Episode 128: Feel the Burn

 

Erick and Rich discuss Rewst’s effort to democratize automation for everyone who works at MSPs and their agents too, plus three ways to address customer satisfaction issues before they ruin client relationships. Then Rich is joined by Rewst CRO Charlie Tomeo for a look at Rewst’s perspective on the present and future of automation for MSPs. And finally, one last thing: how an Australian air conditioning mechanic set a new Guinness record by yelling a single word louder than a jet aircraft.

 

Discussed in this episode:

Rewst Answers the Automation Divide With AI-Native Capabilities as MSP Task Volume Surges 2.4x

Man crowned world’s loudest person makes as much noise as a jet taking off

 

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] MSPs, summer is here, and so are vacation schedules, staffing gaps, and the challenge of keeping service levels high with fewer hands on deck. Join MSP industry thought leader Erick Simpson and Kaseya’s Dan Tomaszewski for a live discussion on how successful MSPs are leveraging AI and automation to streamline operations, reduce manual work, and support more clients without continuously adding headcount.

You’ll discover practical use cases for AI powered service desks, ticket triage, security operations, and faster issue resolution that can help your team work smarter while maintaining an exceptional client experience. Save your seat today at https://bit.ly/aimspwebinar. That’s [00:01:00] https://bit.ly/aimspwebinar and learn how to run lean, stay profitable, and scale support this summer.

And now, on to the show. And three, two, one, blast off. Ladies and gent- gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the MSP Chat Podcast, your weekly visit with two talking heads talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need to make it big in managed services. My name is Rich Freeman.

I’m one of your co-hosts on this show. I am also chief analyst at Channel Master, the organization responsible for this fine podcast. I am joined virtually side by our CEO and chief strategist. His name is Erick Simpson. Erick, how you doing?

Erick: I’m doing well, Rich. I’m not traveling on the road like you are right now.

We are in two different parts of the country. Please share.

Rich: Which has to be confusing to people in our video audience right now ’cause our backdrop is identical. It looks like the same [00:02:00] office. You’d never know that I’m coming to you folks from a hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee, where I am attending the Reust Flow event.

Reust is doing their annual partner conference here in Nashville, and I’m attending the show and covering it for my blog, Chanaholic.

Erick: Awesome. And I know some news that you’ll be covering comes at us straight from the show as you’re gathering it in r- in, in real life.

Rich: That is exactly right. And in addition to that, earlier today I recorded a an interview that you’ll hear later in this episode with Charlie Tomeo, the chief revenue officer at Reust, in which we’ll be getting into some of this. But yeah, let’s dive right into the story of the week, which is coming to you hot off the virtual presses here at Reust Flow.

The big news that Reust announced at this show is an AI-powered I- I’m tempted to call it automation tool. So Reust, as I’m sure the vast majority of MSPs in our audience know, is an RPA [00:03:00] tool. Basically it is a very popular tool for MSPs to build and execute automations within their business.

For years, basically as long as that product has existed, it’s been a really powerful tool in the hands of builders, people who know how to build automations and know how to use the tool. And that’s been a limitation for it and for Reust partners as well, is finding those people who really know the ins and outs of the tool and know how to put it to work.

Aaron Chernin the CEO of the company, was on stage here this morning and he, he said, “Depending on whose numbers you believe, there are something like 80,000, maybe 90,000 MSPs out there, and maybe 1,000 people who really have the skills to, to use Reust to the best of its abilities.” That will be changing very soon.

Just in a matter of days actually, Reust will be rolling out a new version of the product that allows more or less anyone, my words not theirs, to vibe code an automation. You’re really not gonna have to be a builder [00:04:00] anymore. You’re just gonna have to, in natural language, kinda tell the tool, “Here’s what I’m trying to accomplish,” and it will go build that for you.

And this will have all sorts of different implications for MSPs obviously. On the one hand just, as a starting point it’s going to democratize automation within an MSP. So it’s not even just that it- you’re gonna go beyond that one builder you have in the organization and allow anyone, any engineer in the organization to build an agent.

Theoretically, you’re gonna be able to allow anybody in the organization to build automations. I was just talking right before this recording session with an MSP here, and he is already looking forward to giving this tool to his HR person so that they can build training automations and also– And this, you’re not gonna need any s-skill, knowledge of scripting or anything that Reust does.

You’re just gonna know I’ve got a workflow that I wanna build or automate. You’re gonna be able to do that with the tool. So internally this is gonna [00:05:00] unlock access to the tool and let a lot of people benefit from it. Reust has been talking for a good year and a half now as well, though, about what they call automation as a service.

So Reust was originally designed as an internal facing tool for MSPs to automate themselves. Yeah as of the last 18 months or so, it’s also been a tool that MSPs can use as the foundation for a service that they bring to their customers to help the customers automate th-their workflow. And obviously this is going to make delivering that service much, much easier for MSPs as well.

You’re not gonna have need to have a builder on the team who can cre- turn that blueprint that maybe a salesperson put together with help from a customer. Here’s something we, we wanna do. You hand that over to the e- engineer, the builder to bring that to reality.

More or less anyone. Maybe this might be a little bit of a push, but maybe that salesperson can go ahead and create that automation for the end user. And so that, that’s gonna accelerate delivery of automations to [00:06:00] customers. It’s gonna make it easier for many more MSPs to add automation as a service to their tool set.

And all of this, Erick, is within the sort of near to medium timeframe here. The tool I’m describing becomes available at the end of June. But there were hints, there, there was some discussion on stage during the general session today about where this is going next. And right now what Roost is rolling out is a- an upgrade, a new version of their platform really, in which an agent is empowering a human on the MSP side.

But they’re already looking forward to the day when more and more of the work that an MSP does is actually done for them by agents. And so they’re already kinda looking forward to the day when Roost’s agent is empowering the MSP’s agent, and it’s all a sort of agent-to-agent interaction. I won’t get into the detail, not because any of it’s classified, but just in, in the interest of moving on I won’t get into s- the details about what they said and the [00:07:00] hints they dropped about that.

But it was kinda interesting to me because it got me thinking about the degree to which vendors beyond Roost are really gonna have to look forward to the day in which they are selling whatever it is that they make to agents essentially. That, and it’s not, that we’re looking past service desk automation.

