AI Client Engagement Model: Who's Actually Doing This Right?

We've been shifting in this discussion over into— I said I'm going to bring it up.

There we go.

Into this discussion around AI and AI engagement. How do we get our clients talking about it? All of this good stuff. And so this is gonna be a lot of fun today. And if you're watching today, if you're in the Empath app, you can come join us in YouTube or on LinkedIn on Cloud Capsule or Empath's pages and come say hi. Otherwise, you can just watch behind the scenes. Man, Nick, this is going to be a lot of fun. What are you most excited excited about today?

Excited most about our guest, but definitely the topic, you know, that we're bringing to the table as well too, in the sense of, you know, obviously being a big hype cycle right now, a big topic of conversation with a lot of MSPs, but also just demystifying a lot of the clarity behind, you know, good uses of AI, potential not good uses, but also just like we put, we posted before this kind of the, you know, the over-marketed pieces as well too. And what are you actually doing right within your business or MSP today to maximize your use of AI, but more importantly, how you're talking to your clients.

Yep, well said, well said. So just to kind of get us into the discussion today, if you don't know who in the world Nick Ross and I are, just a super quick intro. Hey, I'm Wes Spencer. I am one of the co-founders of Empath. We're also joined by Nick Ross, one of the co-founders of Cloud Capsule, and really excited about this conversation, not because of us, but because of our guest. I'm gonna go ahead and bring him into the live stream here, the one, the only, John Harden. John, how's it going?

I'm good.

Have you ever seen a conference wall before? I can tell you what it looks like.

Quite a few of them, my friend, for sure. John, for anyone who does not know who you are, say hi to us. What are you doing? Who are you? And thanks for joining today.

Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I've been looking forward to this for all week. So thanks for having me on here. My name's John Hardin. I'm a founder in a stealth AI venture right now studying the intersection of AI and the real-world MSP operating models. Like, how are customers actually responding to conversations? How are we securing them? How are we doing them repeatably? All these things we're going to talk about today. But 17 years in the MSP space. I grew up in the one help desk. I started my career as a 16-year-old, so I got, you know, most people go, how did this guy, how did this end up here in 17 years by starting a long, long time ago. But I've been through a few SaaS ventures, went through the telecom era, and then my last venture, Saslio, was acquired by Auvik. I saw your little ticker reel down here, Wes, at the beginning of the show, which said shadow AI is the new shadow IT. And it's so near and dear to my heart. If you don't think we're not going to talk about shadow AI and how it pulls through in the discussion today, You're crazy. Just because I'm not at SaaS or Avik doesn't mean— or just because I'm not at SaaS or Avik anymore doesn't mean I don't deeply believe that that is one of the biggest problems to focus on. So I'm just thrilled to be here.

Man, we are really, really glad to have you. It's going to be a super fun discussion and something we've been itching to get into for quite some time and couldn't think of anyone better than you to join us today. So, you know, I think to get us onto the playing field, just one tease for folks later in the show, we're going to give a QR out. You can go grab— we've got built out a really cool AI readiness conversation worksheet. It's really Cool. We've been spending a bunch, a bunch of time kind of building this. And the goal for this worksheet— I'm gonna show you kind of a little peek of what it's going to look like right here. The goal for it is really to help you in conversations, to help you start the conversation with your client, to get the discussion going of how do I broach this subject of AI, what the client might or might not be doing with it. And honestly, Nick, I don't know about you, but I would probably roleplay some of it internally before I even start taking it into external conversations, just to make sure I'm in the habit of correctly speaking through all this. Don't you Do you agree?

100%. Yeah, I mean, I think role-playing and then just getting those reps in, like we talked about in the previous episode, is probably the best thing you could do. Even asking the open-ended questions of, "How are you guys thinking about AI today?" right, is a super easy softball question, but can open up the door to so many opportunities. So yeah, excited to unpack that too, just from the standpoint of, you know, internal exercises you guys can start to, you know, do at your MSP.

Yeah, agree. And the one and only Rob Chaffee checking in saying that shadow AI sounds like a supervillain. Hey, let's talk about that for just a second. John Harden, would you mind to tell us, just for anyone listening that may not have heard of that term, what does shadow AI mean?

Yeah, so shadow AI is a subset of the term shadow IT, right? It's just a subcategory of shadow IT. By the way, hi Robert, it's good to see you over here. I love the chirps you're bringing into the stream from LinkedIn. Shadow AI is really the usage of any, predominantly right now, generative AI tool and where you're putting your data into any generative AI tool where there's not governance, policy, guardrails, or security set around it. I would say probably the most common bad AI we're seeing right now is free usage of ChatGPT. You know, I did a talk 2 weeks ago at a local university in Indiana called Butler University, and I had the kids raise their hand if they have used ChatGPT, and every one of them used it. And I bring this story home to say the new workforce is coming into business and they're bringing shadow AI with them. They passed half their courses and half their curriculum using AI to get their jobs done and get through schooling. And so it's real. I mean, we talked about this, Wes, at IT Nation. If you're a company with more than 11 employees, you have a 92% chance of having shadow AI in your business. Two tools. And once you get up to something above 100, it's closer to 11 tools. And it's like a 97% chance. And this was back in November. And so I just, I wish I had access to the data. I don't have it anymore, but hopefully maybe all the— publish a new version of it. But basically the answer is definitive. Shadow AI is here and I might explode your AI readiness phrasing when you're ready.

Let's do all of those things. And I think you perfectly led into the discussion today of what we're seeing is really it is the real opportunity. And Nick, I'd love for you to kind of take the lead here on what are we starting to see in the world around around us with MSPs and the reality that AI is in front of us. And we— it's not just a reality we have to accept, it's also one that I think we have to embrace.

Yeah, you know, I've seen both sides of the spectrum personally of, you know, MSPs really thriving in this opportunity and really trying to fundamentally shift, you know, internally, not change overnight, but create this bridge, right? Starting with baby steps now to build this practice around, well, what does scaling look like, you know, for our team? As we move forward into this era, you know, 'cause the traditional career path looks a little bit different now, or a lot of bit different, right? For some people, like, you know, a traditional technician as an example, maybe moving into more of an AI automation role as a track that would go into that. But fundamentally, there's also this big, you know, effort that I've vocalized too, just 'cause it's near and dear to me for cybersecurity, which is around, you know, AI reigniting cybersecurity conversations with your customers. And so we'll probably get into that a lot here today too. But then on the opposite end of the spectrum, there's, there's a lot of MSPs today still kind of thinking, I'm not an AI expert, I don't know where this is going, there's definite hype cycle, I'm not stepping in at all today. And I think that's leaving some of a deficit because your clients are doing this to John's point, right? Either going to have employees that are using AI today, and they're already going to be moving with or without you. And so it's your time to kind of inject yourself into that conversation and guide them on that journey.

