AI's Impact on MSPs: 95% Adoption, 64% Low ROI, and the Future of IT Workforce Dynamics with Rich Freeman and Dennis O'Shea

[00:00:12] We're diving into the implications of a new study showing strong demand for AI and advanced solutions, but low satisfaction with ROI. What does that mean for MSPs and solution providers? How fast should MSPs embrace agentic AI and how fast will they? And what will the MSP workforce look like in the future when AI takes over basic management tasks? Rich Freeman and Dennis OShea join me today. Welcome to the Business of Tech Lounge.

[00:00:42] The live version of the Business of Tech Podcast. It's Wednesday, March 26, 2025. It's actually not. It's April 2, 2025. And I'm Dave Sobel. I'll take questions and comments throughout the show, so make sure to put them in chat. You know we're live. Those mistakes come right up. We'll take any questions and comments throughout the show. Now I want to thank Sales Builder, our Patreon sponsor, whose support makes this show possible.

[00:01:07] Focus on your IT sales workflow with the power of automation and visit them at salesbuilder.com. That's B-U-I-L-D-R.com. And a reminder, I am keeping an eye on the chat. We'll take your questions and comments live. Now Rich Freeman is a seasoned journalist and channel analyst focusing on the SMB, small and medium sized business technology sector.

[00:01:29] He's the founder and executive editor of Channelholic, an online publication delivering news, insights and analysis to managed service providers and the SMB channel. Rich, welcome back to the show. Well, thank you very much. Thanks for having me back. And I just assumed when you got the date wrong a moment ago, that was a delayed April Fool's Day prank. Is that the explanation? You know, let's totally go with that. That's exactly what I was going for.

[00:01:55] And Dennis O'Shea is the founder and CEO of Mobile Mentor, a company established in 2004 with a mission to empower individuals to maximize their potential of their technology. Mobile Mentor focuses on modern endpoint management and security solutions in the US, Australia and New Zealand. And Dennis has been instrumental in forging strategic partnerships, notably with Microsoft, leading to multiple recognitions in Microsoft's Partner of the Year Awards. Dennis, welcome to the live show.

[00:02:22] Thank you, Dave. Nice to be on the live show. I was on the not live show. Yeah, we had you on for a great interview a couple of months back and I knew I had to have you on to mix it up for some of the fun topics when we do this live. Thank you. Now, I'm going to dive right in. Rich, you and I were prepping for the show and you brought up a new set of research study that I found really interesting, where clients are heavily investing in AI with a 95% adoption rate, but are not satisfied with the ROI.

[00:02:52] As 86% are feeling like there's pressure to show results and 64% admit the investments haven't delivered as expected. I'm going to ask you, like, what were you thinking as you dug into this data research and said, what are the big implications here for providers? Yeah, I mean, the data was fascinating, right? Because we're talking an enormous appetite among the end users surveyed by Logicalis, solution provider MSP.

[00:03:21] They did this research and 95% of the people they surveyed are going to be investing in these advanced technologies like AI, machine learning, IoT in the next 12 months. Very similar percentages in the last 12 months. So it's not like you've got to convince these companies to be interested in advanced technologies. Where the problem is, is delivering something that is actually getting value or bringing them ROI on the money that they're putting into it.

[00:03:48] And the enormous delta between the interest and the results spells opportunity to me for the people out there in our audience right now, who have the skills, the knowledge, the experience, the capabilities to go in there. And not just talk to the clients about AI and IoT, not just sort of, you know, proof of concept something, but actually roll something out that works and that delivers results.

[00:04:16] And particularly now that this is a window that is open, but it will close over time. But for right now, if you are in that minority of solution providers out there who can actually deliver ROI around these technologies that businesses very badly want to be investing in. It's not just a revenue and profit opportunity. It's a huge sort of stickiness opportunity as well. You're the folks who helped us figure this out when nobody else could.

