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A staggering 16 billion credentials linked to major services—Apple, Facebook, Google, and more—have just been confirmed leaked and Erick explores the grim reality and potential aftermath, and what it means for MSPs, as well as the types of AI services MSPs can deliver to their customers to increase their strategic value to them as well as their recurring revenue. Then, Erick is joined by Pax8’s Chief Product Officer, Libby McIlhaney, at Pax8 Beyond 25, for a look at AI’s impact and opportunity for Pax8 and its partners.
Discussed in this episode:
16 Billion Apple, Facebook, Google And Other Passwords Leaked
Stanley Cup damaged as the Florida Panthers celebrate a second straight championship
Transcript:
Erick: [00:00:00] And 3, 2, 1. Blast off. Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode of the MSP Chat podcast, your weekly visit. With one talking head this week talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need to make it big in managed services. My name is Erick Simpson, the chief strategist at Channel Mastered of the organization responsible for the show.
I’m flying solo this week as your other co-host, rich Freeman, the chief analyst at Strat at Channel. Mastered is out. I. It has been quite a week as I’m recovering from attending not one but [00:01:00] two channel events. Last week, a PAX eight Beyond 25 Conference in Denver, Colorado, and Ingram Micro’s Trust Deck Unplugged Event in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In fact, our interview guest for this episode is Libby McElhanney, the Chief Product Officer at Pax eight. Who I interviewed live during the event, and you’ll get to hear how AI is front and center for PAX eight and its partners in just a minute. But let’s get to our story of the week, 16 billion with a B.
Apple, Facebook, Google and other passwords have been leaked. This is no joke. According to Villus Petski at Cyber News, researchers have been investigating the leakage since the start of the year 30 exposed data sets containing from tens of millions to over [00:02:00] 3.5 billion records each have been discovered.
This is being reported from Forbes. I’m reading from their article here, this 16 billion strong leak housed in a number of ion super massive data sets. Includes billions of login credentials from social media, VPNs, developer portals, and accounts for all the major vendors. So this is happening in real time right now.
Ultimately, if you’re an MSP, the time to act is now. This is a leak that transcends any other leak and according to reporting, these are brand new. Passwords. This, these aren’t old data sets. There may be some old data in here, but from the reporting that I’m reading here, this is brand new. So this is probably the greatest password leak [00:03:00] breach of all time as we know it.
What does it mean for us? What does it mean for our clients? We really need to take a serious look at how we’re managing our clients’ passwords, how we’re allowing them to log in using MFA, using pass keys. The old ways of logging in and securing passwords just are not good enough.
In fact, I’ve begun changing my passwords. I use a password manager. I use pass keys. I’m going through and changing my passwords because this is the mother of all cyber security breaches. So take action now. Meet with your clients, evaluate what’s happening, and strengthen their cyber security posture if you haven’t already.
Like I said, this isn’t this isn’t. Something that’s happening in the future. It is happening right now, so a red alert. Nobody is safe [00:04:00] anymore in today’s, hyper accelerated security environment that we’re in. Alright, so let’s switch gears now and talk about my tip of the week.
Rich and I have been talking a lot on the program, almost in every episode about AI and the impact of AI and the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about AI and how partners are trying to figure out how to monetize ai. I’ve gotta say every platform, every marketplace, every distributor that we’ve been covering has strategies.
To implement and integrate AI not only into their platforms, but also empower their partners on leveraging the opportunity to leverage AI for revenue generating and strategic value enhancement to their end customers. So people of the week this week is to [00:05:00] evaluate the opportunity for you to assess your existing clients’ environments.
For AI enhancements, so categorizing their data sets, identifying the data where it lives, integrating and delivering more AI related services. There are lots of opportunities out there with third party vendors now that allow you to create private data lakes with your client’s data and help them get more out of their data, not just from a visualization perspective.
Going beyond just the chat bots and copilot. So Microsoft copilot, many of you have clients that rely on Microsoft Services for their business, operations for all of that. Office management, word, Excel, PowerPoint. Now’s the time to really sit down with your clients and become what Pax eight [00:06:00] calls the managed intelligence provider.
So I heard this new at the PAX eight Beyond Conference, and they were talking from the stage about this new era of evolution that MSPs should be moving towards becoming much more strategically valuable to your client’s relationships because you are helping them achieve business outcomes, leveraging ai.
