Episode 108: You Got Chocolate in My Peanut Butter

Erick and Rich discuss what ConnectWise buying zofiQ says about the future of AI automation and tool stacks for MSPs and how to make sales excellence as important a part of your culture as technical excellence. Then they’re joined by two top executives from Thread for an inside look at AI-powered service desk automation from a leading vendor in the field. And finally, one last thing: an incident involving a Waymo in Phoenix that might inspire you to delay your first ride in a self-driving car.

Discussed in this episode:

ConnectWise To Acquire zofiQ—Bringing AI-Powered Automation to IT Solution Providers

MSP Chat interview with Lee Silverstone of zofiQ

A Channelholic article on Thread

Waymo passenger flees after car drives on Phoenix light rail tracks

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. Blast off. Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode of the MSP Chat Podcast. Your weekly visit with two talking heads, talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need to make it big and managed services. My name is Rich Freeman. I’m Chief analyst at Channel Mastered, the organization responsible for the show.

I am joined this week as I am every week by your other co-host, our CEO and chief strategist at Channel Mastered. His name is Erick Simpson. Erick, are you ready for some football?

Erick: I am so ready for some football, but I’m so trepidatious about being ready for football. Rich. It’s a nail biting time.

My team’s, the Rams, your team’s, the Seahawks. We are going to have the [00:01:00] Clash of the Titans this weekend as we record this. Oh, it ain’t gonna be pretty, it ain’t gonna be pretty rich. The good news is one of our teams will advance.

Rich: That is good news. One of us will be really happy Sunday evening.

But yeah, the other one will be very disappointed. I think very quickly, Erick it’s incumbent upon us here to place the traditional conference championship, game wager here. If the Rams win your choice, I’ll send you some Seattle coffee, some Seattle salmon, maybe some Seattle beer. You get your what do I get if the Seahawks win?

Erick: If the Seahawks win, rich what will you get if the Seahawks win? Oh my goodness. You come to California quite often, what can I do to make your next trip special? Gosh, let’s do this rich next time. Next time the Seahawks play the Rams like they did earlier this year.

You’ve got a seat next to mine at SoFi Stadium. How about that?

Rich: That is a great deal. That is a great [00:02:00] deal. Okay. All the more reason to root for my my hometown Seattle Seahawks. But let’s plunge into our story of the week, Erick. And actually it does in a that it begins with a little bit of a wager actually, because my very first post of the year in my blog channel Holic included me saying I’m really not into prediction lists because everybody does them.

And so they bore me a little bit. But I’m gonna make one prediction for 2026. I said one of the really big managed services companies, one of the big R-M-M-P-S-A suite makers is gonna buy one of the AI native service desk automation. Products that I wrote a lot about in 2025 in channel log. And here we are three weeks later, Erick, and that prediction has already come true because yesterday officially as we record this, ConnectWise has acquired Zoic.

Now, regular listeners will be familiar with Sofic Lee Silverstone, the founder and CEO of that [00:03:00] company was with us on the show in early November. In an interview segment, basically the Zoic tool it helps you automate a lot of the work that a PSA solution does. The, this story is significant in a bunch of different ways that relate to things we’ve been talking about on the MSP Chat podcast in the last few weeks.

So we’ve been talking about the fact that PSA systems are classic systems of record as the terminology goes, which is to say, older school technologies that help you streamline, accelerate workflows. They have a centralized store of information, a data lake that serves as the single source of truth for the business using them.

A system of record can be Salesforce, it can be ServiceNow, it can be SAP. If you are an MSP, it’s your PSA solution. A system of action, which is a new thing that we’re seeing come onto the market now that is using ag agentic ai not to streamline, accelerate work for you, but to [00:04:00] actually do the work for you.

And there are a lot of companies out there building software that sort of rat themselves around A PSA solution to help MSPs get more of that work done at the help desk automatically so that they can shift that labor into other parts of the business that are higher margin, higher profit lower their operating expenses.

We, we are seeing that the big MSPs in particular the roll-ups get very aggressive about rolling out this kind of system of action, ag agentic, AI technology, MSPs of all sizes have to be doing that. And one of the things we talked about is. How, if you are a PSA vendor how do you deal with the fact that your customers are going to be increasingly deploying the system of action solutions?

And to the extent that those systems of action are really the systems that the MSPs are gonna be interacting with, relying on to run the business efficiently, they’re gonna have a [00:05:00] strategic edge in terms of that relationship with the MSP. What we talked about on the show is basically there are two ways for a PSA vendor.

To get out of that bind, build, or buy. And ConnectWise, I can tell you, having interviewed the CEO and the Chief Product and Technology officer about this acquisition, very recently they were building, but the thing about a company like Quick ConnectWise is they have a lot of different issues to think about at any given point in time.

So they were building, but they weren’t building as quickly as zoic was, basically. So they really saw the need to go out and buy a company that has been thinking about nothing but this for the last several years, unlike ConnectWise, which has a lot on its plate. So this is really accelerating the move into systems of action for ConnectWise.

Some further significance coming out of the deal here. So one of the things that, we were talking about is you’ve got all these little startups, nimble, AI specific AI native startups doing nothing but [00:06:00] create service desk automation solutions. We’re gonna be talking with one of the two of the principal executives that one of those companies friend later on in the show here.

They now are in a position where one of their partners owns technology that does a lot of what they do. And so there’s an interesting thing we’re gonna see happen in the market here where MSPs are gonna decide, do I want to invest in one of these third party solutions, marry that up with my PSA, or are there economies and conveniences that come with just getting it all system of record, system of action from one vendor?

The other thing to know is that Zoic prior to the acquisition was a product going forward. It is going to be part of the A ZO platform. It’s going to be an a ZO component. So the first thing you’ll see the Zoic technology do is what it’s doing now, which is automate the PSA. Over [00:07:00] time, you’re gonna see it automate the RMM, you’re gonna see it automate BDR ConnectWise has a plan to intro, treat that technology as a platform layer component that they’re going to weave into everything that they do.

That’s another thing for the service desk automation. Vendors to think about a little bit. We overnight basically, Erick this situation changed dramatically from one in which we were watching the AI native startups steal a march on the on the big incumbent vendors to one of which we’re seeing one of the big incumbent vendors now has that same set of capabilities.

We’ll see what that wind up meaning for the industry. And the last thing I’ll just say, excuse me, is at the end of my interview with Manny Revelo, CEO of ConnectWise, he said you’re one for one on predictions. Rich, what’s your second prediction? And my second prediction is this is not the last acquisition of this kind that we will see.

I would not be stunned at all if Kaseya [00:08:00] makes a similar deal at some point this year.

