Above the Stack Ep 15: Building an AI Learning Strategy Across Your MSP

Communications arrays are aligned.

Nobody cares about your stack, bro. It's the truth. Your clients don't care. Your tools—they're. Not really all that important. I'll tell you what is important: security maturity, leadership, strategy, and outcomes that drive to a difference.

We're stepping above the noise, the checklist, the buzzwords. This is where MSPs stop guessing and start leading, because frameworks like CIS, they're no longer optional.

Welcome to Above the Stack,

where business meets technical and security becomes your differentiator.

It's time To go from operating in the weeds to owning the airspace.

Control, call, lead.

Signing off. We will see you there. Nick Ross, what is going on, my friend? How are you?

I'm doing good, Wes. How about you?

Uh, really good, really good. I don't know why this, uh, overlay is up. I'm gonna figure out where that pesky thing is coming and I'm gonna kill it out. I have no idea where it went, but man, how's life been for you? You ready for quarter 4?

I think so. I was just talking to Andrew before kicking things off. This year's— it's weird to feel like it's already almost done, you know? Yeah, it's been flying by and we're about to go into fall break and all this stuff, but we got a lot to do before then. But yeah, it's been a good year, but a fast year for sure.

Yeah, we are about 2 months away from Christmas coming up right in front of us. It's wild. But quarter 4 always is like that, right? It's always this blur of like, go, go, go, go, go, get everything done we haven't gotten done. So yeah, it's just part of the game, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, we have got the one and only Andrew Moore joining us today. I want to say, what's up, Andrew? Thank you for joining us today. Really, really glad to have you. Let me kind of get our slides up. But I'd love, Andrew, if you wouldn't mind, just to share a little bit about who the heck you are and we'll get on the playing field, really. I

appreciate you guys having me, Wes and Nick, good folks to know on the channel. I've had the opportunity to spend some time with you guys over the last few years and watching what you all have been putting together with Empath and Cloud Capsule. So it's been really cool to be a part of that journey with you guys as I've exited my MSP and kind of gotten into the other side of the channel, which is, you know, helping MSPs find the right partners and build the right solutions. So I ran an MSP for in some form or another for the last 25 years. We exited out to private equity, I don't know, probably 4 or 5 years ago, stuck around for a couple years, helped do some integrations, and then took a break, and then decided it was time to get into the channel. And it was right about the time you guys were putting Empath together. And I really wanted to get into the L&D part of what we were doing. And I didn't want to be a competitor. So I thought, what could I do? And so we've kind of started to build some accountability group solutions, some one-on-one coaching. We're building a out training solutions that, you know, dovetail into what the Empath strategy looks like for MSPs. We're helping them build out custom solutions for people to use your platform on their own LMS systems. So really excited about what we're doing here at Ridgeview because I feel like learning is the, the most underserved part of when we see people process tools. And we say, we're going to focus on our people. I'm like, great. So how much, how much do you spend on their training? How much do you spend on your own training? Like how to— Yeah. How does that look for you? And, uh, you get a lot of like, well, we do pizza parties. So, um, I, uh, I really want to— I love what you guys are doing on the channel. I love to change the perspective of what people see, um, investment looking like in their people. So that's what we do here. That's what—

Yeah, man, it's been, it's been so fun to work with you over the past, uh, year, year and a half. Um, and man, just so many mutual partners that you're working with inside of Empath that are just super happy and I love what you're doing. It's something, I think you said this right, and Nick, I think you know this from your MSP days as well, even at large MSPs, you know, the investment in the people stack is one of the last things that gets any kind of money at all. And yet in the P&L, it is by far the most expensive line item. And you look at where the— and I know it's not really quite what we're talking about today, but it's going to come into it. You look at where the new floor is, the floor is definitely raised. I mean, there's so many new things, not just AI, but what cybersecurity insurance has done, what GRC has done, The demand for better automation and, you know, really having a way to prove better margins. All of these things, people are right in the middle of that, and it's shocking how much that gets left behind, Nick.

Yeah, I would, you know, speak with the passion towards Microsoft, obviously, from all the content that I build and interact with mostly from the space itself. But I think, you know, we not only talk about like existing hires and employees, like how much change there is even just in the Microsoft ecosystem. I always think about, right, because it's like that alone is a full-time job for anybody, you know, that's managing tenants, things like that. But also when you think about like I always talk to MSPs who are trying to hire and they're really struggling to find, you know, talented engineers, talented, you know, help desk representatives that even know the basics of things like Microsoft, but not to mention like the core of what makes up your MSP with ticketing. And, you know, now like I'm excited to be talking and unpacking the things that we're doing today around AI. Because that's a whole nother learning curve. And I don't know about you guys, but I also feel like, even for myself, I feel like I'm a pretty fast learner, but this is changing so rapidly that you, you quickly get underwater or feel underwater, right, with most of these things. So yeah.

Yeah, there's no doubt that it's moving at a furious pace. And if you're just now joining us, glad you're here. Make sure you shout out and chat, say hi to us, and we'd love to bring you into the conversation. We can do that. We're live streaming into a whole bunch of channels all at once. So come say hi. But you're right about that, Nick. And I don't think any of us are able to catch up in the torrent. And sure, there's elements of this that there's hot takes everywhere that, you know, we're in a bubble that, you know, what is a lot of what's being used today may not last into the future. But that doesn't mean that we sit still. And I think one of— Andrew, I'm going to turn this first question to you, one totally unprompted, but just in the line of this discussion. I think a lot of MSPs in the early days felt like, I don't know how much of a bubble this is, and I don't know how much the toolset that we have in front of us today are going to be used next year and the year after and the year after. And MSPs really do, they're good about standardizing. And so I think some MSPs said, we're just gonna hold back on some of this until we figure out where it's going. But the danger in that, Andrew, is that you hold back too long, and all of a sudden, you become irrelevant.