So during that conference we heard a lot about. The different ways that folks are engaging with ai. We start off with these chat bots, right? The chat bots you deliver some input. They return an output. We’re migrating into more agentic AI or AI assistance that actually will take action on your behalf.
And then the concept is that when we are creating these digital agents or assistance for our clients, it’s actually creating digital labor. So think about. Orchestrating not [00:07:00] one or two agents, but a whole army of agents to help your clients do simple tasks. A couple of examples that I know of working with existing partners that are low hanging fruit opportunities beyond helping them get the most out.
Microsoft copilot and training them how to use. Copilot to achieve their business outcomes on a day-to-day basis. Get things done quicker, filter out the noise, improve marketing and sales and email communications and document writing and things like that, and research. But really thinking about creating an ability for your clients to do the mundane, noisy tasks in the background.
An AI agent for sales, for instance, I. For marketing, for SEO for just basic financial governance. A couple of partners that I’ve talked to are actually focusing on verticals like nonprofits and [00:08:00] government sector government focused companies. So for the nonprofits, these are organizations that typically are writing a lot of grant requests all the time to to receive funding to continue their work.
90% of these grant requests contain a lot of the same data with maybe 10 or 15% of it being different. Perfect example of where an ai workflow and a set of agents or maybe, a team of agents can help create those RFP responses and then just have a little bit of minimal oversight by the person responsible.
One term that I heard at the conference was taking things that used to take months and taking it down to minutes Now. Same thing with folks that are responding to RFPs for government contracts and things like that. The majority of every one of these R RFPs probably the same basic stuff about your organization and things like that.
And then maybe 10 or 15% of it is specific to the scope of what you’re responding to. And again, if you’re responding to a lot of the same type of RFPs, [00:09:00] you’re feeding this data into your LLM private LLM, I’ll say so that your data isn’t out there. And available for folks to steal, but nonetheless, getting a business to achieve a strategic business outcome, thereby increasing your strategic value and allowing you to charge more for these services.
So there’s, four kinds of examples that were shared during the conference about how MSPs can monetize this opportunity. Number one. Monetizing it per agent that you’re creating and tuning and managing for your customers. Number two, per action. So this is more of a consumption based model.
So every time an action is executed, then you get to bill your client for that based upon, the AI strategy that you’ve delivered to them. Number three, per workflow. So now a series of actions that, that deliver again, a little bit of [00:10:00] a consumption based pricing model and my favorite per outcome.
So what are we trying to achieve for that business? Increase m QLS by a certain percentage. Reduce the time it takes to close sales. Increase SEO improving SEO on the website, things like that. So it really, becomes very interesting in what this new era of technology is leading us into. So think about these things and think about how you can become more strategically valuable by jumping into the pool with some of this low hanging fruit opportunity, assessing a client’s ability to leverage Microsoft copilot, for instance, as it opened the door and starting to then evaluate data.
Data and other ways to integrate AI for those business outcomes. In fact, one statistic shared I believe it was by Jay McBain at at the conference was that [00:11:00] 87% of SMB business owners said they are, they want to adopt more AI because just like everybody else, it increases efficiencies. It, it filters through the noise and it gives us actionable intelligence so that we can make.
Better decisions. Alright, now it’s time for our spotlight interview with PAX Eight’s Chief Product Officer Libby McElhanney, and explore how PAX eight is leveraging AI and helping its partners prepare to take advantage of this huge service opportunity that it represents all coming your way in just a few minutes after this break.
Stick around. We’ll be right back.
Welcome back for part two of the MSP Chat podcast. I’m joined today by Libby McElhanney, the Chief product Officer of [00:12:00] PAX eight, and we are broadcasting here. From PAX eight, beyond 2025, and boy, what an event it is. Welcome, Libby. Thanks for joining me. Thanks so much, Erick. I appreciate it. I know it’s been a crazy conference.
Libby: Yeah, it’s been really fun.
Erick: So you guys have just been dropping all kinds of news and new improvements to the marketplace. I’ve got like a bunch of things I’d like to cover with you. Great. And I know that you’re probably out of breath because you’ve just been going a hundred miles an hour.
Some of the really fun things that we saw here today were, just robotic dogs and all kinds of things. Dancing, robotic dogs, dancing robotic dogs. That kind of feed into a lot of the AI conversations Yeah. That you’ve been having with the audience. So a couple of things that just jumped out at me.