Erick: Wow. Wow. And Rich the. You and I are at the nexus of and everyone right in the channel is at the nexus of the impact that AI is having specifically in the MSP channel. I remember, the last time you interviewed Manu Rubo, we had him on the show.

He talked about, he was very candid about where they are with a IO and coming clean with the partners and saying, you know what? We’re doubling down. We’re gonna meet those commitments to you. This seemed like it was just, the timing was just right for these two organizations to find each other when they both had a need.

Of course, Zoic has a need to, expand its capabilities and reach more partners, and ConnectWise has a need to, address the issues. That many was very, blunt about in aio and it’s one of those Reese’s moments, right? Whoops. You got your chocolate in my peanut butter.

You got your peanut butter in my chocolate. [00:09:00] That’s better together a thing. Good predicting rich. Yeah, and I think you’re right. I think this is not the last time we’ll see this news and we’ve got a here in January of 2026. We’ve got a long rest of the year for more of this kind of activity, and dare I say, more entrance into the market, more evolution with ai.

And I think about this, system of record, system of action kind of relationship that we’ve been talking about very recently together. And I, it to me, tell me how, from a layman’s perspective, right? Tell me what you think about this analogy. It’s kinda we went from chatbots to agents.

As individuals, as human beings. Now we’re seeing the Ag agentic agent becoming the platform now. So it’s almost like it’s evolved into a whole platform, a set of an agent or a bunch of agents that we orchestrate now. It is a full-blown [00:10:00] platform, and there has to be a system of record for the system of action to be effective.

It doesn’t, it doesn’t create or store or collate, it has to have data to do what it needs to do. So there’s that chocolate and peanut butter analogy coming back in my brain. Now. What are your thoughts?

Rich: Thought one, you’re making me hungry. Thought two. I’m gonna put a slightly different spin on, on what you said.

I don’t know that AI is the platform, venture capital firms always asking themselves when they’re evaluating investment prospect. Am I investing in a platform product or feature, right? And I think what we’re seeing now is this kind of ag agentic AI capability is becoming a feature.

The platform is still aio, right? AIO now has this AI feature built into it. This is something, by the way, for the the AI native startups to think about as well is because, they’re now starting to look less even like products, let alone [00:11:00] platforms and more like a feature. And, all the other ConnectWise competitors are gonna need to incorporate a feature like that into their platform to keep pace.

Erick: Yes, I think you’re right. It ev to me. And so I’ll add a little nuance then. Z was a platform right now it has evolved into a feature within another platform. What do you think about that? Is that closer or, yeah. Gimme a little room there.

Rich: I I don’t know that it was a platform.

I don’t know. We can, but it was certainly a product.

Erick: Okay. It was a product. All right. We can argue this, for the rest of 2026 because we’re not gonna stop talking about, systems of record. Systems of action. These acquisitions, these integrations and the value that they bring to the channel, both from the vendor side and the partner side.

Rich: We are gonna suspend our conversation on that topic just a little bit as [00:12:00] we get into your tip of the week, Erick, because the service desk, operational efficiency very important to the bottom line, but sales is still critical to the top line, and that gets us to your tip of the week.

Erick: Absolutely rich and.

My tip of the week this week is all about how great MSPs are rich and making certain that, their technical team is up to snuff. We invest in training, we invest in tools. We send our teams to live workshops, get certifications. We subscribe to all kinds of training, platform certification platforms.

We want to make sure that we are skilling up our technical team because in some cases, rich it benefits the MSP through their vendor relationships to attain some of these certifications. They enjoy more benefits. [00:13:00] They enjoy, greater discount levels or commissions and rebates and MDF and all kinds of things when the vendors feel like.

The MSP’s technical team is really doubling down and investing time, energy, and effort in getting trained. And MSPs are even happy to pay for that because they know that, this is a value that they bring to their end clients. So they’re really good at focusing on making sure the technical team gets training, maybe additional training, maybe refresher training and things like that.

But guess what, rich, not so much from the sales team side of the house. In my humble experience MSPs don’t really know sales. I’m not saying everybody, right? I’m saying the majority of MSPs and are technically led organizations. The leadership, the folks that build these organizations skew higher percentage wise to technically folks with technical backgrounds.

Then [00:14:00] some with sales backgrounds, then some with kind of operational and business backgrounds. And maybe in that order, maybe I’ll swap the last two, in, in some cases. So the tip of the week is, Hey, we’ve got to invest in our sales team. We can’t continue to have experiences that sounds like, Hey, we hired a sales person.

We let them write their own comp plan. And there’s really no quotas and we hope that they, generate more revenue for us. That’s not fair to the sales professional. It’s not fair to the organization As stakeholders, we need to take the same view in every business unit in our organization, but most specifically in sales, which is the lifeblood of the organization.

So we’ve got to, sell. In order to onboard clients and deliver billable services. Three tips on how to look at this in a more direct manner. Number one, just institutionalize [00:15:00] that thought process across the organization is that we have a top-notch engineering team. We have a top-notch sales team.

When I’m working with MSPs Rich I use the phrase, Hey, we are a sales organization focused on delivering managed services, sales led organization. We gotta think about that. So make sales training mandatory when you’re hiring a sales professional for the first time. Get some outside help. Don’t roll the dice.

There are folks, like me and others in the industry that are really good at helping construct recruitment posts and construct comp plans with gates. And quotas and making sure. Here’s one of the other things that I tend to find Rich is, some of these MSP owners, because they’re not as experienced in this and letting the sales professional write their own compliances, sometimes they’re overpaying from gp.

We’re building compliance based on top line [00:16:00] revenue. When in fact, after the service is delivered we’re eroding our margin and sometimes upside down because of how the co plan is constructed for the sales profession. Sales compliance, when constructed properly rich, incentivize performance and rewards success.

It’s not backwards, it’s not a giant base. And then you get extra commission, in case you sell something, right? We drive performance and behavior based around how the sales plan is built. Get some help in designing that, get some, put that sales professional through some training, coaching.

Make sure that you have some requirements. What training and coaching, what sales methodology do they subscribe to? Any sales professional that’s worth their salt will name off two or three or maybe more sales methodologies that they’ve gone through have been involved with or familiar with.

I’ve been involved with probably six different ones. Big secret here, rich, at the end of the day, they’re all the same thing, right? Whether you call it a seven step sales process or a five step sales [00:17:00] process, there are very specific steps that have to occur in order to gain acceptance and sell services to these folks.

Tip number two. So that was a long one. Make sure that when the sales professionals and the sales team and the admin, anybody that’s involved in the sales process, even sales engineers, I make sure that anyone that’s touching the sales process that, the accidental, engineer, that the sales person says, Hey, I need you on this call ’cause I need, I need some muscle.