Yeah. So what I'm, I've been having conversations with a lot of MSPs, and they're like, you know, are we going to be a Copilot shop? Are we going to be, you know, a HAT shop? Are we going to be, you know, a Claude, an Anthropic shop, right? So there's this idea about central utilization of the stack, right? And this is different in a lot of ways, right? And I think that you're seeing opportunities as the products become more robust that they're beginning to specialize in different areas, right? These different tools, right? Where Claude is gonna be like a lot more business focused and maybe code heavy and maybe, you know, your OpenAI stuff's gonna be more code-heavy, but Microsoft integrated, and Copilot's going to be more Microsoft ecosystem. And so, you know, you're starting to learn what these each do. And I think what we're starting to see is there's this new set of tools that's evolving around the central, like, frontier models that becomes really interesting for MSPs. And what I keep telling my clients is, don't, like, experiment internally, right? Like, this is one of those opportunities where you don't want to give it unfettered access to, like, certain parts of what's inside your business. But you need to start understanding what each of these things do because they're, it kind of can become a Swiss Army knife if you find the right harness, right? Or if you find the right like aggregator, like router that you can build so you can start creating opportunities to build better outcomes by really understanding like Nano Banana and Gemini does a really good job of creating infographics. Like if you're looking for marketing and training, like that's the way it goes. Claude sucks at that. Like it's not good at it, but it's really good at creating a PowerPoint deck. Right? Like, so you're gonna learn that if you can start figuring out what each of these tools kind of does, you can start creating these— I'm not gonna call them cobbled together, but it's not like it was before. Like, they're built to be interrelated to each other and to start pulling information from different systems and using APIs. It's, it's— I haven't seen anything like this. I was talking to a guy at one of my clients. He's like the service director, and he's, he's, he's a youngin'. He's like in his, you know, early 30s. And I'm like, You haven't seen anything like this in your lifetime. This is what it was like when we first started doing MSP, where you were like, what does this switch do and how does it interoperate with this firewall? Because nothing was like standardized and you had to figure it all out yourself. Like, and it's really an exciting time for MSPs who like to tinker, right? If you dig that, this is the time to start messing with these tools and figuring out what they do. So really long answer, but I think it's really cool what all these tools are doing. And I think you have an MSP owner operator. Need to start touching them and getting tactile with them if you're gonna understand how to integrate them not only into your business but into your clients' businesses, is my opinion.

How do you take that, Andrew? I'd be curious to hear your take too, just because you've been talking to some more people. But, um, you know, in that sense, like, how do you take that? Where I see the opposite end of that, where you could get like everybody's just kind of exploring and playing and, you know, there's not necessarily a real direction, right, of where you're heading, and you can get caught up into like You know, a lot of the hype of we've got some really cool stuff, but it's not really helping the business. Or you try to create an automation with AI that replaces a workflow that you could just be doing manually and it takes you 5 minutes, right? Like it's not the ROI, I guess, is really not there. So I'd be curious to hear like your thoughts on that and just kind of how, how maybe, maybe you should start thinking about that too.

Yeah. You mean like you, you get into, you know, Claude or something and you're working through a problem and it probably could have taken you 15 minutes to build the deck, but it's, you're 3 hours into it. And you realize that you're fighting with your, your own prompt. Um, that's a real, that's a real concern, right? And part of me feels that you kind of have to learn some of that by doing it. Like, some of that is like prompt management and understanding how to build out, um, the parameters around it. A friend of mine told me something really interesting about a year ago when I first started messing with it, and he said that The illusion of inconsistency is not a bug, it's a feature, right? They want it to feel like you're having a conversation. So it's not always gonna give you the exact same output every single time, right? So it's up to you to learn how to give it parameters to get that sort of output. So I think that that's one of the first things you need to start learning is like how to create some guardrails around what your outcomes are. And then I think honestly, when I say tinker, What I really encourage my MSP teams to do is like, look at a problem within your organization and everybody immediately jumps to, let's automate tickets. Okay. Maybe let's like take a transcript of the last SBR you did and feed it into the system and get a summary. Like, would that be an easy place to start where you get a consistent output and maybe it, you know, is generating some tickets for you for follow-up on the service desk or something so that, or putting data into the CRM so you can track a new opportunity? Like, How do we, how do we solve the problems that are taking our time and not necessarily like all the problems that we've got that are like heady, like gross margin issues, right? I feel like that's kind of where I would start.

100%. But anyone who tells you start where it's really difficult and do this colossal moonshot is completely wrong. And I will die on that hill. I do think you're exactly right. We have to start simple and small. And especially, I mean, we've done a lot of conversations already with clients and how do we engage our clients in AI services? And what does that look like for us as an MSP? And, I mean, we have to realize that the average starting point is convincing the client that the, you as the MSP are relevant in the conversation. Because the first thing they're going to say is, shut up, nerd. I've got this all on my own. I've got ChatGPT, and I use it every day. You're not helpful in this discussion. But that's because of their limit of knowledge, right? And that's because they don't understand how much more is possible. And I, the other thing, so I would, the thing I would add is, and wouldn't change any of that, Andrew, it's right on the money. The other thing I would add to is if you think about Google, for example, like I know we always make fun of them for how big their graveyard is of their tools. But the one thing I think that made Google the innovator that turned them into the empire that they are today is they allowed for, structured for, and even incentivized and enforced innovation time. With those, is that like 20% or 10% of your time goes into basically one day out of 5 a week can go into just doing something that's not in your, your, your job responsibility. In the early days, people like, they're crazy for that. Their margins are going to get— they're going to die. They'll never focus on what matters. And what came out of that is, yes, a lot of dead projects. But what also came out of that, to steal from Edison, is like 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb. Same kind of thing, 1,000 more things that, this is not in our wheelhouse. This is a good idea, but not quite right, whatever. And so I think when it comes to the MSP, like, you're right, we have to find a way to allow our innovators to innovate at our MSP, our tinkerers to tinker. Not completely, not exclusively, but we have to allow for that. We have to give a safe space for that. We have to incentivize that. But then I also think, and this is what I'm curious in both of you, you're always going to have certain employees that don't do that. And they're just like, tell me what to do. And I'm not that person. And I'm very much an SOP person. So give me the SOP and what you want me to do, and I'll do it really well. So I think there's kind of both camps in the MSP around this. What do you think?

