve got to give props to Pax8 for standing their ground and saying. We’re building this way because this is where the market is moving. This is how buyers want to buy now. And so many thoughts from, based upon this announcement and what PAX 8 has built.
Number one, and customers and clients, they’re gonna buy things outside of the MSP’s control anyway. How many times Rich in my MSP, Did I show up at a client’s location or get a call and say, Hey, we just bought this, XYZ device at Best Buy. Can you guys come over here and set it up? And then of course it’s got the wrong licensing.
We can’t, connect it to the network and to Active Directory and all this stuff because they’re buying the wrong stuff. And number two, so this now allows the partner to say this is what we recommend. Here’s your custom. I love the ability to customize the experience for each client to say, We know what your vertical market is.
We know how big your user base is. We know how fast you’re growing and customize it for those clients in that fashion. Now I would, if I’m in the MSP, I’m like I’m going to create a template that is good for all my clients, the basic stuff, and then I will tweak and tune it and then promote it.
And number probably three, as I’m trying not to try and keep count of all these ideas, the buyer wants to buy when they want to buy. Yeah. So just like the feedback that you just shared about Ingram, the challenge of always having to talk to somebody as a partner [00:10:00] to try to get this, your clients are the same way.
They don’t, when they want to buy, you need to serve them any way they want to buy and engage. So did they want to wait, for you to get back to them two days later, if they want to buy a laptop or something simple or something that you. They can do on in your storefront We should cater to those needs and rich.
I feel that it’s going to grow revenue for partners The more that they adopt it the more they promote and then let their clients know this is available if they are packs eight partners And make it available to their partners so they can consume I think it’s going to grow their revenues. And again, leveraging AI, and we talk about it a lot, right?
And we’re going to talk about it. About, the interview with Dave according from HP, AI is a lot more than just cloud intelligence, it’s coming down into hardware and things like that. And, just as we’re trying to adopt it and MSPs are trying to adopt it in their businesses.
We can provide these types of services that are powered by AI, that these end clients and customers can also self serve and consume. So I like everything about it, Rich. I think it’s the wave of the future. And we’ve talked on the show before about, this move to platforms and ecosystems and marketplaces and things like that.
And it’s just where the puck is going to be, right?
Rich: I’ve we have zeroed in on the aspect of the marketplace that really most jumped out at me, which is all this self serve stuff. I think that’s the most strategic part of of what they’re doing there, but there’s a lot more going on in this tool, actually, it’s worth looking into.
And I’ll give you one small kind of unsexy, but example that Pax8 partners would probably appreciate a great deal. The new marketplace has multi cart functionality. Great. And so if you’ve ever been in that situation where you’re assembling a cart of stuff to buy for a customer and you’re waiting on an answer to this or approval for that, and then another customer wants to buy something and you either have to abandon the first part or make the second customer wait, like now you can have multiple carts open and you can fill them and you can go ahead and complete the purchase for each one, whenever they’re ready, there’s a lot of stuff like that.
There’s some really interesting. Solutions functionality in the tool, because of course, what you really should be selling your customers isn’t products, but solutions that combine products and there’s some functionality to assist you with that. So worth looking into, but again I think we’re in agreement.
The strategic piece of it is just this aspect of accommodating the end users wish. To have more of a self serve experience with IT procurement.
Erick: One last thought, Rich, because this is probably the most, and of course thinking of all these things, but probably the most, probably the most interesting feature that maybe not a lot of MSPs would think is super valuable is this intelligence that is being gathered by what all the buyers are buying.
So as an MSP, how do I, keep up with the general market and what all my clients are buying and things like that? We’re, one thing that MSPs need some help with rich as we’ve talked about before is marketing and sales, right? So with the intelligence that is gathered from what all the buyers are buying through this marketplace.
Allowing is so will it be Hey, you may also be interested in this or that, or does it give intelligence back to the MSP to say, if you’re creating your storefront, here’s what buyers are buying, consider these things. I would assume that is something that could easily be included if it’s not already in the process, in the platform now, because I think that’s super helpful.
So now. Just like when we shop online, rich, we were buying stuff and we go, Oh, the other people that bought this also were buying this stuff that will it have that kind of a functionality as well to help even grow the total value of each purchase when a, when an end client comes in there and start shopping, it definitely has that
Rich: kind of functionality with respect to the opportunity explorer.
What the MSP sees. Basically. For example there is a feature in the opportunity explorer that takes the CIS framework for, all the elements that really ought to be in a complete security stack, and it can map here’s what this customer is using, here’s where the gaps are.
But then go a step beyond that. And based on. Size of customer, industry location, it can actually point you to the right solution in a particular category to get the one that is most likely to be effective and appreciated and purchased by the end user so that there’s less guesswork there that, like you’re saying, this is all based on data.
I don’t know if the end user gets that kind of recommendation too, but it would certainly be a logical thing to do at some point.
Erick: Yeah, Rich, what a time saver for the MSP too, right? Trying to put all the, the stack together and the portfolio and pricing and quoting and all that.
Again, this is, this is the future. This is where we’re going. So it’s great to see PAX 8 doubling down. And [00:15:00] like I say, respect for standing their ground and saying, you can turn it off if you want, just try it, right? Because this is where and I suspect Rich.
MSPs that begin using it will find lots of reasons to continue using it and positioning it as, another option for their clients in how they engage with them. And again, because they can customize these storefronts for each client and branding and all that, it’s a unique differentiator. Against their competitors.
Rich: So it’ll be an interesting story to follow across the rest of the year and into next year. People are just gonna start getting their hands on it very soon. And we’ll start to hear from people we know, or, what their thoughts are about it, and what kind of impact it’s having. I think the PAX 8 folks know that this is a very New and different interface.
