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Erick and Rich discuss overcoming the gap between employer enthusiasm toward AI and employee mistrust, plus strategies MSPs can use for transitioning from IT provider to business consultant. Then they’re joined by Jason Ulacio of informer to explore the thinking behind Microsoft’s Intune for MSP program and the opportunity that initiative presents MSPs. And finally, one last thing: guess what the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s world of the year for 2025 was.
Discussed in this episode:
AI’s potential excites executives and investors, but general public remains skeptical, survey says
CEOs to Keep Spending on AI, Despite Spotty Returns
Fathom Insights: Rising AI Use, Rising Calls for Action
How People Around the World View AI
Microsoft Discovers MSPs. Again.
Merriam-Webster names ‘slop’ the word of the year
Some guests on this podcast are clients of Channel Mastered. Compensation plays no part in their appearance or the content of the discussion unless the episode they appear on is a “bonus episode” explicitly labeled as sponsored.
Transcript:
Rich: [00:00:00] And 3, 2, 1.
Blastoff, ladies and gentlemen, welcome for 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 managed services. My name is Rich Freeman. I’m chief analyst at channel, mastered the organization responsible for this show.
I’m joined with you here in the new year with my cohost, our CEO and chief strategist at Channel mastered Erick Simpson. Erick, how you doing?
Erick: Doing great, rich. Yes, and it is a new year, so everything old will be new again with the addition of AI at the end of it.
Rich: We are in an a, a new Q1. You know what in the interest of transparency though, I, or [00:01:00] I’ve just gotta come clean with the audience.
We are actually recording this in December. We are, we’re looking forward to a little time off. So it’s actually December as we’re speaking. This episode goes out to the world January 2nd, but Erick and I are already in a Q1 mindset. We’ve already emotionally taken half a step into 2026, wouldn’t you say?
I would agree, and yes. In the,
Erick: Spirit of true transparency, we are prerecording this episode as we normally do with other episodes. We just happen to not yet be ourselves in 2026, but by the time you listen to or watch this episode, we’ll all be there
Rich: indeed. And so Happy New Year.
Erick: Happy new Year.
Rich: Now with that let’s dive into our story of the week. And this is something by the time this episode goes out. I will have written about this in channel Hallock my blog. It’s based on a question that kind of popped into my mind recently. If you were to try to identify, try to guess at the number one AI [00:02:00] related hashtag of 2025, AI bubble would probably be a pretty good candidate for that.
But if you were to look for the number two on that list, AI backlash might not be a bad choice for a bunch of reasons. We, the, there have been a lot of headlines in the news about AI coming for people’s jobs. I saw a figure recently from the Burning Glass Institute which studies this kind of thing, unemployment for 20 to 24 year olds with bachelor’s degrees went up from four, 5.2% to 6.2% late in 2025.
People with jobs depending on the job are in some jeopardy due to ai. People graduating from college as we know, are having a very hard time. We know that AI is driving up consumer electricity prices in some areas right now. There’s a lot of backlash about data center build outs for for other reasons as well.
Out there in the world there’s a lot of concern and skepticism about ai and so here’s [00:03:00] some more evidence of that. Pew Research went out and asked people in various countries around the world, how do you feel about artificial intelligence in daily life? Does it make you more concerned than excited?
More excited than concerned? In the United States, and these numbers put us at the top of the list anywhere on planet Earth that pew study. 50% of people, half of AmErickans are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence in daily life. Another 38% are equally concerned and excited, a little wary.
Only 10% of AmErickans say they’re more excited than concerned about AI right now. And again, feeds into this. Wariness skepticism kind of narrative. But let’s look at some other figures. That came out late in in 2025, a a nonprofit called Just Capital did some research in which they found that 93% of corporate leaders and 80% of investors said they believe AI will have a net positive [00:04:00] impact on society within the next five years.
Very bullish. A consultancy called Teneo just a few weeks back, released its annual survey. 68% of chief executives they survey plan to increase AI spending in 2026. Again, very bullish. A company called Fathom Insights found that about 70% of rank and file frontline workers are using AI day-to-day.
According to a different study from Mozilla, 60% of those same rank and file frontline frontline workers are only comfortable using generative AI for low stakes matters or things they know about. And so there’s a real kind of trust issue there right now. So put yourself in an MSP shoes. You’re sitting down with a business owner, a C-level executive.
You’re saying, I am your trusted advisor, your business consultant. I am gonna help you implement this AI stuff and transform your business. And based on the [00:05:00] research figures out there, at the likelihood is they are receptive to that message because they wanna see what a AI can do to make their business grow.
And you go and you design a solution and you implement it. And now you need to get those frontline rank and file workers. To use it. And we know that they, they have trust issues with ai and they are very skeptical of its effect on society outside the four walls of the workplace. This can be an issue.
Now I have reached out. It just occurred to me, is this happening? Our MSPs running into resistance from the people who actually have to use these AI solutions in order for the solutions to deliver value and make the business owner happy. I reached out to some MSPs, they said, yeah, I’m seeing this everywhere right now.
And they’re all kind of improvising techniques for dealing with it. Some themes, start with small wins. Help people develop trust by showing them how AI can help them with things that are slowing them down. And then you build on top of that include people in [00:06:00] the the AI design development rollout process so they don’t feel like it’s something that’s being imposed on them top down, which is only gonna make them more suspicious.
