In this episode, we welcome Nils, co-founder of Ironbridge, to discuss the transformative potential of AI for Managed Service Providers (MSPs). Nils shares his extensive background and experience in scaling businesses and investing in tech startups. He elaborates on how MSPs can leverage AI to revolutionise their operating models, scale efficiently, and deliver new, high-value services. The conversation covers the transition from traditional IT infrastructure to AI-driven solutions, the importance of strategic partnerships with clients, and actionable steps MSPs can take to stay ahead. Nils also highlights the unique role MSPs will play in the AI era, becoming indispensable partners for SMBs and SMEs by integrating AI into their operations and offering consultative, outcome-based solutions.
00:00 Introduction and Greetings
00:58 Nils’ Background and Experience
02:37 The Role of AI in MSP Development
03:59 Changing the Commercial Model for MSPs
06:07 The Unique Opportunity for MSPs with AI
08:30 Implementing AI in MSP Operations
12:42 Challenges and Strategies for MSPs Adopting AI
14:13 The Future of MSPs in the AI Era
16:33 Practical Examples and ROI of AI Implementation
29:35 Final Thoughts and Contact Information
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Connect with Nils Howland on LinkedIn by clicking here –https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilshowland/
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/
Visit The MSP Finance Team website, simply click here –https://www.mspfinanceteam.com/
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We look forward to catching up with you on the next one. Stay tuned!
Transcript
Daniel: Nils, welcome to the episode.
Nils: Hi, Daniel nice to meet you.
Daniel: Really good to. Happy 2026. Yes. We try not to date these recordings, but yes. I think we should be okay to release this during 2026. And therefore we’ll be we’ll be okay. So Neil was you and I met last year and had some really interesting conversations that we definitely wanted to share with our listeners on the podcast here. And, your background as an investor and an operator of businesses with your vision of what the ai, uh, revolution will mean for the MSP community. I think has some real inspiration, um, in terms of kicking off the conversation. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about where you see the MSP uh, development happening in terms of ai first of all.
Nils: Yeah, I mean, before that I would quickly start with an introduction on myself. I’m one of the co-founders here at Ironbridge. We are an AI first buy and build in the UK with a global ambition currently focusing on the UK market. Quickly on my background, I’m a trained computer scientist. With a background in m and a at JP Morgan. I then went on to operate a few businesses. One was a fast-scaling journey, sort of hypergrowth scaled a business from seven to 700 people within 12 to 18 months. And then I run our family business in IT services in Germany, which is where you might hear my accent coming from. So we scaled that business from singer to double digit growth.
And yeah, then I had the great privilege to work with a phenomenal set of founders over the past couple of years. Deployed around 300 million into Europe’s most ambitious startups. And as part of that, worked very closely with both AI operators as well as it service operators. So, Dawn Capital, the fund that I’ve been working with together has been the early invest into Mimecast, which many of you may be very familiar with from an email security side. But also over time some of the investments that I’ve been leading have been. Lean Ax, which was an IT enterprise architecture management tool, which we exited to SAP. Botguard / Blackwall, which is a network security provider that works with many MSPs and hosting service providers as well as well as a bunch of other providers that have worked on building the autonomous AI first security operations center to enforcer, which was one of our latest deals that I’ve worked with very closely. With the team. So get a bit about my background. Quite frankly, what we are up to now is we’ve realized that there’s a massive opportunity outside of the pure play software build, and we believe that. and differentiation in the long term will come from the trust and relationship with end customers. And MSPs have an absolutely phenomenal, insertion point of AI for their end customers. They’re the natural partner for the end customers to deploy AI over the coming years. And we believe that’s a great opportunity. So we wanna work with MSPs on a bunch of different things. Firstly, essentially changing the operating model internally.
Allowing, allowing the MSP to scale much faster without adding additional headcount and being an AI first organization. So thinking about it as being your customer. Zero. And then the second thing is really helping the MSP and working with the MSP together on selling AI outcomes end to end. Which requires a change of the commercial model, quite frankly. but yeah, all of that by investing into MSPs and then working closely with them. So we consider us investors and operators at the same time. But that is as part of a quick introduction and super happy to jump in and why we are so excited about MSPs outside the fact that we’ve been working with the industry over the past couple of years already.
