dnsUNFILTERED: Jennifer Bleam, AI for MSPs

[00:00:00] Mikey Pruitt: Welcome everybody to another episode of dnsUNFILTERED. Today I'm joined by none other than Jennifer Bleam, the cybersecurity Sherpa. Jen, how are you?

[00:00:09] Jennifer Bleam: I am good. The one and only. I am so excited to talk to you and your listeners, your guests. So much fun. Let's jump into it.

[00:00:17] Mikey Pruitt: So Jen and I have met a few times in person, which is probably rare in this like internet space that we all live and work in.

So it's really good to see you again. We had random conversations even before we met in person, just 'cause we were curious about things each other was working on. So it's great to see you again. First of

[00:00:35] Jennifer Bleam: all. You too. You too. Always a pleasure.

[00:00:38] Mikey Pruitt: I'm curious, Jen has been on this mission recently to bring AI to MSPs.

Yeah, I've seen it on LinkedIn. We, I've seen it. Actually, I'm on your email list. I should, I'm gonna pull that up actually while I have that. Okay. Anyway, tell me about the journey of mSP like cybersecurity to this new AI push.

[00:00:59] Jennifer Bleam: Okay, so when I first shifted over to the vendor side my husband has an MSP, so let me start there.

My husband has an MSP, I've helped him with his sales and marketing for maybe two decades now. And at some point I decided to shift over to the vendor community. And one of my first jobs as a vendor employee was helping a cybersecurity company go from really startup to acquisition in a very short amount of time.

I think it was about a year and a half, maybe two years. We were selling Sentinel One, for those of you that ever bought anything from Carver Cybersecurity, which became Continuum, which is now ConnectWise. I was part of that whole growth process. So I was the VP of sales and marketing. And what I saw in the cybersecurity growth world is the same thing that I'm seeing right now with ai, but it's a little scarier with ai.

And what I'm seeing is that a lot of MSPs, because they typically are very data driven and very methodical and logical, they like to have all their ducks in a row before they pull the trigger. That's not necessarily a bad thing With cybersecurity, what we saw is we saw early adopters figuring out their packaging, their pricing the pros and cons, the objection handling.

Sometimes they crashed and burned and got them, picked themselves up and then tried again. But we had a lot of the laggards or the ones that were I'm gonna wait and see, is this cybersecurity thing really such a big deal? And again, that skepticism is valid because if you think about the adoption of cloud, like cloud was like all the rage and then it rolled out very slowly.

And then cybersecurity was the rage. But it also rolled out slowly, and I'm seeing that same reticence with ai. Like I know there's money to be made. It's clearly, there's buzz around it. Clients and prospects are asking about it. It falls loosely in the box of technology, but there's a lot of MSPs that are back on their heels waiting for someone else to figure it out.

And that may have worked with the cloud. It definitely worked with cybersecurity, but it's not going to work with AI because AI is evolving so quickly. It's I liken it. I talked to Ms. PA couple days ago and I said, it's like with cybersecurity. You could watch the train go by and you're like.

Another train is coming right by in, in another month. I'll hop on that one. I'll figure out my packaging in a month or it'll be next quarter's quarterly. Rock AI is like a rocket ship. Like by the time you see it go by, you're, you can't get on it like it's gone. And so it's, we're seeing that same trend with ai and so I'm trying to wake up the MSPs to say, yes, you can figure this out.

It's not, maybe it's not the easiest thing in the world, but it's not the hardest thing in the world. You figured out packaging and pricing before your clients know you, like you, trust you, but you have to start selling it. Or a consultant is gonna come in, sell them or convince them to use free tools, cybersecurity issues, data compliance issues, data governance issues, and they're just going to trust that consultant.

So it's a perfect storm. Just like cybersecurity was a perfect storm, and I think it's a wonderful time to get on board and figure out how to sell it.

[00:04:25] Mikey Pruitt: So jump on that Rocket show you had jump on Rocket Show. There is a lot to unpack there. Yes. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to peel back the onion layer by layer here, starting with the email I got.

Oh, I got it today round. No. Awesome. So the first sentence includes a quote. What if I picked the wrong AI offer? So tell me about that.

[00:04:46] Jennifer Bleam: Yes. So I've talked to probably in the last month, I've probably talked to about 30 MSPs, and that seems to be a very common refrain is what if I picked the wrong thing, the wrong offering, the wrong tool, the wrong whatever it is, solution the wrong builder.

And is there a chance you're gonna pick the wrong thing? Sure. But if you start by having conversations with your clients, business conversations, almost consulting conversations, like what kind of things are you doing in your business that are repeatable, systemized? Maybe you have SOPs for them.

What are some, I call them chores. What are chores in your company? That the next person is always waiting. Sales is always waiting for marketing to fill in the blank. Operations is always waiting for sales to fill in the blank. Like those are bottlenecks. My clients are always waiting for me to blank.

My prospects are always waiting for me to create proposals. Like whatever that is there's some kind of a bottleneck and uncovering those will start to color what your offering should be. And so don't create it in a vacuum. Don't just, throw a dartboard against the wall and say, oh good, we're just gonna start offering agents or automations or custom GPTs or whatever.

Do it based on the conversations you're having with your clients.

[00:06:11] Mikey Pruitt: So it sounds like they probably already know what they should tackle first. Like the, one of the bigger pain points maybe, in the top bucket of things people don't like to do or always get bottlenecked, start with one of those, and maybe start with one of the small ones who automate slash inject ai.

Where a human normally would do something is, I think, a pretty good strategy. Would you agree with that?

[00:06:35] Jennifer Bleam: I agree with most of that. I don't think most of the end users really know what to do. They want to get involved in ai. Some of them are real anti ai, but most of them are leaning in.

They're curious or they're like all in they will buy it tomorrow, but they don't know what that thing is. What should I be automating? What should I be optimizing? And so some of the questions you mentioned are perfect to get them to realize, oh. Is that a use case for ai? I didn't know.

We've always done it this way. We've always, cobbled together or spread, this complicated spreadsheet where I'm manually pulling data from five different tools. I didn't even know AI could help with that because we've done it this way for 10 or 20 years. So I think they are capable of identifying those chores, those challenges if you prompt them or ask them correctly.