Yeah, me. If I could just start with the. PAX eight, the new PAX eight marketplace experience. We’re talking a lot about the managed intelligence era. Yeah. On stage [00:13:00] and kind of this evolution that MSPs. Are going through or should be thinking about going through definitely right. To meet the needs of their organizations and their customers organizations.
Tell us a little bit about this vision that you see and how MSPs should be thinking about how to stay ahead of the game with their customers.
Libby: Yeah, that’s a great question. What we’re seeing, I think probably we’re all seeing this, right? We’re hearing news every day about new things that are coming to market for ai and.
I know my team and I have been working really hard to keep on top of it. It’s a lot it’s a lot to digest. There’s so much new coming at us, but I think what we’re trying to communicate is that we believe that fundamentally a lot of aspects of the MSP’s job and business and focus are gonna shift over the next several years.
And we think that shift is gonna be towards really being more strategic. For their customers and clients and that [00:14:00] strategy will be around helping those clients get more efficient and keep their costs low and bring in more capabilities. And then a lot of that will be done through ai, specifically through agents.
And then MSPs will be the trusted advisor in the context of getting agents instrumented. And fully functional in the work streams of their clients. And so much of that is like a little bit of a mindset shift I think towards how can I work really closely with my clients to understand what aspects of their day to day are most right to transition into agents and how can I help them save money and do things faster and also, monetize ’em along the way.
Erick: So for the audience members that, aren’t quite up to speed on what agents are and what this new opportunity looks [00:15:00] like, let’s back up a little bit. Yeah. And talk about what we’ve seen with AI so far, what some folks are used to, but where we’re going.
Libby: Yeah, absolutely. So I think hopefully most people have played around with.
What I think of as a chat bot, it’s just chat box. Yeah. You’re, you go, you ask a question, it gives you great answers. Sometimes it gives you wacky answers. But, I think that’s a pretty good place to start. But when we think about the evolution of ai from there, it won’t just be information and retrieval and collaboration in that way.
It will also be able to do multi-step multiple steps without having to have a person tell her what to do. Being able to adjust to new information or adjust to a new experience and then be able to oversee other other AI instances of AI that are doing tasks for them. So we think about these as agents and an agent is really, it’s a, it’s essentially a small piece of software that is [00:16:00] connected into an LLM that can.
That’s more sophisticated and it can respond and it can think, and it can coordinate tasks. And because of that level of sophistication, we really see that as a major step forward in terms of capabilities where you’re not just gonna be talking to a chat bot, you’re gonna be asking AI to go do things for you and then work with you on the results and adjust and that kind of capability.
Is what’s going to radically change, I think how we do work.
Erick: And I think for some folks that think, that, that fear it. It does give you a level of autonomy. Yeah. Because it does emulate some thought prices. Yeah. So with anything that’s new.
Libby: Yeah.
Erick: There’s also some governance that needs to be a fly.
Libby: A hundred percent.
Erick: So talk to us about that.
Libby: Yeah. I think.
Erick: So
Libby: my team just stood up an MCP server for for our partners.
Erick: So MCP let’s, yes. Let’s unpack that. Let’s unpack that. Yeah. ’cause that’s, [00:17:00] this is all coming so quickly, right? I know. It’s crazy. Yeah.
Libby: So Anthropic, maybe you’ve heard of Anthropic.
They’re one of the big AI companies that are out right now pushing the envelope. They created basically an emerging standard for how agents can talk to existing systems, distance data stores, and software. And we set up this new technology to and as we were doing it, we realized that there were all these security rules in what we were doing because you could, if you did certain prompts or if you put in certain snippets of code, you could really exploit it.
So we did a lot of work to make sure that it was watertight and safe. And this is model context
Erick: protocol.
Libby: Yes, that’s right. That’s model context, protocol. But. You’re absolutely right. The governance is gonna be so critical in this, and security is at the center of that, right? It’s, it is making sure and ethics, right?
We don’t want, we’re in like prime directive territory here.
Erick: I love that reference. Oh, you got me right there.
Libby: And [00:18:00] we need to understand and make sure that these tools that we’re leveraging are not going off doing things that we’re uncomfortable with. Or doing things that are not legal or doing things that are discriminatory.
And I think that MSP is gonna be really critical in making sure that they have great guardrails around all the AI that they’re gonna be using on behalf of their SMBs, so that the SMBs don’t get themselves into a tough, tight spot either with security or with ethics or, hang on. There’s a lot in governance and we have we’re, we have pulled together some enablement.