You think about anything that an MSP does that an agent can, will be doing for them it’s really gonna be the agent and the ag- on either end, the vendor end and the MSP interacting. And that’s gonna change how vendors design software, it’s gonna change how they sell and market, because in some cases it’s gonna be the agent picking its tool.

Essentially the agent will be the customer, it will be deciding what to buy. Longer term interesting issue that we’re gonna see play out over the course of the next 18 months, say. But some really interesting stuff for Roost partners coming much sooner than that.

Erick: Wow. Two thoughts come to mind immediately, Rich.

The first is the opportunity and I’m glad you shared [00:08:00] it, for MSPs to take this solution and then deliver AI first or AI forward services to their customers. That’s always how, MSPs are thinking if it’s g- is it g- it, is it good for me and my team? Great, that helps us. But how can I monetize that with my customers?”

And then maybe a sub thought under that one is this also allows folks that aren’t MSPs, as we’ve talked about on the program before, that are building very deliberate just AI workflow automation and agents and things like that to end customers of SMBs, mid-market, and enterprise folks as well.

So has there been any conversation about that, or have you heard any talk about the potential competition of some of these folks that are just basically focusing on helping SMB customers leverage [00:09:00] AI, for themselves, regardless of who’s delivering the technology or security services?

Rich: So the interesting thing I…

And you tell me if I’m addressing the issue that you have on your mind. But, one of the things that I have been talking to Roost about and folks will hear some of this come up in the interview with Charlie Tomeo a little bit later in the episode. You go back in time just a little bit and in my writing I was often using this term hyperautomation, and hyperautomation referred to the combination of RPA and AI.

And all anyone’s talking about now is the AI piece of that. And I’ve been interested in what is the f- future of the RPA side of that. And part of the vision at at Roost basically is that th- there will always be, Agentic AI is never going to make RPA unnecessary, no matter how smart it gets, because what RPA does is empower the MSP on behalf of their customer, essentially, to define what those agents do what they can do, what they can do, can’t do, how they do it.

[00:10:00] Essentially, RPA becomes almost a set of guardrails. It’s not a security tool, so that’s not a precise way of putting it. But it, it defines, it sets limits it provides a sort of a training set essentially for the agents that will be doing more and more of the work for. So the, these AI and RPA the AI tools you’re referring to, I think and Roost, they’re from a Roost point of view, they’re more complementary basically than things that might replace one

Erick: Got it.

Got it. Got it. And I guess, just another funny thought that I had i- is, we heard– we’ve heard the the term feel the burn, and I would just insert feel the token burn as more and more AI agents become involved in everything that we do, whether we’re MSPs or not, whether we’re, consumers.

There’s layers and layers of orchestration now that’s happening. And, it’s very interesting to figure out, what does that hierarchy look like, right? Who is… Remember the first Tron movie, Rich? I’m sure you [00:11:00] do, and there was the master control program, the MCP.

What is the ultimate master agent that lives on top of everything so that we as human beings don’t have to worry about anything anymore

Rich: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I do remember the original Tron well. Yeah. And we’re gonna come back to the feel the burn concept here. I’m gonna put a pin in that because there’s something that comes up in the Charlie Tamayo interview that touches on that.

And at the end of the show we’ll talk about that a little bit more, but you’re exactly right to bring that to mind in terms of how it plays into this. So like I’ve been saying, there are longer term and shorter term implications to what Roost was announcing here at the show.

Timing, shorter term versus longer term when you act on something has a little bit to do with your tip of the week this week, Erick.

Erick: Thank you, Rich. Thank you. Yes, and it’s a it’s a common topic that we revisit from different perspectives now and again on the [00:12:00] podcast. And this is all about preventing client churn.

We know that, MSPs now are really a lot more mature in how they’re looking at their business operations and the equity value of their organizations, not by any means being impacted by all of the M&A activity that’s going on in the channel for the last two years, even since COVID.

This… i’m joking, right? Every MSP that I speak with is getting hammered by folks wanting to, “Hey, are you interested in selling your business? Are you inter-” And I’m s- I’m getting those emails, Rich, and I haven’t been an MSP for years, right? But I’m on every list, on the planet, I think, which is good.

It keeps me in tune with what’s happening out there and what people are saying. But the, one of the drivers of valuation, something that can absolutely impact a multiple or an offer [00:13:00] is churn, and not only employee churn, staff churn from an m- an MSP, but- Customer churn. And we’re talking about the net revenue retention KPI or metric, right?

So the more that MSPs can hang on to existing revenue, not churn out customers for anything that, you know, that they can control. Obviously, we know that customers will get acquired and MSPs will lose that relationship because, the large organization has their own internal IT or has their own preferred provider.

It’s hard to to guard against that. But for the things that we can control and for the things that we want to measure within our clients’ relationships are that customer sentiment that, you know that feel good. How are we doing? Trying to get these surveys done.

And so this is really about getting ahead of any surprises, right? The last thing [00:14:00] that that we wanna know is a client wants to leave, and ultimately when we find out is when they start asking for, their passwords and their network diagrams and things like that, right? Ask me how I know, Rich.

So here’s three things that partners can do today to try to get in front of this and try to, read the tea leaves, and not only the tea leaves, but get real data so that they are essentially including this as a metric in their business operations, like customer sentiment and the ones that are at risk.

So first thing is identify your top five most important clients. They… Hopefully they’re strategic, we’ve all had clients that are not very strategic, but they affect a large portion of our revenue, right? So there’s also that risk of, revenue being with too few clients, or maybe one big client is, represents 20% of your revenue.

That’s a risk. Identify who those clients are and make sure that you’re speaking with them [00:15:00] recently and often about their business goals, not just about support issues. We talk a lot on the program, Rich, about having those boardroom conversations rather than server server room conversations.

Don’t sell technology outcomes, sell business outcomes. Moving toward this AI opportunity and things like that, that, that deliver more value for your existing clients. So make sure that you’re having conversations with these clients. Sometimes MSPs think, “Oh, no news is good news. I haven’t heard from clients, so they must be happy.”