Yeah. And I love, John, I would love for you to elaborate on a little bit of what Nick said there is that it's not about rushing to go sell an AI tool. And I think we have to level set as MSPs that our natural inclination is to say, that's something cool. I want to go grab it and I want to go sell it to everyone. And if we lead that way with AI, we're really going to fall behind because the reality is The client already has tools at their disposal they're already using that they didn't pay us for.

Yeah, yeah. So I was at a panel out here, I'm in Chicago at GTIA's CCF event, and the panel, we all talked about it. Our customers didn't all of a sudden give us a phone call and demand for an RMM, right? They didn't give us a call and demand for Microsoft 365 security tools. They didn't call us and demand to move us to 365 in the cloud in the first era. And, you know, I'm kind of calling back to our break-fix era and our on-prem era and our risk era and now the AI era. And so the difference is that customers aren't calling and demanding these things. They're just using them. And I really, I hope this doesn't blow up your document you just talked about because I am on a warpath against AI readiness and it's kind of Microsoft's fault on this one. I love Microsoft, so I'm not bashing them. But, you know, AI readiness comes from who they serve, their enterprise customers, right, to help them get ready. To put data into Copilot responsibly. But if we are MSPs saying, hey, we're going to get you AI ready, think about the tone deafness of that when we know the data proves that they don't need to get AI ready. They need it. They need AI enabled. They need activated with AI. And so I think your document still holds merit, by the way, but I'm really against the phrasing AI readiness because what it says when you walk into the room to that customer is, dear Mr. Customer or Mrs. Customer, I know you're doing these AI things, but we're going to blow all that up. I want to get you AI ready the right way. And you're just saying, we're going to— if I'm that customer, what I'm hearing is you're about to be the person to tell me all the things I'm doing is wrong. You're about to take all of my productivity away. You're about to remove all of the tools I love. I didn't hire you for that. I hired you to keep my uptime. And so if you're walking the door selling AI readiness, you've already walked yourself out of the opportunity, in my opinion.

And And to add to that, if I'm a client, I'm like, sounds like you're about to try to sell me something.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's in my mind, I'm already hearing the nos fire off, right? The no, you can't do this. No, you can't do that. And we know in cyber, the minute we bring that evil two-letter word in with no, we're going to end up blocking our opportunity to solve the problem. You know, it's got to be yes and. So yes, you can do what you're doing and we're going to work on getting it ablement. So Um, yeah, I didn't mean to blow up the first slide right out the gate. It's just my hot take recently.

Yeah, it's a term that we're using because I think people understand the term, but to your exact point, we're actually taking this in a pretty big different direction. Yeah, Nick, what are your thoughts?

Oh yeah, I think it's a really good, good, uh, you know, injection there just because it does make a lot of sense, right? Like it's, it's you leading with EQ right into that, that conversation of how we're going to, you know, build this into your practice knowing and understanding, well, it might not always be the business leaders. Likely, you know, the downstream employees are using it as well, too. But if it's the business leaders, even more so on the emphasis of, hey, let's enable you to do that better, faster, quicker, right? Like whatever, you know, terms you want to use with that— better, faster, more secure in that sense— and move it forward in that progressive way. So yeah, I love that, actually. I think it's a really good inflection of just reflecting on that term in general.

So, so let's talk about this disconnect then that I think exists around us, right? So you, you kind of hinted towards this, John, that a lot of MSPs are like, well, still trying to figure out where the market's going to go. You know, you got Claude, you got GPT, you got Groq, you got Gemini, you got all these other secondary level, you got all these CI/CD platforms like Lovable and Cursor, you got all these AI embedded into everything. And so I understand a lot of MSPs might just be like, well, let's just kind of wait and see how things fall out. But the reality is that clients are already using AI today, as you mentioned, the data shows very clearly they're actively using it. And on top of that, they don't see us as the MSP as the advisor to go to with AI. We're not the sage that they want to go and talk to, are we?

I mean, no, not at all. I'm in the background here trying to pull up our data from IT Nation's talk that we did on this one. You know, let's see, I can share it if you want as well. I'll share it after this and we'll pull back to the real data. But if we go in and we say that, of course we've signaled the wrong way. And that's where I go into the yes and category. You know, as MSPs, I think when we look at our customers, we know that they're going to make decisions and we know that we can't stop the way that their business functions because we know that it's insecure. We have to find ways to wrap it around and help them move forward. And what I mean by that is we should focus on the things that we're really good at. And look at securing an environment that they can get value out of. And we were just having the same talk in the same panel out here. That's things like governance, things like policy. Tactically, that's sitting down with the customer and understanding, you know, what is the ROI of moving to a more sanctioned tool like a Copilot versus a free ChatGPT? What is your risk tolerance of— are you okay with free ChatGPT versus moving to a more sanctioned tool? And then the little tactical items like, you know, you hear this all the time, take your AI acceptable use policy, analyze it for your customer, understand if your technical controls are meeting their business expectations or craft one with them. And I think it really is a way to broker that conversation without being the no person. It's like, just where are you? What is your risk tolerance and how can we help move you forward?

Yeah, and I remember this in my CIO days is my job was ultimately to praise the board for anything that they're interested in doing that has anything to do with tech technology strategy, even if it was off the mark of where I knew we should be going as the actual practitioner. So I learned to have that conversation of, "I am so glad you're asking that. What a great question! Can we talk about that a little bit more?" And then leverage that in a way to say, "You're so smart to say this," and then kind of change it over here a little bit. And I love that. That's really the way I think we need to do it, and we need to convey it. And that brings up a really good question that Brian Weiss has in chat. And let's bring this up now, because I think it's a good time. If, if not an AI readiness pitch, which has recently replaced the need to improve a security posture pitch, then what should the pitch be? AI alignment? Should it be something else? What do y'all think?

I mean, I have a take, but Nick, you look like you might want to jump in, so I'll let you go first.

No, I think you phrased it well earlier, you know, in the sense of AI enablement, AI alignment, you know, basically showing them that you're going to encourage what they're already doing, but, you know, facilitate it in a manner that's, you know, giving them either, you know, more bandwidth and capabilities because of your knowledge and subset. That could be it. Could be giving them security around that to feel safe as they operate around AI with their data and the governance behind that. And it could be from, you know, just going in and making it better, right, than it already is today. Optimization of what that looks like. So I think there's like, I think, a 3 angles.