[00:04:42] Which leads me exactly to Dennis. So Dennis, you're spending time talking directly to customers. Give us a little bit of the insight of what they're asking for to address with AI. Like how are they addressing it? How are they asking for it? And what are you telling them? A lot of it is very tactical today. It's people asking for, you know, initial licenses to experiment and figure out what's possible.

[00:05:04] And the ROI question is probably the hardest question to answer. Honestly, there are a few others we see that come before that that are slightly easier, but still challenging. The first is usually the use case, you know, what are the use cases we should be looking at.

[00:05:18] Some organizations will allocate co-pilot licenses or, you know, other AI licenses and products based on seniority or roles in an organization rather than truly looking at the nature of the work a person does to see can generative AI make a difference to the way they work. That's that's the first thing is I didn't find the right use cases and that journey will go on over time. The second thing we see is is securing the data.

[00:05:44] And that's the big difference between consumer grade AI and AI in a business is the need to need to protect the data because whatever it's worried about is oversharing. You know, if I do a search and say, show me Dave Sobel's last pay slip or show me, you know, whatever, whatever I'm looking for, AI will find it unless the data has been appropriately classified and tagged and labeled.

[00:06:07] The third issue I think we see is empowerment, showing people what they can do because it's not enough to just get the tools. Sometimes people need a bit of help to learn how to do good prompts and the fourth is probably figuring out where organizations need to build agents or how to extend their AI tools into their line of business applications. So the AI, the AI can reason over more data to be more useful in their environment.

[00:06:36] And that then gets them to the ROI question, which for many organizations are still unanswered. You know, I think people intuitively feel like we're heading in the right direction. We should be embracing AI. We don't want to get left. Can we actually, in the words, can we tell our shareholders getting a return on this? Hmm. I haven't heard a good answer to that question yet. Now, I want to follow up that with a little bit of the thinking because I would think that the data security questions are maybe almost our sales questions, right?

[00:07:06] That that is a entire opportunity of preparing customers for AI. Yeah. Is that part of the conversation? Like if you get into that, do you have to do that work first? Is it coming automatically? Give me a little sense of how that's playing out. For most smaller organizations, they're not mature in the way they manage data.

[00:07:25] Large organizations, say legal firms, banks, any organization that has to comply with CMMC or any kind of serious security compliance posture will probably have their data classified and tagged. But most businesses don't. And so that is a real, that's a real issue for them. And it's a prerequisite. You know, before rolling out AI tooling on mass at an organization, that issue needs to be addressed.

[00:07:55] Gotcha. Now, Rich, I'm going to throw it a little bit to you because you actually spent some time talking to both solution providers and vendors on here. Give me a little bit of a sense of what that conversation looks like, particularly as I think about like, you know, from the same study, CIOs are noting that 94% of them see their role as strategic. Like they're looking for that to the end customers looking for that. How are you finding both the solution providers and the vendors preparing for that?

[00:08:21] Well, you know, the interesting thing is I'm not sure that a huge portion of the solution providers, at least, out there are properly preparing for that. I think a lot of the conversation around AI right now with end users tends to be more product oriented, you know, and so and I say this in part because it's top of mind for me. My post coming up in a few days on Channelholic is going to be about vertical AI solutions.

[00:08:50] And the companies that I'm talking to that are doing this are having a different kind of conversation with a different person. So they're not coming to an organization and talking about productivity, which is definitely a form of ROI, but it's also a little bit abstract and hard for people to kind of appreciate. They're not talking about how we're going to make your your IT department, you know, more efficient or whatever. They're like, what is the most painful thing about being in your business?

[00:09:19] And let's talk about fixing that. Or one of the people I interviewed basically said, you know, one of the questions. So their engagements always begin with an envisioning process before any conversation about data or security or anything like that happens. It's like, let's talk about your business needs and workflows and pain points. And one of the questions they like to ask is, what is your number one competitor really, really good at that you would like to be really, really good at, too? Let's figure out how to do that.

