Episode 91: Eaten Alive

Erick and Rich discuss Syncro CEO Michael George’s take on why Microsoft is destined to dominate the managed services landscape and what that means for MSPs and vendors alike, as well as techniques for protecting your clients from deepfake phishing attacks and other AI-powered cyberthreats. Then Rich is joined by Art Gross, CEO of Breach Secure Now, to discuss his new book, From Prompt to Profit: The MSP Playbook for AI-Driven Client Success. And finally, one last thing: A new AI-based podcast service that spells certain doom for Erick, Rich, and MSP Chat.

Discussed in this episode:

From Prompt to Profit: The MSP Playbook for AI-Driven Client Success

5,000 Podcasts. 3,000 Episodes a Week. $1 Cost Per Episode — Behind an AI Start Up’s Plan

Some guests on this podcast are clients of Channel Mastered. Compensation plays no part in their appearance or the content of the discussion unless the episode they appear on is a “bonus episode” explicitly labeled as sponsored.

Transcript:

Rich: [00:00:00] And 3, 2, 1. Blast off. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome another episode of the MSP Chat podcast, your weekly visit with two talking heads, talking with you about the services, strategies, and success tips you need to make it big and manage services. My name is Rich Freeman. I’m chief analyst at Channel Master at the organizational, we’re responsible for this show.

I’m joined as well by your other co-host, our CEO and chief strategist at Channel mastered. His name is Erick Simpson. Erick, how are you?

Erick: I’m doing well, rich, after getting back from travel, as you were out on travel last week, both of us were traveling, but at two different events. So are you still recovering from that week of travel and catching up?

Rich: I am [00:01:00] definitely bouncing back. It is funny, we’re recording this at the end of our work week here. We’re both at home in our home office. We were 3000 miles away most of the week, both of us. I got back actually quite late Wednesday night, and so Thursday was a little harder than today.

Doing better today on on Friday, September 19th as we record this. What about you?

Erick: Yeah. Same. Same. And my travel day was long because there’s no direct flight to where I was going. It was connecting flights. I got home last night about 12:30 AM or this morning, I’m sorry, at 12:30 AM So I’m just working on adrenaline right now.

And TGIF Rich, TGIF. There you go. There we go.

Rich: Yeah, we’re we’re in the home stretch. So as long as we’re talking about travel and events that we’ve attended let’s go right into our story of the week because it’s inspired by a conversation that I had with the folks at Synchro.

And I will say it was two conversations, one of which will appear as a spotlight interview segment on this show coming up in just a week or two’s time. But I wanted to [00:02:00] talk a little bit about it from a bigger picture perspective. Synchro, and we’ve talked about this a little bit on the show before they’re not in that, top three, top four tier of R-M-M-P-S-A vendors.

Growing rapidly, fighting their way in. And they have a very distinctive strategy for doing that. They, in the spring, launched a solution that they call Synchro XMM and it combines RMM and PSA and some other P pieces and a single seamless solution. We spoken before on the show about that seamlessness and ease of use aspect of it.

But as I dived into the thinking behind that, deeper with Michael George, the CEO of the company this past week he really did a great job of, I think, finally getting me to understand his read on the market the market writ large really even beyond managed services but certainly as it applies to MSPs going forward.

And that, so I’ll take you through that, his thinking, and then you’ll understand why [00:03:00] Synchro has built XMM the way it has. But what I really wanna get input on Erick is this read on the market and what you think about it. And so basically from Michael’s standpoint, it’s not just that the number one partner that, the most commonly sold and supported vendor in the industry for MSPs right now is Microsoft.

Microsoft is the vendor. It is already today. The dominant presence in the SMB channel and therefore in the world of managed services. And Michael would have you know that it’s only going to get more. So going forward, who is the biggest name in the biggest technology in SMB? Or any portion of it right now?

Artificial intelligence, that’s gonna be Microsoft. Did you know Erick that a year and a half ago, which is the last time Microsoft reported this number, they said that they, their trailing 12 month revenue from security was $20 billion. Palo Alto reported nine point something or [00:04:00] other this past week.

CrowdStrike saw like a 13% overnight bump in their stock price earlier this week when they said they’re gonna be at $20 billion a year. 11 years from now. So all I’m telling you is Microsoft is already probably the biggest security vendor in the industry and it is getting bigger. And part of how it is going to get bigger, and this factors into the thinking at Synchro, is over time they are going to, and regular folks in our audience will hear this term come back in the interview segment.

I did with Michael George later. He would have, you know that over time you’re gonna see Microsoft, Sherlock, lots and lots of security vendors out of the market. Sherlocking, I had to look it up, I didn’t know what it was, but it’s a term associated originally with Apple. And the idea is they see some partner solution that their customers like and they think is cool and they add it to their operating system and away goes that.

Partner because nobody needs them separately [00:05:00] anymore. The feature is built into the operating system. And so this security, for example, Colossus that Microsoft is building, it’s gonna get bigger and bigger. Anything that you could think of that might logically be adjacent to Defender today is gonna be become part of Defender down the road and there will be fewer and fewer security vendors out there, basically doing business alongside Microsoft.

Big picture as Synchro sees it, basically it, and I’m paraphrasing something Michael George said. It is a Microsoft world, therefore if you are an MSP or if you are a company like Synchro making software for MSPs, it’s all about Microsoft. If you look at XMM is there security functionality in there for the MSP?

There absolutely is. It’s built entirely around defender and for ai. They just, this past week. Launched a cloud backup solution. When you hear cloud backup from a lot of vendors out there, all sorts of different clouds that they’re [00:06:00] backing up. This is a hundred percent backing up. Microsoft 365 backing up intra id.

All they’re really thinking about is Microsoft because their view on the marketplace is that already, that’s the number one thing that MSPs think about, and that’s going to be more and more true over time. Really, the big name in everything that SMBs do, and therefore SMBs do, is gonna be Microsoft related in one way or another, and therefore a company like Synchro has to think about.

What can we do that is complimentary to what Microsoft does that helps them compete in the marketplace. And that is unlikely to be sherlocked by Microsoft going forward. And that is it’s an interesting thing because this is a kind of a challenge that Microsoft itself faced once upon a time when they were brand new in the marketplace and they were looking at IBM as both their number one ally and there was this [00:07:00] phrase that they used at the time riding the bear and you just had to know where the bear was going and you had to stay close to the bear and don’t get in front of the Bear’s mouth.

So it eats you and you just gotta get really good at writing the IBM and now Synchro MSPs, Michael George would have you believe, really need to be writing the Microsoft Bear. That’s what Synchro is doing. It’s not so much what anyone else out there right now is convinced of, and I’m just curious to get your take on the matter.

