AI Won’t Replace MSPs. But MSPs Ignoring AI Will Get Replaced

Communications arrays are aligned. Nobody cares about your stack, bro. It's Nick Ross. What's going on, my friend?

Much for us. It's, uh, another exciting week. How about you, man?

It's been good. Yeah, we've got part of the team out in, um, I think at Robbin Robbins in Dallas, so a quieter office this week and Yeah, life is good. It's good to have the show season back up and being busy again.

Yeah, hoping to— I'll see you guys there, but I'm hoping to see a lot of people here might be on the call too just later this month at the Kasei event, um, that we'll be at as well too. So that should be good.

Yes, I'm excited for that to kick off as well. It's going to be, um, really, really fantastic. Uh, Max, thanks for checking in. Uh, Max is out in, um, South Africa. It's super cool to see him on. Hope you're doing good. Make sure y'all come in and say hello. Let us know where you're coming in from. And this is gonna be a really fun episode today. We're going to be having a really good time chatting through a topic that I think, Nick, is a pretty hot topic and one that really does need to be discussed.

Yeah, I think we got a lot of interest on this one just from the title alone, but certainly a topic that's, you know, coming up in my purview quite a bit just from MSPs reaching out. I was mentioning this kind of as we were prepping to go live here, but, um, you know, the, the AI conversation obviously is, is dominating a lot of the meetings we're having today, and a lot of our focus and attention is going towards that. But there's still a lot of, you know, uh, confusion. There's still a lot of, uh, confidence that needs to be boosted in a lot of these ways. And I think a lot of people are looking to navigate that. So happy to be diving in today too.

Yes, 100%. Yeah. And Soul Hunter, not only do you have the coolest name ever, but yes, this is all recorded. So it's streaming and recorded so you can get back to it. You can share with your teams, all that good stuff, all free, all available. So no worries when you got to drop, you'll be able to jump right back in. Laura, thank you for the intro. It is a banger episode or banger music. Absolutely love it. And then TM Squared checking in from South Florida. I love it. So Nick, let's go ahead and just jump in. I know folks are waiting, and I don't want to keep people waiting anymore at all. So let me kind of flip the screen here and get back into the topic. So what we're gonna be talking about today, and if y'all haven't joined us before, we are a pretty— we don't use a ton of slides in all of this. So we'll show some slides to kind of get you understanding what we're going to talk about, but then we're just going to chat. And so please use the comments. We're checking in on both the YouTube feeds and the LinkedIn. We can see your comments and questions around this. And, Nick, Nick, what got me started on this whole conversation, I was listening to a podcast from Jensen Huang, the CEO over at NVIDIA, and he made this statement maybe a month ago at a conference he was at. He said, you know, he said, "AI is not here to replace jobs." He said, "The people using AI is here to replace the jobs of the people who don't use it." You know, some kind of quote like that. And it really got me onto this train of thought of, we've talked about this on Above the Stack before, that I think a lot of MSPs, there's trepidation in the industry of what's it going to do to us? Is our industry going to survive? Is my job going to survive? And I think a lot of what we're going to talk about today is where we see the industry starting to ebb and flow and shift into. And the reality is that it is something that we have to grasp and hold on to. But also, it's probably not something we got to panic over yet in a sense of like, I talk to MSPs all the time and we're still all at the introductory level of starting to use AI internally, starting to have the conversations externally. And any MSP that's out there, it's like, you know, saying these wild things like, oh, we're 100% AI enabled, every client is in the stack, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Probably just a lot of hyperbole. So there's opportunity, but there's also time for us to kind of build this out correctly. Is that your thoughts as well?

100%. Yeah, I think you can often get in that FOMO mode of thinking you're behind or, you know, I think a lot of MSPs are being asked by their clients. We'd love to hear in the chat, you know, if you guys can validate that, but hear a lot of MSPs that I talk to, their clients are reaching out saying, hey, you know, can I go in and install Claude on my desktop, right? Or some other AI tool. And bringing that to their attention, where there's one aspect of that of which, you know, you're being directly brought into that because they're restricted in some way, like downloading an app, right, on the workstation. But in other cases, they're just doing this, you know, unbeknownst to your purview, right, in a lot of these ways. But for a lot of us, that might feel like, you know, we're behind in nature. You see all these pieces of news and articles that are coming out, even the latest from Anthropic, right, that came out in the past couple of days about their new Mythos model is, is, you know, fascinating, but also can't release it to anyone else.

It's that leading edge.

Yeah, yeah, a lot of hype behind it too, right? But also, you know, pretty concerning in the sense that it's finding all these vulnerabilities in OS and browsers and tons of security considerations to even think about as well there too. But yeah, I'm excited to unpack this topic as well too because I know a lot of you out there might be feeling that, that FOMO, or, you know, just trying to understand how to get started. And maybe, you know, you feel like you haven't been started at all. So we're going to unpack a lot of that today.

We are. And I saw a bunch of people there that way just scanned the QR code. We'll get to that later. But we got a free giveaway. We try to every single episode have something we can give to you. So we've got an AI discussion guide that we used on the last episode. It's really, really good and got some good feedback on that. So grab that at any point through the episode if you would like to. So yeah, just if you're kind of new with us, I'm Wes Spencer. I'm with Nick Ross. I'm with Empath. Nick is with Cloud Capsule. And this is not about either of our companies. It's just about both of us really kind of being passionate about helping MSPs go above the stack. It's— tools are great, but really, at the end of the day, it's our people that make the difference. And how do we continue to grow as an MSP and as an industry? We grow together, right? And so that's what this, this entire show is all about. We found ourselves in the series, really all around AI. So there is, as I mentioned, the QR if you want it. It'll be up throughout the entire episode if you want to grab that customer, that Readiness Conversation Worksheet. We introduced it when we had John Harden on. That was a great episode. And that's really kind of led into what we're going to be talking about today. So it's all there for you. Absolutely free. Just scan that and happy for you to get it. So let's start with this, Nick. I'd love for us just to talk about how AI is and isn't really changing the game for us, right? One of the ways that I think we need to understand, we need to stop treating AI like it's a tool, Right? We need to stop looking at it like it's Claude Code, like it's lovable, like it's ChatGPT, whatever it is. We need to start thinking about a capability-first thinking. In other words, what are we trying to do? What are we trying to solve? What are we trying to accomplish both for ourselves as an MSP and for our client? And then starting to look at AI from that lens rather than just a tool that I pull off the shelf that I then try to sell to somebody, give to them. Is that kind of how you see the world too?