So folks who are partners with PAX eight can go learn more about governance and ai.
Erick: Yeah, I wanna, it’s a big topic. I want to get into some of that. Yeah. In just a minute. Yeah. Yeah. Because like I said, you guys are just dropping the announcements here, so it’s been a long year. Yeah.
Yeah. And the hard work is starting to pay off. Totally. So how should MSPs view this moving forward? Because. We know that their customers are using [00:19:00] these chat bots. A
Libby: hundred percent. They’re
Erick: right. They’re in there doing stuff and probably
Libby: putting proprietary information in there. Who knows?
Erick: But already creating risk for themselves a
Libby: hundred percent.
Erick: So how does an MSP have a conversation with an end customer that kind of aligns what needs to happen in order to give them that? That sense that, oh, this is not just another app. This can, could create a lot of risk from my organization. And how does the MSP emulate what you said become very much more strategic, working on these business outcomes for their customers to elevate their value to the cu the end customer?
Libby: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I will say that we do have, as I mentioned before, a lot of enablement around this. So there’s smarter people than me to give you even better answers. When I think about it, I really think about it as. Sitting down with your client, first of all, you need to understand the risk landscape and you need to understand the ethics landscape and the governance landscape.
So take some time to educate yourself. But I think some really tangible, maybe slightly scary use cases, right? To talk through. You [00:20:00] can expose your expose data, you, your customer’s data this way, or you could, if you, depending on how these clients are using it. It would be, it could be existential for some of these businesses to expose customer data, or it could be, really a problem for them if if they’re using a chat bot and it is offensive or, it does something that, that frankly is not in line with that company’s values.
And so I think having a little bit of this, here are some potential sticky wickets you could get yourself into, right? These are some things that you that you need to be aware of. I think that’s a great place to start, right? Giving tangible. Clear use cases of where it can be a problem. I think that’s a good starting point.
And in terms of switching to think through strategy, it’s funny because I work in product management. I grew up in product management. I started as an engineer, but my heart is in product management and so much of product management is about strategy and I really think one of the hardest things about it is forcing yourself to take the time to think strategically.[00:21:00]
Because there’s a thousand tactical things every day that you have to do. There’s a thousand tactical things you have to do on behalf of your clients. There’s a thousand tactical things you have to do for yourself and forcing yourself to sit down and actually think about your client’s business and think about how you would open a conversation about what are the outcomes you’re trying to drive as a business.
Client, what are your outcomes that you’re trying to drive? And where is it expensive for you? Where do you see friction in your business? And talk to me about what, where that friction is, where that cost is, maybe. And then guiding through that conversation with signposts to, this is identifying the problem space, collaborating on what the real shape of the problem is.
Where the cost is, where the slowdown is, where the difficulty is. Maybe there’s capabilities that are missing. And then working through, not solutioning right there and then, but thinking about how, what good would feel like for the client. I [00:22:00] think that’s a great way to start that conversation.
Erick: So let’s pull back a little bit though, because first it starts with the MSP. Yeah.
Yeah. So tell me a little bit about. What PAX eight is doing to equip and enable the MSPs. Yeah. Because, we don’t want this cobbler and cobbler’s kids situation, where they’re beta testing stuff on their clients.
They’ve gotta adopt it and be and be trained. Yeah. Themselves. Yeah. So share some of what your strategy is here.
Libby: Yeah. I’ll tell you, that’s exactly what we did. So Scott Chason, who’s our CEO, put the hammer down on all of us and said, we’re all doing ai. No excuses. Everyone in the business is gonna be doing this.
And it was a great catalyst for us to get serious about it. ’cause we’d all been playing. I’m work in technology, so we’ve been playing with it, but I don’t know if that was true of all the other parts of the business. And we just started to do it ourselves. We rolled up our sleeves, we did the research.
It’s a lot to wade through, which is why for us, we’re hoping to short circuit that experience for our MSPs by [00:23:00] giving them. What we think are great ways to approach it that we’ve learned from our own wandering in the wilderness with ai. But the answer is we used it ourselves. We learned it ourselves, and that’s how we decided that, that’s how we chose MCP, that’s how it, a lot of the things that we’re working on right now for our clients, so for our MSPs is because we’re doing it we’re using it ourselves.
