Episode 40: The AI Trifecta
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Erick and Rich discuss why it’s not just smaller MSPs buying into MDR services and other outsourced security offerings and three keys to effective communication with clients. Then they’re joined by West McDonald of AI consultancy GoWest.ai to discuss making real money in AI through business process optimization. And finally, one last thing: Evidence that raccoons have trouble distinguishing Tesla Cybertrucks from dumpsters.
Discussed in this episode:
Managed SaaS Alerts now. Managed everything later?
Canalys: Managed cybersecurity services face an existential threat
Gartner Forecasts Global Information Security Spending to Grow 15% in 2025
Latest episode of West McDonalds Assessments and Insights podcast
Racoons Mistake Cybertruck For A Trash Can
Transcript:
[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 in managed services. My name is Rich Freeman. I am the Chief Content Officer and Channel Analyst.
At channel master, the organization responsible for the show. I am joined today as I am every week by your other co host, Erick Simpson, our chief strategist. Erick, how you doing? I’m doing well, Rich. I have not traveled this week as you have, so I have no travel related stories to share. How about you?
What a lovely softball there. So as regular listeners and viewers probably know, my hometown is Seattle. I am actually in Dallas this week attending the 20s Vision 2024 conference. And it turned out to be relatively simple to get here, but this was not a sure thing when I left home Tuesday morning, because as you may or may not have read, SeaTac, my hometown airport, got hacked last weekend.
And they were, that was like Saturday Erick, and I was flying down here to Dallas on Tuesday, and they were still down in a lot of ways. Like the signage was dark, and the airport Wi Fi wasn’t functional the baggage system wasn’t working, so they couldn’t scan barcodes. If they lost your suitcase earlier this week, it was just gone, right?
Because they didn’t know where it had actually wound up. Interesting. And as I quipped online here’s an airport disruption that nobody can blame on CrowdStrike. This was hackers. Yeah, sounds like they need better IT support. Yeah, absolutely. And you know what, let’s dive into our story of the week because it it takes place in the world of security and full disclosure I’m going to touch upon news this week from a company called Sassalert is a channel mastered client.
And part of why I call that out is alerts, regular members of our audience are going to think, Hey, wait a minute, didn’t you shout out SaaS alerts like two or three episodes ago? Yes, we did know that has nothing to do with our business relationship with SaaS alerts. It’s just, once again they announced something this week that I think is telling.
So quickly their news SAS alerts for folks who don’t know that this is a a cloud security platform, specifically a SAS security platform. Up until this week, they have sold the software and you take, you, you as an MSP take care of the software. As of this week, they now have a fully managed version of that service.
So for an extra 75 cents per user per month, they will set it up. They’ll configure it. They’ll set auto remediation rules. They’ll handle all the monitoring day to day for you and take all of that off of your hands. And, part of the idea is just that Having somebody else do all that for you is probably going to be beneficial to a lot of overstretched MSPs.
Some of that has to do with the fact That security is a complex field and who knows it better than security specialists, like a security vendor who knows a security solution better than the vendor who wrote it, right? You start putting those pieces together and you get to the theme that I really want to talk about this week, Erick, which is just this idea that I increasingly have.
That managed versions of security solutions and services are going to become more and more popular. The common wisdom about those kinds of offerings in the past has been they are mostly for smaller MSPs that don’t have the resources to handle that kind of work in house. Larger companies particularly larger ones or are MSPs large enough to have their own SOC and maybe a security specialist or two, they’re going to want to handle that stuff in house.
I’m not so sure anymore for all the reasons I just outlined. Security is complex. You really have to invest to keep up with it. Even if you go through that time and expense, are you really going to know a platform in particular, a security solution in particular As well as the company that actually created that solution.
IT spending is pretty strong. This year, Erick Gartner expects it to go up seven and a half percent. Security spending even stronger. That’s according to Gartner are going to go up 13. 4 percent this year. NDR spending managed detection and response, sending, according spending, according to Canalys, that’s going to go up 50 percent this year, a much smaller base.
And I should double emphasize so that the SaaSAlert people don’t yell at us that their offering is not an MDR in any way, shape, or form. I’m just bringing that up as an example of a, an outsourced managed security service that is [00:05:00] outgrowing the security market as a whole by leaps and bounds and outgrowing the IT market as a whole by leaps and bounds because I think there is an underlying, not just financial, But security and safety logic going with a managed offering even for larger MSPs, a lot of the time.
Rich your story this week really shines a light on the challenge that MSPs have today, keeping ahead of their clients needs and requirements. And, I was just on two different calls today with two different MSP clients of mine that both. Are struggling with the workload that they have and supporting it with their existing staff and needing to hire more staff and the challenge they’re having in getting the folks that they need.