Yeah, I'd agree. Yeah, I think, you know, there's certainly your laggards in the sense of adoption as well, right? Like where, you know, people are gonna be really Uh, champions and Ford First on one end and not necessarily, you know, thinking about how this could improve my day-to-day, right? Or, or maximizing that. And they need, uh, you know, if we want to use AI terms, like a harness, right, around it of like, hey, I need to, um, basically give this, this person like skills and prompts that they could use to then mold it around their job. And I'm not teaching how to use them, you know, exactly in their day-to-day. But I'm giving them enough competency around like as basic as prompt engineering into, you know, how to start thinking, right? It's more so about your thought process of how you're interacting with it than actually interacting with it, and you can carry that forward. I personally found that, you know, like I can, I can take skills that I've learned over the years and, and reincorporate them back in, and then I'm going through my own learning cycle about how to interact with AI or what things that I can get really good ROI out And then retest it again in the future. And that test in the future is only like a couple minutes, right? It's not anything that's time intensive, but it allows me to have a constant feedback loop. And I resonate too also with the MSPs who are trying to, you know, resell it back downstream to their customers, and they have different variations of generations that are working there that are either heavily resistant to it or, you know, just not as quickly to adopt in that sense. But you want to get you know, more with less is really the macro term. People are frustrated with that too. You have a wild range of emotions with that. But Andrew, we'd love to hear your take on this too.

No, and I think it's interesting. There's a couple of things that you touched on that our path is a little weavy here, but I think there is something to generational adoption, right? And I think that it's not what you might expect. Like, you know, GetSecured, it said, you know, Gen Xers are maybe not interested. Like, I think there's probably quite a few that are like, great, we get to mess around again. Like, we're not doing just SaaS reselling in this space. I think it's kind of fun. Like, I know for myself and some other owners are fully entrenched Gen Xers. Like, that's a thing. But it's a real opportunity for people who are looking to, you know, potentially buy into an MSP in order to maximize it for the future. I think that there is an opportunity there for the folks that don't want to reinvent their business. So I see that. But I also see that, like, generationally, you know, folks that are in their 20s right now are kind of ardently against AI, whereas you would think that they would be interested in adopting the newest technology. So I think there's going to be a real push to see potentially what we can do with artificial intelligence as a tool. And maybe not, it's as, maybe it won't be as forward-facing as we're seeing it today, right? Like, so seeing it where you're saying, Hey, you know, Jessica, I want you to get online and I want you to open up a chat and I want you to, like, figure this thing out versus we've already figured this thing out. It's running in the background with APIs. It's pulling data from here. It's transforming this. It's doing that. Like, you're getting the output, right?

Yes.

And then you're working on that thing. So I think right now we're in this kind of space where we're playing with things from a tooling perspective. But I think it's really important to, to have MSPs and the channel broadly understand It's almost like gateway drugs. Like, I hate to want to, like, use, like, this kind of, like, really terrible analogy, but I've gotten to the point with Claude, I can't use the interface effectively anymore. Like, I have to build applications in order to mainline that data into something else, right? Like, I'm— it's not effective for me to run through chats the way that it was when I first started using it. And you'll get to the point where you'll start to see that as you begin to use these products more and more, the chat interfaces are really cool. And you can do some neat things with the harnesses, and you can do some really cool stuff with, you know, building projects and skills. But where it's really at is like, when you take a very specific task, you write code around it, you build the APIs on the backside, you let it do what it's gonna do, and you gain, you know, a lot of advantage by getting the outcomes and outputs. And I think that's a really interesting thing that people don't realize is they just keep seeing it as, oh, I open up this chat and I do this thing. Like, there's a whole nother level to this that people aren't even really digging into. And in my opinion, the MSPs that understand that, it one gets them excited, but it also freaks them out because they're like, oh my God, now I'm gonna be a software shop, and how do I support that? Like, I don't want to do that. Like, what tools do I use? And I'm like, okay, everybody just calm down. Like, We'll get there. But I see it as kind of a relevant issue is they're having to understand the outcomes of their clients' needs and to build solutions that manage those outcomes. Whereas for the last 10 years, they've been managing to reselling software to their clients at a lot of— and, and I think this is a huge shift in the industry back to consulting again.

Yes.

And that's starting to freak people out, man. And I've seen it Every day with my clients, and the ones that get it, that are like DevOps, and they're like, let's go, and they're creating partnerships, it works. The ones that don't are kind of ostracized, you know, putting their head in the sand. And kind of, as you said, Nick, earlier, kind of, hey, maybe we shouldn't move forward with this. Like, maybe we're not good at adopting this. Let's, let's keep watching. So I don't know what y'all's take on that is, but I'm starting to see that a lot with my clients, for sure.

Can we just pull that thread a lot more? Tell me, when you say, because I agree, but I want to make sure our audience is Following your wavelength here. When you say, Andrew, that their MSPs are becoming more and more consultative and more and more like a, like a consulting company than just a managed, here's the tools I use, and, you know, that's the end of the story, and you find your own value and your own outcomes as the client. What are you— can you, can you elaborate on that a little bit more on like what a good MSP does that makes them more consultative?

Yeah, I think one of the first things that you're gonna wind up doing is, so let's start with like, in my, this is what we like to help our MSPs work with and understand. So the way the first thing that we look at is like, how are you managing your ongoing relationship with your clients, right? So really putting together a great account management cadence, having conversations about what's going on in their business. I know this is all stuff that people teach on a regular basis and tell you you should be doing, but you need to be doing more than just paying lip service to it. There needs to be a real conversation. Yeah. Of what challenges are you seeing in your MSP, or sorry, in your company today? And a lot of the times they'll come back to things that MSPs typically haven't had to deal with before. So they're gonna have a conversation. They're like, well, Sarah in accounting has to go in and take information from like 4 different vendors. And then they have to go through the process of normalizing that and then re-entering it into QuickBooks or Sage or whatever. And most MSPs are like, yeah, yeah, that's a bummer. Right? Like, they don't even think that they could help solve that problem because they don't do dev. But now because of what's going on with, with AI, they're moving in the direction where you have to start figuring out how to answer those questions because they're, they're gonna see that they can go ask ChatGPT or Claude, hey, how do I fix this problem? And they're either gonna fix it on their own or they're gonna be like, that seems kinda complicated. And if you don't have an answer for it, they're gonna go find somebody that does. Right? And so when we talk about being consultative, you have to really start understanding what the outcomes are of your client's business and what impedes them from being able to make money or shed, you know, margin or whatever they need to do or increase margin or shed their cost. That's where the consultative part comes back because they're not going to take the time to understand the technology parts of, you know, whenever you run a chat, it lives on your computer or, you know, you need to have a business class model, you know, so that whenever you're running it, your information is contained. Like, they're not thinking about that stuff. They're just thinking, my accounting person is inefficient. Like, how do I fix this? And so if you don't have a good answer for that, they're gonna seek an answer from somewhere. And more and more they can start seeking it from ChatGPT, right? And as you're starting to see, OpenAI recently was like, you wanna do marketing now through OpenAI? Like, you can do that. So Pretty soon, like, competitors are gonna be selling like, oh, you asked like how to do this thing? Like, we can help you. Like, it's gonna turn into this problem for MSPs and they're gonna get left behind because they're not gonna have an answer for how to be consultative. They're just, well, you have a problem. I sold you some software, right? Like, I installed this EDR on your laptop. It really is kind of where it's gone down to. I feel like our entire industry is turned. It's like that scene in one of the Shrek movies where he like goes back in time or something and like Puss from Puss in Boots like has like become this like fat cat because he's been drinking milk and he's not the adventurer anymore. Like that's our whole industry. Like we've been enjoying like the software solutions from our partners, right? And a lot of us haven't really understood why we're deploying these softwares or what these outcomes should be. We're just like, well, you need security, so I'm gonna install security. And there's an upper echelon of MSPs who understand how to do consulting, that are thriving through that and making more margin and building off of that and creating more opportunities for themselves through projects and whatnot. If you're not doing that as an MSP with AI, I think you're gonna get left behind over the next 4 or 5 years. Could be wrong, but that's, that's my hot take on it, if that makes sense. I agree.