So there are various techniques that MSPs are coming up with right now to deal with this issue, but this is an issue that we certainly haven’t spoken about before on this podcast before. It’s one that MSPs are dealing with, and I think it’s going to be one that will continue to be an issue here in the new year.
Erick: Yeah, I agree, rich. It’s and good guidance there on, what to think about when you are, we’re having these conversations or thinking about. Integrating it in your practice and even guiding your clients, which I talk a little bit about in this week’s tip of the week, but I’m, we, you haven’t mentioned AI slop, so there’s this other I don’t, it’s not a fun, its a reality where it know the workers that are using AI are using it in a way that is not ideal.
[00:07:00] It’s creating, it’s creating nonsense output. And then, other supervisors or business owners are having to redo this work or get after these folks to say, Hey, this is, this is not the level of performance that we expect. We’re seeing backlash from even TV commercials that are created with ai, people calling out where they’re having to pull these commercials.
We’re seeing folks heck they’re, trying to become artists in music and in with acting with AI generated agents doing this stuff. So there’s a bunch of slop, there’s a bunch of, negative sentiment about true creators, true artists, folks that, have honed their craft over years and years of experience seeing these folks come along and just try to get, try to get by with using AI and producing less than appealing product.
And I read a research report a couple of months ago, rich, we should have talked about this before the new year in 2026, but that indicated that there are millions and millions of dollars being [00:08:00] spent redoing this AI slop work in business. I know that you’re tracking all of this. What are your thoughts?
Rich: Yeah. First of all I’m not gonna do a spoiler here, but we’re coming back to swap. There’s even more lop discussion on this episode of the show right now. No, it’s actually that is yet another data point and another observation to add to the pile of reasons why people might be less than the actual employees might be less enthusiastic about AI is, yeah, I, it’s enabling me to churn out that report that I wasn’t excited about having to.
Write more easily, but then it’s doing the same for everyone else in the office, and they’re dumping all these worthless reports in my inbox, and now I’ve gotta read all of that stuff. So it’s another sort of lifestyle impact issue. There, it occurs to me, it interesting there was that famous, some might say infamous MIT study last year.
We talked about it, debunked it on the show a little bit. And it said that, 95% of AI proof of concepts are failing [00:09:00] to deliver results. And what was less noticed in that study is that it also said there is, there are a lot of people using AI at work and who are reporting productivity games and getting benefits from it.
And but in those cases, what’s happening basically is what I will very loosely call shadow ai. People are finding, improvising their own way of using their favorite AI tools. And in specific ways that they find useful. And when that happens and when people, again it’s not being crammed down from the top.
People are doing it on their own. They’re finding their way to value on their own. That’s when people become more receptive to this AI stuff. And so this, which kind of raises another issue, which is to the extent that MSPs are going into their accounts and just as an, a pretty obvious example saying, Hey, copilot is pretty amazing and I want you to deploy copilot across the business here.
And now again, [00:10:00] top down copilot is the two tool we use this workplace, no more chat GPTT for you. That’s gonna be another kind of issue for folks to to negotiate down the road.
Erick: Yeah. And we will keep tracking this phenomenon and reporting on these things, but you’re right it’s such a revolutionary game changing technology.
I use revolutionary rather than evolutionary because we’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s disruptive. And the early adopters that are. Really putting in the effort, the time to understand it, to utilize it in the ways that you just suggested Rich is, Hey, I’m gonna use it for very specific things.
It’s going to help augment me, but it is certainly never going to replace me. Those are the folks that are gonna get the most of it and will be the best advisors and consultants to the clients they serve as they talk about best practices in governance and utilization, and what are the guardrails around, what’s acceptable and what’s unacceptable to, business environments [00:11:00] based upon these conversations with clients.
Rich: Yeah. And a lot of that conversation goes beyond bits and bytes. A lot of the whole, dealing with employee resistance to AI is not a technology issue at all, but businesses are gonna be looking for help with that from their MSP, which is a pretty good segue into your first tip of the week here for 2026 about being an IT provider versus a business partner.
Erick: Absolutely rich. More and more conversations we’re having in the channel and on the show and with other MSPs and really folks that are maturing to the point where they are adding so much business value to their clients as MSPs. That I’m really encouraging everyone to start thinking about, we talk about being the trusted advisor.
I’m saying we should be the trusted business partner because the opportunity for MSPs to impact their clients’ businesses goes far [00:12:00] beyond, the help desk and, upgrading infrastructure and things like that, especially in today’s environment around, cyber threats and AI and things like that.
I want us to start thinking about what it takes to be a true business partner. And, Jay McBain talks about the seven. Folks that every business owner wants to keep close to them, like their trusted folks, and, the MSPs are one of them. But in, in order to grow that relationship become more strategically valuable to them, we need to start thinking beyond, how many vivir, how many expand emails we blocked and those kinds of things.
And downtime. So let’s shift the conversation a little bit. Rich. Here are three things that I’ve been thinking about. So the first one is, you know how we typically as an MSP have a report card, right? That we generate from our PSA or RMM tool and we go have these, business review meetings and we say, oh look, here’s our report card.
