6 MSPs On How They’re Helping Customers Leverage AI

MSPs discuss how they’re assisting customers in utilizing AI technology to streamline operations and enhance productivity across multiple facets of their business.

The interest in AI technologies such as Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT is rapidly increasing across MSPs’ customer base. From writing emails to summarizing meetings, businesses are harnessing the power of AI to become more efficient and MSPs are there to help them harness the technology.

AI has been effectively utilized to streamline human resources operations, enhance productivity in Microsoft Teams meetings, automate processes, and enhance support functions and data management.

At CRN parent The Channel Company’s XChange August event in San Antonio last week, MSPs discussed how they’re helping customers utilize the technology to streamline operations and enhance productivity across multiple facets of their business.

Here’s what they had to say.

Where are you seeing the most AI adoption from your customer base?

Alejandro Rosado

CEO

12:34 MicroTechnologies

Lancaster, Pa.

There’s been a lot of interest. We’re a Microsoft shop, and there have been a million questions about Copilot: ‘When is it available? What can it do?’ So we jumped on it right away as soon as it was available. We’re getting our hands wrapped around it. We have customers that are using Copilot. And it’s accelerating. Every month, I’m adding probably 10 to 15 licenses of Copilot. It used to be like one a month. It’s still very early in that product’s life. I think Microsoft’s still trying to figure it out a little bit [as to] where’s this going to fit? What are the security concerns?

Atul Bhagat

President, CEO

BASE Solutions

Vienna, Va.

We’re obviously seeing a lot of curiosity around AI. Everyone’s talking about Copilot. But we are being very strategic in telling our clients, ‘’Hold off, let us figure out everything.’ We can’t rush into something like this. We’ve got to get our bearings and understand the ramifications. Am I pro AI? Absolutely. Do I think it’s the next step in the progression of business? Absolutely. But we have to be strategic in how we’re doing it. I think any variance from that, where you’re not paying attention to all the aspects that you have in that situation, [is a problem]. You’ve got to be aware of all those things.

Melvin Williams

CEO

M&N Communications

Blue Bell, Pa.

We’re seeing Copilot licenses being purchased, but we’re also seeing organizations that are scared and don’t understand how to implement Copilot. We’re trying to provide them with an assessment that allows them to be able to know what they have to do with their data and get their data cleaned up. For the most part, we’re seeing Microsoft Copilot as the entryway into AI technology.

Thomas Vaughn

President

Central Technology Solutions

Lynchburg, Va.

Currently we’re seeing the adoption of AI more so on the, ‘What can I find on the internet? I wonder how to write a code,’ or ‘Where can I find a document to do this?’ It’s less business adoption, but more support and questions around answering and grammar. They’re saying, ‘I’m writing an email and I want to make sure it looks good, I want to make it sound more professional.’ I do believe as Copilot and other AI engines within organizations develop, you’re going to see more and more of that built in. But right now, I’m still seeing people going to the internet to the ChatGPTs of the world that are more public-facing.

Don Monistere

President, CEO

General Informatics

Baton Rouge, La.

We see a use case in assisting human resources with information for their internal use. Disseminating information to their entire organization sometimes can get really burdensome to the HR department. That’s where we started because it made the most sense, and we ended up really being very successful at reducing the number of calls that came into human resources. In fact, we were thinking about hiring an intern just to handle some of that, and once we deployed AI, we didn’t have to do that anymore. And while people always say, ‘Oh, we’re going to lose our jobs,’ nobody lost theirs. But we did see a slowdown in labor growth.

We’ve seen other use cases that are very specific to what I would consider to be large organizations or associations that have a lot of statutory and regulatory requirements that change on a pretty regular basis, whether it’s tax-related, a specific regulation around safety, or what have you. Businesses are loading that into their models to make it easier to go to that information whenever it’s needed. That makes it an easy way to say, ‘Hey, what does the state of Louisiana think about x?’

Those are probably the two use cases I see the most, not to mention the personal use of ChatGPT and all others for content creation. That’s table stakes. I don’t even think about that as AI anymore. It’s just a toolset, right? Obviously, it’s AI technology, but it’s just a toolset. And many of those tools are being injected into line-of-business applications like Canva and Jasper AI.

When I really think about what companies are wanting to train their models on, like actual data they have, it’s usually going to be large amounts of data that we need to be able to get to quickly, and especially that data that somebody looks at as a subject matter expert inside your company and is constantly being pinged for that information. Other use cases we’re trying to implement now include agreement language for customers, making sure that our engineers know what our service-level agreements are. That could be an easy, quick way to say, ‘Hey, what is our service-level agreement for this particular customer?’ And that information comes up quickly.

Michael Goldstein

President

LAN Infotech

Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The low-hanging fruit is definitely Copilot. But we have had a lot of discussions with customers about how to use AI outside of that. In a Copilot discussion, I tell customers the biggest benefit that we’re finding is in Teams. I say we can re-engineer how they’re doing Teams meetings to make things productive and upgrade their post-COVID conference rooms to smart technology. We always see Microsoft demonstrating it: ‘What did I miss in the meeting?’ It happens to me all the time. So smart transcription, speaking like you’re in that chat, because we’re never all going to go back to the office anymore.

We are having discussions about automation. I’ll use a classic example. We have a high-end kitchen and bath supply company. It’s not rocket science there. What happens is, they’ll scope out a kitchen, they’ll have the designer lay it out, and then God forbid they sold European cabinets and forgot the specific screws. It could set that project back three or four weeks, and there goes the profit. Their data purely comes from a spreadsheet. So we’re working to help them automate the process to help scope out the job and then put some of those dependencies in there. AI could check the proposal before it’s fully done, and say, ‘Hey, you have a dependency of this piping or this kind of thing.’ It can look for those kinds of things without trying to make it fancy.

We already have the thought process of these things are going. We’re working with HAT-AI to help with, I don’t want to call it no-code or low-code, but the ability to take something simple and build a large language model very quickly. Not super sophisticated. We’re the IT for customers, so we don’t want to sell them something that’ll have overhead for us. So now we’re getting deep into their business goals, and it won’t break the bank, but in reality, it’ll make them more efficient. So I think efficiency is the biggest thing.