Erick: R this is until you put it into the perspective of the trailing 12 of, Microsoft versus everybody else and just this, that, that act Absolutely. Makes it very clear how dominant they are and Yeah. Riding the bear, that’s, I remember, that was something that, that they would talk about in internally at Microsoft is we’re just gonna ride the bear specifically on that IBM relationship, right?

It’s we’re gonna hang on as much as possible, that bear’s gonna be trying to shake us off, right? But we’re gonna try to hang on for dear life. [00:08:00] And so that’s what I remember that, that phrase that, that reminded me of that. And, the concept of being sherlocked because this is reading the tea leaves, right?

There are so many other vendors out there that provide a competing product. Purport to do things better than what Microsoft does, but as Microsoft sherlocks this stuff in to their own platform I think that creates a lot of, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and has a lot of vendors trying to adapt more to integrate more tightly and closely with Microsoft, just synchro is doing.

So those are some very interesting takeaways. And ultimately, for me as a recovering MSP, I’m always thinking about what’s best for the partner? Rich, is it better in your opinion for partners that Microsoft just incorporates more and more of these solutions for the partners and leaves less in, maybe potentially less choice?

’cause they’re also acquiring [00:09:00] vendors especially around, specific. Solutions that it’s faster for them to buy than to build and buy and integrate, if you will. So is it better for partners, what we’re talking about here as the top story, or not so much?

Rich: It’s interesting.

And you’re reminding me of something. And again, I think this will come up on the the interview when it appears on the podcast. O obviously Michael is very conscious of that idea. That the first thing MSPs are gonna say is, I don’t wanna have all my eggs in that one basket.

And it’s a basket that’s, owned and operated by this massive company. And what Michael basically said is, look like it or not, your eggs are in that basket right now. It, is it good or is it not good? It’s probably not great. But guess what? That’s where we’re going.

There, there aren’t gonna be that many alternatives is the synchro perspective on where the industry is going right now. And so you can either ride that bear to the best of your ability [00:10:00] or try to fight it, probably get thrown off and eaten alive.

Erick: Hope for the best plan for the worst.

Rich: Yeah. And, I, and that’s, and that’s what they’re doing at Synchro. I’ll just do this very quickly and then we can move on to your tip of the week. While I was at that, so I recorded the interview segment people here at the MSP Summit, which is where I was earlier this week in Orlando.

And while I was there and interacting face-to-face with Michael George, the CEO and d zep, the Chief Product Officer of Synchro, Microsoft, announced something that I haven’t actually seen very much media attention directed towards yet, which is that. They, they, they very much want Intune to be the management lane for their for copilot and for for, Microsoft 365 and so on.

They are, they have awakens to the facts that one of the key inhibitors to that is it is not a multi-tenant system. And Microsoft has officially declare enforcer and [00:11:00] nerdio their kind of go-to multi-tenant intune partners. And they’re gonna be doing all sorts of things out there to enable to, to arm enforcer and nerdio to go out and recruit lots of MSPs so that those MSPs have a multi-tenant intune kind of option.

And, the folks at Synchro, they are super, super plugged in at Microsoft. I mean they, the two people I mentioned, the two executives, they’re meeting on a weekly basis with very senior people within Microsoft. And I’m there with them when Microsoft announces this thing on Wednesday. They did not know it was coming.

This just gives you a sense for how hard it is to ride that that particular bear. Basically it is a big bear.

Erick: Yeah. Microsoft is now the bear when they were talking about it being IBM back in the day yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. It’s and I, my, my tip of the week comes from is derived from some sessions that I attended at Ingram, micros [00:12:00] Cybersecurity Summit 2025 in Buffalo.

That’s where I was. But it just, and the reality that reinforces what we talked about here as Microsoft being the bear and being this, $20 billion in trailing 12 and all that. I did a session at the cybersecurity summit for Ingram Micro and a hand raise like, how many of you folks do not do business with Microsoft?

No hands are went up rich. That’s very telling.

Rich: Let’s move right onto that tip of the week because we’re talking about Microsoft in the context of AI and of security, and you’ve got a tip that’s right there at the intersection of those two things, and it’s an issue actually, that’s been on my mind some.

So what is that, Erick?

Erick: Yeah, so boy. Oh boy. It, the advancements in threat actors leveraging AI is exponentially growing. To the point Rich, where, and I, sat in a few sessions at the cybersecurity [00:13:00] summit and to the point where these folks are actually using live deep fake technology to fake users out.

They’re using AI assisted tools and techniques to do phishing attacks. We’ve talked about this, but boy, the more and more I begin to get immersed into kind of the, more of the cybersecurity side of kind of our conversations here with channel vendors and these events.

It’s staggering just how advanced these threat actors are in using deep fake and recording. They’ll even, record video with a deep fake using AI voice so that it’s getting so, so good that it’s fooling the folks that it never would’ve fooled before in the, with using the old tactics of trying to do social engineering and phishing and things like that.

My tip of the week is really all around how [00:14:00] MSPs could perceive the, these new threats that their customers are being exposed to right now and how they can shield those customers from this. Three quick thoughts, rich. Number one, and this is something that, if I had some references, we could drop in the show notes.

I’d be happy to, but I’m sure we’re gonna keep having this conversation. There will be other vendors that’ll come up or other folks that we will be introduced to over the course of, what we do on the day-to-day that we can maybe help partners with. But number one, it’s training clients on how to detect anomalies in voice and communication patterns linked to some of these deep face fake attacks.

And some of this too just happens. It’s happening with video, with virtual meetings, but it’s also happening a lot with phone calls, right? So this technology, so it’s a lot tougher in detecting these anomalies, rich, as you can imagine, than it used to be in reading [00:15:00] the, the email from, the saltan from some African nation that needed you to send them some money so they could get all their money out and then pay you a huge reward to do that, right?

Those emails were littered with obvious takeaways, but they still worked with some people, right? Which is still mind boggling. So think about the effectiveness that is, that can be had using AI and deepfake and all of this. So training clients on how to detect those anomalies. Now again, I wish I had some more concrete here’s what to look for and things like that.

Do some research. Survey your clients. Ask them if they’re getting some of these types of social engineering attacks or phone calls. And I’m getting texts all the time that are obviously phishing attempts. I’m getting emails that I have to look at Rich today, like three or four times. Man, and this is so good, right?

It is so good that somebody, I can just imagine somebody at an [00:16:00] organization that isn’t aware of these threats and just the small little things that they give it away that then I, of course report as phishing and delete and things like that. So give your clients an awareness. If anything feels weird, looks weird.

Recently I’ve been getting these emails rich that are like and the effort that’s gone into this. It’s like a whole email thread between somebody that I don’t even know, and this, vendor. Let’s say it’s a vendor or somebody that they’re trying to collect an invoice on, and so it’s three emails in the thread between them.

