Above the Stack Ep 13: The Buyer's Psychology of AI

Communications arrays are aligned.

Nobody cares about your stack, bro. What's going on, my friend? How are you?

I'm doing good, man. Feels, uh, feels like time's flying. The summer's getting— yeah, winding down here, you know. So yeah, it's surreal, but feels good to be going into fall. But it's been good. How about you?

Yep, it's good. Today's the first day school has been kicked off, so the kids are out of the house. And it's quiet here, which has been fantastic. I'm like, oh yeah, I remember all these days when like the house is quiet. So yeah, life's good. I'm glad for the routine and all the things kicking off for sure.

Yeah. Well, it was good to see Kyle and Alex as well too at ChannelCon. I was out there a couple weeks ago in San Diego. Yeah. It was a good show. Yeah.

It was good.

I heard it was fantastic. Yeah, I didn't get a chance to go, but San Diego is always a wonderful place to go when you get a chance. So yeah, well, I wanna say welcome to all the crew here. This is gonna be a really fun conversation. Before we introduce our guest today, I, you know, we've been chasing this whole journey on what does AI look like? We've been looking at this from a, not so much what tools are out there. Again, we're really trying to go above the stack here, but really looking at what does go-to-market look like? How do we market this? How do we think about it? And last month, Nick, was so great having Dustin Bolander on from Clear Guidance, just hearing how he's talking about AI and how he's bringing it up in customer conversations. And to me, that naturally led directly into what we're going to be talking about today is just the buyer psychology of AI. Like, how does the buyer think about this? And so I don't know about you, Nick, but I think this is the perfect segue for where we should be going next.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think even after that call with Dustin, you know, we had a partner reach out that was on the call, was actually in Australia, listened to the call at like 3 AM his time. Um, but he got enough confidence and, and feedback from that call to actually go out and charge for a workshop, which is really cool, you know, to see as well too. Because, you know, Dustin mentioned that he was doing that with these cloud workshops that he's running. And, um, I think that's, you know, like we were talking about psychology today, half of it is, is certainly a confidence layer for a lot of people out there to feel confident in what they're selling and, and, um, you know, going to market with that, but also understanding where the client's limited So happy to be unpacking that today as well too.

Yeah, completely agree. And just so everyone knows, if you do want to get in touch with either of us, emails are here, LinkedIn is here, reach out anytime. Well, without any further ado, let's go ahead and bring up our guest. This is a friend of mine who has been somebody I have relied on and talked with, and I've just been a good friend for a long time and even worked together multiple times, I think. Mr. David Powell, how the heck are you, my brother?

Really good. I like the pictures earlier. You know, Nick's all professional with his tie. You're wearing a shirt that has your name on it. And I've got the quarter zip, I think, in mine. So we're all very on brand in different ways. Although Nick, well, I appreciate the tie. I only wear a tie if someone's getting married or buried. Those are the two, the two times that I wear a tie. Rest of the time I try to avoid it. But yeah, Wes, I mean, I love the time working with you. And I've always loved staying in touch and looking forward to the convo today.

Yeah, what, man, we, we are too. Um, tell us, um, Dave, just a bit about who you are and, uh, what you do at LionGuard.

Yeah, man, I've been in this MSP space like a really long time. Um, as a matter of fact, so long that somebody back in the day came up and said, well, y'all are an MSP. I'm like, what's an MSP? You know, because we were just doing recurring revenue, had pivoted away from break-fix and that kind of stuff. So primarily, you know, I mean, to be honest, what my claim to fame is, is that there was this MSP here in Birmingham where I live, and they were a big VAR, and they brought me in to build their managed services practice. So when I got there, we went from $300,000 a month in managed services revenue to $3.6 million a month in 7 years. So we had this huge growth, and that's really what kind of got me on main stage speaking stuff. Then I was at Logic Monitor. We exited that to Vista. I did a PE-backed roll-up with some MSPs. I was with you at Perch. We sold that ConnectWise. I sat out my non-compete for a couple years, came back in the space. I was most recently over at Pax8 where I kind of built their cybersecurity go-to-market program for the MSPs. And then LionGuard came and recruited me over to be CRO. And I'll tell you, like, the coolest thing that LionGuard does, which is this MCP integration with Qualm, didn't even exist in February, right? So the coolest thing we do right now and the sexiest thing we can show you in a demo or in a, you know, QBR or whatever it might be, didn't even exist in February and could not have existed, you know, a year ago. And so it's just really crazy how quickly things are moving in this space. And I'm a tech optimist in general, and I always tell people, you know, this is really no different than all the other kind of evolutions we've been through. It's just going a lot faster.

Yeah.

So everything used to be on-prem, then it went to the cloud, blah, blah, blah. All of that happened, but now this is just, That type of transformative thing, but it's also the speed at which it's going is something that we really haven't dealt with before.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I find myself just keeping up to speed is one of the most difficult pieces to all of this all the time. But it is so exciting when you run into so many conversations of people that, hey, I'm doing this now, I changed this. And it really is such a fast— I mean, as an example, like, I find myself even asking AI all the time, hey, are you capable of doing this thing that I think I could Sure enough, it is. Like, a good example is I had a bunch of YouTube Shorts I uploaded, just batch uploaded, and I was like, I asked it, like, can you go and automatically schedule every single one of them, give them a title, all this stuff? There's like 60 of them. And sure enough, after an hour of work, um, off it went and it did its thing. And it's just even little minute things like that that would have spent hours before, um, was just so, so powerful. You just find yourself wondering.

My grad school professor had this phrase where she said, you can't have an autopsy until you have a corpse. And the point of that was like somebody had come up to the professor and was like, I don't know what to write. And she said, just write something and then we have something to dissect, right? And to tear apart and to revise. And I think that AI is fantastic at providing the corpse. You know, it's like you would never just, you know, Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, select all, copy paste what it wrote and send it off to someone. But if you're staring at a blank sheet of paper, you know, it is really great at producing the rough draft of corpse that then you can perform the autopsy on. And, you know, I think that that is a great gateway point for people to begin to use it. Because I think people look at it and see all the stuff it'll do, and it's bewildering. And kind of your point, what, what it's even capable of changes daily. But like, okay, just start with something, right? So just pick something and begin to see, and the more you do, then the more you become immersed in it.

Yep.

