AI Consultants Are Coming for Your Clients, MSPs
And Breach Secure Now's Art Gross wants you to do something about it before it’s too late.
Per an earlier post, I spent part of a long flight home to Seattle not long ago reading a recently published book by Art Gross, CEO of Breach Secure Now, called From Prompt to Profit: The MSP Playbook for AI-Driven Client Success. There’s a lot to like in it, but one chapter in particular grabbed my attention. Called “The AI Consultant Threat (And Why MSPs Must Lead),” it warns MSPs of a rapidly mounting danger hiding from most of them in plain sight.
“Right now, there are consultants popping up everywhere who know how to build GPT agents, have experience creating automations and workflows, know how to navigate business operations and change management, and are positioning themselves as the experts on AI strategy,” Gross (pictured) writes.
Who are these people, I wondered, and what led Gross to devote a hunk of his book to them?
His answer, shared during an interview for the podcast I co-host, required a trip back in time to 2009, when the federal government’s HITECH Act budgeted billions of dollars to subsidize adoption of electronic health record solutions. All of a sudden, self-declared specialists lured by that money began selling EHR services to clients Gross supported via Entegration Inc., the healthcare MSP he continues to lead as president and CEO. Worse than watching an interloper make off with revenue that should have been his was watching his trusted advisor status with customers melt away beneath his feet.
“I went from being strategic to that tech company that just implements someone else’s strategy,” Gross recalls.
Now he’s watching a new crop of consultants run the same playbook in pursuit of the $307 billion businesses worldwide will spend on AI solutions this year alone, according to IDC.
“It’s a gold rush,” Gross says.
The organizations pursuing it, he continues, aren’t MSPs or solution providers. Many of them aren’t even technology companies, which is why so many IT providers don’t know they’re out there. But they are without question out there. Run a search on “AI consulting” plus your zip code and the results will almost certainly include businesses you’ve never heard of offering AI automation assistance to clients like yours. They often know little about AI, according to Gross, but a lot about sales.
“They’re going straight to management with promises of ROI and efficiencies,” he says, adding that it’s a problem in ways extending beyond lost revenue.
“All of a sudden, they’re the ones dictating the technology that MSPs potentially have to support,” he says. Worse yet, they’re connecting that technology to your customers’ data. “That could cause some security concerns,” Gross notes.
If it does, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself if you don’t yet provide AI services of your own, he continues. His book outlines a 90-day plan for filling that void that includes conducting “AI risk assessments,” delivering AI awareness training, and developing industry-specific AI policy templates.
“Get ahead of the AI consultants,” Gross advises. And if you still can’t beat them, he adds, consider joining them instead.
“Not all consultants are bad,” Gross says. “A lot of MSPs don’t have [AI] capabilities, so give yourself time to start to build that internal understanding and knowledge and potentially start to build it yourself, but maybe in the beginning, partner with other vendors to help you.”
Want more of Art Gross’s thoughts on AI for MSPs?
Reading Gross’s book is a good way to get them. Listening to the interview he did with me recently for an episode of MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host, is another. That episode airs September 19th, but there’s plenty of good stuff to hold you until then, including interviews recorded in the past few weeks with Kaseya CEO Rania Succar, Canalys analyst Jay McBain, and venture capital investors Joel Abramson and Mark Scott. Check it out here.