That is a mistake. That is a mistake. Do not assume that silence means satisfaction. It can mean the opposite, actually. They could be out there looking for your replacement without you even knowing it. Number two: ask one difficult question. Now, this one takes a little bit of humility, Rich, to ask a customer and say, “Hey, is there anything we’re not doing as well as we could be?”

Nobody wants, that report card. Nobody wants to get the bad news. But [00:16:00] if we’re asking that question repeatedly and consistently during QBRs, during client meetings taking clients to lunch, whatever it is, we want to get that feedback, and we want them to be candid, and we want them to know that we are taking note of that, and we will put a plan together to address it.

Again, this is that confidence booster where, you know, we wish that every one of our clients wants as well for us and our business as we want for them, and the only way to know that is to ask them directly and to build that stronger relationship. And then act on that feedback, that last thing. So if you’re meeting with your clients regularly and you’re asking for that input, the next time you meet with them, let them know what you’ve done about it and demonstrate that to them so they feel like, oh, we can have an open conversation.

It goes both ways. And we really wanna build a strategic relationship where the client is as concerned with our well-being [00:17:00] and growth as we are for them. And sometimes, Rich, in, in building our client relationships, we might have two or three clients that, that they don’t even care enough about their own business for them to even care about our business.

So that’s like the first thing is don’t expect too much. That’s why I say start with your strategic clients and work your way through your A and B clients, and maybe you’ll have a few C customers in there that you wanna have these relationships with as well. But you wanna make sure that you’re doing everything possible that you can so that they don’t churn out because of you not listening or asking these questions or paying attention to what their real needs are and being more strategically valuable to them moving forward

Rich: You know surprises in life can be a lot of fun, Erick.

By and large, you never really wanna be surprised with your end users, ’cause most of those surprises are gonna be bad. It’s gonna be the news that they’ve replaced you [00:18:00] with somebody else. And so yeah, th- this is the logic behind staying in regular contact with the customer. You really never wanna be surprised in an unpleasant way by some problem between you and the client, some problem in the relationship that you are not aware of.

And the question that you were talking about there as, potentially awkward and something people don’t wanna ask I can’t underscore enough how smart that is to do. A- And this goes, you don’t even have to be an MSP to benefit from this advice. Whatever it is you do if there’s a service element to it, asking the customer on a regular basis, “How are we doing and how can we do it better?”

is just a really smart thing to do. And even if the answer is, “We’re doing great, and I can’t think of anything you could be doing better,” people appreciate that you asked the question, that you wanna know that their satisfaction matters to you. W- last thing I’ll point out… two related things.

So first of all, you were talking about how 100% of the MSPs in our audience are getting inquiries from potential acquirers and, private equity firms and such. That phenomenon [00:19:00] is so huge Erick, that I’m getting those inquiries, and I’m not an MSP. You haven’t been an MSP in decades.

I’ve never been an MSP, but my name shows up on registration lists for events like this one I’m attending right now. So people assume that I’m a, I’m an MSP, and without even looking to see if I’ve got a website or something, they’ll, send me an email, “We wanna buy your business,” which is kinda hilarious to me.

So that’s where that’s going. And then I’m thinking of an article I wrote or published on Channelholic just a few days ago as we’re having this conversation right now about Treeline, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed MSP we’ve talked about before. They’ve begun doing some acquisitions of their own, and they they confirmed something we’ve talked about before on the show and something that you were getting at a little bit earlier.

First of all they look closely at churn, at net re- revenue retention. Yeah. Which is something you said you’ve seen with your customers a lot right now. So confirmation from a very sophisticated potential acquirer, that matters a lot to them. Another thing that matters to them, though, is they wanna [00:20:00] know that you as an MSP are in that AI conversation with the end user.

Not necessarily that you’ve got super sophisticated workflow transformation services in market right now, but that you’re having that conversation on some level with the end user because they know at Treeline, and this is true of other acquirers, if you’re not having that conversation, somebody else is.

Another MSP, an AI consultant. You risk winding up just a little bit more than a help desk, which is the ultimate commodity obviously. Something else to think about in terms of keeping the customer satisfied, ask them if they’re satisfied, but also talk to them about what they want.

Increasingly, that’s AI and make sure you’re acting on that.

Erick: Absolutely. And one last thought that I’ll tag on. I think a lot of MSPs are used to these automated surveys and the little give me a smiley face or a sad face when I close this ticket or, just, net promoter [00:21:00] scores.

These online or email type of things This is different. This is you asking the question directly. It, it hits differently. It’s more direct. It’s more personal. You’re asking someone, ’cause at the end of the day, end users and business leaders are just like us. If I get, three or four survey requests a week, I’m gonna stop responding to them because you’re not the only person sending these to these business owners and to their end users.

We get surveys from every place we shop at and all this, and so after a while, folks just become desensitized to it. So you’ve got to really dig in and build that personal relationship. A personal relationship cannot be created digitally, right?

Rich: 100%. Couldn’t agree more with that. Let’s talk a little bit more about what Roost has been announcing here at the show, but this time let’s do it with somebody from Roost.

We’re gonna take a quick break here. When we come back on the other side, [00:22:00] I will be sitting down with Charlie DiMaio, he’s the chief revenue officer at Roost. We’re gonna talk a little bit about the news here at the show, automation as a service. We’ll get that perspective from inside Roost.

All that’s coming your way in just a moment, so stick around

And welcome back to part two of this episode of the MSP Chat Podcast, coming to you live from Roost Flow 2026 in Nashville, Tennessee where I’m very pleased to be joined by the chief revenue officer of Roost. His name is Charlie Tameo. Charlie, welcome to the show.

Charlie: Thanks, Erick. Appreciate it. Good to see you again.

Rich: Yeah, you too. Good to see you, and I thank you for taking some time out of a very busy, very crowded show. Great turnout here. As our introductions imply, we’ve known each other for a while. Yeah. But for the benefit of anyone in the audience who is not familiar with you, and somehow or another isn’t familiar with Roost, just give them the 101 on Charlie Tameo and Roost.

Charlie: Yeah. [00:23:00] Charlie Tameo. I’ve been with Roost as the CRO for three and a half years now. And before that, worked at other MSP-centric companies, Axon and Webroot, for a number of years. So I’ve been been around the community for quite a bit. We’ve seen some great growth in Roost and now we’re looking to take it to the next level.