Then ultimately the person says, oh, you need to send this to Erick Simpson to get it paid. And so then they the top of the thread is them communicating with me, Hey, please pay our invoice, kind of thing. And I’m like, that is wild. So I can imagine how many people that’s fooling.

So just train your clients on what to look for. Something looks weird, something is out of the ordinary, that’s why it’s super important, rich to have, SPF [00:17:00] and D Kim and d Mark set correctly for clients emails so that they’re, able to identify somebody who’s, that stuff doesn’t align.

So if it doesn’t align, it’s already suspect, right? Number two, elevate baseline security posture, your baseline deliverables and what you require your clients to elevate to an advanced cybersecurity. Posture we were talking about Microsoft instance, put them on defender P two. Don’t just take the default stuff, put them on a higher level of M 365.

So they get more security and more ability to identify things that may be a threat. Enforce MFA and enforce password managers. And we know the ones to avoid because, the news is out there. Who’s been acting, who hasn’t? And do regular vulnerability scans for your clients. This is now table stakes for MSPs Rich.

Number three, if you can include AI based threat detection tools. And again, as we discover these [00:18:00] and find them we’ll help promote them on the show. But just AI based tools. I know there’s a couple, there’s one that I use, I can’t remember the name of it right now, but where you can drop in content.

Then it tells you what percentage of it was AI generated and what’s human generated tools like that can also be helpful. So these are just three quick tips because this is not gonna, this is not gonna get easier. And these folks are just amazingly advanced at what they’re doing and it’s targeting the majority of SMB customers, right?

So we only hear about the big breaches, but a majority of these attacks and the majority of the revenues being generated are from SMBs having to pay ransoms or their insurance company paying ransoms because it’s quicker to get the data back than not. And then you’ve got that double jeopardy where they’ll post it on, they’ll obey the ransom.

They go, okay, now we want this other ransom because we’ve all exfiltrated your data after the phishing attack was successful and we’re gonna post it on the internet.

Rich: Yeah, you’re [00:19:00] reminding me years ago, and this was highly speculative at the time, but years ago I predicted that someday, just as we’re all familiar with business email compromise attacks, BEC, as deep fake technology becomes mainstream, we would witness something that I called the Business Zoom Compromise attack BZC, right?

So it’s not just an email that is convincingly from your boss. You’re looking into the face of your boss, hearing your boss’s voice. The boss is saying, I need you to move a million dollars of Bitcoin into the offshore account. And it’s a hundred percent real as far as you can tell. Everyone out there in our audience right now, highly aware of BEC, they are protecting their clients against that.

They are, I hope training their clients, to recognize the telltale signs of phishing lures and BEC attacks and so on. And the new table stakes, the new baseline as you were saying, is going to be. Taking all that, continuing to do all of that, and adding on [00:20:00] awareness and protection around this new layer of AI powered threats out there.

Because your customers are gonna be extremely exposed if you’re not doing that. And I guess the last little point I would make is just this further sort of underscored I don’t know that anyone in our audience needs to be convinced that they need to be paying close attention to the security landscape out there.

But if there’s any hesitation, any thought that, there’s only, there are only so many hours in a day, this is why you really need to be carving out a little time to see what the threat landscape looks like and what’s happening to, to SMBs being victimized by cyber crime and so on.

Because you want, you don’t wanna figure out that there is this new giant risk when it’s too late to do something about it. And some of your customers have been hit and your competitors are already talking to clients about how to insulate them.

Erick: Let me give you one scenario that seems to be growing in use and it’s a, it’s an IT technician contacting a user on the network in the [00:21:00] environment, and coming up with some reason why they need to change their password.

And the, it’s, it works. It’s like the social, they’re so good at social engineering and they’re reaping millions and millions of dollars in ransom. It is just insane. So think of this I’m gonna run with this for a second, rich. So think of a threat actor knowing who your customer’s MSP is, you, M-S-P-A-A-B, C, and contacting them as a technician from the organization convincingly using AI and deepfake technology.

Knowing enough. On just social engineering to say, Hey, we detected this issue with your software. We need to change your password really quickly. Let me help you with that. Let me send you a link. And then that’s where it starts, right? Which, and it’s just, it can be that easy to get someone to go, oh, okay.

And then, they’re, they now put their credentials [00:22:00] into, a fake website that the threat actor now grabs those credentials, logs into that application all of a sudden. And now, bad things steamroll from there.

Rich: Absolutely. It is a very interesting and sometimes very scary world that we’re in right now.

But let’s maybe pivot Erick to the more positive side of the AI story. ’cause we’re about to take a break when we come back on the other side. We’re gonna have an interview segment for you that I recorded in the not too distant past with Art Gross, the CEO of Breach Secure.

Now, he is also the author of a new book. It is called From Prompt to Profit, the MSP Playbook for AI Driven Client Success. We’re gonna talk about turning AI into a source of revenue and profit for your business. Something a little bit more upbeat, that will just be me and a, because I recorded this when Erick was deep, deep under the weather.

But we’ll come back after the break. We’ll have art gross for you. And then Erick and I will come back after another break and talk a little bit about what Ark had to stay, stick [00:23:00] around. We will be right back

and welcome back part two of this episode of the MSP Check podcast, our spotlight interview segment where I’m very pleased to be joined by somebody I’ve known for a long time. He is the CEO of Breach Secure now. He is also very recently the author of a new book. It is called From Prompt to Profit, the MSP Playbook for AI Driven Client Success.

I had a chance to read it. There it is. Happened to have it right here. I was watching on video. There it is. I had an opportunity to read it on a nice long flight home to Seattle from Florida recently. I wanted to have our own show to talk about it with us. ’cause I think the book is really very good.

Art, welcome to the show.

Art: Thank you Rich. It’s great to be here and I’m was thrilled when you gave me the, the invite to, to join you. And I appreciated that feedback also that you shared with me.

Rich: So I keep calling you Art. I’m [00:24:00] not sure if I specified. Your name is Art Gross. So for folks in the audience who are not familiar with you, just give ’em a little bit of background about who you are and what you do.

Yep. I’m Art Gross.

Art: I am an MSP. I’ve been running an MSP for 25 years since 2000. I’m also the CEO of Breach Secure now and online employee training platform focusing on cybersecurity, Microsoft 365 productivity and now AI awareness as well. And we do HIPAA compliance too. We have about 3000 MSPs on our platform, 35,000 small mid-size businesses, and we trade over a million people.

And it just keeps growing. That that’s me.

Rich: There are lots and lots of great insights in the book. One of the things, one of the points you make you emphasize for MSPs is that your AI journey as an MMSP kind of has to begin inside your own four walls in terms of adopting and implementing and getting to, to know ai.