It’s almost bringing home your report card to your mom and dad when you’re a kid and say, look, I got a b plus, and all that. So let’s [00:13:00] turn that around and say, the report card that we wanna measure is the business impact that we have with our clients, right? Don’t, judge don’t measure my performance, right?
We assume. That in this day and age, the MSPs that are doing a great job for clients don’t need to continue to reinforce that. But if they’re not doing a great job and are not being very strategic, then absolutely there’s some work that needs to be done to shore that stuff up. But when you get to a point Rich, where you’re working with strategic clients as business owners, you can have strategic conversations.
I use the moniker all the time about moving the conversation from the server room to the boardroom. The KPIs that I’m suggesting MSPs begin to develop are, instead of downtime avoided, like you were up 99.9%. Let’s talk about the efficiency gains that we are creating for that organization.
I, when I had my MSP, we did this a rudimentary exercise, I would say back then. Heck, it was, 20 years ago or whatever where we wanted to know, just like for an MSP, we wanted to know what [00:14:00] that the cost of doing business was. Our clients. So a couple of our a clients told us, what their burn rate was, what their labor costs were and things like that.
And so we were selling managed services based on calculators that said for every hour of downtime, it’s costing you this because if the entire organization is down, I remember these were the while, while West Days when, there was DSL lines and things like that and there was downtime all the time, right?
So we, we had a different kind of an approach and we would say, okay, here’s how we work with clients to make sure that we reduce that amount of downtime. That also has an impact on productivity, efficiency and profitability. So if we can, as MSPs in today’s day and age, creates a set of KPIs that reflect our positive impact to the business rather than the simple, Hey, we blocked these, emails and phishing and all this.
So efficiency gains, cost savings that we’ve created. Along with kind of the security incidents and things like that. I’m not saying replace all this stuff, but start peppering [00:15:00] in these strategically valuable measurements that you can have a different conversation with your clients about being that true business partner.
So treating yourself as a true business partner, wanting to know what it takes to operate that organization and start moving in that direction. Then the second tip would be, now that we’re gathering this data and information, how do we present it to clients? You and I have been talking about the VC a IO moniker, right?
That we’ve been kicking about. I’m gonna claim that we, I’d never heard it before, so I’m gonna claim that we created it on this program, the MSP chat program. Guys, have you heard it before, folks? Yeah. Just the comment and the comments, but, so these expanding our services into the AI frontier, just like we were just talking about the top of the show.
What are those services that we’re gonna. Clients dip their toe in the water, right? Start governing what AI that they allow in the organization. If it’s, something other than copilot, then we’ve gotta do a [00:16:00] lot more security and governance around that stuff. Copilot has some built in security and things like that, but how do we walk those clients through?
You mentioned a 68% data point that said, business owners are adopting it. I’ve heard Jay McBain stay at a higher percentage of what SMB business owners want to adopt ai. So this is the newer frontier for MSPs, let’s say that we talk less and less about the tickets that we closed, right?
And all of this table stake stuff, right? There’s no need anymore for us. I won’t say that way, but there’s less need today to again demonstrate how good we’re doing a job for you and there’s more opportunity. For us to start talking about things that move that business’s needle, right?
Moving it in the positive direction. So your V-C-I-O-V-C-T-O and VC A IO conversations. Now, when you’re having your strategic business reviews, and I’m starting to get away from calling ’em quarterly, quarterly business reviews as well, rich strategic business reviews, because you’ve got some clients where you need to meet [00:17:00] with them.
Heck, we had clients, we met with ’em every week, and we had clients that we met with every year, and we had clients we met with every two years when the need arises. So if you’re, you adjust that cadence based upon what your client needs and the opportunities and their growth pattern. If you’re really strategic about it, you’re working with clients that are always trying to grow.
So you’re having a lot more meaningful conversations talking about these AI efficiency metrics that you’re delivering, the workflows that you’re helping the users get more efficient at. And this takes a little bit of polling and a little bit of serving in a different manner. With the user community, rich than what we typically send a little smiley or sad face at the end of every ticket.
Closure, right? This is real valid. Real time impact and feedback that we can share with clients. Along with the conversations about budget planning and ROI that we’re de delivering all, all around, but again, be becoming and embodying more of that business partner and having more strategic business [00:18:00] conversations.
And then the last one would be training your internal staff as an MSP. We talked about a tip of the week we had on the last show where I said, Hey, preparing your organization to operate as if you know you can exit at any time, training your internal leaders and other folks in your organization to gather this information, to collate it and to have these conversations with clients.
So this is you now building out. The ability to become that new business partner or that evolved business partner for your clients, and then teaching others in your team on how to have these conversations. Because at the end of the day, the most challenging person to replace in an MSP organization is the business owner, rich.
Rich: So great stuff. And you know what it makes me think of basically we speak frequently on the show here about the importance in terms of that server room to boardroom transition. The importance of [00:19:00] providing solutions to clients that enable outcomes as opposed to providing products and doing maintenance, right?
In order to deliver outcomes, you need to know what outcomes are most potentially useful to the client. You need to know where are the opportunities for them to make more and spend less. And so that is a very strategic conversation for you to have with the client. And then if you can take the outcome of that conversation the opportunities that you identified in that conversation, and translate those into KPIs and then show them the progress that you’re making towards helping them achieve those outcomes.
