Episode 112: No Seagulling

Erick and Rich discuss the reasons MSPs need to be implementing AI automation tools and the risk limits they should consider when doing so, as well as concrete strategies for growing profits and exit value by simplifying your tool stack and customer base. Then they’re joined by Pinar Ormeci of Lexful to discuss that company’s ambitious new AI-native system of record for MSPs. And finally, one last thing: A boxing ring TKO in which the “T” stands for toupee rather than technical.

Discussed in this episode:

Summary of Omdia’s 2026 MSP predictions

Lexful Goes God-Mode on AI

Boxer loses hairpiece in the ring and blames mother’s shampoo

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 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 to channel mastered, the organization responsible for the show.

I’m joined with you side by side this week as I am every week by our CEO and chief strategist, channel mastered. His name is Erick Simpson. Erick, how you doing?

Erick: Doing great, rich. Getting ready for taking a, a few well-deserved days off next week for my family vacation.

Rich: You, you’re gonna be hitting the slopes, right?

Erick: Yeah, we’re gonna be hitting the slopes in Park City.

Rich: Lovely, [00:01:00] lovely. Well don’t bring a laptop, turn off the phone. Just go skiing and, and watch sports on TV and, and whatever you do to relax. You’ve earned some time off, buddy.

Erick: You really should be a comedian Rich You, that that’s, that’s just saying.

Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Well, I will try to unplug as much as possible, but as most folks in our audience know, it is really, really hard to completely unplug for an entire week when you’ve got a lot of balls you’re juggling. So, yeah. I’ll do my best, my friend.

Rich: Okay. Well, yeah, if, if you can get it from four balls to three that that, that’s progress.

So just do what you can, take some time off. In the meantime, let’s dive into our story of the week and stay with me on this one. Erick, I’m gonna take you on a little bit of a journey here. But this, this is something that’s on my mind right now as I’m working on this week’s edition of Channel Holic, my blog.

So this week, or actually it was last week, oia the analyst organization published their [00:02:00] 2026 MSP predictions report. It was authored by Robin oti, one of the analysts over there, FYI. He’s gonna be our guest on the show a few episodes from now. So we’ll, we’ll get into that in detail with him.

But one of the things that they. Announced when they released this report, is that the best case scenario in 2026 has managed services revenue growing 10% to 635 billion globally. Now that, that’s a best case scenario. Keep in mind though, that’s a little below historical norms for managed services growth year over year.

And it’s actually a little bit below the overall prediction at OIA for it. Spending growth in 2026 is 10.2%. So 10% growth, you know, and again, best case, but even if it comes in eight, 9%, nothing to feel too terrible about, but it does suggest that this is going to be a somewhat weaker, a [00:03:00] slower. Year four MSPs and they’ve seen in the recent past.

Most we do, OIA says, and I think they’re right to economic issues, global uncertainty et cetera. So, okay, you’re an MSP, you’ve got that going on. Basically you’ve also got the fact that you are competing with some very, very large MSPs, spending a lot of money on AI automation tools.

And there are a lot of tools available to you as well. But if you want to keep your bottom line healthy in what’s gonna be a somewhat more difficult financial environment in 2026, and you wanna stay competitive with these big companies that are investing in AI based automation, you probably need to be thinking about that too.

And maybe even hitting the gas pedal a little bit, doing a little bit more of that. This might be a good time for that. Which brings us to where I’m going here. ’cause it’s kind of a, a conundrum in my mind and I’m curious to get your take on it. So one of the things I’m gonna be writing about in Channel Hallock this week is a, a, a [00:04:00] profile of a startup called Nites, N-A-N-I-T-E-S.

They’re not even in, they’re not GA yet but they are building an AI powered network management tool. Highly autonomous, but it’s still very much a human in the loop kind of system. So it will triage and diagnose and it’ll do everything required to fix this network issue except actually fix it.

Then it goes to a technician says, here’s what I wanna do, should I do it? Basically? And I asked Alex Cronin is his name, the founder of the company? You know, are are you going? I, I asked everyone at these AI native startups, this question, how autonomous are you going? And, and when do you expect to get there?

And he’s thinking about maybe someday the system could be fully autonomous, but he basically said, I will never flip that switch as long as LLMs continue to hallucinate. And LLMs [00:05:00] are always going to hallucinate. This is me talking, not him, but that’s not going away, right? Like even OpenAI says, we can reduce hallucination and we’re doing that.

We’re never gonna eliminate it for various reasons. And there are all sorts of people who say, it’s like a feature, not a bug. You, you get useful creative information out of the system because it hallucinates hallucinations not going away. Networks are critical infrastructure that’s not changing. And so Nan, I certainly kind of believes it’s always pretty much always going to be dangerous for a fully autonomous AI network management system to be operating in an MSP environment.

And the question this raises for me are, okay, so let’s say level one. Like password resets, that’s one end of a spectrum. Pretty safe. You can use AI to do that fully autonomously now, and maybe at the other end of the spectrum, it’s anything having to deal with the network, [00:06:00] anything having to do with critical infrastructure, that might be over the line too much.

If you’re an MSP under some financial and competitive pressure to go as far as you can on AI automation, where do you draw the line and how do you figure that out? I, I don’t have an answer to that question. Like I said, this is something I’m writing about in the blog this week. This is the question I’m asking.

I’ll, I’ll see. Do you have any thoughts on that? And does it strike you as it does me? Is something at MSP kind of needs to figure out one of the many things about AI they’ve gotta figure out these days?

Erick: Mm mm. Hold, hold that thought. ’cause I wanna first go back to the Amia forecast and then I’ll jump back into this.

Rich: Yeah.