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think a lot of us, and certainly I have been susceptible to this as well too, in the sense of you can waste a lot of energy, you know, trying to onboard, you know, 10 AI tools that you think are going to solve your problems or they have some hype behind them that you want to institute. And really you just waste up a bunch of energy and don't really get much accomplished in the sense of being more productive. I think many of us could probably relate to that out there. I've certainly gone down rabbit holes of spending hours trying to build an AI workflow automation., and then, you know, it has holes over and over that I have to keep patching and I end up spending more time than if I just went and did the thing. Um, so there's a lot there that, you know, um, I think contributes to that. But certainly when we zoom out, um, and thinking about this holistic cyber strategy or, you know, AI strategy behind that, it, it's definitely something that requires a lot more planning. Um, you know, without this necessarily pressure of saying like, I'm, I'm behind because I'm planning more, right? Or anything like that.

Yeah, exactly right. And so I hope for folks today, as we jump into this, we're speaking a language that resonates with you in the sense of there is a lot of hype, there's a lot of hyperbole that's out there, which turns into a lot of concern. I look at this kind of like you said, Nick, I look at this as opportunity. Anytime you see hyperbole, like I used to do a ton of, I was really big into crypto, still am. I love following all of it. There's, you don't have a world that has more hyperbole and, you know, built-up suspense around it than the crypto universe, right? And I look at that as it's actually a net positive because it means people are curious, people are worried, people are concerned, people wanna know what they should and shouldn't be doing with it. None of that's bad. That's opportunity for us to speak into those questions and be the sage. You know, if you follow the StoryBrand, you know, type of marketing, it's this idea of like we are as MSPs not supposed to be the one with all the answers. We're the sage and the guide, right? We're the Yoda, we're the Dumbledore, we're the Gandalf in those conversations, helping the hero in their journey along the way. And that's really what a lot of this should be. And so absolutely love that. And one of the things I think is just a, like a reality we've got to learn to accept is this, is that clients are already, they're looking for guidance for how to use AI. The question is, are they looking to you for guidance? And this is the first question I want to get back from chat. If you guys will give us some feedback in chat, there's a whole bunch of y'all on, and tell us, because I want to highlight some of it. Are your clients asking you, about AI usage? Are they asking you about how it works? Are they at— or are you having to go and open the conversation? Because one of the things we saw with John Harden last month was that they're already using it. The data speaks quite significantly. They're already using it. The question is, are they bringing you into that conversation? Right? Because we have to understand, if we're not getting into that conversation, then we're not being seen as relevant by the client in the conversation itself around AI. That's not the end of the world. It just means we have to learn how to get ourselves into it. Nick, any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think, you know, if you think about it just in general, like there's a psychological element too that we all feel behind this and that they're feeling as well too in the sense of, you know, they're getting inundated with all this information, right, about how these AI tools are making, you know, these businesses way more performant. Or, you know, there's fear obviously behind it of I might lose my job to AI or things like that that they could be feeling. But there's also FOMO of, my competitors using AI and they're going to wipe us off the map if we don't start using it ourselves as well too. And there's a lot of that that's, I think, misguided. But people are seeing the macroeconomic news too of massive layoffs and people leveraging these tools but overhyping it in the sense of what they're doing. I built a whole marketing team and it replaced 3 employees and I'm only spending $1,000 a month, right? And, and if you really unpack those things, like, I have never seen actually, you know, the use case of it driving businesses forward in a positive manner. And even last year, you know, like, there was a controversial, like, MIT post about this interview that they did with all these business leaders, and it was basically like 95% of them said that all their AI projects failed, um, which is another big reason, uh, that, you know, that you as an MSP would want to be there to guide the customer through that, you know, uncertainty, the fear, the doubt, but also aligning to projects that really give them ROI, right? And don't create unrealistic expectations because to your point, they are already using those tools and they are going to be connecting their data to those tools. You have to make that assumption today. And I've been working with a lot of MSPs lately just on showing them that with Microsoft tooling, you know, just because it has native connectors there, I can see generative AI apps on the network, right? As an example.. And I can point out to them, you know, quickly like, hey, they're using Claude, they're using, you know, ChatGPT. You're not managing that, probably not a corporate account. You know, so there's a lot of risk going on there too, but you want to come in and kind of help them along that journey as well.

Yeah, exactly right. Bunch of comments have come in. First of all, just super quickly, Jason Hall on the empath question, just reach out to our team, send them a message in chat on the app and ask them that question and they'll be happy to get with you on it. No worries. Thanks for asking. Max, I love what Max is is saying here. So Max is saying, "A mixture of some of us are already, some are asking us already, some we're going to," right? That's great feedback and completely agree. And this one I think is good. "I'm finding governance conversations piss off clients, and I feel more worried for their data than they are," right? Because in other words, maybe to retranslate that a little bit, like they look at some of that, like, "What are you talking about? I just want to use it. I just want to, all you're doing as an MSP is getting in my way." And And please don't hear me saying this. Just hear me repeating what clients often think if we're not careful. I'm not picking on Max at all because Max is awesome. But if we're not careful, clients will treat all of this conversation as every time I want to do something as a client, my MSP gets in the way. My MSP jumps in and they're like, no, we can't do it that way. We gotta do it this way. Or why do you want to do that? Or you gotta pay me money to make this thing happen. And it frustrates them if we're not careful, because we're not walking into the, we're really walking into the conversation with, as a friend of mine puts it, speed bumps we put up along the ways rather than guardrails coming into the conversation. In other words, we're trying to tell them how they can't do it and why they shouldn't do it this way, whatever, instead of engaging with them to say things like, "Well, tell me more about what you're wanting to accomplish. Let me understand and learn more about how that's working. What are you doing today?" And then eventually saying, "How do we get to a plan where we can do this in the right, safe way, but still accomplish everything that you need to do? So how do we put the guardrails up, you know, to keep you from careening off the cliff, but not speed bumps that slow you down?" And I know I'm speaking philosophically, and we got to translate that back into like the how, which we're going to do that some today. But I think that's really a big component of all of it. Mark checking in as well. And he's saying, you know, our clients sometimes ask for AI usage guidance, but only the ones that are higher in maturity and score and have a strong relationship developed with us. They don't see the technology as an asset, or if we have more of a break-fix relationship with them, they typically don't ask. And I think that's— Nick, I'm curious what you think about that. I think that's probably a a fairly common reply back from a lot of clients, I think.

