He Built an AI Business From His MSP

[00:00:00] As the leader of the MSP, I think you have to say it's important enough to our organization and to our clients that we have to dedicate resources or we find a partner to work with. But either way, I think MSP organizations particularly have to make that decision soon.

[00:00:15] Hey guys, Damien Stevens, host of MSP Mindset, founder and CEO of Servosity. Today I had an amazing conversation with Shane Noor and he took his MSP and built an automation business. From that he learned how to escape AI overwhelm, how to lead your team through that.

[00:00:40] And he left me with a question that I still can't get out of my head, which is now that you have the magic wand, what will you do with that? How will you help others? If you'd like to unlock that for your MSP, don't miss out on our conversation today.

[00:00:57] Shane, I just want to jump right in. You just launched your virtual AI officer, but I want to kind of back up a little bit because that's available directly, but it's also available for MSPs if I understand that. Correct. I want to get to that because so many of us are struggling with what do we do with this overwhelming pace of AI.

[00:01:20] So walk me back to like the genesis of this because you've been at this for a while. You've been down a few of the wrong roads thing on the way. Some learning lessons along the way. That's right. Yeah. So tell me about some of those lessons. Like where did you start down this path?

[00:01:40] Right. You're an MSP and you built an automation company, which I think it's wise to frame it as automation, not just because what does AI mean? Right. That's that's there's so many reactions. So I think there's even lessons there. Right. So you built this automation company and then take us take me from there. Like what are the lessons you started to learn, especially around the turning this into something that produces profit? Right.

[00:02:10] Like a business model. Like, you know, we can all spend money on it. And time and lots of time. And time. So, yeah, we you know, we've got an MSP business that going on. Well, we just celebrated our 25th anniversary in business. So been in this for a while. Well, thank you. You know, back before that, I had a dial up ISP. If you remember those days where there were actually modems and you had to provide dial up access. So I do.

[00:02:39] I've been in that space for a long time. And back in the end of 2023 was kind of when, you know, chat GPT was really starting to pick up steam. We looked at it in the first part of 2024 and super excited about capabilities. And prior to that, as an MSP, even we were building automations internally. You know, chat GPT is one thing, but automations, you know, from our marketing process,

[00:03:07] we were connecting tools together, building those workflow processes. And so we always had that kind of mindset of how do we build that automation component? And then in 2024, we started talking internally and with one of our peer groups about going to market with, you know, how do we change that messaging that, you know, MSP had kind of, in my opinion, gotten kind of stale at that point in time. Everyone was saying pretty much the same things. Services were pretty stale.

[00:03:36] There wasn't a whole lot that was driving excitement. And so for us, we started looking at, well, what sets us apart? And, you know, we had a desire for automation internally, and we were having conversations with our clients about that. And so that really started us down the path of how do we bring those type of services to our clients? And, of course, with AI, it just accelerated that. But in, you know, we started that path in Q1 of 2024.

[00:04:04] By Q2, we were having conversations with our clients about their workflows. And then they were starting to, you know, dig deeper. And then as we had more conversations, a lot of our peer group MSP companies were asking us, what are you guys doing around this? And do you mind helping us? Yeah. And so, you know, by the end of Q2 of 2024, we were at that point where, okay, what are we going to do with this? Is this an additional service line? Is it a new company?

[00:04:31] And we ultimately made the decision in 2024 that we were going to build a separate company, primarily because I saw this as an opportunity to go beyond our existing MSP base, but I also saw an opportunity to help other MSPs. And so that's the two driving factors that we said, okay, we're going to go all in. We're going to build a separate company. And we're going to have the ability to serve not just our dedicated MSP clients,

[00:04:58] but also, you know, new prospects, new industries that we weren't already in, and then be able to go to market and help other MSPs. And so that kind of snowballed with an official launch, I think, in October of 2024. And so, yeah, that's kind of how we got started with Innovative Automations. It runs parallel to our MSP business and augments our MSP business.

[00:05:24] And through it and our MSP partner network, we can bring a revenue share to other MSPs so they can add that same type of capability. But that's been the driving factor or the reasoning behind why we launched it this way. I get the pleasure to be in build sessions with MSPs just like you, building real things with AI. And the number one friction point, the number one blocker is I can't connect to all the systems.

[00:05:49] In fact, my vendor makes an MCP server or a connector or whatever they call it, yet it's read-only. Another one tried it and it limited them to 100 records. How are you going to search for all the tickets when you can only get to 100? If you're tired of vendor connectors and MCP servers holding your business back, check out the MSP skills repo. The link is below.