Erick: Hot, hot bath water of how far do we allow AI to go? So what would be interesting to me, rich, you know, ’cause I’m, I’m listening, you know, to the new [00:07:00] to you described the new stats and, and I completely understand why there’s uncertainty, I think all of us do in, in the markets these days. But what I would be curious to imagine, to, to think about is it is not just the economic, you know, stressors that are, that may be creating this top line revenue pressure entirely.

What I’m also thinking is, you know, is it because MSPs, and I’m not sure, I don’t know, but I’m gonna hit you with this. Is it because MSPs. Are looking to improve efficiency and profitability by introducing AI and so not really growing top line revenue. But the other indicator would be, are they growing bottom line profitability?

I would love to see if there’s some statistics about that year over year. Like where can we figure that out? Because if, if top line is not growing as fast [00:08:00] as it has been year over year, historically, is bottom line growing.

Rich: So a couple of quick things. So remember Robin’s coming on the show in a few weeks, so hold on to that question ’cause we can ask it of him and get his take on that.

Erick: Yeah.

Rich: The other thing is that growth, that 10% growth number, that top line number, that’s money being spent by businesses, MSPs, right? That’s the, the, the income coming to. But you’re asking a very important question, and this is something for us to ask Robin, about the India’s take on that is the issue is, is economic uncertainty, global uncertainty, et cetera.

But there are going to be people who are gonna wonder, are businesses spending less with MSPs because they don’t need Ms. P services as much thanks to ai. He doesn’t think that’s the explanation for what I can make out, and that’s not to me the sort of Occam’s razor explanation for what’s going on here.

But it’s not a totally implausible theory [00:09:00] either. And it’s, and it’s, you know, it very much kind of echoes a lot of the nervousness slash panic we’ve seen on Wall Street around the effect of AI on SaaS companies and so on. And so that is a topic we can get into on the show in a few weeks directly with Robin oti.

Erick: Yeah, I’m looking forward to that conversation very much. So back to your, you know, when does Skynet officially launch here as the AI’s become, you know, more system of action? You know, as we’ve been talking about recently and, and more autonomous within some guardrails, I think Rich, that the seasoned mature MSPs will be very, very cautious about how much they’ll, they’ll be pushing the envelope a little bit further, but they’ll be much more cautious or, or lean much more cautiously toward allowing AI to actually take action.

You know, they, they will be, you know, they will [00:10:00] take, take a, a process of careful consideration testing and then kind of unlocking some features along the way. What I’m not so sure. About are the new MSPs that are, that are starting businesses today. All these new MSPs that are more born in the cloud e you know, and, and are just more out there without that, you know, that that experience and, you know, the pain of failure and that some of us veterans have experienced along the way.

Those are the folks that I’m not so sure will not see an opportunity to try a little, you know, a little bit of more relaxed perspective on, on these things. So my guidance would be, you know, treat it like, treat it like a firewall. You know, everything. Nothing is being done by the ai. You’re, it’s [00:11:00] asking for your approval, someone senior in your organization.

Depending upon the severity or the impact of that change, there’s you, you’re never gonna get away from change management. And so with the advent of ai, I fear that we may skip some of those change management best practices where we are identifying the need for change. We are exploring all the ramifications of that change.

We are requesting approval to implement that change. Then we’re monitoring that change in case we need to roll it back. I mean, this, these are all tenets of just best practices it service management. When the AI is out there just doing things, you know, it’s, it, it, it can be it can be disastrous if it, it does the wrong thing or exposes data or allows someone internally in a user customer’s environment to have access to data that they shouldn’t have through, you know, their LLM that they’re using internally.

I mean, there’s a lot of [00:12:00] governance here. But the first step for governance is for the MSP themselves.

Rich: Yeah. You know, I I really like the generational take on this that, that you, you brought up there. ’cause it’s reminding me of a, a conversation we had last fall, I think it was at the DattoCon conference with the CEO and CRO of Pia, which is one of the service AI service desk automation that a pretty well known one.

And they told us basically we could add a lot of, a lot more autonomy to the system right now than we have in production. But we’re, we’re trying not to get too far out in front of the MSPs and what their comfort comfortable with basically. And I think the idea that somebody who’s been in managed services for a period of time now has a different comfort level with autonomous AI than a younger, new to the market.

Sort of born in the ai kind of MSP is probably right, and over [00:13:00] time you’re gonna see people get more comfortable, more quickly with more autonomy and so on. But but yeah, that, that, that, I think the comfort level is actually going to be a defining issue in terms of how far people are, are are willing to go.

Erick: I mean, think about it this way, rich. If, if I’m the CTO in an enterprise, you know, as you know, as I have been, I’m gonna be very, very cautious about anything that I introduce into that enterprise IT infrastructure. And MSPs are the outsourced IT department and the CIOs, the VC tos, the, you know, VCs, those VC A IO, you’ve got to be the VC A IO as if you’re running that enterprise infrastructure, even if it’s a.

15 user SMB, I mean, it becomes more critical because, you know, that can, you know, the mistakes made for a smaller [00:14:00] client can have much higher detrimental impacts. I mean, heck, you know, we’ve seen things that force SMBs to go outta business you know, based upon technology or security or the lack thereof.

Rich: Well that right there is a good reason to be cautious about introducing something new into the business. Another good reason is every time you introduce something, you’re potentially introducing complexity, which is in and of itself a problem. And it takes us straight to your tip of the week.

Erick.

Erick: Yeah, thanks Rich. So, yeah, so as we talk about, you know, revenue growth and profitability and governance for MSPs and all, all of these business owners, start a business because they want to build some equity. They want to, to generate as much highly profitable revenue as possible. And the enemy of, of having a great [00:15:00] revenue strategy and a profitable revenue strategy is complexity.

So, you know, I know that there are many MSPs out there that, you know, test and, and, and pressure test new technologies all the time. That’s a great process to identify new upcoming services or solutions or things that you can roll into your client’s environments. But I also know that that in and of itself can be very distracting to an organization.

