Episode 111: The Wave is Here

Erick and Rich discuss why the channel’s AI maturity is stuck in a three-year rut according to IDC and what MSPs can do about it, plus strategies for converting focus and discipline into accelerated growth. Then they’re joined by the managing director of partner programs for Google Cloud, Phil Larson, for an insider’s take on opportunities for MSPs in cloud and AI. And finally, one last thing: how a real-life Jimmy Neutron produced nuclear fusion in his home lab.

Discussed in this episode:

AI is a Growing Business Yet Risky Bet for Channel Partners

IDC North America Partner Landscape 2025: Vendor Relations, Cloud Marketplaces, and Distribution

Introducing Google Cloud Partner Network: What partners should know

Dallas 12-year-old achieves nuclear fusion after four years of effort

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 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 master of the organization responsible for the show.

I’m joined this week as I am every week by your co-host, our CEO and chief strategist at Channel mastered. His name is Erick Simpson. Erick, how you doing?

Erick: I’m doing well, rich, something tells me you’re doing really well today.

Rich: I gotta believe there are some folks in the audience who are tired of hearing us talk about the Super Bowl, but too bad.

‘Cause I’m sitting here in my home office in Seattle right now, still days [00:01:00] later, basking in the glow of a a Seattle Seahawks win in the Super Bowl. A game that was fascinating to people in Seattle and probably nobody else. Maybe not the greatest game ever played unless you’re a Seahawks fan, in which case it was pretty tremendous.

Erick: Take the win, rich. Take the win. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was gonna be the first Super Bowl with I don’t know if this is accurate, but I was thinking there’s gonna be no touchdowns this game. It’s gonna be all, defensive field goals. That’s what I thought going, after a while I’m like, wow, this is very unusual.

Rich: Close enough. Close enough. Yeah. Obviously it is very impressive when a team has a defense as effective and smothering as the Seahawks have. It doesn’t necessarily make for the greatest television but it will win you a championship sometimes. And like I said I’ll take the doll.

You, Erick,

Erick: I’ll tell you what, too Rich. So many of the Super Bowl commercials that, everybody like, okay, what’s gonna be the, so many were just based around ai, right? So [00:02:00] it’s now so pervasive that there are AI companies that I hadn’t even heard of that are, broadcasting commercials during Super Bowl.

Rich: With that as a segue, let’s dive into our story of the week, perhaps. This comes from the latest edition of Channel Aholic. My blog, I had an opportunity as I do every year right around now. To spend some time talking to Steve White, an analyst at IDC. Very busy guy by the way. I very much appreciate him taking some time out every year to kinda walk me through Id C’S latest north America partner landscape research, which covers a lot of ground, a lot of territory.

But I wanna talk in particular about one specific finding in there for a number of reasons. First of all, it, it ties into, it’s a nice introduction to the interview segment On this week’s show. We’re gonna be speaking with Phil Arson of Google, who runs their partner programs. Related topics are gonna come up in that conversation. I think there are gonna be a lot of people in our audience who can relate to the, these data points. And I do wanna get [00:03:00] your take on this too, Erick, very much to see what you think. But one of the things that IDC talks about in their latest research is what they call the channels AI maturity level.

And this is not a set self-assessment by channel partners, essentially. IDC asks people about the state of their AI business and this year. About 60% of the partners they surveyed said that their a AI business is either ad hoc or opportunistic. It’s, they don’t have anything in the other categories that IDC would consider mature categories, repeatable standardized, et cetera.

So if you look at kind of the distribution on a graph, there’s this big bump in the middle. 60% of partners are in ad hoc opportunistic, which is middling in terms of maturity as, as far as IDC is concerned. What’s significant about that is that this is the third year that IDC has been asking this question in its survey, and those numbers haven’t moved in three years.

And three years [00:04:00] by the way, is, chat GPT is only a little bit over three years old. So basically over the course of generative AI’s lifespan channel partners have. Call their AI practice or strategy ad hoc, opportunistic, not programmatic. They don’t really have what could properly be thought of as a strategy, despite the fact obviously that there has been enormous technological change enormous technological advances, all sorts of ways to make money.

Lots of partners who are beginning to make money around AI with their customers, they still haven’t really in to invoke Steve’s metaphor here, placed bets. And the way he put it is, that there are a lot of partners out there who are reluctant to it’s like AI is a big roulette game and there are a lot of partners waiting for the opportunity to bet black or red.

Right now it feels like you pretty much have to bet 17, and that’s your only option there, it’s changing so fast. That if you make a commitment, essentially, there’s a [00:05:00] lot of risk attached to that, and that is holding a lot of partners back. Steve’s expectation, IDCs expectation, is you’re gonna start to see the data move 12 months from now.

The more I’ve been thinking about this since writing this article, the less I’m sure of that because as Steve points out in detail and accurately, AI never stops moving. It, ev every week, every month there’s something new to absorb and digest. As a channel partner, as an MSP, you are always going to be in the position of constant change, and there is always going to be some risk attached to making a commitment.

This is a topic we’ve talked about with MSPs on stage before Toge together Erick for interviews. That became part of, or panel sessions became part of the show. So if you feel like I’m waiting before I commit to an AI strategy, you’re always going to be waiting and always missing out on the upside, the opportunity to get that revenue, that profit, that stickiness with your customers.

[00:06:00] You’re gonna be leaving that opportunity open to competitors. And so it feels like uncertainty aside, risk aside, you gotta start finding some places to make commitments to build a strategy. We’re not really talking about what products am I gonna resell and so on. What is my AI offering? What am I strategically going to come to my customers with as their trusted advisor and help them accomplish an ai?

