AI Employees: Revolutionizing IT Services with Ken Cox

[00:00:02] There's a space of what I call MSP adjacent. Companies that at first glance kind of look like MSPs, and then I dig in and it's like, wow, you're actually really close and we can learn something here. Ken Cox is one of those. He's leading an organization called InLink, but it's not his only business. And we talk about what he's up to, how the business came to be, and what he's working on now, AI employees, on this bonus episode of The Business of Tech.

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[00:01:50] Absolutely. So, Nlink is a DBA under River City Internet Group, which is a larger collection of companies. And the majority of what we do is data center operations. And years ago, when we started the company, we made the decision that it was a group of people of about 30 of us that said, hey, we want to create products and services, infrastructure-based, that help us feed our families for a long period of time.

[00:02:15] And we had a building. And during the 90s, this specific group of people were really successful in the dot-com world in fantasy sports. So, we knew how to host our websites at large scale. We knew how to do internet. We knew how to do all of these things. We launched, you know, coming out of an ISP, an internet service provider, we started a hosting company.

[00:02:38] And we've been using that hosting company for the past 25 years to imagine new products, new services, launch them, sometimes more times than not, launch them, test them. That doesn't work. Shut them down. But occasionally launch them, sell them, bring them to market, and then end up exiting that company.

[00:03:00] We've always used the data center as our ground zero to start those infrastructures because if you own and operate the data center, you're doing it at the least expensive processing unit possible, right? We own and operate every processing unit. So, there's no more affordable way to do that than owning it.

[00:03:20] Now, I would think you're under a lot of pressure in the data center business right now because, you know, there's a combination of both large public clouds that can do a lot of this as well as a lot of SaaS applications, particularly if I think of a small and mid-sized business. Tell me a little bit about the pressures and the challenges in there and why running a data center company in 2025 makes sense. Well, it makes sense because I started it in 2000, right? Okay. That's why it makes sense.

[00:03:50] And we own the building and we have a great core base of customers, right, that need to be – we're in St. Louis, so, you know, we have St. Louis-based companies that have fiber ran to maybe 20 or 30 different other locations and then they store all their data back here. And really, the operator that we like dealing with or that normally do a deal with us is somebody that can't handle the terms and conditions of a Microsoft and Amazon, all of those things. We're privately held.

[00:04:19] We don't have to answer to a board. So, we don't have – we're not legally obligated to do the most profitable thing with your data, right? It's your data. You own it. We're not – we're going to have to do the most profitable thing with your data. We're going to have to do the most profitable thing. And we're going to have to do the most profitable thing with your data. And it's never handed to anybody without all of the proper documentation file. Gotcha. That makes a ton of sense.

[00:04:49] And I think the other thing for listeners to understand is implied in your statement of you founded it in 2000, as much as much as much as much as much as much as much as possible. I don't think you would tell somebody in 2025 building a data center is the best business idea. Just to get a sense, I want to make sure I'm reading the implications. Absolutely. If you wanted to. But, I mean, it's a tremendous amount of stress. The customers that we have run 24-7. It's hospitals and airlines, right? These are 24-7, 365 life safety issues for their workloads, right?

[00:05:19] So, it takes a special kind of animal to live that world on a daily basis and sell that product. And the infrastructure cost, right? I mean, to say go is $10 million today. Just to get started would be a $10 million run. We built it organically over the years, and that's why it worked. And I mostly just want to baseline because oftentimes I have some of my listeners are younger entrants into the IT space, and I want to make sure that we're baselining the conversation so they can think about that.

[00:05:48] Because the other thing that's interesting is you're entering or have entered, because you've got a product in space within Link, the collaborative software space. And this is another space that I circle that and go, okay, that's a crowded market. You know, and if I look at it from the, again, the big players in this, you've got Microsoft, you've got Google, from the sort of core infrastructure piece, I could potentially lump you in with Slack and Salesforce and Monday. Potentially, right? Depending on the way I'm looking at it.

[00:06:16] Give me a little bit of a sense of the reasoning to move into that collaboration space and where the product is positioned. Yeah. Yeah. So one of my predecessors, Steve, and he's passed away several years ago, but he was one of my mentors. And one of the lines that he used to always say in these sales calls, whenever we would be dealing with, you know, a large coal company or a large hospital was, you want one throat to choke. And that stuck with me.

[00:06:44] And it always resonated with the clients. When there's a problem, they want somebody to go to that they're going to have the conversation with and what the problems are. And in this industry and in the collaboration industry and the marketing industry, everybody's always pointing fingers. And so what's different about our services? And, you know, we're not a mass market product, right? I like to deal with customers, clients one-on-one and help them solve problems. I don't need to sell to everybody on the planet. I'm privately held. You know, we're a group of 30 people plus our employees.