You know, I, I, and I’m, I’m a you know. I won’t say a victim of this, but I think I’ve, I’ve done this myself where I’ve gone to in my early career, you know, gone to these shows and things and saw these great solutions and then come in and I have one colleague that used to call it Sea Gulling where a seagull, you know, flies over and just, you know, delivers a goodie on the way on people’s heads or whatever.

So I’d come in, I’d seagull all this stuff to, you know, my, my lead engineers and stuff and say, Hey, look at all this great stuff. You know, go [00:16:00] take a demo and do all this stuff. Distracting, distracting, distracting. So, you know, focus, we, we spoke recently on the show tip of the week was just maintaining focus and being very clear about it.

The, the, the market leading MSPs Rich are trying to simplify to scale, right? Trying to reduce complexity. We’re calling it sprawl, technology sprawl, vendor sprawl. So if your business is getting more complex, but not more profitable, here’s three tips to give you a clarity. Number one, always, always review your, your, your service catalog.

Understand everything that you’re managing for clients. Because if you’ve been in the MSP business for, you know, a decade, you’ve probably got services and solutions that you no longer sell to new clients, but you’re supporting older clients with. You may have bloat, you may have services [00:17:00] that you could reduce the cost of by either negotiating with your existing vendor partners or looking at other opportunities.

But again, maintaining focus. If your focus is to increase profitability, rich, everything that derails you or, or becomes noise and distracts you from doing that is a negative to you and your team and your organization. Believe me, technicians don’t want to manage 17, 20 50 solutions for clients. They want a stack that they can get trained on, get certified on, and deliver wins.

And so do MSP business owners. So look at your stack, try to do it. I, I would say, you know, is, is quarterly too much? Maybe for some organizations, maybe bi-annually. Certainly every year you’ve gotta look at what you’re doing and especially when it’s close time to renewal for some of your products and services.

This is the time to be assessing your options. Number two, review your top [00:18:00] 10 clients for delivery friction. Sometimes we, we bring on clients and we hang onto them, rich, not because they’re the easiest, most strategic folks to, to work with, but because they represent such a large portion of our top line revenue, which in and of itself is a risk, right?

Having more than about 15% of your total revenue. Being allocated to one client is risky. Buyers don’t like that. They don’t like top 10% of your client base you know, consuming more than 25% of your total revenue, right? So there’s that revenue that, that revenue concentration risk that we talk about.

Look for accounts that are just not growing stagnant, you know, no, no growth opportunity. And look for those folks that are creating more work for your team and be honest with them if you need to raise your rates to support them if they’re underwater. I [00:19:00] mean, we know, I know a few, a handful of MSPs that I know personally that are, are maintaining large accounts because they’re not as, they may not be as profitable as somebody they would sell their package to tomorrow, but because the cash flow is cash flowing, the business, which in of its in and of itself, you know, is is another challenge.

So take a look at where your margins are. Take a look at your lowest margin clients and start making some, you know, I like to say player trades, right? We’re trying to go to the championship every year. We’re gonna make some player trades to get there. And, and this conversation of players are some of these clients that either are just difficult to work with, friction, lot, lot more tickets than than you ever thought they would, what they would create when you sold them that package.

Take action one way or another on those. And then last one, rich, is pick one thing in your organization that you are going to simplify this year, if not this quarter. I would say this quarter. Pick [00:20:00] one thing every quarter that you are going to simplify, whether it’s standardizing on a bundle removing you know, extra tool sprawl.

Eliminating some custom offerings, like one thing every quarter. That allows you to keep focused on simplifying, reducing complexity, and then by doing so, you’re gonna make higher profit and have scale to bring on more highly profitable clients as you grow.

Rich: So I, you know, I, I hope nobody is going to dispute the, the case that you make there for the relationship between simplicity and profitability on the one hand and exit value on the other hand.

So, I mean, if we, if we kind of accept the value for an MSP of simplifying where it makes sense, what, what you’re reminding me of, it’s maybe not a, a perfect analogy, but as I’m listening to you talk about this, I’m thinking about this concept in finance called zero Basing the budget. [00:21:00] Where, you know, instead of basing next year’s budget on whatever this year’s budget was, and we’re gonna, you know, plus 5%, minus 5%, you go all the way back to zero and ask yourself, do I need to be spending anything on this?

And if the, if the answer is yes, well, how much really makes sense? You know, based on, on the world does it exists and my businesses, it exists today. What’s the right number? Not in relation to last year’s number. And that’s kind of what you’re, you’re going at here. I mean, o okay, I’ve got. This set of client relationships here, but let’s go all the way back to zero.

Which of these client relationships should I still be in next year? And what am I gonna do about the ones that really don’t make sense for me from a profitability standpoint? I’ve got this stack of tools, they’re integrated. I understand it’s not so easy to, to change vendors and eliminate things.

But do I need, like you were saying, do I need all of these tools anymore, go all the way back to zero and ask yourself item by item? Do I still, is this [00:22:00] still something that I should be spending money on and passing cost along to my customers? I, it, it, it strikes me as a very healthy kind of habit for folks in the audience to get into.

Erick: Yeah. I mean, you know, I know that, I know that MSPs like to have these kind of bespoke, best in breed type of solutions in their stack. I mean, I get it. You know, I, I came from the Enterprise Rich when I started my IT company and later became you know, one of the, one of the early MSPs. But, you know, I came with that mentality that said, I’m going to deliver enterprise grade services and solutions to the SMB.

Well, that comes with a very high price when you’re, when you’re comparing what we use in the enterprise to what is good for SMBs, you know, that’s why we don’t deliver the full framework of ITIL to an SMB customer. Like, there, there’s no way they could afford it, right? For everything there. So you, you kind of use about [00:23:00] 30% of it.