Rich: W- we’re talking here like an hour and a half after the general session in the morning where Aaron and others were making the big announcements from the show. If I… i’m still digesting ’cause it’s only been an hour and a half, but if I was to try to summarize what you guys are doing in this big new release of the product that you unveiled here it’s that you’re essentially trying to democratize au- automation.

That the tool was providing a lot of power to MSPs before. There was a limited set of people who had the skills to to capitalize on that power. And what you’re looking to do now is basically let everybody who has an idea for an automation [00:24:00] build it. So let’s just start there. Is my summarization for what you’re hoping to accomplish accurate?

Charlie: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely accurate. I think if you looked at some of the speech, it talked about all the things that we’ve done, right? Just as vendors that focus on spaces, we, look at personas and, we try to focus on who’s the best fit based on that data that we look at.

And what we did find at Ruus that I haven’t really seen anywhere else that I’ve worked is that the persona wasn’t the normal, size of the company, number of employees, number of revenue. Those are the things, usually the markers that we’d look at or even the tech stack that they’re using. What we found is that everybody of every size wants to automate.

So the real difference was that if you had a a builder, somebody on the tech side that was real pro-automation that wanted to leverage it, and you had an owner that was aligned, those are the guys that are successful. I think Aar- Aaron even talked about, the people that [00:25:00] use Ruus the most aren’t the people…

It doesn’t guarantee that it’s 100 million revenue MSP. It could be the guy that has no choice that’s just starting out that’s maybe a million dollars a year. So he’s building his business and realizing that, “If I don’t automate, I don’t grow, so I can’t just add headcount.”

Rich: So the idea is going forward because agentic AI on the back end is going to be doing the actual coding, essentially vibe coding automations- Yeah

For MSPs. Paint a picture for me. Talk to me about the unlock. What- once that’s out there and any MSP can use a tool like Roost, specifically Roost and anyone in that MSP can u- what impact does that have on an MSP and the way they operate and th- their ability to improve efficiency and productivity and growth, et cetera?[00:26:00]

Charlie: Yeah, I think it’s, one, one of the big challenges that most people start out with, and we even tell you, make your MSP efficient. If you’re gonna use automation, let’s see how you can make some efficiencies there basically saving time, saving money not focus on the mundane. And I think a lot of people get stuck there.

The people that even today that are using it well will go and look at their HR department their finance department, seeing what are they doing repetitively? So and I think what it does now is instead of I think anybody that’s in tech has gone through this to some extent- Is if you, is sh the people that really know the problems they’re looking to solve aren’t the technical people all the time, right?

So they’re the other people that are involved. Even an MSP. It may be the owner may be more connected if th- they’re actually meeting with their customers what their problems are than maybe the tech does. So now it gives you the ability to, put some wrapper and some guardrails around [00:27:00] it, but give them the ability to go and talk about “Here’s a problem that I’m looking to solve, and how could you help me solve it?”

The other thing that, that it’s gonna do is give you the ability to go in and unearth what things that you should probably be looking at to fix. See, that’s a big change from where we’ve been because a lot of MSPs buy the product and they’re like, “What should I automate?” So they really wanna do it and most of them kinda will get over the hurdle.

We’ll help them get over the hurdle. But now the fact that you have more than just those techies trying to figure it out, you have the rest of the b- re- rest of the business units looking at

Rich: it. And y- and there’s so much focus right now in the industry on MSP productivity and all of these service desk automation tools that are specifically designed to help that part of the MSP’s business be more productive and get more done.

You’re kinda talking about every division, every part- That’s right … of the business, the sales, the marketing people, [00:28:00] anyone who could potentially automate a workflow- … get more done. Th- they’re now gonna have that ability on their own essentially.

Charlie: That’s right.

Rich: Yeah.

Charlie: That and g- the interesting thing is here you talk about some of these other, automation now even from three and a half years ago, there’s a lot more vendors doing it, doing components of it.

Even the bigger guys are doing it. I was at KaseyaConnect last week and guy stopped by and he said “I need to understand what’s the difference. I’m really confused. I just saw three or four different vendors.” And he’s, so we walked through kinda some of the things he could do, and he goes, “So let me get this straight.

So I could either probably buy three of those tools and do a p- component of it or I could do all my automation using a platform like you guys have?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” And he goes, “That, that’s a better story for me.” He said, I just can’t see trying to tack on a little bit just to get there.

I need something that’s gonna get me mostly the way [00:29:00] there.”

Rich: You guys now have an agent that is working on behalf of people at an MSP and helping them automate. Some of what you guys talked about on stage this morning though felt like you are anticipating and building toward a future in which your agent is working with the MSP’s agents, that a- at some point down the road as, tools like these service desk automation tools and others really become widespread and widely used and more agentic and sophisticated, that automation is gonna be an agent-to-agent kind of- Yeah

a process. Is that, in fact, the vision?

Charlie: Yeah, that is definitely the vision. And I think part of it is recognizing we’re pretty blessed to have Aaron as a very, forward-thinking guy. Again, somebody that not just could build the tech, but does understand what the problems that we’re looking to solve.

And we believe we wanted to put ourselves in a position that we could help the MSPs on their journey to the next thing they’re gonna be. And so having these tools, having these [00:30:00] abilities even just this … Like you said we just talked about this an hour and a half ago, and a bunch of people stopped by the booth.

And, people that even said, “Hey, listen, I tried using L- Roost. We didn’t put enough into it, but I wanna get back in. This is gonna help me change.” And it’s gonna give them more comfort of what does the future really look like?

Rich: One of the the interesting things that one of the sort of interesting implications of what you guys were talking

But we were talking off the air before this interview about Roost is a very user-focused company, community-focused company. Users drive a lot of the content at this event. That community and that user base over time is going to expand to encompass agents. Yeah. And th- there was some talk on stage about, building the tools for that user base.

And Aaron was talking about how agents are gonna choose Roost because Roost is gonna make their job-

Charlie: Yeah …

Rich: easier. So yeah, to, to what extent are [00:31:00] you already trying to anticipate what, what makes agents happy, what you have to do to make a, an MSP-friendly tool agent-friendly as well?