And it always takes a certain amount of time for people to get used to that. But we’ll see very shortly what what the partner feedback is on the new marketplace. But let’s move on to your tip of the week Erick. And, if you don’t let people buy the way they want to buy, you’re going to lose some sales, but your tip of the week, Erick is a lost sale doesn’t
Erick: have to be lost forever.
Yes, Rich. Absolutely. It’s three tips all in one. How to turn old lost sales opportunities into new future one sales opportunities, if you will, rich, many times when we’re going out trying to engage with new prospects and especially in a competitive kind of an environment where you may be competing against another MSP or whatnot.
We win some and we lose some. But what happens to those lost sales? One thing that we learned in my MSP practice to say to every client that we lost the sale to against a competitor and believe me, these were, we were really good at selling managed services.
So the times that we lost them were, were learning experiences for us. So one thing that we learned to ask first off, rich was could we have a meeting just a few minutes just to learn, what we could have done better or different or what was the unique differentiator?
Why did they decide to go with another competitor of ours and, some clients didn’t grant us that request, right? So they were like, yeah, no, we’ll, we’re good kind of a thing. But then what we would ask in addition. So if we got that meeting, we got some intelligence and really understood.
You know what we could have done differently. So we’re learning from these engages. We lost them But the second thing that we would ask rich is hey, would it would it be okay? If we reached out to you, you know from time to time and just see how you’re doing, you know We’re not going to bombard you and spam you and all that you could we check in on you, once or twice a year and see how you’re doing Sure, they want to get rid of us anyway off the phone or whatever we’re doing You know and they’ll say yes to that.
So the first thing is to get the client to say, yes, check in with me because rich, many times clients, we would check in with them a quarter later, maybe we try once a quarter or twice a year, and they would be unhappy with their new provider. And that would give us an opportunity to get back in there.
And then maybe if there was an agreement in place or whatever, we’d get more intelligence around that. To figure out when that agreement was going to be up for, renewal and things like that to position ourselves So the first thing is hey ask if you can, you know Have an after action a post mortem to see what we could have done better Number two, check, ask if you can check in on them from time to time and do that.
So that’s basically re engaging with them and never really going away. When we were less mature in our sales process, we’d lost an opportunity. We’d never look back because we’re trying to sell more stuff, but you’ve got to, you’ve got to nurture your garden, if you will, right?
You’ve got some mature plants in your garden, and these are great opportunities that close and you’re growing those, but you’ve also got some that maybe not ready yet. Maybe the client went with somebody else, but you still might have a shot. Then you may have been their second choice in that sales opportunity.
And that’s the one thing or another, had them go with somebody else, but they may be unhappy. And in more cases than not rich, we found that to be true. They were just really great at sales. And of course, they beat us. So they were better than us in their sales engagement. And we could have been pricey could have been something else.
So you’re re engaging, you’re maintaining those relationships and looking for opportunities to get back into the conversation. You’re analyzing and you’re learning from the deals that you lost by having these conversations. And then, the last thing I would recommend is to create like Google Alerts.
And leverage linkedin and watch for news from that Prospect that you lost the sale to is there a changing of leadership? [00:20:00] Is there some are there some newsworthy events that you can, congratulate them on so you’re touching them You’re congratulating them. You’re not spamming them and when you do check in with them probably the last little extra You Thought when they, your quarterly call or your, by yearly call and you’re not pitching or selling them rich.
You’re basically doing what you said. You’re going to do checking in to see how they’re doing. Are they’re growing any new plans? You want to be very strategic about it. You’re not pitching or selling, has anything changed? How are things going again? Not saying let us come back in and quote you, but Hey, how are things going with your existing provider?
Things going okay. Awesome. Great. What else is going on? So it’s more of that nurturing you’re playing in that long game. And when we did that successfully rich, when we got really good at it, we were winning back about 35% Of deals that we had lost in the past just simply because we were doing what we said we were going to do And that’s amazing because before we started doing this We’d never would have won that business back
Rich: really great advice.
And, a relationship isn’t a relationship if it’s purely transaction, right? Like it shouldn’t just be about the money. And if it is, and the customer, takes their money elsewhere and you walk away, that was not a relationship. A lot of what you’re talking about here. Is forging a relationship with a business, even if they are not immediately a client.
It’s, not trying to sell them every time they talk to them, checking in periodically. How are things going? Hey, I saw you in the news. That’s nurturing a relationship that can turn into a business relationship as well. Down the road. And then the other thing that occurred to me as I was listening to that, Erick is there, there are.
All sorts of re like you were talking about. Um, you, you lose business to another company. And then you go, you get back in touch with them later on, discover this other company has not been doing a good job and now you can step in. But other things change over time, right?
You might lose. A sale to a company because they’re just at a stage in their growth where you’re maybe too mature They’re not ready for you at but at a certain point in time They’re going to realize i’ve outgrown this other guy and I am ready for you it there are all sorts of reasons why it makes sense to just without, you know investing huge amounts of time in it to get Keep tabs on, keep in touch with these companies because something can come together eventually in 35 percent to, to recover 35 percent of those lost sales.
That’s a pretty remarkable number.
Erick: Yeah. And remember, Rich, we were one of the early MSPs, one of the first MSPs. So again, what we were competing with at that time, we’re not like, as you say, like they, they may not have been ready for us from a maturity level yet, but when they just got back into another kind of a revolving door, transactional relationship with, a break fix provider that purported to be an MSP that really didn’t have it all locked down like we did at that time.
Anyway, it did create an advantage and it is a very unusually high, I would say I’d be curious today how successful what those metrics are, but I’ll promise you and our listeners, this rich, it’s better than zero, it’s definitely better than zero. So yeah, you put a you, you put an interesting perspective on that.
