In this episode, Fiona discusses the rapid advancements in AI, especially in the Managed Service Provider (MSP) sector. The conversation delves into how AI avatars are surpassing human avatars in social media, the adaptation of MSPs to AI technologies, and the importance of staying updated in the swiftly changing AI landscape. Fiona recalls past initiatives like the Mentori Program which helped navigate industry transformations and compares it to current AI integration. She emphasises the need for MSPs to embrace tools like Microsoft Copilot as an entry into AI, and outlines a structured path from basic AI applications to complex, agent-driven solutions. The discussion also highlights the importance of readiness assessments, internal adoption of AI tools, and the significant market demand driven by end users. MSP owners are encouraged to start small and gradually scale their AI capabilities, ensuring they don’t miss out on emerging opportunities.
00:00 Introduction and Greetings
00:17 AI Avatars vs. Human Avatars
01:06 Recent Developments in AI and MSP Land
01:24 The Mentori Program and Industry Shifts
02:12 The Biggest Shift in the Channel
02:58 Monetising AI in the Channel
03:57 Challenges and Solutions for MSPs
04:21 The Seven Week Challenge: From Copilot to AI
04:52 Demand Driven by End Users
05:33 The Role of MSPs in Leading AI
07:04 Selling AI as a Transformation Tool
07:26 Real-World AI Implementation Stories
09:30 Steps for MSPs to Get Started with AI
12:09 The Importance of Internal Adoption
12:52 Readiness Assessment and Pilot Programs
18:59 The Future of AI in the Channel
27:22 Training Programs and Continuous Learning
30:29 Conclusion and Contact Information
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Connect with Fiona Challis LinkedIn by clicking here –https://www.linkedin.com/in/fionachallis
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Connect with Daniel Welling on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielwelling/
Connect with Adam Morris on LinkedIn by clicking here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamcmorris/
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We look forward to catching up with you on the next one. Stay tuned!
Transcript
Dan: Fiona, welcome to the program,
Fiona: Hello again, Daniel. Thank you for having me and
Adam.
Adam: nice to see.
Dan: but are we actually seeing and talking to the real Fiona?
Fiona: Well, that’s the question, Dan. Only you can figure that out. We were just talking about creating AI avatars and how, AI avatars are actually outbeat the human avatars in social media. So dad is convinced that this is an AI avatar.
Dan: And I could is real me. It is the real me.
Fiona: I could believe it for me, but not you fi So, But we do like your digital Dan. I like that.
Dan: With the wobbly head. Yes. thanks to, thanks to Graham, Graham stead for, for sending that to me in the post, this week. And, so we, we recently caught up at the GTIA event, and we were talking about AI and, we, we definitely wanted to record this, podcast, but had we recorded it two months ago, it would’ve been outta date
Fiona: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
Dan: So, perhaps, you could kick off with just telling us about some of the developments that you’ve seen over the last eight weeks in MSP Land and to do with ai.
Fiona: Yeah, so just as I was saying beforehand, it’s like we’re on the high speed train that is moving at lightning speed when it comes to AI in the channel. So when, you know, when we first met a couple of months ago, we were talking about a program I ran years ago do remember, called the Mentori Program.
Dan: I do, yes.
Fiona: we all met. You know me, you, Richard, Todd, Adam, all of them. We all met kind of through Mentori, and when I look back at the purpose of what Mentori was, that was in like 2017, I think it wasn’t it, 2017? 18.
Dan: Correct.
Fiona: and it was really when the channel was going through a huge industry shift.
Remember, we were moving away from selling products to selling as a service, to selling recurring revenue, selling business outcomes, and we kind of created Mentori to be like the roadmap. It was the roadmap to help partners go through that huge industry shift. And where we are in the channel right now is exactly the same.
So for me, we’re going through one of the biggest shifts that I think we’ll actually ever see in the channel. You know, bigger than Office 3, 6 5. Do you remember what Office 3 6 5 came out? We’re all old enough, I think, to remember it, but it feels like that now. It feels like. It’s the biggest shift in my whole time in the channel.