And how can I get started with that? Like I said, Erick, I really wanna know what you think.

Erick: Yeah, that’s it. The most striking thing that you shared there for me, rich, was in three years, this really hasn’t moved. This has been the sentiment of 60% or so of the MSPs surveyed. I, my first gut instinct reaction response thought is, you use the word risk a lot there.

Yeah. They’re very risk averse. MSPs are very wary, very risk averse. They take everything that they [00:07:00] are including into their service bundles and delivering to their clients, almost wholly, right? Because this is something that represents them, their brand. It’s very difficult. Once an MSP has established that stack and is comfortable with that stack, it’s taken years to perfect it in many cases to.

To look at something that is shifting and changing so quickly with no clear leader from a vendor perspective in their minds. I’m not saying that the vendors aren’t trying to promote their ai offerings and capabilities, but the, and deliver it to their clients. I think, MSPs are adopting AI internally.

First. They’re seeing the opportunity to enhance their, their analysis of customer data to, to implement more efficient and effective service delivery to use AI to clear the noise. And even moving [00:08:00] into, some ways to replace some of that level one support with some ai, but very, in a controlled and governed manner.

I as in any business, I think. The folks that are out there on the leading edge, maybe not the bleeding edge, are the ones that will stick their claim or make a bet on something and probably lead the rest of the channel. I think these MSPs are looking to see what are the other MSPs doing.

If I put my MSP hat back on for a minute, rich, I’m like, okay, I’m hearing all this, great information. I believe that AI is gonna help my business, my client’s business, but I don’t yet see a clear model or bundle of solutions or portfolio. We talk on the show a lot, rich, about becoming the VC IO and having conversations with clients about how to bring services to them.

But until there’s somebody that’s actually doing it and not maybe even the first Ms. P, we see, we start seeing the trend of MSPs moving in [00:09:00] that direction. I think the majority of MSPs take away and see attitude. Maybe they. Drug into the conversation because their clients are, asking for help in these areas.

Or maybe they’re dipping their toe in the water, starting off with, some Microsoft copilot assessments and some, some enablement and deployment and training that way. But I don’t know if MSPs yet see a clear path to say, this is going to increase my top line and bottom line revenue by X percent this year, so I’m going to really take advantage of it.

And,

Rich: and I think that’s the crux of the issue. Like I said we together have moderated a few different panels at events where we have had MSPs on stage, MSPs who are doing something in ai. So leading edge. MSPs with respect to ai, and we always get a very good audience for those panels because there are a lot of MSPs who want to know what is the answer, [00:10:00] underscoring the, and I guess my point is just there is no, the answer, there is no one answer. You’ll learn great things coming to one of these panels if we do another one down the road. But if you’re looking for the answer that’s gonna tell you exactly what you need to be doing, you may not find it.

I think the real answer that you get from these panels and from the leading edge MSPs is to try some things that you have good reason to believe will be effective with your customers and see how that goes, essentially. See what gets traction, build from there. Your model of success may be different from your.

Peer group fellows model. But if you’re waiting for the answer, it might be a long wait. And to your point, Erick, it might be a dangerous wait because there are gonna be other people who are talking to your customer about, being their vc A IO.

Erick: Yeah. There’s this, there’s the pressure of that where, we’ve talked on the show before and have had guests on the show that are building kind of AI [00:11:00] first, MSP models and, acquiring those folks and integrating them into that new generation next gen of service delivery kind of AI first delivery.

So yes, there’s pressure from that perspective, but there’s also like I say, the MSPs, they, we, they need a clear playbook and not only what should I be delivering to my clients, how do I bundle it, how do I integrate it into my processes? How do I. How do I price it? Some of these very core fundamental questions still need some answers.

And because MSPs are, risk averse by nature, it’s hard for them to go through and try to do some pricing. Some of the early MSPs, like when I was around in the early two thousands our MSP practice, we made all the pricing mistakes. Richard, it took us nine months to figure out how to sell a flat fee.

We called it flat fee IT services, right? It’s so early to figure that out, and we [00:12:00] lost a ton of money that first year. And then we said, okay, let’s take what we learned and we’re committed to this and let’s go again. We were, fortunate to be able to, recover from that at that stage and continue to move forward because we felt this was the right direction to go.

We had enough clients that trusted us to do that. Today it’s much, much different. Yeah, where do you start? I would say start having conversations with clients. Start assessing their interest. We know from folks like Jay McBain chief analysts at AMIA, that, 70 plus percent of business owners and business leaders want to adopt AI or adopting ai.

We know that they’re users in MSP’s, customer bases that are leveraging ai. There’s shadow ai. There’s AI that folks are bringing in that, there’s no governance around. Playbook is what we need. And the first, I think organization that comes out with kind of a playbook that says, here’s step one, step two, step three, here’s how [00:13:00] you have these conversations.

Go do this with your clients. Here’s how you price it. Here’s where you get your stuff. I think there’s room for some leadership and some visionaries to step up and deliver that for MSPs, rich.

Rich: Everybody in our audience wants and needs an AI strategy. They all want and need growth of course, too.

And theoretically all growth is good, isn’t it? Maybe not. Which leads us to Erick’s tip of the week.

Erick: Awesome. So just taking a deep breath and from an MSP’s point of view, assessing where we are as an organization and how we want to grow. What is the North star? Where, what are our goals for growth in 2026, and how do we create a strategy rich that is just some around some very basic tenets to maintain focus toward that goal?