And, for the for the old, older. Sales professionals listening to this, right? This is basically what we used to call the tickler file, right? Before we had CRMs and applications and stuff, we have the index cards right in the filing system and these were the, and we would separate the follow up calls.
It’s okay, I’m going to follow up with this person in 30 days and 90 days and 180 days. And we would just move the index cards. In our little tickler file and then, oh, and they would we’d move them up when that time came up and now I’m calling back that client, checking in on them. So it’s that tickler file.
It’s that, that touching, that reminder of that client that and in some cases, right? It’s weird because we would get clients to say, you’re reaching out to me and checking in on me more than I, than my existing provider that we lost business to. That didn’t happen often, but we heard that every once in a while.
And that leaves an impression, right? So you want to let those clients know that you want their business, right? Sometimes when, the sales professionals that are new to the game, they have trouble asking for the business. You’re closing the sale. That just means you’re letting the client know that you’re interested in working for them and with them.
And it’s like the point in the conversation where you say, Hey, this is a part of where I. I share with you how much we would really appreciate your business, right? Can we move forward? And this is just a way for you to forecast. When is there an opportunity over time and when might that be?
And again, you’re just keeping, that active, it’s not an active sales engagement, but it’s still in your sales funnel at some point, right? [00:25:00] Great
Rich: advice, folks. Think about if you’re not doing something like this already, think about how you can incorporate it in your standard operating procedures.
And with that, Erick, we are ready for our spotlight interview segment. We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back on the other side, it’s actually just going to be me because we’re out on the road and running around, Erick was unavailable to join me for this interview we recorded this week, but I got a chance to sit down virtually, if you will, with Dave McQuarrie.
He is the chief commercial officer at HP and we’re going to talk about AI and PCs and print and a bunch of other stuff. Stick around. We will be right back.
All right. And welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP Chat Podcast, our spotlight interview segment. And we are very excited this week to be joined by the chief commercial officer of AP, Dave McQuarrie. Dave, thank you so much for joining us on the show. You’re rich. My pleasure. Nice to be
Dave: here.
Rich: As we were discussing off air I had an opportunity to attend HP’s partner conference this year back in March. All sorts of interesting stuff that you folks were talking about. And a lot of it understandably these days was AI related. So this is a really exciting opportunity for me to follow up on some of that.
But before we get into it why don’t you tell folks a little bit about yourself and your role at HP.
Dave: Thank you. We’ll come back to APC because as you say, lots of exciting stuff. Dave McQuarrie is my name. I, as you said, I lead the commercial, which means the go to market, the selling function and all those things that support it here at HP.
I’ve been in the company seven years. You can tell from my accent, I’m not a native of the US. I’m Australian. And prior to HP, I worked in Europe and in Asia at a couple of big HP competitors. So I have have some time. I was competing with and then and then of course, inside the walls here at HP the only other thing I generally tell people when I introduce myself is that while HP has many people with a very long tenure in the company, I can claim to go all the way back to before I was born.
My dad was working at HP in fact, for a few years before I was born. And then for much of my childhood, he was an HP rep and then leader in Australia. So I have a long and strong connection with the culture and the company. That’s great. You’re a legacy
Rich: that it’s nice. Thanks. I want to obviously focus a lot of the conversation around A.
I. But to begin when I was at your partner conference back in March, one of the striking things about your keynote, your presentation at that event was how much Time and attention you pay to the SMB opportunity specifically. A lot of big companies like HP will frankly pay lip service to SMB is something that they’re interested in.
But it was very clear to me, you were quite serious about SMB as this sort of under leveraged opportunity for HP and its partners. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Dave: I, yes. Thank you for noticing. I’m glad the message landed. It is indeed an incredibly important set of customers for us, I would say underserved is what characterizes them.
And it’s only going to get more extreme as we get into this AI age at the edge, and we’ll get to that I’m sure. But the SMB market, particularly by companies like. Like big tech tends to be underserved because consumers on the one end are dealt with through the retail and consumer channels with lots of infrastructure to support them and large companies attract resource and support either from internal IT departments or from companies like ours.
And so that leaves this large swathe of roughly half the market. If you take just the U. S. alone, it’s a nearly 400 billion market. Half of that sits with SMBs. It’s more than 99 percent of the employees are supported, or companies rather, are working for SMBs. So it’s an enormous market, but it’s caught between very well served at the high end and served as an individual at the consumer side.
And we think we have something to offer.
Rich: Okay that might actually be a good segue. Into the AI topic, I’m going to guess when a lot of folks in our audience hear AI, think about AI, they immediately think about that as either or both a software opportunity and a cloud opportunity that their thoughts don’t go immediately to hardware.
So from an HP perspective, to what extent is AI maybe an underappreciated hardware opportunity in addition to a software and services opportunity?
Dave: Certainly it is underappreciated right now. It’s at the very beginning in terms of AI at the edge. So I wouldn’t say yet that people are behind, but if they’re not jumping in now to understand, to work through the opportunity to use AI at the edge, then they will very quickly fall behind.
So yes, today thus far at the edge, AI has been almost exclusively a software capability. We’re all familiar with it. Sometimes we use it without understanding that we’re using it. If we’re in the social media world. We’re using it every day but that is all indeed [00:30:00] software locally and capability that’s hardware based in the middle, in the cloud or at the data center.
And we are excited is that these devices that we have recently launched and the many that we will, we’d be bringing out over the coming months and quarters. These allow for a hybrid approach to AI that which must or is appropriate that it’d be done in the cloud will continue to be, but there is a significant body of the AI type of work.