But I don't think they're gonna come up with it in a vacuum without your help.

[00:07:35] Mikey Pruitt: Now, okay. I gotta step back a little bit. So earlier on you mentioned the skepticism. Jumping in on AI versus cybersecurity. Do you think there are more AI skeptics or less AI skeptics in cybersecurity race?

[00:07:49] Jennifer Bleam: Are we talking about MSPs or are we talking about the small business owners? Let's just do

[00:07:54] Mikey Pruitt: MSPs for now.

Okay.

[00:07:55] Jennifer Bleam: Are there more MSPs skeptical of ai? Yes, and I think a part of that is with cyber security, we could see tickets, issues, web traffic that we don't want our clients to see or our children to see. We could see ransomware attacks, we could see those statistics. With ai, it's not the same. We can't quite see the ROIR OI is a little bit hard to prove.

It's not impossible. It's just a little bit more difficult to prove. How do you measure better customer experience? It's not that they're getting zero experience now that, that's cybersecurity was right now you have no cybersecurity because you're using, a blue router and we wanna put something in play and there's at least some, it's an intangible, but there was still something to sink our teeth into.

This is an intangible that we're, right now, we're servicing our clients. You, maybe it's not perfect, but our clients are staying with us and there's not a lot of churn and so it's a, it's just a different mentality. So

[00:09:05] Mikey Pruitt: first, are you making fun of liny routers?

[00:09:08] Jennifer Bleam: You said blue

[00:09:09] Mikey Pruitt: routers? What?

What?

I think I have one on my shelf back here. Are you using it? No, of course not. Of course not.

[00:09:18] Jennifer Bleam: It's like a the Smith, it's like a Smithsonian over routers,

[00:09:20] Mikey Pruitt: like a throwback piece. Look at the nineties or two thousands.

[00:09:24] Jennifer Bleam: And that's, if you think about it, that's really when cybersecurity started to become this buzzword and then a little while later with ransomware and things like that.

So there we, cybersecurity was solving a business problem, whereas AI is more of an optimizer. It's not, yes, it's not broken. It just could be so much better.

[00:09:45] Mikey Pruitt: And you think about your rocket ship analogy, which is perfect. The speed at which AI hit the market versus the speed at which cybersecurity hit the market is just drastic.

So it's staggering. Chad GPT launched and they, they surpassed the amount of users and before anyone else had gotten to a million users, like the, it was almost instantaneous when AI immersed and then it was like, holy crap, what is this? Everybody has to get on the train or the rocket ship,

[00:10:12] Jennifer Bleam: right?

And it's the first time, I was talking to John Harden about this a couple of weeks ago, and he pointed out it's the first time that a technology started with the end users, and its gradually making its way into government and higher education. Usually it's the exact inverse the government has, great backups, or a wonderful firewall or whatever, insert right.

[00:10:35] Mikey Pruitt: Top secret

[00:10:36] Jennifer Bleam: technology, the ability to stop ransomware or roll it back and then gradually it trickles down. This is the opposite, which if you think of a quick SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, there is a very high probability. I don't have the stat, I could pull it from perplexity.

I saw it a couple weeks ago, but very high. Likelihood that your clients are using these tools and they just haven't told you. Whereas with cybersecurity, they weren't going out and buying enterprise level security solutions. They couldn't, they only had 15 endpoints. Nobody would sell to them.

This is a very different motion. So it's an opportunity, but it's also a threat.

[00:11:17] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. This is more like the iPhone coming out Yes. Than cybersecurity coming out. Correct. Yeah, because. Co consumers had access to it first. I've actually never heard that breakdown before. That is very interesting. I'm gonna have to talk.

Yeah. I hadn't either.

[00:11:29] Jennifer Bleam: John Harden's just got an amazing way of looking. Good job, John. I know, right? I was like, you're right. So

[00:11:36] Mikey Pruitt: you said something else a little bit ago about free tools. Yes. First, I'm curious, what is the free tools that you're talking about? You don't have to say their names, but what do you mean?

[00:11:44] Jennifer Bleam: It's not even, it's not even that there's a brand I'm concerned about. It's more like even if you just go with let's say mainstream chat, GPT, there are. Data risks with everything except for the highest enterprise level tool. So I'm on the $20 a month plan. Probably most people that are paying for a plan, they're not paying for the enterprise level plan.

They're either on teams or they're on an individual, 20 bucks a month plan. And there are just native to any tool that's ai other than there's a handful in the industry. But most mainstream AI tools that your clients are using, maybe even that your team is using without telling you there are native security risks because they're taking your data and they're using it to train the large language model so it can get better and better.

And, there's lawsuit with Chad, GBT not allowed to erase or delete any files ever. That's alarming. And so it's not about naming a brand. There isn't one brand that's good. As far as security and data precautions, and yet your clients are still going to be using them. So it's a sticky it's a sticky wicket to try to untangle.

[00:12:59] Mikey Pruitt: Before I get into a line of questioning, I have curious, what do you think, or if people are gonna use AI regardless, sounds do you think it's detrimental if you don't start using ai? Like just pretend a co company, like even like DNSFilter. So if our staff, if we're not using ai, are we gonna fall behind?

[00:13:24] Jennifer Bleam: Yes, a hundred percent. It's my husband and I laugh all the time. He's a little bit older than I am and his. His teachers growing up were like, you must learn your times tables. You are never gonna carry a calculator around in your pocket. And that one

[00:13:38] Mikey Pruitt: gets me.

[00:13:39] Jennifer Bleam: Yes, we do. We have a calculator, a phone, a scanner.

It's like email. It's all the things, right? And so at when I was, I used to homeschool my kids years ago, and when we were homeschooling, I would always say, avail yourself of the tools, use the tools that are there. And really, we're all using AI right now. There's a lot of different instances, like Amazon is putting at the top of their reviews a an aggregation of everybody's thoughts and opinions.

Everybody agrees that this t-shirt is the best thing ever. It's a very black and is perfect, but where they disagree is in the fit, whatever. So that's ai. We've been going, Hey Siri, Hey Alexa, for years, that is technically ai. If you are not using AI and you're getting on the train or the rocket ship, you will absolutely get left behind.