At Channel Mastered Rich, we [00:14:00] subscribe to the EOS methodology. We have a very focused way that we meet every week that we set our goals every year. And we work toward those goals, those rocks, that, that lead us to our one year plan, three year plan, et cetera. So MSPs need a version of EOS. Highly recommended it if you pick up the book Traction and take a read on that.

’cause that’s what got me started years ago. But focus is the key here. Most MSPs rich take advice from their peer groups, from the conversations that, we share on this podcast and other podcasts and think about these kind of activities that belong in a larger growth strategy, a focus growth strategy as just activities that are not stitched together.

So when we talk about things like, Hey, truing up your pricing, reviewing your agreements every year and making sure that you’re increasing your pricing ev every year for net new clients and bringing your other clients along, that’s part of. [00:15:00] A larger strategy that MSP should have that say, here’s how we’re gonna focus on growth.

And I’m not gonna talk a lot about bundles and truing up and any of that stuff in this tip of the week. Like I,

Typically do on some of our other shows. I’m gonna talk about understanding more about what drives your business from a core fundamental perspective. Number one thing that we as MSPs have done when we started our business, and we probably still have, are these clients that are no longer ideal clients for us today.

I talk a lot about A, B, and C customers identify who your ideal client profile is, and then if you can’t clearly state who that ideal client profile is, it can’t just be anybody that will, will pay us, right? It has to be. So a, an assessment, just like you would assess a vendor, a [00:16:00] new vendor relationship or opportunity, you’re going to have some requirements, scorecard what that looks like and say, these are the types of clients that we want to work with.

And go out and continue doing your sales and marketing and filter those conversations against that scorecard if they are not a fit. Tip number two, say no to these misaligned opportunities. And this just doesn’t have to adhere just to bringing on new clients. Rich. It can also be on projects that clients want you to do.

I remember back in my immature early, IT company days before we really became MSPs, we would pretty much say yes to anything a client asked for. I remember this one time we were working for a client and they had a bunch of, they had a bar and restaurant and things like that, and they said, Hey, you guys install, do you guys recommend and install and man and help with liquor [00:17:00] control systems?

And our salesperson said, absolutely. We do. Liquor control systems in our sleep came back to us and I said, what the hell is a liquor control system? So those kinds of conversations, you gotta know when to say no or when to say, you know what, let us find a partner that we can partner with to deliver that for you so that we’re not burning our time and eroding our margin, which is exactly what we ended up doing.

We ended up after, spending many hours trying to figure this out. Got somebody that was an expert in it, and then just said, please dig us out of this hole. Ideal client profile, ideal services that you are going to deliver. You probably have a list of things on your McDonald’s menu of things that you do.

You could probably whittle down to just three or four core things, three bundles, three competencies that you excel in. And just focus on honing and improving your delivery of those to increase your top line revenue and margin. And then say no to misaligned [00:18:00] client opportunities and misaligned requests or things that clients wanna drag you into.

And then before approving anything in your stack, new in the scorecard, does this new solution platform service align with our growth focus and check all the boxes? Or is it something opportunistic like a liquor control system that you can drug into needing to, ramp up and try to deliver?

So if you’re gonna include something in your stack, if you’re gonna engage with a vendor. Those are the three areas, rich. It’s ideal client profile, saying no to a misaligned client opportunities or new prospect opportunities and services, and then putting things into your stack that don’t align with this very, very focused goal that you have every year to make sure that you’re driving top line revenue that is the most highly [00:19:00] profitable revenue that you can generate, so that you can increase the value of your organization when it comes time to make a decision on selling that company and taking advantage of all that the rewards of all that hard work you’ve put in.

Rich: Yeah, I mean it, there are a couple of things happening here, and it’s a combination of two closely related issues you’re addressing here, focus and discipline. And it, from a focus standpoint, there’s a kind of addition by subtraction logic to what you’re talking about that I think is counterintuitive for some people.

But if you do the assessment you were talking about and you come up with a profile for your most profitable customers, and you weed out the ones who don’t fit that profile and you make sure that new customers do. Then what you’re doing is building a customer base that is increasingly profitable.

And so you will grow faster in, in a better and more sustainable kind of way. And then the discipline piece of that essentially is to know what it is that you do [00:20:00] for those customers to bring them to the business and keep them there and stay focused on that. Have the discipline to resist the urge or temptation to try something that is outside.

Whatever it is that is, is making you successful, making you great.

Erick: Yeah, I think there’s probably one filter that can be applied to any of these, opportunities. Should we bring on that client? Should we do that project? Should we include this into our stack or sell that thing to our clients?

And the filter is, does this reinforce our focus or dilute it? So just, does it reinforce our focus? Does it lead us to, our mission and vision this year? Or does it dilute it? Are we running down a rabbit hole, right? Lacking efficiency and focus and now we’re spread thin already we’re doing these other things.

That’s the, I think that’s the [00:21:00] litmus test.

Rich: Okay, let’s leave that conversation there and take a quick break so that when we come back on the other side, we can share with you a conversation. Erick and I recently had with Phil Larson. He is the managing director in charge of partner programs for Google Cloud.

Google. A couple of months ago rolled out a new partner program. We’re gonna talk about that. We’re also just gonna take advantage of his expert take on opportunities for folks like you in the cloud and in ai. It is all coming your way in just a moment. So stick around

and welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast, our spotlight interview segment. Folks for reasons that don’t need explanation, we talk a lot about AI and the cloud. We talk about those things a lot, specifically in the context of Microsoft because a lot of the folks in our audience are doing business with Microsoft.