I'd love to hear your take too, John.

Yeah, that's it, right? Like, I think it's an AI enablement conversation. But I think here's the problem is AI enablement conversation is even if we're going to replace AI readiness with AI enablement now, we're all just all of an industry, all as an industry, we've replaced it. We replaced all our updates. Dear, you know, dear agents, go update all my documents. I think the problem is the outcome of that isn't what the customer wants either. Really? Let me just step back for that for a second. Like, do they really want an output of all of the controls and all of the technical changes that they need to do to get even? We'll go back to AI AI ready, even if we call it AI enablement. They don't want that. They want value. And so I think, Brian, what you're asking is— I'm assuming what you're asking, please correct me in chat if I'm wrong here— is how do I approach my conversation? It's not about the phrasing of it. You're asking, how do I open that dialogue? I think you start by having the conversation around return on investment, because return on investment is what you can then measure against. The cost of implementing AI enablement. And what I mean by that is if I go run an AI enablement or readiness scan or Copilot scan or whatever I'm doing and getting all these technical tasks that I need to go to complete to get you AI enabled, there is a cost associated with that. If you go pitch that cost, you can frame it a million different ways. You can make it sound as nice as you want. But if you ultimately go to your customer and say, I need $25,000 to deliver all of these technical controls to get you AI ready enabled, whatever cool word we throw at the end of it, it's still not delivering value. And so I step back to this is probably a second-order exercise before a first-order exercise. And a first-order exercise is what is your AI ROI? Because what you might actually find when you have that conversation is you don't need to run an AI enablement survey because there's not enough AI ROI. I doubt you'd probably find many companies that couldn't find the ROI there. But you have to know what the input is before you can get to, or you have to know what the value is to overcome the deficit of value that you're trying to ask for them or the deficit of spend you're trying to ask for them. And so I think it's two things. It's renaming it. It's also reordering the way that you're going about those conversations.

Yeah, I think we talked about this last month of what the difference is between AI and cybersecurity. And one of the challenges that we've always had in cyber is outside of like someone saying, I have to have this to get this large contract or protect this 'large contract' or 'keep the cyber insurance' or to get my CMMC 2, whatever it— outside of those conversations, the majority of cybersecurity conversations are really about risk, about how do we handle that risk? How do we reduce that risk? And it's really not offering— we're terrified of someone coming to me and saying, well, John, what's ROI if I go buy this, you know, nice, slick, shiny cyber tool you're hawking at me, right? And we're terrified of that discussion because we know we can't really answer it from that angle. So we have to go from a risk angle. This is very much a different conversation if it's framed correctly and the client is ready to enter into that conversation of, "Yeah, you know, I don't really know how we might be able to use this in some ways that can make us more efficient. But I've read that others are." Or they might say, "You know, I see all these news articles that all these jobs are going to be displaced. So I'm worried about that. Is that true?" There's a lot of those kind of conversations that the client's already thinking about and curious about. And that's usually an angle of entry that we want to start using in those conversations.

Yeah, I think to that point too, Wes, I would say, like, we're also seeing it from like competitive pressure., right? People see their competitors start to use AI and publish things from that, and they get really that FOMO of, we're not using AI, like, let's rip AI throughout our entire organization. And they won't talk to you, you know, about that when they start doing that as well. I've always found, you know, there's like 3 angles of whenever you reach out to your customer. They're either curious about how to get started with AI, um, they're in the second bucket of, hey, you know, we have projects in mind, We might already be using GPT, you know, to John's point, there's definitely probably that going on everywhere. That's just shadow AI going on with people uploading business docs into, you know, large public language models. And then third bucket is they've already implemented some larger project and are using it actively, right? And they haven't told you or, you know, that they might need you to come in and optimize that as well too. So there's multiple angles also of engaging in that. And I think the easiest one, lowest friction point for you is just having a conversation. And opening up the door that way. The second of which I've seen others do, which is more, a lot more technical, requires a lot more resources and planning, is actually showing them how they're using data inappropriately, right? And that requires specific things to be in place in order for you to facilitate that. And there's a lot of overhead there that you could reach to and get to, and I think it's optimal, but it's not as easy as just having the conversation and leading with EQ, right, into that, that whole open dialogue of I'm going to help you on this journey and enable you to go faster on this too.

That kind of brings up a— I want to show this slide here because this is the kind of— once again, we're stumbling right into like where we're supposed to be going with this whole conversation, which is this, is that a lot of times you might walk into a business owner that says, no, I don't— we're not using that junk. We're just not. I know we're not. But then you go and you start querying both data and just in interviews with the end users and you actually see, we do see adoption at the edge. We see it within sales, admin, marketing, people using it for creative ways. We see it in all kinds of neat ways where it's actually folks that are in the operations and day-to-day. And John, I know that was a big part of your talk and my talk at IT Nation is that we can't assume from what leadership says may actually be the reality, that it's already here in front of us. And sometimes it doesn't matter. And this goes back to that comment that Mark Dunbar had made. I know some of it's going to cut off here, but basically he was saying they did a security awareness training seminar and their compliance strategist was begging their people to say, "Please tell us where you're using it, because I know you are, and I want to make sure that we're not funneling tons of corporate data into this.

Yeah, I mean, I have the data here and I'm gonna— can I even share? It doesn't matter.

Um, yeah, you should be here if you want.