I would say too, on the opposite end of like being a little bit, you know, fearful or having procrastination of like, oh, I'm gonna You know, not, I'm going to have to be developing or doing these new competencies. I see the opposite end too, of like MSPs going full development, but in a way that's like not forward-facing their customer. Meaning I actually listened to a talk the other day, like Chris Day, I think was talking about this with Alex, um, from Empath as well too, just around this whole concept of like, we're getting tool happy. We're getting like, you know, nerdy and tech happy about like all the things we can build now that we didn't used to because we weren't developers. And that could turn into you spending a lot of time and energy into rebuilding an entire ticketing system that your customer doesn't perceive any value from, right? You think it does to you, or you think that like, hey, I just built this really cool thing, but like they experienced no difference in your relationship, that you didn't get into these conversations. In a lot of ways, it's like kind of the easy way out because you're saying like, I'm not going to have this harder conversation about your business and what constraints you have and all these other things. I'm actually just rebuilding things that already exist, and you get into build-by-partner now, it's a lot harder of a conversation because it's easier to build, but the cost, the maintenance, like the ripple effects that, that occur from that can also be a lot too. I always remember this quote from, uh, Joe from Transformative. He's a great guy and, and runs a great MSP. It's evolving too into a, you know, more AI-first company, but he always, you know, when people ask him what he did at cocktail parties or whatever, he would say, I unlocked the revenue trapped inside your business. And it was such a, like, easy way to say, like, I am much more than an MSP, right? Traditional MSP, right? It's like, hey, I'm actually going to come in and transform the way you guys do things. And this is going to be that.

Communications. We're

going back to the beginning.

I have no idea what happened there. Uh, but anyway, we're back. Nick, that's right on the money, bro.

Yeah, that was the end of that thought. Yeah. So,

so Andrew, I want to ask this question. When an MSP comes to you and they say, all right, I hear you, I agree with you, and I'm going to bet on that race, that, that, that racehorse, where do we start when it comes to getting our people on track? Where do we start with like, how do I begin the adaptation, the evolution, whatever verbiage you want to use? How do we get— how do we begin that journey?

So my recommendation, first and foremost, is if you, if you've already decided that this is a road you're going to go down, and you, and you've kind of started to figure out, like, you know, how you want to approach it, there are so many free training materials available to folks so that they can go out and start kind of looking at what, what they want to bring in, right? Yeah. They can start deciding who in the organization needs to take what certification. So Anthropic's got a great one that's online, it's for free. I know Google's got one that's online, it's for free. I'm sure we've got some stuff at Empath that is available to folks that they can go through and understand. They really just need to start creating a common language within the MSP itself and have everybody go through it, right? Like, I think that that's one of the first things that you should do is like, instead of trying to lock everything down, originally kind of just start with like, let me explain to you what all of this is. And everybody doesn't have the time to spend on that. So I think if you create this kind of fluency of vernacular, this glossary of the way that you're going to talk about AI within your own MSP, settle on a few things. And just because you go through like an Anthropic training on what AI systems are, it's pretty agnostic, right? It will reference stuff that's going on with Claude, but it talks about what is an LLM, like what is a harness, like what is a skill? Right? What sort of guardrails you need to put in place to get the right outcomes? How do you build prompts? Right? It'll go through those things. And then, in my opinion, once you kind of have established that baseline, then like starting to get people to tinker a little bit with just figuring out how to make it easier for them to make some decisions about day-to-day tasks that they're doing, like giving them approval, like, yeah, go ahead and ask ChatGPT that. Or if you're enabling Copilot, set it up in such a way where Once you've got some of your data guardrails in place, like allow them to query SharePoint. Like, hey, go back into SharePoint and like look up this information for me. Like, because I don't know, Nick, like as a Microsoft guy, I can tell you like I love SharePoint, but I also hate SharePoint. Like it is really hard to find stuff sometimes in it when it's just like cross-indexing or whatever. And so being able to go in and tie that information to something and have it give you relevant information so you're not in there like hunting and pecking or just doing straight You know, you know, searches for stuff is just such an important like factor of being able to use some of these tools by being able to ask it to go do stuff for you like that. And I just think that if people started to use the tool and go through some real basic training, right, on what it is that these tools are for and how they should be used is the first step that anybody should be doing. I don't know that that's just my take on it. I'd be curious to see what you guys think because you guys are. in the education space with Empath, and you're seeing it at a much broader level. And Nick, you're seeing what could come out of the Copilot ecosystem. So I'm curious to get what you guys think about that too.