And Nick, I don't know about you, but that was one of the big takeaways we had with Dustin last week is he said pretty much the same thing. He's like, I just have to get my clients into using it beyond just chatbot stuff. And it comes a little bit of education. And then so he does like a— they pay him to do a workshop and we'll get more into this in a minute, but they pay him to do the workshop for him to teach them to then come back with the knowledge armed with, this is great, how do we scale this up? This is a project we want to do, blah, blah, blah. And It's been awesome for them. So yeah.

Yeah, I think you really want that, you know, quick feedback loop, right, for them to have this intrinsic value add of AI, right? Whether that's doing research, whether it's, you know, starting to get a blank, you know, canvas built out with what David mentioned there as far as some ideas that you can then curate from. And but then also have the realization like, hey, this got me over this mental hurdle, or this got me to this next phase that, you know, gave me a lot of value. And if you can compound those versus what we've talked about in the past too, of doing like a 6-month data pipeline project with AI, right? Like you're not going to experience value for 6 months. There's going to be a lot of risk to that. There's a lot of technical debt that you could potentially perceive in 6 months, right? Especially with the rate of change. And so a lot of that comes down to, you know, how can you start with the basics, right? With every user in the organization, not just, you know, individual AI champions or anything you would want to call them at this point.

Yeah, I always tell MSPs when they ask, like, where do I start? I'm always like, start with the most repeatable, soul-crushing thing you do, right? And see if there's a way to automate that. And so I always kind of joke about, in Office space, the TPS report, right? Is everyone has, like, the TPS report. And so what is your version of the TPS report? Like, what is soul-crushing but needs to be done and is repeatable? And then let's go figure out a way to do that. And I think what we tend to have is like this crisis of a lack of imagination. They don't even know what is possible. So let's just start with something. And I think that's what we have right here is like, you don't want to do the soul-crushing report. No one wants to do that. Is there a better way to do that? That's never— the soul-crushing repeatable task is never anyone's highest and best use, right? So there's time that can be spent better. And then the other part is like, what's the practical outcome? I hate doing this thing. Now I don't have to do it anymore because— You know, my AI agent Wes does it for me. I mean, that's a great, you know, a great way to test and to find and to put some energy around. And I think as you do that, you begin to see what the realm of possibilities are. Oh, if I can do this thing, I could probably do these 3 other things. But I think most people, it's like, where do I even start? And I think that holds a lot of people back.

So what are some of your favorite questions when it comes to getting to the frustrating TPS report equivalence? Like, what do you like to ask a client to get them thinking through that?

Yeah, I always like— it's really, to me, it kind of comes down to like, what are the bummer things that stay on the bottom of your list that you never actually go tend to? So, you know, there's, um, I think there's this, the phrase eat the frog, right? It's like if you have on your to-do list that day to eat a frog, you know, I think good best practices say to eat the frog first because otherwise you just delay the eating of the frog and push it to the next day and push it to the next day. So I would say, I think the thing is like, look for the thing that is like eating the frog. What is the thing that needs to be done but no one actually, you know, wants to do? I always kind of talk about like pressure washing the patio or cleaning the windows or cleaning the gutters or organizing the garage. I live in the South. I know you guys, I know Wes, you do, and it's like a million degrees in my garage, so I don't ever want to clean it out, but it needs to be done. Similarly, inside an MSP, there are things that need to be done that never get done? Are we validating configurations? Are we validating privileges? Are we doing a data governance project? Are we doing configuration drift? All that stuff that, you know, the guardrails that need to be around your service delivery, they need to be done, but no one wants to do it. It's time-consuming, it's painful, it's just not very fun, just like cleaning the windows or the gutters. So how do you find those things that need to be done, should be done, aren't being done just because no one wants to create the time to do it? And that plus this whole crushing stuff, I think, are all great places to start. It's like, we need to, we need to put energy around the stuff like that, but we don't have the time to do it. So let's figure out a way to automate those things.

Yeah, it's exactly right. And—

oh, go ahead, Nick.

Oh, I was gonna say, I mean, the point that I think about when you say that too is like, these are pretty unsexy things, right, if you will, with AI that you have to go and then tackle. And that kind of brings up a good follow-up question just around like the psychology aspect, right? It's thinking about, you know, and talking with all these MSPs and we're trying to pitch different projects and what our customers are saying that they want to or want from AI, right? As an example.

Mm-hmm.

But there's a delineation between that, what they say, and then what they're actually willing to pay for. So I don't know if you could speak to that. Yeah. You know, just in terms of what you're seeing in that area as well.

I always had that— I mean, Wes and I have talked about this before around cybersecurity— is like, you can't be the 400-pound personal trainer, right? I mean, Nick, you look like a pretty fit guy. I'm not gonna make any comments about mine and Wes's relative fitness here, but Nick looks like a pretty fit guy, right? But if I hired Nick to come be my personal trainer and Nick shows up and he weighs 400 pounds, he's shoving a Big Mac in his face, I'm never going to take advice from you. Right? Or if you're my personal financial guy and I come in and I notice that you've got personal bankruptcy papers on your table, I'm never going to take advice from you on managing my finances if you were bankrupt. And I think what most MSPs are, are in the same situation they were in just a few years ago with cybersecurity is you can't sell what you don't do, right? So they've got their customers inbound asking them, how should we be leveraging AI when all the MSPs are— a lot of them, what they're actually doing is you just have a bunch of tabs open. They have podcasts queued up, they have videos that they've emailed themselves, and they have tabs open that they're going to get around to reading before they actually turn around and execute. And then their customers are coming to them expecting them to be experts on how they should leverage AI inside their small to medium business. And it's just this massive disconnect. And it's really, again, no different than 5 years ago when suddenly cybersecurity insurance providers are asking end users, are you doing these things? And the end user turns around to the MSP and like, am I doing these things? And the MSP's pontificating on cybersecurity when they're not doing those things themselves. And so we're in that exact same bucket to where you can't sell what you can't— what you're not doing. And so if you're the 400-pound guy, you can't be the personal trainer, right? Is you have to be really, really fit to go out and sell yourself as a personal trainer. And I think that MSPs have to figure out AI internally, discover some of those use cases, So then they can speak intelligently, confidently, and competently to their end users around how they could potentially use AI inside their enterprise.

And yeah, and I just, I think conversation around curiosity goes a long way with this, right? Like, I don't know why we're so afraid to just ask the questions, to just literally say things like, hey, help me understand how you're doing this. Help me understand, you know, what, like you mentioned in the very beginning, where you have frustrating time. Literally just being curious and asking questions goes a really long way. And I think it, we feel a lot of times like, if I ask those questions, it reveals how little I know. And then if it reveals how little I know, then it really shows the vulnerability I have of, I actually just don't know my customer that well. And unfortunately, or maybe actually, I wouldn't say fortunately, times are a-changing, right? Like—

Oh, yeah.