So they’re looking at solutions that they can basically include in their bundle that come with some labor tied to it. So whether that’s, cybersecurity or something else, they are relying. More and more or looking more and more toward vendor relationship that can actually take some of that labor cost out of the equation.
They can lean on them for their expertise and their teams so that they can focus on being as strategic as possible for their client relationships, which hint, hint is a harbinger of my tip of the week here. This week. So it’s really the way that business is evolving now, not only for. The clients that MSP serve, but the MSPs themselves and how they’re structuring their offerings and the vendor relationships that they are looking to engage in so that they can reduce the thing that we talk about a lot on this program, right?
The vendor sprawl, the platform sprawl, the pane of glass sprawl, and allowing the labor that they are investing in from their own team to have as high of a profit margin as possible. Yeah. And I think that’s really key. Cause that issue there, the idea that the most profitable way to utilize labor.
It, is going to be to focus on the strategic issues to outsource where you can outsource it. That’s a, that’s what economists would call a secular trend. There is also this sort of cyclical trend that we’ve been talking about for years where, labor is tight, the tech unemployment rate is very low single digits right now.
And so that make, that puts particular pressure MSPs to look for ways to stretch the labor force that they have. Right now that will change over time presumably, but that larger issue, that larger evolution or larger logic that you were talking about there really getting maximum value from the labor that you invest in, however much that is, that’s not going anywhere.
And that too I totally agree that points in the direction of more managed security services. So Erick let’s move on to your chip of the week. Cause you were dropping hints before, and now I’ve got to know what it’s all about. Yeah, it’s all about reflecting the true value of the services that MSPs provide to their clients.
Rich, we talk a lot in the industry and in communities about, the really reflecting the value that we deliver to our clients and getting clients to recognize. Agree to and appreciate that value in ways that turn into increased profits for The msps that serve them and the ability to expand their services within client relationships now I’m not talking rich about picking the right clients, a b and c, we’ve had those conversations before i’m talking about Making sure that the clients that you want to keep and the clients that have the best growth opportunity For you Structuring a communication and client education strategy to regularly and consistently reflect the value that you bring to the client.
And it can’t be the same stuff that all of your competitors deliver. The value can’t be what’s in your solution stack, Rich, because, It’s getting harder and harder for today’s buyers to discern. When we’re all using and supporting the same SAS platforms, M 365, Google, solutions and things like that.
We’re all supporting these SAS applications. We’re supporting infrastructure. So the differentiation rich has to be the strategic value. And how do we communicate that to clients? I speak with enough partners that say, you know what, I try to schedule these. strategic business reviews with them. They may take the first couple, [00:10:00] but then they just ghost me and they don’t keep those appointments.
And hint, they’re not seeing value on them. So let’s adjust the value proposition and make sure that we are reflecting that value to our clients. How can we do that? Three quick tips, rich number one, regularly communicating the value. Meaning here’s a great example that used to happen to us all MSP practice riches.
The clients asking for things and us not reflecting the value of it and or charging for it, stuff that falls outside the scope or technicians going way outside the scope of our agreement and just doing it because they want to keep the client happy. There’s nothing wrong, rich with doing something for valued clients and not charging them for it.
But where I think MSPs have an opportunity. Is to reflect the value of what that is and then communicating that during regular meetings and then even on the invoices that are being sent out documenting what we did extra and then showing them what that price would have been and then doing a no bill at the bottom of that invoice.
We don’t want to itemize everything but just basically indicating on the invoice that hey, We did this additional work provided for good client relationship or something and you know a discount on that something that lets them know Hey, you guys are doing us a solid here because one thing I can promise you rich is clients Don’t remember all the free stuff that we give them a boy.
Oh boy They will remember the last mistake that technician made Right the last time they were on site. So let’s make sure that we are providing regular updates communications when we are meeting with clients reminding them Hey, we love the relationship. That’s why we went ahead and did these extra things And and did not bill you for it, right something like that so just keeping that top of mind number two providing some educational content in terms of communications newsletters Webinars for existing clients, right?
That reinforces the value of the relationship that we have, articles and things like that, these are things that typically tend to be the Achilles heel of MSPs, right? Rich is like, Hey, promoting our value, doing some marketing. Let’s showing them in our newsletter. Here’s the here are the things that we’re adding to our solution.
Like here are the things that. We are doing to protect your organization, inviting them to a webinar that focuses on a component of the portfolio of services that we deliver to clients and reflecting to them how they can utilize it, what it protects them from and the value that it brings to them.
Number three, if we’re doing those things, rich, we have a much better shot at getting clients to agree to strategic meetings. And these strategic meetings call them SBRs, QBRs, a strategic meeting that adds value to a client’s relationship. We know that there are new and different services and solutions that are being introduced into the channel that are not the typical thing that we see partners, including like ways to increase productivity and efficiency, right?