Erick: Using it ourselves. Yeah. And some of the announcements that you’ve shared so far today. Ki talk about what you’re doing to empower the MSP. So let’s cover a couple of those. Yeah. If we could. So yeah, the first one it, and again the theme here was the evolution of the MSP from the, the break fix model, the MSP, the cloud.
Yeah. And now you guys are talking about the managed intelligence provider. Tell us a little bit about that.
Libby: Yeah. I think break fix, we all know what that looks and feels like. We’ve all probably both been on the receiving end of questions related to a break fix and have also been the creators [00:24:00] of those questions.
So that’s really where we started, I think as an industry. And then moving to MSP was really more about services, right? How can we create a complete package? How can we get ahead of issues? How can we think about client’s issues more holistically? And not just scrambling around and, making money by the hour.
So I think that transition was a really critical one and what we see right now as a transition to a new framework that we believe MSPs will need to step into in order to really take advantage of all the crazy opportunity that we’re seeing for AI enablement and the managed intelligence provider is really all about transforming their small to medium business clients.
With the power of ai. So becoming more efficient if we’re becoming more capable with ai. And that managed intelligence provider is really about strategy, as I mentioned before, right? It’s putting on your strategy hat and saying ins instead of saying, oh, I have a software toolkit for you for that, right?
Oh you need [00:25:00] to track sales opportunities. Let’s give you HubSpot. You can say. Oh, you need to track sales opportunities. What is your complete workflow, not just in HubSpot, but across your entire sales flow. What is that flow and how can we create a complete set of AI enabled agents that will connect the dots across that entire workflow?
And that is a different question. You’re answering a different question. It’s not what is the piece of software we can give you that will solve this? In a framed up way already. And these are the capabilities that software brings to the table. It’s saying, what is the workflow we’re targeting and how can we as an MSP assemble solutions across that workflow that are really customized to the specific client and their specific workflow.
So it’s a lot about putting on that strategy hat and thinking through customization.
Erick: So the PAC P eight team has really been working hard. The [00:26:00] platform. Yes. And the strategy. Yes. So let’s walk through some of these in no particular order, but, you mentioned you mentioned changes to the PAX State marketplace experience.
Yeah. The integrations hub Yes. Is so cool. Yes. The managed intelligence toolkit that you’re providing for partners. Yes. So just start where you like and kinda lead us through because there’s a lot to unpack.
Libby: Yeah, absolutely. For those of you who who have been around you may remember that last year we rolled out a whole new marketplace experience that included opportunity Explorer, which was like how to come up with recommendations and find new things to sell, cross-sell and upsell.
We had quoting, we had a new quoting tool. We had storefronts and even more than that, a, we have multicar, a bunch of other things. We wanted to, we’re not dropping those, right? Those are products and features that are dear to our hearts and we wanna make sure that we’re continuously evolving those to improve them.
And we got a lot of feedback on storefronts that our partners were saying, look, it’d be great if I could open this marketplace [00:27:00] storefront for my prospects, not just my existing clients. And we were like, great, we’ll do it. We built public storefronts. It’s a branded, beautiful experience for our partners that they can open up to their customers and those customers can self-serve if the partner wants them to.
They don’t have to, but they can. So that’s really exciting. It really, will hopefully take a lot of work off of our partners plates in terms of having a beautiful kind of brochure site to show their clients, but also brochure at the brochure site that actually works where you can actually make a purchase and these clients can self-service.
Erick: And you shared a really compelling statistic about how, what, how much growth partners are seeing using the storefront
Libby: Uhhuh. So our partners who went ahead and made a storefront last year, they saw a 30% increase in client self-service revenue. Not every single. That’s blended across all of the partners still.
But
Erick: very impressive. It’s a very,
Libby: hey, that ain’t nothing. I would take that Absolutely.
Erick: I’ll take a 30% increasing
Libby: clients also. Yeah.
Erick: So talk to me a little bit about the integration sub, [00:28:00] because it’s not when you hear integration sub, like everyone has preconception of Yeah. What that is.
Yeah. But what you guys are doing, it’s a little different.
Libby: It is a little different. We like to dance to the beat of our own drawer. So it’s a combination of things. We’ve had our PSA integration for a while. We’ve had APIs for a while, but we didn’t love them as much as we should have.