But Microsoft is far from the only company with a [00:22:00] very serious footprint in cloud and ai, which is why we’re very excited to be joined this week on the show by Phil Larson. He is the Managing Director of partner programs Google Cloud. Phil, welcome to the show.

Phil: Thanks so much for having me. It’s my pleasure.

Rich: Ordinarily this is the place where I ask our guests to introduce themselves and tell folks a little bit about the company they work for. I’m gonna guess a hundred percent of our audience knows about Google. So maybe tell folks a little bit about yourself and your role at Google.

Phil: Sure, yeah.

I’m a systems engineering background with an economics double major. So I’ve always played at the intersection of technology and business. And I’ve run partner programs my whole career. So I started working and running partner programs at a small company back in the day at Appian, I ran the VMware partner network for a long time.

I built the Snowflake partner network from the ground up from 2019 pre IPO to 2024. Saw that grow substantially, and I rejoined Google here about a year [00:23:00] and a half ago to rebuild the Google Cloud partner network from the ground up to focus on driving customer outcomes at scale in the age of a

Rich: Yeah.

We you have a unique vantage point on the cloud market and the AI market, and we wanna get into both those things with you. But specifically why we wanted to have you on the show is because I believe it was approximately two months ago, Google rolled out a new version of its partner program.

Tell folks a little bit what’s new, I guess first of all, why revise the program at all and then what’s new in the program you have just recently introduced?

Phil: Oh yeah. Thanks for the question. This is what I came back to Google to do. We did launch on January 15th, the Google Cloud Partner network.

It is not just an update, it’s a complete transformation. We’ve we’re setting the foundation for how to go drive customer value in the age of AI with an ecosystem that’s a hundred thousand plus partners. Put at the [00:24:00] center of that. It’s fundamentally about customer experience. I believe a world class customer experience is delivered through a high quality partner experience, and the old partner program wasn’t measuring some of the right things in this new age.

We need more partners driving co-sell and services activities to, to go bring workloads into production of at customer sites of all sizes. At the end of the day, customers need confidence that when they’re engaging with a Google Cloud partner, that that partner has done similar work. It’s similarly situated in the past, and now the program’s measuring that better than anyone else is doing at Hyperscale.

Erick: Yeah. And what caught my eye, Philip, was the transition from the, original program to this modern feel for the program. Things like rewarding and sending partners for all the motions that it takes to bring on a new customer. We’re seeing that in market now with more modern partner programs like, [00:25:00] incentivizing and rewarding for the presale support and co innovation and influence and things like that.

If you could pick, it might be a, an unfair question, but if you could pick. One thing that MSB should particularly pay attention to? What would that be?

Phil: It’s a really great question. I think my answer would be outcomes over fulfillment. We are shifting our entire ecosystem, not just the MSP world, not just in a particular customer segment, SMB corporate enterprise or what have you.

We’re shifting across the board from what has historically been a more fulfillment centric model to one that is entirely outcome centric. That ensures that the partners that we’re investing in are the ones that are driving tangible results and innovation for our customers. So I’d encourage the MSP community to continue to think through how in the age of ai, they can con, re reimagine [00:26:00] their business to continue to drive outcomes for customers.

Rich: You were talking in explaining the origins of the new partner program about wanting to improve partner experience. And we talk a lot on the show about how MSPs can and should use AI to improve internal workflows, make things more efficient. One of the interesting things about the new program that you talk about at a high level in the blog post announcing it, and we’ll link to that in the show notes, but a apparently you guys are using Google AI to automate some of the administrative work that partners did before or would normally do with a company like Google.

Can you talk a little bit about the role of AI and automation in this new program?

Phil: Yeah it’s it’s, look, it’s part of the reason I came to Google to do this. For someone who’s done partner programs their entire career the question is like. Where would you wanna do it in the age of ai?

And I want to do it [00:27:00] where, at a place that has, the full AI stack from the infrastructure all the way up. Because I get to play with that stuff internally and rethink and reimagine how you’d engage with partners at scale with that kind of technology. I personally think that we’re living in an era where five years from now, nobody’s gonna remember how you built or managed an ecosystem at scale without ai.

It’s just gonna be so transformative in it. And so yeah, we are looking across the board if you think of. An ecosystem of this size. There’s onboarding of new partners. There’s ramping those partners up from an enablement standpoint and a training standpoint. There’s joint business planning with them, co-selling effectively with them, driving joint delivery with them helping customers find partners through partner finder tools, incentivizing them.

We are infusing our AI technology into every single aspect of that. I personally, I mean it’s a little bit metaphysical, but we’re using our AI leadership to create an e to, to, to power the [00:28:00] experience for an ecosystem that is gaining the AI skills necessary to ultimately create AI outcomes for customers.

So it’s kinda like this three tier mechanism of how we’re using AI to ultimately drive customer outcomes. I think. It’s an additive stool, if you will. Those are the three legs of the stool. Like when you put ’em together, it creates a really great differentiator for Google and a really great reason why partners want to work with us.

Erick: Philip, your experience and background, perfectly positions you to have a really good sense of how partners can make money in the cloud. So from your perspective, what are the, obvious areas that are, that go unexplored or un exploited by MSPs in finding additional revenue opportunities for their partners in the cloud?