We’ve talked about this a little bit, Rich, new vendors that are coming in That deal with a component of a business that typically MSPs don’t think about, but now can look at and say, Hey, I can add that as a strategic value introduced to my client that helps them achieve a business goal or improve their business efficiency and operations that are maybe not something that we typically think about from a technology service provider.
I’m thinking about efficiency, improvement and productivity and time tracking solutions, rich that we’re seeing come on the scene and things like that. But more importantly, lead the conversations around strengthening their cybersecurity posture, ensuring uptime and availability making sure that we’re training them and having in house or maybe even virtual training sessions on how to identify, suspect emails, avoiding phishing things that actually Add value not just we’re hitting we’re here to present you the things that we’ve done.
Please review my report card with me mom and dad it’s interesting. I mentioned at the top of the show, I’m here in Dallas attending the 20s Vision Conference. Tim Conkle, the CEO of the 20 delivered a keynote this morning. And he made a point that dovetails nicely with that.
The last third of those points that you just made there, which is if you want to be a valuable MSP these days, you really need to focus in He didn’t say something strategic. He said, you’ve got to have a unique value proposition because the stuff that you think are your strengths, your technical know how, your great customer service, those are actually the most commoditized things that you do.
Everybody. Has those same strengths or certainly thinks that they do and so [00:15:00] you need something else that is going to set you apart from everybody else. And absolutely in this day and age the more strategic that is, the more it reflects that you are on the cutting edge of technology and keeping your clients there.
I think the better you’re better off that you’re going to be. The other thing I think or thought listening to go through those three bits of advice there, Erick, is just this kind of ties back to a classic old school issue around managed services that I’m sure you experienced when you were a leading edge MSP yourself once upon a time, which is that if you’re in the proactive IT business and you’re really doing your job well.
Half the time your client doesn’t know you’re doing anything for them because nothing’s going wrong and that’s what you’re doing for them. Nothing’s going wrong. And so you have to get good when you’re talking to the customer at showing them here are all the patches we applied and all threats we interfered with and all tickets that we addressed for you and just call attention to the value that you’re delivering all of that, I think you’re saying Erick is table stakes now you really need to be going above and beyond that And talking to them about the freebies that you’re giving them, the strategic advice you’re giving them, et cetera.
Absolutely. Rich. You should be, maybe spending 10 percent of a QBR talking about what we did for you that is expected, right? Nobody gets an award for closing tickets, rich, every MSP closes tickets, right? But it’s also that strategic planning and that strategic cybersecurity security and compliance.
Discussion and planning. It’s let’s look at your three year plan. Let’s get your five year plan. Let’s look at where we are now. Let’s look at growth being that true business partner that your the MSP’s client sees as a critical component to their business operations today and in the future as they grow.
Like you want to be seen as invaluable to that organization’s growth so that when when your competitors come a knocking, the client. Basically refers them to you, right? Cause we used to have that happen as well. No, you can go talk to Erick. I’m not interested in what you’re selling and and that’s a great client.
This is actually a nice segue to our spotlight interview segment this week. Erick, we’re going to be talking with West McDonald. He is a consultant who works with MSPs to help them build AI practices and what better way to show your clients that you are on the cutting edge.
You’re keeping them on the cutting edge. You’re delivering strategic value. Then to help them utilize the power of artificial intelligence in a way that’s beneficial for them and profitable for you. So we’re going to take a quick break now. When we come back on the other side, we’ll be joined by West McDonald to have a conversation about specific present day.
AI services that you can deliver to your clients.
All right, welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP chat podcast our spotlight interview segment and as promised a moment Ago, we are joined by West mcdonald of go West ai West thanks so much for joining us on the show Oh, I can’t thank you enough for having me on the show as you know from past exchanges There is nothing I love more than talking AI really glad to be here.
We’ve actually known each other you’re working in the realm of AI right now, but you’ve been around in the channel for a long time. Tell folks a little bit about yourself, your background in the channel, and then also about Go West AI. Yeah, you bet. Yeah, we have known each other a while now, and I’ve been conducting workflow or managed print assessments or other types of things.
Sort of 360 style assessments for the last 20 years or so. And about a year and a half ago, I got poked on the shoulder by somebody that introduced me to this little thing called chat GPT. And once I saw that and the powers and the capabilities, even in those early days, I understood just how transformative it was going to be for our industry.
So it didn’t take me long. I started to go West at AI and our team of folks now does workflow assessments with an eye on AI solutions that can actually help. Solve those workflow solutions. So really looking at productivity, looking at trying to use AI in ways far beyond what people think of as just having a chat assistant or being able to talk to AI, to accomplish things.