And one of my favorite chapters in the [00:25:00] book actually was when you talked about how you did that at Bre Breach Secure. Now. So talk a little bit about how you built AI into the culture of how the company operates. Yeah I think

Art: that’s one of the most important aspects, and a lot of MSPs don’t get that at first.

And with BSNI remember it was November, 2022. Someone sent me over a link to this new toy or new tool chat, GPT, and I’m, I tried it and I knew within 10 minutes this was. This was game changing. This was going to change the world. I just couldn’t believe the capabilities that I saw. And that was way back then.

I started talking about it inside of BSN breach, secure Now and I started telling my employees this is, we need to be in front of this. This is something that we could leverage. I immediately lowered the fear. I said, I’m not looking at AI to replace any of you. I want to make us more productive.

And we really started to build a culture around using the tools, sharing, new [00:26:00] prompts, sharing new tools. ’cause back then it was brand new. It was brand new, and everyone got excited. We would have Friday sharing sessions. So the culture that we built was all about, let’s keep talking about ai.

Let’s use it. What we found out is that we were able to enter new markets, we’re able to do things yes, faster, right? Obviously we, emails were faster and marketing reports were faster, but we were able to get into Microsoft 365 training, AI awareness training by using ai. So our content that we’re building, us as experts on how to train and AI as subject matter experts.

We’ve been able to leverage that internally. And the key aspect here is building that culture where employees are not scared of AI or they’re not hiding their AI use, where they’re excited to use it and share that they’re using it. And I think what you mentioned in the beginning is MSPs need to do the same thing.

If you’re gonna help your clients with ai, you have got [00:27:00] to understand, what AI adoption culture looks like. What is some of the resistance, what training do you need? Guardrails you need. So I really do believe MSPs need to, adopt ai, not just for ticket resolutions, but how everyone in your company uses AI effectively, safely, productively.

Rich: And there’s some, really good best practices in there. First of all it’s very much a top down kind of initiative, right? This was coming straight from you, this is important to, and so that’s gonna be something that folks in the audience need to pay attention to. And then you also, like the Friday meetings you were talking about, you, you created venues for people to share their experiences and so on, so that it just, it wasn’t a bunch of people independently figuring things out.

You were talking about it inside the company all the time.

Art: We were definitely talking about it, sharing, show and tell, and employees really enjoyed it. And honestly, that kind of changed our culture. Normally we have about a [00:28:00] hundred employees. We have our finance department, our marketing, our product, sales development.

They all kinda work together. Separately. But together this sharing of the AI tools and prompts and use cases brought the company together and it really started getting us working together more. Not only did it change our AI culture, but it actually changed our culture of working together and looking for projects that we can collaborate on it.

But that, that, that team building, that sharing, that, taking that knowledge and sharing it was really important. And one of the success factors that we had.

Rich: Now the book sketches out a sort of roadmap for getting started. Once you’re ready to start talking about AI with clients, you’ve got a whole roadmap in there about where to begin and how to progress and we’ll talk about some of the stages there, but it more or less begins with Microsoft copilot logically.

I forget the exact number, but I saw a figure a research number recently on the percentage of MSPs who are selling [00:29:00] copilot to their customers. And I was shocked how low it is at this point in time. Why do you think that is? And where would you advise the folks in our audience who are not invested not talking to their customers about copilot right now to get started?

Yeah.

Art: It’s interesting for an MSP copilot seems the place to start, right? You’re selling Microsoft 365 licenses. It just maps perfectly into, your governance and the data, the protections you put in place. And why not just keep, going with copilot?

On the other hand, employees know Chat, GPT, they’re using chat. GPT, a lot of them are using the free version. So you’re going to get clients who are very familiar with Chat, GPT and they’re gonna want to lean into those tools where, MSPs are saying, no, we should do co-pilot. And up until recently, Microsoft just added GPT five to co-pilot, co-pilot was always lagging behind.

It didn’t have the deep research, it didn’t have [00:30:00] the interface. It was a little more difficult to use than some of the commercial tools. So I think that’s part of the problem, where employees wanna use chat, GPT and the tools they know MSPs are going to wanna push for copilot.

Clients are just saying, if I’m gonna spend all this money on licenses, I want my employees using it. That becomes a real, it goes back to the, internet Explorer versus Chrome, right? We want you to use, we want you to use Internet Explorer, people want to use Chrome.

We want you to use Microsoft 365. You want to use Google Workspace. So I think you’re going to see these, like the browser wars, you’re gonna see the AI wars within your client

Rich: base as well. I, is there a way for MSP to win that war? Basically, if you run into that objection what should you do?

I think

Art: when it comes down to any tool that you give to a client, training is a big piece of that, right? Because you, anyone can buy copilot licenses. Anyone can buy Microsoft 365 [00:31:00] licenses, and, but if you don’t train the finance on how to use Excel. Or how to use PowerPoint in marketing.

Those tools are not going to get used. So if you’re going to introduce any tools, you have got to make sure that employees understand how to use it. They see, they, they’ve gotten the training, the use cases that, the jumpstart that they need. And I think MSPs are struggling with that.

They’re buying licenses, they’re not being used. The employees don’t know how to use it and maybe they sit unused and the productivity isn’t there and clients just don’t wanna continue with those prototypes. That is really important, explaining how to use it, what to do with it, how to be successful with those tools.

And I also think, honestly. There’s going to be multiple tools in clients. Just it isn’t okay, Excel could do everything for you, right? There’s gonna be word, there’s going to be PowerPoint, there’s gonna be Outlook and Teams. All of those different functionalities are like different AI tools, right?

There’s gonna [00:32:00] be video capabilities that’ll be perplexity or on perplexity Synthesia or Google VO three. So you’re going to get those, you’re going to get research in perplexity. So there’s gonna be multiple tools that, and I don’t think MSP should be just shoehorning one tool, right?

They need to understand one of the chapters in the book is figure out the best tool for the department for, the client that may be in a different industry. What tool works the best? What tools work together well? What can you get the insight. Into who’s using it. So I, I would urge the audiences don’t just focus on copilot.

Yes, copilot I think is a key aspect because it does integrate with Microsoft 365, but there’s going to be other tools and other use cases, and there could be a collection of tools that, that a client, will need for different departments and different functions.

Rich: I should point out the book has a really handy section about how to [00:33:00] methodically figure out what tool is best for which use case and so on and capture that information so that you don’t have to figure it out over and over again when you’re talking to customers.

Speaking of talking to customers you, from a sales perspective, there’s some really interesting advice in the book where you recommend to MSPs that rather than position AI as this world changing kind of brand new thing to them, you liken it to things they already have already done.