Charlie: Yeah. We’re already working on that, and where it will … we got to the point now where it’ll recommend if we did something just plainly with a tool like, let’s say, Claude Code and it’ll recommend that it’s easier to do it with using something like Roost because it knows that it’s hooked into there.

But, ul- ult- ultimately it’s … That’s one component. The other component is putting some structure around and somewhat of a wrapper around us now all of a sudden MSPs setting up MCP servers for their customers, right? Making sure that there are some controls. The fact that you’ll be able to have auditing to see what these people are doing, how they’re doing it I think it’ll take some of the scariness out of it for the customers.

And also it puts the MSP in a ability where they’re [00:32:00] still very valuable in what they’re providing. ‘Cause we all know that even after COVID, a bunch of these customers bought a bunch of tools that were SaaS-based tools unbeknownst to the MSP And they’re probably getting 10% of the value of those things.

So I think it just puts the MSP in a similar position that they’ve always been, is being that trusted advisor and be able to provide value as things are changing.

Rich: And it’s interesting because now that shadow IT phenomenon you were talking about, after COVID has become shadow AI. Yeah. And it’s the same story, basically.

A bunch of stuff comes inside the business that the the MSP doesn’t know about. It, it occurred to me within the last two, three weeks that there was a time not that long ago where the term hyperautomation showed up in my writing fairly regularly, and hyperautomation basically was RPA and AI.

Collectively, they were hyperautomation. I don’t use that term anymore. I don’t hear other- … people use it. All the talk now [00:33:00] obviously is about AI. How … And there, there was some content on this on stage before. Help the folks in the audience pick apart what RPA is valuable for and versus what AI does and how those two are maybe better together for the MSP.

Charlie: Yeah. It’s really just putting the the structure out. And that’s why, like everyone … i’ve had people say to me, “Oh, so you’re an AI company now.” We’re not … No, we’re not an AI company. We’re AI enabled AI native. Being able to leverage that to make things easier to do, but still having that framework built out so that you have, some processes around it, you have controls, you have auditing ability.

If you look at some of what we deal with AI today, I think it’s very similar that every MSP’s comfortable with where they built scripts, right? Scripts were big. Anybody that’s been doing this for a hot minute knows they were one of the big basically forces of change for RMMs [00:34:00] and things like that by being able to make them better, being able to go given that ability.

And I think that’s what you’re seeing now, is just we need to put some structure around what we’re doing with some of the AI in-house. Also, having the ability that if your best tech quits, it’s all in the system, right? You’re able to go in there, the things are reproducible, you know how they work.

So it’s still … there’s still a happy balance between the two of them. But I would just say for us it’s really supercha- charging your automation and making … Anyone can automate, especially with AI

Rich: The structure point is r- really interesting. You can bring an AI tool in as an MSP to automate some function that- Absolutely

you perform for your customers. And the the better together piece is RPA is gonna put some structure or some guardrails essentially- Yeah … around what that AI can do and how it does it. Y- you’re [00:35:00] effectively training it and tutoring it on- That’s right … how to serve the customer.

Charlie: Yeah, and if you think about it and I think even Gary Peak was mentioning it, where he said, somebody called up and said, “AI me.”

No, but they don’t really know, right? They’re still trying to figure out what that means, but they’ll have some level of comfort. But the fact that you could actually make it a very pointed solution, that they’re gonna, get extreme value out of it is great. We looked at that with, somebody in our early access is testing out that for a a title company.

So the fact that they have so many, places to go for data to figure out is that a clean title? Are there any issues? Things like that. Now you’ve kinda put it in one bucket, and you’ve taken all of the potential human error out of it. So it’s just things like that are gonna get better.

Even Aaron’s demo was, having that guy be able to get access to all of the financial [00:36:00] data just by typing it in is huge. We all, da- data is key, right? But bad data is terrible, right? So it just put yourselves in a position where you have integrity in the data that you have.

You also have stuff at your fingertips.

Rich: And that role basically that RPA plays now will play, it plays now with technicians it’ll play with agents going forward. That’s a long-term role. I, I- one of the things I was gonna ask about is, over time, as AI gets more capable, does it start to do more of what RPA is doing now?

But there’s always going to be a need for structure and process and defining your way of doing things at an MSP, and it sounds like you guys believe th- therefore, there will always be a role for a tool- Yeah … that tells the AI what m- what to do effectively and how best to do it.

Charlie: Yeah, I think that, I think like everything else, we’re go- we have to adapt as we move forward.

So we’re gonna adapt the platform [00:37:00] to make sure that we’re getting the most out of it and that we’re still providing the value that, that they’re looking for. But it does put you in a position where it’s not the old days of inconsistencies and what the actual outcome looks like. Aaron used an example of, you’re actually spending less on AI if you’re leveraging our platform, right?

So that’s another big thing that, as we know I think we’re all hoping that we get to a poi- a tipping point where everyone’s using it so much that the prices go down, but it still could become a problem, right? If all of a sudden, the one thing that MSPs do not like, and I’m sure their customers don’t like, is surprise bills.

I I use the … Best example I use is when we all had cell phones based on usage. You got that surprise bill once, and then you never did it again. So we wanna make sure we’re putting people in a position where they could be successful leveraging AI for the automations but also feel [00:38:00] comfortable that they have some guardrails around not getting, a bill for 10 grand that they didn’t know they were getting, right?

So it’s just a mixture of both. And being able to manage it having the granular auditing to come in, not just from a security standpoint, but also just from, hey, what is somebody doing? How are they doing it? Do they realize what they’re costing us when they’re doing it?

Just having those those safeguards in place I think are gonna be big

Rich: When Roost first came out, and for the first couple of years it was available to MSPs, it was a, an MSP-only facing tool. That was a tool for MSPs to use internally. I remember meeting with Aaron about a year and a half ago, I think it was, when you guys first started opening the door to the MSP using the tool that they were using internally with their customers, helping their customers- Yeah

automate as well. You guys refer to that as automation as a service. Yes. This is a service, a product that MSPs can and you believe should be [00:39:00] selling to their customers. Define automation as a service. What is that opportunity for MSPs?

Charlie: So it’s definitely re- revenue driven, right?