Where are they leaving easy money on the table from your perspective?

Phil: That’s a great question [00:29:00] too. I, e every MSP is a little bit different, so there’s a little bit of generalization that you have to bring to, to answer something like that. But there are a lot of MSPs that are out there providing cost efficiency or predictability to what otherwise would be unpredictable.

Having to go, staff up and in-house. IT team can be expensive. MSPs are able to bring specialized expertise in ways where, it’s hard to build that expertise or expensive to build that expertise in-house. A lot of MSPs bring proactive management to situations where otherwise the organization would be kinda like in firefighting mode of reactively trying to put out fires as they came up.

And so I think there’s just the historical view of all of the value that MSPs have been adding, and then the question, is like. How does AI change that and what opportunities come from that? And Erick, to your point I think it’s pretty significant. I think if you look at these mega [00:30:00] trends more and more customers are adopting cloud technology broadly, and there’s a strong need from partners like MSPs for cloud financial operations as a service, for instance.

I think that’s underutilized at the moment. There are a lot of it, for large enterprises in their cloud spend, they’ve got resources to go optimize that spend, make sure there’s not leakage, make sure that they’re using, the committed use discounts and things of that nature to, to make sure they’re mi minimizing spend where possible MSPs have the potential to provide that kind of service to segments across the board.

But SMB in particular where, there’s a, there’s. The risk of being over-provisioned or leaking money and, or leaking SaaS seats because you’re not optimizing this kind of spend. So I think the opportunity to act as a cloud CFO for these companies and make sure that you’re optimizing, financial spend is one, one area.

I [00:31:00] think data. Look it, I can’t work at Google and not talk data data as a service across customer segments data is growing. There’s a lot of people who say data is the new oil or whatever, but, organ, these organizations are sitting on oftentimes mountains of data across their CRM systems, their ERP systems, their web analytics, depending on their businesses.

And I think there’s an opportunity for MSPs to, not to better manage that data infrastructure and provide visibility and insights against it. I think it’s, I’m biased here, obviously given my background, but I think when you start building helping support a company’s business intelligence layer, you become absolutely indispensable.

You move from just being a utility player to like, a strategic partner for the duration. So I think there’s opportunity around data and I think the third, I feel like there’s [00:32:00] a long-winded answer, so apologies for that. I think the last thing I’d say about it is like.

Infusing AI into, in the same way I’m looking at how do you infuse AI into everything that that I’m doing around partner programs. I think MSPs should be doing the same thing. At the end of the day, a lot of life is just inputs and outputs. MSPs are taking tickets in and, case resolutions out.

Looking at how you can use AI to, to manage those inputs, analyze those inputs, and use AI to, to create higher quality outputs regardless of the business process that you’re running. I’d say those are all underutilized opportunities.

Erick: Yeah. Let me, I’d like to put a finer point on that question if I could.

So I always talk about, taking the conversation out of the server room and into the boardroom, right? Being more strategically relevant to your clients and specifically, focusing on the AI part of your conversation there. I think that is the biggest opportunity for MSPs to. Distinguish themselves and differentiate [00:33:00] themselves and add that irreplaceable kind of business partnership that you just spoke about.

Philip, what’s your take?

Phil: I agree wholeheartedly. I think if you could take any aspect of that. If you’re keeping, if part of your job as an MSP is keeping the IT running at an organization, monitoring the servers, patching oss, then there’s pain points related to that exist today in the pre AI era.

Alert fatigue. There’s so many alerts. I don’t know which ones matter. Why are we still spending human resources against these routine tickets, like password resets and VPN issues? How do we better handle after hours, incidents. And AI has solutions to some of these things.

Predictive monitoring, it can go look at the whole alert history and say, these 12 seem to have the same root cause. Avoid the noise of looking at all 12. Solve this one root cause and you can make some of that [00:34:00] alert fatigue go away. Auto remediation and a help desk standpoint where tier zero, tier one are being handled automatically through ai, 24 by seven with no human support.

IJI mean, that’s just keeping it running, right? So like I, I ju even in something as basic and as timeless as that’s been, I think AI is has the potential to go revolutionize. Cybersecurity is another area. License management is another area, whatev, whatever.

Wherever you go, AI has the potential to do it. Better and make you more strategic. You mentioned something, from the server room to the boardroom. I actually think in a lot of ways it has the potential to, to act almost, and help MSPs become more like virtual CIOs. Which, which empowers you to enter the boardroom.

I think one of the, if you take cybersecurity as an example, which is a real, one of the reasons a lot of, companies are leaning on Google. We tend to do the security side very well. [00:35:00] But if you’ve ever had to read a security report, it’s tough to understand as a business user, a CEO, or and so even just using ai, Hey, summarize this 20 page, and put it in, in, in a language that a business per executive should be able to understand.

Is meaningful and, if you’re creating QBR decks, AI has the potential to, to frame those decks and create those in a way that is, is more easily consumed by a business audience. And so I, I do, I think it is doing exactly what you’re saying. It’s helping move MSPs out of the server room and into the boardroom.

Rich: Ai you were talking about data finops or financial optimization. Let’s put some of this specifically in the context of Google and what partners can be doing with Google, because to the extent that folks in our audience are partnering already with Google, and I imagine a lot of them are, it’s probably in the context of Google Workspace, [00:36:00] but as you think about some of those other opportunities you are outlining out there what should people in the audience here be thinking about in terms of how Google can help them go after those opportunities?