And all it takes is taking a look at what kids are doing with ai, what, how quickly you can create a rough draft of a blog post or a rough draft of a social media marketing plan or a pillar content or videos like all of that. Is now instant or pretty close to instant. Whereas those of us that have been in this knowledge working space for years, we're used to starting with a blank page.

And even if that's the only thing you do is say, you know what? We never, our culture is that we never start with a blank page. We at least use AI to get an a skeleton outline or a working first version. Even if that's all you do, you will be worlds ahead of where you were a year ago. But I had a conversation with a vendor who shall remain nameless.

They're on the smaller side. They are growing quickly. They cobbled together the money for a senior marketing person, let's call them a chief marketing officer. I don't know their title, but that, that level of person, senior vp, CMO. And that's all the money they had. A couple of founders, CMO were bootstrapping, but what they did, and I wanna know how, 'cause I don't know how yet, and I'm going to find out they created a, an AI team for this, we'll just call her A CMO.

So it's, it on paper there's only three or four team members. But in, in reality, I guess we've got AI team members that are helping the CMO do her job and that's the direction that we're going. It's staggering.

[00:16:14] Mikey Pruitt: I'm glad you said that 'cause that's exactly what we're doing.

[00:16:18] Jennifer Bleam: Good. Okay, good. Then let's talk offline.

'cause I'd like to learn more about that.

[00:16:23] Mikey Pruitt: I'll tell you some of the things we're. Experimenting with, I guess is a good word, is so you can actually build a knowledge base of all of your public information Sure. And give AI access to that knowledge base. So we can do that. Like for DNSFilters website, our help documents, our API documentation, throw it into this vector database is, like a brain essentially.

Yep. And then use a large language model to put questions upon that brain and give it access to web search and a few other like tools we'll say. And then it can really shortcut us into being better marketers, better at sales and faster.

[00:17:05] Jennifer Bleam: Yes. But there

[00:17:05] Mikey Pruitt: is still, we've been seeing that there's still a need for human in the loop and we're building these tools to augment our staff, not to replace anybody.

[00:17:15] Jennifer Bleam: Yes.

[00:17:15] Mikey Pruitt: And I think the value in ai, I hate to say this, but. The value probably lies in reduced future headcount versus reduced headcount from today. Agree. So I can scale larger with your people, the people you already have.

[00:17:32] Jennifer Bleam: Correct. I would agree. It's interesting the output that AI gives, it's fast.

It's blazingly fast. Like five years we would've drooled over it. Now we start to get annoyed. If it isn't perfect, the, second or third iteration, but it's still not perfect, it may not a hundred percent match what you were going for. It may not a hundred percent align with your brand voice.

We might have m dashes all the way through, like all the things, but. That's why AI is a thought partner and I trumpet this a lot with my MSP clients is never give up that thought leadership seat. You the human are always the thought leader. AI is the thought partner. And I attended a webinar a couple weeks ago with a pretty well-known influencer in the broad marketplace.

He's not even in the IT space exclusively. He's, just think of like big successful 10 to $50 million mainstream businesses and his value prop on this webinar, and I knew it was gonna be light education, heavy sales, and that's okay because it was AI and I just wanted to learn what he was doing and he gave four or five different examples of.

People who came on board, his team and they were like an unpaid intern from Disney and we hired Sally and we turned her into a senior director and like this person was a dental hygienist and she's now a VP of marketing and like all of these great transformations. And I went The color me skeptical because yes, people can elevate them, they can learn skills, they get I don't have an issue with that, but someone who a year ago was.

Sweeping floors at Disney World cannot possibly take the AI output and know what's wrong with it. So can we really take that person and make them a, an SEO expert, in 10 minutes simply by giving them a prompt or an agent or whatever we're gonna get. Automation doesn't matter.

We need someone who can take that information and go, that's really close, but we should not put that on the website. We're gonna get, Google slapped, or it's gonna take our website down, or it's gonna whatever we've got. We have. So I, we're not quite at the point that we can take a junior person with zero experience and make them into a VP of marketing.

That's today. Today, that's a pipe dream. In five years, I don't know. We can, yeah, right? Five years sooner. Five years. But today, that's just not possible.

[00:20:14] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, I won't get on my, what happened to all the junior level employees soapbox, but I

[00:20:20] Jennifer Bleam: need one of those. I need the junior employee. And they're tough to find.

[00:20:25] Mikey Pruitt: Yes. But I do want to talk about this AI unlock for MSPs. So you're in the space, you talk to a lot of vendors, a lot of MSPs. How do you walk them through how to get over the hump of their skepticism?

[00:20:39] Jennifer Bleam: So I have six modules, and I'm not gonna be able to go into all of them today, but we talked a little bit about the first your packaging, what is it that you're going to sell?

And before you can figure out your packaging, you need to have a couple of conversations. And for some MSPs, that's the hardest part because they're good at the technology, they're good at opening and closing tickets. They're reasonably good at documentation. And then when I'm like, and now talk to a human, they're like, what?

Like in person? I'm like, yeah, ideally in person Zoom would work, get on a teams call or something, get on a phone call if you have to. And sometimes it's because they aren't people, they're just not a people person. Other times it's that they're so busy and they're like, Jennifer, you just gave me a chore.

You just gave me a task. Otherwise we can extrapolate, and the more MSPs I'm talking to, the more I can extrapolate what I think the offers can be. But for me to say, this is broadly what m what SMBs want versus this is what your base wants, two very different things. So starting with conversations it can be as simple as an ASK campaign, which is you email your clients and say, I'm thinking about creating this thing.

And thinking about creating a, an offer where we come out and for four hours we we mind map and workshop your current workflows. Looking for ways to, you might wanna use the word optimize or automate because if we say AI and they're very anti ai, we just lost them. So be careful of your language. I'm thinking about doing this.

If I offered this, it is a paid offer, would you be interested and see what kind of response you get. And then just keep playing with the languaging. Hey, I'm thinking about creating an offer where we teach your team members how to safely and effectively use some of the mainstream tools. If I did that, would you be interested?

I'm thinking. So just rinse and repeat and ask campaign. A, SK. Every other month or so until you get enough feedback that you're like that's the one that landed with my clients. And now you've got your offer. So ideally you will have one-on-one conversations, if that is impossible for whatever reason, or you're allergic to conversations or you just don't have time, then you can go with an ask campaign email, just an email campaign.