They need to be trained on how to participate in that sales conversation. It’s being led by the sales professional. So the engineer has to know what to say, what not to say, and how not to say it, answer questions very directly as if they’re a witness in a jury trial. Just enough information, not too much information.

This is the sales professionals deal to win or lose, and you don’t wanna be the reason why the deal goes sideways. So make sure that you’re training these folks not on speeds and feeds and [00:18:00] features and products. Kinda like we were just talking about Rich, but on value and business outcomes. What is the, what does life look like on the other side of the fence?

The bright sunshine and the flowers and the birds singing when you engage with us. We wanna sell business outcomes. We want to position our services as ways to deliver business growth outcomes to those clients. That’s why, cybersecurity and AI are easier to sell together than independently.

You can pull through cybersecurity services and managed services if you’re talking about delivering business outcomes from a client’s data. Who is interested in leveraging ai? Third one, align your sales training to the KPIs and metrics you want that sales professional or your sales team to achieve. So I’m gonna give you a real life scenario, rich.

We bonus and [00:19:00] incentivize our technical team to complete and accomplish technical training and get certifications. Same with the sales team. I’m going to put you through this sales training. You’re going to, get through it and you’re going to, get a, they’re not gonna certify you, but maybe there are some sales training methodologies that will certify your sales professionals in that way.

So figure out a way to incentivize the sales professional through that process as well. And then don’t think it’s a one and done thing. Rich. I’ve worked with a lot of MSPs in my experience where yeah, they put their sales team through sales training four years ago. Oh yeah. We put ’em through sales training.

And you know what? It’s a continual process. They have to be refreshed because, like anybody, rich, we’re human beings. We’ll take shortcuts after a while, and if our comp plan changes and it’s not built to skew toward exactly what we need to sell and how much of it we need to sell, sales professionals tend to lean on the [00:20:00] things that are easiest for them to sell for the highest commission.

Sometimes that is not what leadership wants to be sold. So a lot of different levers here. Think about it. Get thoughtful about it. Start thinking about treating your sales professional, your sales team as another lever in your organization. That needs to be measured. It needs to be managed, right?

That’s the other piece. You gotta have sales meetings. You’ve gotta go through pipeline. You’ve gotta call BS when you see Bs in the pipeline and ask tough questions. And if you’re not comfortable doing that, get some help from the outside. Or maybe when you’ve got one or two salespeople, maybe your next hire shouldn’t be to promote someone from internally to manage those sales folks that doesn’t have that experience.

Salespeople are like technicians rich. If they don’t think they can learn something from you or can respect the accomplishments that you’ve made. They tend to, listen through one ear and goes out the other. So just a lot to think [00:21:00] about here, but it’s 2026. It’s time to get busy. It’s time to grow revenue, profitable revenue to increase company equity value, or when it’s time to exit.

Rich: Yeah, obviously a lot. To chew on there, I would say, first of all, it is a great and important observation that as an MSP you are running a sales led organization. And I think I, I suspect most of the MSPs in our audience don’t think of themselves that way. And because they don’t, and because sales is not tariff firm for them, and the technical side of what they do is, this is part of why there is less of an emphasis on sales training sales discipline, sales rigor a culture of sales.

So if, if people take nothing else away from this, just re-orienting your mindset a little bit around what it is that enables you to operate and grow as a business. It is generating revenue that is sales. You are a sales-led [00:22:00] organization. And then. Let the consequences of that ob observation follow in terms of the time and effort and the forms of time and effort that you invest in sales.

I think that’s super important. The other thing I’ll underscore because it’s something that’s come up in conversations with MSPs before is that your technicians are an extended part of the Salesforce. I like the idea of training the techs a little bit in sales because even if they’re not sitting in on a sales call with a sales professional, every interaction with a customer is to some extent a sales opportunity.

You need to be listening for things, you need to be offering thing, and that takes a certain amount of of training and and just building awareness in the technician that you are part of that sales motion that we have at this company. And that requires training.

Erick: Absolutely. Two quick tag ins on that.

Number one, there should be a ticket [00:23:00] type in your PSA for sales opportunity because as you said, once the client is onboarded, they’re gonna speak much more often with a technical team than they do with the salesperson. And if you’ve only got a sales hunter or you’ve got somebody doing hunting and farming, like there’s not a lot of time for them to stay ahead of things.

So teaching these technicians about sales and about not being as honest or let’s say managing the impulse to be a technician and give the client the technical answer that prevents them from moving forward with a buying decision works against us. So when we can train the technicians I’m about to listen for and say, Hey, you know what, I’m gonna have Erick reach out to you.

I’m just gonna note this. So it ends up. On his board and look out for a call with him. And the second thing was, when I’m doing live training and speaking at events like you and I do a [00:24:00] lot rich together, if I ask the room, raise your hand. If you are in sales and a small percentage of hands go up, everyone’s hand should be raised.

That’s what we want people to understand is that we are all part of the sales motion. What I do every day can help accelerate a sales conversation or, because of the great customer service that I’m delivering or my responsiveness, even from an administrative perspective, I’m building trust and confidence in our clients that allows us to sell them more services and grow client lifetime value together.

Everybody should think. From that, like you said, it’s a sales culture, a sales led organization. And we need to impress that upon every member of our teams, especially when we’re having, all hands meetings. The culture has to be one that, hey, we are we. And one thing, one important note, nuance rich.

We are not [00:25:00] selling things even though the activity and the verb is we are selling things, right? We are helping clients make the right decisions to invest in the tools and technology and services that help power their organizations to deliver the business outcomes that they’re seeking.

Rich: Okay, I love it.

Now we suspended the conversation about systems of action and systems of record. We are gonna unsu suspend it now, folks, ’cause Erick and I are gonna take a quick break when we’re joined on the other side or when we come back on the other side, we will be joined. By Mark Elia and Bobby Jo Bobby Jacobs, excuse me.

Both of thread a service desk automation vendor. We’re gonna talk to them from the inside on what it is that systems like Thread do for MSPs. Quick note, we recorded this interview a few days ago. At that moment in time I did not have broadband. I am, I was in my home office. I went for [00:26:00] 27 hours last week without broadband.

So I was, using the broadband on my phone. You’ll hear us refer to that. A little bit. This is what we’re talking about a little bit is that I was having some internet issues when we recorded this interview, but that did not stop it from being very interesting and informative.

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. Folks who are regular members of our audience will recall that Erick and I spoke at some length than a recent episode about the concept of the system of action for MSPs and the, what that means in relation to systems of record.