Yeah, 100%. I think, you know, if you haven't already established this client engagement model where they're treating you as more of like a board-level member of their team versus we just reach out to them when we have a break-fix issue, things like that, they're likely not going to talk about that. And there's some of them that are going to be laggards, obviously, for adoption that are typically lower mom-and-pop type shops. That you might manage today too, that have a lot of uncertainty, fear, and doubt that leads to procrastination, like some of us also have today too with that. But I think, you know, ultimately that's why we mentioned this on the last call as well. It's like, hey, we want to be proactive in those conversations we're having. But to your point, Wes, it's leading with curiosity truly, right? It's saying, hey, how are you looking at this today? Not— John, on the last episode, John Harden, you know, mentioned something that actually stuck with me quite well, which was around he doesn't like the term AI readiness. He likes to use AI enablement or something else that kind of dismisses this parent-child type of connotation that that can provide. And to your point, Max, that's probably why you're getting, you know, some of that feedback. It's like you're coming in trying to disrupt their workflows or saying, to your point, Wes, like speed bumps, right? As part of that versus thinking about, you know, how can we enable you to use this and I'm going to help you do it, but I'm also going to help you do it safely. Securely, and, you know, we'll get you to where you want to be. But there's other parts of this that, you know, we can be compliant on as well too.

Yep, that, that's exactly right. A couple other comments, then we'll get back into a little bit more of the content today. Uh, Keegan, I love Keegan, he's a great guy. Thanks for checking in with us today. Now more than ever, it's prime time to position yourself as an SME. And there's a lot to be said about that SME discussion of like, we as MSPs don't feel like I'm qualified to be the subject matter expert. Um, but to steal from my good friend David Powell over at LionGuard, um, and I know he's stolen this quote from others, but in the land In a land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. So congratulations, you're the expert, because the best your client knows how to do is open up ChatGPT and type into it. So the fact that you know much more about this makes you the expert. And if you're not the expert, and that's the extent of what you need to know, well, then the onus is on you to grow and to learn. So really love that. But now is the time to position. I completely agree. And Melissa, Melissa, good to see you on as well. Melissa is an awesome human being. "Tell me more" is such a great phrase for better conversation. Completely agree. And you'll hear me saying that often as well. Really agree with Melissa there. It's a great thing to say. Oh my goodness. And I like that one, "Fist my bump." So Max, I am a huge, huge, huge, huge fan of Project Hail Mary and anything written by Andy Weir. I read the book twice. I went and saw the movie opening night and then the second night. I'm just that much of a nerd. So I get that reference. And what a great book and movie. Have you seen it, Nick?

I have not, no. So that's good to know.

Bro, you gotta go. Yeah, the movie is good. It does justice to the book, but the book is always better, of course. So fist bump. If you don't know what we're talking about, then too bad.

All right, cool.

Let's jump on a little bit more here. And let me bring those slides back up, because I think one of the other things we want to talk about too is just looking at AI as a signal in the market, right? So some— and it's a loud signal in the market. Here's what we mean by this is that is we're asking about AI because we don't want to be left behind, right? You said this earlier, Nick, is that so many MSPs have this fear because we've been told this, we've been force-fed this, that if I don't figure out how to have a full AI enablement, you know, within the next, you know, 30 days to 90 days, I'm irrelevant as an MSP. It's like, timeout. No, you have time here for this. It doesn't mean that it's not important, but it does mean that you don't have to have this fear factor that drives you. You should have this, how do we start to really introduce this correctly? And I had this conversation with a whole bunch of MSPs, actually today, one that's over $5 million, one that's over $20 million. So just kind of give you some good sizes of these MSPs. And both, and then another one I think is around $10 million. All three of them said, I talked to MSPs myself, Wes Spencer, and none of them are fully in what's being sort of prognosticated by us vendors and being hyped up by the Sams of the world, right? So we have time to do this. But what we really need to do is figure out what we should be investing in and what we should not be investing in and not falling victim to the fear. Nick, I know you're super involved just as a Microsoft MVP, you know, in the Microsoft world. Tell me more about your thoughts around all of this. And I'd even love to hear a little bit of your thoughts on what's happening in the Microsoft ecosystem around AI and some of the hype and what MSPs should and shouldn't be focused on.

Yeah, I think, you know, obviously Microsoft is trying to shove Copilot down everybody's throat as much as they can from, you know, a marketing perspective. And physically on our, you know, devices now with keys that even are Copilot and trying to inject that into our everyday lives. But I think a lot of us have tried to go in and, you know, implement Copilot and say like, hey, this is something that you can use that's more of a compliant workflow, but it's underperformed, you know, from an ROI standpoint. It's not very proactive. It's very much like you have to measure adoption. And they've seen really low adoption of the product as well, too, as an example of that. But all that to say is, you know, when I talk to a lot of MSPs about implementing it, Copilot's usually the default just because it's baked into existing licensing. But, you know, trying to go at that with this connotation of like, we're just going to give you Copilot licensing without any enablement behind that, without any, you know, help and training, without any holistic AI practice, to your point earlier, right, is also leading to them not adopting the product and thinking like, I've got to go use these other outside tools to get what I need done. And that's when they go to Claude and they say, wow, this thing answered this thing way better than Copilot ever did. I'm going to keep using my personal email address and, and going and do that. So I'm seeing that proliferate. And that's why MSPs are now asking me like, hey, can you give us some guidance on like hardening, you know, for Claude and for ChatGPT and these other tools and some structure that we can give? And usually, you know, when I talk to MSPs about that, it's like, hey, I think to our point, we don't want to cut you off at the legs and say, Copilot's it, this is all we're doing. We need to have the structured conversation of why they're using that and what value they're getting out of those tools first, and then build a compliant workflow around that as well too. And I think there's certainly a lot of risk in any tool that you're looking at, right? But that goes back to this holistic strategy and you're guiding them, you know, through these conversations. I'd much rather have us set up a, workspace for something like cloud, right, as an example that's compliant and towards the business versus like blocking their access to that website, right? Because they'll find a way, they'll maneuver around in a way that's even more uncompliant of what you're thinking in that regard. But a lot of these things with Microsoft specifically is this, you know, a lot of people have tried this AI readiness talk track and even, you know, we had that, you know, previously as well too. And I think it's evolving. Over time because even that is, is, you know, to our point here, making clients very defensive, right? I don't need to be AI-ready to get, get going in this. Like, our competitors are already using it. They're already, you know, building more than we are as part of this as well too. So there's a lot there. I see John's in the chat again here too, so it's good to, good to have him back on. Um, but definitely use that line now in a lot of these, uh, user groups and, and other, you know, talks that I've done, and it's resonated a ton with not only MSPs but direct consumers as well too.