You make it a little bit familiar in, in that way. Talk a little bit about why that’s effective and then maybe just provide an example or two of what to say and what not to say.

Art: Yeah. One, one of the big things that I really push is to look at AI as this AI intern, right?

It’s very relatable, because you think about ai we may be talking about copilot or chat GPT for teams, but clients. They just hear ai, they don’t know whether that’s robots, self-driving cars. [00:34:00] What is this generative ai like, what is this? And I think, and us MSPs, we’re very technical, right?

So we wanna go in with, oh my God, this thing could, read A PDF and summarize like. No, it, it know what could do. It could make your meeting, we can summarize your meeting with action points without you taking any notes. It can make your, your salespeople give them more insight into a prospect.

They’re talking to find out more information in five minutes than they could in, in hours of research. You wanna make it where it’s relatable as opposed to that, that I don’t understand what this does and why I should invest. My time and effort and money into putting this that those, that’s really important to, to look at specific functions that they’re doing today and figure out how AI can make those employees better.

That’s a big piece that I really push for with early adoption is look at it as a productivity tool on existing functions that your [00:35:00] clients do as opposed to automation. We can automate something, we can replace the human by doing that. It’s really a lot easier for adoption in the beginning of saying, if we get your employees using this, just like they use Excel or PowerPoint or teams, they use CHATT or copilot, they’ll be able to do their functions a lot faster or a lot better, and they’ll be able to do things they couldn’t do before.

And that’s relatable, right? And especially that AI intern, think of it as an AI intern. And even interns don’t replace your employees. Interns make your employees better. They need training. They need to, your employees need to know how to work with interns. But if you look at AI as an intern, it makes your employees better.

And imagine having an intern for every single one of your employees. How much better, how much faster they can get their jobs done, how much better they can be, and maybe how much happier that they can be. That I think, is the mindset that small [00:36:00] businesses really need, at MSP’s, clients really need to understand, because that is relatable.

I understand what an intern is and I don’t understand what this automation is and how I won’t need my employees to do this. I think that is a key aspect of initially talking to clients about where generative AI could fit into their organization.

Rich: So just to make the contrast clear.

So that’s what you should say, that that’s how you should position AI to the clients in a relatable way, a kind of concrete and pr they can understand the impact. What is it that MSPs tend to say or prone to say otherwise that is less effective?

Art: Yeah, we talk about technology, right?

We talk about, the how great this tool is and how you can analyze, spreadsheets and how this agent can go and talk to another agent. And, when we start talking about the technology and we don’t talk about the outcomes and, business owners want outcomes.

They wanna know, if [00:37:00] I put this tool in place, I’m going to get a better outcome, but. MSPs, and I’m an Ms. P, so I’m allowed to say this about US MSPs. We love technology. We love to talk about firewalls, right? We love talking about, the next generation firewalls or socks or sims.

We need to bring that back to why, what does this tool do for my business? What does this tool do for my employees? And I think that’s the piece that MSP struggle with because every, a lot of our partners, they’re all talking about these agents and building, these automations.

And and I caution them and, because a lot of times I know my employees, they don’t really know my client’s business, right? They know the tools they use, but they don’t know the business. So if you’re gonna look to, to, to a. To automate a process, you have to understand that process.

And a lot of our techs in MSPs, they don’t understand the business process. It’s gonna be very hard to automate that, but that’s where we’re [00:38:00] starting to focus on. And I think that is a problem that MSPs need to go back to the business outcome. What can we do with this and make it, make it better for your employees?

Rich: Talking about outcomes and business process. It’s a great segue for something I wanted to get into with you. ’cause, the you’ve got the roadmap for getting into AI for MSPs in the book, it begins with things like training and copilot, but ultimately where you’re trying to get to is being a virtual chief AI officer to your clients.

That’s a concept that Erick and I have spoken about in the podcasts very recently. More than once. Even give folks your definition of what it means to be a vc ai O It’s A-V-A-I-O

Art: virtual AI officer. Okay. VAIO. Yeah. VIOI don’t think there’s a C in there. So I think there’s A-V-A-I-O, that’s what I was calling it in the book.

Virtual AI officer.

Rich: And how do you define that and why is that where you ultimately wanna be as an [00:39:00] Ms. P?

Art: Yeah. Yes. I I’ll define it first. First. I think that’s a very strategic role, right? That is evaluating where the organization is in terms of their AI adoption, what tools are being used, what safeguards are in place, and what other opportunities are there to implement ai, to streamline that organization.

It’s very strategic and you can think about ongoing evaluation of different departments, different functions, where does AI fit? But and so when you think about it, the, it’s very much like A-V-C-I-O, right? Where does technology help your business?

That we’re, MSPs are very familiar with the VCIO. Where do we use technology? What, where can it be applied? How do we make sure that employees are using the tools we put in place? Very strategic, very much, making sure those operational pieces are strategic. Same thing with ai where, we’re keep using it, but what I’ll caution right now is [00:40:00] that I don’t think MSPs are ready to be the aios, right?

Because you have to start, like we, we go back to what we started this conversation with. You have to adopt that within your own Ms. P you have to understand the challenges, the resistance, where the reporting the ROI on these tools. You have to get really good at that. And the way to get really good at it is to implement that in your own MSP, to start with some of your clients, to understand where they wanna go, where they need to go.

So I would caution MSPs not to rush right into this VAIO officer, but ease into it. Get your clients using the tools, get them asking for more help, more questions, more, more reporting. Once you start seeing the clients really adopting this, that’s when you can form more of a strategic role.

But in the beginning your role as an MSP is, get your clients using ai, lower the resistance. Get your client management saying, wow, I [00:41:00] can start to see some success, some use cases. This is good. Let’s build momentum. That’s when you start charging for those, those virtual a IO officers.

And. MSPs want to get there right away. We wanna, we want to, monetize AI right away. And I caution because you may not have the skillset to do that day one, right? And your clients may not be ready for that day one. In fact, they may feel pressured, get them using the tools, get them seeing success, and then work your way towards that, that, more strategic role in around ai.

What do you think about that, rich? Do you agree with that? When you were talking with Erick? Do you know, does that align with what you were discussing?

Rich: Yeah, absolutely. I think speaking on behalf of Erick as well, I think if we share a concern, it’s just that people are gonna hang up that shingle virtual AI officer prematurely because you it’s not just a matter of being.

The outsourced provider of input about ai. I, I liken it as [00:42:00] much to VCIO as to vcso Virtual Chief Information Security Officer. Yep. You can call yourself that, but it really, in the real world, it means more than just, I’m the guy you go to, to talk about security. Like you, there are certain skills there that take time to develop and it’s going to be the same thing with virtual AI officer.