Yeah, no, I would agree. I mean, I think that you're building that foundation, right? I think that allows you also to speak confidently to your customer where you are seen as like that thought leader, you know, that they can have confidence in with these projects that you might want to bring to them or, you know, creative ideas as it relates back to that. That. But having those basics, those will carry forward, you know. Like, if GPT comes out with GPT-7, right, it's not going to be like monumental difference in the sense of like those foundational skills that you need to learn to massage. And truly, it should be getting— like, my experience has been it's gotten easier to do things with the same level of, of effort, you know, if that makes sense. So it's like, hey, it's getting more intelligent, it's able to tap into more data sources more freely, Um, security's a little mixed on that, but like, you know, there's, there's all these things that you, you get into that you can compound over time. And yeah, it feels overwhelming when there's another model every day and there's new, new features every day and all these things. But even the core basic, like Dustin was on our channel not that long ago and he's talking about giving workshops to his clients and he was talking about building a whole skills library, you know, that you could reuse for your clients. And it's like— Right. Same thing internally, right? It's this is a unique time where we can also have a lot of major benefits and growth and shared learning, you know, through just your team collaborating through, hey, what did I do today? This is what worked for me. My guy the other day showed me how to, you know, put my raw video in Claude and make it edit it in 5 minutes, and I didn't know I could do that. Like, it seems silly, but it was like, I didn't know it was at that level of sophistication where it cut like a very clean video for me. In 5 minutes. And it was like, oh wow, you know. Um, and so it's just that, that type of motion that's gonna save me hours, right? Uh, for the things that I do. And so those are the things that like you always learn from. But curious to hear your, your, uh, take too, Wes, just from everything at Empath and things you guys are seeing there.

Well, I, you know, first of all, going back to like video editing and just capabilities we just never thought were possible, you don't know until you try. You don't know until you experiment. You don't know until you give something a shot. And you are exactly right, by the way, on that Um, if anyone doesn't know, go check out my co-founder Kyle Christensen's page. All the— he's been cranking YouTube out lately left and right, and the reason why is his robots are fully editing end to end. Uh, he doesn't touch it, so all he has to do is go record the content. He just has to have the thought leadership to get out there, turn the camera on, off he goes, and the robots do the work. Uh,

even the B-roll, right? It's amazing. It's, it's crazy.

B-roll, overlays, the whole thing. Andrew?

Not to interrupt you, but what I do, I wanna stress this thing, right? Like the ability to generate content en masse at a high quality is one of the things that I think is going to be both, it's like this interesting paradigm in that like you need to start being able to teach people what outcomes look like. And the best way to do that is to create high quality content so that people, because a lot of these like entry-level things that they're doing, these tactical things that they're doing are gonna go away. So they have to learn like why they're doing stuff. And it was so expensive and difficult to create this content before. And now you can do it fairly quickly, right? And you can really get your message out there in a way that's got a high quality to it, that's got a lot of learning behind it. And you can really use the AI to accelerate what your team is doing to the outcome level, not just like, let me create an SOP video for you, which is fine. But like, let's talk about why we're trying to get this outcome, what this is trying to accomplish, right? And those are much harder videos to accomplish other than, you know, videos of you showing them how to do the work. Now you're going to talk to them about concepts and information and creating graphics. That shit was expensive before and it took a lot of time and you can do it really easily now and very cost-effectively.

And you know what's remarkable? We still have our video editor at Empath. And what's, what's happened, it just, we're chasing this rabbit trail of video content because it's a great illustrative example of what we're talking about today. What's happened is that now our video editor is an AI-first video editor, and he has the ability to use AI to drive so much more of what he's doing. And it's, you know, you think about like the org chart for a second, right? You typically have like executive management, some type of senior management, you have middle management and employees. And what AI has really done is it's caused a new layer in the org chart to appear, and that's the robots that are doing the work for the individual employees, meaning That now the individual employee is a manager themselves of their own fleet of robots, if we're going to use— you're going to continue to chase this direction. So what does that mean? It means that the individual employee has to think about what kind of outcomes am I expecting? I am not just a cog in a wheel that takes this SOP and does this thing over here. If I now have robots that are doing some really cool things for me, what is it that I want them to do? How do I assess what good looks like? How do I correctly feed it all the things that it needs to happen, needs to correctly assess and think about to be successful. All of these things are normal management layer functions. And so going back to like Empath's view on things, this is why the person is so stinking important, because we are going to always get stuck where you have Johnny the AI whiz kid and Bobby the AI, just tell me what to do and I don't— I'll do what you want. We're going to always have a big schism between the two if we're not thinking through how do we help our people actually understand what they're trying to accomplish? It's turning them into managers themselves. And I just think that's fascinating. I I think for Empath, the most transformational thing we've gone through is exactly that journey over the last 6 months, seeing every single one of our software developers, they're all AI-driven now. I'm not saying they don't write code, but they now have a fleet of robots, each of them themselves, and they now are overseeing all of that. And it's just as an example, but same with content, just as an example. So yeah, it really is a fascinating concept.

No, and I think it's really important to understand too, it's like, Like, there have been times where I've used AI to like delve into a topic where I am very surface level and it gives me back a bunch of information and I'm like, man, this sounds really good. And then I dig into it and I'm like, a lot of this is bullshit. Like, this is just AI, right? But on the stuff that I'm an SME on, the stuff that I know really well, when it gives me back an output, I can run through it, I can tweak it, I can update it. It maximizes my time and it allows me to get so much more done. Yeah. where I'm able to guide that chat or guide that project or skill in a way that makes a meaningful outcome for me, because I know what my output needs to look like. That's where I think people need to be focused. When we set the tools aside, it's very agnostic, right? They're all going to be different things that they're going to be good at. But they are all, in fact, tools. And with the way that we're managing these things moving forward, To your point, people are gonna be managing these tools whether we like it or not. And we really need to be focused on how do we train them on outcomes? How do we get them smart as SMEs in this functional area of their, of their work or our business? And that really translates back down to if you can start getting people to think like that within your MSP, then you can start helping them to take that out to their clients because then it's the natural next step. Yeah. And I love what you said, Nick, about your client. What we used to always say is we're a service company, technology just happens to be what we do, right? Like, we provide service. And I really want everybody to continue to remember that in our space is that we're service providers, right? Managed service providers, right? And that service right now happens to be accompanied by this new tool. We need to learn it, but the outcomes are the most important part, right? Yep. We don't wanna just deploy something in there to hope that it works or that it checks a box, because AI is not gonna check boxes like a security It's just not. It's very different. So I'm really excited to see like how people begin to do this because I'm already hearing from people. I'm like, you know, we're automating all of our tier 1 work. We're getting rid of our service coordinators. We're doing this, we're doing that. And a lot of these were the entry-level jobs, right? And now it's going to be really interesting to see what happens if you hire somebody out of college and you don't have a service coordinator and there's not like a person checking backups on your NOC. Like, what— how do you get them smart on stuff, right? Like, what does that look like? So I'm super excited to see where our industry— and I think it comes back to training. Like, you're gonna have to sit here and apprenticeship and train and, you know, manage these robots for a little while until you get a pretty good understanding of what we do here. Um, so yeah, I think that's a great point