Like I’ve been in it for over 25 years. It’s the biggest shift I’ve ever seen. Everything is changing.
Dan: are we though? so just to challenge you on that, like thinking back to office 3 6 5, which of, I think it was it BPOS
Fiona: was before. Yeah. We’re all so old.
Dan: Phase or the office 3, 6, 5 phase.
Fiona: We are coming outta BPOS into Office 3, 6 5. So we’re at the stage now. We’re still a little bit behind. You know, it depends what kind of partner you are, but we’re definitely at the stage now where we already have partners that are monetizing AI already. they’re not going the whole way towards Agen ai. We’re starting off. Slowly with copilot and building it into an AI solution, and then next year you’ll see that develop into a genic AI system. But there’s definitely a big split in the channel. You know, when I first came back in a few months ago and I surveyed over 50 different MSPs, you know, MSPs I’ve already worked with beforehand, and honestly, only 10% of them are what I would class as AI enabled.
The other 90% hadn’t even started. They have.
Dan: and that’s what changed in the last eight
weeks.
Fiona: So in the last eight weeks we we kind of had to pull back ’cause I had all these great ideas of teaching around agent AI and digital teams and digital avatars and everything else. But when I was speaking to those MSPs, it became really clear that actually that market was very far behind. So we always had to backtrack and take a step back and meet them Where they were today and where they are today is they’re sitting on a huge base of Microsoft 3, 6, 5 customers.
They don’t know how to start talking about ai. They don’t know how to monetize it or package it or anything else. So we kind of pulled back and we created our seven week challenge from copilot to ai. So, you know, a pathway into AI for all of their Microsoft 3, 6, 5 customers. And that’s what shifted. Now they get it, now, that now it’s something, it’s a language they can understand.
Adam: When you say they, you mean the MSPs themselves or their end client?
Fiona: both. Both because, what we’re actually seeing, and again, this is another shift. I’ve actually never witnessed this in the channel in my whole time. A lot of the demand has actually been driven by the end users. So we’ve kind of hit a point in the channel where the demand is so high, it’s end users that are actually driving it all, and the supply is so low because there isn’t enough MSPs trained on how to actually meet the demand.
So right now, the top 10%, they’re creaming it. they’re the ones that are getting all the conversations because they’re ready to start talking about it.
Dan: And when you talk about being able to, to meet that demand, I guess there’s a. a a sales commercial capability and then a delivery capability as well. Are we talking about both parts of
Fiona: Yeah, you need to talk about both of it because, and again, this is why I talk about this part a lot, Dan, because the MSP industry should actually be the people leading the AI conversation. Because you know, when I look at it like I am an AI consultant myself, but you know, when I see there are so many AI startups out there and they’re selling in the big dream of what agent AI and AI agents can do, and they get all of these clients to invest time, energy, money, a lot of money in it, and then they put the agent in place and it crumble. Because the foundations weren’t there in the right place to put the agent in and it broke their data security, it went against their governance. Whereas actually MSPs are doing it the right way because they’ve already got a good foundation of identity security, governance, workflows. They’ve already got the foundation to put AI on top, so the AI that they sell will successfully be deployed and it will be safe. The other ones are causing a risk. But that’s why they should be leading it.
Dan: Re really good point. one, one thing I’ve picked up in this whole AI topic is. Like describing AI as a thing, it, it’s, like the cloud.
Fiona: Yeah.
Dan: so when we talk about ai, we’re talking presumably about professional managed services and some form of technology products. correct.
Fiona: it’s more transformation. I don’t like to see it as a tool, because what you are actually selling is the use case. You’re selling the transformation or, you know, increased productivity or increased capacity or improving experience. it’s the same as when we were teaching business outcome selling years ago.