Phil: Opportunities. Gemini Enterprise. Gemini. Enterprise, Gemini Enterprise. I so you said moving from, I like that. Moving from the server room to the boardroom. I also think that. If you are a little genErick about MSPs and basically say, Hey, we should move beyond tickets to managing agents.

I do think that’s the future for MSPs is more and more frequently there are gonna be, agents talking to the data layer at these companies, agents talking to the CRM systems and the er, the ERP systems on, on, on the behalf. And there’s an opportunity for MSPs to manage that agentic intelligence.

If you think of that age agentic layer over time, and I get nerdy about that, I think it’s basically taming intelligence. We tamed water, we [00:37:00] tamed electricity, we tamed, arguably knowledge with the internet. Now we’re in the process of taming intelligence and turning it on like a utility.

And I think MSPs in a lot of these companies are gonna like control that, you know, or have the ability to manage that age agentic layer on behalf of organizations whose business model isn’t managing that. Like a, a company that’s whose who’s in healthcare.

Their business model isn’t gonna manage a age agentic interfaces to data layers. They’d probably be willing to go pay someone to go do that on their behalf so that they can go, invent new drugs or do whatever they do. And so I think Gemini Enterprise for us becomes a, an extremely strategic add-on to workspace and transformation and in the collaboration layer more broadly.

And it, and we anticipate that it can, for a lot of organizations, be the entry point into that age agentic architecture that, you know untapped intelligence. And so [00:38:00] I would heavily encourage more and more partners to get out in front of that by understanding where age agentic interfaces are going.

Understanding Gemini Enterprise as a leading tool for those age agentic interfaces and understanding how you could monetize that as a service across the segment. But, especially in SMBs and corporate segment.

Erick: Well, Philip, it sounds like I struck a chord with the Seral room to the boardroom thought.

What do you think about, you mentioned VCIO, I’ve been saying VC A IO for a while now as well, so now you become. The chief AI officer, the virtual chief AI officer. So I wanted to run that by you and get your spin on it.

Phil: Yeah, I think it it’s exactly right. I think.

I think that what is a virtual CIO base in, in this [00:39:00] context, you want to be moving from reactive to proactive, providing intelligence back so that, executives can make, strategic thoughts and you want to be able to help inform these decisions.

You also want on a quarterly basis to, to help give line of sight to the kinds of, issues that you help prevent. And that’s a tough thing to do, but like giving visibility into the fires that never got started that you didn’t have to put out because you were proactively managing these things.

And I think you’re exactly right. As AI becomes part of just this standard processes by which people run their businesses as AI becomes a standard mechanism by which their human, employees are, accomplishing their work on a day-to-day basis. And as the agents, as increasingly it’s agents that are interface with the data layers at these companies it is [00:40:00] going to be the expectation at an executive boardroom level that CIOs understand that AI architecture can speak to the risks of it, can speak to the security around it, can speak to the upside.

For the business of doing it at scale. And so I do think I like the term virtual, C-I-A-A-I-O and I think MSPs are gonna have an important role to play in providing that as a service.

Erick: So if we follow that train of thought then, and, the VC A IO is the MSP now, who’s leading these conversations in the boardroom, being more strategic about it, talking about governance, identifying kind of shadow AI that’s running around, the users are using stuff, the platforms that the business is using, have, AI being embedded into it.

Making sure that there’s, governance and policies around that. Is that a very strategic way in your in your. [00:41:00] Thought process for MSPs to start building more AI based revenue strategically, valuable products that generate more revenue for them with their existing clients.

What are your thoughts there?

Phil: I do think so. I think I think when you’re in, in, in an old world of manage your it and we fix things when they break, there’s only so much money people are gonna be willing to spend for that. But when you can use AI to start telling an MSP story of, we prevent downtime and reduce risk by aligning your technology to your business goals.

In ways that couldn’t have been done before, before ai, through, through automation so that you can get better business outcomes faster at a lower cost. You’re having a much, much more strategic conversation than the one of Hey, when you know, when these things go [00:42:00] down, we can help fix it for you.

So I do think there’s, that, that shift from reactive to proactive is measurable and quantifiable for a lot of companies of what, if AI can help us, with fewer outages, fewer emergencies and measurable uptime, how many more drugs could we, we build without the distraction of that?

How much more could our business, provide, or what new markets or revenue streams could we explore without that distraction? And you add the. That together with the, security side of it. Don’t need more alerts, we need better decision making. We don’t need, I, I think they, they start to add up across the board.

Every every process gets a little better. With ai, every in interaction gets a little bit better with a help desk with ai, and that frees up resources to go build businesses. I think the friction of it’s never been easier to [00:43:00] start a company. Like it’s never been like, you can use AI to go figure out the legal stuff and get a jumpstart.

If that’s the constraint that you have with it. If your constraint is the idea, like it can, help ideate, with this thing. And so I think across the board, AI is just removing friction from the process of starting companies and scaling companies and MSPs would do well to really figure out what friction it can take out of the processes they’re managing on behalf of customers so that they can uplevel and continue to move up the strategic stack.

Rich: That’s actually a great segue to something I wanted to ask you about, because literally right before we got together to record this interview, I was doing a little number crunching for a channel mastered client using a data analysis application that I vibe coded a few weeks ago in Gemini.

Phil: Right.

Rich: And EE Erick’s probably sick [00:44:00] and tired of hearing about this by now. I talk about it a lot, but every time I talk about it with people I emphasize how. Profoundly incompetent programming. I am, I do not know how to program, and I can now on my own, in a matter of minutes, create applications that are functional and useful.