[00:06:13] It's got over 50 different MCP servers, skills, and connectors that you can use to connect your entire stack to the agentic AI of your choice. Now, why do you care? The reason is you can now go through and say, find all the unused licenses that I'm paying for that I shouldn't be. Would you like it to go through and prep across all your different tools for that QBR? That thing that took you hours to prepare for for one client?

[00:06:42] Is now one sentence. So if you want to make sure you're getting the value out of AI, you've got to connect it to your real world business systems. And there is no better place than the MSP skills repo. Check out on the link below. And if you have questions or if you just want to join, learn more, come to the one of the build sessions. You'll see us putting it into action. Let me kind of unpack that because you said a lot there.

[00:07:08] So you were really focused on automation before AI was good. Is there any way to say that? And so you guys were already automating workflows. You were already the person that your peers were looking to in your group, peer group. So you decided to build this automation company, especially with the growth of AI.

[00:07:38] Why? Right. You got an MSP that's now 25 years in, right? You could just keep doing what you'd always done. Yeah. For me personally, I kind of go back to MSP had kind of gotten stale. Quite frankly, I had lost a lot of the passion I had for the industry in the early days when we were building something new and exciting. And this, you know, in the background, I was doing these automations to your point. That was part of what drove me.

[00:08:07] I enjoyed doing that. And in those days, it was, you know, we were using Zapier and connecting the applications and, you know, the triggers and the workflows. And I would get excited when I was talking to other MSPs in our peer group about, hey, look at what I did with this. And we were connecting our PSA to, you know, Postalytics, I think was one of the ones that would print postcards. And then we tied it into our calling platform. So it built this entire sequence. And as we were talking with other MSPs in our peer group,

[00:08:36] they were like, man, you light up when you talk about this. And I was like, you know, you're right. This is something that, you know, kind of got me at that inflection point where that was the next stage of technology for me that drove me and excited me. And so, yeah, that's kind of why we decided. And to your point, that was really prior to any, I won't say any, but most of the AI functionality coming into play. It was about connecting tools through the, you know, the APIs that were there and just leveraging the logic.

[00:09:07] And obviously AI enhances that. But at the end of the day, even with AI, what we're really all looking for is automation. And so, yeah, there's some learning lessons along that path as well. But that's kind of where we started with it. So, you're passionate. You start the new company. That makes a lot of sense. And tell me about some of the lessons learned because starting a new company and being passionate is great.

[00:09:35] And it's usually where I learned some hard-fought lessons along the way. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess I'll start with some of the most basic ones. So, you know, in our MSP operations, you know, we've got an ISR or SDR, depending on which terminology you want to refer to. Basically, someone making cold calls to try to generate interest and set an appointment. So, my son was wanting to come work in the business. And he asked if he could do sales for us

[00:10:03] because he saw the potential for sales for a long-term profession. And so, I said, well, sure, we've got this new venture we'll launch. If you want to learn sales, you're going to learn it from the ground up. And I said, so we'll let you start doing some dialing. And one of those lessons we learned right off the bat was AI, while we were calling about it. In my mind, AI is exciting. It's bringing new functionality. Everyone's going to be excited about this. And I remember first week of dialing, my son comes to me and he's like,

[00:10:33] Dad, do you just hate me? I was like, what are you talking about? He said, I just had a guy cuss me out for five minutes about how evil AI is and that it's not real. And so, to that point, that was one of the first things that we learned is that there's a segmentation in the market in terms of impression around AI. And from that point, we learned that we had to kind of understand who we were calling, what their aptitude for AI versus automation would be, and cater that messaging around that.

[00:11:03] And so, what we ended up doing is our default offering or terminology was around business process automation. Because most people, when they heard that, they would be a little curious and they'd say, well, what do you mean? Whereas if AI, if there was someone that was already in that space, they loved it. But you could have that negative reaction that, man, it shut things down immediately. Yeah. You know, that's probably one of the first lessons.

[00:11:30] When we first started out, we started out doing mainly just projects because we weren't really sure how to bring this to market. We knew we liked doing this. We knew that it required hours to do it. Yeah. It was kind of back in the early days of our MSPs. We all did just projects, one-off type projects. And I quickly remembered why I didn't like those. Time materials is not something most people like for a reason, right? Right.

[00:11:58] Not only from our perspective, but from the client perspective as well, you know, because they just – the other aspect of it that plays into that is in a traditional IT project, you know, we – on the MSP side, we pretty much control all the variables. If we're going to go in and do a new network infrastructure upgrade, we tell them, okay, we're going to take it down at this time. We get complete access. It operates to our schedule and it finishes on our schedule.

