IT By Design Helps MSPs Eat the AI Elephant
Implementing AI is a journey. IT By Design is providing venues for MSPs to plan that trip cooperatively.
I recently called GTIA the managed services world’s purest expression of community. I was wrong. The purest expression of community in managed services is when managed service providers tell other managed service providers about their biggest business challenges.
“They’re going to tell you an honest answer of how to fix it,” says Ahmed Fadili (pictured), chief strategy officer of Boston-based MSP Focus Technology, even if it means sharing the recipe to the secret sauce driving their own success.
I’ve witnessed this dynamic before and got to do so again last weekend at a pre-day mastermind session hosted by IT By Design at its annual Build IT Live event in Jersey City, N.J., where a couple dozen MSPs, most of them strangers to one another, spoke frankly about the biggest business challenge facing MSPs in general right now: devising and executing an AI strategy.
“Customers are asking questions about AI. They’re expecting us to know AI,” Fadili says. “It’s something that we have to deliver on.”
Because, of course, those customers are searching for answers with or without help from their current provider. “They’re doing it themselves by building an in-house team or they’re hiring an AI-native MSP or AI company to do that,” says Sunny Kaila, IT By Design’s CEO. “It’s happening. It’s just you don’t know.”
And the fact that you couldn’t provide AI help to someone who asked for it is limiting the enterprise value of your business. Everyone knows that acquirers look carefully at EBITDA when evaluating MSPs, Kaila says. “What they’re not aware of is that there are other strategic plans that they can put in place to exponentially increase their enterprise value.”
Meaning strategic AI plans, of course, and life would be a lot easier for MSPs if creating them was as easy as wishing to. Unfortunately, for reasons both Pax8 and Fadili both well understand, it takes time.
“It’s not just something that you can create really quick,” Fadili says. “AI right now is a journey.”
For the client as well as their MSP, he adds, noting that Focus is assigning virtual chief AI officers to its customers to guide them through that journey while both parties figure it out together. This typically begins with an evaluation of the client’s AI maturity level, Fadili says. Kaila encourages all MSPs to do the same.
“Everything starts with the assessment,” he argues, before proceeding to governance, security, training, and eventually workflow automation. “It’s crawl, walk, run,” Kaila says.
Fadili shared part of his secret sauce recipe for navigating that progression with the Build IT Live mastermind group. Rather than treat AI preparation as a series of one-off projects, Focus sells it as a 12-month readiness engagement billed at flat monthly rates and followed by ongoing solution design, delivery, and management. That turns AI transformation into an operating rather than capital expense for the client and eases them through the AI journey gradually.
“How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time,” Fadili says, noting that each bite is recurring revenue that strengthens the relationship between the customer and their trusted advisor.
Which, from Kaila’s perspective, is key. Embracing AI is at least as much a human-to-human story as an agent-to-agent story, he says, and always will be.
“We are in a people business, and that does not change with AI,” he says.