[00:09:48] And so now you're you're not talking to the CIO. You're talking to the CMO, the CFO, the CEO, and you are very much talking about solutions as opposed to products. Gotcha. Which, Dennis, I want to get a little bit of your insights here, because one of the things that I'm starting to notice is I'm starting to watch the vendor interactions move into sort of what I would say two buckets around this.

[00:10:15] And the first is, is a group of people that understand, hey, there's a whole process here. You've got to lead to AI. There is data management to do first, all the things that you've outlined. And I've seen another group which are just talking about it as, oh, you need to find a way to bundle AI and sell it. And I would quickly classify like, okay, the first group gets it and the second group doesn't get it.

[00:10:38] Like, talk to me a little bit about the way that you're finding the interactions that you're having with your vendor partners around the way to go to market. Sure. So I guess in the enterprise space, what we're seeing is process focus. We see a lot of large organizations like, like the comment a moment ago, finding an intricate problem or an intricate process.

[00:11:05] And many times, many cases, what I've seen is it's a might be a process in healthcare or real estate or manufacturing or supply chain that involves many different parties, many stakeholders, many contracts, many agreements, many dependencies. And AI being able to manage all that complexity better than human beings have done traditionally. That's probably an area where AI is really, really powerful and the ROI story might be strongest.

[00:11:36] The productivity angle that we talked about a moment ago that Rich talked about, that is certainly more challenging. Intuitively, people feel like I would be more productive with this, but I know people who, you know, have AI tooling in their environment set up correctly and don't use it very often. Unless prompted might use it in the browser, might do meeting recordings, but not a whole lot else. So the productivity ROI story is more challenging for most businesses.

[00:12:04] And I would say finding a complex process and putting AI on that might take longer, but the ROI is going to be stronger. Now, a reminder for viewers, if you have a question or comment, throw it in chat. We'll bring it up interactively. Now, I'm going to pivot a little bit to the agentic side of things because that's clearly the buzz that we're all hearing right now.

[00:12:25] Talked a little bit about it on last week's live show, but Rich, you just recently did a whole piece on Channelholic around Atera and their implementation of autopilot, which is their AI driven tool to put forth and do automatic diagnosis and resolve IT services issues without client intervention.

[00:13:31] And that's what I'm going to do on behalf of the MSP. And I think it's a little bit more about the fact that it's not necessarily on its own unless it needs assistance with something, runs into a roadblock. And so by and large, the vendors out there aren't really comfortable doing that. And I think a lot of MSPs, most MSPs, aren't really comfortable with that either right now.

[00:13:59] Atera is kind of out front there right now. They sometime back introduced an RMM feature they call Copilot, which works very much like Copilots and any other solution that we use out there right now, just in terms of doing the easy stuff on behalf of a technician, helping technicians get more done, be more productive.

[00:14:23] They are in the very, very final stages of beta testing, a newer feature that they call autopilot right now. And autopilot is, as far as I can tell, a truly agentic technology, meaning that in a lot of cases, not all by any means, but in a lot of cases, it will just handle the entire ticket on its own.

[00:14:45] And, you know, I there's no question in my mind that this is where this industry is headed right now. And the big question is just how soon do we get there? And the existence of autopilot tells you the technology is not the roadblock. I think the roadblock is going to be how comfortable are the vendors with introducing that kind of technology, given that things theoretically could go very, very wrong.

[00:15:14] And how comfortable are the MSPs in adopting it for the same reason? Which also extends out to the customers. Dennis, like, you know, this almost feels like it's robotic process automation or amped up with caffeine and energy drinks to a level of, you know, that goes all the way out. And I would think that there are natural both process and people resistance that would go through the entire stem, you know, both at an organization like yours and at the customer site.

[00:15:42] Like, tell me a little bit about the way that you're viewing agentic. Like, how far along are we? How real is it? And how much is it hype? Before getting to that, can I just share with you a funny insight into what Rich was sharing before? Of course. Yeah, autopilot and copilot. The confusion that's being created in the marketplace is astounding. Because you're probably aware, autopilot is a technology that most MSPs are using to automate the setup of Windows machines. It's a Microsoft product. Right.