If you don't know your customer really, really well and what they're doing and how they do it, you're already behind. So you might as well start playing catch-up on that today. Because that is, I think, one of the areas where the lack of knowledge causes us to not even know the right questions to be asking them to get into these conversations.

Well, this is something I talk about all the time, Wes. It's like back in 2007, if I told you, hey, Wes, there's going to be this piece of glass you carry around with you everywhere you go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. First thing you look at when you wake up, last thing you look at before you go to bed. You're going to summon a stranger and get in their car, let them take you somewhere for money. Well, David, that's nuts, right? So Apple got rich when these came out. But who got really rich were all the applications that sit on top of this, right? And to your point, I think that we need to look at AI, the foundation models, as the iPhone, right? And there's going to be all these little applications that are going to come up. It's like, what is AI for catfish farmers? What is AI for cement companies? What is AI for fill-in unsexy business here, right? And the only people that are going to be able to have those conversations are the MSPs.

Right.

because that knowledge is not gonna come outside of those unsexy businesses. And the guys in Silicon Valley, the private equity guys, and, you know, the Patagonia vest, the douche koozie, you know, is that the guy in the douche koozie in Silicon Valley is never gonna put money behind a company that's gonna go solve AI for catfish farmers or cement companies. So there's this huge monetary opportunity financial opportunity where a bunch of people are going to get really stinking rich, where an MSP is going to come in. And if you've got a vertical, if you've got dentist office, let's just say, and you can solve AI for dental offices, then you do that as a project, and then you shrink-wrap that and take that to every other one of your dental offices and sell that as a recurring service. But to your point, you're going to have to go ask because no one can surface those insights from outside. No MSPs can be able to clearly state to a dental office, here's the soul-crushing repeatable thing you do. You're gonna have to go in and say, hey, what's the soul-crushing repeatable thing that you do? And then how can we help use AI to automate that? And then that same use case is being everybody just like that and take it and sell it to them.

Yeah, I think that's a great point. We've talked about that, Wes, too, in the past episodes, right? About niching down, about specializing, you know, really to number one, obviously differentiate yourself comparatively speaking. We're kind of Talking about this, David, in the preamble before the show started about, you know, just what do you differentiate in as an MSP? If you ask, they'll say great customer service. And it's, you know, it's a hard thing to then differentiate from that standpoint. But I think, you know, if you're not already niching down into verticals or specialty areas like that, I think it's a good time to reflect and wonder if you start to or should do that because Number one, I think, you know, you can then charge premium prices for what you're doing. You can talk to your target customer a lot better if you say, you know, hey, I offer AI services for dental offices, right? Or, you know, something along that nature. It's definitely a more compelling motion, but also on the backend side of the house, I think a lot of people, you know, don't always reflect on that too because it's like your operations get more streamlined, you get reduction in COGS. There's a lot of efficiency that you get in that area. And it's a good time to experiment while things are really, I would say, unstable in a lot of ways, but also everybody's trying to figure this out and there's a lot of noise and saturation, you know, AI-generated noise in a lot of cases, right?

Yeah.

Where we're all trying to pick the same thing here. And I think a lot of MSPs will naturally gravitate towards what they do well, which is like security for AI. But I think that that's gonna be really noisy as well too versus trying to enable a business We'd be curious to hear your take on that as well.

Well, I think one of the oldest things in sales, right, is like, by the way, there's this joke right now is like if you go into Home Depot, there's gonna be some 25-year-old that doesn't know anything about anything and you ask them a question, they're gonna tell you it's on aisle 6. But you go into Ace Hardware, there's gonna be an 80-year-old guy in the aisle that knows how to build a house from scratch. And you ask the question, he'd be able to tell you exactly what you need. Well, I think that the thing in sales from forever ago, one of the first things they teach you in selling is that You know, somebody comes into Ace Hardware wanting a quarter-inch drill bit, right? They actually want the quarter-inch hole. They actually don't want the quarter-inch drill bit, right? And so stop selling the tool and sell the outcome. The outcome is the hole. The tool is the drill bit. And I think what we've gotten with AI is we're wanting to sell the tool, AI, instead of selling the outcome. What does AI enable you to do? Ultimately, the customers don't care if it's AI or not. Pick some sexy thing and put a name on it, whatever. They really don't care. What they want to do is like this soul-crushing thing that I hate doing, the TPS report. I just want that to automagically happen every Monday morning and be sent to the 5 people that need access to it. They're never going to read it, but they're going to fire me if I don't produce it, right? It's like, how do I automate that thing? Whether that's AI or a Commodore 64 with a serial RS-232 connection on the back and a 5¼ floppy drive, no one cares. They just want the outcome, right? And I think what we have to stop doing is start to stop talking about AI Now, it's sexy, it'll open up a bunch of conversations, but ultimately people are buying outcomes, not the tool. And that's where we have to focus is what are the outcomes that we can deliver? And the only people that can provide that to the SMB is the MSP, right? Claude, I mean, Anthropic, OpenAI, none of those people are going to build a sales team to go call on all the small to medium businesses and show them how to use AI to solve your problems, right? The people that are positioned for that are the MSPs. And so they're gonna have to pivot away from cybersecurity, gonna have to pivot away from, does this thing work? And if it doesn't work, you have someone to call and focus on what does your business do? To your point, Nick, how do you— what is it that you do every day? How do you, you know, make money? What kind of goals are you trying to achieve? And then let's see if we can cobble together some tools to provide you those outcomes and what those tools are that customers don't care about.

