The executives tell CRN that AI-powered tools are making an impact on their day-to-day management of IT for customers.

For MSPs on the front lines of managing IT systems for customers, tools for generative AI and other AI-powered capabilities are making an impact on their day-to-day operations. That’s the message that MSP executives shared with CRN at last week’s XChange March 2024 conference.

The surging interest among MSPs in GenAI could be seen most clearly during the standing room only session on Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, but the topic of bringing AI to IT management in a bigger way could be heard throughout the three-day conference in Orlando, Fla. The conference was hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company.

[Related: Microsoft Copilot Leader: 5 Boldest Statements On The MSP Opportunity]

In reference to Microsoft Copilot specifically, Steve Lu, president of Print Choices, a Lake Havasu City, Ariz.-based MSP, called the tool “a huge opportunity.”

“If we can get just a small piece of the pie, that would be big,” Lu said. “From a business perspective that is what we see. That is why you see all the excitement around, ‘I need to figure this out today.’”

But there’s a lot more tools resonating with MSPs beyond just Copilot. What follows are comments from MSP executives on AI-powered tools they’re using, as shared with CRN last week.

Brent Morris

Vice president of business development

Success Computer Consulting

Minneapolis, Minn.

We used Crushbank and now we’re with Rewst. We’re using Rewst because we want to take advantage of the opportunities that it represents in our service delivery function. So our expectations are high and what we’ve seen so far we’re really happy with.

Dan Tomaszewski

President

Green Light Business Technology

Jenison, Mich.

We’re currently using external tools that are integrated into our vendor-provided solutions. Having things built into RMM and PSA would provide a lot of value, it’s internal. Essentially, those external tools aren’t going to be connected to the data that we have within our platforms. Things that would be native to those applications would be top notch. The ability to have that data contained and kept private is the most critical thing. Any kind of tools that are external right now, you really cannot trust and they’re of great concern from a privacy perspective. You’re not going to put any kind of sensitive information in it.

Luis Alvarez

President, CEO

Alvarez Technology Group

Salinas, Calif.

We are using CrushBank for helping us with our PSA (professional services automation) tool and helping our engineers find resolutions to problems much faster.

They use Watson as their AI engine, which is not as sexy as ChatGPT but it’s been around a little bit so it knows what it’s doing. It’s awesome.

We implemented it, and it took about 90 days to really start seeing results. But it’s been great. And it’s saved tons of time. We’re getting tickets turned around a lot faster.

And we track all that stuff. So I know the metrics are true.

David DeCamillis

Chief Revenue Officer

Techmedics

Pasadena, Calif.

Being in marketing, naturally I was attracted to ChatGPT years ago.

And I started using it – I was a journalism major, an editor. So I have, a lot of time, written a lot of my own content.

So I started playing around with it and I found that it just saved time on research, gave me a different spin on how to say things if I was stuck on a thought or an idea.

But I learned pretty quickly the more you put in, the better information you get out. And no matter what comes out, freakin’ edit it.

Read over it, because it might not be your voice. … To truly capture what you’re trying to get out of AI, you have to put a lot into it. … Just give you an example, like if I’m writing a blog on anything – cybersecurity for our company – to capture our voice and my voice, I put all this information on Techmedics, on me, on our audience, our target market, our concerns, and then put in the paragraph or paragraphs that I’m writing.

And then say, ‘Hey, I want to take a little different approach with this. I’m trying to attract new customers. So here’s where they’re located. Here’s what they do. This is my ideal customer. What do you say?’

And then it spits it out. And then you take that and you cut that paragraph out, rewrite that. Boom, boom, boom. So yeah, it’s a process. But it’s been really damn cool.

(I used the) free (version of ChatGPT originally). And then I went to Bing (Chat) because of security. … Now it’s Copilot. … I use it every day. I did a really cool pairing where I paired cyber threats with wine. And I used Bing Chat, now Copilot, to actually help me come up with different wine varieties to actually fit. That was pretty cool.

Patrick Wong

CEO

Wong Computing Services

Leawood, Kan.

In how I communicate with people. And also it helps scan leads and things like that. Also, generating leads for me as well. … Honing in on keywords and then it will send a text to me. … If somebody mentions telephony, boom. Or like … RingCentral, 8×8 or whatever. … To follow up with them.

And then also using the AI to call record, but also transcribe. And then, ‘Patrick said this. Customer (or) prospective lead said this.’