[00:16:10] So now we've got apparently an AI product called autopilot. Copilot is the Microsoft name for their AI tool. And I know HubSpot also have a copilot tool. And so now we just found out that Atera have a copilot tool. We are really doing a great job when it comes to using our customers. And this is an industry that has always been bad at Naveific.

[00:16:29] Yeah, we're setting ourselves up for some incredible confusion here. We have multiple autopilots and copilots everywhere. But getting back to your question, agentic AI, I'm not seeing it in small business in DMS.

[00:16:44] You know, as an MSP, I'm not seeing it. A lot of our businesses also working with large enterprises. Microsoft brings us into a lot of their clients to help with more complex stuff. Yes, we are seeing some of the large organizations, a small number, deploying a huge number of agents like really aggressive in their in their rollout of agents and large teams and forward leaning at typically professional service firms, pharmaceutical firms with very heavy research bias.

[00:17:11] But for most small, medium sized businesses, no, we're not seeing a lot of agentic AI yet. So let's step that back one level back in the process that how much are you thinking about it potentially from your venue? There are vendors that are starting to talk about it in this space. Oh, yeah. How comfortable are you with with this idea? Or how are you looking at it within your own organization? Good question. We just signed a contract with a guy who's going to come in and build our first internal agents.

[00:17:40] He starts first of May, I believe. And he's going to be reporting to somebody else who starts on April 8th who's going to be overseeing that area. So we're investing in it and we know we need to learn. We need to figure this out. But we're not there yet is the honest answer. But we know we need to get there. So I think that question leads me then to the next area that I kind of wanted to discuss with you guys. And I'm going to say, like, let's let's talk a little bit then about what the workforce looks like.

[00:18:07] You know, Dennis, you just said you're literally hiring somebody to think about that. That kind of implementation of a we call a chat bot and an agent, whatever it is that has very specific implications on the kinds of humans you're going to need in your organization. And that's a great question. Both say this year, then also within the next 24 months. And if you're trying to think about people in their career path, which I know an organization like yours is, you've got to be thinking about, well, people are going to be working three, four and five years out.

[00:18:37] Like, what are you thinking about the future of the workforce in this space as you're starting to bring in agents? I'm thinking the task of writing code becomes infinitely simpler. We've got another business that's building a SaaS product. We've got a BA who is now doing DBA work, which would have been, you know, work where you would have needed an experienced SQL person in the past to write the scripts.

[00:19:06] A BA is able to do that using AI tooling. We've got people able to do PowerShell scripts way faster than they ever could, or using natural language to be able to produce custom queries and kick in QL to do advanced troubleshooting and diagnosis. So the skill of writing code is going to get so much easier for basic work.

[00:19:32] I think the skill of understanding what the code does, dependencies, interfaces, API integrations, security considerations, that will become a lot more important because organizations will simply produce more code because the barrier is going to be lower. So somebody previously who might have been a low code, no code operator will now certainly be able to produce a lot more code.

[00:19:56] So the need for oversight, security, good interfaces and APIs and managing all that integration. So really the architecture layer. I think that's going to become way more important going forward. Now, Rich, you just recently talked to Elliot Hyman over at Lyra Technology Group, who's part of Evergreen. He's been a guest on my show as well. And he was talking a little bit about the fact that he's got little clarity into this. I know you've got, you've been thinking about this some.

[00:20:24] Where are you thinking MSPs are going to be going with their hiring? Yeah, you know, it was it was a really interesting conversation. This is just a few weeks ago. I was interviewing Elliot at a conference that Evergreen was doing in Austin, Texas. And, you know, I mean, for folks who don't know, this is a very large organization he's running. I don't know if he's got hundreds or thousands of employees, but this is a very big organization. And Elliot is very experienced, really knows the industry well.