[00:12:25] When we started doing automations and digging into business processes, we found very, very quickly that we control very little of that, or at least not the majority of it. And we learned some really hard lessons around that, that we got projects delayed. You know, some projects just completely went away because we couldn't get the information from the clients because it took time from their schedule. And so learning that was another huge obstacle we had to go through.

[00:12:55] And then kind of, I guess, the final component to that is when we did projects around automation, scoping that. I remember in our early days of our MSP, we did a lot of high-end Cisco network projects. And I remember some of those projects just ate our lunch where scope creep killed us and we couldn't control it. And it all came rushing back to me when we started doing these automation projects because we couldn't control it.

[00:13:25] The client dictated a lot of it. And then as we started building automation, they would say, well, can it do this? Well, sure it can. And we wanted to make the client happy and we're building something new. So we said, okay, we'll do it. And the next thing you know, I mean, one of our projects, we were almost 20X over budget and it was on us. We ate that time because 20X is quite the difference. Yeah. And so point there being is projects when it comes to automation

[00:13:52] and building something with the client as opposed to doing something for the client was a complete change of mindset and whole project management philosophy. Yeah. Different culture around that, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So what is the business model that made sense? Because I think I just talked to somebody last week and they said, how do we, I don't want time and materials. How do we, how do we form a business model around this? Yeah. So what's your current thinking on that?

[00:14:21] So, you know, everyone in this space knows the advantages of monthly recurring revenue. And most of the time we got to this space because we had conversations with our clients and we kept telling them, you need to be doing these things. And they said, yeah, but I just want this. And so then we decided, well, maybe if we just do it as a monthly service, we bundle all that in and whether they know they need these things done, we just do it as part of the service.

[00:14:47] And so I think for us anyway, there are, you know, other agencies out there that will just do pure projects on time. But for us, we found that we wanted to go back to a bundled approach. And so that's, that's kind of how we've modified the offering in the last six months is coming at it from making sure we're providing what the client needs on an ongoing basis. And when you build an automation, you know, the customer sees, well, this is the outcome

[00:15:17] I want, but there are so many things that change. The models, you know, the AI models themselves change. The applications they're connecting to have, you know, UI updates, APIs change. And so that's one of the challenges we found in the early, you know, rollout of this is that clients had a static view of this when in fact it was a constantly fluid and dynamic approach that does require upkeep and ongoing maintenance.

[00:15:44] And then there's also the governance side as well, right? Because most organizations aren't even really thinking about that at this point in time. And so again, it goes back to give them what they need in a recurring manner as opposed to what they're asking for, but still deliver that result that they're looking for. Yeah. So do you present that as a block of hours or a managed service or like what, what kind of, if I'm the customer, right? How do you present that? And that's a good question.

[00:16:13] We struggled with that for a while. So the short answer is it's a combination of both, right? Because there's a consulting component that needs to be there. There's things that need to be done every month, you know, looking at the automations, what are the, how is it affecting token usage? What are the, you know, API changes that are coming down the pipe? What are the model changes? So there's that component. There's also the governance component.

[00:16:36] So helping bring awareness, visibility and true control, at least an assemblance of control over that aspect is giving more. And I think it's going to become more and more important over the next few years. So that's the consulting component that's pretty static. We set and we provide those things based upon the size of the organization and their needs. And then we look at what are they looking for in terms of automations?

[00:17:04] And then we do try to bundle in some blocks of hours so that you've got a governance component. Then you have automation engineering hours that can continue the development cycle and maintenance side of things. And what we see is most organizations start at one tier. And, you know, it may be that they want to build, you know, a particular automation that requires a lot of hours in the beginning. So we'll bundle more hours on the engineering side. But then as, you know, that automation is brought into production, that scales back. But you still want the governance component.

[00:17:33] You still want the ongoing maintenance component. And so, yeah, from our perspective, we've moved, I won't say, 100% away from project-only type offerings to more of an ongoing management and governance and build component to the way we bring it to our clients. What about, you mentioned governance. I want to talk more about that because that's underrated. So they want the thing.

[00:18:02] They often don't know they need other things, right? Whether it's the shape or cleanliness of their data, the governance, there's so many other things. So how do you approach that when, you know, the outcome is what they want? Yeah. And, you know, you've got to do these other things. And again, it goes back to some of the painful lessons we learned in the early days. Because you're right. Most of the time, the first challenge was helping people see what's possible.