Dan, you’re not selling the tech, you’re selling the transformation that it’s going to give you. and when you start charging on outcomes rather than how many hours it takes you to manage it or the tech stack you’re selling, then that’s when the price is literally 10 x. And customers are willing to pay for it because honestly, they’re like, I know one guy who did create an agent, but his client actually asked him to create an agent, and this is a real story at MSP. He had no idea how to price it. It’s the first agent he ever created. So he kind of went, What do we think people are paying for agents today? And he priced it at 15 K and he thought they’re never gonna pay that for one agent. So they did pay it. Two months later, the client came back to him and said, you have no idea how much money you’ve just saved us.
You’ve just saved us about 2 million a year. So what did he do with his prices?
Dan: Well, I imagine he put them
Fiona: Of course, put them
Adam: And, what exactly what was the agent doing in that exact, instance, Fiona.
Fiona: It was in the financial sector, so they were managing a lot of the backend financial side of the business and you know, they were able to save a huge amount of time on resources, capacity and give them more
revenue
Adam: actual,
was it one particular workflow or was it replacing labour? human manpower somewhere. How was it making that saving?
Fiona: It was making it by taking away all of the repetitive stuff, so you know, like the same invoice has been sent all of the time, creating new workflows for things that really probably have been done the same way for a number of years. Actually, it could be done better now with ai, so it actually created a full agent workflow to give them the output, but much quicker
Adam: So
labour savings ultimately then on,
on labour. Yeah.
Fiona: Human labour. Yeah, but not getting rid of the people, and this is why it works so well. You’re not removing the people with ai. You’re removing the work
that is repetitive, that’s rule based, that’s resource heavy. You’re removing that part so they can focus on more
high value
Adam: so, just going back to, Some of the things you’re helping, your ai, cl your MSP clients with at the moment where you explicitly said, we’re not ready for agents yet, but we are ready for co-pilot in the way that Microsoft are trying to help everyone monetize this. So, just dig into that a little bit more than, Fiona and paint a structure for, where MSPs should be going today.
If they’re not already thinking about how to monetize this. If they’re already selling 3 6 5 today, what should they be doing?
Fiona: perfect. So you guys like cars, don’t you? Well actually, Adam, you
Adam: Well, I quite like a, I quite like a motor car as well. I just thought as obsessed as some people.
Fiona: So see it. so the way I like to explain it is, see at the moment where your clients are. So your clients are already comfortable using Microsoft 3, 6, 5. You know, their whole business runs around it. MSPs are comfortable to talk about 3, 6, 5. So the way I see it is the very first part into AI is copilot.
And c co-pilot as the learner card. It’s the learner curve where you’re starting to learn about how do I talk about ai? How do I build my confidence? how do I build my belief? How do I package it? So I’m selling it as an AI service. Then eventually, yes, you will want to get to Agen ai, but you have to get your license first. So you have to go through all of the steps, for example, from copilot. Then you might move on to, doing apps, you know, creating a single use app. And getting comfortable with that. Then you’d move on to agents. Then you would move on to workflows. Then you’d move on to multi-agent workflows. Then you’d move on to the digital team and the business outcome.
But you have to go through and get that license before you get the Ferrari. So you’re starting with a fiat panda with copilot, that’s just the start. But to sell the Ferrari, which is agent ai, you have to get your license.
Because you can’t just build the agent straight away. You need to go through the whole workflow management and you need to be able to, really architecture the outcomes that your clients are trying to achieve.
So, you know, watch the transformation they’re really trying to achieve and you map it back from there, but also building it on a foundation of governance, security, and
Adam: and how are you recommending MSP’s approach this initial stage? Are we talking about some kind of discovery, some kind of audit, some kind of, you know, workflow audit, automation? What are they doing today? what does their workflow look like? Then trying to prioritize that. Just take us through, say a typical approach.
Fiona: definitely. So, your first one is to be your own customer. Zero. So you have to start using it yourself so that you can then start to use it with confidence and sell it with confidence. So we always say step one is to adopt copilot and some AI internally yourself. Track your own use cases. So for example, you know, we’ve just implemented it into a service desk in Sheffield. Where they weren’t even using the teams element, you know, to record your calls and record the transcripts and then have that turn into a follow up and put notes into the PSA system. We have saved literally two hours a day per service engineer just by implementing that one part. So you become your own best use case and you use the demonstration of that to share that with your customers and then start your lead gen. But then the next step is the readiness assessment. So you do have to do that audit, that readiness assessment to see if they’ve got the right foundations in place. So we build a full readiness assessment to check across all of the pillars, including the security, the identity, the governance, everything else.