[00:20:53] During the interview, you know, no great surprise. We got to talking about AI. And at one point in that conversation, he sort of looked off into the middle distance and said, I think half to himself rather than to me. I don't know what my people are going to be doing five years from. And and the point was, I don't know if I'm going to have people. It's I'm going to have people. They're just not going to be doing what they're doing today. Right. And I don't know what they're going to be doing.

[00:21:18] So if you've got level ones and level twos now, you will not three to five years. But the role won't exist. There will be all sorts of customer support roles that don't exist anymore. And if you know, I'll just say this. I mean, if someone like Elliot does not know what that workforce looks like three to five years from now, I certainly don't either. I'll give one thought that just to kind of create some some sense for how different the workforce might look five years from now.

[00:21:48] Some months back, I was interviewing a Forrester analyst about agentic.ai. And he was talking about how, you know, agentic is just going to completely change IT management for IT departments as well as for MFPs. And he was sort of saying, you know, that the the help desk stuff is all pretty much all going to be done by agents a few years from now. But there's going to be a person.

[00:22:15] So if you've got I don't know, depending on the size of the company, dozens, hundreds of agents out there doing all sorts of different things at any given time, you're going to have somebody on the team who is monitoring and sort of supervising, overseeing the agents, making sure that they're doing what they're supposed to and running properly. They're going to be doing, you know, they're going to be doing, you know, exception handling, maybe escalation to level three. They're going to be really good at prompt engineering and refinement.

[00:22:43] So you're going to have what I will call, you know, an agent wrangler on the team three to five years from now. That role doesn't exist today, but everyone is going to have it three to five years from now. And then the question becomes what other new roles are needed? And, you know, if you freed up all those level ones and level twos, what what are they doing that they can't do today because they're resetting passwords? I'm going to throw out an idea for both of you.

[00:23:11] And I want to get a little bit of your reaction to this, particularly because I mean, I talked to a lot of business owners, but I actually one of the interesting things, particularly in my YouTube shorts comment content more than anything. I hear from a lot of younger members of our community, the people that are earlier in their career. And I think they would be asking like, hey, what are those people look like? And I would say that for most that the biggest value you can bring in an IT firm right now is someone who can who can both understand technical concepts and then communicate that effectively.

[00:23:39] Spoken word and written word to other human being a translator. Dennis, I'm seeing you immediately sort of nod like I would sort of say, like for those individuals and organizations that are looking to future proof. Is that sort of the balance of talent that you should be thinking about? Or is there another set of skills that you're really thinking about? Dennis, you're nodding. Yeah, I'm biased because I run a service business. And a lot of what we do is act as the interface between people and their technology. You know, I've been doing this for 20 years. We've worked with millions of people.

[00:24:09] And contrary to the conversation that Rich had with Forrester, I think there will always be a need for people and humans and a service layer. Yes, the technology is going to do amazing things and agents will do a whole lot of work that may have been done manually in the past. But human beings will still need to talk to somebody from time to time, perhaps during their onboarding as an employee, perhaps when there's a security incident, when there's a lockout situation, when they're getting a new device and they're porting something in, porting something out.

[00:24:39] Human beings will still want assistance from another human being. I don't think agents will replace all of that and replace all the level one, two, three hierarchy we're used to building. And as the technology becomes more and more complex, yes, somebody needs to translate it. Somebody needs to be able to explain to the exec, here's what's possible. Here's what you can do. Here are the things you can retire. Here are the technologies you can take out. Here are the costs you can take out. Here's a better, smarter, faster way of doing this. That's a conversation. I don't believe an agent can do that.

[00:25:09] So I truly believe companies and people will need a mentor to help them with their technology and help them navigate through change. And as change accelerates, the need for that human interface might even be greater than it is today. Now I'm going to layer on another little detail here. And Rich, you threw this data my way, and I thought it was particularly interesting. Joe Panatari posted this on LinkedIn about some of the implications of coding. And these are data cited from CNBC.