[00:18:31] So a lot of times they'll come to us and they say, we know we need to be leveraging AI or automation. We're just not sure how or what that means or, you know, where there's tangible value. So there's that whole discovery component of it, of assessing what's in use in their environment. What are the constraints? And then we look at, again, to your point, the data cleanliness.

[00:18:56] That's one of the automations that we ended up going way over on ours was because their data was just such a mess that we had to spend a lot of time cleaning that up. And then there's the component of, okay, you're in a compliance regulated industry. What are you using? What are your end users using? And helping bring visibility, number one, to that. Because every organization that we've talked to thus far, when we start talking about what

[00:19:23] are you guys using in terms of AI, they'll list maybe one or two applications and say, this is what we use. And we say, are you sure? Well, yeah. I've even had organizations say, we don't even allow AI usage. And then we go in and we actually do the audit. And, oh, my gosh, the list is this long of the AI that's actually in use. And then we start talking through, how does that affect you from a compliance perspective if you don't control it? Or what happens if there is some type of data exposure?

[00:19:54] How do you control that? And so it's about bringing awareness to that, bringing visibility to that. And it's not just a one-time audit. It's what we try to educate people on. This is ongoing. Something that needs to be looked at, monitored continuously. And so that's where I think that's probably one of the most undervalued or under-assessed

[00:20:18] components of AI and automation today is the lack of awareness around the governance. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like that's something that most MSPs could be, you know, they have some background that could be strong in. But you said something I want to go back to that I think is a challenge foremost. You said assessing where they are and what they have and what they need.

[00:20:44] Do most of them come to you and say, I want to automate this process or workflow? I have something in mind. Or do they just say, I know I need to do automation or AI and come in and they really don't have an idea, I just in trend drive, like, do you help them figure out, like, what works best for them more often than not? Or is it more often than not they kind of come in with some idea of this is the process or workflow I need to automate?

[00:21:12] Well, you bring up a good point because in the early days, we would just say, hey, you want this automated? Okay. Here's what it's going to take to automate that. The challenge with that is that most of the time they don't have all the variables to bring to the conversation. They know this is the outcome they think they want, but what it takes to get there is the unknown variable. And so, you know, our current offering, we structure every engagement.

[00:21:37] Even if someone says, hey, this is the automation I want you to build for me, we start with what we call our executive jumpstart. And that's a 30-day engagement where we actually go in and do that full audit. We're looking at what applications are in use, what are the AI capabilities inherent, what are the API capabilities that are inherent, is there an MCP available. And the idea is that we want to collect a complete inventory of all of the components.

[00:22:03] Then we move to their actual business process where we survey their end users. And the idea there is another hard lesson we learned was in the MSP space, we sell to the business owner, business decision maker. When we started having these conversations with business owners, when we start talking about what do you want to automate, they've got this much view. Their view is what they do. Right. And most of the time, when we look at an ROI on an automation, we want to look at where

[00:22:31] are the most hours being spent, which is not what the CEO or the manager is doing. And so, we realized quickly that when we, prime example is one project, we talked to an owner who said, I want this one project automated. We said, great. You know, what does that look like from an ROI perspective? And as we started going through that, I said, well, are there any other automations that would make sense? He said, no, I don't know of a whole lot else that we could automate. I said, well, do you mind if we actually talk to some of your key team members? And we actually sent a survey out.

[00:23:02] Within a week, we had 71 different automation suggestions from his team that as we brought to him, he's like, I had no idea. And the idea there is that when you build an automation, you don't want to look at it in a singular view because you may be building on the wrong platform when it comes to the total scope of what could be automated. We look at it in totality and build sub-workflows so that it can be stacked and built upon. And so, that was one of the things that we looked at is, you know, how do we bring that

[00:23:32] visibility? And so, that's the point of our executive jumpstart is that we go through, we bring all of that into view. We do that audit. And then we say, okay, here's what it looks like from the top three to five automation candidates. And here's what that ROI would look like in terms of a payback time. You mentioned ROI. That's the missing link for most MSPs, I think, are struggling to articulate that and certainly to drop the buzzwords and the excitement.

[00:24:01] And, you know, I say excitement, but it can be a new app, a new product, a new harness, a new model. And it's like, oh, we're going to put that thing or this thing. And it's, you know, everybody's really excited. And then you ask questions like, what's the ROI? And that's harder, much harder, I think. So, how do you frame that? Especially when my experience is a lot of times, unless you can measure the input, the

[00:24:28] number of hours or something, they just don't, they don't really know how much time they're spending or they don't know what faster would, they know it's better and they know they want to admit, you know, in my experience, they're struggling to articulate that. And that's a common factor that plays into these discussions because, to your point, they, even when we ask how many hours are you putting into this, you know, most of the time it's wildly different what they estimate, either higher or lower.