But they’re going in and taking what they learn in trying to solve their internal problems to figure out how do they get to understand what that actual customer’s problem is that they could make more efficient, they could put predictability around. Some of it, believe it or not, is just as basic as you can imagine, where people are still updating spreadsheets on important data that, whether it’s the- their board looks like their owner looks at.

And as we know that’s clumsy, right? It’s pretty clumsy. It’s not as on demand as it really needs to be, whereas if you can, if you could automate that and you could leverage something like, an agent, we could pull that data on demand. So if that, if that CEO, CFO wants i- information, bam, they’re just clicking on it getting it.

So those are some of the things that we’re seeing. [00:40:00] I do think it’s also some efficiencies around the tools that they’re self-managing. I think that’s the other component. But bottom line is it makes them stickier. So now I’ve provided even more value than just, “Hey, this is my IT team,” right?

So I know we’ve they’ve shown great value around security. That was a big lift for them. Now I think this is just the next thing. And we see about, say, about 17-ish percent of our partners are already doing that. They’ve already figured it out. To Gary Peak’s point, they have to figure more about not making it as, as bespoke as every account’s the same thing, but if they could find ways to go in and clean things up.

And I think ultimately they … As they’re looking at it, what I’m seeing is when they see all these tools they’re paying for and they’re able to now build into automation as a service and they just got rid of three tools that they’ve … somebody probably put on their credit card during COVID there’s easy value [00:41:00] there

Rich: The efficiencies that you were alluding to there.

When that automation as a service capability in the platform first became available, my recollection is you could u- as an MSP, you could use Roots to automate QuickBooks workflows. There were, like, two or three other- Yeah … tools that you guys started with. It sound- So I guess first question would just be, what are- does the tool set that you can automate look like now?

But the s- the follow-up question basically, it sounds like you’ve gone beyond helping the end user automate tools that they’ve deployed- … to automating in a much broader, potentially more strategic sense.

Charlie: Yeah, and I think that part of that is a couple things. We had probably l- since the last time we talked, w- we’ve given the ability for basically any tool that has an API, they could build out an integration.

So it’s fairly easy for them to do basically taking Swagger docs, importing them, and now all of a sudden they have an automation to a tool that we may not have focused on, and [00:42:00] there’s a good chance it may not even be MSP-focused, right? We’ve expanded out on that. We’ve also expanded out with RoboRoosty, which we…

About three months ago we gave them the ability to start building in native language. So now we are having a lot of these practitioners that are internal to the MSP that do work more directly with the, the- their customers, solving the… they’re understanding the problem, and now they’re able to solve it literally just by asking RoboRoosty to build it for them

Rich: Talk a little bit about some- maybe some specific examples.

We, we’ve touched here and there on, how maybe the the CFO be- but that 17-ish percent of partners who are doing automation as a service, are you seeing any scenarios, any use cases? Maybe it, it could be specific to one MSP or it could be an emerging pattern. What are people actually doing for their customers that’s working?

Charlie: One of the ones that’s big, everyone’s afraid to talk to is HR. [00:43:00] But being able to actually enforce HR policies at times or putting themselves in a position to audit things that are HR related, whether that’s people going through, And what happens is there are tools that could do some of these things, but again, that’s another layer of something that they could do.

But being able to do that is big. Also enhancing what what their form systems look like, having internal forms for them for things that, that they need to do that are just manual today. So even something like somebody, a ne- new user coming on board, being able to go in and filling out all that information in advance will help them.

So we’re seeing things like that, and then some of the stuff is vertical specific, whether it’s a law firm a- anything that, that they need that’s actually extra help to make sure they’re compliant, they’re able to go in and do things like that.

Rich: And what MSPs always want, [00:44:00] obviously, is you come in, you do the project, you build the automation, you get paid for that, and then it becomes a recurring revenue source.

That’s right. How are you seeing MSPs, do both of those essentially?

Charlie: Yeah. So they’re, I still see some doing more of that old project work and building something. But for the most part, when they when they’re building out things, especially on the reporting side, they’re making it so that they’re gonna constantly update that, they’re gonna manage it and they’re able to get recurring revia- revenue out of it.

Because they basically just correlate how long it’s taking for them to do that manually today, and they d- they do the math. And in some cases, what we’ve had is, They’re going in and they’re making these efficiencies and making their experience. So same problem that MSP has, a lot of times their customers have.

So if there’s somebody that’s billing out every month being able to make sure that and especially some of them that have more of that service-based model, is making sure that those things are [00:45:00] accurate. The last thing that you wanna do, w- one, one partner that 50% of their invoices that they went out were wrong, and they had two people that were doing it every month manually.

We were able to come in and actually make that so that it was more of a five-nine success rate. So the MSP came in, did that, and they wound up getting rid of one of those people because they didn’t need two anymore, and they cut down on the complaints

Rich: You were talking before about how the tool for some period of time has had the ability to integrate with more or less anything the end user is using- Yep

via API. I assume, but just kinda wanna confirm that the agentic functionality you introduced here at the show makes creating that integration a lot easier- Yes, it

Charlie: does … for the MSP. Yep, absolutely. Yep. You it’s insane to see what how far we’ve come so fast, is as long as you know how to prompt, and we have classes to teach you if you don’t know [00:46:00] you could get it to do anything.

You could get it to look for problems, look for repetitive things. So i- it’s gonna be… It- We’re gonna be in a better position with the MSPs with automation as service where they’re gonna be more consultative when they go into their customers.

Rich: And so is that that sort of automated integration automated automation process that you’ve got in in the tool or coming very soon, is that sort of the unlock that gets you past 17% of…

I- Yeah … aaron was talking about bottlenecks. What- Was the bottleneck in the past the skill set you needed to have to go into an end user and do that automation for them? The fact that the tool can build whatever it is I envision now, is that what you guys think get you way beyond 17%?

Charlie: I think so, because what it does is it breaks down the barriers of people thinking that they don’t have the skill set, they don’t have the time, all these things. So we’re taking a lot of [00:47:00] those objections away. This is the first company that I’ve worked at that when people come in and and leave, they apologize.

They said, “We just, sorry we didn’t have the right resources. We didn’t take the time. We didn’t…” It’s not “This is the worst tool I’ve ever had,” and, “I can’t believe it.” It’s more of “Hey, we kinda know where we missed the mark ourselves. We just couldn’t put enough time into it.”