You wanna talk about stickiness. That’s what’s gonna do it, right? It, that person the outside IT provider who is smart enough to help the client identify the business needs, not the technology needs, and then deliver results against those needs. That’s somebody that customer is gonna wanna [00:20:00] keep doing business with for the long term and do more business with in, in more ways.
The more outcomes that you deliver the more I’m sure that client is gonna identify for you to to help with as well. Yeah, I that KPI piece in particular just really created an image in my mind of that initial conversation with the customer where you, let’s identify the business outcomes that matter to you, and then whatever it is, once a quarter or twice a year, whatever it is, let’s revisit.
Those business goals and look at progress against those and where there are places for us to do more and different things to maybe accelerate or take the next step on that progress.
Erick: Yeah, that’s an excellent way to position it Rich. And I started thinking about how, as MSPs we’re moving, beyond cybersecurity and enhanced cybersecurity postures for clients to more of a compliance, security compliance opportunities, right?
Which is very sticky. And you think about how [00:21:00] that model works, where you’re assessing an organization from a co, against a regulatory compliance requirement, and you’re working over time to improve it more and get them closer to it, right? There are the priority things that we’ve gotta get done right away.
And then over time, it takes time to get an organization within compliance and then to help them maintain that compliance. So think about just flipping that into the business operations itself and these business outcomes rather than, like you said, technical outcomes. And I think that is, and if you have a scorecard, a metric, a KPI that we are tracking just like we do when we’re helping clients achieve regulatory compliance, you can see that progress over time.
That’s exactly the evidence that you’ll need in order to really maintain and grow that trust and confidence in your client relationships and that stickiness that you talk about.
Rich: Okay, with that folks, Erick and I are gonna take a quick break here. When we come [00:22:00] back we will be joined by our first interview guest of the year.
His name is Jason Lcio. He is the recently named Senior Vice President of Business Development at Enforcer which is a Microsoft cloud management platform that he will tell us all about in a few moments. But I’m gonna just take a guess, Erick if I say the words Intune for MSP to our audience of MSPs here, a lot of them will have no idea what I’m talking about, but they should, and we’re gonna find out what it is and why it matters and why it’s interesting in a lot of different ways.
In just a few moments, stick around folks. We. We’ll be right back
and welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast, our spotlight interview segment, where we are pleased to be joined by Jason Lucio. He is the recently named Senior Vice President of Business Development at Enforcer. Jason, I mispronounced your name just before the [00:23:00] break there.
I, I welcome to the new year and welcome to the show.
Jason: Hi, rich. Thank you. Thank you very much. Very good to, to meet you guys and appreciate you all having me on. And yeah, excited to get into more of enforcer my transition here from Microsoft and I think a few interesting things around that connection that you all like to discuss.
Rich: Yeah, we’ve got a bunch of great stuff we want to get into with you. But as I said I think you’ve been in this role and at enforcer for two-ish months right now. Enforcer has actually been a real a pretty impressive success story in the managed services software world in recent years, but still maybe a little bit new to some folks in our audience.
So just to kick things off, tell folks a little bit about you, your background, your role at enforcer and enforcer. What does Enforcer do?
Jason: Yeah in terms of me as you mentioned Jason, last year, I joined earlier this year about a little bit over three months ago. I joined Enforcer as SVP of business [00:24:00] development.
Prior to that I spent nine years at Microsoft. I think most relevant for our conversation, I spent the last. Four years of dad working in the security business development organization. And what that really means is I spend most of my time working with our product leadership on corporate partnerships on the overall strategy of the business where we need to go to expand into what their priorities are.
And then the two areas that I covered most deeply were Intune and then something that we called SMB Security, which is an all encompassing word for business premium and the different products that fall under it into an intra defender for business and so on. But that’s really where you quickly get into the MSP space.
Transitioning to enforcer. Enforcer is an ISV. So we offer or vendor offers a [00:25:00] platform to MSPs to empower them to deliver Microsoft at scale. So our platform helps MSP streamline the management of Intune intra defender and purview at scale by making it easy for you to create standards, automate deployments monitor drift and manage all of your customers in a centralized platform.
Sure, we can, we’ll get more into the details of that and how it, it connects with Microsoft in, in a minute.
Rich: A big part of what we wanna talk about with you in this conversation is Microsoft’s Intune for MSP Initiative. But before we go there, I wanna take two giant steps back and start here.
And you are actually the perfect person to address this topic. Given your background at Microsoft and your current role at Enforcer. Why is the Intune for MSP initiative comes out of increased interest at Microsoft in SMBs and by extension [00:26:00] MSP. So just from a general standpoint, why is Microsoft suddenly even more focused maybe than they were before on SMBs and their MSP partners?
Jason: Yeah, so I. I would say there are a couple themes really that, that drive that I like the phrasing that you use even more because I think a lot of MSPs and people in the SMB community feel that Microsoft might not be interested or focused on them. And I think there’s many reasons why many feel that way.
But there are a lot of people internally at Microsoft that over the years, have spent time trying to enable SMBs and MSPs to deliver more and better Microsoft services to their clients. I think the main reason why you see a heightened focus in this space over the last year or couple of years or so, honestly, is [00:27:00] because of.