And so we’ve not only improved our documentation for our APIs, but we’ve consolidated all of our PSA integrations in one place where you can easily go find them, figure out how to do that integration really easily. But then we’ve also added more, so we’ve created realtime events. Basically web hooks where our partners can go subscribe and get time updates.
So instead of having to constantly ask, oh, did my, did the price change, or, oh, has any, how, have any of my clients bought anything? Or, what are the new subscriptions that we have? We can actually send you an event when it happens. So it’s, we can, we can push that information to you just to, instantly as soon as it happens.
So we are really excited. I think that’s gonna make our partners much more efficient so they don’t have to [00:29:00] constantly ask us. We can we’ll tell them, we’ll tell you, we’ll tell you when something happens.
Erick: And you’re leveraging AI for a lot of that backend integration as well?
Libby: Absolutely. Yeah. So actually all of my engineers are using ai.
We have, we’re very neck deep in ai, in our, in terms of our development process and how we’re bringing products to market, not just in engineering, but also in design and product. Yeah, AI is like all over the place for us also we have the model context protocol service that I was talking about earlier, and that is I can’t, when my team first showed me the demo of our integration, I was.
Honestly, I’m so excited. I think you’re reliving that. Aren’t I highly, it’s so cool. I was like, this is amazing. Just the power that it gives you, the questions you can ask. It is so cool. I’m not gonna curse, but it is cool as all get out
Erick: so freaking cool. It
Libby: is so freaking
Erick: cool. You can see it.
Libby: I highly recommend people check it out just because, so give us
Erick: a use case. So what? Give us an example.
Libby: Yeah. Yeah. So the demo that my engineer showed me. First she [00:30:00] created, she figured out what subscriptions we’re renewing in the next 30 days which is a question we get asked a lot.
How do I, how do we make it easier for our partners to know what’s coming up on renewal or what’s gonna have a price change? Let’s come up a lot. And you just, she just asked, Hey, what subscriptions, and they all just, they just came right out and then she basically formed that into.
With a several, a couple of other prompts. She created a QBR report for a specific customer in our marketplace, and it looked at what they were buying. It looked at changes to their subscriptions over time, and it recommended other things that they might be interested in buying based on their profile.
And that all but just got, and it came out as a PDF from the l LM we were using, which was clogged. Just through those conversations with our MCP server, and it took. It took maybe 10 minutes
Erick: and now it just runs. Yeah. That’s the power we’re talking about.
Libby: It was amazing.
Erick: So the [00:31:00] integrations of the, you’re also you’ve also made some improvements to allow partners to integrate their own other integrations through Yeah.
The new APIs, right? Yeah
Libby: we have 15 trusted third party integrators, roost, super Ops, a bunch of other ones. And you can go in, you can find those existing integrations and you can connect super easily. We made it very straightforward, so easier to find, way easier to discover, and much better documentation around it.
And how do I get connected in through these trusted third party integrators that will make my life easier? We’ve got things like, ERB systems all kinds of stuff.
Erick: So talk to me about the agent marketplace. I. So there’s more. Wait, there’s more. There’s
Libby: more. Yeah. So we so we started doing some thinking, some ideation around agent marketplace LA late last year.
Just is there a, there, is this something that we think people would be interested in? Is this, what, is this something that we want to do? And we started to create some designs on how would it look, [00:32:00] how would it feel? How would people discover agents? Can agents talk to agents to find out?
What their capabilities are. So we did a lot of design exploration, and now we’re just starting to gear up on development. So it’s gonna take us a minute. We’re looking at next year before we’re gonna bring anything to market. But we’ve, look, we’re not gonna push for our MSP partners to create agents and leave them hanging.
We want to give them an ecosystem where they can come in, they can find the tools that they need, even at, and when those tools are agents, we want them to be able to find those agents. We wanna give them observability orchestration. So there’s a lot in there. So that they can manage them as well.
Not just find agents and use them and buy them, but also manage them and oversee them and orchestrate them. So that’s a lot of kind of where our head is at with that and a lot of what we’re just starting to come work on.
Erick: Have you lifting?
Libby: I’m we never run out of work to do at Poxy.
I’m never sitting around wondering what am I gonna do today?
Erick: So all this work that you’re doing on behalf of the partners [00:33:00] now, the other point that is, resonates with me is giving them that enablement that you were talking about. So tell, talk to us about the Transformation Academy.