So I think taking that fear away. The other thing is that, like everybody else, depending on where you are if you’ve been working at an MSP for 20 or 30 years and now you have to kinda learn something new, that may be a bridge too far. You may look at it and say I really don’t wanna do that now.”

Whereas I think now you take away some of those objections. Our goal is to make sure we enable everyone to know what they need to do, be successful in the platform, and being able to, to show them how, frankly, how easy it’s gonna be

Rich: It- it’s actually a really interesting [00:48:00] story you just told there, that o- odd, far and away easily the biggest pain point that your partners had was just the resources and the skills to- Yeah

to ta- It’s a, an astonishing thing when people who drop the tool are apologizing to you. Yeah. It’s us, it’s not you. So you’ve addressed that head-on with the new version of the tool here right now. Is there another sort of pain point beyond that, that you’ve heard about, that you’re thinking about, that you hope to be able to address as well?

Charlie: I think it’s just gonna be working and collaborating with them to make sure that they don’t miss out on the opportunities in front of them, like what should they automate? So one of the things that we did build out is a PSA analyzer tool. So that tool will actually go in, it’ll look at all your tickets in your PSA, and will talk, and will tell you about opportunities that you have to actually optimize that.

So we, they can go in basically now and say, “You need to go do this. Here’s something that you could use. [00:49:00] Here’s an automation that you could use that’d actually reduce your tickets by 35% if you just run this.” And then we also have it connected to our app builder platform, and we built out a automation roadmap.

So it’ll actually be able to tell them, “Hey, based on what we’ve seen here’s probably the things that you need to focus on,” and then we work together with them to figure out how we knock those out based on importance. Y-

Rich: you may have begun answering this question already, but the press release you guys issued about the news at the show today was talking about how this is a major milestone on your AI-centered roadmap.

Yeah. Which of course raises the question- Yeah … what else is on the AI-centered roadmap that you can talk about?

Charlie: You’ll have to talk to Aaron about that one, I think. He’s, … I- it’s pretty in- incredible because he’s just always seems to be thinking about the next thing. And like the whole agent bit that he went over he’s just worked that, on that in the last couple weeks.

Most of us didn’t even know he was gonna present that.

Rich: Huh. [00:50:00]

Charlie: So there is, there’s always the next thing and he’s always looking at that. And I think part of it is that he makes himself pretty available to talk to partners, so he is part of the community. He’s not one level up for the community.

He’s, if you can see how people are coming up, talking to him, shaking his hand. So he… I think he does a good job of keeping on the pulse of where technology is, but also what the community needs.

Rich: That was a interesting story too, how quickly this came together, and it’s something I’m seeing in a number of different vendors basically.

You guys are using the ability of AI to accelerate development and democratize development for MSP, but you’re taking advantage of that internally as well. I keep encountering vendors who are moving down the roadmap much faster than was possible before when their professional developers are using the AI coding capability.

Charlie: That’s right. Yeah, and that’s something that I think some people initially go kicking and screaming that it’s not a real thing, but then once [00:51:00] they embrace it, they realize how much more efficient they are. I think this is one of the times where it’s not gonna be good enough to just market your way out of AI.

And you kinda know what I’m talking about, I think. You’ve been doing this long enough where we’re famous for coming out with certain terms, right? I’ll use an old one so no one gets offended, but something like bring your own device. Everybody did something on it. Didn’t matter what you did what your product was.

I think they used an example of what’s the sneaker brand? I think Allbirds. Somebody was saying today how they are AI driven, right? So if nothing else you’ll… for us in tech, you’ll be like, “Hey what does that even mean?” It’s my sneakers. But it’s just everybody’s using it, but I don’t think you’re gonna see…

Our community’s not gonna let us get away with just marketing speak. They have to be able to deliver on it

Rich: So Charlie, like I said, obviously a very busy few days for you here at [00:52:00] the show. Yeah, it’s exciting. So I very much appreciate you taking some time out. For folks who wanna get in touch with you, follow up on something you said, wanna learn more about Roost and the stuff that you announced here at the show, where should they go?

Charlie: Yeah, just connect with me on LinkedIn, or you could reach me at [email protected]. And definitely go out, connect on our LinkedIn page and you’ll see all the updates from Roost this week. If you wanna sign up for the early access for the the next-gen platform, be more than happy to provide you with that.

Rich: All right. Charlie, once again, thank you for joining us here. Folks, we’re gonna take a quick break here. When we come back on the other side, I will be rejoined by Erick. We’ll share some thoughts about this conversation with Charlie and some of what Roost has been announcing here at Roost Flow.

It’s all coming your way in just a bit, so stick around. We’ll be right back

Welcome back, part three of this episode of the MSP Chat [00:53:00] Podcast. One last thank you to Charlie Tomeo for joining us at the show getting into all of their news here from the f- show with folks in our audience. I told you earlier on in the show we would kinda come back to the feel the burn concept there a little bit, Erick.

You kinda heard where that came up, ’cause in terms of RPA having a long-term and essentially permanent role to play in the automation story as a complement as opposed to being replaced by AI, one of the things that it can do is control token consumption, right? It, it can be the set of rules and boundaries and so on that are constraining what the the agents do and what they spend doing that.

So that, that is a role that folks at Roost envision for for RPA going forward. And it was interesting, I, it one of the challenges that MSPs and their customers are gonna have to deal with and that you’re already seeing kind of people deal with things like OpenClaw, is [00:54:00] the power of agentic AI is enormous and the potential is enormous, but obviously because this is all autonomous, th- there are a lot of things that can go wrong as well, and we’ve talked about various ways the technology industry is looking to compensate for that.

And and Roost style automation, RPA as a tool in the toolkit for that in terms of giving an agent a set of capabilities things it is permitted to do, things it ex- is explicitly forbidden to do. Some structure, as Charlie put it, around how they go about what they are doing.

That’s actually gonna be something that I think is very useful both for MSPs and for their customers as MSPs deliver automation as a service. O- one last thing I believe this came up quickly in the interview there. I had a chance to talk about it a little bit more with Charlie off the air after we finished recording this interview.