We figured there is no better way to actually get into the specifics of that topic than to bring on two of the senior leaders of an actual system of action for MSPs, one of the best known [00:27:00] examples in that product category. Actually thread. We are joined by Mark Elia, the founder. And as you will see if you’re watching on video Chief of Magic at Thread, as well as Bobby Jacobs head of Growth at Thread.

Welcome to the show guys.

Mark: Excited. Hey guys,

Rich: good

Mark: to be here.

Rich: We really appreciate it. We’ve got a ton of questions for you. Before we get to those I’ll start with you, mark. Just tell folks a little bit about who you are and what you do with Thread.

Mark: Oh, man. My, I’m MSP through and through. So I had to get a permission slip from my high school to work at an MSP very early on.

So worked Tier zero, tier one, two, got into the tier three disaster recovery left because I tried to make a software company and at the MSPI worked at, and they have, they know how to think about software. [00:28:00] So I left, had a startup, and I came back into MSP to the same MSP where I was Director of Service Delivery and ultimately chief Data Officer.

Certainly when I joined back my number one priority was, I’m happy to be back, but I need to do something. I need to build something for the MSP space. So that’s where we created Chat Genie and is now known as Thread,

Rich: Mark, or excuse me, Bobby, your turn.

Bobby: Yeah. Hey, I’m the head of growth of Threads.

That means sales really means that we spend a lot of time helping MSPs think about how to implement AI into their service desk. What the future looks like, where you can get started to get value now versus, how you’re gonna run an MSP that is AI first and AI centric. Yeah get to talk to a ton of MSPs on a regular basis.

Our team at Thread on the [00:29:00] sales side is about 20 people or so now. So we get to help MSPs at scale.

Rich: Great. I said Thread is one of the best known examples in the industry right now of a system of action for MSPs. I say that in part because your co-founder and COO is on the record in an interview with CRM saying that you are building a system of action for MSPs.

Erick and I talked a little bit about what that means to us from what we can make out. A few episodes ago, either one of you, both, you tell us what system of action means from thread’s point of view.

Mark: Certainly, Bobby, am I Okay. Take this one.

Bobby: Go for it. Yeah.

Mark: First let’s figure out what we’re not.

The PSA is ultimately the ERP the core of many MSP businesses where they’re seeing all their tickets, their customers, their agreements. What we’re seeing is that [00:30:00] while the system of record is important in a new era of ai, what is important, what is becoming more and more important is our ability to make changes to, to make decisions.

For example, you can go into chat GBT and take a customer message that comes in and say, is this important? Is this a priority one issue? What do you think is the type, subtype and item? And you can get that from an ai. You can get that from an agent, however. Making those changes is very important. So the hardest part of having a great system of record is maintaining that record.

And those records are maintained through actions. What is the priority? What is the category? Oh, you have a new number you’re calling from. And [00:31:00] further to that is you have a ticket that you need a password reset on. Can you go and trigger that action? Can you actually go resolve that problem? And if you do, of course, update the system of record.

So think about the system of record, remembers everything, the system of action does everything.

Erick: Bobby, anything you’d like to add from your side of the house?

Bobby: Yeah, I think orchestration is such an important topic. The PAX eight report, the one that’s 40 pages or so does a really great job at talking about the future of managed intelligence, provi intelligence provider, which by the way, we have a few MSP partners that would now take offense at being called MSPs.

Their ips, their websites already say managed intelligence provider, which we love. And I, when you’re doing that, like orchestration is such an important piece of it. You can’t have 20 different LLMs and models that you’re managing from the ground up that are a part of your [00:32:00] service desk. There has to be one or two maybe core pieces that operate like a flywheel.

So there’s all these different features and even categories of AI product that are needed to make an AI service desk work. And it’s important that a lot of those products happen within the same ecosystem, which really means the same vendor that you’re working with. And that’s a big part about how we’re thinking about Thread.

For example, we just launched Contact Intelligence and our intelligence suite across the board. If you just had, when we call Intel, say, intelligence, you could think of it as like an AI assistant that has context of ticket history and documentation and such. If you had a standalone tool that just did that it could be helpful, but it would be limited.

When it’s in an, a whole system of action and orchestration tool, you get this flywheel effect where now we’re omnichannel. So when it’s going through chat, it’s using the same intelligence product. When it’s connecting to [00:33:00] reset a password, it has the context of what happened last time. So it really makes the conversation so much larger.

Erick: As a recovering MSP, I have lots and lots of questions. I am I’m a fan of ai. But for the folks that are listening to our show, I think, can you share kind of the distinction between kind of what we’re seeing now, like we see some of these PSAs, these systems of record that are now adding AI into their systems.

Compare that against a system of action, the way that you see it from a thread perspective, because I think there’s still a little bit of a confusion between am I already getting that from my existing tools? Why is this different to me? If I were to, in my simple brain mind, I think of it as oh, this is the entire.

Agent [00:34:00] for all the things that my other platforms aren’t doing, connecting and then taking action based upon the guardrails that I dictate to it. How far off am I,

Bobby: mark?

Mark: So many thoughts. Yeah. Yeah. So the reality is you’re not gonna be able to buy a piece of soccer without AI anymore. It’s everywhere. And the big difference is there, the AI functionality that’s existing not only in the PSA more broadly, is always about, okay, here’s a recommendation.

Here’s what we’re thinking. Here’s what you can do and giving you access to that LLM. The difference is that the system of action is actually cross platforms or cross functionality. So while your PSA. And actually in the PSAs, you’re getting recommendations. [00:35:00] They’re not actually making those changes.

They’re not making decisions based on what the AI learns. And so what I see, and what I believe the industry’s gonna see at large is you’re gonna see that there are dedicated platforms that are vertically specific. This is very important, just like how MSPs win. MSPs win when they standardize, when they have their customers, right?

Oh, I’m going after dentists, I’m going after medical industry. Because you’re getting more and more context and more and more intelligence, and you become a better service provider. The systems of actions will become vertically specific. And while the systems of record will continue to show you insights and intelligence.

Or reflect on some of those things, they’re not making the changes necessary to complete a whole [00:36:00] process. So systems of actions are vertically specific and they supplement the system of record. Bobby, I’d love to hear your thoughts as well.

Bobby: Yeah I think that’s really well put. The most MSPs have no AI in their service desk at all.

So one piece that you hit on Erick is system of records are launching some AI features. Like how do you think about those? And NMSP should use them, like they, they should turn them on. There’s a lot of helpful things happening across the whole stack. If you go to Connect Wise’s website and you look at their product tab, it’s 35 different products, right?