Both Size of model and use case, it is perfect for use at the edge. Perfect. And that is where we see the opportunity and whether it’s an SMB or a large customer or a consumer, we are all going to be, and they are all going to be candidates for using AI at the edge. So we don’t think of this as replacing AI in the data center or from the data center, but we do see it as augmenting it and creating a whole new set of capabilities that thus far have not existed.
Rich: The sort of defining characteristics of an AI PC are the addition of NPUs on top of the more traditional processors that you would expect in the device. It just beefier specs in general. And that, you read about that and think these must be devices for particularly sophisticated use cases, maybe a subset of the PC using universe out there.
How universal. An addressable market is there out there for an AI PC? I think like any
Dave: new capability it’s going to evolve. There is a time not too far into the future where I would expect every single PC, all up and down the price stack, be AI PC, even to the point where we’ll stop calling it that.
If you go back far enough in our industry, a Wi Fi PC used to be a thing. As you used to be able to buy them with them without, and it was equally transformative to, to cut the cord and be able to be mobile with a PC, but that was considered for a subset of users at a higher price point. And here we are today, you couldn’t imagine buying a device that didn’t have the ability to move around.
And in the mobile space. So I think the I think the beginning will indeed be a small group of users. But our projections are that we think about half our PCs within a couple of years will be. To businesses will be AIPCs and the trend will only continue in that direction.
Rich: Are you, it’s very early days for AIPCs right now, but I know analysts have been projecting for a while that the PC market will rebound this year and it’ll be AIPCs that make a giant contribution to that.
Are you seeing, hearing that kind of demand through your partners already? Yes,
Dave: We’ve already seen the market start to, to turn back to growth. We have enormous interest across consumers, SMBs, and large customers, and of course, public sector. And the reason is, particularly for companies, particularly for small companies, productivity lift.
You made the comment, maybe these would be considered appropriate only for a certain type of power user. It’s going to change and revolutionize, not just incrementally change, revolutionize the way every single product is sold. Knowledge Worker works, every single one. We, if we are creative as users or as company owners in finding the things that our people do, that an edge device enabled with AI can either augment or take over.
And if we as companies like us, and we are, partner with ISVs and software providers to create those capabilities that will sit On and be performed by that edge device. So it’s really a case of how imaginative or how laterally we can think about the processes and tasks that our users, our employees perform.
But just let me give you one simple example. Right now we have lawyers, of course, in a large company, we have a legal team who are doing contract reviews now doing lots and lots, hundreds in a company like ours, thousands of hours of that, but take an SMB, that’s a law firm. They employ. Very capable lawyers and paralegals to go read through contracts.
You’d use AI to do what takes hours or days in minutes and mark up a document and then get it to that very qualified person to make sure they’re comfortable with the final recommendations or the final document. And the rest of that time that’s saved, they can apply to creating revenue or serving a customer or increasing the education and capabilities that they have.
We think it’s going to augment everybody from, the front office to the back office, to the sales rep, to the manufacturing line, small companies, large companies. And the, at the edge capability is again, it’s what’s going to transform because we already have AI and ML. And as we’ve had that for many years, decades, in fact, what this does is put that power right with you.
It reduces latency, it increases security because data stays local, and it dramatically reduces cost. And those three changes, they’re game changes with relation to how we use and think about AI.
Rich: We’re talking about extending AI out to the edge and and to edge devices.
Obviously, PCs are edge devices, so are printers. To what extent is there an AI angle [00:35:00] in the world of print?
Dave: Significant one. And I normally when we talk about PCs, I have to explain use cases to people and they have to imagine whether or not it applies to them. In the world of print, I don’t have to because everybody who has ever printed anything has experienced the frustration of what they see in front of them on the screen, not always coming out perfectly on the printed page.
That they print, whether it’s you’re printing an article from a newspaper or a recipe or a photograph of one of your kids. There’s always a process that one has to go through. That is so AI in the consumer and the small business printing world, where we are planning on deploying it, will show up first as an example in making sure that what and what you want to print is what you get printed.
It will take something like you’re printing some article or document off a webpage, and it will, using AI, to interpret that image. Give you a recommendation. Here’s what I think you wanted to print when you selected print on this particular webpage, it’ll remove the headers. It’ll remove the ads on the site.
It’ll fill the image to the right size of the page. That sort of customer experience driven AI application we think is a really big again, way that we will change the way printing is done. In the office space, our office printers, we already have AI and have had for some time, we use that, and I’ll just give you the example again, where the sound of the drum inside the device.
We have sensors in the devices that are listening for that sound. We compare the sound of that drum, every rotation against a database using machine learning to predict whether that drum is likely to fail because the amount of data we have of hundreds of millions of rotations, and then when did drums that sounded a particular way.
If we pick up anything like that through this in analytics, we can proactively replace the drum. And so AI is already in print, but we think there’s a lot of opportunity to bring more of it to the print experience.
Rich: I want to stick with print for just a moment here, and this might be just a little bit of a detour from the AI topic, but following the partner event in March, I wrote a piece for my blog about print as an opportunity for MSPs.
This is an MSP audience we’re talking about here. And part of why I wrote it, I think there’s this perception out there, particularly maybe in the age of AI That print is yesterday’s technology. It has, a limited future And actually during that conference, there were some data published by IDC that made it pretty clear there’s a whole lot of paper out there still.
So print is actually a pretty big opportunity, not just for an IT provider, but for an MSP as a managed service and a recurring revenue service. Can you talk a little bit from an HP perspective about how folks in our audience should be thinking about the. The longevity of print and specifically about managed print as an MRR opportunity for their business.
Yeah, I
Dave: mean, I’m glad you brought it up because often people assume that print is on a, a one way decline and that the the decline is rapid. And while there has been over a very long period, a very gentle decline in the number of pages printed in in overall terms. It’s very minor, the amount of printing that happens, the size of the print market is still significant.