[00:24:58] And so, getting to a point where we put some tangible numbers to that is one of the things that is a hard variable. One of the things we learned early on, because, you know, from the automation perspective, we were even dealing with traditional RPA platforms like UiPath, which has got this agent that can go out and it can calculate what is the time being used in this process and map it out. You know, but it's a huge step from an investment perspective to get that level of detail.

[00:25:28] But what we were able to do is look at what is that measuring? What is it pulling in? And how can we bring that, even if it's a manual assessment of that? And so, that's what we try to model that after today. It's not perfect, but it at least gives us something to gauge from. The non-tangible components of that are, what does it bring you in terms of, you know, effectiveness or competitiveness?

[00:25:54] Those are things that, you know, we still haven't figured out a way to put a dollar figure to. But what we try to do is base, when we come up with the top three to five automations, we're purely looking at what is the time required by user? How many times is it done per day? How many users? And that's where we start with the building blocks. And most of the time, we can find at least three automations that give you an ROI in those

[00:26:20] measurements. And then you start looking at the non-tangible components that, okay, yes, it's going to give you an edge on your competitor. But that is a challenge. And it's something that you have to factor in because just because it can be automated does not mean that it should be automated. Right. A lot of times people come to us with, you know, really good ideas. We had a manufacturer come to us and ask if we could help build this automation to tie into their old ERP,

[00:26:49] 20-year-old ERP solution that required a traditional RPA because there was no API available in it. And we started running the numbers and we're like, no, you should spend money on upgrading your ERP because what you'll invest there is going to pay back, you know, tenfold over the next five years as opposed to automating your 20-year-old ERP solution. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I can see the client wanting to do that because, you know, I don't want to change the thing.

[00:27:19] I want it to be like it was and I just need, you know, with the new thing. Yeah. That's exactly it. Why do you think it's important to not just rely on reselling a vendor AI product? What we have found, and we're pretty vendor agnostic when it comes to the solutions we deliver. We've got platforms that we prefer to build on just because out of convenience and knowledge.

[00:27:43] But what we have found is that the models are changing quicker than anything we've ever seen in the industry, right? Because you could build a practice around this solution and next week it could be obsolete. The other thing we see is that we've built automations that, you know, take care of a gap in a software application that, you know, can't do. We spend two months building the automation for them and then a month later the application builds that process into their workflow.

[00:28:10] So getting to a point where you can be flexible, which is another challenge in this space right now is staying up to speed on all of the different technologies and tools. And, you know, what's good today may not be the best tomorrow. So for us, we approached it from day one that we're not going to be a reseller of, you know, Microsoft Copilot or any of the other tools out there.

[00:28:35] We may use those and we may recommend those, but we're not going to say that's our go-to-market strategy because it's too fast-paced today to do that in a reliable long-term strategy, in my opinion. Yeah, it's awful early to bet on one horse, right? We're very early innings, I think. What about how you mentioned something that everybody struggles with.

[00:29:02] I think it was Karpathy who was a founding OpenAI and Tesla guy and now at Anthropic. He said he feels like he's six or 12 months behind. We all feel like we can't keep up overwhelmed. And I think there's great reason. Like it's never been faster. I don't think it's humanly possible to quote unquote keep up, especially in a broad area.

[00:29:26] You have both an MSP that may want to know certain things, even if they're not doing automations, that want some probably knowledge in this area. And you have an automation company, which by definition means you need to kind of have some idea, right? Yeah. I would imagine. And so how do you approach that? Because I feel like as an owner, I feel like I'm behind. How do I lead well?

[00:29:55] I don't want my team to feel like they need to work 100 hours a week. Half of those keeping up, reading, studying, trying things. I mean, if Carpathia feels behind, what chance do we have? I mean, because and I sit in on calls with other people that are building stuff and I come away from those. Number one, I learn from every call that I'm on because someone's doing something a little different than I'm doing or a different tool. And I've got folks in the industry that I look to as kind of my mentors.

[00:30:24] But I find that even they have mentors that they feel like they're behind on. And I think that we're in a weird space in technology where it's going to change. We think it's changing fast today, but I think it's going to continue to accelerate to the point that we're always going to be playing catch up. And it is it is kind of a weight that I think anyone in this space feels on a day to day basis that, oh, my gosh, I don't know as much as I need to know.