And so there’s a lot of places that they can implement ai. That’ll be helpful to an MSP. I think the challenge is there’s also 35 products that they need to go build that across. And so to Mark’s point on the verticalization and going really deep into how does a service desk work and how does it work, cross platform I think that’s the right approach there.

Now there are some things that that [00:37:00] you’ll have offered from a bunch of different places. Like setting the priority on a ticket. You could do that in different ways. Some tools are better at it than others. But when you think about, do you go back to that orchestration piece? I think at scale, like when an MSP is really running a full AI service desk they’re gonna wanna orchestrate those things from the same place.

Rich: So you’ve got a lot of partners, some of them have been using the tool for a while. Give us a sense for the scale of the benefit. That your system of action is delivering for them, just so that people in the audience kind of understand this is what the business impact potentially could be from using Thread or another tool like it.

In terms of operational efficiency, profitability, freeing up labor for other tasks what are you actually seeing out there on the field?

Mark: Yeah. I’ll start with a funny comment because the only person that, or the only companies that win is Microsoft and OpenAI scale is growing [00:38:00] intensively.

So we’re, we’ve processed 16 billion tokens in December alone. However, and that’s what Microsoft is really happy about. Our Azure bill, what that translates into, we’ve saved over 30,000 hours for our MSPs using the AI platform and the system of action platform in that these. Whether you have centralized dispatchers or the technicians are decentralized and they have to put in that information you’re seeing a massive game of time saved.

Now, when we talk to partners MSPs, we ask, how is your service delivery model set up? Do you have centralized dispatchers, do you not? And we work really closely with them to refine their service delivery process to be AA native while helping them to pull the cost out. We [00:39:00] have one partner that had six dispatchers within 30 days of starting with us.

They were able to reduce it down to two dispatchers because their dispatchers were just categorizing, prioritizing, moving it to the right place. And our system was able to actually also communicate with the end customer, understand more. From the end customer. So the impact’s been incredible. When I was at the MSP, it’s just, it’s so much overhead to just get the ticket to a workable place to the right person.

Bobby: Yeah. I think on a similar note or, when we talk about triage, like triage and dispatch is an area where we spend a lot of time, but the customer facing conversational AI is a huge piece of that. There’s an MSP, we work with PE backed. They have seen. When the AI engages with the customer over 10% of the time, it’s closing the ticket end to end on its own [00:40:00] with no human engagement from the MSP and the CSAT rate has gone up on those tickets.

That’s frankly a little higher than we expected the conversational AI to do on its own great before getting even deeper into the action downstream of changing things. But a lot of that one signals that the end users are choosing to opt in to self-service, which is something that, MSPs are white glove, there’s services business that they are, it can be, it’s really scary to hand off service to someone who is not a human in your building.

And the worst experience is what Rich is going through right now with an ISP, right? Where you can’t get them on the phone and they’re trying to get you to hang up and they’re actually calling you. So that’s awesome. Everyone’s afraid of that. But the best experience is when things are just auto resolved instantly.

And that’s what we’re seeing. A lot of our partners are having the end users then calling them after the ticket just to tell them how [00:41:00] cool it was to get their problem fixed.

Erick: Rich and I speak a lot on the program about ai, about automation, about the impact of AI on these tools and platforms that partners are using.

The impact of AI on valuation, on strategic interests from an m and a perspective. All of these different types of things. But at the end of the day, you guys, realize that the lifeblood of all of this is the MSP themselves. It’s the MSP that has to deal with the fires every day, has to figure out ways to, do more with less.

And I was having a conversation with Rich just recently. I posited that, you know what this fear, uncertainty, and doubt that we’ve been hearing about, at least in the MSP channel that we all live and breathe in about, it’s gonna take our jobs and things like that. I think what I’m sensing more in speaking with MSPs is [00:42:00] there, that’s not really what’s happening, but what it’s allowing them to do is scale more broadly with the existing staff.

They have scale up their existing staff to be more strategically valuable and then profitable for the company, and perhaps delay the need to hire additional staff in in, in those, in kind of those really tough decision making, decisions where you say we’ll just sell our way out of it.

Or do we hire first? Do we build it first? That kind of thing. A little bit off script Rich for you, but I would love to hear your input and feedback on what I’ve just described, the impact that it’s having in all of these different areas to the actual MSP themselves.

Rich: Yeah. Wanna kick us off Mark?

Erick: He’s process.

Mark: Yeah, no, certainly. I thought you were pointing at Rich for that. It’s, so my hypothesis is that there’s a [00:43:00] lot more demand for IT services than we’ve even been able to capture. If you’re a 40 person company, you’re gonna get a quote for about 150, $200 per employee per month.

That can be really deferring like it’s $8,000. And if I’m a dental office or if I’m a lawyer firm, accounting firm. I can hire another accounting person or hire a paralegal in a legal firm. So there’s massive demand pent up for IT services. So my hypothesis is that as we’re able to drive that lower, we’re gonna be able to capture more of that demand overall.

Now, in terms of is AI going to replace us because there’s so much demand. That’s why I started on the demand side. We can’t find the talent to service all of those customers. We are struggling to do [00:44:00] and so the hypothesis and what we’re seeing in the market is actually people are, once AI comes in, you’re getting one or two people that are becoming supervisors of ai.

The other folks are actually upleveling to become tier one, tier two, so that they can help service those customers. So you. Yes, you can handle more customers. That’s the big thing. You can handle more customers, more end users with the same amount of people. You’re not firing pe We don’t have enough people.

We need more people. And so it’s just an incredible opportunity to say, stop prioritizing, stop categorizing, start fixing.

Bobby: And it makes the work so much cooler too. Our, you guys have probably seen, we say death to the ticket, got a death to the ticket flag on the wall next to me here. Like we let, love to say the tickets are a terrible way to treat people, end [00:45:00] users and technicians.

But the technicians like, they have to do statuses and priorities and categories and boards and titles and time entries like so much of a technician’s day. Just sucks. And then their service desk manager’s mad at them because they didn’t do all of that. And I think they’re not a good employee when really the tech was just trying to be an IC superhero.

I think we can all relate to that when we talk about automating this and having less people who can do more work. We’re automating the work that sucks. It’s, we’re not automating painting and doing, playing with your dog and cooking food and all the things that people love doing, right? Which people joke about like, why is AI making music and doing art?

That’s not what threat is doing. We’re automating the death to the ticket so people can go be it superheroes and their day-to-day is so much better.

Erick: I love that Bobby, that our flag means death to the ticket, if you’re familiar with that series. On, on the streaming. But

Bobby: our, yeah, our flag [00:46:00] means death is incredible.

