Microsoft, OpenText Execs: MSPs Can Help Take Copilot GenAI Boom To The Next Level

‘We need you as the MSP community to come along with us on this journey,’ Microsoft’s Jason Jones told MSP executives Tuesday.

For Microsoft Copilot to reach its full potential, the tech giant is looking to MSPs to work with customers in a variety of areas to enable GenAI adoption, a Microsoft executive said Tuesday.

Microsoft’s Jason Jones and OpenText’s Josie Keck addressed a packed room of MSP executives Tuesday at XChange August 2024, which was hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company this week in San Antonio.

The executives said during the OpenText session that opportunities abound for helping customers with the key foundational steps that are needed, including around cybersecurity and data governance. The goal, they said, is all about enabling customers to move from experimenting with Microsoft’s Copilot offerings toward broader deployments of the productivity-boosting GenAI technologies.

“We’re just at the precipice of this,” said Jones, director of global partner solutions at Microsoft.

“I’ve talked to a lot of MSPs throughout this event,” he said. “And without a doubt, everyone is excited and unsure. And even at Microsoft.”

Ultimately, “this is an amazing area of massive investment for us, and we need you as the MSP community to come along with us on this journey,” Jones said.

One Microsoft-focused MSP that has been exploring Copilot is Alejandro Rosado, CEO of 12:34 MicroTechnologies in Lancaster, Pa. For Rosado and his company, the big question at this point is not whether to embrace GenAI, but how.

“That’s the big thing for me that I’m trying to figure out—how, as a company, am I going to embrace it?” he said.

There’s no question, however, that GenAI technology will be pivotal for MSPs in the future, Rosado said.

“It was the same thing that happened when the cloud had just become a thing. The MSPs that were like, ‘I’m not going to go cloud, I’m going to stay on-prem’—if you didn’t embrace the cloud, you were gone,” he said. “This is the same thing. This is the same evolution. If you don’t embrace AI, it’s over.”

In other words, it’s clear that when it comes to AI, “the businesses that are going to make it long term [are] the people that can embrace it, understand it and leverage it,” Rosado said.

Rick Khan, CEO of Pasadena, Calif.-based Micro Trends, said he was highly impressed by a live demo of Copilot that Jones carried out during the session Tuesday.

“It motivated me, personally,” Khan said, noting that he can now foresee use cases for Copilot with many of his customers including for uses with human resources, sales and customer service.

“We can tell our clients, ‘We want to fit your needs into this, and we’ll help you through it,’” he said. “I think that’s probably the role that I see as an MSP.”

Microsoft’s Jones said that many MSPs will likely want to help customers with preliminaries for Copilot such as security and data governance as a first step.

“Maybe you don’t start with Copilot,” he said. “It’s [more] like, ‘What is your AI strategy?’ And here’s the big one—‘How is your data governance?’”

The reason this is so important is that when you roll out Copilot, “it inherits the data governance policies and security policies that are already in place,” Jones noted.

Keck, who is sales team lead and senior account executive for channel at OpenText, said that in addition to providing key security technologies, OpenText can assist MSPs with Microsoft licensing, rebates and support. “We help you to find opportunities to upsell and cross-sell, for you to make more money,” she said.

The bottom line, Jones said, is that MSPs will want to “understand the starting points of where you as an MSP can come into play—whether it’s an assessment, a conversation, what rules you want in place—before we start going down this journey. [It’s about] establishing that foundation.”