Yep. Exactly. I totally

Art: agree with that. And MSPs didn’t start that way, right? We started with firewalls, antivirus. We did, dark web security awareness training. We started down that path of getting our employee, our clients, thinking about training their clients. Then we implemented it, A an MDR, an EDR.

We started to get more and more, and maybe we got around compliance. Then we started to do that v cso. And you didn’t start there, but your journey led you there and your clients weren’t ready for it day one. In the beginning it was, your employees are your weakest link, let’s go train them, right?

Dark web information. [00:43:00] And then we eased our way into these advanced security services. Same exact thing with ai. Get them using it, train them, implement more and more services, and then become very strategic as an outcome.

Rich: So shortly after I read the book, I sent you a a thank you note, and I mentioned that at some point I wanna talk about one chapter in particular that really jumped out at me.

And this is that point basically, so this was the chapter you have in there about AI consultants and the threat that they potentially pose to MSP. So let’s start with who are those AI consultants and why are they a risk factor here?

Art: So the AI consultants, think of this. AI is a gold brush.

Everybody wants to be involved in ai, right? AI is the new cybersecurity. AI is the new cloud. AI is the new internet, and everyone sees this massive adoption, billions and trillions maybe of financial outcomes going to [00:44:00] come outta ai. So everybody wants a piece of it. You’re getting these AI consultants.

Anyone can be an AI consultant. In fact, I went down the rabbit hole and started looking for AI consultants in Facebook and Instagram, and now my feed is just loaded with it. $47 will turn you into an AI consultant. Again, it’s a gold rush. So people are selling these classes to make you an AI consultant.

On the other hand, there’s now people who are saying, I’m an AI consultant. I will go to, your business and I will help you implement ai. And what we’re finding is that they’re, they could be really good at sales, right? Yeah. We, I go I’ll talk to the owner of of small business or management.

And go around the IT component and say, Hey, if you implement ai, we can go from four SDRs down to two SDRs or 10 meetings a week to 30 meetings a week or products that could be done faster. So I’m going to help you implement AI and I [00:45:00] think business owners are going to be very interested in, they’ve heard ai, they don’t know how to do it, and these consultants are selling them.

This ROI dream, more sales, better productivity. And that’s a real threat I believe, to MSPs. ’cause MSPs have been that strategic voice. Here’s the technology that we should implement. I will manage it. I’ll make sure everyone’s, ready to use this and I’m your strategic advisor.

I think these AI consultants are going to start to become strategic advisors to some of MSP’s clients, which I think could be a real problem for them.

Rich: And the, these AI consultants, they’re not necessarily MSPs themselves, but they’re also, their expertise is not necessarily limited to ai. There, I, there are a number of issues with an AI consultant getting into your clients, and one is that any money they’re making is money out of your pocket.

But is there also this it sounds like there’s this possibility that once [00:46:00] they’ve established a beachhead around ai, they can start a sort of land and expand from there.

Art: Yeah. And you nailed it. Now in the traditional sense, if your client doesn’t like you, they don’t like your MSP services, they replace you with another MSP.

And so your real competition is other MSPs, for the most part. With AI consultants, they’ll come in and they’re, they’ll say, oh, I’ll even work with your MSP. And they’re coming in and they are, becoming the strategic voice. So they, when you, we were talking about we were talking about co-pilot, they’ll tell, they could say the client, oh, you don’t want copilot, you want this tool that I know about and it needs access to Microsoft 365, to Salesforce to your ERP.

And we’ll need to open up all that and your, it is slowing us down. So it becomes a real problem because these consultants are coming in and they’re, they want access to data. That could cause, some security concerns if you’re an MSP, but also [00:47:00] they just start to land and expand.

We, we did this project, let’s go work on your marketing projects next, or your product management or your support. And all of a sudden they’re the ones dictating the technology that MSPs potentially have to support. And that is a real problem that I’m hearing from MSPs. It’s happening already, right?

The, these consultants are starting to knock on the door. They’re going straight to management with, with promises of ROI and efficiencies. Small businesses, some of them are very interested in taking those services which I think MSPs have to be very concerned about.

Rich: And interestingly enough, you actually have some experience from earlier in your career with this same phenomenon in a different sort of technology field. I wanna say it was ERP it’s actually EE

Art: EHRs. It was electric health records. Yep. Back in the meaningful use days in 2010, two thou to 2015.

Rich: So what [00:48:00] did you learn from that experience? For the MSPs in our audience who do see an AI consultant either talking to their clients or actually getting some business from their clients, what did you learn from that EHR experience about how to react to how to keep, in this case, the AI consultants out and what to do if they’ve managed to get their foot in the door?

Art: Yeah. And so the history that I had was, we supported healthcare and part of meaningful use part of all of the money the government was giving healthcare. To implement electronic health records. All of these consultants popped up. They knew how to implement EHRs.

They knew how to make sure that they all work and automate these clinical workflows. And I didn’t I knew the technology, so the consultants were coming in and talking to my clients and it really was, I went from being strategic to the tech company that just implements someone else’s strategy wasn’t very good.

The good news is they left after they did an implementation, they would go on to the next hospital and next me [00:49:00] medical practice. But that is where I, when I talk about these AI consultants, it’s from the history that I saw and it, they did get between me and my clients, which was a problem.

And now with ai, it MSPs, I again. I think MSPs need to get these tools into clients’ hands, whether it’s copilot or chat, GPT or perplexity or whatever tools that you want to support and start to lead the conversation because clients are just looking for where do I go with it? If you’re not talking to clients, they’re like, I don’t know what to do with ai.

And some consultant comes in and tells ’em the world. That sounds good. But if the MSP is already leading that adoption, even if it’s just using the tools training guardrails, then they, then that your clients are going to want to go to those consultants, say, thank you. My MSP is helping me, but if you’re not helping them, then there are very susceptible to these AI consultants promising the world [00:50:00] and starting to do that, those implementations.

So I think that is really important to get ahead of the AI consultants. The other piece is if a client is working with a consultant, and not all consultants are bad, they’re consultants that are really good at what they do. You want to be really strong in what you’re good at. Data, making sure the network is secure, making sure the data is secure.

You wanna lead the security. And so if a consultant is asking for access to data. You need to be able to talk to the, your clients on what are the risks of doing what this consultant wants. What, where can we control the who gets access to the data? What’s the security around it?

Very important to still lead from a cybersecurity and then also to establish that relationship with a consultant. Make sure that you are in the loop and they understand their role and you understand your role and they’re not doing, your role and you’re supplementing [00:51:00] and helping them make your clients successful.