And it surprises me, though, a little bit, Phil, how few people in our industry,

Phil: yeah.

Rich: Thinking about this, taking advantage of it internally, using it to build applications for clients. Talk a little bit about the what the channel partners in our audience should be thinking about with respect to building applications in ai.

Phil: Oh my gosh. I you struck another nerve. I love it. Like we, when we were building the Google Cloud Partner network the programmatic infrastructure as well as the system behind it we were vibe coding in all of these workshops. I got I, you’d think that I would have been just, proactive about doing that, but it turned out that our engineering team set up a workshop and they’re like, we’re all gonna go vibe [00:45:00] code. And I’m like, all of us, but you’re absolutely right. The amount of ideas that were generated in 10 minutes and visual, like pictures worth a thousand words worth, you were able to accomplish in a two hour workshop with, a few sessions of 10 minute vibe coding, what would’ve taken like weeks of trying to align and people talking over each other and the ideas are now, the best of those ideas that emerged from that are, and now launched on January 15th as part of this.

So I, I do think that the ability to take idea to reality. Has never been faster. And I think we’re just scratching the surface of people understanding it. I, like it’s a little bit maybe OO off color, but my father’s writing a book. He was under Secretary of State for Madeline Albright and Colin Powell for a long period of time and working at the State Department, and he is saying, Hey, like these, this deep research is massively valuable even to him as he’s mapping out [00:46:00] the structure of what this could look like.

My son, who he is in high school studying, trigonometry is literally creating vibe coded, applications to go quiz him, on upcoming tests. And so it’s an absolute travesty that we’re not using it more in industry when like the, the two ends of the stream of society are starting to realize that the power of this.

So I do think any partner. That’s out there that isn’t using Gemini on a daily basis is missing out on an opportunity to go train for the future.

Erick: Yeah. And Rich I am never get tired of hearing you tell me stories about Phil Fast thing. You’ve hot coded. In fact, Phil, just to be candid I just said, rich teach me how to do it.

And he said, I don’t need to teach you here, just go here. And he sent me a link to Gemini and I’m like, okay. So yeah, it, we all use AI every [00:47:00] single day and there’s endless opportunities to explore and expand things. Like I am the kind of person that like, you know I have this, un endless list of to-do things right.

All my to-dos, and I’m like, oh my goodness. I just, the more and more I include AI into helping me get those to-dos done, the productivity skyrockets. And of course there’s always, trust but verify, right? Always the, but it helps data gathering, it helps with analysis and then trust, but verify.

But man, I get so much more done and it’s, it, I have more mental horsepower because I’m not straining my brain on this minutiae that kind of taxes us sometimes. So I’m, I’m enjoying it. Phil, for partners that wants to learn more about Google and all of the, advantages [00:48:00] of Gemini and AI and things like that where, what does Google offer in terms of, training and resources and things like that around the AI services we’ve been discussing so far?

Phil: Oh it’s there’s a ton and it’s coming out fast. For any organization, please do join the Google Cloud partner network if you haven’t already. Any partner that has been working with us is a part of it already. Within that we automatically link out to learning management systems, to provide training across the board.

We have formalized certifications at an associate level, like our Gale gen ai leader certification as well as professional level certifications at a higher level that, that you can go achieve. Gail is very approachable. I’m having my whole team go through it. And and we’re more, on the business side than on the Pure tech side.

And then within that, there’s no shortage of five minute, 10 minute, hour long kind of things that are, very targeted [00:49:00] and specific on topics related to ai. It’s never been, easier to get trained up, I’d say as a partner for this. And in fact, it’s one of the areas where we’re using AI is like AI coaches, learning coaches.

So if you have any questions around it, you can ask ai what you should take next, and it’ll have recommendations for you. But yeah, the, I that I, I would, it’s the growth. I, I think I need to be a little bit careful or HR is gonna, and PR is gonna get mad at me, but like the growth rates around this AI stuff is insane.

So the wave is here. It’s the wave’s getting bigger, not smaller. And so the time to, to ramp up and the time to, to think through the implications of this for your business are now and Google’s here to help.

Rich: And this is exactly why we very much appreciate you coming on the show with us, Phil.

Very interesting conversation and obviously a very timely one as well. For anyone in the audience here who wants to get in touch, learn more about [00:50:00] you or just learn more about the Google Cloud partner network, where would you advise them to go?

Phil: Sure. If you wanna connect with me, connect with me on LinkedIn, that’d be great.

I’m pretty, pretty good on, on that and I welcome any discussions related to partnering or what Google can do for our ecosystem and or what the opportunities are around AI there. If you’re interested in in participating in the program, please go to Google’s Google Cloud website and in the partnering section and log into the new Google Cloud partner network and start your journey there.

Rich: Alright. Phil, thank you very much again for joining us on the show. Folks, Erick and I are gonna take a quick break right now. When we come back on the other side, we’re gonna share some parting thoughts about this conversation with Phil arson of Google. We’re gonna have a little fun. We’re gonna wrap up the show, stick around.

We’ll be right back[00:51:00]

and welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast. One last thank you to Phil Larson for taking some time out of a busy schedule to join us. Engage in that very interesting conversation with us. Lots to chew on there. Erick. I will just say quickly. It was not by design, but just by nature of what we were talking about we were giving him lots of opportunities.