You nailed it. And that really kind of gets to what we, I think, really wanted to talk more about is I want those of you that are listening today to literally ask yourself this question. How are you at your MSP, and not just you, but everyone in your company who's responsible for client conversations and the VCIO role or whatever that similar role type is, having conversations aligned to what Dave just said? Are you really getting towards This right here, if this thing that you've identified could be better, in what ways, what would that unlock for you? What would that do for you? What would that change for you? What would that mean for your company and for your business? Ask yourself that question. I'll give a great example of this today. In fact, I'll just show it. One of the things that we have built for this, it kind of ties two birds together, is we've built out this worksheet that we're going to give away. So we'll have a QR code up for it in just a second. And this is a perfect example of it is we spent a bunch of time iterating and building out what this entire discussion guide should look like with the client. So you'll scroll into this and you'll see things like, hey, look for what we've been talking about, things that are repetitive, etc., etc., etc. So this guide is literally walking you through all of those components and questions to ask in discovery, all of this. My point to all this is I built all of this through a whole bunch of using AI and a whole bunch of editing and Word and looping and going back in. But then what I normally do is I'll give that over to my design folks and I'll be like, hey, can you turn this into something pretty like you see here? That's super taxing for people that I'm not sure that's their highest and best use of time. So one of the things that we've done is we spent a bunch of time in Claude Design and we built out all of the artifacts and all of the design system for how we build above-the-stack documents. And now we just run it right into that and it comes back in, I don't know, an hour and it's Fully ready to go with a few edits and all that stuff. And so I asked my team, I'm like, hey, how much time did that save you for the first time we did this through Claude Design? And they're like, you saved us over 80%. That's a game changer, right? Like that, that is a meaningful difference. And so those are, I think that's kind of what you're getting at, right, Dave, is like find the problem, find the pain, and then make sure that you can move towards an outcome that the client comes back and says, yes, that was valuable in this way and it's changed our company, made us better.

And I talk about 2 things in my talks on this right now when I'm talking to MSPs and end users is demonstrable and provable. Number one is demonstrable, right? It's like, um, my yard, Wes, looks amazing, right? My washing machine— I replaced my Samsung with a Speed Queen. My Samsung sucks. It's the worst washing machine I've ever had. My Speed Queen is fantastic, right? So, but when I bought the Speed Queen, it's supposed to be more efficient. Let me tell you what I'm not doing is taking my power bill, my water bill, pre-Speed Queen and after Speed Queen, and comparing those things, right? But I have someone that cuts my grass. I know what it used to take me to cut the grass, 2 to 2.5 hours, right? So now when they cut it, I know exactly the time I'm getting back, right? And I think that's the thing with this AI automation is we've been selling— too many people have been selling hand-wavy. You become more efficient. Your service delivery will be more efficient. You'll be more secure. You know, very vague kind of stuff. But right now, if you can go through and automate this stuff and say, okay, It used to take you 3 hours to do this. Now it takes you less than 5 minutes. You know, I've been doing this thing, Stump the Chump, where at the end of my talk, I pull up Claude talking to the LionGuard data via MCP, and I'll get people to ask a question, and let's see how long it takes to come back. One of the questions was, show me all of my pre-11th Gen PCs with, like, less than 8 gigs of RAM and more than 90% utilization or whatever. Basically, the sucky PCs that I manage report is what it wanted to run, and then build me an HTML. And so I pumped that in. It took like 20 minutes via MCP to pull that data out and render the HTML report. So then I turned around like, okay, how long would it have taken you to do that? He's like, hours, right? Not only would it have taken hours, no one would have done it because that's a low-value thing, which is to go find all the sucky PCs that I manage, which, by the way, if you correlate that to most of your tickets would be coming from the sucky users or the sucky PCs that you're managing, right? So the sucky PC report would've taken him hours to pull the data, but then he doesn't have anybody on staff, he said, that could render it beautifully in an HTML file like Claude did, right? And so now I can say, here is a 4-sentence prompt, and that saved you hours of work if it ever got done at all, right? So that's the demonstrable part. And then the provable part, Is, can you prove what you're doing? And I think that that's the thing that a lot of MSPs are getting hung up on. It's kind of— there's 3 groups you have to prove something to. One is compliance. You have to prove the things that you're doing to your end customer's compliance or regulatory body. Then they have to prove that they're doing the things they're supposed to be doing to the customers. Then they have to prove to themselves that we're meeting our MSAs. And lots of times that proof, like getting the proof around those things is a soul-crushing, painful, time-consuming, never happens, should happen but doesn't happen project. And now you can automate a lot of that provability and provide the actual documentation needed to support these things that before just no one wants to do. They don't do it well just because no one, you know, is eager to go and surface that type of information.

Yeah, I think, I think the interesting point with, with all this too is just kind of like who, what personas you're talking to, right? Meaning, you know, when you, when you go talk to a company owner, um, that persona is going to have their own obviously opinion about where they want to go tackle AI initiatives and where they think they could improve the business. But if you go into these, most of these organizations, like Dustin uncovered it in the last call as well too, it's often even at the individual contributor layer or departmental layer where you have actually some of the best time savings because you can automate a lot of that work or through discovery, you can find that, you know, you could actually just solve for this with a different technology and not try to blast it with AI, right? Or you could change the process, um, and you can be an advisor in that way too. So for MSPs, I think it's extremely important even to start doing workshops, right, with departments, with these organizations, and just starting to do an exercise with them that unpacks like, what is that thing that you do every day or every week that you just hate, or it takes the most time And to your point, Wes, on that worksheet, it's like, well, if this wasn't in your life anymore, if it was automated or if it was reduced in time, what would you be able to do at your job? And that's a powerful reflection point for them in that workshop. But then you as an MSP can also unpack all of the findings from that and potentially most often cases I've found that you can actually reuse those as marketing in the future of like, hey, here's the next packaging things that we can do for you, right? And that's Kind of how you get started. Yeah, because this is kind of a blank canvas for most of us, and you need a way to get this feedback loop. But the more that you get in front of your customers, but more specifically even those individual departments, I think you have just much a higher propensity to generate what could be your recurring offer in a lot of those cases too.

And isn't this the moat that you want to be in as an MSP, in the sense that you're actually talking to the client about challenges, about problems and solutions that the business actually cares about, right? Like, I know everyone, we always joke about business outcomes and no one ever defines what it means. That's what it means. It means what it means, what's important to the client at the end of the day.

Yeah.

And we don't know that until you start asking those questions, and then you'll be able to find the opportunities that they care about. So the opportunities come after we discover what the problem is, and we'll never know what the problem is unless we get into discussion with the client to really start to understand that in a better way. And so, I don't know, I just hope one of the takeaways that everyone's getting from this is like, We don't have to overthink this. It's, um, this, this is something that, that asking the right questions and doing the right discovery will start to turn into the right results.