Let's try it here. We're going live, we're doing this dangerous here. Um, let's do the Chrome tab handout. There we go. So this is from our talk, uh, so this is the data. I thought we'd present it here. Um, let me see if I could zoom in for you here, but this is what we talked about. You know, if you are— these are SMBs and MSPs, by the way. This isn't just some hypothetical Forrester or Gartner data. You know, look at that. If there is 26 or more employees, you're at 92% chance of having AI, and you are 3 apps in the— are in use, or 5 apps are in use at 50 and more. And so I present this data not to reiterate what we've said already, that they're using it. I present this data because I think it's a way to talk to the customers. You know, I think it's a really good expansion wedge to open that AI topic. You know, it's not the no person in the call. If you come to your customer and you're, you know, you pull in some of the tools that you're seeing shadow AI being used and you're saying, hey, I see this, and you can find this from like Microsoft OAuth logs, you can find this from like Defender data, you can find this from some already accessible things. And if you bring that data to the conversation, say we know you're using it and we want to help you adopt it responsibly. I think that's a way to broker that conversation with shadow AI without like slapping their hand because you don't want to come into the dialogue and tell them they can't use these tools anymore because now they've started to build workflows. There's a super interesting study by Andreesen Horowitz called the Cinderella Glass Slipper Effect, and I'll send it out here in a second, but it's the retention rules in the AI era, and I put it here for you in chat and private chat so you can share it out. But basically, once AI is adopted, a model is adopted, the retention is like a Cinderella glass slipper. It's extraordinarily high. And pulling somebody from that tool is extremely difficult. And I say this to say that if your clients, if the client or the employees at your clients have already began using AI and shadow AI, you are going to have to extract that from their cold, dead hands, likely. Like if they're using FreeJetGPT, it has all their memories. It has all the ways they work. This is going to be a really difficult thing to do. And I think if I'm in your shoes as an MSP, the later, the longer you let this live, the longer it's going to be hard to replace it. And I don't think maybe replacement ultimately will ever be achievable. If you wait a year or two, they're not going to look at you as the one who solved the problem. So there is a real important and urgent requirement to get in front of this because they're not going to be any more open to displacing their AI tool next year than they are today. And so that's a really scary thing when you combine the Andreesen data and the Shadow AI data and the relationship with the MSP. It's just a weird trifecta that creates even more urgency than I think we already all feel.

Yep, it's well said. So I want to shift the conversation just a hair if we can into— I wonder if we have folks that are listening today that feel a little bit of the imposter syndrome, that feel like, who am I to be talking about all of this? That like literally 3 years ago, 4 years 2 years ago, I was sitting here doing everything I was doing, and now all of a sudden we have this, you know, huge mass adoption of not just AI, but we see this huge push towards it and everyone out there that's way smarter than me, way more capable than me, and I just don't feel qualified to talk about it, right? So I'm curious to know, and I've got the wrong slide up, let me flip over.

Here we are.

I'd love to know from you, Nick, can you share with us a little bit more about like, how do we help MSPs overcome some of that that, that fear of I'm not the expert, I should not be the one talking to a client about any of this.

Yeah, it's funny, every talk I've given about, you know, AI and, you know, our, our thoughts on that at Cloud Capsule, things like that, that's the question I get the most is like, we don't have this competency internally to build AI automation workflows, we don't know, you know, these, these LLMs in and out or anything like that. And I think, you know, it's fair to be intimidated. I think we all are to a certain degree, right? Like that imposter syndrome of this whole new technology that changes literally every minute, right? It moves faster than anything else that we've seen in the sense of change and being able to sound like a professional when you're bringing to those or what you're bringing to those conversations. But I could say personally speaking for both myself and all the engagements that I've done with clients as well as seeing other MSPs that have been successful as well too, the big things that I feel like actually end up happening from those conversations is you just have an open discussion about their workflows and what they're looking to accomplish and the, you know, AI automation that they would want to build or what outcome that they're looking for. And you often find that it's just a lot to do with their internal business processes, and there's a lot of things that don't even have to relate to AI. So first and foremost, you know, there's, there's a lot of big wins and just having the discussion and not necessarily thinking that, you know, I can't even bring this subject up, right? I think that alone is what's crippling a lot of people, is not having the confidence alone just to say, hey, what are you thinking about with AI today? Maybe you don't have the best solution for it, but in this sense, like, but you can at least open up the conversation and know 100% that you can help that person, right, in that journey, just with fundamentals alone of what you've been doing for years in cybersecurity as an MSP and helping their practice grow through technology. So I think that's one aspect of it. The other, I would say, you know, we talk about AI in general and thinking about, you know, how do you scale that conversation? It's also like nobody's truly an expert, right, today in this sense and thinking about reflecting on what does that mean for you and what types of expertise do you want to get into? You know, what do you want to build your practice around and thinking about narrowing that down, you know, into something central that you can talk about. I'd love to hear from you too, Wes Spencer Spencer, what you've been talking about with MSPs. I'm sure it comes up a lot.

Yeah, I think you're, you're right on all that. It's natural to feel those, those, that imposter syndrome kind of creep in. And this is where, and Brian, I saw you asking about the guide. This is why we wrote the guide. I'm going to bring that QR back up so people can see this. This guide that we just popped, right, there we go, up is a free guide and would love for you to use it, love for you to give feedback. But it's a way to start building the conversation. It's a way for you to start getting into the mechanics of Even like what the commenter just said a second ago, who's using what today? And what does that look like in your environment today? And how are you using it? And what is your appetite for it? And starting to do some interviews with end users that are actually doing things inside of the, the client base and seeing what, what is actually being used today. I think what you'll discover is you start those discussions, being the smart person that you are, you're going to be like, "Wait a second." That's such a great idea. I can actually help them do this and this. I could probably wire this up. I could probably— some automation I can do over here. You'll probably come up with a number of ways that you can help extend this into not just SOP, but also into scalability and the secure and right way to do and all these things. And so I think part of it is just getting past your analysis paralysis of being fearful to open the conversation and just start with the open mindset of, like, can we see what you're doing today? Can I interview some of your folks and see what's happening and how we're using it?

John Yeah, sorry for the backdrop change here, but I hope I didn't miss Nick Cross saying your famous quote that I know you stole from somebody else too. We're all just kind of the blind leading the blind here, right? Like, we're just a step ahead of everybody else. And so I think when I look at this problem and I focus on it with that same mentality, to become one step ahead of your customer as the blind leading the blind, you have to internalize.. And so I think where that analysis paralysis goes away is when you internally focus on your MSP and your business and focus on some things that are universal to everything your clients do. What do you— what do I mean by that? Every one of your clients drafts emails. Every one of your clients has sales. Every one of your clients has marketing. Every one of your clients has marketing. Every one of your clients has invoices. Every one of your clients has like There's so many things that we can look at doing that if we focus on our own business and build our muscle around our own use cases, then when we are just one step ahead of our customer 30 days later after automating one of those processes, we can go to our customer and say, "Hey, I now use Copilot to draft half my emails. How are you doing it?" "Oh, hey, I use this tool to help me with sales deck creation. How are you doing it?" And I think it's really about, um, twofold things. You know, everybody says internalize before externalizing. I think the first reason is so you are just a blind leading the blind. Um, but the second one is the more of those friction points you remove from your MSP is the more capacity you open up for your MSP. And the more capacity you open up for your MSP allows you the ability to become more educated in the use cases around AI. And if you come becomes a bit of a flywheel. And so if you're internalizing first, you're opening up an education gap that you can fill with new knowledge on these AI services so that you can deliver new services to your customer. And so there's two reasons why everybody's saying internalize first. One, so you can be slightly smarter than your customer. I think a lot of us could be more than slightly, but at least slightly one step ahead. And then second, so we open up the operational capacity to deliver a new layer of service. Instead of saying we're going to skip our internal business, we're just going to go help the clients because it's a gold rush right now.