So if you’re delivering these enterprise grade solutions that are very costly to your clients, you know, maybe that’s, you know, and again, kind of coloring outside the box, you wanna standardize and simplify so that every one of your clients has a bundle of services. And I like the, you know, the, the good, better, best model because it allows flexibility to move clients up and down when there’s economic uncertainty and things like that, and, and helps you maintain your margin.

And it gives you upsell opportunities that really generate higher margin across the entire client life cycle for you. But, you know, if you have some of these really bespoke, costly tools, there better be a really good justification for that, right? Not because, okay, we have one client that needed this one thing and we’re supporting it, but we’ll never sign up on another client in that, in that vertical ever again, or support any more clients with that tool.[00:24:00]

They might be, that would be the hardest decision, rich, if they are a, a large client that is generating, you know, top line revenue, maybe not, not a lot of, or let’s just say they’re, they’re profitable too. Okay. Maybe there’s a set aside for that client, but moving forward, we are putting people into these.

Good, better, best packages were not, were not allowing us to stray off and support something else. I remember Rich Long tip of the week this week. I remember a client that we had that had a very, very unique you know, platform that they wanted us to manage. And we said, you know what? We’re gonna exclude that from our, our core managed services bundle for you.

And we will charge you per ticket until we evaluate whether it’s something we can support or not. But it’s outside, it’s out of scope. You know, open some tickets, let us get a feel for it. And that gave us the opportunity rich to, [00:25:00] to, to let them know, look, either, you know, we’re going to support it or not, but we don’t know enough about it yet.

So through that, rela through that scenario, actually, and this was one of those unique things where we eventually figured out that the way that, that the vendor was supporting the tool and the, and the things that they were telling them basically our technicians figured out there were some flaws in the configuration and they solve those.

And then there were no basic tickets for that solution. So then at that point we said, okay, you know what? We’ll uplift you this much a month just to manage and maintain it, and we can move forward. But those are very unique opportunities today. I would say if, if a client doesn’t fit into one of these bundles of services, then that’s not a good fit for us.

When we’re looking towards profitability and we’re looking towards an exit event.

Rich: Okay, well we talked a little bit about AI systems of action earlier on there. Let’s talk a little [00:26:00] bit about an AI system of record for MSPs, specifically a very young company called Lex Full. You and I talked about them just an episode or two ago on the show here.

We are pleased to be joined in a moment by the CEO of that company, Pinar Orgy. And we’re gonna get into what makes that company and its ambitions very interesting. And just a little bit on the other side of this spray stick around. We’re gonna be right back

and welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast, our spotlight interview segment where we are very excited to be joined by the CEO of a brand new company, very interesting company called Ful. Her name is Pinar Oma Gy. And Pinar, welcome to the show.

Pinar: Thanks so much, rich for having me.

Thank you.

Rich: So like I say Exel is a brand new company. We’re gonna kind of get into what it does exactly [00:27:00] down the road. But for folks who are new to you, just give us a little bit of of background about who you are, what you do, and how you got to ful.

Pinar: Sure. So I’m pun Ji that was a really good pronunciation of my last name.

I’m originally from Turkey, so that’s why the accent, that’s why the interesting name. I’ve been in the technology sector for a long time. I’ve been in the US for a long time. My career started as an electrical engineer and in pretty large enterprises in the r and d, like Qualcomm, Ericksson and so on.

But after that I moved into, you know, more piano rolling functionalities. Since 2018, I’ve been firmly in the startup world. I just love it. It’s suits my personality. You make an immediate impact. You create something. It’s, it’s, it’s really fun. I do love the ambiguity, the fast pace that comes with the startups.

And for the last five years I’ve been in the MFP space and guys, I, I love it. I love the community aspect. I [00:28:00] love how even vendors are partners. We are all trying to. Get the MSPs, you know, scale in the new world and so on. So I, I really love the MSP space. Before Lexel, I was the CEO of another Ms. P first vendor, TIMOs Networks in cybersecurity.

And for the past year I’ve been with Ful. We have been under stuff. And that culminated with our launch last week at Writeoff Boom in Vegas, which was really amazing.

Rich: Now like I said, we’ll get into what the solution does in just a moment, but I mean, the, the really sort of simplified version of this is it, it is an AI powered documentation tool.

And, you know, from an MSP standpoint, that’s maybe an interesting place for a startup to focus, right? It, it, it probably feels to some folks in the audience out there right now, like documentation is sort of, it, it’s a solved use case. We, we’ve got tools for that. What was [00:29:00] the opportunity in documentation for MSPs that you folks saw and felt that you could address with a new company?

Pinar: Actually, it’s interesting that there are no other companies that approach this because we see a real pain point in the industry, right? When it comes to documentation. Yes, documentation is storage, storing documents and the assets. In some place, maybe that problem has solved, but how do you get from static documentation and from legacy documentation tools that solve for storing information to a true operational intelligence, knowledge, operations, where you are actually putting your data to work for you 24 7.

So that’s the problem that we came to. To the market with, and there’s a real pain point for it. So, system of record, yes, documents [00:30:00] exist, a static documentation, but how do you get to the right context? How do you get to the right answers? How do you make sure your documents are actually up to date? How do you make sure your technicians trust the document that you have versus things having to live as tribal knowledge because people long lost trust with what they have as their data.

Erick: Pinar, rich and I have both been in the MSP channel since the very, very beginnings, and we really appreciate what you said about how the channel is something that, that, you know, really resonates with you. It resonates with us, the community. There’s no. You know, community like the MSP community that I’ve ever been a part of.

So we appreciate that spirit of, you know, everyone growing together and, and collaborating and, you know, coopetition is great, but appreciate that that shout out there. So [00:31:00] I, I’d like to ask, you know, how exactly does the product work? What exactly does it do for the MSPs from, you know, in their normal day-to-day work?