Yep, yep. So, and I, we've always promised ourselves we will engage the audience on anything you ask. So here's a great question that came in from Max, and I'm going to turn this one over to you because you know far more about this than I do, but do you think co-work and Copilot is going to change things?

I would say, you know, transparently, I've generally been, you know, pessimistic around Copilot just because of how it's has performed, you know, up to this point in time, comparatively speaking. And certainly, you know, I'm coming at it from the phase, and a lot of MSPs are too, as like a power user, right? We're very technical in nature. We're expecting technology to do things. Your average user at a bank or, you know, an accountant or something like that isn't necessarily expecting this complete AI automation workflow in the back of their business. They're fascinated if it could just draft an email for them, right? In a lot of these cases, you can't forget the basics. And John brought that up on our last call as well too, to versus these like nuclear projects for AI. But with Cowork specifically, I would say it's probably the best, uh, solution that I've seen come from Microsoft to this point in time. Like, it actually does what you would expect, which is analyzes your email in depth, summarizes it, you know, prioritizes lists, can go out and take actions, can do things on your behalf. And it has got a ton of bugs still, to be fair, right? I've tested it extensively, But it's also, you know, got Anthropic models, like Microsoft's being more open with their models at this point as well too. But again, it's just one solution, right? And that's just one thing that you could begin to pitch. But I think you have to have client-specific use cases that they can go in and perceive value from that. And that to me is a quick win that you could get with them because it's more chat-based, it's leveraging their work data, things like that, you know, provide strategic value. In that sense. But it overall, back to our top-level point, is not a holistic strategy, right, in that sense as well too. So you want to try to drive those things that, that lead to those business outcomes. And that might just be personal productivity in some ways, but I think the more that you can get the business to interact with each other and those individual users, the higher adoption obviously that you're going to get too.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's well said. And we do need to be paying attention to everything Microsoft is doing because it is so baked into our ecosystem. And we'll talk about tools here in just a second. It's actually a perfect segue. Also, Michael Ramage, Dr. Ramage, check in. I'm excited to see him here in a couple weeks. I've got a talk over at Murray State, go Racers, in a couple weeks, do the keynote over there on exactly this topic of what AI is doing. I think students need to hear this as well, right? But he's right that sometimes usually the truth is somewhere in the middle versus the extremes. It's well said. Keegan, love this as well. It's the equivalent of Apple forcing us all to listen to that one YouTube YouTube album. I remember that came out. I'm like, it's just included? Like, yes. Yeah. So let's, let's shift topics. Let me bring my screen back up. We're actually just kind of segue into this, this conversation around the stack itself. Like one of the, I think, I don't want to say bitter realities that we've got to accept, but one of the truths that I think we need to accept is that most MSPs today still overthink the value of their tools. And I'm going to give, maybe some people are gonna say this is a hot take, but I think it's reality, is that we for years and years and years have thought as MSPs our value comes from the stack that we offer. Oh, they can't get this from anyone else other than an MSP. Well, guess what? Three guys down the street are offering the same thing, right? And these days we can buy tools from anywhere, and I don't really need an MSP to get access to tools to do my job. And so I think one of the foundational shifts that's starting to happen in the industry for all of us. And I got in a little hot water for making a post on this a while back, Nick, but, and I was speaking myself a little hyperbole just to buzz people up into this conversation. But I think the foundations are beginning to change under us. And as MSPs, it's less about us coming in with a stack that we offer that's unique to us and more about how do we help come in and solve problems. It's forcing MSPs to become a whole bunch more consultive in nature, and forcing them to understand, how do I solve a problem for my client that positions me as the expert to help them either get out of that hot water or increase margins or be enabled in a better way or have growth and scale without having to keep the same headcount or have a transition in ownership of the company from the dad to the daughter, and now we're just much more modernized. I mean, you can go on and on with these examples. But like, This is the future of where I think MSPs will find their success, not just offering tools off the shelf that they sort of say, well, they're protected, you only get them from me. And I think if we come at AI from that decision criteria, we're going to be met with resistance because the clients are like, time out, hold on, nerd. I don't need you for this. I'm happy with ChatGPT and Claude on my own. Thank you very much. You haven't earned the right into this conversation with me.

Yep. Yeah. And I think that's really prevalent too with, you know, the technical skill gap has definitely been reduced by AI. We can all, I think, agree to that. And also the software itself, you know, it's going to start to normalize. Like when I think about this, I think about it with our own business too, just because we're a software company. It's thinking like our moat is no longer who can build the best product the fastest because we all have the same access to this technology now that can help us accelerate at a very rapid pace. So really the moat shifts back to your brand. And I would say that's the same for the MSP as well too. And to your point on that engagement model, it's really around how am I positioning myself, you know, to be that trusted advisor that they'll want to work with me on this guided journey where I'm enabling them. I'm not, you know, restricting them in a lot of ways, but I'm giving them advice just like a financial advisor would on investments. When you think about that, just because you're not going to advise them to go go get all these penny stocks, right? Um, as part of that, you're going to take them down a journey of a portfolio, and they'll have their influence of what they want to do or how aggressive that they want to be. But you're still going to be that guiding, you know, factor as part of that relationship as well too.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. So I just— what I, what I would do to follow up with this conversation, have an honest conversation with everyone at your MSP. Get folks together and say, how are we actually positioning this today? What are our clients asking for when it comes to all this? Are we even asking the right questions? What do, what do our, whatever you call those, QBR technology strategy cadence calls, what does that look like with the client? What are they saying? What are we asking them? Because I think we need to get grips on, we've got to standardize our own language internally to be able to adopt correct thinking and correct phrasing with our clients. And we've got to start teaching and learning how to jump in these conversations. And please do not panic. If you're listening to this, you're like, well, I don't know how to be consultive. Melissa already showed you in chat— I'm gonna scroll way back up— which she used a very simple— I'm gonna find it here somewhere— but she said, it's very simple. Just literally say, "Tell me more." OK, I can't find it. We got too much chat going on. But somewhere in there, Melissa was like, just say the words, "Tell me more about that." Take great notes. Have an AI notetaker with you if you need to. And then come back with your team and start thinking about a plan to address. Because I think what a lot of this comes down to is we typically overthink these types of conversations. At the end of the day, the client just has a problem; they want it fixed. And we should be able to think through how can we be involved in that strategy? And it doesn't always come from a tool that we pluck off the shelf and put in front of them. I think that's going to happen less and less and less. And so what we have to be able to do is help them solve problems at the core of what we're offering.