In fact, if we use as a reference point, the number of pages printed, if we just use an index before the pandemic of 100 during the pandemic, that number went down into the forties, obviously with people going home, the office printing dropped and it’s now back in the high seventies, early eighties. We don’t think it’ll go back to 100, but the notion that, the pandemic killed it or that it’s gone away.
It’s entirely false. We yes, there’s a massive opportunity. Yes, the number of pages printed is almost exactly the same as it was across the world five or ten years ago. Opportunity for a, an MSP and for a contract for print. It’s really well established. Again, if we contrast that with PC where we’re trying to encourage customers to see the PC, to acquire the PC as a compute rather than a computer, we don’t have to do that same selling motion, if you like, in print, because so many people are so familiar with print by the page, right?
I pay by the page, whether as a consumer through InstaDink or in a contractual motion where they’re paying for service, the device, the toner and the paper, and they’re just paying a flat fee. That concept is so well established in the print space. And it has been for decades that anyone who’s selling transactionally is missing the opportunity rather than having to create it.
They are missing one that already exists. The benefit of having that fleet Mutality, obviously it changes the conversation from price for device to acquiring a capability, but it also gives great flexibility for some of the things that we are bringing out two partners in the direction of management of a fleet and also expanding the management of a fleet beyond the printer.
If we think that today fleet management software exists, we have it, other companies have it, there are some that run across a multi platform. The real ambition for an MSP or for a customer should be one piece of one, one pane of glass, if you like, one management console that [00:40:00] allows you to manage all of your devices.
And we are working on that. It’s called WEX, HP WEX, which is Workforce Experience Platform, and it begins with something as straightforward as the print fleet. We think that the printer, uh, contractual motion, the method in which customers acquire and use printing as a service Is a wonderful way in for MSPs because that allows you then to move from the printer as a service to the PC as a service and even something we haven’t gotten to yet, but collaboration as a service, right?
The room you can see over my shoulder here, this camera this, rooms which have cameras and collaboration equipment in them. They are a service. If they have a problem, you don’t want to have to replace the device yourself and be distracted from whatever your core business is. You want to pay for a service where somebody will make sure the thing just works.
We think that Managed Print, Managed Device, and Managed Collaboration are all good examples. Managed Print is by far the most mature. And therefore the easiest we think for partners and customers to get their head around to use as a way to get into customers and to expand that services or that recurring revenue motion.
Rich: Yeah. You folks have been doing subscription pricing on PCs, I think for a whole bunch of years.
Dave: Yeah, but not anything like the way we do on print. If you think of print. Again, we we have a really strong capability in print all the way through to being able to tell you the carbon footprint of your print flick.
Now have a piece of software that allows you to assess how because people still feel that printing might be something they need to understand the footprint on I’m, and we are really proud that our printing is a carbon neutral printing. You can make that selection when you buy our managed print solutions and we will plant additional trees to ensure that your printing impact is zero.
In fact, positive is the goal. On devices, PCs, we have, it’s been less mature. This is one of the things that’s really moving quickly right now. And, If I think of where the device goes, I’m going to go in the same direction as print. So take print as the example. If you and I run a small business together and we buy we have a contract for two printers and then we expand and we need a larger printer, we HP or an MSP would take away one of them, put in a larger printer and we would just be paying a different rate or we might be paying the same rate for a longer period or we would be flexing that contract back and forth rather than focused on owning those two devices for 10 years.
It’s how print service is powerful because it allows angers over time and allows optimization of the fleet. If we see one of those printers is being underutilized, we will share that with the MSP can share that with the customer and make an adjustment to improve the performance or the cost or the productivity.
On PCs, we’re not there yet. Imagine a day when we are, imagine if we, and we’re working toward this, imagine where we would say, You have a computer, I have a computer, you have one of our new AI Ultra X PCs that’s got an AI capable NPU on it. And when you’re done with it after two years because the next AI PC hits, Because it’s a service to the company, you give it back, we refurbish it.
And it goes to somebody else in the company is their first device. Cause they don’t need the latest, fastest AI PC. They just need something with an NPU to pick up some of that local workload. That notion of, and by the way, the alternative might be you give it back to us or 20 SP and it goes off to a third home having been wiped or ensured that it was it was the security of your data was protected.
But all of that is made possible by. I say as a service, we’re working on all of it because we see just as I described collaboration and print, we see the compute device really just as a tool, like any other tool. And if you can get that tool under a contract that can be managed by somebody else, then you as the SMB, you go focus on what you’re good at.
Rich: How how mature is the collaboration as a service offering right now and where maybe is that evolving toward? It’s.
Dave: It’s young in the machine, the, in the language of maturity, it’s young. Now, Polly, before we acquired them, had some of those capabilities. So it wasn’t that HP started this when we acquired Polly a couple of years ago, but there are a number, a small number of large companies trialing that where we are in there with them.
Of course, we are our own first, that expression to drink your own champagne. So we are a managed collaboration service customer or user. Our goal is to get this to many more large companies and then enable this down to medium and small businesses in that same fashion. So it’s young, but growing if I can put it in that way.
Rich: And while we’re on the topic of services and managed services, one of the things I wanted to ask you about a little bit is, HP has a range of different Managed services. And this is something that I suspect a lot of MSPs don’t know a lot about. I think some of these services are very corporate IT oriented, but to what extent are the managed services from HP potentially a business opportunity for an MSP who’s looking for an [00:45:00] easy way to, to layer something onto the services they’re offering to their clients right now?