It's not as great, but it's a good, it's a good second choice.

[00:23:10] Mikey Pruitt: I think that is really good advice. So you're basically saying. Be a human, talk to them. Preferably, if you have to use an email, you can do that. But, do the human side first. Do the footwork legwork so that they know you're still there for one thing.

Yes. Which is always good for MSPs to let them know that you are advancing, you are growing, you're offering new services. That's a pretty exciting thing that they can kinda show off a little bit. And you're just connecting on a human level because when you start introducing all this automation and optimizations.

There may, you may find yourself less you, you're observed less frequently. Even with all the cybersecurity tooling we have now, like you're removed a little bit from your clients.

[00:23:58] Jennifer Bleam: Yes. Agreed. Agreed. And and that is not unusual for the SP to say I'll, I will ask you, tell me about your, your third from the largest client.

And they'll say they're a manufacturing company. I'm like, okay, good. What do they make? I don't know. Okay. Do they have Sure. Have you look at

[00:24:15] Mikey Pruitt: their website?

[00:24:16] Jennifer Bleam: And they're like, I don't know. Do they run 24 by seven? I'm not sure. Do they have any compliance regulations? I don't really know.

And I'm like, okay, let's go get to know your clients. And a good way to do that is to just bring a second person. And say, Hey Mikey, I already know all of this about your company, but for the purpose of introducing this to Sam, would you tell Sam about your company and what are you manufacturing? And so just, Sam's our new person and we want him to know, and I thought it would get to hear from you.

[00:24:48] Mikey Pruitt: When I introduced my friend, my wife, or something at a party, I'm like, oh, this is my wife Kelly. And my wife knows that's the key to say, oh, and what's your name?

[00:24:56] Jennifer Bleam: That's, oh, that's great. I need to teach my husband that. 'cause I'm not particularly great with names.

[00:25:01] Mikey Pruitt: Oh, she knows the drill. That's awesome.

I'm like, this is my wife. I'm like, your turn

[00:25:08] Jennifer Bleam: tag. You're it. Yeah. Jack,

[00:25:11] Mikey Pruitt: So you mentioned you have these modules set up and I'm curious like what are. Some of the other ones, are they worth diving into? Do you wanna go through 'em?

[00:25:18] Jennifer Bleam: So one of them is branding. You mentioned it. The idea of branding is let's update our website, let's update our social media presence, maybe start posting about ai.

And you nailed it when you said you're rolling out a new division or a new offering, which is exciting, but it's also I talk to MSPs all the time who they, they get a little prickly when an existing client who is happy with them and then they go buy a phone system from someone else and they're like, wait.

We sell phones. Why didn't you buy a phone from me? And they're like, oh, I didn't know. Okay, maybe next time. And, next, that's your problem. It must

[00:25:54] Mikey Pruitt: be

[00:25:55] Jennifer Bleam: it's, yeah, 10 years. It's 10 years from now before they need a new phone. So this is also building a little bit of a trench around you.

Don't go buy AI from some other consultant. We are your cybersecurity guys and gals. We're gonna take care of this for you. We'll take a holistic look. We'll talk to your team. We know what you're, what you like, what you don't like. We know what makes you frustrated. So we are your go-to company for ai.

So branding, so we, packaging and pricing, branding. Sales of course, I love sales. So we have a lot of different things in terms of sales marketing a little bit more broadly marketing. So a little bit of that is ask campaign. A little bit of that is paid discovery. So when I was talking about getting a whiteboard or having conversations about flow charting, what kind of things are your team, is your team up to on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?

And mapping that, doing like a mapping session that is a paid consulting gig, which is a little bit unusual for MSPs. So we talk about what that looks like and we have a playbook for that. And it's going very well. People are, it's a mindset shift. I had a client that a week or two ago, he took a phone call cold phone call off of his website, and they called and said we're looking for a microphone.

And he said, a month ago I would've just said a microphone. What am I gonna make $10 on that? I'm just gonna send you a link. Buy it yourself. You don't need me to install it. It's one cable. You got this right? Send us about

[00:27:25] Mikey Pruitt: a link. Not even Amazon affiliate link.

[00:27:27] Jennifer Bleam: Yeah. Because it's that worth it.

It's okay, fine. And to his credit, he said, yeah, I can help you with that. What are we trying to accomplish? And it was, I think it was a dentist or it was a doctor, someone in the medical field who said. I want to record into the microphone my emails because that's gonna be faster. And then he said, the prospect said I have a lot of repetitive emails where I just feel like I could speak it much faster than I could type it.

Which is true. 'cause most of us, on a good day, type 60 to 80 words a minute, maybe with or without typos. And most of us talk 168, a hundred, maybe 200 words a minute. So great troubleshooting on the part of the prospect. But the MSP said, I'm just curious, what if we could put some optimization or some automations in place so that some of those emails were just answered automatically And it opened up a conversation about ai.

Now it did not close. The guy was like, no, dude, I just need a microphone. It's fine. It's okay. The reason we celebrated that win inside of the community. Is a month ago, Brian never would've talked about ai. He would've just said, here's a link for a microphone. Or go drive to Best Buy this weekend and buy yourself one.

You got this. Go away. Goodbye. But instead he opened up the conversation and cracked the cork, on his first AI conversation. And that's, it's just a different, it's a different shift, different way to think about it.

[00:28:53] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. He basically got curious what is your microphone for?

Yes. And honestly. The way I, when I hear that, heard that request. I went a microphone for my emails. I was just thinking of the brilliance of the chat GBT app on your phone. Yes. And just talking into it like it's really good at, it's so good transcribing your voice like you would think Siri would be that good, but No it

[00:29:16] Jennifer Bleam: is not.

No. I, the amount of driving around that I do on a day off and fix a lot of business problems, Hey, this just came to mind. Can you help me solve it? And I have this dialogue with chat GPT and 30 minutes later oh, great, we have an action plan now. Wonderful. This is good.

[00:29:34] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. You're like, I'm stuck in the car anyway, I might as well get something.

I may

[00:29:36] Jennifer Bleam: as well get some work done. Have a conversation

[00:29:38] Mikey Pruitt: with my ai.

[00:29:39] Jennifer Bleam: Exactly.

