Video: 1Path CRO on Implementing AI The Right Way

hey Channel insiders I'm Katie boso and welcome back to part two of my interview with Arman agayi cro of MSP one paath in this half of the interview Arman explains his focus on implementing automation tools to anticipate client needs and take time spent escalating service requests off their plates I'd really like to talk more about some of the offerings that one path has including uh your Cloud offering final Cloud spelled FY n l I'll let you describe it what is final cloud and how does that differ from the public and hybrid Cloud offerings that are also in your portfolio final cloud is US responding to a specific need that our clients have and that is the need for some type of customized private Cloud experience right I need the ability to run art S servers I need the ability for some type of dedicated desktop as a service I need the ability to customize certain file servers application servers whatever that might be and when you look at the market that serves our Market there isn't a ton of cloud providers that are like yeah you're super great at this obviously the thing that the market has incredibly is the public Cloud providers and so we coupled essentially a public Cloud offering which is the big three AWS Google and Azure and our own buildout of a private Cloud offering to give our clients the ability to have more customized versions of backup and Disaster Recovery Service offerings more customized versions of desktop has a service offerings more customized versions of various compute offerings that they may need and we call it final Cloud because we want it to be the last Cloud they ever need would you say there might be a specific kind of customer that would be a good fit for final Cloud I'm thinking of you know running through potentially your existing customer list is there a vertical or an industry that you see this working really well in or a type of business for example a senior living facility um or a large scale one I was going to say that the majority of our clients that are using it are our senior living clients and our Professional Services clients so financial services and legal services and generally speaking my assessment is that it's because they tend to be a little lagered in their adoption of public Cloud Technologies or just other call it newer Technologies they're also in a lot of cases using software that can't run in public Cloud environments they have to be run directly on the infrastructure layer they're not in any type of virtualized environment they can be in a virtualized environment or in many of these cases these providers have some level of special Network working requirements that we're able to facilitate because we actually own the physical infrastructure in our Cloud so we can stand up a different firewall we can build out a different level of access a different level of control so I it's it's interesting it's not our by by business it's not even close to our biggest sector of our Revenue wow but in terms of maintaining and keeping and often getting clients it's something that's been an incredibly valuable investment because it's a service offering that fills a specific need that often comes up within the client base that we have what is the biggest sector of your Revenue by a long shot at it Services by a long shot that was my next question yeah you offer a lot of Outsourcing Services too just a lot of General IT services what are you seeing impact that and is it growing because of that yes the unemployment rate has always been a benefit and this regard it unemployment specifically for IT services type employees consistently has been low right and so there's always competition for the types of people and that we're hiring and that our customers would hire in the event that they were going to insource this the difference it being that we have a lot more scale than the customers obviously right and so if their core person leaves it's a pretty big impact and Outsourcing that is by nature mitigating the risk of that very problem that they have the other big thing that contributes heavily to this is that there is a growing complexity within the it organization and so companies want more and more varied Technologies in their ecosystem different SAS offerings different network requirements and as a result of that have varying security requirements or varing risk profiles related to the Technologies they're introducing into their environment that means that there needs to be a broader range of knowledge within the internal it team so even if you can bring someone on the likelihood that you can fill all of the roles you need with the proportion of time that you need them I only need a security guy or girl for 3 hours a day I only need a networking person once a week right whatever that might be so I need 10 different smart people but I need two full-time employees how do I facilitate that and MSP or Outsourcing it is the answer the other big thing is is very critical that it service providers understand it's a race to the bottom in terms of getting Automation and getting proactive work to drive all of the respons iess to our clients so the goal for all of us should be to get to a state where clients are never having to call us for anything ever and that actually seems a little counterintuitive because that's how we make our money is the reactive support people picking up the phone we have humans available to answer those calls and respond the idea of someone being on the phone with us by nature is work stoppage right and so our clients don't want their employees dealing with technology issues every minute of time is wasted capital on their part msps that are able to figure that out and effectively Drive the amount of time that clients spend on the phone with us to the ground while providing value in other ways making sure Technologies are up and running providing good guidance etc etc etc showing all the ways that they were able to reduce the amount of time that employees were on the phone are going to be both the msps that last through this change that's occurring in the marketplace but also the ones that are able to continue to scale and grow