So really excited, clearly it is such a hot business area. The last nine or 10 months in particular for us we’ve been having some struggles with trying to figure out how to manage growth and they’re good problems to add. Very excited to contribute however I can today on the show.
Now you, your your customers are not if I remember right, a hundred percent MSPs, but you do work a lot with MSPs and as it happens just a few days ago, I was interviewing somebody from DNH, the big distributor, and we were talking about AI and he was saying basically there’s an an enormous amount of interest in among D and H partners in [00:20:00] AI and a sort of, rough loose intention to get into AI, but not a lot of confidence among MSPs in their ability to deliver AI services to their clients.
They’re a little bit wary about over promising and under delivering, not quite knowing the right thing to deliver. Is that consistent at all with your experience? Yeah, it is. And I can tell you that, part of the problem is and, that MSPs traditionally, when you look at how they can offer AI to their customers, it doesn’t fit their traditional business model, right?
So when you look at things like offering solutions from some of the typical partners, and they’re great partners, if you’re working with Microsoft, if you’re working with others to provide hardware solutions or Office 365 or other, traditional MSP offerings. They don’t fit all of the corners, if you will, for where I can help businesses.
And so that’s the difficulty is that they’re having to look at working with partners and solutions that maybe they haven’t worked with in the past. They’re looking at having to help customers in ways that maybe starts in a different way than traditionally offering the services that they do.
So it has been a hard ground. The MSPs that we work with. We always start with helping them understand that their customers don’t know what they don’t know, and that’s where they need help first. So it’s like D& H to be able to get rid of the mist around AI and figure out where some of the real practical solutions are that can help.
So we always start with workflow problems first, never the solution. Unfortunately, a lot of people start there saying, give me an AI solution, help our business. So they’re I don’t know your business yet. I don’t know where you’re having problems. Moving beyond just chat capabilities.
You really have to dig deep and understand where their workflows are challenging where they have broken parts of their workflow that technology to date simply hasn’t solved and starting there. So working with MSPs to help them, to help their customers to do that. I will say that, MSP should become their own customer first.
In other words, start moving through some of these AI solutions internally. To actually work on their own productivity, their own workflows to build up some expertise to be able to deliver to their customers, right? So it is a different animal than what they’re used to doing.
I can tell you that for the other customers that I serve, it’s also a different animal, right? So in the Office Equipment Channel, which are typical dealers that offer solutions for document management for office productivity, usually related to copiers and printers, et cetera. It’s a different service for them as well, right?
But they took the leap, I’d say. A couple of years ago when they started evolving and offering things like cyber security started offering solutions outside of their traditional wheelhouse that were done in different ways. So I think they’ve got a little bit of a head start because they’ve already started that diversification within their organizations, but certainly nothing to be terrified of.
It’s just a different approach for those MSPs. And, the, I think the biggest problem with AI right now is that it’s, there’s a lot of free versions and then people try it. They don’t really know how to use it. It doesn’t do what they think it’s going to do. And so they just give up.
And that’s our job as folks in the industry that are specialists in AI is to help make sure that they use it for what it can be used for to make sure they understand full stop with the limitations are and being able to move forward with that knowledge. That’s really paramount right now.
West, you covered a lot of ground there in your response and I want to bring it back to the MSP focus being a recovering MSP, I, I’m still embody that, that, that sensibility and working with MSPs and things like that, and I found that MSPs can get stuck in a vision of what their value is.
To be managing infrastructure to delivering, service desk support, cybersecurity, now cloud migrations, things like that. AI is, as you mentioned it’s just, it’s a unique and different animal. And I don’t suspect that a lot of MSPs immediately see this as an opportunity to add more value.
And deliver services that they can wrap to become more strategically valuable to their client relationships. What’s your response to that? What are the barriers preventing MSPs from really seeing this in a way that may enable more conversations? And from gaining the skills and knowledge to really deliver something of value that actually returns ROI to them as well.
Yeah, it’s happening quickly. And that’s why I mentioned at the beginning that what they traditionally are accustomed to offering. It doesn’t fit right that this is different. The MSPs that we do work with today have had to make a leap. And that leap was to be able to, first of all, to go to their clients and say, we’re going to start with an assessment.
This is different. It’s not a service offering as [00:25:00] we’re traditionally offering you, but it’s going to help us understand where your workflows are broken. And once we do that, then we can come forward as a traditional MSP and help you with some solutions that we can layer in to solve those problems, right?
Very similar to the stack you’re using for cybersecurity and other things, right? But again, it’s not starting with that solution. It’s not trying to move what’s already known into the environment. It’s trying to go with the unknown first. And then coming up with those solutions to fix it. The other thing that we do with MSPs is give them a monthly recurring revenue stream by helping them understand that those customers are going to need help with integration.