Yep. Yep.

100%. Cool. So next thing is, you know, I actually think this makes us more important. So one of the questions I think people ask all the time Well, is AI going to replace my job? Right? We stole that quote from Jensen and used that sort of as the title today. No, it's, I really don't think so. Now, AI should for sure make us more efficient and things. I mean, I can give examples after examples of how we're using it internally at Empath. I'll give you one simple example, just so that we're not all pie in the sky. We've been thinking through, like, how do we start, we have all these transcripts from all these enormous amounts of course data that we're building. So we at Empath, we make all these courses. Well, we are thinking through, like, what about, what does language translation look like? And in the old days, well, what you do is you literally just rip it, and you just use a translator, and off you go. But that doesn't work out very well because of sometimes nuances in how language works. Even in our industry, all the acronyms that we use, how we capitalize certain things, like, there's just a lot in a very technical world. And so we actually used AI to build out a huge sort of like rubric or a guide that really kind of helps us understand what is the language syntax and— there's a word I'm looking for, not hierarchy, but there's a word I'm looking for there, it's not coming to me— but how do we build out what that should look like that would translate into any language? And so we used AI to build all that. It was immensely helpful for us to speed up that process of language translation in other languages to make sure it's crisp and comes across cleanly and correctly, not just the phraseology, but acronyms, on and on and on. So just one example example, right? But I think what this is doing for us is this is helping us solve the technicality layer way easier, but it still requires a human in the loop to be able to make sense of things, to guide things, to correctly communicate things. And so I, what I want folks to understand and know from this conversation is it's not making you irrelevant. You just got to learn how to get into the conversations correctly and know that your, your value as a human in the loop is critically important. Important.

And I think, yeah, to piggyback off that, I think, you know, the, the psychology behind it— the more that this continues to be shoved, you know, in our faces and down our throats, in the sense of like, how many, you know, emails do you get now that are AI-generated? How many LinkedIn messages do you get a week now that are AI-generated? And how inauthentic do those feel, right? I think you, you and Alex always call those out, and I think it's always funny to watch because it's, you know, picking on how bad these things are. Are, right? In the sense of how disconnected it feels to get a message like that that has nothing to do with you or your profession or, you know, not even close to, you know, anchoring into me even wanting to reply in that particular case. And I think everybody's going to start feeling that in various aspects of life, but also in the work, you know, immensely, you know, from the basics of, you know, sales enrichment to, you know, sales enablement, things like that that you normally would do. As part of it. So I think the psychological factor of having this human element and these human relationships being super valuable, and you kind of transcending this previous message a lot of people have, or MSPs have, around our number one thing we do is customer service. I hear that a ton from MSPs, and it's really, you know, highlighting, you know, that in a further motion of really proving that out with the relationships that you have, but also being that trusted advisor for them to navigate the noise. Of all these tools coming to them or understand, you know, and help them guide them into, well, you know, your competitors might be using AI this way, but it doesn't mean they're doing it better than you, right? At this point in time, they might just be promoting things and giving nice marketing behind it, but I don't understand their ROI at this point in time too. So I think that trustworthiness that you already have as an MSP is going to be magnified just because of, you know, the elements that we're going to be dealing with, where authenticity is going to be, you know, a big factor into who I want to go work with. And that trust factor as well too. It's like, I think about like when WebMD came out from a perspective of medicine, right? It's like a lot of people then had access to what they thought was, you know, much more, you know, medical information and, you know, had access to see, like, put in their symptoms and see results. But it didn't make them, you know, not want to still go to the doctor. Factor, right, in those cases as well too. It's like, I still want to have this element of validation as part of this. And I think we'll see the same thing here too with technology that they're looking at.

Yeah, exactly right. And I'm working on this keynote I mentioned for Murray State, and a couple little data points I think are really interesting around this. One is there's something called Jevons' paradox, or Jevons' paradox. Go look that up if you haven't seen it before. I didn't— I wasn't anticipating this, otherwise I built a slide on it. But basically it's this, is this idea of anytime we introduce new capabilities, new automation into a marketplace, it actually increases and scales up the usage and the demand for that rather than removing the demand. And that sounds crazy, which is why it's a paradox, right? But it's this idea of— and you can take so many examples, right? You take the example of when electricity was introduced into the world en masse, especially in America. And now all of a sudden, these hard manually tasks are now done by machines and machine automation, and it opens up the ability to have factories. It actually increased the need for goods and services, not reduced, right? And there's a lot of examples of this. Another really great example of this is A lot of people were saying, well, with machine vision, computer vision, and AI and automation, there's no need for radiologists anymore. We will have no need for that because machines can do all of the X-rays and interpret it all that correctly. Well, come to find out, with the introduction of all of those things, radiology is actually— all of those things are true in terms of it's way more automated than ever before, way faster, way cleaner, way better. But guess what's happened? It actually has increased the need of radiology. Radiology. The number of radiology hirings of radiology techs, radiologists, the doctor themselves has actually gone up because of the access, the speed, the capability has actually made more demand. And so I think when we come back to this human conversation, I'm not— don't hear us saying like every single possible job out there is going to see an increase in demand. There will be some jobs that will be replaced, but what it will do and what it should do is what always happens when technology comes out is it unlocks more capability. Right? That's really what should be happening. And so our job as an MSP is to sense that and to know it's a wave coming towards us that we're not going to be able to, like, I don't surf very much. I've surfed a few times in my life. One of the things I've learned is I can't beat the wave. Right? So I either have to swim over it or I have to ride that wave. Those are my only two options. And I think that's how we have to look at what's happening in front of us. It can't stop it. And so it's, what it's doing is it's making our people more important than ever before, because humans have to be in the loop, as you said, and where we're going is, it can't just be just technology in a vacuum. It's never been that way. Right? So the real reality is this, Nick, and I want you to talk about this, is this competitive landscape means that if we're not careful about this, that someone else will come alongside and modernize our client instead of us. And if we're just having the technology conversation, selling tools off the shelf to them under a managed service, and we make all your problems go away, and you don't have to talk to us, well, we're opening ourselves up to a lot of risk.