Dave: You, you, Rich, you went there at the end of your question. It’s the layering on that is the opportunity. One of the benefits that our strategy around channel has is that we are a channel first company, which means that we build services only to the extent that they augment. Something a channel partner or an MSP is capable of providing.
If an end customer comes to us and says, I want this capability. And it’s at one of the very handful of customers who buy direct from us, and it’s possible we’ll serve them. But by far, most of our services are served to and through and with channel partners. And so an MSP. Would look at the, if you like the super set of services that they would like to provide or that their customers demand and they would map within that where they are already capable and we would aim to help fill in the blanks for them and they could package those services onward as a part of a, a one cost or a one price per month.
So our almost an a la carte menu, if you like the the goal is to. Help partners and MSPs would be a good example. Make the transition to services. Now, MSPs are further ahead than your average channel partner, as you will know, in that notion of selling a service rather than selling products. But we think this is the direction of travel for the industry that more and more customers will demand a managed technology outcome versus owning and acquiring an asset.
Therefore, MSPs are pretty well placed, I think, to serve that. But our job around services, to your question, is to augment and fill out the map. So they can offer a full value proposition.
Rich: One of the things MSPs will often ask when they hear about this kind of offering is whether or not it’s, white labeled, is it, does the customer feel like they’re getting it from their MSP or is their relationship with HP, how do you handle that?
Dave: Depends a little on the service and the location. Some of the larger, more mature markets, we are able to entirely have it be the MSP on the front end. Others, they might see that we are behind it. But again, we have such a strong connection with and history with those MSPs that the fact that a customer might see that is being augmented, we hope it does nothing other than burnish the credentials of the partner.
The other area that I would say, would probably be obvious and in fact is part of the value. Is something like Active Care or Proactive Insights. These are services which rely on the telemetry, not just 1MSP’s installed base, but of all of HP’s installed base. And so we are able to offer those insights using the Telemetry Offer device and map it against a hundred or more than a hundred million now devices and all of the telemetry coming back from them.
That requires the scale of a company like us. And so in those cases, we would be quite comfortable declaring it. And I’d hope an MSP would too, because it’s of enormous value, the bigger you can get that data set.
Rich: Yeah. Transitioning back to AI for a little bit I think there are still a lot of MSPs out there who are working their way through how to, Get into AI as a market with their customers.
And I’m curious if HP has a perspective on these edge devices we’ve been talking about as maybe a foot in the door, a first step toward AI with clients, or is it generally a second step you’re going to go in with something like copilot or chat GPT whet the appetite for generative AI And then come back with a story about how upgrading your hardware is going to enable you to get even more value from those services.
Dave: I think what’s fascinating about where we are right now is that the various paths to leveraging AI are All of interest in a different way. So you mentioned copilot. I think copilot is a really important player in this space. I think cloud based AI where it’s a large language model and you don’t know the name of the software behind it.
You’re just being served off of an agent to serve whatever your need is and edge devices. Running the language models locally or running the local inferencing immediately and real time. These are all going to play a role. So to answer your question, I don’t see it as an evolution. We start in one and you migrate to others.
I think the real unlock of productivity is to find the cases where one is appropriate, as well as where the second, as well as where the third examples are. Now, one of the ways that we are encouraging and trying to help partners That is with an AI masterclass that we have rolled out about six or seven weeks ago to all partners, and it has a number of modules, including some fundamentals about the technology and then how to identify who might use how they might use where you might serve, because exactly as you said, the whole industry is learning about generative AI and AI at the edge, and we don’t think that leaving it to partners or the customers to do their own research and hope that they can convey The value and benefit of our offering, we don’t think [00:50:00] we should leave that to chance.
So we’ve rolled out this masterclass, like I said to all of our partners around the world. It’s unique. Nobody else is doing this. And we think that I’ve made all of our salespeople take the same program. We’re an adapted version off because the more educated and informed we are, the more able we are to go help customers understand how to use this, whichever type of ai instance appropriate.
Rich: Yeah, I was going to ask about the master class actually because one, one of the things that I encounter certainly when I’m having conversations with MSPs, their customers are enormously interested in AI. They’re probably already to some extent using it. MSPs recognize that there is a business opportunity for them various business opportunities in AI, but there’s always that nervousness that, you, you take that first step into any new technology and you’re a little bit nervous.
Do I have the knowledge I need to have this conversation with the customer. One of the things it sounds like you’re going to learn in the masterclass is how to assess an end user environment and put together a structure and offering for that client. But are they also going to come away from that class with the skills, the knowledge they know to talk about this stuff with the customer and feel like they have the answers the customer is going to be looking for?
Dave: The short answer is yes the First, it’s about helping the SMB customer teaching the SMB channel person to help that customer make buying decisions that are right, that are the right fit for the organization, that organization’s unique needs. So yes to that. Then it will go on to a number of areas around use cases, our portfolio, the data analytics platform and how they should think of this evolving over time.
And then finally, there’s a specific role based learning path that gives you different areas. Streams, if you like, for whether you’re in sales or solutioning or implementation. Now, we’re going to continue to add pathways to this based on feedback from partners to keep allowing for that, that evolution of education.
So it’s by no means finished, but it is, it’s well started. The last thing I would say is as a person who spent most of my life or worse, my career, In sales, I completely agree. I don’t know any salesperson who wades into a conversation with a customer about a subject that they don’t understand very well, because that’s a path to losing credibility, not gaining trust.
However, this is not it’s not a voluntary. Your customers are going to ask you about this. If they haven’t already, they soon will. And so we all need to get educated. This is not something where you can shy away from it and hope that. The zeitgeist will move on. This is a ball rolling down a hill.
AI is going to permeate everything we do. It already permeates a lot more than I think most people know. And so becoming educated, becoming competent and proficient and trusted is a critical requirement for all of us in the tech space, and particularly those who serve customers directly in the channel.