They’re going to need help with ongoing implementation of AI initiatives. And the MSP is in the best position to do that, right? That they’ve been helping them with all these other services first. So that’s really the leap I talk about. They have to start with the assessment. And then they can start moving into services that might look and feel a little bit more like what they’re used to delivering today.
And again, different partners are going to be different brand names. They’re going to be different solutions than they’re necessarily used to dealing with today. Some of them will be the same, obviously with office 365, with Microsoft, with their co pilot pro offerings et cetera, some of the hardware solutions through Lenovo that maybe they’re traditionally used to dealing with, there are still layers that they’ll be adding to the But I’ll be the first to tell you, they’re not enough.
You’re not going to be an MSP and solve a customer’s problems just with the hardware and just with the software pieces, with the traditional offerings that you have today, it’s a good start, but it’s not the end game. Yeah. And that’s what’s so interesting about this conversation and where it’s going is it really isn’t in a lot of ways about AI itself.
The real service that you’re talking about delivering, I think this is what Erick was getting at as well. It’s a very high value service, which is to say, it’s not about, hardware and software and keeping the lights on and the infrastructure running, it’s about assessing your workflows, understanding the business processes, doing business process optimization which is a more valuable offering for the MSP to be doing, but it also might be a little unfamiliar.
So in, in terms of where we’re at today and getting started as an MSP and so on, how much of what they need to be doing is educating themselves about AI and how much is it about educating themselves about this kind of business process optimization relationship and and sales motion? Yeah, that’s why I said they have to become their own customer first before they start offering this to the world, because the best way to learn these things is to experience them, that they have to move through their own workflows and figure out where that fits.
I’ll give you one example. So if you’re offering cybersecurity for a customer, if you’re not talking about AI and how it’s used in the office, then that’s a discredit to that offering, right? So one of the first things that we do with MSPs is work with their customers to build. AI policy and guidelines for the organization that align with their cyber security practices, right?
So much like in cyber security, when we actually, it’s never enough just to have the tools to keep us safe. We have to train users, have to teach them how to avoid phishing campaigns, how to avoid clicking on that tempting email. It’s the same thing with AI, with shadow AI, right? That Most people because there’s so many free versions of different AI tools out there because it’s so unregulated because it’s so new that they are unwillingly introducing shadow AI into their organizations and MSPs can help with that.
So that’s one of the first areas that they can tie it to one of the offerings that they already have today to get customers thinking about responsible use and secure use of AI. We’ve heard the term shadow being used in different ways. This is the first time I’ve heard the term shadow AI being used West.
So I appreciate that. And how did you, so my question becomes. In terms, I love the idea of an assessment, right? I think MSPs, that’s an easy to understand concept. It’s Hey, we do assessments. We do infrastructure assessments. We do cybersecurity assessments. You’re saying that there is a now an AI assessment that is maybe the first step to evaluating what the strategy might be for that MSP to assist that client.
In improving their, their business process, optimizing that. So this is also not an unfamiliar term for MSPs, BPO, business process optimization. For some MSPs, that may feel like a daunting cliff as well, right? So we’re talking about business process optimization AI assessments, tying in with cybersecurity.
This seems to me, West, to feel like We need to rethink our overall strategy with our clients that includes AI, how it affects or ties [00:30:00] into cybersecurity, along with the value that we’re going to improve your business processes, Mr or Mrs client, so that you can deliver you can, your team can operate more efficiently and profitably here.
So what are the core components of. This kind of larger strategy, would you think that features AI as a lead component? Yeah, I want to start with what you said about having a change, you know Kind of how we approach our businesses right that we’ve been here before right when you know back in the day when?
Cloud services you remember when cloud was a dirty word, right that People didn’t trust it at all. And it had to become quickly as it took off a core part of how we, service our customers, right? AI is going to do the same thing. So although it’s not a an area of expertise so far, it’s going to have that same kind of impact.
It’s going to have to be part of what we deliver to our. Our customers. So it’s good that the assessment piece at least ties into something that they’re familiar with, right? For the other pieces that they can reach out to people, that’s all they do all day long, right?
So at go West at AI, for example, that’s what we do. We offer our services through partners. We don’t sell directly. To end user customers, right? That we become that mechanism, if you will for an MSP, for an off squid mid dealer, for a managed IT provider to be able to hit the ground running with AI services for their clients through a trusted brand.
That, that’s one way to do it. And I’m not saying it’s the only way to do it, that if they do want to build a practice internally themselves that what they really need to look at is how they’re doing their assessments today for other assets of their MSP practice and how they might be able to tie in a I and business process optimization into that, right?