Yeah, yep, that's well said. Go ahead, Nick.

No, it makes total sense.

I mean, I think, you know, a big portion of it too, if you think about these conversations you're having, they might also be, you know, trying to build some AI workflow that's going to make them more inefficient than they actually would if you just clean up a business process, right? And I think even just bringing that to their forefront, it's like you being the advisor, right? And so immediately they value more, even if you don't deliver an AI solution at all, because you're just having this dialogue to say, this may be not the best decision. Maybe we should look at putting energies into this instead, because we talked to this business unit and this is way more inefficient, costing you way more money or way more time. And I think that alone doesn't require you to know anything about AI. AI, right? Necessarily. Uh, John, I think, reposted something the other day on LinkedIn. It was some meme that some guy put out there, or some post that was like, I did all this AI optimization, I spent over $500,000, you know, and I effectively—

I'm probably paraphrasing wrong here, but it was like, I, you know, I solved the $1,000 problem or something like that, right? It was, um, you know, something minuscule that was like counterintuitive.

So yeah, it was the guy who said, um, now I spend $1,500 a month on tokens instead of $500 a month on SaaS. Um, and I think that goes to say, it goes back to the whole point from earlier around the ROI, right? Like, just because we can doesn't mean we should, uh, in a lot of cases. And that's why we have to start with ROI in any of these dialogues. Just because we can doesn't mean we should. And really where if you internalize in your business, kind of just back to my point again, you'll know if you can or should, you'll know if there's value there and there's empathy in that value and there's translation of that empathy in that customer interaction when you talk about that value. And it's no longer, you know, I read a study from Microsoft or I read a study from Forrester or Gartner that, you know, you could save 9 hours per month. It's now my business. "Saved 30 minutes a week in this one friction point. I would love to talk to you about how we did that." Because that's empathy. That's real. It's not just some cold article that you read and quoted just to try to sell them something.

It's, um, it's a weekend.

You know what not to do for your customer next time, at least, I guess, is my answer there.

Yeah, yeah, exactly right. So this kind of brings up— I'm going to bring the slides back up again. John, I know you have done maybe 100 conversations with MSPs around what they're doing with AI, how they see the world around them, all of that. And I want us to zoom in just a bit more into like what kinds of— if John is sitting in the driver's seat as an MSP talking to a client, what are some of the questions you might be asking? That way we can just, if I can say it, steal from you.

Yeah, no, of course. I'm here to help educate. I mean, I'm happy to have that conversation. Conversation? I think there's a few easy questions, right? There's some low-hanging fruit when you're starting to do a workshop with a customer around use case identification. How does data flow through your business? This may be a little too technical for some of your SMBs. You know, I've done, you know, you said I did 100, I had 100 MSPs in 120 days, and I also have now done ride-alongs with VCIOs having the AI dialogue, and I've sat in a construction office for a 30-man construction firm, and I had this conversation with a guy that built his firm from the ground up, and he doesn't want to hear me talk about AI readiness or any of this stuff. He wants to say, I've built my construction firm for the last 30 years, tell me how it's going to make me more money. And you know, you have to just focus on that, like, how do you make money, and then pull the thread from there. How do you make money? Okay, you you know, in this construction conversation, it's, you know, we make bids through RFPs. Okay, how do you do RFPs? Well, we, you know, go out and we talk to some of our vendors and we talk to some of our contractors. We get information, we put in our RFP process. How do you have that interaction? Um, if you just start with the question of how do you make money, you could probably find a lot of opportunity. But I'm going to be like a very high level of warning here. Just because you find opportunity, it doesn't mean you have to strike on that opportunity on that use case where the construction GC guy said, you know, I go out and I submit RFPs, or in a use case where I go out there and I say, well, I send out bids to vendors and I bring the data together. Us technical people jump immediately to this world of, well, I'm going to string up some innate inflows and I'm going to automate this entire thing and I'm going to, you know, why talk to the vendor? We can automate that. And why put together, you know, I could build you RP intelligence platform that's going to take your win rate from 20% to 30%. And like, you jump to this, this nuclear bomb of a solution, and yes, there's an insane amount of value there. There's also an insane amount of cost. And you could also probably really demonstrably change the way that that construction GC works by saying, did you know you can take those RPs when you're done with them and drop them into Copilot and say, what, what could I have done better? Or did you know you could, you know, draft emails to those vendors with data from the, you know, drop the RFP and say, write me an email to a vendor to quote these items. That's going to save you 2 minutes. It touches on an interesting point there. I know I'm kind of going rambling here, but like it touches on an interesting point, which is one, let's not, when we go to our conversations, let's start with where the money is and kind of pull the thread back, but let's not build a nuclear bomb. And also let's not get away from where AI is. In the sense that we still need human-in-the-loop components. And I think that's one of the biggest mistakes I'm seeing in our space right now, where they say, how do you make money? And then they say, great, we'll automate it all. That'll be a quarter million dollars and it'll save you a million dollars. And aren't we all happy? But AI is just probably not ready for game time yet. And B, we are definitely not. I'm saying we as an industry, not including the innovators or the outliers, but we as a industry are not ready for global BPO automation and global transformation. That is a, in my opinion, irresponsible motion right now when there is so much value in just helping them get value. This GC didn't know how to use ChatGPT or Copilot to write emails or do anything. Let's just start with the basics. Can we just, can we keep it simple, stupid? So I kind of went on a little stump speech there, but I think I answered your question, Wes.

I think you did. Yeah. Nick, anything else stand out to you there?

No, I think it's a great point. I think a lot of people do— you'll either get your clients to be in that motion, or you do want to come in and transform their business, right?

Be this hero of, you know, I've completely changed your lead model, your lead funnel, right, by implementing all these different AI tools to do that. And what often find, you know, when you go in there, their data integrity is garbage, right? So that's like, well, we can't do much with this.