Daniel: Maybe let’s start with the end in mind then, and talk about the commercial model for MSPs changing and then work back from that. Presumably that’s the opportunity that you see in terms of new revenues and of working relationships.
Nils: Yes, absolutely. So briefly, just to set the scene I guess everyone will be aware that it’s a unique point in time for MSPs and AI forever changes how we get work done. It’s going to be the most important industrial revolution yet, and it is fast in terms of adoption and it has a greater impact than previous industrial revolutions. We’ve learned is that adoption is painful and slow. And change is the thing that we will have to work on, quite frankly. And what it will require is to rethink operating systems from first principle. Which means we, we can’t just automate existing work, but what we should really think about is can we actually unlock net new work, so provide services to our customers that haven’t been possible before, frankly, that are now possible with AI free up time within the team to spend more time with the customers instead of spending time on filling out tickets and or. Different items in your CRM, yeah, I think most importantly we believe that MSPs are the platform that will deliver that revolution and that change to the broader SMB and SME space. And there’s no more natural partner. They’re the McKinsey’s of the world. They’re the large system integrators of the world. But they don’t really understand the SME and the SMB as well as MSPs do. They don’t have the trust, they don’t have the context, nor do they have the relationship. and again, MSPs do have, they own the IT estate quite frankly. They have access to their technology, to the infrastructure and to the data which means that they’re the best sort of partner on that change. Same as they’ve done over the last. Two, three decades handholding their partners through the technology revolutions and transformations. Which is why we think, yeah it’s a phenomenal time MSPs not just from an internal perspective and transforming the internal model, but more importantly starting to sell AI solutions to end customer. But to dive a bit into your question, what does it mean? It means that you will need to change tenants of your commercial model. You will need to move from a tactical a strategic partnership with your customers from selling times and materials to selling outcomes, which is very much a term that is sort of being thrown around the industry. But how you start with this. sometimes asking a customer, how much are you spending on doing that work today? much would you be, how much would you be willing for willing to spend for that work to be done automatically? Like what’s your, what are you willing to pay, quite frankly?
And then with that, it’s an attribution problem that you will solve over time, quite frankly. but yeah, in the end of the day, all of that means that you will need to start much earlier. Sort of with a problem, discovery and touching on business problems, quite frankly, and business outcomes with your end customer, which will allow you to go yeah.
A level beyond the IT infrastructure into the boardroom almost. So the real goal that we have is to become the chief AI officer. Of and SMEs and how Jensen from Nvidia framed it early February last year was you become the HR of the AI agents within your end customers. That means eventually you’ll be the person that sets up onboards, that manages that orchestrates, that monitors that evaluates the jobs that the agents are doing around your business. As a CEO, you will need a partner that tells you what on earth are those 10 15 agents doing that are running around my business?
What data are they touching? What is the RI of those agents? Are they still performing? Have they been recently updated? Are they running on the latest model? All those questions will be relevant and important to be answered as the strategic AI service partner, and we believe it’s the next evolution of an MSP.
Daniel: So to pick out two, two things that I heard there, uh, to help me understand. The first thing I heard was that the primary commercial. Model the pain that the end client has is one of saving time and therefore re reducing staff costs. And then the second part I heard was that.
Nils: Yeah.
Daniel: Although MSPs today have been focused around, as you quite rightly said, predominantly infrastructure management as some only some then venture into line of business application and you know, beyond office productivity you are then saying there’s a new infrastructure requirement that’s gonna be created around ai. On top of the traditional IT infrastructure effectively we create some new problems by solving one before with agents to do things for us. But then the next problem is managing those agents. So, yeah, maybe pick those two, two points if you would.