It’s just got to be an integral wrapped in part, of course. That’s every business’s decision is which part do we outsource for now until we feel that we’re comfortable? And do we just start this from scratch and do it ourselves? I will say that the hardest part, because this is such a new space, it’s like the early days of the internet.
You remember the. com before the dot bomb, it’s almost like every day there was a thousand new. Solution sets that are out there and trying to navigate that and figure out which of those pieces is actually going to work in their business. Very difficult. And there’s another hard part to that story is that they’re going to make some decisions for their business.
Some solutions, which are not going to be around in a year that there are going to be some experiments that have to take place simply because we can’t sit still and it is changing so quickly. Providers are buying each other up very quickly. There’s investment dollars in a lot of areas.
Yeah, it’s going to, buckle up. It’s going to be some interesting days, but we have to get started. Yeah, in terms of getting started we’re talking about building a strategy and a motion around assessments and workflows and process optimization. And, all that stuff does take time but as I mentioned I’ve interviewed D& H recently.
They, like all the other big distributors, are talking to their partners about Microsoft Copilot as something that you can go out and make money with in AI right away. It may be that there is No right answer to this question from your point of view, but are there low hanging fruit opportunities in a right now that anyone in our audience could be or should be thinking about delivering to their customers?
Right away as they work on this larger plan for the future. Yeah, there are. And I call them kind of the AI trifecta, right? And so the first thing that everybody should be doing is making sure that they’re using a corporate grade level of AI. So you remember I mentioned shadow AI, right? That if they’re using co pilot, they should be using co pilot pro.
If they’re using chat GPT, they should be using the team edition. And honestly, those are really the two that we recommend the most today. And the reason being that those team additions and the higher level subscription additions with Microsoft come with a private workspace, right? And with OpenAI and their chat GPT offering, it’s actually SOC 2 compliant and feels very much like using, let’s say, Office 365 or other trusted sort of cloud platform, applications, right?
So that’s number one, stop using the free stuff and make sure that you’re using one of the business grade additions, if you will, of what they’re doing. The second thing I would add is. Make sure that you’re using AI as an assistant. So to be able to take notes, to be able to be there during interviews, to be there to summarize things and to create tasks.
So the one that I use, myself personally, although we do work with all of them, integrates with my CRM. So once I’m finished a call with a client, I don’t have to write down my notes and then remember to put them into the CRM. That happens automatically. The second piece is that it goes into task management as well.
I personally use Asana for that. And so once I’m finished, my tasks automatically Get tabled into a Santa, right? So that’d be number two, get an assistant straight away that can start to help you to feel a [00:35:00] different value proposition than just conversing with AI, right? So if you think about it, it’s the first example of what I would call a light action model, where it’s actually.
Doing a function, which is invisible. You don’t have to interact with it to do it. It’s just sitting there, doing stuff beside you. The third thing, and I would say probably the most important part of this trifecta is develop your own AI guidelines and policies. Ones that you’re going to incorporate internally and ones that you’re going to help your customer to develop.
You don’t have to be an AI expert to be able to help your customers to use AI safer today, right? Build the guidelines the policies. We have a free templates, which we share with MSP so that they can get a headstart on that. And those would be the three, I would say low hanging fruit. Very easy to to implement much more secure than just using the free versions.
Protects the organization because then at least people within the organization at the MSP and their customers understand how they’re allowed to use. AI and what they’re allowed to use it for, right? So those are definitely the three that I would, I recommend pretty much with every client that I talked to, to get started.
West, I like the idea that you shared is governance and kind of a strategy and things like that. When we’re talking about AI. And I think that everyone that listens to this podcast will be familiar with the term garbage in garbage out. Yeah. A lot of the value that, that AI brings, it seems to me is related to the quality of the data that is in, that isn’t that you’re feeding it or that you’re using or exposing it to.
So is consolidating and cleaning up a business’s data a good opportunity for MSPs or helping them do that as part of this assessment and preparation for implementing and optimizing AI? For the organization. What are your thoughts there? Yeah, the data part is very important, right?
And but I guess there’s a difference with they can actually use a how to help them clean up that data, right? So this is one of the things that I help clients with. Is that unlike a traditional data cleanse? We’re going through and trying to standardize everything, right? That AI is pretty good at looking at both structured and unstructured data.
As long as it’s trained on what kind of things to expect with that unstructured or let’s say less than perfectly cleansed data, right? One of the clients that I work with, we’ve actually been going through a more automated ordering system for them. So when they get orders. From their clients, the orders come in weird and wonderful formats, right?
Sometimes it’s the right part number. Sometimes it’s not. And the problem is with that kind of data is it doesn’t come clean. You can’t ask the client to send you that clean data. If they’re going to give you money. They’ll send you the data in a way that they want to, right? We’ve developed AI to be able to cleanse that for them, right?