A big success from Microsoft in the enterprise space. But this creates this strange situation where when they look at their overall customer base, they have high penetration in enterprise of, products like Microsoft E three and E five and so on. And when the leaders start looking at the areas of opportunity and areas of potential growth in the future, one of the glaring areas that was ripe for opportunity is the SMB space really is the SMB and frontline worker are one of the two big areas that has driven from the top down a lot of focus and investment in this space and focus and investment that I don’t think is gonna go away anytime soon.
And that’s where a lot of these initiatives have were born from.
Erick: So Jason is the recent launch by Microsoft of Microsoft [00:28:00] 365 copilot business and related pricing changes. A indicator of what you just described is that, we know that the SMB eclipses from a user perspective, enterprise workers, is that shift now an indicator and a kind of a guideline to a signal to MSPs to say Microsoft is really, doubling down on the SMB and the MSPs that serve them?
Jason: Yeah, I think it’s result of this heightened focus in the space, right? Once you start once you have enough people.
Focused on actually listening to MSPs and SMBs. The result of that is these Microsoft leaders quickly realize that there isn’t a one size fit all approach that they can take to the solutions they bring to market like M 3 6 5, copilot and so on. Correctly they’ve taken steps [00:29:00] to address these and come out with specific SKUs, starting with things like this premium many years ago.
And now even with new solutions like copilot, the copilot for business and SMBs.
Rich: So we do wanna dive into Intune for MSP with you. Tell folks a little bit, first of all the role, the sort of strategic role Intune plays for Microsoft in pursuing the s and b related goals you were just talking about there, and then how they’re doing that through Intune for MSP, what that initiative is.
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. From a overall Microsoft landscape, the Intune product sits in the Microsoft security business, but it is together with intra Microsoft’s identity product. Intune is Microsoft’s device management, endpoint management product. It is, it ties together really what enables MSPs to deliver.
M [00:30:00] 365, so the office products and security at scale. And so it was a natural starting point for a lot of the activities around MSPs, which at the end of the day start really from a delivery of Uhler IT services that helps Derek. Their SMB customers be productive and secure, right? So Intune intra and the rest of that business premium suite sit at the core of that and enabling MSPs to do that.
Therefore sort was a natural starting point for Microsoft. And really what it is, it’s a formal initiative from Microsoft to help MSPs deliver and manage the many customer tenants that they need to manage with Microsoft tools at scale. And we can get into sort of what more of that is in a minute.
Erick: Jason MSPs have been out [00:31:00] supporting clients with lots of other solutions and services that. Do the normal monitoring and patching and MDM stuff that, that Intune does. So what specifically does Intune do differently or uniquely, or the value drivers or the benefits that will influence, excuse me, influence MSPs to pay attention and buy into,
Jason: yeah.
Yeah. So there are a handful of things. One is that it is fully integrated into that Microsoft stack. If a customer is delivering Microsoft services or if an MSP is delivering Microsoft Services is fully integrated into that Microsoft stack. Beyond that, it has a few things that I think. In reality, only Microsoft can do or only Microsoft delivers that are highly [00:32:00] valuable to an MSP.
Things like conditional access and being able to control and manage access to company resources at scale across that Microsoft landscape via into an enterra. It also has tie-ins to many other things like Windows updates and app updates and so on in a way that is a lot more streamlined for the average MSP and I would say at last it is cloud first, right?
So it is a lot more scalable and takes MSPs on that cloud journey. And moving away from what used to be, back in the day on-prem management with an agent and so on.
Rich: We should make clear, one of the reasons you’re such a perfect guest for this conversation is enforcer along with nerdio is one of the inaugural launch partners for Intune, for for MSP.
So tell folks a little bit about and why [00:33:00] Microsoft needed launch partners at all for this. What it is you’re bringing to the table for them, and then what an MSP who becomes part of Intune for MSP gets from that.
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. So MSPs have long struggle to manage Microsoft capabilities at scale.
Keep up with policy drift and changes that happen over time and really keep their customer secure while, while having to jump into a bunch of different portals enabled in order to do microsoft. Are well aware of this and were well aware of this. And with Intune for MSPs, really what they are doing is they’re acknowledging this multi-tenant gap in the market and providing a clear path to their MSPs in order and on how to solve it.
And the way they’re really recommending to solve it is with these vendors that they have backed, enforcer [00:34:00] included, that give partners a centralized views, automation and standardized process on how to manage these M 365 tenants at scale and deliver more profitable managed services there.
Erick: Jason, I wanna pivot a little bit and talk a minute about ai. Sometimes I feel like the MSP Chat podcast is the MSP AI Chat podcast because Rich and I spend so much time talking about AI and the opportunities and the risks and governance and all that stuff. I wanna ask you specifically about, an MSP’s perspective on engaging with ai, and let’s talk about, copilot and things like that.
But what, beyond getting the licensing and the skews, right? Should MSPs be thinking about ENC closing their AI readiness gap for themselves and their clients? What other [00:35:00] skills do they need or conversations should they be having with themselves internally and with their clients to make sure that they’re.
Being mindful about, mindful, governing the deployment and management of AI for their internal organizations as well as for their clients?
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. I would say, for starters, I think MSPs should definitely not shying away from ai. It’s one of these. Once in a lifetime.