If we have this prerequisite, and then that's where it balloons up into this nuclear piece that John's mentioning of like cost is now enormous because in order for us to clean up the data for AI to work okay, now we're looking at a $100,000 bill, right? And it's like that escalates up fast versus like, what do you do every day that takes you 30 minutes to this point? I think those quick wins will instill habits in people and you'll also instill, I think an important point is if you do put them into approved work streams, where they get a positive ROI or intrinsic value back of, hey, I fed this thing this one thing and it got me what I wanted. And it used to take me 5 minutes, it did me 1. It may seem small, but that adds up, you know, and the more that they can emphasize that, I think the better. And targeting those personas, I think is good too, because they'll begin to vocalize it. And then I think that's also an important point while you talk about that. It's like, how can you ignite that at a customer side as an MSP, right? How can you get them if they're not already, to be sharing the wins of how they're using approved, you know, AI workflows, right? Not, I just spun up this cloud bot and it, you know, ran all these workflows for me off in this other siloed environment. It's more of, you know, how can we get this ROI here for what we're doing? Because the average person is, to John's point, going to be very, you know, like their learning curve is going to be huge compared to anybody else too on what they're doing.

And I started pointing all exclamatory because I thought you were going to say something. I think you said it just in different words. Even if I save that VP of sales only 5 minutes and I do it iteratively each month, guess who did it? The MSP did it, not the customer. And so when the customer goes, oh, I really want to do this big AI project, they go, oh, I know who I can call. When I wrote up my 2026 predictions for this year, I said one KPI you better be tracking is customer silence around AI. If they're not talking to you, they're talking to somebody. And so the reason I love the 5-minute win model is because, A, it's momentum-driven. It's not this like massive moonshot and it's just, you could make small iterative improvements, which is one of the benefits of being with a customer for multiple years. But the other thing is when you do these little momentum-driven changes, you're also really, really helping that customer build a level of trust. Trust that you are going to be there to help them. You're no longer the uptime guy every time, and when they really want a big value project, you're going to be the first person they call because they know that you have them on all the other discussions.

Yeah, this, this comes back to, in our world, we software nerds that are on here today, this comes back to Agile engineering, right? If you go and look up Agile, um, what it really is all about is is how do I produce value at every little iterative stage? And the way I've seen Agile sort of explained was like, if I want to build a car, instead of going from zero to car, I might start with a skateboard and then maybe I put a handle on it and steer it like a way to steer it. And then I put on a little motor and then I put on a seat and then I expand it. Every time along the way, it's still a device that moves me from point A to point B and I'm just iteratively improving on it, right? And this is sort of this idea of like, if you're hearing us today, you should be thinking, I can do that. I can definitely do that. You absolutely can. And so I love this idea. What I'm hearing, what I'm distilling down from both of you is a little bit of start simple, start small, where you can do small things with big effect, especially iterative, repetitive solutions. 5 seconds, 5 minutes makes a bigger difference than this huge, huge, huge, big strategy and drive that's prone to failure. That all stands out to me. The other thing that stands out to me too, though, John, if I'm not a student of my business and I'm not spending time interviewing and understanding what they're doing, How am I ever going to know how to introduce any of this? And this gets back to one of the core challenges that, if I can just be a hot take for a minute, I think a lot of MSPs struggle with is they haven't really ever spent the time to do this. And so now they also have the double burden of having to walk into the client's business and say, help me understand what you actually do. And I know it's crazy for me to ask that for the first time, but I kind of feel like I have to.

Yeah, I think we as an industry have been clamoring to get the C-suite at the table and it's right in front of us. It's just right in front of us. We've been wanting to have this business conversation for a long time, or we say we have been at least, and it's sitting right in front of us. If we really take the moment, we can seize it and we can create value for them. I mean, there's one other value you brought up too, Wes. Like you said, we have to be students of the business. I agree there, but I also think there's just a lot of things that every business does that's the same that we can start with as low-touch wins. It doesn't matter who they are. They sell, they write emails, they, all the points I rattled off earlier. And so you could create value in those little low horizontal use cases while being a student of their business. And so it gives you a reason to unlock. And my last— that whole thing is, if you take a macroscape to what I just said and what we just talked, um, if we go back to the nuclear bomb— I don't know, we're just going to name it that for the sake of the argument today— and that massive GCE project, and we implement that I might have just spent 6 to 9 months of my MSP's time building this massive use case for this one business, which my other hot take, that's just custom development with an AI veneer on it. Okay, I won't go down that rabbit hole, but it's just custom software development. Can we all just call a spade a spade? But anyway, if you do that whole thing, like you've moved one customer forward. If you help every one of your customers moving forward and every one of your QBRs to you get 5 minutes back and every single time you meet them, you've just moved 100% of your customers forward. And that's really important because the key thing here that we have is the advantage of the MSP is that we have relationships. And so if I have a multi-year relationship, I can move people 5% at a time every month across my whole base. But if I only move that one client 90% of the way, you better bet the other 99% of my clients are getting phone calls from MSPs offering them something to do. And so that's another really important reason to momentum and not moonshots, is because we're neglecting everybody else by selling that one really big project.

Yep, it's well said. And this, this goes right into the guide itself, right? And check this out, the QR code— I can never point correctly— is right there. It's free, go grab this if you want it. And it deals with exactly this. It really, it helps us start to understand what are some of the normal everyday use cases areas that our people probably are using AI for today. Literally walks your team into this, into asking easy questions to understand what's going on, to start doing this discovery. You don't even have to deploy a tool with this. You can literally just start asking some of these questions and then start to understand some kind of ownership. Are we aware of some of these things? Are we OK with some of these are in use? So this is just a neat guide that can start to walk us through each of these little things step by step. And I just show it because A, it's free, it's here for you, and B, I think it's a really easy way to start getting into the mechanics of what you're talking about, John.

Yeah, yeah.

Heck, I took a photo of it. I want to look at it. I haven't— I didn't— I was never told there was a free AI guide from Empath. I'll sign my credit card.

It's Empath and Cloud Capsule together. It's what happens when you get smart people like Nick Ross involved.

I love it.

So let's change gear a little bit then. So a couple things I think are I think it's also important to talk about, as I bring my slides up, you guys should be able to see them, but I'm working on seeing them myself, is this idea right here is that readiness is more than just signaled interest, right? They may say that they have interest. They may say that we're, you know, interested in handling all of this. But there really is, I think, John, maybe you could talk about this. What are some of those stages that we go through from the moment the client says, "Yeah, I'm definitely interested. Yeah, I think we're using in some ways. Yeah, I'd be interested for you to kind of figure out how we're using it, help us with it," some of that, "I'm very interested in all that." How do we start to walk them through that, all way into, what are those iterative steps as we walk them through that journey of helping them progress in their own AI maturity?