We check all of that first. In most cases, customers are semi ready, so we score like between a one and a five. Most of them score between a three to three and a half, but if there’s some of them that are one, two, don’t even go there because it’s not gonna work.
Dan: So they’re not ready on the readiness
Fiona: not ready on it. So you have to score a three and above, and then if they’re ready, then we’ll start to do a pilot. But the way that most end users will work is they will start with a small pilot. They’ll start with like five, maybe between five and 20 people. But the key thing with that pilot is getting them the value and a quick win. So we do like a 30 day onboarding program where we make sure that the use cases they’re trying to get. They achieve that in the first 30 days. and then we do an acceleration plan after that. We do like prompt aons, we do gamification, we do acceleration and adoption hubs. So you’re making it work, basically.
You’re showing it because AI is something and you know you’ll know what yourself. AI is something. It is better if they see it. And you have to kind of see it to believe it. And when they see how much time they’re saving, that’s when it expands into the rest of the business. And then that’s when you start to sell your full stack.
So you go way beyond the copilot license and your packaging readiness, plus copilot, plus training and adoption, plus acceleration. Then you have the security element where we sell security as a service to make sure it’s secured safely. And then once you’ve mastered that, then you can go into Agen ai, but master the ground of copilot
Adam: and what would you say to MSP owners out there that are nervous around the business level conversations? So they’re fine, you know, with the tech. They’re fine security, they’re fine with their own processes, right? They don’t understand how legal companies work, how finance companies work, how retail people work.
So we are now suggesting they get immersed into business workflow and have a business conversation, which might be a bit of a leap for some owners out there. So, so what’s your sort of thoughts and ideas around getting over some of those hurdles?
Fiona: Well, the best thing is a lot of the end users actually know what they want to achieve themselves. So you’ll find them coming and we’ve heard another lawyer did this, or we heard another accountant has done that. So a lot of the time they actually come saying, we’ve heard that we can do this. Can you help us map it back? So really all you have to do is get yourself out of the IT fixer mode and become the AI facilitator. So just work it backwards. This is what they’re trying to achieve. How can we start to help them to achieve that with copilot today? But this is also why you need to use it yourself first
internally, because that’s what gives you that knowledge.
Adam: I think that is true. I, you know, just from my own experience, this isn’t something you can re, you know, ask chat GP about chat, G GP about, or any other AI LLMM and just get an answer. You actually do need to live it. You need to understand, which use cases it excels at, which it’s poor at.
when it hallucinates, when it doesn’t, you know, you are the driver of the car. You’ve still got your hands on the wheel, haven’t you? And you can’t take those hands of the wheel off just yet. for most scenarios.
Fiona: and that’s why that first 30 day pilot’s really important because you’ve both got your hands on the wheel and you’re making sure it works before you then put it into the wider organization. But you know what I’ve noticed even on, like, we do a seven week challenge, but we implement as we go through it.
So everything. We’re telling you to sell to your client, you have to do it first yourself. So even in, you know, you can, create some agents in the Microsoft 3, 6, 5 copilot, you know, the free, the paid version, but free agents and we build agents together. I’ve just been, I’ve had three of them today already, where we’ve built a proposal, a writing agent for an MSP. We’ve built one that builds QBR documents. We built an agent for that, but they do it with me live on the call because the only way you’re gonna do it is if you focus yourself with time to say, let’s do it now and build it and see how quick it is.
Dan: And, who is driving and. Monitoring the output from the agents, in this case, in the MSP, because I think to, to Adam’s point earlier, he mentioned, owners as the people to be doing this, but actually, really in a scaled, managed services business. you’ve got, commercial people, technical account managers, you’ve got project managers, you’ve got, technicians, engineers first to fourth line, for example.
So who’s actually doing what in this process?