Yeah, I think it kind of comes full circle too with this kind of overcorrection that a lot of us are tending to navigate in towards because it feels natural. And when I say that, I mean, you know, you're coming in and saying we need to lock down AI, right? We see a lot of exposure and it's, it's fair for you to do that, right? You're trying to be the trusted advisor and say, hey, I see a lot of risk with your data and I see it all the time, right, with SMBs because they haven't had data governance. Their repositories are a mess. Yes, Copilot could surface up anything to them at any time. And obviously there's not restrictions on like a DLP perspective of them copying, pasting company data or documents into these other third-party AI tools with no governance in mind. So it's coming from a place of, hey, I really want to help and I know how to help here. But what they're going to take it is, is that parent-child dynamic as part of that. But effectively, you know, when you're going into those conversations, if you're doing that and also not helping them enable the parts of the business that they want from a productivity standpoint or just getting them on track with a holistic strategy, then there is going to be somebody else who will come by and say, "Hey, I do this and I can enable you to do these productivity things." And they'll say, "Great, let's go ahead and do that," or they'll seek that out. And then that same person could be an MSP, could be another provider that says, "Oh, I can also do all this other stuff too that you've got from your other provider." water, let's consolidate down. So there's that risk in that sense. And that's not to say that I want to put that out there to push fear into anybody about the whole FOMO and I've got to act now and do all these things, but it's being realistic, you know, with the concern and risk that there is out there, but also starting to create this bridge of the conversation. Honestly, I think it can really as easily start with just having that open conversation with, with your clients, because because it, it does allow them to know where your positioning is on this, but also that you are a resource that they can ask and help, um, you know, as they go through this as well too. And I think we talked about this with John a little bit, but what I would love is, you know, the fact that if I talk to all my customers, I've got this immense amount of data that I can go work with as well too that says we've got a lot of similarities here across our clients and what they want, or they're all facing the same pain point because they're in this regulatory field. You could find patterns, I, I think, no matter what in those realms. And that'll help you develop your initial offer without going, you know, overboard in the sense of like, we're gonna, you know, do this massive project for you. And that was John's point too last week around spending all these hours on just one client versus trying to get, you know, a lot of your clients at their first step, right? So they, they start working with you, you give them quick wins, there's some collaboration going on, but that, that sets you up much more for expansion, but it also lets them know, I'm going to go talk to, you know, our MSP about this, versus thinking about like putting a job rec out or, you know, trying to seek outside vendors or firms to come in and, you know, be an AI tool for me. Because there's a ton of AI agencies popping up, right, that are what I would consider to be like crazy amounts of risk, because these are kids that don't know what they're doing, right? Like they just, they saw some videos on YouTube, surely not I can build an end-to-end workflow, right? And they come in, they don't know much about the data governance side, and so, you know, but clients will see that and say like, they're getting me where I want to go from a productivity realm, and they'll be attracted to that without understanding the risk. So that's where we got to play this fine balance, but I think just having the conversation is really the best step first.

Yep, that's exactly right. So let's move on just a little bit here. Is so we've kind of introduced this whole like, please do not hear us adding into the fear factory of your jobs are gone, you know, all that kind of stuff. But do hear us with the urgency that at the end of the day, the old ways will become more and more and more vulnerable, right? So I don't want to say that we're like at MSP 3.0. I'm not using any kind of language like that. Oh, by the way, the word I was looking for before, Nick, was taxonomy. It's just the law. It just lost on me. So I don't want to use the taxonomy of like MSP 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, anything like that, right? I just want to say this is, again, I'm just going to say it before: if you are in this world of, "I've built my moat around the, the, the tools that I sell, and I try to hide the tool names that no one could go and find them, and my whole pitch, my whole value proposition is I make your IT problems go away so you never have to talk to me," that is not going to be relevant into the future. It's just not. And so that is what we need to think about. That those are the things that are changing and the operations model is beginning to change. We have time to get ready for it, right? But how do we start thinking through the fact that AI is not really going to kill the MSP model, it's just going to expose stale value props? So for me, one of those big stale value props I mentioned was just that idea of, hey, you know, I make your problems go away, so don't talk to me. May have been valuable a long time ago and people are like, shut up, nerd, I just need you to handle my IT junk so I can go back to to being a lawyer or a doctor or a CPA or whatever it is. OK. But today's day and age, they need more. They're more reliant on technology, not less. And they do, they are curious about, "Wait, what do you mean I could use some new things to make myself more efficient? What do you mean that we could actually map the flows in the day-to-day usage of our employees and how they're using technology and find better ways to do this and be more efficient?" I'm interested in that. Right? I've got an MSP, and I think, Nick, one of these days, we got to bring him on. I won't say his name until I get confirmation, but I showed him these slides and he's like, this is awesome. He's like, this is exactly it. This is what MSPs need to hear. I'm like, well, you want to come and join us? And he's busy at a conference today. But, um, it's this idea of you can literally walk into a client with the tell me more, show me more, what are you doing with these kind of conversations, and start learn from them what they're doing, and then find ways to help them operationalize, standardize, scale, and secure it correctly. And that's really what all this comes down to, I think.

Yeah, and I think there's a lot of like the, the thing that's holding a lot of people back, I think, is that confidence level of, hey, I'm— they're gonna ask me questions I don't know how to answer. But I think we have to zoom back out and think about this holistically, right, about how fast the pace of this technology is moving and how this is— to your point, you know, you've got one eye in the sea of blind people. I'm misquoting that, but, um, you know, it's, it's effectively, you know, you're coming in in, you already know their technology, and you know the technology way better than they do, you know, in 99% of those use cases as well. And this gives you an opportunity to learn more about their business, I think, is the other powerful component of this that probably you didn't get into before or you didn't understand before. So it's going to unlock a lot of levers, in my opinion, you know, when you do that. All the engagements that I've done personally that have been consulting in nature, when I've gone in to do data governance or talk about AI implementation, we've gotten into the weeds enough where I know a ton about their business by the time that engagement's over. And I know there's another opportunity that I could work with them on that's actually gonna help them a ton too, but it's also gonna be business for me. So it's a win-win and you get this perspective of, of just kind of revisiting that well, but also understanding that you've really met their needs by understanding the workflows or departmental gaps or, you know, business processes that you really didn't fully get into before because you're just saying, hey, I've deployed my stack, you know, you're good to go, right, as part of this.