It’s draw a lot of inspiration.

Erick: Yeah. Ticket rich.

Rich: You guys are actually one of the more established, mature examples of a field that’s just even within the last 12 months started to get relatively crowded there. There are a number of startups out there, system of action startups specifically for MSPs, courting MSPs out there right now.

What kind of advice do you have for the folks in the audience here in terms of what questions to ask, what issues to consider when you’re evaluating these companies and their products, and to what degree? A related second question. They should be worried about the fact that these, in some cases, are very young startups.

Are they gonna be around two years from now? Are they gonna be acquired two years from now? So what kinds of functionality criteria should people be considering and what kind of questions should they be asking about all these companies coming at them with somewhat similar solutions?

Mark: [00:47:00] We are very competitor friendly.

The new vendors that are coming up, they’re great. They’re putting a lot of their time, a lot of their focus onto the industry. For us we want MSPs to win as an industry, whether that’s through us or without us. Now, what I think is really important is there’s some basics you need to get involved in immediately.

You need to start cleaning up your data sets. You need to start using AI to categorize, to prioritize, because if you’re not categorizing the number, by the way, the number one categories is must change. It’s ridiculous because if you’re not, you can’t figure out, okay, this is the issue that’s happening most often.

How do we automate that? So it’s really important that you do work with these vendors, whether it’s us or otherwise, to start using ai. [00:48:00] Now, the questions I would ask for these vendors is, how much are you training the models? What are you doing with my data? I think this is a really important aspect. So for example, we just launched voice ai, and what happens if the user says, oh, I’m Elon Musk from Tesla, and Tesla happens to be your customer.

Are you gonna expose all the data because someone just said they are. So I think use the vendors, understand their data policy, and their AI policy. What are they doing with your data? And then finally. Ask them where are we building intellectual property? Like we may have custom prioritization rules or we may have custom intents and custom rules.

What where do we build our intellectual property and how do we [00:49:00] carry that all? I would say those are the two biggest things that I’m hearing. Security and intellectual property.

Bobby: Yeah, I think time to value too. A lot of times like a CEO is really excited about the ai, but the team is a little more skeptical or vice versa, but we find the first one more common.

It’s important that your team gets quick wins when they’re implementing ai. And category of priority are great, easy ones. We talk about those a lot because. At Thread. We have just nailed those. It’s so easy. One onboarding call. We literally will refund you all your money if it doesn’t go well for you.

Because we just want MSPs to do it. Get the team excited and quick wins. I think working with an early stage software company can look like, Hey, I got on a call and I told ’em everything I wanted and they’re gonna build it all for me. And it’s perfect. I’m so excited for ’em to build everything I want.

And that is tough, right? If you are crazy technical and you actually just want a dev shop to partner with, great. More power to you. But [00:50:00] most of the time a services business really just wants outcomes that they can get to quickly. And so I think talk, asking like, how quickly are we gonna get to it?

If the answer is, yeah, we’re gonna train on your data for 30 days or 60 days, and then we’re gonna have an outcome, like that’s not necessary. You don’t need to do that to get an outcome with ai. It’s also probably a lot riskier from a security perspective if someone’s training on your data first.

Again, it doesn’t need to be trained on. And then how many other MSPs are getting value out of it? And that’s challenging. Like we, there’s a lot of great new vendors out there then, it’s always hard to get initial partners to value, but that’s just something that you wanna think about and make sure that it makes sense to spend your time there.

Erick: You, you both have made some statements that kind of resonated with me and then I thought, huh, I’ve heard something different. I think Mark, from your perspective, a lot of the work that, that I do with MSPs is helping them. Do those blocking and tackling things that you talked about [00:51:00] as categorize as issue type subtype item and then your top 40 troubleshoot shooting tips and all this other stuff and trying to, normalize that within the PSAI absolutely see the value in leveraging a platform like yours or some of these, ai enablement benefits for an MSP.

Absolutely. Bobby from your side, you talked about it, there’s not a lot of need to train on your data. We’ve had other folks on the show that have said, Hey, the value that you have as an MSP is your customer data. That’s what makes the AI so valuable and so much more effective.

So I think there’s truth in both those statements. I’m not, I don’t wanna mischaracterize what you said, but my question is this. Understanding that they’re, just like onboarding is a project for a new client or customer for an MSP onboarding is a project typically for an MSP to bring on a platform like yours.

You said, Hey, [00:52:00] we can hit the ground running pretty quickly. But in general, how long does it really take for an MSP to get onboarded with Thread and to get all of their team trained and really begin realizing the benefits of it? Because, to me, I love leveraging AI for all the value and benefits it, that it delivers, but can it also help accelerate the onboarding and execution process?

How does that work?

Bobby: Yeah. Process change is the biggest thing here, and I don’t want. To portray that it’s not and we do tons of AI readiness assessments and when we’re out at peer groups, we’re always talking about that kind of stuff because you need to think about the implementation and, tickets are gonna land in different places and people are gonna work them at different times.

They’re gonna be touched and solved differently if reports are gonna be different. Like the process change, it can be significant when you’re implementing an AI service desk. Soup to nuts. Again, I think it’s really important to get quick wins. So we try to separate that out in the [00:53:00] onboarding priority and category is pretty low process change.

Hey, you used to set the priority on tickets. Now it’s automatically set and you can update that and you can change it. But when you think about, Hey, we’re implementing AI that’s gonna answer the phone and talk to my customers, and there’s gonna be tickets solved that no one touches, and then other tickets are f fully triaged and 50% solved by a time the technician gets there.

There’s a lot that needs to change along the way there. And so you can’t just go to our website and buy our product, like we make you meet with our team because we want to talk through those things. We make you go through an onboarding process where it’s four to five sessions with consultants on our side.

Again, you could set up our product probably in three to four hours. We encourage you not to do that. We encourage you to go through more training sessions and testing and implementing. So a great onboarding for us is 30 days. But that’s typically four to five sessions with our team and then some homework from there.

Erick: Yeah, I appreciate that. Fo

Mark: I have to pine I’m like so [00:54:00] passionate about what you said because

Erick: jump

Mark: always says two things can be true. And to your point of should you train on data, but your data is your unique advantage. I just wanna address that. When we first built auto prioritization, auto categorization, and we’re so much further ahead now, we saw it was 30% accuracy and we’re it was killing us because when we go through the AI answers, it makes sense.

It’s logical. The reasoning is logical. And so we started to meet with the service delivery folks and said, okay, that, and we were comparing the AI decision versus the technician, the human decision. We were at 30%. And so we said, okay, service delivery managers, we’re gonna go through each one, one by one.