too. Yeah, no, I think that's a great point too that I've been hearing as well, just on the, like, even the tech side, like newer technicians coming in and kind of blindly trusting AI, you know, with configuration changes and like, hey, what should I do with this, this knock, you know, alert? And it's like, hey, go do that. And they're like, all right, I'm just gonna go click buttons. And so there's, there's like, I would have a ton of fear, right, in that, um, you know, blindness, if you will. Not in a negative sense, but it's just like, well, how much trust are you placing in this? And like, how much are you actually learning if all you're doing is asking questions and then, you know, doing, you know, the other, the other side of that. So, um, yeah, I think it's an interesting concept. I liked what you mentioned too, Wes, on the, the, uh, piece about making everybody a manager, because it's like, let's give them enough autonomy, you know, that they can go make their own decisions, but then that gives them a sense of responsibility to where it's like, hey, if I'm managing all these people or something goes wrong, like, I am actually responsible for it. Which is why I wouldn't want to follow, you know, instructions blindly without understanding. Like, you can, you can go further into that statement. I think people just naturally get lazy. I certainly have, right, with some things, or when you're feeling tired of like, I don't want to read all this stuff that it just, you know, pumped out to me. What is the, the TL;DR, right, of the statement? So there's, there's a lot of different concepts with that, but it, it's both exciting and scary, right? Just given like how much are we actually like also retracting, like how much much, um, you know, mental energy that we're expending on this as well too. So,

so yeah, and this is the reason I love this conversation thread. It's really one of my big takeaways today. Before I say the takeaway, I want to talk about a conversation I had yesterday. I talked to, um, so I'm on Murray State's Board of Advisors. That's where I went to school. Go Racers! Um, and I'm sure most of you have no idea who Murray State even is, but, um, and so their, um, their new site, their cybersecurity program 4x'd the enrollment from what it was when I was there, which is a wonderful sign, right? But one of the things that the director told me, a good friend of mine, he said, you know, he said, a lot of these kids are, you know, they're taking all of their software development classes, and they're very worried that what they've seen about vibecoding, where their heart and passion of like building software is now eroding before them, they have no role anymore. And so I was like, can you let me talk with them? I'm really excited to. And he's like, yes, I'd love to. So soon I'm gonna get with them. And I think what's happening is that the perception And so while the perception is that AI is killing off a lot of these kinds of needs that we used to have, the reality is, and this is the thread of the conversation today, is that the reality is this. This is my big takeaway today, is that the burden of the business is to make sure that you educate all employees to the ceiling. I'm sorry, to the floor, to the floor, and give them the opportunity to rise to the ceiling. In other words, take software development as an example of this. The difference between me as a VibeCoder and an actual software development developer doing like AI-assisted engineering is this: they understand how software works, they understand how code works, they understand all of the things that it takes to build great software. If we don't develop that skill set, they're never going to be the senior-level AI-assisted software development engineer that we want them to become. And so what does that mean for us? And Andrew, I think this overlaps directly into what y'all do at Ridgeview, is the mandate is upon us if we want to be a great MSP that continues to survive and thrive in the future, we have to understand we're now hiring Gen Zs that are coming into the workforce without any of that prior knowledge, and we have to develop it, and we have to— the burden is on us to teach to the new floor so that they can rise to the ceiling above it, right? And I don't think, Andrew, a lot of MSPs are thinking about it that way. They're just like, oh, AI is at our fingertips, ask anything you want, and garbage in, garbage out, as you

No, I would agree with that. And I mean, I'm not trying to throw people under the bus. Running an MSP is probably the hardest job on the planet. Like, I mean, I'm probably exaggerating, but it's hard. It's stressful. It's difficult. And, you know, you're— it's like being the IT department of, you know, running a company that's got 60 different departments and each one running their own software with their own set of rules and responsibilities. And it all has to be perfect. Right. And nobody calls you to tell you you're doing a good job. Right. It's hard. And the, the, the, the model has always been, and Empath exists for this and so does Ridgeview, the model has always been, when we hire somebody, you go over there and sit with Jim because he's smart and he's going to get you up to speed in about 3 or 4 months and you can start taking tickets, right? Like, that's just kind of how people did it. And then they're going to take some online training or whatever to get certifications. That's not going to work anymore. And, and Sitting with Jim, Jim's gonna be managing bots. He's gonna be doing stuff, right? Like, like what he does is not what you need to learn how to do if you're coming in clean to an MSP. So I really do believe that you're gonna have to, one, get people smart on the business part of what you're doing, right? Like, and we should have been doing that forever anyway, but you're gonna have to be even more diligent about it now. And I think that's a really important thing. Creating an actual training outline to try to get people where they need to be. Yeah. I think is going to be really critical, not just go sit with that person and then, you know, eventually you'll be able to start doing their job. I think you're really going to have to get them smart on what the tools that we're using, how are they interconnected, what do these outcomes need to look like, because they're not just doing checkboxes and entering time into a system. They might be managing 3 different bots that are running like security tickets for, you know, 7 or 8 different clients at the same time, and they need to understand like Like, when this thing comes up and it says, I'm gonna run this action, are you gonna approve it? You need to be like, well, I need to understand what that outcome looks like instead of going approve. And then when it breaks something, you go, well, I didn't know. Like, I wasn't sure. I was just checking the box. Like, all that's over with over the course of the next few months. And then I think we have this other interesting challenge. It's gonna be how to get people on board with AI that are coming into the workforce. in a way that they don't see it as a threat to their wellbeing, to their environment, to all these other things, right? With the pushback on data centers and then AI taking jobs and driving down wages and all this, we're gonna have to figure all of that out as a society and as MSPs because 50% of the US economy is built on small businesses. And guess what? That's what MSPs support mostly. And so we're gonna be, it's gonna be incumbent upon us as the MSP community to figure out how to message this and drive it forward. And I was so proud of what we did during COVID And I was so proud of what we've been doing with the shift to security. Guess what? It's on us again. Right? And I'm really excited to see what we do with it. But in my opinion, Wes, like it, you know, it starts with education. And I, and it starts with a focused decision about educating your staff and your workforce on what they need to know. In order to be better at consulting and business and not just, this is how you work a ticket, this is how you, this is how you, you know, you know, fix a backup. A lot of that stuff's gonna get automated, right? They need to understand why. And that's gonna be important for the next 20 years or longer in this industry, I believe strongly.