Fiona: So the people we work with most are the owners. ’cause a lot of the owners are doing the selling themselves as well, and they’re salespeople. So we start with that. The technical people actually don’t need to be involved in the first part of it. They need to get involved from the security aspect of it.
But the initial part, they actually don’t need. But like today, we’ve just done an overview of purview and I mean a lot of the MSPs that even we’re training, they don’t know about purview in 3, 6, 5. They don’t know about the governance, the security side, the prop management. So when we teach them through that part of it, that’s when their IT team go.
We can actually use this and scale it and we can do everything through purview. Or security copilot, whatever it is they want to sell, but they sell, manage security as a service. That’s when they make the shift from managed, service provider to managed AI provider managing it securely. So they, the tech people tend to get involved at that part, but it’s mainly the business side of people that get involved at the start. You do not need to be techie to sell ai. In fact, it’s the worst thing. I mean, I’m not techie, you know that, dad,
Dan: I, I think you do yourself with injustice
Fiona: I’m definitely not techie.
Dan: but, so what we’re selling though is a service, however it is
Fiona: Yeah.
Dan: and somewhat there, there will be some accountability that needs to go around that. So are we saying that this predominantly is the. The,the player manager in the smaller MSP and the technical account management team, salespeople in the larger MSP that are both selling and project managing the rollout of this.
Fiona: Yes. Yeah. But the good thing is, I mean, you know, some of the bigger MSPs, so, you know, let me give you an example of one, node four. Huge MSP in the uk, you know, they’re already selling agent ai, so they are already creating all of the agent workflows, they’re creating the digital workforce, everything else.
So when you get to that stage, it’s a different game. you do need a lot more technical people. You need an AI architect. You need additional skill sets at that level. But at the start level, you don’t need that. You don’t even need code, Dan. You don’t even need coding skills or anything. You don’t need to know Python even to build agents yourself.
You don’t need that. You need low code, no code ways to do it. We just want a AI and I gives you the pleasure of doing.
Dan: Pre, pre presumably you can, you can create, agents to, to deliver the, the agents.
Fiona: honestly, and that’s what’s so good. You have like, so we call that the orchestrator level. It’s when you have lots of different agents and then you have an agent managing the agent. But that’s when it starts to get into agent ai. And kind of the easy way to explain it is if you think of copilot, copilot is more of like an assistant. So it’s an assistant in ai, but when you get into agent ai, you’re telling the agents to take action. So you’re giving it the autonomy to do something. That’s when you need an agent managing the agents, and then human in the loop to check.
Dan: Driverless cars
Fiona: Exactly. Driving his cars. Exactly.
Adam: So, so the other sort of significant component, well there’s 2, 2, 2 really I guess. But, the one I was just thinking about was the fact that by definition, because this is moving so quickly, There will clearly be, you know, it should be straightforward to monetize the ongoing support and maintenance of everything that’s put in, right?
Because it’s gonna break. Things are gonna change, whether from the security per the security or the workflow component or something else. And so clearly there’s an ongoing support plan then that can be sold around whatever, implementations are made. because for me. you know, I think any MSP should be, looking to sell monthly recurring all the time.
and monetize any kind of project into some kind of ongoing, value adding, monthly recurring piece of work. so I think that, again, is a huge piece for me. it’s not just about that initial project, it’s about monetizing it, on an ongoing basis. the other component to all of this, and I think we kind of touched on it already, is there is 90% of the market.
SP market who aren’t having the appropriate conversations with their clients around this, and probably half of their clients are like, well, when’s he gonna kind of talk about this stuff? Right? Because I’m kind of hearing it kind of here and there, and I’m not really sure what we should be doing or if you should be doing anything.
So, so I think the other part here is, it’s almost the case of even if you don’t, even if you’re not confident today as an MSP owner, even if you don’t have all the answers, just get started.
Fiona:
Adam: just get started. Just know a little bit more than your clients do. you know, you know, sell something.
Maybe you don’t have all the answers to what you’re gonna sell, but sell that audit. Then work out how to do that audit, right? Because you’re gonna learn from that process and you’re gonna be better at your second audit. So we’re not looking for perfection on day one because, you know, we all want perfection.