Nils: Yeah. I think the first point it’s not just around reducing cost. It’s more around really making sure that your core team can spend time where it’s most valuable, which means spending time with your end customer instead of spending time completing. Redundant, mundane tasks on a daily basis. So we want to shift the focus to becoming higher quality, to becoming faster, better, in a sense cheaper at delivering the service you actually have the opportunity to spend more time with the customer. that looks like from a perspective of what we wanna build is. We wanna grow much faster at the same hot count. And there’s some players in the market that are already showing that this is possible. I believe some of the examples you’ve covered in previous and previous sections of this podcast where people have talked about the natural insertion point of AI into your help desk, where it’s around triaging of tickets, where it’s around. Some ultra responses on level one where eventually you will need to make sure that the tickets that are high complexity and high value will actually reach a human being and or those where you know that the customer relationship is. Is critical at this point in time that you will need to inject. Now there’s lots of other interesting examples and we could go through the whole organization. Lots of them will be, will also be back office tasks. But many of the MSPs are already on the journey to being a and or are already a strategic partner, which means that lots of times spent on creating reports, creating quarterly business reviews, meetings with the customer to play back what we’ve learned about the business. is a function of gathering data across a disparate set of systems. From your CrowdStrike or hunts to your sort of ticket management system to your alerting systems, and those tasks currently take a lot of time to be prepared. And take humans then to be performed. So ultimately what we want to, what we want to achieve as well is reducing time in these preparations and really making sure that it’s more around the personal interchange rather than the data cleaning and getting everything from different points.
Those are just two examples. There’s many other examples when you think about. Professionalizing your sales motion and go to market and using AI to be more efficient on that perspective and to have higher number of leads in and have essentially high velocity in your sales motion to move to a high velocity motion in, in itself as well as finance.
But long story short, lots of things to be done on the first bit. On the second bit. The important thing, again, is.
Daniel: Yeah.
Nils: and it will be a process that will happen over the next year to come to change the way you sell. and to change and focus more and more onto the strategic topics and the business topics and how you typically start the conversation is understanding what the bottlenecks are in your end customer’s business, ultimately tying those to the p and l of your end customer. Which is, hey, your end customer, the CEO really cares about, one thing is top line, which is the revenue that comes in and how can I get more of that? And then it’s the bottom line. How much comes.
Adam: I was just gonna ask, and you sort of already sort of started to surface this subject. If we go back a couple of decades, MSPs have had to change and pivot as technology has evolved. You know, there was the. Whether there are networks, first of all then cloud, then security.
Now ai, if we’re summarizing it at a low level. And each time the MSP to some extent has had to kind of review what they are. Are they a p shifter now or are they now a service provider? I, someone else a service provider and I’m just an interface. Oh, hang on the security thing now. My security first.
Oh, hang on. Am I AI first? What’s going on? So, so. How do you think the end user market perceive this latest change? And are they thinking, hang on, AI is something different to. Generic infrastructure and security management. I need someone with a different set of skills here. They can’t just pivot from supporting 3, 6, 5, 1 day to suddenly being business process experts and understanding my business.
So I’m gonna choose someone else who’s not got that legacy MSP background. I’m gonna choose some kind of developer, some kind of business consultant type credential. So do, how do MSPs need to kind of. You know, I’m not saying this is gonna be the case, I’m just suggesting it might be the case.
How do you think MSP should approach this? Should they look to redesign what they are fundamentally or make some kind of gradual shift from infrastructure security into hr ai, ai, HR manager, as you said you know, then into business consultants.
Nils: Hey, I think I should put this question back to the audience. How many of the MSPs and IT service providers in the audience have been approached by the end customers asking them what they can do with ai? Whether it’s a simple question around copilot agents. Or whether it goes beyond into, Hey, can you help us set up some AI systems for our go-to market, for our CAM, for our Microsoft Dynamics or whatnot? We, we’ve done a survey earlier this year and I don’t know the results on top of our head. It’s on the Dawn website where we have asked MSPs. And the majority said that customers are approaching them for advice with regards to ai. So to answer the first set of the questions, I believe that end customers are looking to the Ms.