[00:29:41] Mikey Pruitt: So one thing you brought up earlier is that the AI packaging is an upsell. Yes. And this is MSPs have, they're always looking for new revenue sources and this is the perfect one. It's, you don't even have to do any marketing for AI because the entire world is doing that on your behalf.

[00:30:00] Jennifer Bleam: Correct.

[00:30:01] Mikey Pruitt: All you have to do is say, I am the deliverer of said thing.

[00:30:04] Jennifer Bleam: Exactly.

[00:30:06] Mikey Pruitt: How do you think they get in front of their customers with that knowledge? Prove that they're the person?

[00:30:11] Jennifer Bleam: Yeah, so I just sat down with a chatbot builder and that seems so blase, but I think if you have a spreadsheet of all of your clients and you've got okay, they have how many seats and do they have my backup?

Do they have my firewall, do they have my internet filtering? Do they have my full cybersecurity stack? Are they managed services? Are they co-managed or have we talked to them about compliance like that stacked chart, you should have a new column on that says, do they have a chat bot on their website?

And if they do not, that is such an easy ad. I just demoed this tool with my guys this afternoon and one gal which is very typical for this industry. We've got 11 companies, one of which is female owned. So that's, about average, and it is literally a tool that you log in, I could drop in my client's website and I can create a, it's not a dummy chat bot.

It is about 20% functional. It's functional enough that it essentially, they call it demo and close. So let's just pretend like I was pitching to you and you own a, an accounting firm. I would call you up and it's not a cold call because you're a client. Could you do it as a cold call? Yep, a hundred percent.

But I test it out with your clients first and you're like, Hey, I just billed something cool for you. Do you have 10 minutes to take a look at it? And you're either gonna say yes or you're gonna say no, or you're gonna say, how's next week? Any of those is fine. And then when we get on the Zoom call or the team's call next week, what happens is there is a picture of your website, it looks exactly like your website and the chat bot is functional over top of your website.

So it looks like it's on your site. Yeah. And you should be very upfront and say, listen, this is not fully baked out, but I just wanted to show you the kind of things that it could do. And so it, it will say, Hey, is this your first time to my site? And it can do voice, but most people will probably do text.

Yes. First time to your site. Awesome. Are you looking for someone to, to balance your books every week? Are you looking for a new tax preparer? I'm looking for a new tax preparer. Cool. Are you an LLC? Are you a, a business, personal, blah, blah, blah. It goes through the whole intake process and then schedules an appointment.

And so it literally does all of that. And it takes the MSP about three minutes of work because they've got it all templated and there's just like four little highlighted areas that you have to update. And now we've at least done a demo. And what I'm seeing is that I can say to my client, listen, we'll set all of this up for you.

Like I told you, this isn't fully functional. We need to finish tuning it and setting it up. But typically we would charge about $5,000 to set this up. You are a client, so we're gonna do it for 2K, and then the management is $500 a month, could be $1,500 a month. There's very little management and it's the first in.

And then you could even say, once they say Yes, congratulations, that's your first AI use case. 'cause this is ai, why don't we come in and look for more? So it's a really easy in and it's pretty easy to convince someone. Hey, are you always on your website? Do you know when someone's on your website? Do you ever miss a phone call?

'cause we could set up a voice bot as well to answer the phone, and you can show statistics about if a lead is followed up on within 10 minutes, it's 300% more likely to close. Or whatever those stats are, find them, find the real ones. What I quoted is approximately right. And now you are enabling their business.

You're not just keeping their business running, which is what you're used to on the managed services side. You're not just keeping the business secure, but you're making the business better. And you wanna talk about something sticky. Let's say it's a this is my pet peeve with my my chiropractor.

When I think about my back hurting is first thing in the morning or last thing at night. And guess when they're not open. First thing in the morning or lasting at night. So how cool would it be for me for a patient experience, customer experience, for me to be able to text my team, my chiropractor, go, Hey, my back at midnight.

At midnight. And the bot talks to me and it's like, Hey, this is Dr. K's bot. I'm so sorry to hear that. I have an opening tomorrow at 10. How's that? And I'm like. Done. And now that bot has made that chiropractor money. So we've talked through a couple of different use cases, but that's a really easy in and then you sell it and then you're like, by the way, this is, you probably knew this already, Mikey, but this like fully AI driven, why don't we see if there's some other cool use cases and you just start to stack it like, like Lego blocks.

So it's a little bit bespoke, it's a little unique for every client. Everyone won't need a chat bot, everyone won't need an automation or an agent. They're all gonna be just a little bit different. But if you think of maybe 15 or 20 options, every client is gonna need a few of those 15 or 20.

[00:35:31] Mikey Pruitt: Absolutely.

So I had this conversation every time I go get my hair cut. I dunno. It looks good, right?

[00:35:36] Jennifer Bleam: Yeah. So my, my

[00:35:37] Mikey Pruitt: barber, this guy on and off, it's been cutting my hair since I was like four. And to get an appointment, you have to call him. And then he writes something down a little book. He's not open on Fridays.

He's randomly off on random days 'cause he needs vacations or whatever thing he wants to do. And I'm like, Brad, you could have a text bot or a phone answering bot that could just schedule these appointments for you. All I would need is access to your calendar.

[00:36:05] Jennifer Bleam: Correct. And

[00:36:06] Mikey Pruitt: you wouldn't have to do all this.

He's yeah, eh, it seems like a lot of work. I'm like, it's not at work.

[00:36:10] Jennifer Bleam: It's not a lot of work. And to your point, in five years, the barbers that have, that are gonna be further ahead than the barbers. Who don't, the chiropractors who have that are gonna be worlds ahead of the chiropractors who don't.

[00:36:25] Mikey Pruitt: So you said something awesome that you wet their appetite with a AI.

Automation optimization that they may or may not even realize was ai.

[00:36:36] Jennifer Bleam: Correct.

[00:36:36] Mikey Pruitt: Because there's a lot of there's a lot of AI out there. There's like new AI tools coming out every day. There's this new video thing, this new image thing, this new voice synthesizers and cybersecurity risks. Like you, your child can call you and ask for your credit card number now or whatever.