To train it on what those things look like, what it probably means. I’ll give an example. When you’re looking at, let’s say a colon, which is required for the ordering system, which is quantity, right? Sometimes it’s quantity. Sometimes it’s QTY. Sometimes it’s hashtags. Sometimes it’s a bunch of different things.
And you can’t necessarily clean that data. Or sorry, let me, you can’t exactly expect your customers to clean that data when they send it to you, but you can use AI to clean that data before it comes in house, right? So definitely but again, the big difference is you can actually alleviate a lot of those cleansing constraints, which we previously had by training AI, how to actually help you to cleanse that data.
A lot of what we’re talking about here is project work, right? We’ll come in, we’ll do an assessment. We’ll identify a a workload, a workflow optimization opportunity and help you implement that. Or we’ll come in and clean up your data. Where are there MRR recurring revenue opportunities in AI?
And if so, where are they? Yeah, there, there’s a couple. So one is the fractional chow. Piece that I’d mentioned at the beginning, right? The clients are going to be looking for help. They’re going to see the initiatives that they could implement and they’re going to realize we don’t have the people to do it.
They’re going to, they’re going to have the ability to actually get contracts with those clients. We typically start with a one year contract with our clients to help them roll out initiatives. Some people do six months, some people do two years, whatever, right? But, That’s a consistent regular monthly recurring revenue that they get to be able to roll those solutions out.
The second way that they can make money is that most of the solutions we have At GoAsk. ai we’ve got about 35 validated solutions, ones that we’ve tested, ones that we’ve looked at. Clients don’t necessarily always have to go with those. They can go with their own, but any of the ones that you do represent and that you can put your name behind, you can get affiliate revenues from those organizations once those solutions are implemented, right?
So you will get revenue share from the solutions that are put in place. And so it’s You know, I would say that it’s really important for them when they’re looking at partners to make sure that’s in place, the [00:40:00] hard part is a lot of the AI solutions right now they’re direct to consumer, right?
And the trick is to make sure that even some of those like chat GPT, for example, it’s difficult to make money on that unless you’re a very large, I think they’ve only got one or two partners now where they actually do. Revenue shares that it’s those other solutions that aren’t necessarily the main chat engine, which is where they’re going to make their money.
So all of the organizations that we work with, once we’re willing to put our name behind it do have revenue share opportunities through their affiliate programs. Okay West McDonald thank you so much for joining us on the show this week. AI is such an enormous topic, obviously such a an enormous topic of interest with our audience.
Anytime we can have a conversation with somebody who makes it a little bit more specific and talks about approaching it in a more practical way, it’s interesting for us and I’m sure valuable for listeners and viewers. So thank you so much for joining us. Where can folks get in touch with you, learn more about go West ai?
Yeah, I really appreciate that. The QR code that I have up on my screen there is probably too small to read but just very simply go West young man, right? So go West.ai. You can reach us there. We’re also obviously on LinkedIn. As I mentioned prior to the interview, we actually have our own.
Series, our own podcast online called assessments and insights. We do it every two weeks so they can find that on LinkedIn as well. We bring on guests like yourself at experts. Outside of our own space, even to add value. Certainly recommend that, they check us out on our website and on LinkedIn, and we’d love to help.
The one other thing I’ll offer Rich and Erick is again, for those policies and guidelines we offer those absolutely just as a like a free service. If people want a copy of a statement of procedure to, to be able to help build those and some examples of what they look like, then they can reach out to us for those as well.
Yeah. Fantastic. West, thank you again. Folks, we are going to take a quick break here when we come back on the other side. Erick and I will share some final thoughts on this very interesting conversation we just concluded. Have a little fun, wrap up the show, so stick around. We are going to be right back.
All right, welcome back to part three of this episode of the show. It’s interesting how that conversation with West dovetailed with stuff that we’ve been talking about in a very different context on this podcast in weeks past, which is this idea that, device management, cloud management, these basic infrastructure management services Are if they’re not already commoditized, they’re rapidly on their way to becoming commoditized.
And what you really need to be thinking about is how do I provide more strategic value to the customer in terms of outcome oriented solutions and not just products? And that basic infrastructure service, and that’s exactly what West is talking about. That’s his whole take on AI is, you don’t think about that as a technology.
You don’t think about it as a product or something that you’re bundling in with a bunch. You think of this as a means to an end where the end, the value you’re delivering to the client is that ability to Make your business run better to improve workflows iron out road bumps that are slowing you down and costing profitability.
And it’s like a twofer. Erick, if you follow West’s advice, you’re both becoming that more competitive, strategic, high margin provider to your clients that you really need to be. And you’re also getting in on the AI wave. Yeah, I tell you what, Rich, I was just soaking it all in as all of the questions and discussions you and I have been having as you say, over the past few episodes around AI and the opportunity around AI and how to MSPs monetize it, is it too early?