To talk about Google products and I was refreshed by how rarely he leapt at the opportunity to turn this into a promotional conversation. Kudos. Thank you to Phil for keeping so much of that in the thought leadership realm. ’cause that’s really what we wanted to get out of him was just what does the market look like from the perspective of someone who’s building program designed to, to help partners take advantage of that.

And then it was interesting, if you think about the needs he identified and the service opportunities there around. Data and financial optimization. We ha got into a whole sort of application building, vibe, coding kind of conversation there. [00:52:00] It’s not necessarily the stuff that always seems to come up in these kinds of conversations.

And it’s a great illustration of the fact that there are a lot of different opportunities very real opportunities that address very real needs for a lot of different customers out then and out there. And circling back to what we were talking about, the bidding beginning of the show, you can pick any one of those and others that we didn’t even get into around AI security and and so on.

You can pick any one of those and make that your starting point and set yourself up pretty well to to get some momentum going. But interesting take on some different opportunities for folks in the audience to think about.

Erick: Yes, what a wide ranging conversation we had with Bill.

And I really enjoyed just geeking out and nerding out a little bit with him. ’cause like I had that, I felt a connection there with him. And I think, from an MSP’s perspective, like you said, rich kind of, there’s all these opportunities out there. But I’ll bet you, I’ll [00:53:00] bet you that a lot of MSPs picked up on the thread about, man, what if we, our technical team took, a couple of hours and we did a few vibe coding sessions, this quarter and just see what would come of that for the MSP’s practice.

Because that really got me thinking. And again, trying to, follow in your footsteps rich and get into a little bit of vibe coding myself, because I’ve got so many ideas that, you know, typically I feel like many people do. It’s i’ve gotta do this, I’ve gotta develop this.

I’ve gotta, I do things with trying to upload and integrate and spreadsheets and make sure that formulas work based on tabs I’m doing, and I’m thinking, man, there’s lots of ways that I could simplify that by picking up, a regimen of vibe coating. I’m even thinking rich of carving out, an hour a week every week and just focusing just on that again, back to the tip of the week.

You, does it improve my focus? Does it help [00:54:00] me get things done? You’ve got some great successes on your own, but I would encourage MSPs to think about doing that. Bring some, bring some lunch in, do a, extended lunch with the team and. Run through some ideas and see what you can come up with in some vibe coding.

I bet you’ll come up with some things that might be valuable for not only for your practice, but maybe for some of your clients as well.

Rich: And, not for nothing. I’ll just point out based on conversations I’ve had in recent weeks with the CEOs of very large MSP roll-ups, if they are thinking about acquiring you and you clearly have some AI expertise, it doesn’t have to be application building, but it can be, right?

If you built some AI muscle inside the organization that will influence your price in a beneficial way for you. Yeah I think it’s a really smart idea to take an hour, two hours a week just to invest in this kind of thing, not just [00:55:00] because it’s cool and it’s interesting and who knows, but the more that you are building a culture around AI innovation inside the business, the more successful you’re gonna be with your customers and the more appealing you will be when exit time comes to an acquirer.

Erick: Yeah, agreed. Any kind of IP that you can develop, in general is gonna increase your valuation, but. Specifically in, with ai, that one seems to be the thing that is driving most of the interest and investment in the channel right now.

Rich: So folks that leaves us time with just or time for just one last thing.

And there, there are times in life where you feel pretty good about what you’ve accomplished and and how all your hard work has paid off. And then there are other times when you just feel like a slacker. And this is one of those times because a 12-year-old in Dallas has recently completed a quest to achieve nuclear fusion.

That’s right. There’s a 12-year-old in Dallas who in a [00:56:00] laboratory. Has created nuclear fusion. And by the way, Erick this was a four year pro. This is very difficult to do. Let’s be clear on that. He’s not the first person to do it. But he is we believe right now the official Guinness World record holder is 13 years old, or was when he got to fusion.

And this Aiden McMillan of Dallas has applied to be recognized by Guinness as the new youngest to reach fusion. And he got started when he was eight. Took him four years, but at at age 12 he pulls it off and congratulations to him. The most amusing part of the story is when he was eight years old and and decided he wanted to do this and told his mother about it.

And the, he said the alarm bells went off with mom. He must have had to explain to her. Now you’re thinking fission. This is fusion. This is safer. Mom. I’m not trying to split the atom in the basement, but she was okay with it. And now I’m sure she’s very glad for giving her approval.

Erick: Oh, boy.

Yeah. Aiden, [00:57:00] Jimmy Neutron McMillan is what? I’m gonna give him a middle name on that one. What an achievement.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah. Congratulations to you, Aiden, and thank you very much, audience for joining us for another episode of MSP Chat. We’re gonna be back in a week’s time 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 we’d like to check us out on video, you can go to YouTube, book up MSP chat. You’ll find us there. If you’re watching us on YouTube, but you listen to audio podcasts, go to Apple, Google, Spotify, wherever you get ’em.

You’re probably gonna find Ms. P Chat there as well. And wherever it is you do find us, please subscribe, rate review. It’s gonna help other people find and enjoy the show just like you. This show is produced by the great Riley Simpson, part of the team with us here at Channel Master, where we help vendors build thriving.

MSP channels. You can learn more about our end-to-end set of services for that at msp, excuse me, www.channel mastered.com. I’m thinking [00:58:00] ahead to msp, mastered our sister organization. That’s Erick working one-on-one with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business. That URL learn more is www.mspmaster.com.

So once again, thank you for joining us. We’ll see you in a week. Until then, please remember, as we so often encourage you to, you can’t spell channel. Without MSP.