And what we found was the technician was wrong [00:55:00] repeatedly. And so that data is actually worse than you think. The prioritization, the categorization, because

Erick: I know

Mark: they don’t remember they’re doing their best.

Erick: You can’t report on it if you don’t have it properly categorized. And they’re just like, how do you measure performance?

How do you get everybody doing the same thing the same way to deliver the same delightful outcome for the end user?

Mark: Exactly.

Erick: Yeah.

Mark: Exact. So we literally had a machine learning team and there’s no pattern. It doesn’t make sense. So your operational data sets. Likely have a low a low accuracy within them.

So that dataset is what we’re saying. You don’t need an AI to learn on bad data. You should start for first level principles. [00:56:00] You’re using isight, use itil. How do you think about that and let the AI reason from first principles. Now where learning does matter is memory. Hey, I just got a new MacBook Pro.

I set it up with a doc. My doc is, is not working the way it should be. I’m using a 27 inch screen. Those things we lose as MSPs. We don’t know that they’re using a 27 inch screen with a doc. We’re probably getting some of the information from the rmm. That’s why two things can be true. You can learn about your customer, you can learn about your client through the conversations, but mining operational data sets we have found does just simply does not work.

Erick: One last thing I wanna touch on is something that you’ve repeatedly [00:57:00] emphasized, Bobby, is we need quick wins. Change is hard. And the last thing that an MSP wants to think about is, man, how much time is this gonna take? How many, how much extra food are you gonna scrap on my plate before I, start losing some off the other side of it and things like that.

I really appreciate that. In any kind of transformation, you’ve gotta give the team quick wins so that they feel like, hey, they can, administer and orchestrate this change without it having too bad of a negative impact on their day-to-day. And they see the improvement over time.

So I really appreciate that insight.

Bobby: Love it. Yeah.

Rich: So the flag on the wall says death to the ticket. We’ve been talking a lot about service desk automation in the context of systems of action, but there are plenty of other processes and workflows evolved in running a managed services business that potentially could be accelerated automated with the help of a system of action.

In terms of thread or just looking beyond thread across the industry, how [00:58:00] much further beyond the help desk do you expect this whole system of action concept to go?

Mark: Tremendously. I think it breaks down if we look at the, at an MSP, you have your service desk, you have your field services, you have your professional services, you have cyber services, and not as well.

What we believed is that service desk is ripe for disruption. We believe that moving up from there, cybersecurity is starting to use more and more. AI for intelligence Knock is using more and more. Field services is more about dispatching. So I believe out of the five general categories of selling, four of them are going to be heavily disrupted.

And what I say on the big, beautiful blue websites [00:59:00] that most MSPs have, and I love the blue color that says trusted technology partner, the part that’s gonna be least affected is likely professional services where you’re actually talking to your customer.

Bobby: The dental office

Mark: that’s ready to open up the second, third, fourth dental office.

Or the accounting firm that’s finally ready to adopt AI because they’re sick and tired of, manually processing emails. So I believe that the four of the five are going to be heavily AI driven, and we’re seeing a lot of great activity there, honestly in those categories.

But I think professional services is where we’re gonna make a lot of our money moving forward. Meaning as MSP, sorry, I different hat.

Erick: Yeah I do that sometimes too. Oh. Yo, I’m no longer an MSB, but I always talk [01:00:00] about we and us and all that, right? Because it’s in our, it’s in our DNA, right? Alright, team, here’s the million dollar question from me. Is there a potential future in the multiverse Madness? Where an MSP might not need a PSA or system of record.

What’s your predictions?

Mark: Wow. Talk about radical.

You will need a system of record. Does that have to be the PSA? Not necessarily. And it’s it’s ironic because when Arnie and David Bini and Robin from Robin Robins started they taught people about the per user per month. And what really happened is that, by [01:01:00] the way I’m like a historian of the PSA.

The PSA was stolen from the legal industry because they were doing a lot of time and material billing, and that’s why the tech industry took it. We pivoted heavily away from time and material as we move away from time and material. The reality is you need a system of record like a CRM or a dynamic like an ERPA billing system.

And because we’ve become more standardized, it’s going to be very difficult to justify PSA. Like why not bill through a QuickBooks? Why not bill through a zero? Why not bill through Stripe? Because we’ve already normalized a lot of the problem that the PSA was built for, which is the time material.

So will you need a system of record? Yes. Is the PSA going to be the system of record?

Erick: That’s the question.

Mark: I don’t, [01:02:00] I think they’re gonna have a hard time justifying that. And it’s difficult. It’s difficult. It depends how they evolve. I don’t believe so. Because they’re the ones that taught us to charge per user per month.

Rich: Super interesting conversation guys, and that’s a super interesting note to close things out on. We thank you both very much for making some time and joining us on the show. For folks in the audience who would like to get in touch with either of both of you learn more about Thread, where should they go?

Bobby: Yeah, if you wanna know more about Thread, you can go to get thread.com, check stuff out. You can book a demo right there. You can find Mark and I on LinkedIn, Bobby Jacobs mark Alive. We’ve both got thread shirts on in our pictures. Connect with us there.

Erick: Awesome, man. Where can we get those cool flags?

Mark: Those are OG flags. Bobby, those are from like the first. We unveiled Thread as the [01:03:00] new company.

Bobby: Yeah. We used to use them for our parades at be before We’ve been kindly asked not to do parades anymore at conferences. That’s why we had ’em.

Mark: They’re vintage. Erick,

Erick: I’m always thinking marketing and top of funnel stuff.

I think you guys have come up with a really cool incentive and just say, Hey, for a limited time, get yourself an OG flag. Do these three things for us.

Bobby: I love it. Let’s do it.

Erick: Appreciate you guys. Thank you so much.

Bobby: See you guys man.

Rich: With that Erick and I are gonna take a quick break.

When we come back on the other side, I predict my internet’s gonna be up again. And I know for a fact Erick and I are gonna share some final thoughts about this very interesting conversation with Mark and Bobby. Have a little fun wrap up the show. Stick around.

Bobby: We’re gonna be right back

Rich: and welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast. One last [01:04:00] thank you to Mark Alive and Bobby Jacobs with thread for that. Very interesting. And as it turns out, very timely conversation. Sure enough, as I predicted at the end of that interview, my internet is back. And so no more issues there.

A few things. There are a lot of things we could talk about in, in in that interview. One of the things that I really appreciated was when Bobby was talking about the onboarding process. It I’m not gonna point fingers at any particular vendors, but you can imagine vendors in the business thread is in painting a picture where you just wet the agents through the front door and magic happens immediately afterwards.

