AI Consultants Can Be Friends as Well as Foes for MSPs
wave4, for example, has business consulting and AI coding skills few MSPs possess, but is more eager to partner with MSPs than to replace them.
It’s come up a few times here in recent weeks that SMBs aren’t sitting around waiting for someone to pitch them an AI solution. Some of them are placing outbound calls to IT providers, including companies they’ve never spoken with before, asking for help launching AI initiatives. Guess what happens if you get one of those calls but have nothing to offer.
“MSPs would be foolish not to assume that these really progressive, technology-forward businesses aren’t going out and talking to alternatives who can provide them with AI services,” says John Bush.
He knows, too, because he’s one of them.
Bush is founder of Dallas-based AI consultancy wave4. If you’re a Channelholic regular, you’ve read about AI consultants here before. They’re the people phoning up your clients if you’re an MSP and offering them workflow-transforming, time-saving, money-making AI solutions you don’t provide, making them in theory a competitive threat. Well, I’ve spoken with one now, and he’d much rather be your partner than your replacement.
Bush cut his teeth on AI while building enterprise security solutions for KPMG. “I think all of us working in technology always had the suspicion this is going to be a thing,” he says of AI. “The question was always when.” And the answer became obvious a little over a year ago as he watched engineers on his team put AI coding tools to work.
“They were doing work that would have taken them a week in like an hour,” Bush (pictured) says. That was his “AI light bulb moment,” he continues, and it had nothing to do with the enterprise.
“There’s this huge opportunity with smaller businesses who just don’t have a lot of technical talent or knowledge of all this,” Bush says.
wave4 is the “AI transformation partner” he created to fill that yawning gap. Early on, the company just asked clients what kind of AI solution they were looking for, and built it.
“What you realize is that most businesses don’t know enough about this stuff to be able to make informed decisions about what they really need,” Bush says.
As a result, client engagements these days begin with a thorough onsite assessment of a company’s people, processes, and technology, Bush says. “That allows us to unearth the solutions and the opportunities that exist for them to use AI.”
Those solutions and opportunities vary from helping businesses embed Microsoft Copilot in their workflows to building custom CRM solutions. “We’re training some of their employees to become power users who can do some of this themselves as well,” Bush says.
wave4 bills its work at rates low enough to be affordable by SMBs but high enough, when combined with the company’s extensive use of AI tooling, to deliver substantial margins, he adds.
“I’ve kept this very lean so I can come in around that, let’s say, high four- to low five-figure range, depending on what the scope of work is,” Bush explains, noting that he has two developers and two part-time consultants on staff at present. Their work involves skills an above-average MSP’s best technicians usually lack, even if their employer encourages them to spend five hours a week acquiring them.
“I’m doing twice that in a day,” Bush says. “It’s just a reps thing, ultimately. Just having more time on task.”
That said, Bush is fully aware of where his expertise ends. wave4 knows which AI tools to use (his favorites currently are Claude Code, Codex, Oz, and Hermes Agent) and when to use them, and it knows how to speak with SMB decision-makers about pain points and business goals in their own language. It knows nothing about standing up and supporting an IT infrastructure.
And doesn’t intend to learn—Bush is partnering with an MSP in California at present to fulfill that need for his clients, and wants to partner with more.
“This allows them to have something they can offer to their clients tomorrow and be able to provide all of the consulting, training, and implementation that their clients are already asking for,” he says. It gets him warm sales leads. “We can really solve each other’s problems in a lot of ways.”
Nor should potential partners worry about wave4 mastering IT services and stealing their clients someday, Bush continues. Indeed, if anyone should be concerned about the future, it’s him. AI consulting is an MSP’s game to lose.
“A lot of these businesses have never bought an AI service before, so working with someone who’s already done good technology services for them is a big advantage,” Bush says. “They have the trust element.”