P because the MSPs are the natural point that have guided them through technology change over the last decades. And the cloud was the same move, essentially. It was a completely new environment for end customers. It, it was change management that was required. It was painful. But we see particularly in markets like the UK and the us it’s extremely high penetration markets like Germany where I’m from are bit slower quite frankly, on, on that front. Now on the second bit in terms of what you should and should not do, in the end of the day, it’s the decision of every single MSP as to how they want to embrace this change. And we would’ve seen the same again, each of the times in the history where we’ve seen movements from people changing their pricing models, from people sort of moving from box shifted to service providers, people. Evolving from a pure place service managed service provider to managed security service providers. Those are active decisions that you as a business leader have to take for yourself and where you have to decide on where you lead the future. We wanna partner with people to be super upfront and transparent, that are extremely excited about this opportunity. this opportunity means, again, change on all fronts, which means that we need alignment. With the entrepreneurs that the operating model will change. We will spend more time with customers. It will be more of a consultative sales fashion. All of that on steroids with regards to AI and using as much technology as possible to cut the time during knowledge work.
But most importantly, we will increase the time spent with end customers. And that is sort of high level the focus that should be in the prime light.
Adam: It does seem to me though that, and agree with what you said, but it that there’s something a different this time around. Salty skills required, so up until now. Tech, first Tech. You know, an owner who was an engineer, was a tech. That’s how he built his business. He’s in his comfort zone around everything that they do with their clients.
It’s all been around tech ultimately. And now we’re asking them to be business experts as well, which we’ve always, to some extent wanted them to be right to have them having the right conversations and setting outcomes Still. But is this, is there something a bit more fundamental going on here that’s going to be an opportunity for some and a risk for others?
Nils: Hey, I think it’s the right question to ask. And again, you would see that some have moved from being a pure player technology provider into, actually, I’m your virtual C-O-C-I-O, you may call it. I spend more time with you and leadership and or I drive the roadmap together with you. but all of that tied to what does it actually mean from an RI perspective. So that was the first change on that side. But hey, look, that’s why I think it is quite a unique opportunity for us to partner with MSPs because we, as Ironbridge bring exactly that to the table. We will bring an autonomous independent A team that runs on a separate p and l that will support you both with a perspective of how do I change my internal operations and build something that scales much faster essentially. And then with regards to how do we commercialize and how do we sell outcomes? A model that is, has been proven in the past and that has worked extremely well, is the forward deployed engineering model of Palantir where they’ve shown that it’s. Engineers and technicians that are deploying into their end customers and solving business problems. And what they’re just doing is they’re extremely curious and they dive deep into the problems that their customers have, and then they solve it with technology. So that is a beautiful model to look at the paling model, just to
Adam: Which model? Sorry.
Nils: it’s from Palantir. Which is, I suppose that the stock has dropped a little bit, but it’s one of the richest multiples on the public markets. They are in the end of the day, they’re a service business, which is enabled. But yeah that’s exactly why we want to partner with MSPs and support on that front. We have collected a range of operators our cap table ranging from people at OpenAI, to people at hugging face to people at DeepMind that are supporting us to one, being at the table when new things are coming out, but equally. Working with us through the challenges that come with changing the way that we sell. because what we see from a software side is that software providers realize they can’t just purely bring software to an end customer anymore, but they will have to also attach the services around it. And they realize that they will need to go much deeper. Into the engagement with the customer than before because they need a different set of data, and it’s not just out of the box software anymore, but eventually it will be sort of a custom software set for your end customer, which is again, that’s sort of the straddle from both sides. Right? I see it from a software side and from a service side.
Daniel: Yeah really interesting and. Of the things that always stuck in my mind back to the start of my career was con conversations around how much is invested in software versus the services. And, I’m pretty sure it was like best practice was, it was like you, you spent as much on service and implementation and support and optimization as you did on the product itself.
And in, in effect. If you’re a software provider, you’ve been leaving half your revenue on the table as a result of that. Unless of course you’ve got a really engaged. Partner community that that are your implementation partners, which of course is sort of the MSP model really. Taking a Microsoft product for example, and then providing a service solution, wrap around it and then taking that to market. And just to Adam’s point around the end user’s view of the MSP and. The authority that the MSP has to position themselves as now a business process optimization consultant really is the fact that they’ll have done it themselves on their own business. I think is Neil’s point.