Once in a decade opportunities. And it is also one where their customers, if they don’t bring a solution for them, their customers are going to be or gonna go somewhere else and look for it. So creates a innate risk there for the MSP and their business. In terms of where to look and where to start, I think there’s a few areas.
One is providing their customers a. Compliant AI solution that they [00:36:00] can use. And, if given, we’re experts on Microsoft I will talk to you about the Microsoft option there. So Microsoft obviously has co-pilot, many people don’t know that included in your M 3 6 5 license, you actually get m Microsoft copilot chat.
So that’s like the chat GPT version experience of copilot for free. And it has a lot of the functionality, a lot of the copilot functionality that you would other otherwise use in one of these chat experiences. That are, I would say, not compliant, not secure, not managed by U-S-D-M-S-P. But I would say I would start there.
I would as an MSP that has my customers on the Microsoft stack, I would start by getting all of your customers to start adopting copilot chat, right? Because that is a compliant and secure and manageable. Like you can have as an MSP, all of your security and access policies that you set for your customers apply to copilot chat, [00:37:00] unlike, things like Claude or Chatt and so on that you don’t have any control over.
The other thing is you do need to start having a conversation and ideally running assessments with your customer to understand what, their data state looks like what their data management, what their SharePoint sites looks like, for example, because at the end of the day, the AI is only going to be as good as the data that you put into it, right?
You put bad data into it, you. Bad outcomes or bad results, for the most part, are not as good as you could. So we help customers with that through, with our copilot readiness assessments that help it will one segment out which customers, which users at USMB customer are most likely to benefit from copilot and these AI tools based on their usage of M 365 today, and what [00:38:00] are the scenarios and use cases that they can leverage and get value from today by department, for example and so on.
But then also give you a breakdown of what are all the security capabilities that you need to turn on for that customer. What are all the sharing permissions that you need to take care of and data sensitivity, label policies and so on, so that you avoid the, i’ve spoken that scenario where me as a average user and the company can search for salaries and suddenly get access to an Excel from the finance team with everyone on the team salary, right?
Or random unfortunate scenarios like that, which are totally possible if you don’t have the right access permissions and things like that set. And so that at a high level are some of the things that you wanna start doing. And I would push very much on the messaging that you want to provide the customers.[00:39:00]
A AI environment that they can be assure of is secure or access is managed within their tenant and data is staying within their tenant, right? You know that this is not. Being thrown into a public AI solution where the access, you don’t know where that data’s going to, who might have access to it, what is being trained out of your data and to take it a step beyond.
Certain customers might also get into scenarios where they might actually be in breach of legal policies and so on. If you are letting you know, a, let’s say if you’re in a healthcare company or in healthcare environment if someone is. Throwing things that have HIPAA compliant data into touch GBT to create summaries of things for them, et cetera, et cetera.
Just because it’s convenient and I understand why a user might do that, but as a company owner, MSP [00:40:00] that’s helping that company owner. You need to help them manage that risk by giving them compliant solutions. And I would advocate they look into and leverage copilot to do that.
And we certainly can help them from enforcer with what our copilot readiness assessments help them go on that journey. But at a high level, I think those are some of the things that they need to plug out.
Rich: Yeah. Talk a little bit about that readiness assessment. I remember just a few months back August or so, I, I spoke with a colleague of yours from Enforcer, and that tool was, I think, still in development at that point.
But what is enforcer role? What is the role of that co-pilot readiness assessment in terms of preparing an MSP to have that conversation that you were just talking about?
Jason: Yeah, so absolutely. So what the assessment does, so we have an assessment engine in the platform today.
That can assess for many things like assessing whether a tenant is compliant with [00:41:00] CIS baselines and give you a breakdown of where it is compliant, where it is not, what are the gaps, et cetera, et cetera. We’ve taken a similar approach and built on top of that assessment and engine, this co-pilot writing assessment that really what it does is it looks at the M 365 usage of the whole SMB, the whole tenant, and then creates a summary based on that shows you who are the top candidates, what are the top departments at that SMB, and what are the top use cases for that customer based off of this usage.
Then it goes one layer deeper and uses those. Policy assessment and security assessment that, that I talked about initially to also build out recommendations of what are the different security and data governance policies and settings that you need to turn on for that customer in order for them to securely [00:42:00] deploy ai.
And then lastly, it will do a check of all of their SharePoint sites and all of their SharePoint environments to tell you which SharePoint sites are maybe just stale and sitting there, haven’t been updated in five years or something like that. And you might want to turn those off from access to copilot because it’s just gonna be feeding it just bad data, stale data and so on, and will maybe influence bad results that come out of it.
So it helps you clean out their data state. And then what we’ve seen is MSPs. Running this co-pilot readiness assessment. And you really can run it in 30 seconds. You get this result back for any given customer. And then either leveraging this to drive a conversation to just enable co-pilot leveraging this to run projects to then take care of all of these different areas before they enable copilot.
And it’s been very successful. We’ve seen it might be an anomaly, but we recently had a an MSP in the [00:43:00] Netherlands tell us that they have started one, they were already doing this, and they used to take them days to run a much simpler analysis in terms of getting into the tenant, harvesting all this data, doing the analysis, and so on.