So it’s a balancing act. But I do think that what we’re going to see is these AI automation consultants or business process consultants pop up and be channel friendly. I do see, that’s a huge opportunity for companies to say, Hey, we’re gonna, we know these automations and business process re-engineering, but we’re gonna work through MSPs, almost like MSPs, right?

That they’re working, they’re helping MSPs. So we’re gonna start to see a lot of those companies that MSPs are gonna be able to partner with to do a lot more advanced services that they may not have those capabilities. You’re fending off AI consultants, you’re looking for partners to bring in to, to expand your services to, it’s a tightrope right now in terms of making sure that you’re still leading that conversation.

Rich: Yeah. It’s interesting. It sounds like one really smart strategy for dealing with the whole AI [00:52:00] consultant phenomenon and keeping them from costing you business is to actually research them yourselves. Find one you believe in, or forge in a partnership and go to market with, to your clients potentially together.

And, this is one of those things where their ability to find new clients could bring more business to you if they bring, belong to the clients that they’re engaging with that work.

Art: And that with cybersecurity, right? There’s so many vendors.

Look, that partner at MSPs partnered with BSN to provide training, with soc companies with all of these different vendors that they didn’t build all of those services themselves. They partnered. With AI services, we’re gonna see the same thing. Yes, trying to form those relationships to expand your capability, especially early, what I guess a lot of MSPs don’t have those capabilities, so give yourself time to start to build that internal understanding and knowledge and, [00:53:00] potentially start to build it yourself but maybe in the beginning, partner with other vendors to help you, other consultants to help you introduce these services to your clients.

Rich: So we’re talking a lot here about what I’ll call augmentative generative ai. But obviously the thing that the industry is super excited about right now and we’re starting to see this actually roll out is agentic ai. We’re instead of augmenting the user, the AI is actually completing processes autonomously actually doing work that people were required to do before.

I’m curious, first of all, what kind of thoughts you have about the future of Agen AI in, in the managed services world. And I’m also curious if you are doing within Breach Secure now, the kind of thing around agentic AI that you did, with chat GPTA few years ago, are you beginning to build a culture of experimentation and interest around that?

Art: We are we’re definitely starting to look at [00:54:00] that internally. Again still making sure employees feel comfortable with the technology, still making sure that culture is right. Where if we start to automate and start to, to ensure that, start to automate some of those processes that the human, that the employees are still in that loop.

That they don’t feel like they, ’cause you look over and if you’re gonna implement this, this automation, am I gonna have a job? So we’re doing it very slowly. And we’re also asking employees, what is the use case that you would love, right? You would love us to help you with what are, what’s your pain point?

So instead of us just coming and say, all right, we’re gonna automate this function, we’re actually enlisting employees to raise their hand and say, I have a great use case. Can someone help me with it so they feel a part of it and they feel like that this could help them. And, I, I really do caution, Yeah.

Agents and automation in the s and b market. I don’t see that for two [00:55:00] years. I really don’t. I know we hear about it and we’re hearing about it up, up in, in the enterprise, but a lot of these projects are failing. Although I know that’s where we’re going and the technology is gonna get better.

I caution MSPs to be jumping there. I believe we will see these, these agents and full blown automations. But right now, in the next two years I really think that we’re going maybe 18 months, two years seems a little too long, but we’re really going to need to get more adoption, more use cases more, more making employees, more productive, and then slowly introducing this entire agent-based AI adoption.

And although I think there’s more noise around it than there are implementation, that’s where I am. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen and definitely will happen but in the short term I think we’re going to, I think it’s further out than people think, especially in the SMB market.[00:56:00]

Rich: So let’s close by focusing on the short term. For the folks in the audience here who really haven’t gotten their AI journey started. What is the first step you want everyone who is in that category to take other than buy your book? Of course. After they have, after they’ve finished listening to or watching this conversation,

Art: I think you, you really have to take a step back and say, okay, if we’re going to get involved with ai, I’m going to roll this out.

Inside of my MSP, and I don’t mean just in your ticketing system. Give your salespeople access to ai, give your marketing sales support support’s your main function, finance. Make sure that you understand that challenges that you, your clients are going to face. Be able to say we successfully rolled out ai.

I have use case after use case. I can show you ROII can show [00:57:00] you improvements. That’s it. A lot of times we wanna rush it to our clients. Spend the time building this within your own organization. Figure out your internal champions. Figure out who is resistant. There are some people who just are, they hate ai, they just, they don’t think that this is a good technology.

What do you do when you face those employees? ’cause we have some, and your MSPs are gonna have some what are those challenges? Get really good. Just like you’re really good at managed services or it get really good at AI adoption and then start to build out those services.

But don’t skip your own organization and don’t skip training. Don’t skip policies. Don’t skip the guardrails that make you successful, and then show one of the key pieces is clients will pay for successful adoption. If you could say, I know how to successfully implement ai, where your employees will use it.

We’ll be able to show productivity and advances. [00:58:00] Your clients will pay for that, but if you don’t or you are not able to do that, you’re going to struggle. So internal is the place to start and get really good at that.

Rich: Okay. You can show the cover again. The book is called From Prompt Profit, the MSP Playbook for AI Driven Client Success is available on Amazon.

We will link to it from the show notes as well for folks who wanna check it out. Art for folks in the audience who wanna get in touch with you, learn about more about you and reach secure now, where should they go? I am

Art: very active on LinkedIn. In fact a lot of my posts were the foundation of writing this book.

Connect with me Art Gross on LinkedIn. Also, my email address is Art [email protected]. And if you have any questions or comments or want some more information, I’d be more than happy to connect.

Rich: Fantastic Art. Thank you so much for carving out some time to speak with us on the show.

Very interesting conversation. Folks, we’re gonna take a quick break here. Now, when we come back on the other [00:59:00] side, Erick will rejoin me. We’ll share some thoughts about this very interesting conversation with Art Gross about ai. Have a little fun wrap up the show, stick around. We’ll be right back.

And welcome back to part three of this episode of the MSP Chat podcast. One final thank you to Art Gross for taking some time out to talk about his book. Yeah, he contacted me when I was in the middle of a business trip and he said, Hey, rich, I’ve written this book, would you like to read it?

And I’m thinking to myself. Oh boy. But sure, art, go ahead and send me the book and I read it cover to cover on a flight home to Seattle from someplace, and it really is quite good for the many folks in our audience who are really just trying to wrap their brains around how to get into this market.

Where to start, where to build from. From there I really do advise you to take a peek at it. It’s available on Amazon. Yeah. Lots of interesting stuff In that conversation, I wrote a whole article for my [01:00:00] blog channel Holic about the AI consultant conversation that we had there, and this whole class of partners talking to your customers about AI and AI strategy you’ve never heard of before.