Yeah, I think I said it earlier, right? We start with the AI ROI and we have to calculate what that looks like before we then move into AI enablement. I'm not going to call it readiness, but I get it, we can't change the slides live. From the AI enablement, then you move into the AI AUP and you start talking about What is the acceptable use? And those, those three kind of motions then get kind of married with the technical readiness and you move those forward as things that need to actually be completed and work the jobs need to be done. It's repeatable, it's reusable, it doesn't require rocket science. And the guide that I saw there seems like an absolutely great way to get started with it. And I think, I think that's really the whole key here, right? I'm standing at conference full of MSPs and vendor thought leaders at CCF, everybody I'm talking to has this exact same conversation. They all say, I've spent the last year, I've been ad hoc and experimentation. I'm trying to figure out what it looks like. I think the, the steel thread that needs to get pulled through in every MSP operations today is what is repeatable and what can I do across all of my clients. If you want to be able to do something responsible. And so I hear this as a trend, and I'll make one last statement, right? Like, the same things that we faced when we went from like on-prem to cloud, or the same things that we faced when we went from break-fix to managed, or when I call it from AV to cyber, but we'll call it the risk era, all started with storming before norming. And so I wouldn't be discouraged if you've ad hoc experimented for the last year and you felt like you're storming because that is the calm before the storming or the calm before the storm. That's a bad use of mixing up analogies here, but that is what has to happen before you normalize. And so I'm just gonna reiterate that one more time. Like the thrashing is regular, the thrashing is real, the thrashing is uncomfortable, but the thrashing is ultimately what's gonna help you be able to deliver something repeatable to your customer base. So don't feel discouraged with the thrashing. We all know this is the momentum where we're heading with. Just look at content like what Wes and Nick are putting out there and try to build something repeatable and focus on that this year in '26, is my opinion.

Nick, what are your thoughts on this? I mean, you're a dang Microsoft MVP. You've written courses on Copilot. What are your thoughts when you talk to MSPs about adoption and moving them through this journey?

Yeah, I think that the big thing, you know, John pointed out ROI. Like you're doing a bunch of discovery up front, right? It's almost like you're coming into this wide open without saying, hey, I've got this shiny new package to sell you about AI, right? We brought that up earlier, but it's really leading with this empathy of, you know, we understand a lot of people are getting into AI, we think we could help you, but we want to understand your workflows, how you're thinking about AI today, and how you're currently using it, right? And some people may say, hey, I don't know, but we And I've gotten every business owner to say, "Yeah, we know that our employees are chatting with unapproved workflows like GPT or Gemini or Claude or something like that as part of that." So there's natural empathy that you begin to build because it's like, "Yeah, we're on the same page here." And we get to a lot of yeses based off of that too.

And then from there, you could bring some intelligence to that conversation of, "Hey, we can bring some governance into the organization to help out with this." to make sure that it's secure, but also make you go faster without the, you know, the fear of your client data leaving the organization, things like that. So bringing up real risks and uncovering them, but even just asking the open-ended question, don't make assumptions, right? It's just saying, hey, what fears do you have around this?

Do you have any concerns about your data, right, when it comes to these AI workflows, things like that? We hear this from other companies, you know, in that sense. So it's a lot of back and forth, and that's really just having the conversation and those repetitions, to John's point about, you know, going across your customer base, is where you're going to find a lot of similarities, most likely, in what you're looking for. But if you take all that data back, that'll also help you craft what your package should look like, you know, and how you can leverage your existing competencies, your existing team, to maximize the offer that you're going to then displace down to your customer base.

That should be repeatable. It should be something that you could do with client, it should be backed by a process that you can follow and you can fulfill and you can deliver a great offer, right? And so those fundamental pillars don't change, you know, what we're doing, but we're all dealing with this holistic experiment of like what's going to work best in these client environments. That's not the nuclear project, right, that John's talking about where you could spend half the year and it could still not work for them, um, you know, at the end of the day after you build all that automation in there.

From the Copilot sense, I think it's interesting if you take that angle because you can say, hey, you know, we can immediately start getting into, into a more compliant solution, you know, that leverages your existing data. It's compliant with that.

And by the way, you know, it's aggregated across all of your employees, so there's natural learning that's going to go on with your data, you know, that's not in silos. And so it'll actually get a better ROI, you know, if we start looking at this. And there's asterisks to that, obviously. But, um, you know, it's trying to get them into these approved work streams and getting that trust built up over time as well too.

So I think there's a lot you could do with tooling and technical aspects that's secondary to that. You know, I think that's the whole theme of our channel, right, is moving beyond your tools and getting into these deeper conversations first, um, and then supplementing it with data after the fact, right? Because that's going to show them the raw output and the ROI of which they're either working with you or getting into that, but it doesn't inhibit you.

That's the lowest cost thing you can do is just open up a meeting and have a conversation.

Yeah, it's well said. So as we kind of get ready to close up shop here, there's so much more to talk about that we probably don't have time for, but just some things I want everyone to be thinking about, some areas where you can start to offer value day one, going back to some of this conversation, is think about workshops. I'm going to pull on Dustin Bolander for a minute. I was talking to him over at Clear Guidance, and he does some really cool things around. He's like, I just walk into my clients and actually bill them for these workshops and make money on it. And I show them, hey, here are some of the major AI tools today and here's the differences, here's how we use them. And here's, you know, starts to introduce this. He's like, I'm going to come back again next month and we're going to see how you're starting to use some of this. We're going to get some, some, you know, some, some discovery ourselves and what you're doing with all of this and how you're helping. And he's like, that's so valuable for me because it probably feeds ideas for my other clients too, right? So helping them work through value is repeatable throughout your customer base, or thinking about things like as you— as they move down that adoption journey, to John's point, helping them with some of the acceptable use policy, the enablement around this, and then again, focusing on the high value, right? So I love all that. I want to kind of get past a couple of these slides because I know we're just about out of time. But John, I wanted to query you and see, What do you think about some of these conversation starters? Any of these that ring to you that you like, or you say could be better, or any of the ones that you think are really valuable? Because I do think it's helpful to even understand, even scripting and role-playing, how do I enter into this conversation with some easy questions I can ask the client without me feeling awkward, without making them feel like, "What are you talking about, nerd?" Or maybe they answer in a way I don't know how to handle it. How do, what are some of your favorite favorite actual conversation starters, John?