Well, and Wes, I mean, this is memorable because it has a bad word in it, but what I always tell MSPs is like, when I've led sales at MSPs, like, do not overcomplicate this. What you sell is ASS, okay? Is that the, the environment should be available, supported, and secure. Right? Does my stuff work? Is it available? When I click Outlook, does it open? Right? In the event it doesn't work or doesn't open, is it supported? Is there someone I can call and talk to about this? And are they making it secure? Right? That's all that MSPs do is that, right? It's available, it's supported, it's secure. So that, though, becomes with, you know, we've talked about the lack of differentiation, becomes somewhat commoditized where everyone's providing those 3 things. It's available, supported, secure. What we're talking about here is a higher value conversation layered on top, right? It's like, hey, I'm here today to talk to you, Nick, about how I can make your business better, how I can take something that you hate doing and get technology to do it for you. And so it pivots. I mean, like, I think the hardest part about being an MSP is like no one calls you on a Monday. It's like, hey Wes, guess what, man? Everything's working great. Appreciate you. You know, in fact, most of them have a really short memory. They don't remember how bad their lives sucked before you came on the scene and made their stuff work. And so then every MSP runs in the same boat. 6, 9, 12, 18 months later, they're all in a board meeting. They're like, why are we paying these guys $10,000 a month? Our stuff works. But they don't remember how it didn't work before you got on the scene, right? But if you can go in and save time for them in a demonstrable way, not hand-wavy, you become more efficient. But like, hey, that thing you used to have to do every Monday morning, now you don't have to do that because we created AI automation that does that for you. That's great. But kind of the flip side of that is you do have to understand and probe a little bit on the processes. I think, you know, when we were doing lift-and-shift stuff back in the day and moving stuff from on-prem to the cloud, there's always this joke, you know, if you suck on-prem, you're really going to suck in the cloud, right? So you can't just move your entire environment to the cloud because the resource utilization in an always-on metered environment is very different than a CapEx spend environment. Similarly, If you have kind of crummy processes or the processes aren't really well considered and you automate it, you're just going to drive that car off the cliff that much quicker, you know? And so there does have to be this consultative kind of piece. Like, oh, don't tell me how you're doing it now. Just tell me what the outcome you want is. And then let us architects see if there's a better way to get that outcome. Because if all we do is automate your existing process, that may not give you the result, you know, that you want. We may just be crashing the car more quickly.

I have a funny story about this.

Everybody does have that.

I mean, I'm gonna leave the vendor names off, but I was talking to a vendor friend and they hired a go-to-market engineer. So if you don't know, it's like the new hot sexy term that is someone that is basically marketing.

Or a Floyd engineer.

Yeah, same with Floyd. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And the job of this go-to-market expert was to automate a ton of like outreach and all this CRM enrichment, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? The person did a great job, got all this stuff going correctly, but they discovered— the vendor friend told me they discovered he burned like 25 million tokens going and doing something that he just didn't know. He had the right concept in mind of how he wanted things to happen because— but he— because he didn't have any engineering background and understand to do it correctly.

Yeah.

It was an absolute colossal waste of tokens. And it just became a process that, while valuable in concept and theory, was not valuable in practicality because of the costs. So they went back and had to re-engineer some things to get things to run in a much cleaner way. And it just made me think, like, this again comes back to what you just said about, I think what AI does is it really becomes yet another tool that lets us do yet more powerful things. But if we're not thinking through how do we scale this up correctly, how do we do this in the right way? And even to Bob's comment about governance ends up being the last thing anyone cares about, but we do have to bring governance into it in the right way. These are the things that I don't think your job and relevancy as an MSP is going away. It's going to become more and more important because of your ability to help them bring those things up correctly and not just do it like an idiot would do it.

Yeah. And I think that Marc Andreessen has a good quote on that where he talks about AI is great at what he calls a 5,000-person problem, right? So I think that we got in this position where we thought, I want to replace Nick with an AI agent. Now the real answer is, can we basically make everyone 20% more effective? Right? And so Marc Andreessen talks about the 5,000-person problem is if you had 5,000 MBAs in a conference room, what task would you give them to do? So what is typically resource constrained? And so I used to be on the Board of Education here. I was talking to our superintendent about this and he's like, so gimme an example of like 5,000-person problem. And I'm like, well, look, you have recorded every board meeting since you've been here, almost 10 years, right? So what if you could give a transcript of all the board meetings, right, and then make those searchable? So if at some point you were like, hey, what were we thinking about when we were looking at that? But that's a 5,000-person problem. Somebody's going to have to go watch hours of board meeting, transcribe it, meta tag it, make it searchable, all that kind of stuff. Similarly, the sucky PC report is a 5,000-person problem, right? Go scour every single environment that we manage, look at every single PC config and find the ones that suck so we can go tell those customers it's time to replace those things, right? That's a 5,000-person problem. And so I think this idea around the stuff that used to be not knowable or seemed to be unknowable, now can we know it, but then also make sure that we're not burning a whole bunch of tokens to do something cool that's not actually business value?

Yeah.

Well, I think that brings up an interesting point too on the buyer psychology piece too, right? Because if you're coming into these engagements as an MSP with just, or I've seen it a lot with just AI consultant shops popping up a lot, you know, just in trying to engage SMB and often cases they're finding it hard. They're getting a lot of people engaged, right, to do a discovery call, but they're finding it hard to move forward on the actual like project or the engagement. And I think it's a basic sales 101 of you really haven't uncovered a pain point that they're willing to pay for. for. And by doing this exercise or by uncovering, you know, these, these things that are just hyper time-consuming or cause you to get distracted from where you could be contributing a lot more to the business, that's something that, you know, you would put value behind. Where if you just said, hey, we can go enrich your data pipeline, right, as an example, and it's pretty generic but there's not a lot of pain around that today, that's cool, it's flashy, it's good marketing fodder, but it's not necessarily going to be something that people are going to go, yeah, like, I really want to want to pay money for that, or I want to stroke a $5,000 check to go do that for this quarter or something of that nature. So I think that's, that's the other half of it that I see a lot of with most MSPs as well too, is just not knowing how to uncover those pain points, right, that you really are using as your sales, you know.

Well, I think to that point, Nick, you know, there's this thing in sales you talk about, are you selling vitamins or aspirin, right? Is that ultimately vitamins are good for you, but there's not an urgency around buying vitamins. It's a good idea, You know, but people actually don't do it, right? Aspirin is like something hurts. Here's the answer to that. MSPs unfortunately have been forced to sell vitamins for a long time, right? And particularly cybersecurity is do this, but do I get to see the results? Not really. I'm going to spend a bunch more money. Am I going to be that much safer? Kinda. You know, it was very squishy, right? And now we can say like show us a thing that you know show me point. Show me on the doll where the bad man hurts you, right? Is like, does it hurt here? Does it hurt there? And we can provide you, you know, options to solve for that. And so it is, it is a great opportunity as an MSP to go in and sell legitimate pain, you know, mitigation. As you got the pain here, let's see what we can do to make that better with, um, some tooling, you know, which is AI. Um, and so yeah, I think this is a great inflection point for MSPs to pivot away— not pivot away, but But sell some aspirin in addition to the vitamins because vitamins just aren't that fun to go sell. But if you can identify a pain point and sell some pain management for that, that's real and it's felt. You know, it's like this used to hurt, it doesn't hurt anymore. Again, that report I had to do every Monday, I don't have to do that anymore. My week is better versus the fuzziness around my stuff works and is secure.