And it, it is a process to get this system to where it needs to be to really deliver value for you. And in thread’s case, at least, I don’t know that this is true universally among its competitors, but it’s, it sounds like it’s a very hands-on kind of process where they are working with you to make sure that you’re configuring the system, readying the system [01:05:00] to do what you bought it to do for you.

So that’s something I appreciate hearing. It takes a little of that AI magic spin out of the conversation kind of brings it, grounds it in reality a little bit. I thought that was something that jumped out at me a little bit in that conversation.

Erick: Yeah. And as you were expressing that thought, rich I just thought of the elves that come in at night and do all the cobbling for the cobbler.

So just like the AI agents release them, let them go do their thing. That was also something that’s very, it was very interesting to me, rich, was this idea that, hey, we can onboard quickly because we’re, we’re, we have a set of best practices. We have ways to identify, categorize tickets and look at SLAs and do all that stuff.

For those folks that consult with MSPs like myself, that is part of what we do for these folks. We may be, leveraging AI to help us do that a little bit more rich [01:06:00] or, not be doing that part of it anymore because the agents can gather that intelligence much faster than we can sit down and carve out time.

’cause this is always the challenge is like when we say, okay, we’re going to, identify issue type subtype and type and then we’re going to categorize these tickets and we’re gonna understand what tickets should always go to a level one technician. What tickets should never go to them and go to level and all of that work that takes somebody on the MSP side, rich hours and hours to actually do that stuff, do the work.

We can give them guidance and we can say, Hey, here’s how it should look. But you guys have to go do that. With a solution like this, that stuff can be much done much quicker because of the data analysis that the AI solution can deliver. Lots more. Like you said, we can unpack all kinds of things outta that very interesting conversation.

And, we have the team, sit there and think and mull over some of the questions that we were [01:07:00] posing, which means they’re really being thoughtful about how they think about these things and how they’re delivering these services and onboarding their partners. Go ahead, rich, you had a thought.

Rich: I and you just led me right into it. I wanna quickly call out before we move on. Mark was particularly thoughtful about the last question, the question you asked about the future of PSA solutions in relation to solutions like Thread.

Bobby: Yeah.

Rich: So I should play it out quickly. When we recorded that interview, to the best of my knowledge, neither of the two guys we just spoke with knew that ConnectWise had acquired Zoic.

It was not public information, then they may have somehow sniffed it out, but I don’t think that was on their mind. And the thoughtfulness of Mark’s response there really underscores the complexity of the relationship between the system of action vendors and the system of record vendors in managed services even before ConnectWise buying Zoic.

I have never, once I’ve spoken to a ton of these [01:08:00] startups doing AI automation, none of them has ever told me our ultimate goal is to put the PSA vendors out of business,

Bobby: right?

Rich: But now, and again, off the record, they’ll mull, these are people who are like deep into the AI weave and they’ll just mu a little bit, they don’t really know.

The answer to the question do the PSA solutions remain relevant or does AI get to a point where maybe people don’t need that software anymore. So all of that was very much, and obviously if you’re thread and you partner with all of these PSA companies, you don’t want to go there essentially.

So all of that kind of factors into an answer like the one that we got from Mark and now it’s an even more complicated landscape for thread and companies like it.

Erick: Yeah. Yeah. And part of me is just thinking about your second prediction about, another acquisition like that in 2026.

And this definitely focuses, the attention on [01:09:00] companies like Zoic, like Thread. We’ll see what happens,

Rich: And if and when that acquisition happened, you heard of here folks, first folks. So that’s why you tune into MSP Chat every week. And that leads us with time for just one last thing.

And once upon a time on this show, Erick, you and I were talking about how neither one of us had actually being in a self-driving car. And the next time that we go to San Francisco or one of these cities where those are out there we’ve gotta make a point of ordering up one of those and experiencing that.

And I have been very excited to do that. I am rethinking it just a little bit following this story, which comes to us from Phoenix. Where somebody a a pedestrian caught a a Waymo on camera with a passenger in the backseat driving down the light rail tracks. Apparently the car got a little confused about what’s road and what’s light rail railway, and fortunately it was not.[01:10:00]

It looks like there’re in the video, it looks like there are two parallel rails. There was a train coming in the opposite direction, but on the other rail. And so it, there was no immediate danger of a front end collision. There was actually a train on the same rails coming up behind it, but that was okay.

It did not there, no one got hurt, no one got impacted. The car kind of froze at one point, once it realized it didn’t quite understand where it was and there was something coming at it. It looked like it might be a train. And then in the video you see the back door open and sun. The passenger wisely jumps out of the car and moves away.

So all’s well that ends well. But, these technologies, they’re extremely powerful, sophisticated capable, but they’re not perfect, are they,

Erick: Ready for prime time in that instance. And Rich, remember it was a month or a little bit more ago where it was in San Francisco, I believe, where the traffic lights just stopped working and all the Waymo’s just [01:11:00] stopped where they were in traffic everywhere, creating an amazing headache for passengers and for, the local, law enforcement and all that, trying to figure all this stuff out.

This is stuff out of sci-fi movies, right? And the first one with a train reminds me of I make a, a chase scene in a mission impossible movie, or, this is nuts. So yeah, I’m with you. I have yet to. Hire Waymo, but they are now here in Southern California, I think in some spots.

But yeah, it, you don’t wanna end up on a railroad track ever in a car, not in a train, let’s put it that way.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah. I think everyone can agree on at least that much. And with that, folks, we are out of time on this episode of the show. We thank you so much for joining us here.

We’re gonna be back in a week with another episode for you. Until then, I will just remind you, this is both a video and an audio podcast, which means that if you are listening to us right now, but you’d like to check us out video, go to YouTube, you’ll find us [01:12:00] there. If you’re watching us on YouTube, but you’re into audio podcasts, go to Spotify, Google, apple, wherever it is, you get your audio podcast.

You’re gonna find us there too. Wherever it is, you find us. Please subscribe, rate, review. It’s gonna help other people find and enjoy the show too. This show is produced and edited by the great. Russ Simp Russ Simpson. Riley Simpson part of the team with us here at Channel Mastered and channel mastered by the way has a full suite of, if you wanna understand better what we are up to, I encourage you to visit www.channel Mastered.com to understand the full suite of services.

We offer vendors that have and wish to grow and optimize MSP channels. Channel Mastered has a sister organization called MSP Mastered, that’s Erick working one-on-one with MSPs to help them grow and optimized their business. And you can learn more about that by visiting www.mspMastered.com. Once again, we thank you for joining us.

We’re gonna be back in a week. Until then, folks, please [01:13:00] remember, as we always encourage you to, you can’t spell channel. Without MSP.