Pinar: Sure. Let me start with what we do before we even migrate an MSP’s existing documentation into selectful, right from their legacy documentation tools. A lot of MSPs already have one tool or the other to bring in the assets from their clients. Including their passwords and also to capture their own guidelines, SOPs, compliance frameworks and all of that.

Before we even migrate any of these into Lex, what we have done is we context engineer and LLM model to live in the MSP space and in the IT world. So before you even bring any of your MSP and client specific data, what we are offering with lexel is [00:32:00] a super smart senior technician that is very well seasoned in all things MSP best practices and it, and documentation.

So that’s number one, right? Like we have pretty smart AI engineers in-house that’s been working on this. The number two is one of the problems with the legacy documentation tools is they were built on a, in a different era before ai. So. That’s the reason we rebuilt this pro, pro product platform from the ground up so that AI can seamlessly and safely operate in it.

So when we are migrating now the existing documentation intellectual, one of the things that we do is we restructure retransform that data so that everything is context, relationships, assets, and and so on, that the AI can bubble up the right context and the information instantly. The, one of the key things about Lex [00:33:00] Full is how you interact with your documentation or your data or your own.

Secret sauce, if you will, when it comes to onboarding and how you do things is AI as the ui. So when you first get into L School, first thing you will see is an interface similar to chat two PT or other a m tools. And you just literally ask, Hey, what’s the admin password for this client? Or How many devices that need patching for my clients in a certain region?

Or what are the devices that with expired warranties, gimme a project plan. Like what’s the does this client comply within this framework? Like stuff like that. Like anything you have as a question, you can now start interacting with ai. Like I said, that is. Context engineered in the MSP space and now is getting fed by your MSP guidelines and all the client data, so you can [00:34:00] see how powerful is that, right?

Our goal really is to have Lex full for the MSPs as an efficiency force multiplier at a minimum for the technicians, right? Getting the right context to the right technician, anchored to the right client, and permission aware instantly, but at right of boom. A lot of the MSPs also asked us about customer success account management or revenue use cases, right?

This is not a tool only for the technicians, also for the customer success teams, also for the CEOs founders before they meet with their client. What you normally do is you try to find the right person who work with that client. You try to grab context from anyone who knows something. Now you literally just go to Lexo and you just ask for it.

So that’s the paradigm shift from documentation to a true knowledge operations where [00:35:00] it, it really is paradigm shifting.

Rich: Yeah, I, I, I think that’s a really kind of critical point. I, I mean, I set up what you’ve built as a documentation tool and, and that’s the easiest way for people to sort of introduce themselves to it.

But your vision, what you’re building goes well beyond documentation and the technician and the help desk. Part of what makes it so interesting to me, you, you were talking about, you know, upon installation the system is migrating data in from documentation. In order to help MSPs in areas like customer success and account, I mean, clearly you’re looking to build a a data lake, a data set inside the application that’s bigger than the legacy documentation record.

So where, where are you getting data from now and what does the vision look like for where data will be coming into the Lex full solution over time?

Pinar: Sure. And Rich, I, I mentioned I love your writeup about Lex full enabling God [00:36:00] mode for the MSPs. And that is exactly where our vision is. So AI and the model we build gets stronger and smarter as the context that it has gets richer and richer, and that really happens through.

A simulation of data, right, through different resources. And of course, number one is the existing documents and the SOPs and the procedures the MSB already has. And then it comes through RMM And then the PSA we are, for example, integrated into scale pattern line guard today. What we are working with Scale Pad is like bringing all that customer success data that they have into Lex Full.

Suddenly you have a whole customer success context, this operational memory when it comes to the clients and everything that goes with that lifecycle. And it makes Lex so much smarter. So things like that, like the more we integrate, the [00:37:00] more we grow our circle of influence, if you will, the more contextually richer and the insights will become much better as we integrate more and more into the.

Tool stack that exists today for the MSPs.

Erick: Hmm. Pinar, when we were talking about Lex Full recently on the show, I asked Rich, who does Lex Full see as their competitors? So I, I would like to ask you directly, now, I’m gonna ask it to you in two different ways. First, how do, who do you see out there that that is potentially your competition, but then when you’re talking to MSP partners and explaining what you do, who do they perceive as being your competitor?

So it’s the same question, but from two different perspectives. Where are you from?

Pinar: Couple of important points here. We are a [00:38:00] system of record, meaning we are not here to execute, be a system of action. If anything, what we want to do is. Accelerate MSP’s own AI journeys in the sense automated workflows agent you know, workflows and all the stuff that they do with the AI agents, all the system of actions out there because AI needs structured data and we hope that we are the fuel for that.

So we are not competing with the System Act system of actions that enable an agentic workforce or workflows and so on. For the system of record though, like I said, we are an AI native documentation platform, so we are going to replace the existing IT documentation solutions out there. So we are not a yet another tool we are here to replace that the MSPs might already have.

And you know, you ask like names, that’s it. Glue, of course, that’s DU or [00:39:00] any other, legacy tools that the MSPs traditionally use to store their client data or their SOPs and so on.

Rich: So there are a number of different ways you can envision this system impacting an MSP. What, let’s just talk for starters about the, the financial impact. So you, you have access you know, God mode access to everything that you’ve ever done for any of your clients. What, what impact do you expect or do you, have you seen maybe in testing the system have for MSPs in terms of margins, operational efficiency, et cetera?

If somebody in the audience is thinking, what, what’s the ROI for me? If I invest in this, what, what are you seeing? Or what do you expect to see?

Pinar: Honestly, it’s game changing, rich. So in our opinion, the legacy. Documentation is broken and it’s costing MSP’s margin in [00:40:00] terms of the signals that they are missing in terms of the technicians wasting time, trying to find the right knowledge, get the right context, and eroding client trust, right?