[00:07:14] So our mission in life is to feed our families and have a happy, healthy life. It's not to dominate the stock market or any of those things. So we're more real. Like I answer the phone still, right? For our clients. So competitive space, yes. But, you know, if you need that one throat to choke for your website, for your calendars, for your email and collaboration, for your phone system, if you're looking for that one vendor to go to and say, hey, you know, not, we're not the guy that's going to say,

[00:07:42] we'll revamp your entire infrastructure today. Okay. But, you know, add piece by piece and then scale into it at an affordable rate with wonderful support with people you probably are going to get to know if you have, you know, if you're really trying to overcome some specific challenges. And it's just a different way to do business. And it's more face-to-face. You know, I think that's one of the things that I like about the MSP world still is that it's, you know,

[00:08:08] typically a guy in a town that started the MSP and he's got five or six guys that are going out and fixing your computers. And I like that kind of America. And it's fun for me. Well, it's one of the reasons I love S&P too. I just also want to make sure that I'm understanding pressures, right? Because, you know, that is a tough space. You've got to compete with a large player that has a long feature set that customers are looking at. And by the way, on potentially slim margins, right? Because, you know, email is not necessarily a premium product right now.

[00:08:37] If I think about an email, but you've pivoted that a little bit because you've also added some AI to it. Give me a little bit of a sense of what that means, you know, in terms of like beyond the marketing. Hey, you've added some AI. What does that mean in terms of it actually being able to do? Right. And I'll take that caveat to say that we are the email provider for one of the largest companies in the world. And we have that. So that's like kind of our anchor tenant, right?

[00:09:02] If we were a strip mall, we have an anchor tenant for our email that has thousands and thousands of email accounts, right? Got it. And over the years, I've personally been managing over 100,000 email inboxes on a regular basis for decades, if it was through us.net or one.com or any of those players throughout the years. So email is just something over the years that we had done.

[00:09:26] And some of our corporate clients are kind of saying, hey, we need that with AI, phishing's gotten out of control. Spam got way out of control for a little while. I think most people are seeing that kind of fix itself right now. Spam is going down and that's AI scanners and things like that.

[00:09:43] So we reached out to some of our friends in Germany, Open Exchange, to build and deploy a new exchange environment, open exchange environment with us in collaboration so that we could bring that to our Fortune 100 customers. Well, while we're bringing that to them, I wanted to also say, well, I love Main Street and they don't have a lot of options, right? So let's make an affordable package for the small office, home office person that they can get in.

[00:10:12] And maybe they have a different option, right? I mean, Nike and Adidas run the market, but I'm sure happy that there's K-Swiss out there. Right. Right. Right. Now, I'm curious because one of the theoretical, I want to talk about it, of a large player on this is like their integration ecosystem. So, for example, if I think a lot about, you know, a Google Workspace, right, has the ability to integrate with tons of other products. You know, I don't mind for telling for listeners, I'm a Google Workspace shop myself.

[00:10:41] Integration with Notion is super important. We then integrated into Zapier. We've got all of that kind of stuff. How are you, are you able to address that and what are those kind of the challenges of taking on that integration ecosystem? Yeah. So what we did was we used some of the core fundamentals of our base product, our data center for stuff like storage and, you know, the daily processing workload stuff. But then we've partnered with OpenExchange that has 200 and something developers that can do all those tie-ins, right?

[00:11:10] We partnered with WHMCS to take all of these things together and put them under one hood for the end user. We partnered with GoHighLevel to hand you one of the best CRMs on the planet. And we've integrated the AI employees into that, which is just a phenomenal resource for small business today. We've taken all of these things. And since we are an infrastructure provider at heart, that's what we always were. And we understand the bell curve of business.

[00:11:40] Coupled with the influx of AI, I mean, we're able to bring these services to you. We're taking out that bell curve at the top, right? Because these services are going to be able to offer to the end user at very reasonable prices. And I don't think we're going to see – I think we're going to see that price tick, the price war on AI services way faster than we've seen it on anything else. I would agree with that. I mean, and we'll just allude to there's a whole other discussion we could have about AI pricing, particularly because we're talking very near to the release of DeepSeq.

[00:12:10] So, like, there's a conversation to be had, but I actually want to double-click on something that you said really quickly in there that I think is important to spend more time on. You used the phrase AI employees. Say a little bit more about what that means in the context of what you're doing. Yeah. So, with AI, you know, right when AI and Open Exchange – or AI came out – not came out, but really hit the ground running about two, two and a half years ago,

[00:12:35] so I applied to go to MIT for AI and business, and I went through their 16-week program and really stepped back. I'm like, okay, how are we going to handle this? Well, something with the super large language models that happens is hallucinations. And what we find – and I've got a couple patents on narrow language models, stuff like privacy policy provisioning and stuff like that.

