As we’ve noted here before, you can make good money selling software to MSPs but great money selling software through MSPs to their customers.
It’s a lesson the founders of Clairify have taken to heart. When I first met with them, on the sidelines of Pax8’s 2024 Beyond conference in Denver, they were hard at work on a product that would help busy, mobile MSPs organize and triage the information flying into their phone between meetings from ticketing systems, emails, texts, and other sources. Then they realized MSPs aren’t the only busy, mobile leaders inundated with tasks and information.
“The problems are always the same,” says Mehul Patel (pictured), a Clairify co-founder and its head of product. “When you have a small business, you’re typically surviving on the heroic effort of the owner.”
It’s apt that I first met with Patel and co-founder Randy Spangler, an ex-MSP, at Beyond given that multiple Pax8 executives at this year’s edition of that show endorsed building a digital chief of staff as a great first step toward mastering agentic AI. Clairify’s solution is designed to spare us all that work.
“We’ve taken that basic ChatGPT AI system model, and we’ve elevated it to a chief of staff role,” Patel says.
Specifically for leaders, the people who most need a chief of staff. “We’re really talking about protecting the user’s attention and making sure that knowledge is available and distributed throughout the organization, the typical things that a chief of staff would do if it was human,” Patel says.
Theoretically, you can accomplish that with Microsoft 365 Copilot, but Patel, Spangler, and a lot of SMB end users prefer the results they get from ChatGPT, Claude, and other frontier chatbots. Yet training those takes time and (as we recently saw elsewhere) governance does too. Plus, recent headlines have underscored the security risks frontier agents can pose.
“It’s a ticking bomb if you don’t do it right,” Patel says. “An MSP’s not going to sell you cybersecurity and then deploy an unsecured agent in your workspace.”
Furthermore, he adds, ChatGPT and its peers are all-purpose tools with (as Lexful’s CEO would probably agree) too much context to perform a targeted set of functions effectively.
“They’re not fundamentally designed from a user experience perspective or from an information architecture perspective to serve executives,” Patel says. “[Clairify] is tuned to the executive level, and it’s a very specific corpus of data that we’re developing for a very specific purpose. Because of that, we think that we can produce higher fidelity output.”
While drawing on frontier AI’s inference power. Clairify automatically connects via natural language prompts to any LLM you use (including local ones), not to mention any SaaS solution in an end user’s stack with an API. It then consolidates data from those systems on the fly to process queries spanning multiple apps.
“You can get answers to just about anything and let the AI do the joining,” Spangler says. “It’s a lot less hassle for the backend and the user.”
It also, Patel adds, gives MSPs without AI expertise something compelling to offer customers immediately. “You get an AI that knows your business, connects to your tools, and is secured from day one,” he says. “And if you ever need help, just call support like you would if the printer jammed.”
Clairify is available for iOS at a launch-priced $12 per user per month, with additional subscription options coming soon. An Android version of the system is on the way as well.