So how do you— here's a question for you. Let's say that an MSP starts going down this journey. They're asking these questions, they're educating Communicating, teaching their client why this matters. They're starting to get up to speed. Now they've identified, I don't know, 3 or 4 problems that the client says, yeah, these are all issues. We can't tackle them all at once effectively. So what advice would you give to someone listening today on how to start to distinguish where do we start when we have a myriad of possibilities we could, we could work on, help on, help the client on?

Yeah, I would think which— this is really kind of goes what Nick was pointing out earlier is like Do you have verticals? Do you have some niches? And I would focus on the one that is the most repeatable, right? It's like, um, and, and I think too that MSPs, and this is because private equity came into the MSP space, and enterprise value creation is built on recurring, right? So MSPs are trying to get a— we're trying to get away from professional services, one-time revenue. They want recurring revenue. We might have to rethink that a little bit here, is that we may need to go do some professional services engagements to solve the problem the first time, then turn that into a reproducible type of thing that you can sell many times to your other customers that have the same thing. So I think there's always been this aversion to professional services recently because they're not staffed for it and they don't get the— it doesn't seem as attractive on the P&L when you're, you know, getting the colonoscopy and due diligence from a PE firm. But I do think that the professional services is the way, is the way to accomplish this the first time. And then I think shrink-wrap what you can and then go resell it. And then you benefit from very low cost embedded in those additional downstream solutions as long as it's solving the same problem. To solve the same problem, I think you have to have some verticalization.

Yeah, I think you're right. And I've talked a little bit with my co-founder Alex Farling about this, and we've talked about this on other shows, is that I think you're right. The MSPs have been told forever, you know, any type of project revenue is evil and bad for all the reasons you just mentioned. Don't do it. You need to stick or stay away from it. Everything managed service is the way to go. And I think overall, I understand where that's coming from, right? I mean, I'm a vendor myself, so recurring revenue is really what matters.

Sure.

I get it. I totally get it. But like, one of the questions that you're gonna have to think through if you're an MSP when it comes to this is like, if you walk into the client with that same type of thing, like, you should pay me X amount more per month to manage all your AI for you, they're going to say, shut up, nerd, go away. I've already got all of that going. I've already got the tools in place. All you're trying to do is sell me something that I already have and managing myself. I just don't need you in the middle of that conversation. And so, I mean, I'm with you. I think what we're going to see in the future of where MSPs evolve into is project revenue will lead the way. And I don't think it's bad. I don't think— I'm not saying that everything you do should go to project revenue, but I think when we think about classic IT support, Microsoft licensing, all of the stuff that you've been doing forever that will probably continue to stay as a managed component for sure. It makes sense. But I also think we have to be open to what you said is project revenue leading the way, defining opportunities. And then I do see a future where it could be maybe if it's not like recurring revenue, it's a retainer that acts recurring, right? And we actually have a retainer overhead on top of it that is AI. And you're doing all kinds of things like what we learned from Dustin on Managing their AI steering committee, having constant, you know, projects under that retainer that are continuing to be worked on, all of those, the education component to make sure they're staying up to speed, all of these things that come in. But I do think we have to prove our value there first, and a lot of it is going to be project revenue that comes from a transformational project that gets them to understand new thinking. And I think that's where MSPs will find success.

Well, I'm attempting to have a conversation with one of the AI frontier models around MSP channel, right? It's like everyone's figuring this out. There's no enablement, there's no programmatic approach, all this kind of stuff. And ultimately, MSPs have always done— taken raw materials and sold finished goods, right? Is they take Microsoft and all this kind of stuff and then they sell a finished product, a finished good to the customer. Same thing with AI, right? There's all these raw materials, all the different models, all the different tooling, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what customers want is the finished good. They don't want the raw materials. And particularly in the SMB, enterprise can afford to go buy all the raw materials and create their own internal foundry that turns that into finished goods. SMB can't do that. They look to the MSP community to do that for them. So the MSP is going to have to figure out what are the raw materials that I want to take and what are the finished goods that I can sell. And I think to your point, Wes, the first couple of those are going to have to be project-based, right? Is you give— I can solve this problem, but I'm gonna have to charge you a fixed fee project or a per-hour project to take these raw materials, create this finished good. And then I think 1 out of 3, 2 out of 10, 9 out of 10, who knows, of those finished goods will be resellable to someone else, you know? And I think that that's the, that's the approach they're gonna have to be. It's like if I was a contractor and I built a bespoke kitchen for Wes, at some point I was like, oh, this is a really good one. I'm going to use this one to show to other people that want to redo their kitchen, and more people are gonna buy the Wes Spencer kitchen, and I'm going to turn around and rebuild the same one I just built in a similar footprint, type of finish, all that kind of stuff. And so we see this play out in other places, but it does have to be a one-off to start, and then you can productize. Yeah, yeah, makes sense.

Yeah, I think that's what it's good to— we talked about it before too, Wes, on that last episode, I think too, is it's kind of better to do Or get more at-bats right now with your customers, right? Have more conversations, discover more projects, discover commonalities across them so that you can, you know, more quickly niche down or more quickly productize in a way that's repeatable, that also is, you know, probably really healthy margins. And I think to your point too on the retainer, I think that's what I'm seeing most often. It's like first and foremost, it's just like a maintenance retainer, right? Because it's going to break, the APIs are going to, you know, change. There's just tons of maintenance. I've never had an AI automation that I've stood up that, you know, works for 6 months straight, you know, bare minimum. Um, it's always something that you have to, yeah, you know, tender love and care in the sense of, uh, making sure it's up to date, making sure you can refine it. Um, and then there's a new technology that comes out, right? Like N8n is a great example of that where it's like N8n blew up. It was a crazy, you know, popular tool. And now it's like Claude can, can do most of that without having to drag and drop things into a canvas. So there's just the rate of change is also what you kind of pitch and everybody I feel like, you know, can accept that, right? They're feeling it, they see that. And so it's not like you're asking for something ludicrous of a retainer just to keep things up to date.