Rich: Training might might be your answer to this question, but for folks in the audience who want to get started in AI at the Edge and AI PCs. Are in the process of building an AI offering for their customers. What’s your advice on the first steps after they finished listening to this interview that they should do to get started?
I’d give you three.
Dave: The first is indeed training the class. I’d sign up for it, get started on it. Make sure that, if you’ve got feedback for us, you let us know so we can keep evolving it. That’s one. Two, I would buy one. You don’t have to buy a hundred, but I would get my hands on one and start using it.
The ability for you to do things on the device is unique. It’s just, there are things you can do on a device. Take this example of this podcast right now. I’m looking at you. On my screen, I’m looking at you. But if I was to look like I was looking at you, I’d look at the camera. Problem is, I wouldn’t be looking at you.
So your facial expressions, all of this would go. Eye on the device will allow me to look at you, but for my eyes to look as if I’m looking at the camera so that you and I get a much more personal interaction than you thinking I’m looking away. And I would allow, if you spoke a different language more comfortably than English, for real time translation.
And it has to be at the edge. Nothing else is low latency enough to do it. For me to hear your voice in whatever language I choose, and the same for you. For example, for any of your listeners out there struggling to understand an Australian accent, They could have it done in an America or a Canadian or a pick your language, French if they wish.
And so these are things that are unique to local inferencing, impossible without. There’s much more that’s coming. All of that is in our future. But if you bought a device today, you could try recall, which is a capability to go and look at all the history the device has on it. Because you remember I was looking at this two weeks ago and you just asked the question.
I was looking at something had a picture of an elephant in the top left corner. Go find that web page for me. This is a convenience capability that accelerates how we work. All of that local. So that would be the second one. Go buy one. And then the third one would be for your customers. Start sitting down and thinking about use cases because this is going to be the time of domain experts.
You need to understand the process. Change the process. Change the process [00:55:00] using AI. You need to understand a little bit about AI, but a lot about the process. So I would be engaging customers already in Help me understand the processes or the day in the life of your employee. Because the better I understand that, the more of it we can apply this new capability to.
So those would be the three quick starts.
Rich: All right. All right. Three three good, solid steps there at Dave McQuarrie from HP. Thank you so much for joining us on the show. Very interesting conversation about what is obviously the most timely topic in the channel right now. For folks in the audience who want to learn more about you maybe get in touch with you.
Learn more about what HP is doing in AI and elsewhere. Where would you point people?
Dave: Flip at your sales team everywhere that you are located is a good start. If you want to talk to me, you can of course, come directly to me. I can give you my email address here, or we can put it in the In the podcast text.
But we should have salespeople everywhere. We have a significant sales force out there trying to serve you and all of your customers. So I’d start there.
Rich: Okay. Fantastic. Dave, thank you again for joining us on the show, folks. We’re going to take a quick break now. When we come back on the other side, Erick will rejoin me and he and I will talk a little bit about the conversation I just concluded with Dave McQuarrie.
Have a little fun, wrap up the show, stick around. We will be right back. Okay,
and welcome back to part three of this episode of the msp chat podcast very Interesting conversation with dave mccorry. I thank him once again, for joining us two quick things Erick, before I get your the thoughts on this and one and this is just a little bit maybe inside, baseball for us But, when we’re recording these shows and this is particularly relevant for the folks watching on YouTube.
I’m looking into a camera right now, so that I’m looking at you. I’m not looking at Erick. If I was to look at Erick, I would have to look down here. And that’s, that doesn’t look so great on YouTube. But I’m looking into a camera, therefore I can’t see Erick’s face. And it was really interesting Erick, when Dave pointed out that with an AI PC, The AI allows you to, I would be able to look at you.
And the AI would adjust the image. So it looks like I’m looking into the camera. It’s like a small thing, but man, I would love to have access to that. The other thing I wanted to call attention to was something he said, right at the end of the interview there that really hadn’t occurred to me before, and I was asking, how do you get started?
And he said go buy an AI PC and start using it. And it occurred to me as he did, that’s obviously going to acclimated, give you a chance to familiarize yourself with the product and what it can do. But there, there’s also this phenomenon I’ve seen through the years, Erick, and maybe you have as well.
You go to. A meeting with a client on site with them and you pull out your AI PC in this case, to show them something or other, and they get interested in what your PC can do, and then you have this opportunity to say, Oh yeah, this is latest generation AI PC technology from HP. Look at some of the other amazing things that can do and watch.
I press the co pilot button, but all of a sudden, this product, they weren’t really thinking about upgrading to. Starts to look more real and more interesting to them. So I thought that was a really good and interesting piece of advice.
Erick: You know what I’m taking away from this rich is that there is so much more to the AI conversation or MSPs and their clients, and we use AI heavily at channel management.
I use it heavily not to cheat, but as an assist, it helps. It helps with research, it gathers data, it gives me some thoughts, and then it informs how I want to move forward. So we’re not just Oh, let’s take whatever they, I said, and use that. That doesn’t really work that way.
If you’re going to really be unique and distinct and be a thought leader for your clients and things like that, you want to leverage AI for your internal sales teams, I know, or your internal service teams and sales teams as well, I know that. AI is coming into our CRMs. Co Pilot is, already being, is loaded already in our operating systems.
And one thing that I was thinking about, Rich, in listening to your kind of, feedback on the conversation with Mr. McQuarrie from HP is, This is now beyond just like a cloud thing. It’s more of, it’s much more than just an idea. I don’t know how end user customers, are getting their information about AI, if not from their MSPs or their trusted advisors, right?