Like when you go to a, and hey, I’ll get back to you. The answers take so long to answers. The QBR are not completely buttoned up. It, it really has a real impact on the MSBs in terms of how fast they can scale and what’s their margins, right? Like making revenue is one thing, but what about your margins if you’re like, bottom line is not controlled.

So that’s number one. That with the operational efficiencies giving. Proactive insights into, Hey, what’s the best next thing. Giving trends across clients in terms of what worked, what didn’t work. Being able to get, give the technicians instant context to be able to [00:41:00] troubleshoot the issues that they arise.

Being able to get in front of the clients in a much more professional way, really bottomed up, crossing the t’s, dotting the i’s with the help of a platform like you know, Lex Full. I think it, it, it really is game changing and, but we are just getting started. So these are like the immediate ROI impact in terms of just the operations and the ability to scale.

But there’s also a. Monetization opportunity with Lex Full, right? Like the SMBs are underserved when it comes to doing some of the things that MSPs can do with Lex Full. So, you know, one of the things MSPs also get excited about is, Hey, what about like, I actually expose this Lex full functionality to solve my clients.

Meaning not only as a AI native self-help center, which we enable already today as part of the license, meaning the client and users can [00:42:00] come only within their own documentation. They can immediately ask, ask Flex. That’s a feature for that AI native knowledge assistant. Hey, what’s my Zoom password?

Like, what’s the password? How do I, this printer is broken, or whatever it is, right? Like, like, what’s the wifi password? So clients already can go to ask Lex and do the self-help significantly reducing the volume. If TMSP choose. To do so, right? Like it’s up to the MSP to enable this functionality or not.

But how about I also have the client to be able to come and create documents, manage their own passwords, be able to use the full lex full functionality for their own workforce, and then of course the MSP gets to monetize that. That’s, this is just one of the things, of course, like fundamentally the ROI, to Rich’s point, yes, we started as a AI [00:43:00] native documentation platform, but what we are really giving you guys is like a super experienced senior technician slash executive who is now.

Like who, who knows everything about your MSP, all your documents. And like I said, it’s completely context engineered in all things MSP and your clients and the, in the general world, it’s, it’s really from a labor cost perspective for the amount you’re paying Lex full over a year, you are getting so much more.

So we believe the ROI, you’ll immediately see it like in the first couple of months.

Erick: Yeah. Ana, that’s interesting because, you know, there’s nothing that, that peaks an MSP’s interest more than saying, Hey, you know, you can use the platform, but you can also monetize it with your client. So I, I appreciate that, that opportunity.

So you are competing with some well-known [00:44:00] organizations and brands, some big names in the MSP channel that have been in the channel for years. So they’ve got a large. A number of MSPs already entrenched you know, into their platforms. What’s your plan for addressing that and, and, you know, growing market share against these more established competitors?

Pinar: We are really focusing on what we are doing, Erick, in the sense that we are laser focused on our products. So we are very product led, like we let the products speak for itself. We are laser focused on innovation. I did work in very large enterprises in my career, I worked in startups. The ability to act fast based on the feedback of the field is something startups do really much better.

You know, just because you have this constant feedback loop with your partners, you iterate so fast. We have bi-week sprints and make no mistake, like we are really here to [00:45:00] innovate, period. So what the MSPs will see from us is. Constantly listening, constantly iterating and constantly evolving what we have today.

So this is not something that, hey, we brought to the market and now like, Hey, let’s see where this is gonna take us. No, we are, we have a very robust roadmap with more AI functionality documents that write and rewrite themselves knowledge automatically detecting gaps, what exists today in the documents versus what’s being discussed in the tickets or in the teams or in copilot, and automatically trickling that down into the like which says Data lake.

And then exposing that back to the ai. We are just getting started. Like my focus is not on the competition. My focus is on the, on the channel, doing right by the MSPs and keep innovating together with that. One of the things [00:46:00] when we were in the beta trial with our founder Circle MSPs, they could not believe how fast we were iterating and listening to the feedback that we collect inside the product through Kenny.

And yeah, like we, we are here to really focus on the MSPs of in and innovation.

Rich: You know, we, we talk a lot about particularly in recent months, we’ve been talking a lot about systems of action. Here on the show we’ve had folks from. Thread and, and zoic on the show within the last few months.

And in the MSP context, specifically, the, the most kind of common system of action out there is an AI help desk or service desk automation kind of system. You were saying before, you know, you, you’re building a system of record, not a system of action. You’re not competing with the system of action vendors.

But when we first spoke, it, it, you know, it, it wasn’t just a matter of we’re not competing with those people. You, you said, we wanna integrate with all of them.

Pinar: Yes.

Rich: Talk a little [00:47:00] bit about the sort of one plus one equals three that you can foresee when you do integrate with these system of action, service, desk automation, or other solutions.

Pinar: Sure. The gist of the matter is. All the other system of actions, they’re only as good as the content that’s available to them, right? What they are working with. Yes. From a ticketing perspective, they have the ticket history. But what about all the other client information, the assets the MSP SOPs and all the other things that an MSP might have on that client other than just the ticket?

So our goal is really to help the other system of actions. Companies like the PSA solutions or self, you know, the help desk type of solutions, give them much more accurate data, timely data, contextual data, data they can trust so that [00:48:00] the, the accuracy of the response they give is much more accurate.

The AI is much faster. The resolutions. Are trusted much more. So that’s like, that’s the one plus one equals three. Because one of the biggest pain points right now, like for these type of platforms is the quality of the data that is the data that they’re working with. You know one of the biggest problems is the technicians work on a ticket.