[00:13:02] But one thing that we realized is that you're going to have to have narrow AI agents to do these workloads. With our partnerships, we came up with just six different AI employees that we're going to be able to launch out, AI Voice, inbound only right now. Somebody calls, we can have an AI guy or a lady answer the phone and talk with your users with your pertinent data. And it's – we teach you how to – you know, teach you how to do it, walk you through it, really slow text messaging.

[00:13:31] We have an AI employee for Google Reviews, Google Review Management. You know, that AI knows how to do Google Review Management and respond to it. And what we've learned with AI over these past two years is that AI can be very, very effective as an employee. You still have to manage it, though, right? If you just say AI, people will think that, oh, I can type some thing and it's going to run off and do its own thing. You still need someone managing these AI agents.

[00:13:56] And I think looking at them as employees is kind of the best mindset that a manager can do with these AI agents. So right out of the gate, you know that you have to manage them, you have to train them. But they work 24-hour and they're really, really affordable and there's no health insurance. So say a little bit more about the approach to managing AI employees because it sounds like, I mean, you've done it. You've thought – given a lot of thought. You've probably put together a bit of a framework to how you think about it. Say a little bit more about the way you're approaching that. Yeah.

[00:14:26] So, you know, I like to have – on my Google Reviews, I like to have five different employees. I like to have one employee that deals with five stars and one employee that deals with one stars. The five stars, I don't have to manage him as much, right? He's a very narrow scope. It's, hey, thank you very much. You know, we appreciate the support and we tell them what it is. But ones and twos, we want to have that guy trigger a workflow, right? And get that to a sales rep and go.

[00:14:55] Then occasionally you need somebody going in and spot checking the responses, right? Making sure that your bot doesn't now think that it's Spanish because the last seven people that talked to it spoke in Spanish. So that starts to happen with some of these AIs as they run for a while and they just need a little, hey, you're not Spanish. If it goes into Spanish speaking, please revert back to English as soon as possible because although the end user might appreciate it, when they get to one of our texts, we can't support it yet.

[00:15:25] Gotcha. So one of the things, have you sort of been able to narrow down to specific sets of types of use cases where these AI employees really shine? Yeah. So answering the phone, absolutely. And transferring to the right department, those things we can make those triggers very good. One thing that I really like about it now is that phone call. You know, if they say that ask for a schedule or want to book an appointment, you can kick that into a workflow that sends that user a text message with the calendar, right?

[00:15:55] These are things that aren't probably happening as frequently and as smoothly as you would like them to happen in your business. Somebody calls, you want them to be able to get an appointment as soon as possible or transfer to the right department. They do that very nicely. The text messaging back and forth, great. Conversation on the website, great. Reviews, great. Funnel building is getting pretty cool. Like, you know, hey, I have this product, this service, and I need a funnel built for it.

[00:16:24] And right now it's going through and it's making all the steps of your funnel for you. We were talking about stuff that we're selling three months ago for $5,000 for a custom funnel. You know, the AI can work with you going through those steps and build the nurturing campaign right in there for you or with you, right? So it's like having an engineer that's going to work on the website with you. And it's really nice.

[00:16:51] So I want to, as I think about wrapping up here, I want to actually go to something. I'm not usually one that focuses a ton on like leadership styles and thinking, but you've said something that I want that resonates with me as a fellow small business owner. Talk to me a little bit about the way you think about this, like stability and profitability, because while I'm 100% with you, you don't have to think necessarily about aggressive growth and profitability. Well, you do need to think about profitability, right? Because you're growing a successful business.

[00:17:16] Talk to me a little bit about the way that you approach that, the balance of short-term and long-term and your overall strategy. And I run a few different businesses and I handle them slightly different. First thing that I had to figure out to do on the finance side was, and I don't know where I remember this term from, but feed the animals, right? The first thing I do every single day is I bounce a checkbook. I see what money came in. I see what money came out.

[00:17:44] So I have a really good understanding of what our expenses are and what our income is on a minute-by-minute basis, right? It just lives inside my head because there's a lot, a lot of moving pieces. Outside of that, something that I've learned over the years, and it doesn't, you can have a great hook and sell product. You can have a great salesperson and sell product.

[00:18:10] But if you just have a great product at a good price, it will sell. And you got to talk about it. You got to get out there. You got to get them out there. Podcasting has been a huge resource for me to do that. It's been a lot of fun. Always working on the long-term while managing the short-term is really what I think it is. Ken, that is a great way to end this.

[00:18:39] Ken Cox is a dynamic entrepreneur and president of multiple companies. We're talking specifically in his role at InLink, a global provider of IT services and business solutions. In addition to leading InLink and several other organizations, he hosts the award-winning Clicks and Bricks podcast, where he shares entrepreneurial insights and success stories. Ken, thanks so much for joining me today. Thank you, Dave. I appreciate it.

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