They may think, Oh, it’s just this chat GBT application, but when it is now incorporated into the actual physical hardware, into the chips and processors and things that we’re using now. And we as MSPs equip our teams with these devices, like you just said, [01:00:00] the sometimes the biggest sales influencer or an MSPs client is not the sales team, Rich, it’s the technicians or engineers that are servicing their service tickets and things like that, because once they’re a client, They’re going to be interacting with the technical team much more often, maybe on a weekly or monthly basis or more often than they ever will with that salesperson after the fact, right?
We talked about, creating PAX 8’s announcement with their marketplace and storefronts. And even at that point, these end customers and these clients are more apt to do some self serve stuff. And what I found rich, and I learned this lesson the hard way in my MSP back in the day, so we were out there and we were we had just partnered up with one of the early VoIP providers, right?
And we weren’t using the VoIP system in our business at all, but we were out there selling it and promoting it. And so one day, one of our clients was, working with one of our technicians and they said, Hey, Erick was out here, talking to us about this new voiceover IP system. How do you like it?
Technician says well, we don’t use it. So how do you think that sale went not very well, right? So I think you’re right on point where if we’re using the technology So i’ll give you another quick story msp story right from the olden days So one of our vertical markets rich was the legal industry.
So we had a bunch of attorney clients. We loved One thing that we loved about serving attorney clients, there was a lot of things that we, didn’t love as much about serving attorney clients. But one thing that we loved about them was, they were all partners, right? They were all, and these partnerships would dissolve over time.
Some, we had one attorney client that had five different partners and they all basically went off and created their own firms after the fact. And we had four new clients out of that and the original one. And this happened a lot with these attorney clients. The other thing that was interesting about attorney clients was the ones that we had anyway.
Is we would show up and these were back, you know before the very beginning of the smartphone days or whatever, right? So we’d show up and we would talk, you know we’d show them this new phone and we’d say oh, yeah, all of our attorney clients are purchasing this new phone wait, what? Let me see it And it was almost like because it was like keeping up with the joneses or whatever, you know It was like, you know keeping up with you The other attorneys are buying these.
Oh, yeah, we can’t we you know, we can’t keep up with it. We need 12 like right away so again to the point if we’re using the technology and if it’s You know an ai laptop, And we’re doing a presentation for it and we’re showing the client and they see the little copilot things Shoot up and say hey, would you like to?
You know, improve this with AI and you click it and you don’t need, you don’t have to explain it to them. They see it happening. They’re like, wait, what is that? Tell me about that. Oh yeah, this is where we’re moving all of our clients to. Oh, really? So I think it’s a great way to it’s almost like a a subliminal.
You’re not really selling it, but you could sell it, right? Hey, this is how we’re using it. Just like we talk about, how we’re using technology at channel mastered, right? It’s we’re using it this way. And hopefully, our listeners, can pick up on that and go, maybe we should look into that as well, right?
So we’re influencing these conversations. And again, it’s brand new technology that clients may not even understand what AI is, and now it’s in the hardware. So we are now thought leaders to our clients and we’re, we’re bringing them into the AI world, into the cloud and cybersecurity and marketplace and ecosystem.
Evolution and helping them be better business owners and decision makers, because we’re bringing this to them as we should, right? Because the last thing that we would want to do is to have, a competitor come knocking on the door, rich, and then present them with some technology that we already, you know, service and deliver and sell and support.
And then our client buys that from somebody else, or comes to us and say, Hey, We had somebody come in and talk to us about this stuff. And then we’re looking like we have egg on our face. Yeah, we do that too, but we’re not doing a very good job being your trusted advisor. Right?
Rich: Yeah, you’re basically turning yourself into a case study for the technologies that you’re encouraging your customers to use.
You can show the technology in use and you can talk to them and in very specific ways about the business impact it’s having for you and so they can see it in action and that it’s likely to motivate some some interest. So just a very Yeah. Simple. We all love our gadgets, don’t we?
We love our devices. Go out and get an AI PC, if not from HP, from somebody else. More and more of them are coming on the market all the time. And get to know that technology more and more. Over time, more and more of your customers will probably be using them. And it opens the door to all sorts of opportunities to influence a [01:05:00] client.
To maybe do a hardware refresh cycle a little bit earlier than they expected to.
Erick: Yeah. I’m not sure what the caviar like deploy internally to your team. Cause remember the clients are going to be talking to your technicians and engineers and they’re going to get, sometimes they trust the technicians more than they trust the sales team.
Rich. Anyway. And yeah, I like
Rich: caviar, not dog food. Very good. Eat your own caviar. Excellent advice folks. But it leaves us with time for just one last thing. And Ericka, a few weeks back, a few episodes back in the show, we were talking about a an AI technology that basically allowed people to create.
A sort of AI version of themselves that could outlive them forever. And we were musing, do you want an AI version of your mother in law in your life for the rest of your life? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Here’s a similar story from MIT where scientists have created what they’re calling Future You.
And the idea is to nudge people in the direction of better decisions and better behavior in terms of job choices and where you spend your time. How many times have we heard about people on their deathbed saying, I wish I’d spent more time with my family. You can interact with future you 40 years from now, telling you, maybe you ought to be doing this and more of this and less of that.
Yeah. But of course, I immediately start thinking about future you and, in more prosaic ways, basically, it’s one more beer. Should I have one more beer? Yeah, they that pizza still looks good. One more slice. What will future me tell me about that decision? And could it save me regret tomorrow?
Erick: Yeah, maybe it could be renamed better you, right? Because if it’s giving you that kind of guidance and going, Hey, It’s like those science fiction movies we watch right rich where you know you from the future comes in comes back to the past and gives you like You know the sports betting, results like from back to the future, right?
We’ve got the sports betting results and now you can go make money, right? So better you maybe right as future you all
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