their IT services because we're focused on that I think we've had a lot of success in maintaining the growth rates of Our IT service offerings that definitely brings me into a question I was going to ask about exploring Automation and artificial intelligence are you actively doing that right now where you're implement menting a way like you said to be proactive and to answer questions without the customer coming to you saying there's a red flag how are you actively going down that past path and investing in automation there the thing that I spend more time on than anything else is that like I do thing the answer has to be yes I think we will start adding some level specifically of large language models AI based Technologies into our ecosystem before the end of the year honestly I think we'll we'll be at a state where we can and the idea is how do we essentially automate all of the things that we can automate right I don't know the answer yet like I wish I had the ability to say oh AI this is exactly what an MSP needs to do this is how to go to market with it uh right now I think that most companies are going the speed to Market strategy as it relates to AI they're all like okay let's get something out this is hot we need to do it throw it yeah just throw it throw see what happens junk like it I I can only read the same generated email 15 times for I'm like okay well I know what in the same way that email campaigns are all crap now because it's you know the same 15 emails you receive 20 times a day from 30 different vendors like yeah your email is not finding me well at this point correct exactly you nailed it the best possible thing you could have said right and so similarly AI is kind of in its phase where we're just tossing stuff at the wall seeing what will stick because there's all these lwh hanging fruit ideas but the lwh hanging fruit ideas are never the things that move the needle with new technology it's all the the tried and tested and innovated on things and so we're going through very carefully and we're asking ourselves in what way can this technology benefit us and what way can this technology benefit our clients if we do something are we comfortable sharing with our clients that we are using AI to do it because if the answer to that's no then we probably shouldn't be doing it anyway because if you're not comfortable telling your clients you're doing it then you probably shouldn't be doing it right and those the answer to those questions will ultimately inform what things we do automate and what things we don't over the course of this year I think we'll get to a place to where we've really really automated a lot and like many things in the MSP space this is all predicated on how much documentation do you have how much can you standardize how much do you know about your clients how much do you know about the technology architecture and infrastructure and most importantly how much documentation do you have do you have uh a branded large language model that you're in particular interested in in trying out or are you still exploring I spent the most time with open AI models um Google obviously had its big Fiasco recently and I think all of them are going to have some kind of thing like that because at the end of the day there is a lot of political influence on these llms and the more you have any type of influence in that regard societal or political the more they're going to be tailored towards a certain thing right and so that creates a difficulty so this is more just what I know personally One path in particular hasn't favored one or the other that's just the the experience I have we're looking at all of the major ones including I don't know if you know this but there's a lot of open- source llm technology out there besides open AI right and so it's not so hard to just open up and take some open source code out of GitHub and build your own llm nowadays like that is a totally possible reasonable thing to do the challenge is that the the developers of those llms don't have nearly the kinds of resources that uh Google has with Gemini or open AI with their platforms the GPT platforms and so from a feature perspective you're likely to be behind the curve if you're using one of those I imagine in the next few years we'll have kind of the same race that we had with Cloud right Amazon introduced the market that's open AI in this context everybody else who had money picked up on it and started building out their own platforms and same thing that's going to happen here right you know Microsoft was first Market in the sense that they were the big investor in open AI Google's got their own platform we all know Apple's developing something like who knows what platforms will actually use for for us for now and I think this is where everybody should be focused on it's about developing the skills related to training the models the models are only going to be as good as you can train them and so more of our energy is going into effective training of the models than it is which model needs to be picked oh my gosh a final llm if you create your own yeah it is there it is you nailed it you nailed it all right we'll talk about how you're going to price that out for my nailed it for my copyright after this exactly yes yeah wrapping up I I want to talk a little bit about the vendors that are supporting you and one thing uh the elephant in the room that I have to make sure that I address at least try to after looking at some of your key vendors are you being impacted by any of the m&a activity that we're seeing in the vendor space right now and how are you moving forward or potentially moving away from some of those vendors in 2024 yes is the obvious answer anybody who says no to that would be crazy you definitely are the reality is that as a technology services provider one of the things that we do is we Aggregate and collect what we believe to be the best vendors that exist in the market and we have to understand that that's our responsibility it's not necessarily the responsibility of the vendors to provide a good service well it is obviously but it's our responsibility to be the the check and balance on are those vendors as good as they