But then also now with this report, they’re selling the assessment alone at 5,000 euros to their customers and have many customers that are buying it. So there’s many opportunity along that journey for MSPs to make money as well from this.
Erick: Yeah, that’s music to our listeners ears, Jason. Making more money and selling assessments.
I remember in the old days when I had my MSP practice, we were giving away network assessments and things like that for free, but people will pay for that. And as you mature your MSP practice and our, targeting larger organizations where you can be more strategically valuable there’s budget for these things when you’re delivering a product that adds value to the next conversation.
So I appreciate that. So speaking of [00:44:00] opportunities for MSPs beyond Intune and enabling AI or or clients from enforcer perspective, what else can MSPs do to take more full advantage of Microsoft’s cloud opportunity in general?
Jason: Yeah. So I think the journey that we recommend MSPs to go on from a Microsoft perspective is, leveraging a tool like enforcer. MSP should first start by standardizing their estate get visibility. Like many MSPs actually don’t even have full visibility of all their tenants, whether they’re actually turf compliant, what’s on, what’s not turned on at any given point in time.
Because it’s really hard to keep up with, a hundred over a hundred tenants if that’s what you’re managing at any given point in time. One, get visibility of all your tenants and then start standardizing your tenants [00:45:00] under a baseline or a series of different baselines, depending on the managed service packages that you offer.
Then from there you can leverage the tool to automate. Deployments, automate assessments, audits, and different activities that you would be doing as an MSP in your day-to-day business saving sort of multiple hours and these sort of repetitive and sometimes even error prone practices. You start by standardizing than automating.
And then the other one, the other opportunity once you’ve done that, that we see is then MSP starting to consolidate. So once you’ve been able to standardize your tenants automate a lot of the work, it enables you to leverage the full power of that Microsoft M 365 stack. And so you start being able to do things like.
Pushing Microsoft’s Defender for Business solution, leveraging ANTRA and the MFA solutions with an [00:46:00] antra leveraging defender for office, for email security, and potentially being able to remove. An EDR solution, an MFA product, an email security product that was basically duplicate technology that your customer was paying for yet you just previously couldn’t really productize that Microsoft or operationalize that Microsoft solution well at scale.
And in that way drive more margin for your managed service solution. And then the last thing I would say when it comes to that list of things is once you’ve done these things, then there’s a bunch of additional things you can productize out of a tool like enforcer and the capabilities that enables you to do we see many of our MSPs start productizing things like proactive tenant hardening baselined alignment and baseline management. We see some partners that offer things like secure score as a service, right? Like we will keep you above a certain secure score and they [00:47:00] leverage the enforcer platform to do that.
We see them productized and deliver things like compliance reporting and obviously these readiness assessments, right? So things like the copilot assessment and so on. And we’ll continue. To, to Rich’s point, the readiness assessment was just an idea in the summer and it’s already out like our team is developing at an amazing pace and will continue to deliver more improvements that help MSPs really create more revenue opportunities for them.
Rich: Jason, really interesting conversation. This is actually timely as well. This is great stuff for the MSPs and our audience to get after in 2026 for those MSPs out there if they wanna get in touch with you, they wanna learn more about enforcer, they wanna learn more about Intune for Ms. P, where should they.
Jason: Yeah, so well, they can always reach out to me. They can find me on LinkedIn. There aren’t that many elaia as we talked about earlier. So I’ll be easy to find, just find Jason Lucio [00:48:00] and always happy to speak to people. So feel free to reach out to me. And I would say one of the things I recommend Ms.
P the most is you can go to our website, enforcer.com and you’ll see the option to book a demo. Our, one of our co-founders actually does a weekly demo of the solution and walk through to the platform. That is very easy for an MSP to sign up to. I think that is a great place to start to get a much just true feel of what we offer and how we can help the MSPs.
And yeah there’s many air ways for you to reach out to us Word. Almost all of the main MSP events, so please come talk to us if you see our booth. But yeah, feel free to reach out. We’re here to help. Most of our team are either ex MSPs themselves or have been in the MSP space for a while they’ll be very excited to talk to all of you.
Rich: Okay. Excellent. Thank you very much. Jason CIO from [00:49:00] Enforcer. Folks, Erick and I are going to take a break right now. When we come back on the other side, we’re gonna share some final thoughts about this interesting topic and conversation with Jason. Have a little fun wrap up the show, stick around.
We’re gonna be right back
and welcome back part three of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast. Once more thank you to Jason CIO from Enforcer Apology for my mispronouncing his name before we brought him on stage there. But he was very gracious about that and we he really is a a perfect person to bring on. For this conversation, which is a very timely conversation for any MSP out there right now.
I really wanna underscore something that he talked about a little bit at the very beginning of that conversation. He, in fact, used the term, top down to refer to the strategic emphasis [00:50:00] accent being placed on SMBs and MSPs at Microsoft right now. Like he said, that, this is even more interest in SMBs and MSPs.
It’s not like there has been none before, but I know from my reporting on Intune for MSP, what’s different here is that at very high levels, no one’s ever given me specific names, but at very high levels inside the company, they are aware of the fact that SMB is a giant growth opportunity for their cloud products.