Libby: Yeah. Ah, it has been so fun to watch our academy team and to watch our learning enablement team also. Like when I said that, Scott told us all we had to do ai, like that was everyone. And that included our enablement teams. And so it’s been so fun to see them roll their sleeves up and get in there and figure out how to use these technologies and figure out how to help our partners understand how to use them too.
And it is. It. Look, it will take you from absolute ground zero. If you’re walking in and you think, I don’t know anything that this lady is talking about today, I don’t even have a to hold in what this lady is talking about. We will take you on that complete path through this enablement journey through our guided of growth.
You can take an assessment and that will help you know, where to track yourself in the enablement journey. And then you can just start getting up to speed. We’ve got courses, we’ll got [00:34:00] documentation. And we’ll, I think we’ll have some events as well around it. But it really is, we’re trying to make it as easy as possible because I don’t know about you, but the first time I started really forcing myself to use AI for real in my job, I was a little intimidated, I was like, I don’t really know how this works.
I don’t even know the words people are using. It was a little bit confusing. We wanna take all of that mystery out of it and give our partners really tangible things. Tangible, clear steps to take to start using these technologies. ’cause we think it’s important for them.
Erick: Absolutely. So for folks out there that wanna learn more about PAX eight Yes.
And all these great announcements Yeah. And capabilities. Yeah. Where should they go?
Libby: They can always go to pax eight.com. We have a partner sign up form where we, they, we will reach out to you and have a conversation about where you are, what you’re looking for, how we can help. But always PAX eight.com is a great place to start.
Erick: Libby McElhaney, thank you so much for spending time with us on the MSP Chat [00:35:00] podcast. Thanks, Erick. And sharing all of this, your excitement is infectious. I’ve gotta say, folks, we’re gonna take a quick break. We’ll be right back.
Libby: Thank you so much.
Erick: All right, folks. A very interesting conversation with Libby McElhaney. Of PAX eight and you get a sense for exactly how much PAX eight is doubling and tripling down on the AOP AI opportunity, as are many other distributors and marketplaces. So again, filling this show up with a lot of ai and trying to deliver the best details that you can consider.
Adjusting your go-to-market approach to help your clients leverage ai. That being said, we’ve got time for one last thing, and there’s a saying out there. [00:36:00] This is why we can’t have nice things. So reporting from ap, I’m bringing it to you right here, right now. The Stanley Cup has been damaged.
As the Florida Panthers celebrated their second straight championship, so they won their second straight championship. Recently beating Edmonton in six games and a spokesperson for the hockey Hall of fame said the keepers of the cup are taking appropriate steps to have it repaired and ready for the celebration parade.
The Stanley Cup is made of silver and nickel alloy. It’s 37 pounds. And it’s relatively malleable, so I guess they were partying, a little bit, celebrating and it got damaged. To note, this is not the first time that the Stanley Cup has been damaged. In fact, according to the AP, damage is nothing new for the 130 1-year-old silver chalice.
It’s been submerged in pools [00:37:00] and the Atlantic Ocean mishandled by players, coaches, and staff for more than a century. Just this decade alone, the Tampa Bay Lightning dropped the Cub during their boat parade in 2021 and the Colorado avalanches dented it on the ice the night they won the following year.
So again, that’s why we can’t have nice things. Alright, folks, that’s all the time we’ve got for you on this episode of the show. We thank you so much for joining us. As always, we wanna remind you that this is both a video and an audio podcast, which means that if you’re watching on YouTube.
You’re into audio podcast, go wherever you get your audio podcast and you’ll find us there too. If you’re listening to the audio version of the show, you wanna check us out on video, go to the MSP Chat YouTube channel, and you’ll find us there as well. Wherever you find us, please subscribe, comment and click the bell icon so you’re notified as soon as a new episode is available.
This show is produced by the Great Rush Johns. It’s edited by the great Riley Simpson. They’re part of the growing team at Channel Mastered. [00:38:00] Willing and able to help you create a podcast of your own. Now podcasts are just a small, tiny sliver of the services that we offer to our clients. If you wanna learn more, just jump over to channel Mastered.com.
We’ve also got a sister organization called MSP Mastered, where we work with MSPs to help them improve their business efficiencies and outcomes. Once again, oh, check us out there at mspMastered.com. So once again, we’d like to thank you for joining us. We’re gonna be back in a week with more for you. Until then, remember, you can’t spell channel without
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