Yeah, that's right. So I, again, we encourage you, think about how you are operationalizing today as an MSP and where you feel like your value proposition is, and then express it with data points to show it and just assess yourself, right? And another thing I think is important too is that AI really is what it's doing is it's lowering the floor, not the ceiling. And here's what we mean by this. A lot of, in the old days, it used to be that the technology that we provided was very complex. Like, maybe, man, I remember when I was a network admin at a university and I remember having to build this very complex set of scripts that would set up the file and folder structure for every single class in our big file store for architectural classes and all these things we had to support. Support, right? And it was a significant amount of work because they had to build out the class structure, the folder structure, every student needed a folder, shares and rights had to be set up correctly. It was very complex. You could not just have anybody go create a script to do this. It was a lot of work, right? Well, today what has happened is we now have the ability, we call this Vibe Coding for, for dummies, or like my engineers would call it AI-assisted engineering, where we're using AI to actually drive the capabilities much faster. It helps us from a quality assurance perspective. It helps in every single way. And what it's doing is it's lowering the floor, is a good way to think about this. It lets us prototype faster than ever before. But what that does not mean is that it removes the need for the knowledge of what we're trying to accomplish, how and why and when and where and what the strategy is. And so the ceiling is where it's always been in terms of, we need to have capable people in the conversation seat. But what we're doing is now the tools are lowering the floor of capability. And I hope that makes sense, because To me, this is what gets me excited. It doesn't mean, again, that we don't have a need for a human in the loop. The human is actually way more important than ever before. It just makes the tools, makes everything so much easier for us to be able to run.

Yeah, I think a great example of that, too, even just at a base technician layer, is like years ago, you'd have to be somebody who was an expert in PowerShell, right, to run, create PowerShell scripts and be able to run those in your MSP and do that. And that was a high-level competency, you know, to be able to execute that. Now pretty much anybody can go in and say, "Make me a PowerShell script for X," and get the output. But if they can't read that and they just start running it, it could also cause some, you know, significant problems there too. So there's its own risk in like, do you want to even understand what you're pushing in from that technical level? But then it ties back to, you know, how does this actually help the business? And PowerShell is, you know, obviously just a silo talk track, but this kind of exists across anything that you're producing for the client. Like more MSPs can create great resources now for QBRs, um, but some of them aren't doing QBRs. And being able to talk about that output that maybe Claude generates or whatever you're using, right, as part of that is the bigger value-add. Because, you know, the dialogue that you have with the customer and that, you know, resource of the customer is going to be what drives them to think this is somebody that, you know, is an expert and is guiding me through this versus, you know, we're talking about, you know, the tickets that they closed out this month again, things like that.

Yep, that's exactly right. One thing, I don't know if this is going to show or not, but I'm going to bring this up because it was absolutely hilarious. Yeah, here it is. I think it's going to work. Let me push this into this tab, uh, because this is so great. Uh, goes exactly what you were just saying. Um, maybe I'll just have to reshare it because it's totally worth us derailing for a second. I sent this to a friend when it comes to like 5 coding and the ceiling being more replaceable than ever before. Let me see. Share. Add screen share. Here it is. This is so good. Is it not going to come up? There it goes. So it's this idea of this is how vibe coding feels, endless tug of war prompts, right? And it's a Family Guy meme. And I don't know if it's going to play. There it is. And this is vibe coders. If you're not careful, we don't have a human that's intelligently knowing what they're doing. This is the equivalent of what they build. It's not working. I don't know why it's not working. Try this and try this and try this and try this. I absolutely love this. I died laughing. I showed it to my wife when I came across. She's like, why is that funny? I'm like, just trust me, this is the reality in front of all of us. So yeah, cool. Okay, let's get— oh, go ahead.

If you have Vibe Code, it is like whack-a-mole, right? It's like this thing is rewriting itself over and over again to try to get to the, you know, thing that you want. But it's, it's very frustrating. And, you know, if you don't know what you're doing doing. Like, the thing with it is you just create so much security holes, which is a whole different topic, but I'll keep going.

Yes, yes. And here we are. This is exactly what we're talking about. So yeah, so, so that's— there is a difference between vibe coding and real engineering, right? Like Wes the Dummy, man, I haven't written— like, I haven't really done like hard scripting since like the days of Perl, right? And may they never come back. Um, but real engineers like my devs and yours, Nick, like, they know what they're doing. This is totally different because the human in the loop is— they know what they're— they're knowing— they give it the right instructions of what to build and how to make things happen. They know how to use it from a QA perspective. They know how to use AI writing its skill to make the capabilities happen. So it's not replacing us. It's simply letting us do more than we've ever done before. And if you follow this train of technology trail, it's always been this way, right? Like typewriters helped us to not have to handwrite everything, right? And word processors came along and let us automate a ton of that. And, you know, you can see this evolution of technology, what it's done as the speed up for, for all of us across the way. So I just want to kind of mention that. But what I'd love for you to talk about a little bit here, Nick, today, as well, is like this pattern is, is we see this across the MSP as well, right? It's not just, you know, in the engineering world and building code, but it's this capability of what technology should drive efficiencies across the board for almost everything we do in the MSP, right?