We want, you know, to get it right. But I think we’ve just gotta get started on this. And I think, you know, if you wait too long, it’s just gonna be out of date anyway. Right? It will have moved on again. So we’ve gotta know, we’ve gotta go with what we know today that’s sensible, that has, you know, a good chance of being, good enough.
For day one. and guess what? The second time you do it would be a lot easier and it would’ve moved on anyway.
Fiona: Yeah, exactly. And you know, that’s why Adam, we start them in copilot because we’re meeting customers and we’re meeting MSPs where they’re comfortable today. You know, home is the Microsoft 3, 6, 5, then we’re putting them into a learner car. In the seven weeks. So we’re saying, okay, this is how you’re gonna learn how to do it with confidence and belief, and we’re also gonna package everything up and give it to you.
So there’s no excuse not to get started. We’re giving you readiness. Assessment playbooks. Adoption playbooks. We’re literally given everything on a silver plate. Just start having the conversation because if you don’t, somebody
Adam: Well, that, that’s exact, that’s exactly it. It’s a sa, it’s now a sales differentiator to have that conversation where someone has an incumbent, which they don’t have a problem with, but they’re interested in the, in an AI discussion or solution, or to understand it more, and that opens that door.
Fiona: Exactly. And you know, and earlier I mentioned the fact that demand is much higher than we have supply. and I’ll tell you a story. I was at, the network group, in Belfast. We, I was running a workshop on AI there with David Tulip, who I’m sure you all know. we actually created a David AI agent.
We actually created one in the demo. It’s so funny and it does actually sound like them as well.
Dan: So this is it. We don’t know if we gonna, we were actually in a meeting with David or
Fiona: Honestly, you need to ask him to show you David ai. It’s very funny, but the story I was saying was I was literally talking to an MSP on the break and we were talking about AI in the education sector because he sells into the education sector and he said he’s inundated with schools and university and everybody asking them to implement copilot. Literally 10 minutes later after the break had finished, I was having a chat with a girl called Natalie who works for Enforcer, and she was telling me that her husband is a teacher, and the teacher said, we are desperate to use copilot. We’ve all got licenses, but we don’t know what to do them. And I said, well, has the MSP not went through an onboarding plan with them, taught them how to use it?
And they went, no. They asked. And the MSP said, we don’t
know how to use it. So I said, I’ve just been speaking to a guy who does know how to show you how to use it. Should I introduce you? So I introduced her to the MSP, who does know what he’s doing. And what do you think happened to the incumbent? They weren’t ready.
So the client went for somebody else, and that is what I see happening. I see it happen every single day. That’s why I say just get started.
Adam: hundred percent agree.
Dan: Really, really powerful stuff there, I think. and. And we of course, haven’t even talked about this as a new business activity. We’re talking about de defending our existing estates
Fiona: Both. Yeah.
Dan: for that very reason you should be,
Adam: Yeah.
Dan: with this from a new business perspective as well.
Fiona: I think both. And you know, honestly, I really think the way that the channel needs to look at this now, you know, not just even MSPs, resellers, bars, all of us, you know, see the channel right now, it’s splitting in two. We’ve got the traditional MSPs, we’ve got traditional IT channel reseller, VARs, and then we’ve got the agenda AI channel and the agenda.
AI channel are the people who are already not just talking about ai. They’re deploying it and they’re monetizing it, even if they’re just starting with copilot. But see yourself as that and ask yourself, which side of the channel do I want to be on back here? Where I’m a fixer or do I want to become a facilitator of the agenda gang era, and that just gets started with copilot.
It’s easy.
Dan: And. Of course, we’ve made reference to the training course that you provide to assist our listeners in, in going through that process. can you share with us in terms of, may maybe something that’s become outdated since the beginning of your training program here to give people a little bit of a taster as to what they might get from the training course.