[00:25:35] For about a quarter of the current Y Combinator startups, 95% of their code was written by AI. And for the last nine months, the entire batch of Y Combinator companies in aggregate grew 10% per week. Now, this implies that with everyone being a coder, and we know that discussion about vibe coding has been another thing that I'm seeing a lot of.

[00:26:00] Like, I think the combination will end up being the ability to craft, as you just said, Dennis, like take those discussions with customers and craft them into the end result. Using code will be the true value piece and communicating and shifting that. Are there other bits to this that you're thinking about, you know, as you're implementing or talking to MSPs that are saying like, this is the stuff that we need to be doing better as the coding portion becomes more driven by machines?

[00:26:31] And was that to me? Yeah, sure. Why not? Yeah, no, you know, I mean, what and part of why I flagged this data with you before is, you know, I've been writing about I've been covering about this industry for a couple of decades now, basically. And for a long time, I've been encouraging MSPs to think about custom application development for their customers because it's extremely sticky.

[00:26:59] It's, you know, high margin. It doesn't get easily commoditized and so on. And, you know, the biggest issue has always been finding and investing in and paying skills, talent, the people who can actually do that. And, you know, all of a sudden it occurs to me that, you know, if these Y Combinator startups, you know, a quarter of them are generating 95% of their code via AI. It's like, heck, I could start a startup right now. Right.

[00:27:29] You know, and 95% of the code is just going to get generated for me. And so that barrier, that idea that I'm interested maybe in coding solutions for my clients, but I don't have the talent in house to do that. That barrier has kind of gone away. And so, you know, we're like, even outside the context of AI, we're at a point in time, like right now, where a lot of the technical work that MSPs do for their end users is becoming increasingly commoditized.

[00:27:59] And the thing that's going to keep you relevant, going to keep your profits high, going to keep your customers loyal to you is your ability to solve business problems, deliver solutions and so on. And coding plays a huge role, potentially, at least in that.

[00:28:14] And so with that barrier to entry around coding, you know, all but collapsed right now, I just think it's going to be a really smart and necessary thing for people, for MSPs to get better and better at using AI to create, you know, vibe code solutions for their customers, basically. Because that's going to be the thing that keeps those relationships alive and keeps you relevant to them.

[00:28:43] And I'll remind the watchers, if you want to throw a question or comment as we wrap up here, I want to make sure that we get your comments and questions on screen. Dennis, how much are you and your team thinking about the way that you're going to start writing code for customers? Well, you know, it's really interesting the way that Dave has framed this as something that MSPs should look at. We did this. So I have some experience to share here.

[00:29:04] About 2012, we decided we should start building mobile apps because we had a lot of clients who wanted enterprise apps with integration into their line of business applications. So we got into the business of building mobile apps and we hired a team of developers, started managing code and doing all of that. And we got out of it three years ago because we found it to be such a difficult business and had so many things that ran a bit counter to running a good MSP and a good consulting practice.

[00:29:33] And if you think about it, doing coding, you know, as you said, it's going to become commoditized because AI is going to do a lot of the coding. But where the coding leads is to a product. The customer isn't interested in just paying for developers on a monthly or annual basis. They're doing it to build a platform or build a product or roll something out. So it leads to product management, which is ultimately a very different business with different KPIs to running an MSP.

[00:29:59] You know, we all know the KPIs that run a good, solid, profitable MSP. They're very different to the KPIs to manage a software product and make that successful. So our experience was that we found the two to be quite challenging to do together. And we saw that over time, one of the things we were developing became a product. And so we spun it out as a completely different company, different ownership.

[00:30:25] And now they're running their own path and growing that SaaS company with the KPIs that matter and that they need to chase, which have nothing to do with serving customers or talking to people or getting customer satisfaction scores. It's all about, you know, they never want the customer to talk to them. They want the software and the product to take care of everything. And so we separated the two. Having taken Rich's advice almost 15 years ago, we ultimately ran that course and then decided to split them.