They’ve spent some time at Roost, as you would imagine envisioning this new version of the system that they unveiled here at the show, and th- there was a lot of [00:55:00] work in terms of validating their concepts with MSPs and speccing everything out. They got to a point, Erick, where they were ready to actually go from, “Here’s what we want to do,” to doing it, actually doing the coding, the development a few weeks ago.

And thanks to the power of AI coding tools, they were actually able to cover that ground very quickly. They really just finished that development process and got to a point where they were comfortable rolling it out to MSPs, I imagine within a matter of days from now. But it’s, it is yet another illustration of how fast you can move, whether you’re a professional developer or just somebody vibe coding with Claude or vibe coding in automation now with Roost.

It’s remarkable how fast you can move

Erick: Yeah, I’m learning that every single week over week, and I’m feeling the burn, as I feed more tokens to try to get a project done because, it’s required now. Yeah. It’s to me, internet is required [00:56:00] for us to do what we do, and I’m now seeing AI as required for me personally to deliver at a level that, that I could never achieve before, not just in terms of total output, but just making sure, double-checking, triple-checking, assessing, finding data sources and things like that.

It’s pretty amazing where I now can say I don’t want to do what I do without AI. It just going back to the old way of doing things it is just unacceptable for me in my workload. What are your thoughts, Rich?

Rich: You’re reminding me we were both at Pax8 Beyond very recently, and you’re reminding me of a an interview I did there with Nick Heady their president and chief commercial officer.

And he was talking about someone on the team at Pax8, who I shall not name, who had told him told Nick basically, I’ve got my own way of doing things. I don’t want AI doing these things [00:57:00] for me.” And Nick is a pretty aggressive user of AI in his work, and he told this guy, “Look you do what you want, but you will not be able to keep up with me and what I need from you if you are doing everything the way you’ve been doing it in the past.”

I– You know, Nick is moving so much faster that he’s warning people at Pax8 right now, “If you wanna keep pace with how I do business, the speed at which I do business, and the speed at which Pax8 increasingly does business, you’re gonna have to get on the AI train, too.” And the ending of that story basically is the person he was talking to said, “Yep, you’re right,” and is now, agent pilled and doing all sorts of things with AI, too, and I’m sure would would never go back.

And that brings us- That’s great. Go

Erick: ahead. I was just gonna say, that’s a great story that MSPs can share with their clients to say, “Hey, are you ready? Do you want to move at speed and benefit from all these things? Then we’ve got to do an assessment. We’ve got to get your users up, [00:58:00] trained up.

We’ve got to s- identify what your three biggest constraints are. How can we apply AI?” This is an accelerant, and it, once you, when you get a whole team behind it, you know it’s pretty addictive, and having these five coding, workshops for clients and things like that, Roost is definitely positioning its focus around helping MSPs get there and then also help their customers get there.

I would hate to be an MSP here in the next, six or 12 or 18 months that isn’t moving toward AI and trying to be one of those AI frontier firms or leading with AI because you’ve got to keep up, and you’ve got to distinguish yourself. If you’re not keeping up with what your clients’ demands are, they’re going to find somebody who can.

Rich: Yeah, you don’t have to be at the bleeding edge, but you do really need to be keeping up for any number of reasons that we’ve talked about on the show. Yeah the you need to be moving forward as as fast as is safe for you to do right [00:59:00] now. And folks, that leaves us with time for just one last thing and it comes to us from Down Under.

Now Erick you and I forget exactly when this came up, but we were talking once upon a time about how loud it gets at Lumen Field where the Seattle Seahawks, my hometown team, play. And you th- you’ll… if you’ve got an Apple Watch, you know you’ll sometimes get this alert that tells you it’s really loud out there right now, and this w- it was, I was at the conference championship game not all that long ago, and it was going off, pretty steadily, and it was something like a hu- there was like a steady 105 kinda decibels and it was loud.

Let me tell you, my… The friend I was with had earplugs. It was loud there. 105 isn’t really loud. 122.4 is crazy loud, and that is the new Guinness Book of World Records record for the loudest human being. 58-year-old Canberra, Australia professional air conditioner cleaner Joseph McGrail Baeta now [01:00:00] holds the Guinness Book of World Records for loudest human.

He yelled the word “now” at 122.4 decibels, and the only context I can put that into for you Erick, is that according to this article I’m reading this from here, 122.4 is comparable to y- you know you’re walking on the street somewhere and an ambulance goes by, and right when it goes by you, it is so loud, fingers in the ear, you cringe, it hurts?

That’s approximately 122.4. Imagine a person that loud. I k- I can’t, but apparently this person exists in Australia.

Erick: Yeah, it’s crazy. A couple of other comparisons was, a jet aircraft taking off. Can you imagine being next to a jet engine as the thing… yeah, painful.

Painful. I… how did this person discover this, secret power that they have, and how would you ever use it in day-to-day life? I, maybe, I don’t know. But

Rich: Yeah. I hope it doesn’t get used too often [01:01:00] around the house. That would get old in a hurry. But it is a good question.

How do you learn you have this talent, and how do you hone it exactly, and where so that nobody yells at you? Folks, that is all the time we’ve got for you this week on this episode of the MSP Chat Podcast. We thank you very much for joining us. We’re gonna be back in one week’s time with another episode for you.

Until then, I will remind you as I always do, this is both a video and an audio podcast, which means that if you’re listening to us right now, but you’d like to check us out on video, you can go to YouTube, look up MSP Chat. If you’re watching us, but you’re into audio podcasts, you can go to Spotify, Apple, Google, you name it, pretty much anywhere you get audio podcasts.

Look MSP Chat up there as well. And wherever it is you find us, please subscribe, rate, review. It’s gonna help other people find and enjoy the show just like you do. This show is produced by the great Riley Simpson, part of the team with us here at Channel Mastered, where we help vendors build, grow, optimize thriving MSP channels.

You can learn all about the many ways we do that at our website, which is [01:02:00] www.channelmastered.com. Channel Mastered has a sister business called MSP Mastered. That’s Erick and his team working with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their managed services practice. You can learn more about that at www.mspmastered.com.

So that’s all the time we’ve got for you. We’ll be back in a week. Until then, folks, thanks for joining us, and please remember, as we so very much want you to, that you can’t spell channel without [01:03:00] MSP.