Yeah, I think, I think to complement it, it's like, this is where you can shine greatly in the sense of that CS Side of the house, right? Like, of, hey, regardless of what you do with your fleet of agents and AI and all this, like, we can really shine with, you know, the customer experience that we provide. Obviously, technology is one side of that that we can use to enhance, but how personal we're being, you know, how much do they feel like they're connected to us? And then they'll trust us more, right? For the next AI project, they'll come to us first. And, you know, it's a big highlight. Like, no matter what you do, it's kind of staying being grounded in those roots versus over-indexing, right, on, on some of that. That can cause that frustration because at the macro level we saw that with like Amazon laying off a ton of people, and then they've had more bugs in the past 6 months than they ever had in the past 5 years, right? Or whatever the statistic was in that sense. But it's like, it's that kind of motion, right? And then they had to hire people back. And, you know, we're all, we're all learning to a certain degree, but there's some core principles that you can carry, you know, that, that should be carried over From a legacy timeframe in a lot of respects as well too.

Yeah. Well, and you said something interesting, Nick. Sorry, Wes, real quick. I just want to touch on something Nick said, you know, being able to create that UX, that user experience. How many times in the MSP space have we heard from people like, my account managers are slammed. They don't have the kind of time we need them to be personal with the clients. They're constantly back here running reports or doing this or doing that. That's where this technology gives you back the cycles to go be Right? Like to go spend the FaceTime because you're not spending 2.5 hours doing an SBR PowerPoint. It just can get created for you. You edit it, you make sure it looks good. You take a 2-hour process, you make it a 30-minute process, and now, bam, FaceTime, an opportunity to create relationships. So if you use it right, hopefully you get to Wes's point earlier, you get some of your time back. You get to focus on the things that are important rather than the things that are I'm calling more tactical and not strategic when it comes to running your business, for sure.

And this is, again, where I think we want to live, is where we want to be. And I guess just a self-assessment question you can ask yourself and your own MSP is ultimately, how strategic are we? And one way you can measure that with the client is how often are they inviting us into actual SBR, QBR conversations? How many times do they skip those? How many times do they defer it to a gatekeeper? Some MSPs have gotten all the way to the point where they're now even helping lead AI steering committees. It's one of the big takeaways I got when we interviewed Dustin Bolander and what they're doing over at Clear Guidance, an MSP out of Austin, is they're getting to that stage where they're so strategic that they're able to work directly with a committee inside the company that's focused on internal innovation. And it just so happens that AI leads the way and they're chairing that committee with the client. You think they're ever going to walk away from that? Of course not. And so I think that really is one of the areas that I think MSPs should be thinking about is, yes, this is a strategic overlay, but we have to earn the right. We have to prove to the client that we have the capability to speak into the strategy, the mission, the imperatives, the challenges that the business has, so that we earn the right to get the seat to have that discussion versus just being at that bottom layer. And Andrew, one of the things that we've seen, I'm sure you've heard Alex Farley, my other co-founder, talk about this, is we've talked to MSPs that have lost business to some AI consultancy company that's probably just a YouTuber that's watched 14 videos from Nick Ross and some other AI guys that are just teaching all this stuff. And now they're the expert and they're like, you don't need that MSP stuff. I'll go automate that away. I'll fix that problem. And the client doesn't know better. And they're like, cool, let's go to that. That speaks to what I care about the most. And I've seen MSPs actually lose business over those kinds of things.

Yeah, I haven't, I haven't yet seen that. It's coming for sure. I'm starting to see I'm starting to see a lot of that happen where they're getting in, right? So they're coming in and they're like, oh, and you're like, you walk into a meeting, you're like, who's this? And I'm like, well, this is Joe and he's our new AI consultant and he's with so-and-so tech. And you're like, oh, okay, I get it. You're the guy that's slipping in here to start taking over some of our opportunity, right? And before you know it, you've lost your seat as the trusted advisor and you've become the commodity, right? And I, this is cyclical within our industry, but we keep using the term trusted advisor, all this sort of stuff, right? Like, if you're not, if you don't have a seat at the table, if you're not helping to drive where the technology is going, if you're not unlocking margin and revenue opportunities for your clients, right, then you are a commodity, right? Like, you're the, like, there's an expectation that when you turn on a computer that it works and it's secure. That's commoditized. Like, you people used to understand that was hard. That's table stakes now, right? The next iteration of this is how do we make sure that we're back to consulting about what it looks like for your business to do the following? Yeah. And so, yeah, I would say that that's a really important thing that MSPs need to be thinking about. But I'm sure what's freaking them out is they're like, I don't have this person on my staff. Like, I don't have this company that I work with. And what I can tell you is your clients, a lot of the times, they don't know what this stuff is either. And I think for some of your better clients, my advice would be go sit down with them where you've got a great relationship and be like, look, this is happening super fast. Yeah. For everybody. We're learning it as fast as you're having to understand it. So let's work together and figure it out as a team. Dude, any partner that comes and sits down and has that conversation with you, you're gonna be like, yeah. Like, but what's not great is you're like, let me keep my head in the sand until I figure it out. And because it's happening so quickly, you can never make a decision, right? Like, be honest with your clients. Go out there and have a conversation with them. Tell them, hey, we're going to learn this together. Like, We're on the same train as you. Like, this is happening so rapidly. Like, you know, to your point, Nick, like, you know, GPT-5 to GPT-7, it's like 1,000 times better processing for that sort of stuff in the last, like, 9 months. Like, what is going on? Like, so we're all learning these things as a society. And I think it's fair to sit down and have a conversation with your better clients and let them know that you're trying to figure it out and you want to work with them on it and then develop your solutions together. And kind of to go back to what Get Secure asked is like, is the juice worth the squeeze? Like, should MSPs go out and learn this on their own? Are they worth their salt? My recommendation is like, yeah, I mean, I think you probably should. But at the same time, like, if you know that you can't find that sort of experience on your team or you can't afford to hire for it or whatever, find a partner, right? There are partner companies out there. If it's a software dev shop, if it's, you know, one of the new MSP AI solutions that's out there that has a little bit of professional services on top of it. If it's a, you know, third-party developer that you want to bring in to help you, like we've been doing this for a really long time. You don't have to own the solution. Your job is to find the solution for your clients, right? And to have that conversation that makes you the trusted advisor. And if you can make some margin on it, great. If you can't, you're still going to stay sticky with your client because you're the one who brought them the opportunity to fix their issue, right? Be the problem solver. That, that's a, a really important part of, like, understanding, I think, where we're going, because everybody's waiting to figure out all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, Wes, is what tool do we pick and what are we waiting for? Like, I think you really start by having conversations, right, with your team, with your clients, with other MSPs. Figure that out and be open about it. And I think you're gonna find better outcomes for yourself and for your, your clients for sure.