[00:30:52] And we give examples. We've got a podcast that we do weekly trying to give clients examples of workflows. And a lot of times I'm like, well, this is a really basic, you know, this is something that's five years ago. But to our clients, they've not gone down that path. And so that that's news to them. And I think there's a scale of this that no matter where you're at, there's always more to learn.

[00:31:16] For us, one of the things we figured out early on was that we had to have dedicated automation engineers. Unfortunately for us, we had some folks on our team that had a software development background that we could plug into this. But I will caution that, you know, I've heard other MSPs talk about maybe they could leverage a project engineer. This is a different mindset. This is a different skill set.

[00:31:41] And I'm not saying that you can't make that conversion, but it is tougher if they don't have that DevOps or software development background. Because, you know, when I got involved in technology, Cisco was the technology, you know, that you get your certification on and you had it mapped out. You took years to get that certification. And that was your badge of honor. This stuff is changing so quickly that what you're training on today is, you know, outdated in another week.

[00:32:10] And so you do have to have dedicated people, in my opinion, that day in and day out love this technology, number one, because I think it takes an aptitude for it to have that drive, that desire to continue to absorb and try new things. But even with that, it is a challenge. And you have to get, at least I do, I have to get into a headspace that I'm never going to know enough. And it's always going to be, you know, I want to learn something else.

[00:32:36] And if you don't have that, I think it's a challenge for you to not get overwhelmed. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think having some knowledge can help you screen things and not chase every shiny object once you know a little bit more. Now, I think you said earlier you're a big believer in getting hands-on capability. MSPs should. Yes. How do you do that?

[00:33:06] Where do you start? So I know for us, again, going back to we had to make that conscious decision that we're going to dedicate. In the early days, it was we were going to dedicate time. I'm going to peel off one day a week that I'm going to let someone explore this. And we're going to take that hit to the billable rate if they're a project person. Or we're going to pull them out of their service delivery area. And we're going to backfill and compensate. You have to make that decision that we're going to dedicate time to this.

[00:33:35] It's not something, in my opinion, that you can pick up in the evenings and just bring to life inside the MSP. As the leader of the MSP, I think you have to say it's important enough to our organization and to our clients that we have to dedicate resources or we find a partner to work with. I mean, it's kind of back in the days of it's one of the reasons we went down this path was we'd never built our own sock. It was just an area that I guess we had really talented engineers that could do a lot of that.

[00:34:04] But I couldn't make the investment in time, resources, talent, infrastructure. I want to partner with someone to do that. And so I think you either make the decision that you're going to invest the time and resources or you say, hey, I'm going to find a partner to help me with this. But either way, I think organizations, MSP organizations particularly, have to make that decision soon. I want to talk about leading by doing, leading from the front.

[00:34:32] So if I need to get hands on, you know, you need to pull that engineer off or find a dedicated engineer or whatever that step looks like. What about for leadership? What about for the founder CEO? What does that look like in your opinion? And, you know, it's interesting because even in our peer group, there was one of our owners was a non-technical owner. So he never really got into the hands-on stuff. And when we first started doing this, he said, you know what?

[00:35:02] I'm never going to touch this stuff. I need to be able to hire someone. And, you know, another quarter we have our meeting and he's all of a sudden, he's neck deep in it and he sees the capability. So I think that the takeaway there is as owners, as business leaders, we have to take an interest in it. And because if we don't, you know, our team is, you know, buried every day in their normal day-to-day responsibilities. Yeah.

[00:35:30] They don't have the time or the opportunity to focus on it. And if you as a leader don't say this is important or, hey, this is the new technology and can you imagine what we can build with this or what we can bring to our clients with this, it's hard for our team to gain momentum around that. And as an organization, it's deprioritized. So for us, I know for me, I'm in it all day long, you know, every day looking at I'm building things. I'm trying new tools.

[00:35:58] I'm taking it back to our actual automation engineers saying, hey, have you guys seen this? What do you think? And how would you do this differently? So I think there has to be an active engagement from the leadership perspective. Even if you're going to partner with another, you know, provider to help you with this, I think the leader has to have that vision because ultimately that's what's going to drive the organization. And whether you're bringing that to your clients with a passion or whether you're just, as you mentioned, kind of reselling another product. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:36:28] I think that that's dead on. Like if you don't get into it and if you're not passionate about it, it's hard to lead by example. Speaking of that, we talked about overwhelm. How do you deal with this culturally? Because I think if we mess up, this could read as you just need to spend all these hours learning or you're not there yet or, you know, this sort of thing. So, right, you have an MSP. You also have an automation company.