Yep. It's an emergency. So there's, and then there's just basic wrappers around Chad GBT that do something that have a good prompt, there's AI is like all over the place, coming out everywhere, all over the place. And it can be overwhelming to the cus client of the MSP and the MSP themselves.

Correct. So I'm curious, what do you think is the best way to s separate the noise from all the signal that we should be paying attention to.

[00:37:16] Jennifer Bleam: Yeah. Okay. So there's two schools of thought and you know me well enough to know I'm gonna go a little bit contrarian. One of the schools of thought is that the MSPs should be learning what's the difference between an agent and automation and what's learn the tools, learn, when is Zapier a good option?

When is make a good option? When is N eight NA good option? I just read a month ago, N eight n there's some new thing coming that's gonna put N eight N outta business. And I'm like, it is so difficult to learn all of the tools and then to stay on top of them. So that's a challenge. That's what some of the coaches are teaching, is just hire these young kids and pay them to stay on top of the tools.

I'm going the other direction. I actually have built an AI provider marketplace where we are vetting the young kids that know the tools and featuring them in the marketplace. And so the MSPs are finding opportunities. I actually created a, my first bot, it's like a chat bot that it says, Hey, I just created this opportunity.

I talked to the client. Here's the problem. Here's what we think we want it to do. Is this a bot? Is this an automation? Is this an agent? Is this something else? Is this something custom software? And no matter what they find the bot will say, that's a perfect example for an agent. Why don't you go to our marketplace and find somebody who can build the agent for you?

So then they can go to our marketplace. And there's, five different companies that build agents. They can interview 'em all if they would like we put them through some security screening, we ask our MSPs to do the same, and then they can get the product or solution from the builder and then mark it up and deliver it to the client.

So then it's up to the builders to find the best tools. It's if we buy a house or you buy the lot next door and you decide to build a second house, you are going to rely on the builder to know how to build the house. You're just like, I just know. I want it to have a lot of windows to look at the, look at the water.

I just know I want it to be two stories or one story sprawling. I would be like, I just know I want it to have a lot of closets, right? And so I get to paint the picture as the client, which is the Ms. P and the MSP's client. They get to paint the picture of what success looks like. Then they go over to the builder and the builder has to create it.

And then the MSP marks it up and delivers it. So that's a much more normal, it's a more it's more aligned to the way an MSP buys right now. They find a problem. I have lots of spam, and they don't build a spam filter. They go find a spam filter that somebody else already built. They mark it up, they deploy it.

It's that same selling motion.

[00:40:10] Mikey Pruitt: So let's talk about this marketplace for Yeah, for a minute. First of all, how do you get to it?

[00:40:16] Jennifer Bleam: Okay, so it is not even, we're not even talking about it right now. Like literally the only people that are in it are the people that are going through my coaching offer. We're gonna start to talk about it probably mid to late September.

So maybe about the time that this drops. How do you get to it? It's inside of our own community, so we're able to lock it down. So you get in. We are kicking around a very low, probably $150 a month to get access to the marketplace, to get coaching every month to get some enablement materials, like some landing page templates and some lead magnets and things like that.

So it's still very much in process, but by end of year. We're actually ahead of schedule, which is lovely. By end of year, we will have more than 20 providers in there. And right now I think we have 13 or 14 different specialties. So AI compliance, AI governance there's this thing called a small language model.

I didn't know there was. It's kind. I think I, I need to get the details, but I think it's a private, large language model and they're just calling it a small language model. I'm not sure. We have a handful of people that can build agents, automations, custom GPTs. We have one organization that does bespoke software.

So if it's this is a massive, this is brand new, we need a special tool and we've got a six figure budget 'cause those opportunities are out there as well. You can then partner with these people that are inside of the marketplace.

[00:41:47] Mikey Pruitt: This is really good. You're basically taking away a lot of that noise and vetting a handful of organizations that, that you and your team trust and that MSPs can further vet and you can work that out as the, time progresses.

It's like a curated, upwork type of thing. Yes, exactly. For ai, automations and bot. Exactly. That's exactly

[00:42:06] Jennifer Bleam: what it is. It we looked at Upwork and Fiverr. And today we don't have the ability to rank them. But we will. That's a hundred percent on the roadmap so that you can sort by cost, maybe you need the cheapest provider, maybe you want the most expensive because this is involving proprietary data and you don't wanna go the cheap route.

Maybe the client's we really value speed over budget. We don't care what we have to pay, but we've gotta get this done this quarter. And so today you can't do a lot of sorting, but there's also only about a dozen providers in there. So it doesn't take a lot of effort to look through. At the point that we've got a hundred providers, we are gonna wanna.

Be able to sort and filter and, provide, hopefully,

[00:42:47] Mikey Pruitt: eventually It won't be like the Apple App Store where there's just like billions of apps. You're like, good. That's not as good as you think it is.

[00:42:53] Jennifer Bleam: No, it will, I, it's not gonna be, it's, it has to be user friendly. I'm, I've been in this world long enough to know MSPs are very busy.

They need it to almost be self-service and maybe we'll just put a bot in front of it that asks a couple of questions and then says, based on what you said, here's the best option for you and why. And then you don't even have to search, you don't have to look through all of the providers. But that's a wishlist item.

Whereas today it's live. We've got about a dozen providers on there, about 13 different specialties that we can fulfill on. And we'll have 20 by year end. So it is live, it is not vaporware. I'll give anybody that wants a tour. A tour. I don't your cat, you wanna I'll give you a tour.

I'll shoot you on and send it over. Yeah. It's good. It's really good. It meets, it's essentially a, as I started to get more and more into this about a year ago, I'm like, okay, one of the big problems is going to be my clients are resistant to ai. And so we've created some cool ways around that, which we can talk about if you want.

But then the next one was going to be, we are already busy. We already can't get to our own internal network, or we're trying to roll out compliance, and now we're also trying to roll out AI, or my teams are fully utilized. How am I supposed to spin up another team for a division that has no revenue yet?

And so I'm like and at the same time as I'm having those conversations, I'm having conversations with the AI builders who are brilliant in their own rights but they aren't selling a whole lot. So they're building these really fancy things to show off their skills. Then they're going door knocking and trying to sell it.