Now they need to go back and update the necessary SOP update, the necessary knowledge base article, and is it really done? Like we hear that as a really big pain point because nobody writes to, likes to go back and trickle that knowledge back down. So that’s the thing that we are solving, right? So we are enabling them to do their job better.

Hmm.

Erick: Yeah, Panara as a former MSPI can relate to, you know, keeping everything updated. You know, the, the [00:49:00] document, the data is everywhere. How do you consolidate it? How do you, you know, make sure you’re doing version control, all these manual things. Right. So I I, I definitely appreciate the approach that you’re taking.

In Rich’s article, he talks about Lex becoming kind of the system, the single source of truth. I want to get that right. The single source of truth for MSPs versus their documentation system. So if you could share a little bit more of your long-term vision for Lex Full, what are you guys cooking in the kitchen?

Pinar: That is exactly true. We want to be the master record. When it comes to truth, when it comes to. What’s available in the Ms. V when for we wanna be the ancho that is living. Right? You know, I, I often mention this, the, the paradigm shift we have is this is what happened when the internet was invented.

Suddenly, instead of going back to the books, [00:50:00] trying to find like that section where it talked about whatever you wanted to know, you just went to the internet and searched, right? And then the answer was there. So it’s the paradigm shift really, like going from ACL keyword search to actually like AI native way of bringing, bubbling up the context immediately.

This is what we started on day one, but where we are going in is a true knowledge operations where the knowledge is always up to date knowledge that you can trust knowledge that rights are rewrites itself, and also wrapping legs full as your. Revenue multiplier. We want to help MSPs monetize new ai, re AI driven revenue streams.

This is obviously a win-win scenario for both of us. Enable that functionality, work with MSPs not only have them scale much easier operationally, but also help them make money in an AI first [00:51:00] world immediate roadmap. For us will be more integrations ’cause we talked about this, the more context we have, better we get, and also more AI war factors leapfrogs in terms of what Ms.

MSPs can do with AI operationally. And that is gonna be for us, number one, knowledge gap detection and automatically trickling that knowledge in back into the the, the, the infrastructure that we have. And also in context troubleshooting, right? If the, if the technician is in co violet, in teams, in Gemini, wherever they are, they’re gonna be able to ask Lex immediately without having to switch tabs, which contacts and all of that.

So those are the immediate roadmaps that we are hoping to tackle in the next few quarters and bring to market,

Rich: you know, at a, at a time when everyone basically is thinking about how to use AI to make tools that are [00:52:00] familiar to MSPs better. Lex Full is one of the companies out there right now thinking instead about how AI can transform paradigm shift in your word, completely redefine an MSP’s tool stack, how they run the business.

It’s, it’s an interesting time. And there are a lot of interesting companies for us to talk about here on the show. For folks in our audience here who wanna get in touch with you or wanna learn more about Lexel, where should they go?

Pinar: They should go to our website lexel.ai. They can, you know, book a demo, but they can immediately start a trial as well.

We make it very easy to do a test run with Lexel, but the experience would be, Hey, as soon as you start a trial with us, you know, we create a tenant for you. We migrate your data from your existing tool, and then you get to use it side by side. We believe in a migration without mayhem, especially for a tool as important as as us, like documentation, [00:53:00] operational workhorse, right?

So we don’t wanna disrupt any operations. We have an API guys, that’s another thing for us. We are very API driven. Everything that we do is. API first, our front end is decoupled from backend. We already have a restful API. If we don’t even have a native integration native connector, take our API do it yourself.

One of the things I love about MSPs, they are very technically adapt people already, right? So that’s like already you can use our API to do more connections and so on, but basically it’s migration without mayhem is zero risk. We run alongside your existing tool so that you can really verify that there’s no data loss.

You are validating that everything is to your liking. And then at the end of the trial, if you like, what you see, and a lot of the MSPs really get to see the paradigm shifting difference between what we have and what they, their existing solution does. At the [00:54:00] end of the trial, if you like, what you see, you continue with Lex Fool in depth, in the schema that we already created with the documents that’s already there, and you let go of your previous tool.

But let’s say that you did not like no feelings hurt, you can continue with your existing tool. There’s absolutely no data loss because you know you have what you have. Yeah. So either book a demo, talk with one of our people, or just let start a trial. The other final thing I wanna say, rich, is what we are noticing is also getting data out of existing tools is sometimes difficult.

You know, like for us, our philosophy is the data belongs to the MSB or their clients. So we, if you wanna leave Lexel, we are gonna make it very easy for you. Your data is yours. We never use your data, first of all. To train a generic general ai, right? Your data stays private. And number two is [00:55:00] we, we’ll make it very easy for you if you decide, okay, Alexis is former is not for me, and I wanna get out.

So we are not here to hook you in and never let you go or make it very difficult to let you go. Like we are literally in it for the MSB with the Ms. B, we wanna accelerate the MSP’s journey in this AI first world. And we are here to work with you, not like instead of you or like keep your data or all of that.

So I just, from the very beginning as the CEOI, I’m just, this is my message to the MSPs guys. We only want you to use our platform if you’re excellent, if you’re super happy with it, if you’re not, you know we’ll, we’ll work with you to take you out of Lex. We are not gonna make it difficult.

Rich: Okay, well, Pinar orgy CEO of Lexel, thank you so much for joining us on the show.

Very interesting conversation 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 very interesting [00:56:00] conversation and have a little fun wrap up the show. Stick around. We’re gonna be right back

and welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast. One last thank you to Pinar orgy of Lex Full for joining us on the show at a busy time in that company’s brief history to talk about what they’re doing over there. Which is really interesting. I mean, to, to kind of allude to something that I posted about Lexel on, on LinkedIn when I first wrote about them for Channel Hallock.