[00:30:55] So now we're a pure play MSP and services company. And the other is a pure play software company that doesn't provide any service. So the obvious follow-up there is how much opportunity do the two organizations have to partner to work on customers together? We have, in our case, we have some because some organizations do still have a relationship with our organization for security, for example. So the services side can take care of that.

[00:31:22] But increasingly, the software product, it's in the forestry industry that is attracting and managing its own customers without any interface with the service business. And that's the long-term trajectory. Gotcha. Well, guys, I know we could go to this all day long, but I want to be respectful of both your and our listeners' time. So I'm going to sort of wrap it up with, for Rich, what's the big thing you're working on that we can keep an eye out for on Channelholic upcoming?

[00:31:48] Well, like I said, in just a couple days' time, I'll be writing about vertical AI solutions and folks who are having a lot of success in that and how that kind of looks different from other AI offerings that MSPs are doing right now. And Dennis, I know you've got an interview that has been on this show before. Thanks for joining me. If people are interested in talking a little bit more and getting more of your perspective, what's the best way for them to reach out? LinkedIn is the only platform I'm active on.

[00:32:14] Or my company address is mobile-mentor.com. You can get me at Dennis at mobile-mentor.com. Well, guys, I really appreciate you both joining me. I will preview for listeners that Elliot will be on a panel coming in June to mix it up here on the live show. So we will keep this conversation going ongoing. Thank you both for spending some time with me today. Absolutely my pleasure. Thank you. Pleasure. Now, I want to preview another conversation.

[00:32:43] Hiran Hasmuk, who's the CEO of Techquibity, discussed with me some insights on the evolution of IT asset management, from their origins delivering it via smart locker solutions, to a comprehensive software platform that enhances organizational efficiency. He discussed with me the critical lessons learned from a data breach they had, the importance of maintaining accurate inventory. And we discussed how AI and automation are set to revolutionize asset management in the near future.

[00:33:11] Here's a preview of that interview. For us, we feel that AI would be an extension to your IT team versus replacing. From a lot of use cases, from a lot of our customer OCs, you still need that human touch, that human element in a lot of pieces of the pie, whether it's in procurement, managing your devices, even through security. That, you know, you still need some kind of human element there to make decisions.

[00:33:37] But the AI can help drive some of those decisions based on, you know, looking at historical data that's coming out of the tool. So give me a little bit. You're leaning more into the idea of automation or data reporting. Like, where do you think the biggest gain is going to be in terms of where you spend your time? Automation, for sure. If we can use AI to save time in an IT department, they can focus on some of the bigger things, some of the more, you know, heavily security-related aspects or, you know, things of that nature versus the day-to-day operations.

[00:34:07] Assigning devices and seeing where they're at. If an AI tool can help you take care of those items, then we can focus on the, you know, the bigger pieces. My Patreon supporters already have this interview if you want to grab it now. It'll drop on the weekend and on YouTube on the podcast feed. If you want to listen, I really do encourage you to dive in and grab it. Visit patreon.com slash MSB radio to get access right now. Now, I want to thank Sales Builder, our Patreon sponsor, whose support makes the show possible.

[00:34:37] Focus on your IT sales workflow with the power of automation and visit them at salesbuilder.com. That's B-U-I-L-D-R dot com. And vendors, you too can get your name mentioned on the live show. It's a simple monthly subscription. Visit patreon.com slash MSB radio for more information. And listeners, you can support the show too. The best way to do it, like, share, and follow on your favorite platforms. It really does make a difference.

[00:35:03] Make sure you've hit the subscribe button or the follow button on whatever platform is your favorite. And it goes a long way to helping us out. Or support directly on Patreon with our Give What You Want model. You said what you think the content is worth, and you get access to my videos early. If you have a question and are listening to the recording, send it in at question at mspradio.com. Thanks for joining me for the Business of Tech Lounge, and I will see you next time.

[00:35:33] I'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you.