And one of them said, they don't trust me. They're like, I'm not gonna give you access to my HubSpot and my QuickBooks. I don't know you. And so I'm like, wait a second. We've got builders that are brilliant, but they have zero no, and trust

[00:44:49] Mikey Pruitt: zero authority. Yeah.

[00:44:50] Jennifer Bleam: And we have MSPs that don't know the tools, but they have a whole lot of authority.

And I'm like, I got something here. This is a marriage made in heaven. So that's what we built. So it's pretty awesome.

[00:45:01] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. So Matchmaker, MSPs to Yes. Build AI Builders. This is great. Congratulations, first of all. Thank

[00:45:08] Jennifer Bleam: you. Thank you.

[00:45:09] Mikey Pruitt: And second, you mentioned something very interesting that I wanted to branch off on, which is the one organization that builds bespoke software that you have in your cohort of Yes.

Builders in the marketplace. So there's a lot of tools out there you just mentioned, like Salesforce and HubSpot. There's a lot of other tools that are really good software. But a high, they're generic on purpose so that they can suit the needs of a lot of people. And people spend enormous amounts of money customizing them.

Correct. And then there's, other pieces of software that people have and buy. But there may be a future where bespoke software specifically tailored to you is so much easier to deliver. Someone who can deliver it is gonna be pretty valuable.

[00:45:51] Jennifer Bleam: Agreed. And if we kind of future cast and we look at, okay, we've got vibe coding where, which I have not played with, although I, if I had more time, I would,

[00:46:01] Mikey Pruitt: You should record yourself.

I do a live stream. It's like I'm gonna build an app today. I don't know what that means yet. We'll find out. I

[00:46:07] Jennifer Bleam: have exactly the app. I'm not gonna say it on the podcast 'cause somebody else will take it. And it'll be like 4 99 1 time podcast in the app store. And I know that there's a market for it.

And it's not just the MSP market. It's a pretty broad market appeal. Everybody I've told about the app is like we do need an app that does that. So anyway, that let's not chase that rabbit. But if we stack on top of Vibe coding and voice bot and kind of this, we're in this interesting world where if you can create, if you can dream it, you can create it.

It's field of dreams. Yeah. Except it actually works. If you build it, if you dream it, you can build it and it's possible. When you combine all of that and how quickly everything is moving, we probably are five years away from. I don't know that I'm ready to say SaaS is gonna go away. But perhaps starting to seesas reach its peak and start to go down.

I think we're a long-ish ways away from SaaS completely going away. I think some of it is as the executives age and they retire, and then we got the young, today's young people become the executives. They may not want to. Buy a learning management solution for $15,000 a month.

[00:47:28] Mikey Pruitt: They're like, we can vibe code that in a week.

[00:47:30] Jennifer Bleam: We can vibe code it, we'll just hire some people off of, whatever. Assuming

[00:47:33] Mikey Pruitt: vibe coding is better in five or 10 years than it is now. It's good, but it's exactly

[00:47:38] Jennifer Bleam: we'll vibe. Then we'll pass it off to our compliance and legal department to check before, before we roll it out. But we, it's such a, it's such a crazy world that we're having to rethink business as usual.

And that is harder for some niches and some people than others. And I think that's part of why adopting AI is a bit of a challenge for this industry because we are very process oriented and it's not so much, oh, we've always done it this way. It works. It's more, I don't know that it's going to work that way.

I don't know that the tool is going to work. I don't know that the automation is gonna work the first time and the way I'm doing it now, it works every time. It might be really slow. It might be really manual, very tedious, but it at least it works. And so it's a little risky to try new things.

[00:48:35] Mikey Pruitt: And you you don't actually know what the AI is gonna spit back out.

No. In the long run. No. You don't. You can't predict it necessarily. No. Which

[00:48:42] Jennifer Bleam: is why, or you can't predict it at

[00:48:43] Mikey Pruitt: all.

[00:48:44] Jennifer Bleam: Yeah. Which is why you really need some kind of education just for your own team as well as for your clients to teach them you, you like trust, but verify check those statistics before you quote them from the front of the room.

Check the code before you deploy it and assume it's gonna work. We saw that recently with very large name, Chan g PT five that kind of crashed and burned when they released it. And I think they probably released it fast. They were thinking it wouldn't be around till mid to late fall.

Instead it was out mid-summer. And I think they did that for competition reasons. There's a lot of pressure on them. And I believe that this is the first software tool they've ever created. So they don't have any rollout schedule or a solid dev roadmap or someone that's, let's say a VP going whoa, we did this 10 years ago and that was a bad idea.

So let's go a little bit slower now though, that they may have people that have that experience, but the company itself doesn't have that corporate mind share about let's test before we roll it out. Let's, let's beta test, let's put it in a sandbox. And instead they're rolling stuff out very quickly.

And so it, it is a it's a little bit thorny right now. It's the wild west.

[00:50:07] Mikey Pruitt: Very much wild west. You mentioned statistics back there and I'm, I want to know. So with all this AI stuff, the MSP, adding a new package with ai, stuff that they barely understand and may need to hire somebody to fulfill it how do they measure success?

Like what is it just revenue? What does the measurement look like?

[00:50:33] Jennifer Bleam: Revenue's the easy measurement and that's what everybody wants. Pipeline is a good, revenue is a good measurement, and in theory, pipeline should lead to revenue. And I'm reverse engineering. If we want revenue, we need pipe.

If we want pipeline, we need conversations. So if we're going to least common multiple, I don't know if that's the right term, but anyway, if we go, if we rewind it, we need conversations with clients, with prospects, with colleagues with people that are rolling out ai with people who decided not to roll out AI with vendors that are offering ai, that is going to serve as education.

And then eventually some of those conversations will lead to pipeline and will lead to sales. So it's, you are really spinning up a new division. It's, you're really, it is a brand new offer. So think of it like a brand new division and in an ideal world, you'd measure all the measurements, but in the real world we're gonna measure, one to three.

[00:51:40] Mikey Pruitt: Unfortunately, we're just humans still. We

[00:51:42] Jennifer Bleam: are still just humans and that's okay. Hopefully we'll be just humans for a long time.

[00:51:48] Mikey Pruitt: And I have some good news for the MSPs and others watching that if there is a AI expert in the room, they may be three or four steps ahead of where you're at right now.