I think I'll give you a tactic that doesn't require a perfect phrasing. Um, what I look at is this. You mentioned Dustin, for instance. Love that he's running workshops. That's a super repeatable motion and something that we already have in our MSP with a repeatable motion called QBRs. Um, there is absolutely no reason you can't email everyone. Give me a reason you can't justify adding 30-minute 30 minutes to the tail of every one of the QBRs you're already having to run an AI workshop with the team members down there to start the conversation and to start the value creation. You can argue with me that that extra 30 minutes isn't worth it. You know, I want to hear it. First off, I'd be, I would, I have a hard time to be convinced differently. But I think what I'm saying that by is like, you're going into how many QBRs next week? If you're an account manager or a VCIO on this call, how many you have next week? Reach out to 2 of them, 2 of your best clients, or maybe 2 of your worst clients. And say, I wanna do an AI workshop with you at the end of this QBR, an extra 30 minutes. Do you think anybody from your leadership team would wanna jump on? And we're just gonna walk through some of the normal horizontal use cases like Dustin said there, and we're gonna teach you on how we can use different models. And now you're starting that thought leadership discussion. They're gonna look at you on AI. And so instead of having to have a conversation starter, offer that QBR expansion. And quite frankly, that's super repeatable in the prospect funnel. You know, when you're having the conversation, yeah, we're a managed IT provider, but how are you using AI? Would you like us to run your company through a free 30-minute AI workshop? If you can't find 30 minutes in your sales funnel to unlock a big customer like this, then I'd be pretty shocked given the lifecycle or the sales cycles that I remember from my MSP days. So I'd love to hear the tips if you're closing them in less than 30. But I think that that's where it comes down to is like, get, get into the motion of workshops. Like, it's just easy, and people are hungry for the content, and people are hungry for the tailored content. Um, and, and I love webinars like this, but people want that in person. And that's something you as an MSP have an advantage of. You're sitting there serving your local region, so go sit down in the office, put up some slides, and have a conversation. And again, just get out of that imposter syndrome because you're just the blind leading the blind. You're one step ahead of the game. You don't have to be 100 steps ahead of the game, you just need to be one, and then you can learn from there.

Yeah, I think about it like— to piggyback off, I think about it like every person that I've known over the years that's hosted a Microsoft workshop, because we got paid MDF from Microsoft for that, right? It's like, you know, this is so much more entertaining and exciting than a Microsoft workshop, probably, hopefully, to anybody, unless you got your real big Excel nerd at some, some of these companies and you maybe do an Excel workshop, I don't know. But, um, You know, that should draw a much bigger audience, right? They should say, hey, you know, I do want to understand, you know, what's going on in the space a little bit more, but somebody who knows my business already or somebody who's here locally with me. And I think that touch point is also where they'll come back to you again if they say, hey, we've got this AI project we could do. I bet Dustin, you know, would know. I bet Jesse would know, you know, if we talk to him about it.

Well, and I think I'll add one last point just to kind of bring that home. Like I said it earlier, but I flew by it and it's an important one. We as the MSP have multi-year relationships with our customers and that is our advantage. We can do momentum-driven things. And I think if you're not, you're looking for, you know, some key phrases to slip into that conversation. AI transformation isn't a 3-month project. AI transformation is an iterative project that takes time and we are here, we are the MSP with you. We're already in your technology, we're already helping secure your business, and now we just want to help you get better with AI. Nobody else is having that conversation with them because everybody else is trying to sell them a one-off project. And so that's your distinct advantage, is the long game and the existing relationship.

So that's awesome. And one last quick question I want to ask in maybe 15 seconds. Josh asked, hey, should we be having this conversation in our QBR, TBR, or should this be out of band as a one-off? What do y'all think?

I, I doubled down what John mentioned. I think, I think you should, you should definitely be piggybacking it into those conversations. It's a natural touch point that you're already having.

I think you could have even another meeting on top of it, but honestly, it'd be a great place to slot in, right? Um, that's where that conversation should be on the QBR side.

Yeah, I mean, even if you're super tight in a QBR, finding 5 minutes to provide value you at the very tail end and saying, hey, these are things we do. We offer these workshops. We'd really love to run you through them. Your customer, it's no additional cost. Like, I don't know, I'm a big— I'm a sales guy, I know it. But like, I believe in BAMFAM, you know, book a meeting from a meeting. If you're in that meeting, BAMFAM it. Like, if you don't have the time to slip it into the QBR, show them what you can offer and book it for the next call with the leadership team. Um, there's no other way you're going to unlock that value, uh, rather than just sitting through and helping them out.

Yep. I love it. I love it. Well, we are at bingo. So just a couple things as we kind of close shop. John, thank you so much for joining. Some big takeaways that I'm getting out of this are: Clients are already using this. They already have a strategy. It's probably just not documented. It's not tied to value. It's probably not managed. This is your opportunity to bring structure, safety, and soundness and make this, make value a reality. And the ones that are winning are not the ones that are going and buying AI tools. It's the ones who know how to ask the right questions and get in the conversation. As we kind of finish up today, go grab that guide if you would like to. It is completely free. It's a way to start into the conversations with your clients. So as we close shop, I'll leave the QR open so you can go see that as we kind of close shop. But John, just want to say thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a super fun conversation. Anything else you got for us as we close out?

No, I'll say this. Um, you know, thanks for having me on the show. Um, you know, if I'm— this is what I live, breathe, eat, sleep, and do, as you could tell. Um, well, I shared what I could in an hour here, but I've got hours of thoughts on it. So feel free to follow me on LinkedIn if you want to get some content around this problem. I'm talking about it dang near daily. Uh, and reach out if you want to have a conversation, right? I'm happy to have a conversation one-on-one, uh, and talk about this problem. It's a super fascinating time, and it's— this my— this is what I get to wake up and live, breathe, eat, sleep, and do. Uh, so it's super exciting to me.

Absolutely love it. Nick Ross, anything else as we close out?

No, I definitely check out John's LinkedIn. Um, I follow his content and he's got some great guests he brings on too and has a lot of great conversations. So, um, everybody on here, I'd definitely check that out.

Fantastic, man. It's been great. We'll see y'all again. We are going to meet next on April 8th at 1 PM. Mark your calendars. We're going to be talking about why AI won't replace MSPs But MSPs ignoring AI will get replaced. It's going to be super fun. John Harden, thanks for joining. Nick Ross, my friend, as always, thank you guys. Have a wonderful, great rest of your afternoon. Thanks everyone.

Likewise.