Is it a fad? Is it this and that? I now see a very clear path forward. Thanks to West insight. As to how MSPs can add more of that strategic value, that stickiness and weaving in, AI with kind of cybersecurity with business process optimization in a way that is familiar to MSPs. We’re familiar Rich with doing assessments.
We’re familiar with asking the right questions, then putting together a solution or a relationship that allows us. to help that client with these, as you mentioned, business outcomes, right? So we’re no longer the technology vendor, right? We are now the business partner, the business process partner, the security expert, the things that these new I will say that as I always say, the post pandemic buyers.
Are thinking about here. And what I loved best about it was West giving us these concrete examples [00:45:00] of how to monetize the opportunity for MSPs that you and I have been wondering what that is, the the AI trifecta that he shared with us, right? So it’s not only just consulting, assessing, and then identifying the opportunity, adding these additional platforms.
That a client can leverage to, normalize some of this data. As he said, it’s not a lot of hard work. I asked the question thing, it sounds to me, I’m thinking, man, what do we need to do to prepare this? No. We use AI and help us with all of that normalization. And then the integrations with these different platforms.
I love that he shared how he’s using platforms to help his workflow, giving our listeners the idea. Wow. I can be, I’m thinking about myself like, Hey, we use AI too rich. And now I’m thinking, wait a minute, I’m not using AI on the way he just said, where it’s actually integrating with my CRM and then giving them my tasks and all that holy cow.
And then the affiliate angle. Around earning additional revenue, just because you’re introducing these other platforms in your ultimate solution to clients. So there’s project revenue. There’s ongoing M. R. R. Revenue from an ongoing advisory and consulting perspective. And there’s kind of affiliate revenue to be had when we put together these packages and programs and present them to our clients that adds real strategic business outcome value to them, making much more sticky and important to that relationship.
And I’ll just quickly point out one bonus payoff of using AI in relation to your CRM system. The way West is doing that is that’s something that you can show. Customers too. We’ve heard multiple times from people including the chief commercial officer at HP that having something in a meeting to actually show something that you’re doing yourself in your business that you can actually show to a customer here’s what I mean.
When I’m talking about, or other people are talking to you about AI, here’s a practical example that gives them something to to latch onto. And it can be a starting point. For a business kind of that might be the first project workflow project you do with them is something that’s around their sales process, for example, so lots and lots of good food for thought there.
Thanks again to West McDonald for joining us. But that leaves us, Erick, with time for just one last thing this week on the MSP Chat Podcast. Look, I am not going to editorialize on the test with Cybertruck. I imagine there are some people out in the audience here, and yes, some folks may own one, some folks may aspire to own one.
There are certainly a lot of people who have some less than favorable, less than admiring things to say. About the tesla cyber truck and apparently raccoons have an opinion of their own about the tesla cyber truck based on some social media traffic From a gentleman who was spending the night. He was at a camping site in michigan or minnesota recently overnight and in the morning when he returned to his tesla cyber truck He discovered that raccoons had attempted to break in And based on an assessment from people who are familiar with the behavior of raccoons at campsites generally, and this particular one, it was pretty clear to them that what was going on there is the raccoons thought that Cybertruck was a dumpster, and they were trying to get inside to see if they could find something tasty to eat.
Again, I’m not endorsing the raccoon’s point of view. I’m simply saying there are raccoons out there who have trouble mistaking a Tesla Cybertruck. Rich, I’m gonna refrain from making any additional comments about that very humorous story. And with that, folks, we’re gonna wrap it up. Thank you so much for joining us this week.
Erick and I will be back next week with another episode of the show for you. Until then, please allow me to remind you that we are both a video and an audio program, which means that if you are listening to us on audio, But you would be interested, check us out on video. You need to go to YouTube, look up MSP chat.
You’ll find us there pretty easily. If you’re watching us on YouTube, but you’re into audio podcasts, go to wherever it is, you get those because it’s almost a sure thing. You’re going to find us there too. And however you find us, please subscribe. It’s going to help other people like you find and enjoy the show.
This show is produced by the great Russ Johns. It is edited by the great Riley Simpson. They are both part of the team here at Channel Mastered. They would be happy to help you with a podcast of your own, but podcasts are just one of the many things we do for our clients at Channel Mastered.
To learn more about that, you want to go to www. channelmastered. com. Channel Mastered has a sister company called MSP Mastered. That’s Erick working directly with MSPs to grow and optimize their business. You can learn more about that at www. mspmastered. [00:50:00] com. Once again, we thank you for joining us. We look forward to seeing you again in a week’s time.
Until then, folks, please do remember that you can’t spell channel. Without MSP.