They’re not MSPs, they’re not even technology companies in a lot of case cases you just don’t know who these guys are, but they’re talking to your customers and establishing these strategic relationships. So there’s lots of interesting stuff in the conversation. I think the thing I just wanna kind of flag, ’cause it came up in different ways, at different points in the conversation, is.

How much emphasis art put on the concept of patience. In, in this industry we are always in such a hurry to to get to where we’re going as quickly as possible. And art was really just, advising people. It’s gonna take you a little while. To align the culture internally around AI and how AI is different and, get, getting people used to it and working it into to their workflows so that you can speak confidently to the customer about it.

It’s gonna take you a while once you have something in AI to offer to [01:01:00] your customers to build the kind of muscle required to position yourself as a virtual a chief AI officer, right? It’s gonna take time, it’s a process and there’s a place to begin and a place to go to market and a place to continue expanding from there.

And this is not something that needs to take you a decade and you can get to revenue pretty quickly. But just make sure you’re getting the steps in the right order and be patient enough to get it right so that you don’t dive in, miss out on something, or just mess something up that makes your customers unhappy.

Erick: Yeah. I, and I, yeah I, sorry I missed that interview ’cause I really wanted to be on it. I’ve known you know him for a long time, and I think from a, from the perspective of kind of this what you mentioned there was like these folks that are talking to your customers that you don’t know about.

I have a relative who’s in the healthcare industry and I took her to lunch a couple of weekends ago when my family was out [01:02:00] traveling. So I’m like, Hey, let’s just go to lunch and hang out. And she, so the conversation, went a lot of different places, but she said, we’re getting calls from these AI companies that are pre presenting their solution to help take all of our unstructured healthcare data from our patients and our providers and all this.

Leverage it in a way to have our own internal LLM, so that we can now query and search and filter and they’re gonna create all these workflows and these agents for us. And I’m like, man, and I said, you’re getting calls from different once he goes, oh yeah, at least four or five different organizations that specialize in exactly our field.

And they are saying the right things to us and we are going to do a proof of concept on one of them. We’re just trying to pick between two of them. So just proves what you just said, rich and that’s happening. I’m sure it, I’m sure the internal IT department [01:03:00] there they’re, they have their own internal IT department is part of that conversation, but I can just imagine how many calls our MSP’s customers are getting with kind of that same pitch.

So I’d be curious if you guys are getting calls. From these AI companies, they’re to your clients. Just, comment in the comments below, I’d love to understand, how much of that is happening to your customers as well.

Rich: In my article on the AI consulting thing, what I advise people to do is something I’ll go ahead and advise our audience to do.

Now, if you wanna get a feel for what we’re talking about here, go into the search engine or tool of your choice, just type in AI consultant and your zip code. See what pops up. I did that. Now I’m in a big city. Depending on where you are, it might, you might not get the same results. But it was striking how many of these companies are out there and again, these are companies you’ve just never heard of, no matter how well you know, the local market.

So try that and see who these guys [01:04:00] are, what they’re offering, what the websites look like. You’ll have a good idea of what we’re talking about here.

Erick: That’s a business tip from you, rich of the week. And I’ll give another one. Do some SEO on your website. So you come up as an AI consultant as well.

How about that one? That’s a great tip. That is a

Rich: great tip. Yes. Yeah go see who pops up. When you do the search, I recommended and see what you gotta do to make sure you’re at the top of that list. I like it. And it leaves us with chime folks for just one last thing and it, it follows very nicely.

I didn’t plan it this way, but it follows very nicely from the show here. ’cause we started out talking about deep fakes. We, we got into AI in the first segment of the show. We talked about AI with art, bro. Erick, I’ve got bad news for you. We are doomed. We’re doomed. And it’s because of a combination of what we’ll call deep fake technology and ai.

There is a company out there right now called Inception Point ai. And what they do is use very convincing [01:05:00] voice and video generated by AI to produce podcasts. In fact, they’ve got 5,000 shows that they have in market right now. No human being involved on the air whatsoever. They’re spitting out 3000 episodes of these five sh thousand shows a week.

They can produce each episode for a dollar or less. Dollar or less they’re selling advertising against these shows. So they’re saying if about 20 people listen to one of those $1 episodes, they’re making money talk about AI slop, Erick the world is gonna be saturated with AI generated podcasts and we’re gonna be the last two human beings doing this.

We’re just gonna have to figure out a way to stand out somehow. Erick.

Erick: It’s nuts, rich and I, I read the article and we’ll post the link to it in the show notes, but I think there was a comment in there something about half of the population will be AI agents or something, in the future.

Heck, if I see the value of AI and I’m using four or five different [01:06:00] agents to do different parts of my job, that’s five times more than me. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. The MSP chat podcast might be doomed, but you know what? I’m, I watch a lot of YouTube videos and what’s driving me batty now is oh it’s very done image, a little hook in the title.

And I go to play this video and it’s bad ai, it’s bad ai, like the sentence structure and then the pauses and things. I’m like, oh, and I’ll just turn it off right away. I’m like, oh my God, I’ve just wasted, my time out of 10 videos, half of ’em were AI generated and that’s what I’m seeing now, and I don’t like it.

I hope they figured out how to do this, but if they do. Then how do we determine what’s real and what’s not? Are we living in the matrix?

Rich: I dunno. We’re talking about AI producing the the show. But AI will also presumably at some point produce the audience and every, at light speed basically, you’ll have the shows popping up and [01:07:00] then AI in the audience flaming the show for the bad content.

And yeah it’s gonna get very quick. We’re gonna have trouble just keeping pace with it. Folks, that is all the time we’ve got for you this week on the show. We thank you so much for joining us. We will be back in a week’s time, was another episode for you. Until then, I will just remind you that this show is both an audio and a visi video deliverable, which means that if you are listening to the show right now, but you’d like to check us out on video, you can go to YouTube, look up MSP chat if you are watching us on YouTube, but you listen to audio podcasts too, go to Spotify, Google, apple, wherever it is.

Get your podcast, you’re probably gonna find us there too. And wherever it is you find us, please subscribe, rate, review. It’s gonna help other people discover and enjoy the show just like you do. This show is produced by the great Russ Jones. It is edited by the great Riley Simpson. They’re part of the team with us here at Channel Master.

They can create a podcast for you if you’d like that. Podcasts are just the tiniest little bit of what we do for our clients at Channel Mastered. If you wanna get the big picture, go to our [01:08:00] website, what is available at www.channel mastered.com. channel Mastered has a sister organization, it’s called MSP Master.

That’s Erick working one to one with MSPs to help them grow and optimize their business. You can learn more about that at www.mspmaster.com. So once again, we thank you for joining us. We’ll see you in a week. Until then, please remember, as we always urge you to, that you cannot spell channel without [01:09:00] MSP.