[00:36:57] I'm curious how you lead your team to both push, learn, because things you have to do. Very, very true. But also, where's that line? What's enough? Yeah. And it's a moving target, right? Because, I mean, we look at what's there today, what the capabilities are, and you get, you know, where you're efficient with those and then it changes tomorrow.

[00:37:22] So, I think it's an area that you have to find out who the right fit candidates for this are inside the organization that can help you champion this. And then it's about collaboration. I know without the team members that we have, I would be lost. Even though I've got a great passion and a drive for this, I still go back to them and say, you know, and the biggest component for me or for us as an organization is what does this do from a security perspective?

[00:37:52] What do we need to architect to make this more secure? What are the vulnerabilities? And if it's just about, hey, learn this, do this, in my opinion, it is really vulnerable because you need multiple people looking at it from a security perspective, from an efficiency perspective, from a capabilities perspective. And getting that community inside the team, I think, is a huge component.

[00:38:15] One of the things we're getting ready to roll out is a steering committee internally where we meet after hours with people that are interested in this. And it's not a mandatory thing. If you want to have a voice in this or you want to learn, we're all going to get together internally as a team and say, here's what's coming. Here's what we're building. Here's what we've seen. But that is going to be a challenge, I think, over the coming years because, to your point, the overwhelm can quickly eat you up.

[00:38:43] And if you ever get to that point where you're thinking, oh, my gosh, I'm so far behind. I can't get into this. That's where it becomes discouraging to try to adopt this. Sure, sure. I'd like to get some of the kind of creative juices flowing, help others. Like, what do you see in terms of demand where I want this automation or I want this thing to do this outcome-wise? Like, what are some common ones you see that you think are impactful?

[00:39:12] So I think the low-hanging fruit for everyone right now is connecting existing data sources. Every organization you go in, whether they are anti-AI or pro-AI, they have data sources that are sitting there. They get applications that they spend a lot of money on, a lot of time, and people trained on so that there's a huge investment.

[00:39:34] And so, you know, five years ago, we all used to, in the MSP space, well, I'm going to go with this tool because it integrates with my PSA and integrates with my documentation. And this is my stack. And I think the mindset now has become, well, which one has the best API or MCP that gives us free access to that data that we can then ourselves connect it?

[00:39:56] And so I think when you start looking at what's the low-hanging fruit, things that you can go after, obviously connecting those data sources. Looking at what applications are they using that aren't talking to each other? What could you do to bring that to them in terms of functionality? And then it shifts the conversation a little bit about, well, what do you wish you could do?

[00:40:22] And then it becomes that, you know, your agentic coding where you're bringing functionality to the existing applications and then integrating it. So I think that's, in my opinion, probably, I mean, there's a lot of cool things going on within the AI space. But in terms of practical business value, I think right now that those are the two that I would hit on immediately is, you know, how do you connect the data sources, make that data flow and talk to each other? And then how do you fill the gaps around what the applications aren't providing today?

[00:40:52] And whether that's through agentic coding, whether that's through, you know, API calls from each application directly. But getting to that point where you fill those gaps, then in terms of, you know, functionality, I've been playing around, you know, with Carpathies. I don't know if you've seen his second brain model that he's put out. That stuff, when you start playing around with that, then it's like, holy smokes. We've got a world of intelligence that we can feed into our everyday operations.

[00:41:22] When I start looking at that, that's what really gets me excited. But basic level, connect the applications, fill the gaps that aren't served by the existing apps. Yeah, I'm guessing that you're not getting that as a typical request. We're not today. But, you know, it is incorporating the discussion in with clients because we're starting talking about, you know, what if you could have access to multiple data points to help you make decisions? What would those be? Most of the time that they haven't gotten that far.

[00:41:50] Well, very, very rarely have they gotten that far where they're seeing what would we brainstorm if we could. Getting them over the hump of, well, this data lives over here and that's where it sits is what we find most of the conversations today. Interesting. Interesting. What is it, Scott, are you excited right now? Is it the hypothetically or the wiki? Is it, what is it that you think is really interesting right now?

[00:42:20] There's so much in this space that excites me. It's just, I think, trying to imagine what we're going to be using in another five years is really the most exciting thing to me now. Seeing the types of technology, I mean, when we look at this, you know, two years ago, we were excited that we could chat with an interface that gave us a wealth of response. Yes. Which is still really cool. I mean, I just did a podcast internally about SEO.