Yeah. And I think that the small, the SMB is gonna be a little more immune to some of the competitive things. Like I think, you know, we've all been involved in startups and I think the old school startup question is if you went out in Silicon Valley and pitched to one of the big VCs, their question is what if Google decided to do you do for free, right? Now the question is like, what if Claude built this in, you know, for free? And so, you know, Figma and all those things, you know, and, you know, Claude for law and all this kind of stuff. So all these things could get bought in, but let me tell you what Claude's not going to do is build in Claude for catfish farmers or cement or whatever it is, right? And so those things I think are going to be immune to some of that competitive forces that the big startups are, you know, getting dinged by, which is like, hey, we burned all this, burned all this energy to build this killer startup and then called an OpenAI, just like checked a box, and now suddenly that, you know, is a part of, a part of the, the platform. So I do think that in this SMB, I think that market is going to be immune to a lot of those competitive forces. And so I do think there'll be opportunities to sell into that and to thrive. And, you know, to Wes's point, I don't know if the I don't know, maintenance, security wrapper, governance wrapper, whatever that stuff is. I'm not— I don't think the market has decided what the recurring piece is, but there will be something around it that'll make sense to be recurring.

Yeah, and I just think, I mean, how valuable is it to at least start with— once you've done some discovery, you've shown the client some of the value, they've sort of taken the red pill to use matrix of, wow, this was actually helpful to me. I've woken up to its value. It's really great. I mean, just starting alone with an AI steering committee that includes a monthly, hey, we're gonna help you chair that committee on a monthly basis. We're all gonna meet. We're gonna use it for the project management components. We're also gonna use it for the education components of like some of the things that are coming out, some of the new capabilities. And for sure, it's a scary world to think like we've all seen the, you know, the SaaS-pocalypse, you know, everyone's been calling it. If you listen to any like the major podcasts, of like, you know, certain companies that were super valuable and today they've tanked by 20 to 40% of enterprise value because they feel like, take Figma for example, and now I feel like Claude Design can do the vast majority of what Figma's value prop was. We are in a time of disruption. So I think when you are in a time of disruption like this, we're just not sure fully where the market's going to end up. One of the best things you can do is continue to have overwatch and seeing what's happening out there, making sure you can stay nimble as a client, you know where to pivot and make moves. I think all of those things are really valuable that we need to be offering to our clients. And I think part of that can literally start at that strategy layer is just starting an AI steering committee for your clients. That's incredibly valuable.

Yeah. And I think looking internally, you know, inside an MSP, there's operation, there's really 3 parts. There's operation, service delivery, and go-to-market, right? I think right now all the energy is around service delivery, right? It's how do we make service delivery more efficient and stuff like that. But let's be real. I mean, there's a lot of opportunities in operations and there are a ton of opportunities go-to-market. You know, I think that most— I've, I have yet, and maybe somebody in the chat, you know, has this, but I haven't met an MSP yet says, man, we got that whole go-to-market thing licked, organic growth is 20% or better, blah blah blah blah blah. No one says that, right? And so I think some of that is in the go-to-market side. It's inefficient today, it's underfunded today, um, it's under-processized Today, as I think, you know, if you go— if Nick ran an MSP and I'm like, hey Nick, what happens when a new ticket comes in? 10-step process. Hey Nick, what happens when we onboard a new customer? 10-step process. Hey Nick, what do you do about sales? Oh, we hire some folks who know some people and hope for the best. You know, is that there is no process there. And so I do think that there's some things that we could do AI around go-to-market, but no one is really putting a lot of energy in that. But I do think that is a very Wherever there's inefficiency, there's opportunity, right? And I think that there's a lot of inefficiency in go-to-market, so there should be some opportunities there to do something with AI.

Yeah, yeah, I think, I think some in the chats too have been commenting around security as a service, and I think that's still, you know, there's a, there's a prime opportunity here. I think that's going to be more of a laggard in the sense of the need, you know, as more companies use AI and then still get popped, right? I'm talking to clients right now who are building live coding tools and they're getting their admin credentials that are public, right? So there's gaps in that, and I think there'll be tooling around that, but I still think there's, you know, a lot of advisory that can go into that too, and they'll be right when, you know, they do have those incidents. But at the same time, you know, it's always been table stakes now that when we go into these projects and talk about, hey, this is something that we can go in and do right for our customer for this project, These are the other security things that we're going to implement while we do it. Is that okay? Great. You know, it's a shorter conversation than we used to have to pull teeth for things like MFA, right, as an example, you know, in the past. So I think that's— there's plenty of opportunity there to kind of do both, but you could specialize in the security. I just think it's harder to get the client's attention, right? Because it goes back to where they're feeling the pain is on the productivity side, and there's certainly probably a ton of security you can do on top of that. Um, that they don't have in place today, but they're not, they're not going to be incentivized to spend the money to go do it in certain ways until they have a breach, right? And that's typically how it's been in the past as well.

Well, and I think that if I was a seller at an MSP, do I want to go talk to a prospect about EDR and MFA and cybersecurity, or do I want to go talk to them about AI? And AI is going to be a much more attractive conversation point. I would want to start there. Then when you look at some of the stuff that's going to cascade down from the enterprise, which it always does, comes from the enterprise downstream, there's 2 topics that I hear a lot talking to my enterprisey type of friends. One would be like an abstraction layer to where it's like token optimization. Basically, can there be an abstraction layer? If I ask a question, of the AI tool, is there an abstraction layer that can find— that can decide where that answer needs to come from? So if it's a very easy answer, can it go to a free open model like Kemi 3, and I don't need to burn Fable 5 credits tokens on it? Or if it's very complex, does it go to Fable 5? So I think that type of approach is going to come downstream, obviously, to us at some point, to where what needs to stay internal and what queries can go external. And then I think the second piece of that, um, kind of idea is this, like, um, I don't even know how to, like, basically frame it up, but this, um, this question of, like, where does stuff live? Are we going to see a— we used to call it repatriation in the cloud, but are we going to see stuff coming back on-prem to run stuff local. So are we going to end up, you know, everything old is new again? Are we going to end up with servers in the back next to the mop bucket in the quote-unquote server room, which was really just the telco closet? Because you're going to have to have stuff on-prem to run some of these things because the regulations are going to begin to catch up and it's going to say you can't send this stuff out, or compliance regulatory bodies are going to say you can't send this information out. So we'll see that play out at the enterprise. where they're going to want to buy GPUs internally. What is that going to look like for the SMB as that begins to flow downstream? So I think this abstraction layer and then where does stuff sit in the regulatory compliance around what can leave, what can't leave. I'd also say really the other thing is kind of like we talk about large language model, like narrow language models is, you know, if I got a buddy who's a lawyer, he doesn't need the works of Shakespeare in his LLM. He just wants every legal thing ever You know, written. My buddy who's a radiologist, again, he doesn't need Shakespeare in it, he just needs it in radiology. So I wonder if we're going to pivot away from large language models and move to like very small language models that are siloed in a specific domain. And then is that going to be something MSPs can leverage because of verticalization? Can we go into those narrow domains and offer up some models that are only aligned to that? So kind of decreases some of the hallucination risk.