Nils: Yeah, absolutely. Which is why we believe in being the customer, zero, starting with yourself, understanding your processes, workflows and business and tying it to the business goals. And then you go to your customers and say, Hey, we are going to work through processes, through your workflows and tie them to your business goals and be a strategic partner. But it’s a journey and we’ve seen many MSPs already on their journey over the past years. I think the most interesting. in a sense is MSP is moving to being an MSSP, now also thinking around how can you on the Microsoft side deliver dynamics. Which is nothing else from a perspective of how you sell it.
Right? And Microsoft has shown with the products that they’re releasing they’re sort of giving us the journey that they want their partners to go on as well, which is Microsoft has focused a lot on, on, on power automate now they’ve pushed Dynamics a lot, now they’re pushing copilot, right? all of those. Essentially demand you as a service provider to spend more time with your customer and their business rather than to stay in the background and being a strategic partner, which is great because ultimately that means that you have a unique selling proposition and there’s a time in the market where the market will re-shift and you can actually differentiate and say, Hey, I have a service. That I deliver that is differentiated compared to all of my competitors that are just commoditized offering and or offering perhaps better SLAs. That’s how we, that’s how we think about the world. But yeah you’re right. The key number that we’ve heard is always that every dollar you spend on Microsoft, there’s around six to eight.
Some people say even over 10. The number that we keep hearing is six to eight attached in services spent. So it’s a massive opportunity, a massive market.
Daniel: Yeah. Right. Okay. And so even more, more opportunity than I thought. And one, one of the, one of the other things that strikes me about the last phases of technology you’d like, if you take the, in isolation, the line of business application which of course could be dynamics, could be power, automate.
One of the key challenges around that has actually been the constraints around. Good quality consultants to actually deliver that. So, and of course AI is the answer to that because now you can create agents. You don’t have to rely fully on people to provide that consulting delivery, services.
It were.
Nils: Yeah, a hundred percent. And look, a lot of the time spent is not just understanding the business and mapping business processes, but it’s then essentially, once you’ve gathered all of the data, it’s then digesting that data and most of the data gathering and the digesting of the data. AI will be massively helpful.
We’ve seen it ourselves. We’ve worked with some of mid-market customers to, to prove the AI journey and we’ve built lovable interfaces quickly ingested the data. We’ve prompted it with AI and got it sort of all contextualized, which just allowed us to do a number of interviews within and across the business in a time that was much shorter than if we had to be there in person, run all of the interviews.
Write on the transcripts, then map what we’ve learned in each sort of, use our pen and underline what was the important things they’ve said. No, we’ve all we’ve run that all through, through our AI in the end of the day to get that all mapped into what are the bottlenecks of the business and from those bottlenecks, what are the agentic workflows that you would want to build and suggest.
And then the important bit though for us was to say, Hey, now we are going to prioritize because we understand the priorities. Of the board and of the leadership. And those two things, bridging those two things needed. The context that we had from the previous interactions with leadership and the board of these businesses.
Adam: And. Just on that, Neil, so, so just some numbers. Roughly how many people did you interview then through ai? And roughly how much time did you save on that particular exercise?
Nils: Yeah, I mean in that specific case, it was around 15 interviews that we run. We run. that’s a good question. How much time we would’ve saved because we didn’t actually do it manually. But I would assume that this would’ve probably taken us two days of analysis and we were done within, I think it was two hours.
It was super, super quick. The most important thing in those two hours was then once we had all of the data at our fingertips in a summarized and consolidated categorized version, was to say, Hey. How do we prioritize it? And that exercise we sort of did ourselves prior to then engaging with the leadership.
But when we had the C-level leadership meeting, we came with a suggestion and we just discussed what is important to them and what isn’t. But we hadn’t really had to discuss all of the, the 1500 data points and but we could jump right in which was extremely helpful.
Daniel: And think, thinking back to my earlier question around the ROI calculation you’ve got time saved, you’ve got. The speed of which you can arrive at the next phase of the process. And you’ve also got the fact that you can be doing higher value tasks for more of the time than the lower value tasks.
