Hatz AI Launches To Help MSPs Build An AI-As-A-Service Business

‘Over the course of the past year, I realized that there was very little AI usage for MSPs to take to their customers. There are a lot of emerging companies that are doing great work in helping MSPs integrate AI inside their own business or working on their help desk, but I experienced the power of using AI in your own business and for productivity,’ says Jimmy Hatzell, CEO of Hatz AI.

Jimmy Hatzell believes there hasn’t been a platform to build an AI-as-a-Service business solely for the MSP market, so he created one.

Hatz AI, a startup that officially launched Thursday with a platform coming in March, was created to enable MSPs to build an AI-as-a-Service business with AI applications and agents, vector storage and custom large language models (LLMs).

“I set out to solve that gap in the market,” Hatzell, co-founder and CEO of Hatz AI, told CRN in an exclusive interview. “Over the course of the past year, I realized that there was very little AI usage for MSPs to take to their customers. There are a lot of emerging companies that are doing great work in helping MSPs integrate AI inside their own business or working on their help desk, but I experienced the power of using AI in your own business and for productivity. I realized that small businesses couldn't adapt to this stuff, and they would turn to their MSPs to do it the same way they did for cybersecurity, IT and other big technology problems in the past.”

Hatzell was most recently at Vancouver, Canada-based CyberQP, first as director of marketing then as vice president of revenue.

MSPs that partner with Hatz AI will get a system of engagement and a system of record, Hatzell explained. The system of engagement is a set of applications that MSPs can use to sell and manage for their end customers. The first two applications being released are an AI chat assistant and an AI application builder that MSPs can use to build custom applications for their end customers. The system of record for small businesses will have custom LLMs and vector storage, all managed through the Hatz AI platform.

The platform will be powered by an LLM operation called Mido and include multitenant management through an MSP admin dashboard. MSPs will be able to integrate AI into their product offering by building specialized AI applications and workflows for their customers and offer organizationally managed AI assistants.

“The ability for MSPs to build their own large language models or tune existing foundational large language models and offer those services for their customers is key,” Hatzell said. “The system of record is being able to manage vector storage, which is a way you can store information so it's readable in AI format and referenceable.”

Hatzell and co-founder Aiden Kehoe raised a seed funding round of $2.5 million from venture capital firm Vestigo Ventures to fund building out the product and going to market.

Timothy Guim , president and CEO of Sewell, N.J.-based MSP PCH Technologies, said Hatz AI will be a way to bring AI to businesses through the MSP market.

“Being an early access partner allows PCH Technologies the opportunity to shape the direction of the Hatz AI platform,” he told CRN. “From an MSP perspective, [it’s being] successful in delivering AI as a service as well as providing valuable feedback from our clients that are early adopters of AI technology. SMBs don't know where to start so this will allow our business to have a competitive advantage when it comes to AI,” he said.

Hatz AI is using foundational models to train the AI systems, and partners have full control over what data goes into those models.

“They can train their own models using their own data or they can train models for the customer using their customers’ data,” Hatzell said.

And there are multiple ways that data is secured.

“We can use foundational models like open AI where the data does touch their servers but, as always, opted out of training future models so the data wouldn't be leaked,” he said. “We also are planning to release private cloud offerings where the LLM utilized is an open-source model and self-hosted. That way it only touches either the MSP server if they're hosting it or our servers.”

The company also plans to release integrations with major PSA platforms in the next six months.

Michael Goldstein, CEO of LAN Infotech, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based MSP, said Hatzell has “a really good idea and product set that could start getting MSPs into the AI world.”

Not that MSPs aren’t using AI, he said, but Hatz AI looks different.

“Hatz looks like there are going to be tools to automate us and help us get some things in there with a plan of what we bring out into the future,” he said. “I think it's going to go a long way with MSPs.”

What Hatzell is doing will be at the “forefront” of the AI space within the MSP community, said Wayne Hunter, founder and CEO of Allen, Texas-based MSP AvTek Solutions.

“What caught my eye is he wants to do this and that puts it on the leading edge,” Hunter told CRN. “Being able to shape that type of solution market for the MSP I think is huge. MSPs that are willing to learn how to use this technology to improve their customers’ business as well as our own will set them apart from everybody else.”

He said if MSPs already have workflows, Hatz AI will improve them and create more efficiencies.

“Helping to streamline and automate some of the things that we already do, it will improve our margins because we will have spent less time to get twice the amount done,” he said. “Then it becomes easy to sell because I already believe it because I'm doing it for myself.”