And, and we’ll link to that story by the way, in the show notes for people who want to read what I’ve written about Lexel in the past. You know, there, there are a lot of different companies out there. There are, you know, a, a, a bazillion AI native systems of action for MSPs out there. And instead of opting to be the next one, another one of those, what Lexel decided to do was [00:57:00] become a partner to the bazillion AI native systems of action.

Like they’re all gonna need a system of record. And the Lex full strategy ultimately, and it’s, it, it encompasses this, but goes beyond it. But ultimately they wanna be the system of record that those bazillion. Systems of action and everything else, then an MSP relies on to run efficiently needs to get the, the best, most complete single source of truth data.

It’s a really it’s an ambitious but it’s a really smart strategy that, that the question of course is just are they going to be able to build brand awareness, earn trust with MSPs, get market momentum fast enough to overcome some of the advantages that, you know, a company like Kaseya, K’s CEO Rania Sukar was on the show with us last summer, talking a lot about data, you know, and consolidating and cleaning up data and building AI around data.

It’s not [00:58:00] like this is an idea that Wexel has entirely to itself, so, we’ll, we’ll see how they do, but it’s a really smart strategy for a startup.

Erick: Very unique, very unique strategy. And yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. They just, you know, integrate with all the platforms, collect all the data from Ms. MSP’s business and give them visibility into pretty much every business unit, if you think about it, right?

So I think the, the, the impact to an MSP’s business with a solution like, like Lex Full, the overall visibility and the, the ability to make better decisions across the entire enterprise are, you know, pretty, pretty amazing. Yeah. So it was a great conversation and I think that, you know, from where I’m sitting, the, this is a really interesting inflection point for MSPs.

I mean, you know, what we’ve been talking about, you know, earlier in the first segment of [00:59:00] the show. About the impact of AI and what it can do and when you allow it to do things. I think when you can apply that across an entire business enterprise for decision makers it it, I’ll bet you rich, that that impact to top line revenue growth and bottom line profitability will be multiplied further than, you know, we’ve been thinking about AI having an impact on an MSP practice up to now.

’cause you know, we’ve so far been thinking about the impact of service delivery and things like that. But when you unleash AI across every bit of data in an organization and data about the customers, wow. The opportunities are, you know, pretty, pretty interesting there. And you know, the last thing that I’ll say is really, now the data is the most valuable thing.

That MSPs have about their business and their customer’s [01:00:00] businesses. And I think that’s where AI is really, really interesting. I I, I just feel like, you know, when we’re, we’re consumers, right? And we’re, we’re signing up for things and now we’re the product, right? Because now all the advertisers know about us and all this, well, the, the data is the product here.

And, and the opportunity for MSPs to monetize that is gonna be really, really interesting in the next six to 12 months. As, as you know, these AI models mature and MSPs get a little bit more mature with using and governing AI and, and, and finally maybe understanding how to monetize it with their clients in a more consistent, you know, playbook style method.

Rich: Yeah. You know, and I, here’s my little tip of the week. We can’t get into this right now, but I, I couldn’t agree with you more that an MSP’s data is a hugely valuable asset, maybe even a slightly underappreciated asset in some cases. And [01:01:00] therefore be careful who you share it with, right? I mean, just think about the, the large language models or small, you know, we we’re, we’re encouraging people to use these AI tools.

Just be thoughtful about how much of your extremely valuable data you are sharing with other people out there and who those people are. You, you really need to kind of think of of your, your, your data store as your, your gold store, basically.

Erick: Yeah. I think I mentioned at the top of the show you, you know, the governance begins with you, the MSP, with your practice, right?

And then you can extend it out.

Rich: Good point. Yep. And it leaves us with time for just one last thing, folks, and it comes to us from the ring at Madison Square Garden, a heavyweight bout featuring an American boxer named Jarrell Miller who had a very good day and a maybe not as good day. The good part of the day was he won his fight.

The not so great part is at some point during the middle of the, that fight, he lost his [01:02:00] toupee. It just kind of came off on him in the in the middle of the bout there. But you know, he stayed focused on on, on mission there and, and did go ahead and win the fight. I, you know, I seems like a, a risky place to wear two pay basically in the ring there.

I don’t know. But then again that’s he can’t be the only boxer in the world with a toupee in the ring. And it’s not like you hear about people losing the toupee all that often. But all I will say in, in conclusion here, basically is this, is the the most unusual TKOI think in in boxing history as in two pay knockout.

Erick: Yeah, I watched an interview with him after the fact and yeah, he got some bad advice after you know, using some kind of a chemical or something in his hair. He said he lost his, his hair so falling out. So he had a buddy that knew a hookup, a barber, you know, a buddy of his that said, oh yeah, I’ll, I’ll fit you with a tooth.

And oh yeah. So a very hair raising. Experience for that box. [01:03:00]

Rich: And with that folks, we will both thank you for joining us on the show. We’ll see you in a week for another episode of MSP Chat. Until then, I’ll just remind you, this is both a video and an audio podcast, which means that if you’re listening to us right now, but you wanna check us out on video, go to YouTube, look us up there.

If you’re watching on YouTube, but you’re into audio podcasts, go to Apple, Google, Spotify, wherever it is, you get your audio podcast. You’re gonna find us there probably too. And wherever you do find us, please subscribe. Great review. It’s gonna help other people find and enjoy the show just like you do.

The show is produced by Great Riley Simpson, part of the team with us here at Channel mastered, where we help vendors build, grow, and perfect thriving MSP channels. You can learn more about that work that we do at www.channel mastered.com channel. Mastered has a sister organization called MSP Mastered, that’s Erick working one-on-one with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business.

You can learn more about that. [01:04:00] www.mspmastered.com. So once again, thank you very much for joining us here on the show, despite the fact that Erick will be skiing as you’re enjoying this episode of the show. We will be back in a week’s time, was another episode for you. And until then, I will just remind you that you cannot spell channel without MSP.