Fiona: Yeah, so I mean, even today, the, readiness assessment. So week two is where we do the readiness assessment, and even from the rollout that I’ve done before this, we’ve just had to update that readiness assessment and change it again today. Because Microsoft had the Ignite Conference in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago.
They made a lot of changes, especially around security, so we had to update that entire assessment again. But you know, the great thing about that is when you’re in a group that’s all on this same journey, but anything changes, we just updated as we go along. So you are always using the freshest version, and that’s what we do in the seven week program.
It is literally get your hands dirty. We do it together. It’s like a cohort office. There’s like 10 to 15 in a group of different MSPs. But you all do it together. we show you together. You learn together, you implement together. You learn what works, what doesn’t work. But we give you the whole roadmap. And that’s the key is just get started on that part first. and we’ve already brought nearly 50 MSS PS by the end of the year. We have taken over 50 through that, and then some of them are coming onto the next part of the program next year, which is literally mentoring. Remember we talked about Mentori to start with. So it’s kind of mentori for ai, but it’s a full 12 month program, like a full 12 months into Magen ai. But we start from, we go from co-pilot, then we’ll go into agents, then we’ll go into workflows, then we’ll go into multi-agent. Then we’ll have the agent that manages the agent and we’ll go the whole way through that.
But that’s a 12 month, that’s a 12 month commitment. It’s not a course. That’s doing AI Labs every month. It’s meeting every quarter like we did with Mentori. We’re bringing in legal experts, AI experts, security experts. It’s literally exactly the same as Mentori, but for ai, and that’s next year. So that’s the plan for next year, but we’re still running the co-pilot AI challenge because you can’t get into the 12 month program until you master copilot.
Dan: right. Very
Fiona: It is the learner car. You have to learn it. The 12 month program is the license, and at the end of the license you’re gonna drive the Ferrari.
Dan: You, you had me at Ferrari, if I’m being honest,
Fiona: I knew that. Well, you can’t just drive a Ferrari. You don’t put a learner in a Ferrari.
you certainly don’t, and unless of course you’re prepared for the consequences. Exactly. And that’s a really good way to look at it because you know, if you see some of these AI people who were out selling all of this agenda, ai, they’re selling their Ferrari, but the consequences are going to hit them. You know, we’ve already seen it happen where customers de it is being leaked.
It’s been breached. You know that will happen because they’re not building it in good foundations. That’s why we start with MSPs.
Dan: Very good. And Fiona, we knew this was gonna be an insightful episode and, it’s certainly not disappointed. if anyone would like to carry on the conversation and perhaps, the starting point is the,
Fiona: The copilot. Start there. Yeah.
Dan: cohorts, how best to get in touch.
Fiona: Yeah. So, we’ll put a link somewhere. I’ll share a link if you want to somewhere around the podcast. And, we’ll give you a saving like we do with the network group and the other groups who come together. We’ll give you receive and anyone who wants to join it. and the next one starts 14th of January. Oh no, I tell a lie. It’s 7th of January. For that, it’s 14th for the 12 month program.
Dan: Okay. I’m not sure what date we’ll get the episode out. we’ll try and rush it out so that, so that it’s before the seventh, well, before Christmas maybe, if we’re very lucky. And, yeah. and of course, anyone that would like to talk to you, separately, you can be found on LinkedIn and at, most popular network, MSP Community
Fiona: yeah, you’ll see me back at the event speaking again. Network Group was my first one back. But yeah, we’re getting booked out for all of the, AI keynotes and everything for next year. So you’ll see me back on the stage. but also just LinkedIn, you know, connect with me on LinkedIn and, we’ll help you from there.
Dan: real Fiona or
Fiona: The real Fiona,
Dan: real real Fiona. Good. You heard it here first.
Fiona: it’s very difficult to mimic an Irish accent, Dan, especially one as strong as mine.
Dan: well, that, that’s, that’s the challenge laid down to AI when, when Robot Fiona is, uh,
Fiona: accent.
Dan: yeah, indeed. Fiona, it’s been a pleasure talking to you today. Thank you very much, for your time and, all the best for 2026.
Fiona: guys, and thanks for having me on. You are welcome.