say they are can we put our name behind this recommendation to our clients at its core that's what trusted advisory and consultancy out of the MSP spaces and as a result of that mindset I don't necessarily think that the vendors impact us too much because is our responsibility to understand that these types of things are going to continue to occur just like our clients the MSP clients shouldn't feel the impact of the massive amounts of m&a that occur in the MSP space so with that I think that it's it's pretty safe to say my focus is just on who are the best technology service providers that are out there what are the best SAS platforms that are out there what are the best security vendors out there what are the best cloud vendors out there which ones are we going to add to our reference architecture such that our Target customer profile is happy when they come to us they say yep we're going to move all of our services to your stack because you have built a mature stack right and the more I have clients saying nope I don't want that technology as a part of this bundle or I don't want that technology as a part of the service offering the more I have to look back and say maybe our reference architecture isn't doing what it's need what it needs or maybe we're going after the wrong client it's that way of structuring the approach that makes it so that we are effective at building the right product portfolio and selecting the right vendors we're not necessarily saying oh look at all this stuff that's happening to us in the market look at all this m&a that's happening us to us in the market it's a foregone conclusion it's G to happen I'm not going to change that right how am I positioning our business to be effective at navigating those things well the answer is that we're singularly focused on best and Bre technologies that make sense for the customer we're going after we achieve that I don't care about anything else don't care right because and and that simplistic way of thinking I'm very adamant about mindset I tell the team all the time mindset mindset mindset if you get the mindset right then the actions and everything else is a natural result if you mess up on the mindset then you got to try as it relates to the actions and all of the everything else and so our mindset as it relates to product is simply that find the best and breed Technologies we don't have to worry about all the other things that are occurring we navigate the Rough Waters when they happen right the VMware debacle that was that blew up on all of our faces so from a product perspective we just don't worry about the things we can't control we worry about the things we can our mindset is really focused around that and then all the other Rough Waters we just navigate them when the time comes well speaking of best in breed vendors are there any in the moment whether it be the support that they're giving just the awesome technology or the fact that they make deals really easy because customers want them are there any vendors that you would give a shout out to right now there are some people that I think have been really really good partners MH and at the end of the day it's interesting I find that the relationship we have with vendors is more predicated on the quality of the relationship managers that they have right and so at open text Steve and Josie are incredibly uh Dana who introduced the two of us right the that relationship hey man that relationship is one that will exist for a long time just because he's a great guy like he is an easy person to connect with and if he goes anywhere and he calls me I'm going to pick up the phone and say I'm interested in hearing what you're talking about because it's you right and so I think and and vendors should realize this and MSP should realize this as well at the end of the day the saying is still true people buy from people people connect with people it's about are you putting the right people in place last question today I know that one path has a history of charitable commitments in the community and you even got your own charitable organization One path local what charitable or philanthropic initiatives or focuses is One path investing in this year I'm going to stay strictly on One path local for this because it is a employee run and funded nonprofit that we are really proud of and what that that nonprofit does is it goes and it works with schools in underprivileged areas of the country and we have our Engineers go out for a day with refurbished computers from our clients that they've donated and we teach the kids at those schools always high schools various skills and Technology trade skills and so maybe things like installing software packages uh troubleshooting issues removing antivirus from the computers they connect with our Engineers directly they are sponsored by the school they have a day or multi-day offsite that they can perform and then at the end of the day they actually get to keep the computers we don't tell them that till the end and so it's a really cool exercise and it's all about actual education with the team I love that Arman if I want to get involved with one path if I'm an IT buyer or a CIO and I want to learn more about you and and sign up as a as a customer as a trusted partner where can I go where can I find you and get in touch one pa.com that's the numeral one the word path be careful not to spell it out uh or you can find me on LinkedIn thank you so much Arman I appreciate your time and I hope you have a great day I'll see you back here in the future yes absolutely thank you for having me I appreciate you as well thank you thanks to Arman for joining me and thank you as always for watching or listening you can check out all episodes of Channel Insider partner POV on Channel insider.com or watch on YouTube at channel inssider unor news and Trends you can also listen to the audio format of every episode on your favorite favorite podcast listening platform like subscribe and follow wherever possible to never miss an episode if you'd like to be on the show email me at partner poov Channel insider.com I'm Katie boso and I'll see you next time

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