[00:42:49] You know, we used to hire contractors to come in and consultants to interpret our SEO data. And now I can actually have a conversation with, you know, an intelligent bot that tells me everything that I would ever want to know in an endless loop to where I can just continue asking. So that's, look at where we came from two years ago and where we are today in terms of what can be done with agentic coding, voice AI, looking at how the data sources are connected, and then trying to imagine what it's going to look like in another five years.

[00:43:19] That's where I'm really excited about being involved in this technology and helping bring that value to other clients and MSPs because I do think that this is probably, I don't know that we'll ever see a time like this in terms of our industries and technology as a whole. It's exciting to be one of the people involved with it. Yeah. It feels to me, if you're not excited or scared or both, you're not engaged. And I'm not advocating for that.

[00:43:48] It's just, you know, I encourage my team to come with those different viewpoints and say, I don't know about this. Or, you know, and, but I also encourage you get your hands dirty, like you said, because then you start to realize they're not, they can seem magical, but they're not. And so you can, you can, some of your fears can go away because you can see that, wow, this can do this, but it can't do that.

[00:44:11] And so I want to, I want to talk about something that you kind of alluded to, but I think is missing for most because most people are like, okay, automation. Great. We're going to save time, save labor, save money.

[00:44:30] Are any of the folks or you guys internally working on like, not only saving your own time or saving other people time, but kind of what I would call, you know, level three evolving where you're like, what was impossible before? What can I do now that what used to be impossible? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:44:50] And again, I go back to trying to imagine that's, that's where I think the most fun aspect of this is, is that it's changing a mindset about, you know, you even go back to how we selected software that we chose it based upon integrations years ago. Now it's based upon what data connection points you can have. Um, I start thinking about, you know, what does this look like in terms of our operations? What, what could we do that we aren't doing?

[00:45:15] And so a lot of that today, you know, one of the, the, uh, differentiators in our industry or in our business was, you know, we followed true methods all the way back from 2010 when they first started. Uh, we were a member of it, getting that audit process where it was really dialed in, took us almost a decade of trial and error. Um, now we've taken that and pretty much automated most of that.

[00:45:39] Um, and so what, you know, two years ago you would have said, would we automate that? I wouldn't know. There's no way because we spent so much time putting all this process together, but we've taken that knowledge and that process and that, uh, you know, the, the key components of that. And we've built an automation that does that now. And so that's what we're looking at internally is what, what are we doing that can be made better through this technology? What are we doing that, or what are we not doing?

[00:46:09] Because there was just a limitation. Um, our client portal is one that we're, we're, you know, by the end of this quarter, rolling out a custom client portal that a year ago, even someone would ask me, could we do this? Well, no, we can do portions of that through this. But I think it's about re-imagining what are you bringing to your clients? What would your clients want if, you know, there was a magic wand? I think we have the magic wand now. We just have to leverage the time to be able to learn how to use it.

[00:46:39] Yes, we do have the magic wand now. I think that is well, well said there, Shane. Um, for folks that are interested in finding you online, getting connected with you, perhaps taking advantage of having a discussion about your virtual AI officer offering. What's the best way to reach out and connect with you? Sure. Yeah. And connect with me. Uh, you can email me, Shane, at innovativeautomations.ai. Um, you can obviously go to the website.

[00:47:08] We've got a partner forum there that kind of walks through the virtual AI officer program. Um, it is a revenue share, uh, approached where, um, like I say, you can go to market tomorrow with a turnkey solution to have these conversations. And we do so in a manner that we've had MSP saying, you know, we want to use you guys for the first six months until we figure this out. Are you okay with that? Absolutely. If we can help you along the path and we can provide value to your clients and we both make money. Great.

[00:47:36] Um, you know, if you want to take it over in another six months, great. Cause again, it's nothing proprietary at this point. It's, it's just that we, we put in some time and effort to get us there. Um, so email, uh, our website and connect with me on LinkedIn that I can share a link in the notes here. But, um, in terms of, you know, if it, even if you just want to have a conversation about what are we doing? How did we build this? What are the components that we throw into this? I'm an open book, happy to share what I can. I love that.

[00:48:05] Make sure to take Shane up on that because so many I've talked with are like, what do I do? How do I avoid time and materials? How do I not just resell a license? Um, which is both betting on a horse really early, but also usually not providing a ton of value path to super thin margins, right? We've been down that path as well. So, uh, you know, 2024 to launch this was very early. So I think if you are listening, you should take advantage of Shane's offer. I would love to have the conversation.

[00:48:35] This is what I live and breathe every day. And if I can provide some insight or help, happy to do so. This has been amazing. Shane, thank you so much for being on MSP Mindset. Appreciate you having me again, Damien. Always a pleasure to talk with you.