Correct. Because this stuff is very new. Still. There is a rocket ship flying away very quickly, but no one has fully grasped the potential of this particular technology. Yeah. So there's still plenty of time to jump on board.

[00:52:12] Jennifer Bleam: A hundred percent. Yep. Very well said.

[00:52:15] Mikey Pruitt: What do you think is next for the AI MSP combo other than your marketplace exploding and, gen lives on the beach in Tahiti or wherever, where you wanna get?

Okay. I

[00:52:26] Jennifer Bleam: don't okay with that. That would be lovely. Other than

[00:52:28] Mikey Pruitt: that, what do you think

[00:52:29] Jennifer Bleam: there, there is a part of me that is concerned that AI is going to erode the traditional MSP model. Because at some point your clients will stop opening up a ticket for a printing problem, and they're instead going to open up a generative AI solution.

Or they might just talk to it, Hey, chatty, help me troubleshoot my printing issue. And it's quite good at that because I have had, I had to troubleshoot a sound card issue when I was across the country in California. I'm in Maryland, my tech support is in Maryland. I happened to be married to the owner of that tech support company and they were sleeping.

And it's fine. I don't pay for 24 hours support, but I still needed, I, listen, it was late. I wanted to watch a movie on Netflix and I couldn't. I just being real transparent, so I got on chat, JPT and. It did get into go into the bios and I'm like, no. Again, thought partner. Thought leader.

I'm like, I will not be editing the bios. I don't even know what that means, but I, that's not something I do. So I'm like, gimme instructions that just have me working with the Windows interface and it helped me fix my issue. Now the next time I rebooted, it broke again. So it didn't fix it. So it didn't be, but you gotta to watch

[00:53:47] Mikey Pruitt: Netflix,

[00:53:47] Jennifer Bleam: but I got to watch Netflix.

Exactly. So it was a win. So it didn't completely eliminate the need for my MSP, but in a year or two, the model is going to change and that's why I'm trying to get MSPs ahead of that model change. Maybe it becomes a big AI with Oh yeah. We'll do your managed services too. When, and if you ever call us.

Yeah.

[00:54:15] Mikey Pruitt: That is hilarious. 'cause right now it's like cybersecurity. Excuse me. Yesterday it was like cybersecurity. Yeah. And now it's oh. And we'll do your, telephones and computers too. And now it's ai. We will do your cybersecurity and your computers and your tele telephones too.

[00:54:32] Jennifer Bleam: I think it's coming.

I, that's really, you asked. That's what I think

[00:54:37] Mikey Pruitt: Shots fired.

[00:54:39] Jennifer Bleam: I hope I, I'm actually, I hope I'm wrong. I love this industry. But I think there's. There's some massive shakeup happening right now that end users are not gonna put in a ticket. They're just gonna ask their AI for help. And I'd be curious if the larger RMM tools could say a, across their entire base, can we aggregate the number of tickets and are they going up, are they going down or are they flat?

I suspect they're probably going down if they're not yet. Yeah, I think they will be in the next year.

[00:55:10] Mikey Pruitt: People are. Are they have access to tools that already deliver a level of support that is good enough sometimes. Correct. But that's also the same. That is the opportunity because the MSB can be providing that interface that the users are chatting with to get answers.

'cause you can fine tune like I was talking about, we built the DNSFilter brain and new hires can just do a Slack message. This is eventually, it's still a vary in progress. Yeah. But eventually they'll be able to say, tell me about DNSFilter. Who's my manager? Who, tell me about the CEO and what should I be doing today?

Yeah. Like that type of stuff can just be interface in Slack or teams or whatever you guys happen to use.

[00:55:53] Jennifer Bleam: And

[00:55:53] Mikey Pruitt: you can do that for other companies too.

[00:55:55] Jennifer Bleam: Yes. And to your point about three tools. I have a colleague that is setting that up using Notebook, lm notebook. LM is free. It comes with every Google subscription and you can upload up to 50 knowledge based articles.

And so he uploads. This is not in the IT world. You're gonna know why I gave that disclaimer in just a second. He uploads all of their company data their policies, their, employee manual and pay scale, all these things into Google. And then he shares the password with everybody on that team.

Don't do that. Okay? I'm not advocating that. I'm just saying this is what your clients might be doing if you're not having these conversations. And then all of the employees log into the same account. Okay? Bad idea. But they can query, Hey, I just started, when's my first pace paycheck? Or I've been here a month.

When can I ask for a day off? How do I do that? Is there a tool? Do I just email my manager? How do I know when it's approved? Like, all of those repetitive questions that the poor HR people or the managers have to answer over and over again today can be done with a free tool. Or you can pay to create a brain, an HR brain that can answer those questions.

And you could charge MSPs. You could charge work with someone in my marketplace to create a rag, which is like a database. And sell that to your clients as a, an HR bot. And that's a really easy use case. And it's a two to six week process, probably in the neighborhood of 4K, maybe three K, 5K, something like that.

Mark it up. However much you wanna mark it up and sell it. So that's a easy use case. But if you don't do that, then your clients are gonna be using notebook, LM and sharing the password, which we clearly don't want that to happen.

[00:57:53] Mikey Pruitt: Yes. And that is why even if the dental office or whoever is gonna build something that's why they still need their MSP, whether the business model changes to some degree it's not that important.

They still are gonna need technical advice when they dive into these things. Yeah, and you can put yourself right in the middle. You're already in the perfect position. Just get in front of that AI conversation. But don't use the word ai, as Jen said in the beginning.

[00:58:20] Jennifer Bleam: Yes. Unless you optimization. Yes.

Optimization. Automation. Unless you know they're all in on ai, then say ai.

[00:58:27] Mikey Pruitt: Exactly. Jen, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been a lot of fun. I feel like we're gonna have to have a part two after the marketplace launches. Yes,

[00:58:34] Jennifer Bleam: let's do it. I appreciate the time. I love this audience. I love what you're doing and an amazing name.

I love the name of the podcast, so

[00:58:41] Mikey Pruitt: DNS. Unfiltered.

[00:58:43] Jennifer Bleam: Unfiltered.

[00:58:43] Mikey Pruitt: Thanks. It's perfect. Thanks for joining me. It's

[00:58:45] Jennifer Bleam: perfect. Awesome. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.