And then, also, I can just do keyword searching using AI because it’s transcribed everything. … I use HubSpot. … Joonto. … Aircall, a contact-center-as-a service kind of type feature set.

Jonathan Gibney

CEO

Southridge Technology

Brookfield, Conn.

We’ve been playing around with ChatGPT. And in that arena, we’ve recently within the last month started to work with Microsoft Copilot. We’ve integrated it in small ways, like three of the 30 people in our company currently have it. We’re trying to understand the benefits it will bring. We don’t know enough about it to intelligently say what we could do with it. So right now, we’re doing the basic things. We’re trying to recap Teams meetings and come up with task lists from it. We’re taking Word documents and converting them into PowerPoints, those types of things. We’ve found it to be neat and successful some of the time. We had a recap of a meeting of ours recently, and it said the ‘king’ was going to take on one of the jobs. We had no idea with the reference was. It sounded like it made that up, for sure.

But there are clear disconnects. One of the things we said internally with our staff is a line that somebody used with me recently: AI today is the best it’s ever been, and it’ll be better tomorrow. We really understand that there is this growth model in it. And because we’re in the infancy, we’re really trying to understand it. What I said to my staff is, don’t get frustrated with it. Allow it to be wrong today so that it can improve and can become better tomorrow.

From an internal process perspective, my first priority is to be able to recap meetings. We have we have so many meetings, some of which are recapped, some of which aren’t. You spend half an hour with a group of five or six people, and if there’s no task list at the end of it, and nobody knows what they’re supposed to do, you have now wasted five people times 30 minutes. And then from there, we’ll start to find other things: the prompts, what can I ask it. We didn’t even know the questions yet.

Michelle Dillon

Senior marketing analyst

Jade Global

San Jose, Calif.

We actually were ahead of the curve. Four years ago, we established a sister company called Kanverse.ai, a subsidiary of Jade Global. Jade Global just celebrated 20 years in business, and we saw the AI trend rising. And so our CEO, Karan Yaramada, established Kanverse.ai, and right now both are flourishing.

Kanverse.ai does AI automation in the finance, insurance, tech industries as well. We’ve got some pretty elite customers and some great testimonials from our customers now, one of them being Solairus [Aviation], a private jet charter company. We’re really excited because we have kind of been in the AI field for years, and now it’s hot. We got into it before ChatGPT even started.

Internally, we have been using AI for finances. And we’ve created a product that helps our CRM customers as well.

Raymond Ribble

Founder, CEO

SPHER

Gardena, Calif.

We built an AI tool — SPHER. I was an MSP first, and in the process of delivering a very large, multimillion dollar MSP project, I became aware of an opportunity to build a solution. This was back in 2017, so a bit ahead of the curve. I decided to use AI and machine learning as the way to solve the problem. The problem was privacy and security and compliance in healthcare. The HIPAA requirements and the government requirements for Safe Harbor mitigation say that you must have products and tools in place 12 months prior to a breach for you to get any favorable ruling from the government. They require you to look at every user on your system to determine if their activities are consistent with what they should be doing. Nobody does it. We looked at it and we said, how do we make it easy for them to do this? AI. If we just take the data from the audit logs, and we load that up into the system, it tells us who’s the user, what are their credentials, what are they looking at every day. We build a behavioral map of them using the AI and machine learning. And I can look at and create an AI map of that person that says, When did they log in? When did they log out? What kind of records did they look at? How long do they look at a record? And what type of patients do they see? When did they see that patient? Then if someone comes along and has my credentials and gets into the system, the AI would identify them as an anomaly.

Allen Falcon

CEO

Cumulus Global

Westborough, Mass.

We’re starting with AI by educating our customers on the security implications particularly with shadow IT. We are talking to customers about the need for an understanding of what is out there and how to use it in a way that is not going to violate confidentiality, legal requirements, industry regulations and customers contracts.

We help customers evaluate whether the AI tool they are looking at is secure and private. There are AI agents that plug into Zoom that are free. If you are doctor doing a Zoom for a medical consult with a paid Zoom account and you have one of those agents that is listening, taking a transcript of that meeting and feeding it to train their engine you are violating HIPAA.

Adam Rodriguez

Co-Owner

The Network Systems Group

Columbus Ga.

We’re here to see how we can make money with AI and how to utilize it. I am not a programmer. I am not going to go create something. I am going to find the best of the best here and then go integrate it for our customers.