Right now, they’re aware of the fact that they’re this multi-tenancy issue for Intune is something that can inhibit, they’re pursuing that and that MSPs, if you give ’em a multi-tenant tool or a multi-tenant way to do what Intune does. You can really go and pursue that SMB opportunity.
And so I think the point there for MSPs is this, they’re not kidding around. This is not just some little sales initiative, some little quarterly announcement that that Microsoft made that you can tap into if you want. [00:51:00] That company is really zeroed in on SMBs and MSPs right now.
And I would encourage anyone out there, keep an eye on what El we were talking about Microsoft 365 copilot business. They don’t create new SKUs and price lists at Microsoft unless they’re really serious about an audience the way they are about SMB and MSP right now. So check out Intune for MSP, but keep an eye on what else Microsoft is doing to help you and companies like you be successful with your clients.
’cause it matters a lot to them right now. And I’ve gotta believe that’s gonna be advantageous for MSPs out there.
Erick: It’s it’s very evident rich that all roads lead to MSPs. We’re seeing huge investment coming in from, pe groups. We’re seeing organizations being built, strategically to deliver and acquire MSPs and deliver AI solutions through MSPs.
We see big vendors and [00:52:00] distributors, really focusing in on, the Ms P channel and their reach and influence with the SMBs. I, I was just thinking about this, it’s wow, I couldn’t have planned my journey any better to be part of, the MSP channel from the beginning along with you and watching the evolution and watching these vendors, including Microsoft, try to figure out.
What this MSP thing is. I remember when, we were, one of the first MSPs on the, on, on anybody’s radar. And we were licensing our MSP training to Microsoft and others back in the early days as they tried to figure out how to serve this community. But fast forward to today, 20 or so years later, rich, I think everybody’s figuring it out and really focusing on the impact that MSPs have on the SMB channel.
And of course like I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot more, there are a lot more users, I’ll just use the term users [00:53:00] in the SMB than there are in the enterprise. It’s opportunistic and I gotta say 2026 is gonna be a little bit of a crazy ride as we see the developments and the consolidation that’s happening.
That’s one point that I’ll, that I took away from Jason. Remarks during our conversation is, reducing complexity. I’ve worked with a lot of MSPs, which as and, I’ve been spending a lot of time analyzing, helping them analyze and assess their tool sprawl, their vendor sprawl, their solution sprawl, and comparing it against what it would look like if they just adopted more of the MSP stack, or the, I’m sorry, the Microsoft stack.
And the difference that it makes in terms of, like Jason said, consolidating, you’re already in that tenant. It’s more of a single pane of glass now that they’re, partnering with folks like enforcer to, to give them that multi-tenancy capability. But, reducing the cost of, four or five different solutions that MSPs have put together and have, relationships with [00:54:00] those other vendors and looking at the difference and comparing that and seeing the opportunity to reduce that sprawl, reduce complexity, increased margins, yeah, it’s MSPs. If you’re not paying attention, you should be.
Rich: All right. That leaves us with time for just one last thing, ladies and gentlemen. And this is actually from the close of 2025 as opposed to the beginning of 2026. And we hinted, this was coming at the beginning of the show. We were talking about slop in the context of ai.
Guess what the 2025 word of the year was? According to Merriam Webster’s dictionary, it was slop, which they define as quote, digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence. And I think that’s the definition we would all share pretty much of what swap is about.
And you think of all the other things that they could have gone with they, Merriam Webster went with [00:55:00] swap is the word of the year. By the way, did the. And I hope I’m pronouncing this right, the Macquarie dictionary, which is the official or most respected dictionary of Australian English, they specifically went with AI slop.
The Collins Dictionary, by the way, stayed in our world, but didn’t go with slop. They went with vibe coding as the word of the year. But I, I like slop as as the word of the year for 2025.
Erick: It’s appropriate. Rich. It’s appropriate. Yeah. We foreshadowed at the beginning of the show and yes, it’s, it’s definitely appropriate. I wonder what mixtures were would be more slop or less slop. We’ll find out.
Rich: Alright folks, thank you very much for joining us this week on the show. That’s all the time we’ve got. We’re gonna be back in another week with you for another episode of the show.
Until then, I will remind you this is both a video and an audio podcast, which means that if you are listening to us right now that you’d like to check us out on video, you can go to YouTube and find us there. If you’re watching us on YouTube, but you’re into audio podcasts, go to [00:56:00] Apple, Google, Spotify, wherever you get your audio podcast, you’re gonna find MSP chat there as well.
And wherever you find us, please subscribe. Review. It’s gonna help other people find and enjoy the show just like you do. This show is produced by the great Russ Johns. It is edited by the great Riley Simpson. They’re both part of the team with us here at Channel Mastered. They can, and we’ll create a podcast for you if you’re interested in that.
Podcasts though are really not mostly what we’re about at Channel Pro. Channel Mastered, excuse me. We are mostly about working with vendors that have or wish to optimize an MSP channel program. You can learn more about that mission at www.channel Mastered.com. Channel Mastered has a sister organization called MSP Mastered, that’s Erick working one-to-one with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business.
You can learn more about that at www.mspMastered.com. So once again, thank you very much for joining us. Welcome to the New Year. We’ll see you in a week. Until then, please remember, as we [00:57:00] always encourage you to, you can’t spell channel. Without MSP.
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