So I guess in my mind, the ROI calculation could be multi multifaceted you know, we’re saving, I don’t know. A 10 hours that would be, that would have a cost of 50 pounds. But we’re also now enabling those 10 hours to be 300 pound an hour task rather than 50 pound an hour task, for example. Is that the sort of process that you might go through?
Nils: Yeah, I mean the, with. Outcome based pricing and thinking about ROI is the attribution problem at the moment, which is going to become better and better over time. The more you spend with your customers in production, which will then allow you to actually attribute it to the essential
Adam: Can you explain a bit more what you mean by attribution problem?
Nils: problem means?
How much time did it in the end actually save.
Adam: Okay.
Nils: And making sure that this data essentially matches up, which is why the first place what, again, what we are saying from a perspective of outcome-based pricing is the fastest take off is bottoms up. You will need to understand the most painful problems, and they’ll tell you how much it’s worth to them if you ask them.
We literally, in those 15 interviews when we gathered. All of the use cases that we started with bottlenecks and then gathered use cases right out of those bottlenecks. It’s like, what are the bottlenecks in your business, in your line? Like, what keeps you away from being faster or better or deliver better service? And then we just simply ask them how much this is worth to you? And, That, that may sound very unsophisticated now, but we came up with a number at the end of the day. it was quite big and the C level was extremely happy about it. because that’s what the team was willing to spend for essentially solving these problems. And then all of a sudden it’s a very different conversation time. You will have to, you will have to move more and more into data driven as to what exact. Part of the business? Is it touching and how much impact does it actually have on your top line, on your bottom line? Which is a function of exactly what you said, Dan, right?
Time saved and customer feedback and whatnot.
Daniel: Brilliant. So, I think my takeaway from this is, don’t overcomplicate it. Ask some very simple questions, di direct questions. You’ll get simple answers and the client is likely to respond and say, it costs us this. Therefore, that’s your budget. Can you fix it for them within that budget? And away you go.
Nils: Yeah, It’s just get out there and start doing. and you will learn so much with your customers and your customers have trusted you for the last 10 to 20 years, which is the beauty of this industry. Right. And why is that? Not just because MSPs have been a reliable partner, but also because it’s a great bunch of people and they probably like you as a person and they probably like to experience bit of sort of new, what can we do and what can we change and are excited about it. So start doing caveat that it’s early days in, in some aspects, but people are happy for you to be proactive is my big learning. And then it’s all about like, spend more time with your customer. Rather than theorizing, just spend time with them on the ground and you will learn from them what their biggest challenges are and again what they’re also willing to pay, to solve, to resolve those big bottlenecks in the businesses.
Daniel: Yeah I really like your point there about the caveat, which is it helps set expectations and take some of the pressure off so that you can be, um, perhaps more inventive and open to change rather than playing it safe and not taking a risk. So, yeah, no, uh, as always talking to you, Neil, it’s a fascinating conversation.
Very inspiring. It’s around this time in the episode that we offer our guest, a shameless plug. So, if anyone wants to carry on the conversation how best to get in touch.
Nils: Yeah that’s a great question. I mean, I’m on LinkedIn. It’s the best way is just to connect me there and or to pop me over and email. My email is nils@ironbridgesp.com. My co-founder Owen will be coming onto this show soon as well. He’s very opinionated with regards to some of the questions we’ve touched upon ROI commercialization water. And he’s sort of our AI mind. So there would be lots of interesting conversations to be had with him as well. And yeah, get in touch. We love to, to speak to MSPs and hear what they’ve experienced and share some more of what we are learning and experiencing. I’ve. I’ve probably met 200 plus AI businesses in the last two years.
So I’ve met most of the AI founders in Europe and lots of interesting war stories from them, from the software side and met many MSPs. So, so always keen to, to exchange and swap notes and share some of the learnings on both sides.
Daniel: Very good. Neils, it’s been a pleasure talking to you today and thank you very much for joining us.
Nils: Thank you so much.