Yeah, and I've talked to a lot of MSPs now. We had a user group out here like last last week or the week before, and we all were sharing, you know, how they were using AI in their business. And I remember one of the MSPs mentioned that he had this, like, you know, client proposal process that he spent 45 minutes per client every, every quarter doing, and he's got a lot of clients, so it took him a ton of time. And he was able to craft a solution, you know, with AI to be able to do that, and it generates those proposals using his data and things that he's connected in about 15 seconds per client. So like, it's a great ROI, right? And it was a use case that he was spending a ton of time on. It was a lot of admin work, you know, just pulling data, bringing it into a canvas to then produce a report for the, the customer. But certainly one where, you know, it's not necessarily replacing a job, but it's, it's giving him a ton of time back to focus on what matters, which is really related to growing the business clients on a more intimate level or expanding functionalities versus doing admin work that you might have within there. And so that's a great way, like you could start to just, you know, do an in-house inventory of those types of functions that are spending and taking a lot of your time today, taking it away from the client and more so into, you know, just poor operational processes or a ton of manual work that you're doing. But it also gives you more confidence, I think, as you begin to develop those and share those wins internally to be able to come back to the client, say, hey, we've done these types of things, it could translate to this in your business if we thought about that. So you have confidence, you have social proof, you know, in that sense of, you know, own internal capabilities of doing that and competency around it that you can just reference versus thinking, yeah, I'll figure this out, more of a fake it till you make it type of approach. But I think, you know, certainly like, you know, the amount of efficiencies you can get is extremely and you should always, you know, try to leverage that. But it's also thinking about your employees if you're an owner today on the call, or, you know, just think of yourself if you're part of an MSP as well. What does your scaling path look like? And I know that's probably, you know, more, um, you know, resonate to you, Wes, in the sense of, you know, just kind of the, the path that somebody take now is way different in mind than they was ago, obviously. But just thinking about what angle do I want to take to to provide value to the MSP. It's an evolution. It's not my job's obsolete, everything I've been doing for the last 10 years isn't worth anything. You can translate those skills, but a lot of people are fearful of that too.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And just to kind of show this is that we think about where the cape, what we need to do from a skill development in our people. Look, we have more, the reality is this, we have more and more young people entering the workforce today with fewer capabilities around knowledge of how to do analysis. I remember, you know, and this is not me like, "Well, I remember I had to walk in the, you know, in the snow with no shoes" conversation. But like, I didn't get into like troubleshooting and analysis skills until much later into college. And learning how to do right troubleshooting around separating a problem into its elements, testing each element at a time, using that to feed back into the loop of, you know, like those are things that like schools typically don't do such a good job anymore of teaching the critical analysis skills. And that's one of the things I think needs to become more and more important is we have access to all the knowledge that we need. The question is knowing what we need, why we need it, and, and how to critically think through it. And so I'd say for an MSP listening today, the onus is on you to make sure you're teaching the critical thinking skills, the troubleshooting skills. Otherwise, they burn 4 hours in ChatGPT or Copilot, whatever it is, answering a ticket, and it's happily leading them down the wrong direction from the very beginning, because they never knew what to prompt or how to think through it. And, you know, we actually don't see efficiency gains. Like, that's a thing right now. So what you need to be doing as a leader today is building and understanding all of this, that we need to make sure our people are up to speed, they have the capabilities, that they know how to think through business use cases and enter into client conversations. That's why that guide we're giving you that's up there is so dang valuable, because you can use that to start triggering this, these discussions, and take that guide and turn it into something on your own. Nick, I know we're about out of time here, but let's talk about what not to do. I'd love for you to share a couple things around what we should avoid doing, not just what we should start doing.

Yeah, I think we kind of covered some of these today, right, in the sense of, you know, overcorrection and things of that nature. But I also think, you know, thinking about AI as, like, with some of these bullets here, like, this is a vendor checklist, is obviously thinking about it a little bit, bit too programmatically versus thinking about coming back to those client conversations that you should be having today and not trying to force-feed, you know, your solution, your governance, your blueprint for safe AI, you know, in that case, because it's going to be met with that same friction that we talked about as well. And then, you know, if clients aren't asking you, you know, that is a concern obviously as well too, just in the sense that they're going to those outside methods right, as part of that. And the third bullet I think is really important. It's kind of coming back to what I was mentioning at the beginning of the call, which is around, you know, just because you're busy doesn't mean you're mature in AI or that it's creating efficiencies for you. I think, and myself as part of this again, is thinking like this— you have this shiny object syndrome of I can automate everything, I can use AI to do my job, or, you know, I can use AI to build build a better pipeline and outreach and all these things. And you spend hours and it's back and forth to your, you know, Peter Griffith analogy there of like just going back and forth on trying to make this thing work. Whereas if you just did it, you know, you could have more productivity. So it's always kind of taking that form of planning, understanding where there's business need and understanding the path forward to get there as part of that. And certainly the people aspect, having that autonomy, you know, having having, you know, the ability to be able to reach out and validate as that trusted advisor, I think, is really helpful. And that's what we'd love to keep unpacking here in future episodes too, probably.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, we— and I love that. So we're here to do this. Understand that our job and the onus on us is to become more strategic, more AI literate, to be able to learn how to solve conversations or challenges for our clients, to learn how to do it in the right way, to be more consultive in nature, that the future MSP is more of a consultant than it is slinging tools off a shelf. And actually, what gives you, I think, some encouragement is at the end of the day, we've always been asking, how do we keep the ankle-biters out? How do we keep people coming in from just charging less than us per seat? Now I can't compete. Well, that's the old-school tools-only mentality. You've gotten what you've asked for. We now have technology that's coming into play that anyone can access. And now the onus is on how I solve problems and how I produce, produce and prove value to my clients. You've gotten everything you've asked for and more. So we're kind of out of time here. But just remember, we do have this AI Readiness or this, we'll use John's AI Enablement Conversation Worksheet. Thank you, John, if you're still listening. There's a QR for that. Go grab that. It is completely free and will really help you engage in the conversations you know you need to have. So I'm going to skip past this. We'll leave the QR up. We're really excited to be talking about this one next. We've got Eric Bolles from Vosa joining us. We're going to shift the AI conversation a bit more into marketing. Because, Nick, one of the things we haven't talked about enough yet is, how do we engage people that are not using our services? And how do we distinguish ourselves when it comes to AI and all the options around all of that? How do we start introducing that into the client conversation? Anything else, Nick, that sticks out to you that you want to cover or say before we end up?

No, definitely join us for that. I think a lot of us out there, you know, I've talked to a lot of MSPs looking for more of those Pratt critical use cases and guidance around execution. So definitely, you know, a great episode around that as well too, just to bring some more freeform ideas to that conversation too.

Love it. Well, here's our LinkedIn and our emails if you guys want to get in touch with anyone over at Cloud Capsule, all the awesome stuff they're doing, reach out to Nick. Same with us at Empath, love to have a conversation anytime. Hope this has been helpful. One of the best things you can do is make sure you didn't hear all of this in a silo today, that you are going to take this conversation and bring it to your MSP as a whole. Share this recording out, watch it with your team, pause it, ask questions as you go. But just understand we're at the beginnings of something completely awesome. And this has been a super fun discussion and really enjoyed every bit of this. And we will see you guys next time. Our next episode is going to be— I should have had that slide up. But anyway, it's, I think we had it. It's coming up on May 13th at 1 PM. So save your calendars for that. We'll see you there. Nick, thanks for joining. It was super fun to have this conversation today.

Yeah, great conversation, and, uh, we'll see you guys on the next one.

Fantastic. We'll see y'all later.