Yeah, there's no question. I mean, I listen to a lot of podcasts on all this. There's no question that there's significant evolution that will continue to happen over, like you said, open source and closed source models. I think open source is really coming a long way. Facebook now has theirs, it's under development, you know, the local compute elements. I mean, even for us at Empath, you know, we trade between models quite a bit. There's arbitrage that goes on there. And yeah, Some of the new Groq capabilities has actually been far more performant and far less expensive than Anthropic for us recently. And I think you're right, the shift to local compute, especially for one of the things like you see this in a lot of podcast discussions, like all the alpha data, right? Like the stuff that really makes us us, whether that's sensitive data, whether that's customer information, whether that's proprietary know-how and knowledge that we simply do not and cannot risk leaking out to the outside world? I think those are all discussions. Keep in mind, I've seen some of the chat. I'm just leaving the chat up because there's so much good discussion going on here. I want everyone to see it. But I also think stay tuned with us because here in the next 2 episodes we have coming up, we're going to dive deeper into security. A couple of y'all have been asking, why are we not having more of the security discussion? We're going to actually focus on that on Above the Stack coming up. But what we really wanted to do today is really talk about the psychology of it. Because David, I think, and I'll ask you this question, this might be the last one we'll have time for, As much as security matters, it has its place in the discussion, right? For a lot of SMBs, if an MSP walks into an AI-based discussion with a client leading with security, you're going to get the hands pushed back. And I'm a security practitioner. That is my background.

Yeah.

I know that if I walk in leading with that, they're going to say, shut up, nerd, go away. That's not what I want to talk about. But they'll be open to it once they see the value of what we're talking about and the opportunity, and then they'll want to do it. Correctly. And what do you think?

Yeah, I definitely think— and first, by the way, shout out to my man Bob Miller over here in the chat. That guy's been around the block a couple of times, I can tell, because he's used least cost routing, which if I recall goes all the way back to the telco days of where it picked the cheapest long-distance rates to like go out and all that kind of stuff. So that's old school, but that's everything old is new again, right? So props, shout out to Bob Miller in the chat for least cost routing. But I think the conversations have to go together. And I think what you don't want to do, though, is create this security conversation where they don't want to embrace it and don't want to try it, right? So you have to kind of temper that discussion. It can't be all big and scary, you know. And by the way, if you say, no, you can't do this until you do these 5 million other things, they're just going to do it anyway, right? So what you need to come up with is like, okay, what are the 2 or 3 things that you have to do. Data governance is a clear one. What are the company goodies? Where are they? Who has access to them, and should they? You know, some very easy kind of things are like that that need to be done first because most people are turning, like, you know, Copilot loose in their environments, and they don't have any idea what the permissions on the sacred company goodies are out there in SharePoint, right? They have no idea about that. And so we've all heard the stories Somebody going in Teams, how much is Wes Spencer making? It pulls it because somebody shared an employee census at one point with somebody and checked anybody in the organization with the link can access it. So, that kind of stuff. But I think that we're going to have to think through those things. But we don't want to create a system of disincentives. We still want to have people pursue it, just kind of pursue it with some low guardrails so that they don't get off in the ditch.

Yep, exactly right. That goes perfect segue into make sure y'all go get this guide. It's completely free. What this will do is just help you in all of these discussions we've talked about today to have the right discovery questions with the right curiosity in mind, to help rank and sort what we're discovering from them. Where do we start? What do we work on next? What's the value proposition? Making sure we have their buy-in to do these things correctly, to earn the right to get to the security conversation, to do these things correctly so that we're not bringing negligence into Right. How can people get a hold of you and what's going on at LionGuard?

Oh man, so the MCP stuff is killer. So we've had this massive data lake and we just got— I mean, I'll be real, we're lucky. So we had this massive data lake and now all the AI models are thirsty for the data. And so we launched MCP in February, uptake like off the charts. we were going to charge for it. We just added it into the platform with a certain number of insights, and now customers are having a conversation with their data. You know, it was like, take this customer environment, compare it to NIST, and build me an HTML site, or prepare this for the QBR, or all the things we thought were unknowable can now be knowable in natural language querying. So that's the coolest thing that we're doing right now. Every time I talk about it, people come to the booth, want to talk about it more, and our existing customers come and like, hey, We, we need to learn more about this because somebody made the buying decision but has been abstracted away from the day-to-day. So that's the coolest thing that we're doing right now. Jump on a demo with us. We'd love to show you. If you've always thought, man, I got tons of data, I would love to have a conversation with it, we can, we can solve that for you.

Love it. I love it. It's been fantastic. Um, just remember, if we can ever help, um, there's all my deets. There's all Nick's deets. Nick, why don't you take us out on, um, what we're doing next?

Yeah, absolutely. Great to have you, David. And as a former LionGuard customer, the last MSP, the MCP would definitely be something that I want to get my hands on.

It's legitimately awesome. Even though it's our baby, it's still— it's a pretty baby.

Nice. Nice. Yeah, yeah. Excited for that. So yeah, on the next episode, guys, be sure to check this out. We'll be having the next one here with our guest Mikey Pruitt from DNSFilter. And like Wes mentioned earlier, we're getting into the security conversation a little bit more of these next couple of episodes here. And so definitely want to stay tuned for the next one here just because we're putting around or kind of unpacking some of the policies you might want to start putting in place for AI use. And we'll be giving away a securing Claude guide, I believe, in that episode as well too. So just some other resources you guys can use, but definitely focused on the security side as well too. So. Appreciate everybody joining and, uh, looking forward to the next one.

Yeah, fantastic. Thanks everyone. DP, appreciate you, brother.

Appreciate y'all. See ya.

Y'all take care. I'll see ya.