Yeah. I think the only thing I'd add to that too is, you know, those are all Like, that should be plenty motivation, right, uh, of going out and doing that and getting some of those, those motions involved and just talking to your client, right? We've talked about that on many episodes. Just, just open the conversation, right? Open the door, uh, for them to discuss it. The other thing I hear from many MSPs now actually is, you know, the other reason to do it would be risk reduction in the sense that I've heard from multiple MSPs now that clients have gone, you know, fully and built their own software, right? Yeah. And they didn't talk about it to the MSP, and they built it with vibe coding, and they got the admin credentials popped immediately, you know. And it was like, because they don't know what they're doing, right? And that's, that's just like a quintessential example. And then like, they're in the news for a technology breach, and it's like, well, who's their MSP? And then you look bad, right, from that. And so that's not to cause fear or anxiety, even though, you know, it should be on your mind with, with some of the things that are going on. Yeah. but it's just to say that like they're gonna find their own way in a lot of these companies too to start spinning up their own apps. I always loved like that Base44 commercial in the Super Bowl that was like all these people in the company spinning up their own app and doing their own stuff. And it was like, oh, that's kind of scary, you know, for all that stuff to be going on, all the data to go everywhere. So, you know.

I'm old enough to remember when we would go into our first MSP engagements in the late '90s, early 2000s, and we'd come in and we would look around and they'd be like, yeah, don't touch that computer over there. Steve built this Access database that runs our entire company. And you're like, where's Steve? It's like, he hadn't worked here in 5 years. Like, what?

Yeah.

And I think we're moving back in that direction where people are like, yeah, I'm gonna vibe code this thing. And then all of a sudden, the whole company becomes dependent on it, and there's no documentation on it. And to your point, I think it's really important to sit down and be like, this is a powerful tool, and it's really great. We wanna encourage it. But here's some baseline training and understanding of things that you should be doing to prevent that sort of thing from happening in your in your company, right? Let us help guide you through that process, right?

Yeah,

totally agree.

This has been just such a fun conversation. Andrew, I'm curious if you can tell me from Ridgeview's perspective, like, what does, what does a good MSP look like for you in terms of like, well, how do you typically work with MSPs and how does that engagement look? What all do you provide to an MSP when they want to come to you for help?

No, I appreciate that. So we have a couple of different things that we do. One is the product that we've put together with the Empath group. So if you guys are working in Empath, and you're really wanting to kind of take it to the next level, we have an entire package where we'll, you know, help you guys build out your job roles and your profiles and align those to the training that goes inside of Empath and build out pathways there and kind of, you know, indoctrinate your managers on how to, you know, run their, their teams through accountability and using the LMS as a way to really drive outcomes. That's one of our core things that we work with. So if you're looking for that, that's an important part of what we do. We do one-on-one coaching for MSPs that are looking to try to, you know, take their MSP to the next level, whether they're getting ready to exit or they're just looking to try to increase their margins and try to, you know, build a more sustainable and scalable MSP. We'll deploy directly into your, you know, leadership teams and work directly with that. And then we're putting together accountability groups where we're doing training and groupthink. And it's, you know, peer groups more on the learning level, right? So you're gonna get together, you're gonna get that peer opportunity to talk, but you're also gonna get a lesson. You're gonna be trained. You're gonna have video content. We're gonna give you templates and stuff to deploy within your MSP and really take your, your operations teams to the next level. So we've got a few ways that we help MSPs, but mostly like we're looking for folks that are, you know, on their path towards wanting to develop a better, more sustainable MSP with processes and and real focus on, you know, the future of what their MSP is going to look like. So that's our, that's an ideal client for us, somebody looking to make a change.

I love that. Make sure y'all check out Andrew, everything you're doing with Ridgeview. We just want to say thank you for the time today and your expertise, all of that good stuff. Nick, I would love for you to chat a little bit about our next November 11th Above the Stack and what we're gonna be doing

Yeah, we're gonna have, uh, I don't know if you guys know this guy Kelvin. Uh, he's, he's a little popular in the space, but, um, yeah, he's, uh, he's gonna be joining us. He's actually who nominated me for my Microsoft MVP, so we've got a great relationship. And, um, you know, he's been active in the community, especially with this recent breach over the weekend, uh, and any kind of providing tooling for that. But we're going to go through, uh, securing Microsoft for AI and some of the great topics in there that we're getting a ton of questions at Cloud Capsule about, even, you know, around Purview and other aspects like that. So this could be a little bit more technical, probably we'll get into the weeds a little bit more than we usually do, but also surfacing in, you know, again, that, you know, it's more about the conversation of, well, what do you do with those tools with your customers, right? What conversations are you having to unlock those new, you know, business opportunities like we've been talking about on this show as well? So very excited for that. That should be a really good one and we'll be doing some more promotion.

I'm excited, and a lot of people don't know this, but not only is Kelvin a Microsoft MVP, as you said, but also owns a very large MSP out of Netherlands. Um, just a wonderful, wonderful human. So, uh, very much looking forward to that. Um, Andrew, once again, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a fantastic discussion. Thank you. Y'all make sure you reach out to Ridgeview and check out what they're doing. Make sure you, uh, put— mark your calendar for November 11th. 1 PM Eastern. We're excited to jump back in with that. And without any further ado, I just want to say thank you all for joining so much. It's been a fantastic discussion. Y'all have a great one.

Appreciate you both. Thank you guys. Bye-bye.

Thanks, guys. We'll see you.