Hi there. I am joined today by Dan Reed, the CEO at Frameworks. Dan, thank you so much for taking some time. >> Well, thanks Victoria for having me. Super excited to get started on this journey. >> Absolutely. So, I guess before we dive into the news that went live this week, Dan, I'd love to just hear a little bit more about you and then about Frameworks as a company. >> Oh, hard question to begin with. Frameworks has been around actually it's only been around uh closing in on seven years this year.
It's actually not it's a pretty young company although I've been doing this my entire career. The Frameworks brand was built out of the idea of really wanting to build an MSP that can bring some of the best and the brightest people together to build a fantastic managed services provider for small businesses. we were born out of an enterprise and uh so out of that uh was really wanted to bring that level of expertise and everything down to the small medium business market that where it's sort of sorely needed. >> So I know this week you have launched neural works.
Could you tell me a little bit more about how you describe that platform in your own words and what you wanted to accomplish with building it? a long time ago actually uh just sort of recognizing that AI was going to provide a much bigger challenge to the upcoming economy and the change of the workforce um it was born out of the need obviously to try to get ahead of that curve right it's going to happen to us we know this so we started off as an internal initiative how can we start introducing AI into our technology stack to help us improve obviously with the goal of getting things cheaper or faster probably primarily faster more than it is cheaper The idea is is to bring that level of collective thought process into our customers much faster approach.
One of the challenges we've always had was keeping enough people on staff to respond to our to our clients and and partners in a reasonable time frame uh such that they can actually move forward. So that's exactly how it started. Um and was happy to happy with the results. It wasn't until probably about 7 months ago we decided to uh not just make it an internal initiative. The other side of Neurworks is just not the AI side of things. Um one of the challenges I keep seeing in our industry, it's sort of that managed service provider sort of hits companies at a certain size and grows up to to another size.
The the challenge being is that many of the small businesses today that need the protections that an MSP can provide can't justify the cost often. So, you know, obviously combining our AI tools along with our complete security solution, the idea is is to bring that level of cost down into a reasonableness that even the smallest of providers can get the enterprise protections that most of the companies today need in order to be in business. That was really where Neuroworks is born out of.
And uh it's it's my desire to really increase the security level of every single company out there. um and do it in a way that they can actually afford it. >> And when we talk about the kind of ways in which you are doing that, right, addressing the cost, addressing the kind of tooling that SMB needs to survive really and in the state of the world at this point, what did you want neural works as a platform as a system to kind of be able to do initially internally to your point and now as you kind of bring it into market? >> Uh to me it's actually giving a lot of the control back.
So, Norworks is about giving control back to the small business owners. One of the challenges with being an MSP is it's an all-in price that becomes a bit of a challenge. The cost continually rise with providing labor. So, it's really getting rid of the labor that is the unseen factor. This is the uh I'll call it the repeatable labor, not the value added labor like resetting your passwords, fixing that print spooler, doing those things that really drive up the cost of of it.
It's not particularly hard. It is repeatable but often it's it's at that stage in in our life where yeah we have to deal with those issues but at the end of the day we don't want to keep paying for those issues especially with new technologies coming out. So the AI was to get rid of the noise. It's not that it's not noise. These are very real problems that our customers have and they need to get solved. Usually they need them solved very quickly. uh nothing worse than not being able to print or not getting that email out or you know a common repeatable task that you know takes us hours to get back to uh which we already know the solution we've been we've been building up we have databases of how much fixing we can get done uh throughout ticket history throughout client history and stop paying for that labor I I call it the invisible labor it's the stuff we don't want to pay for that we just want to get rid of right it's it's not that we're not having those problems but we don't need to pay someone to do those repeatable tasks particularly when I want those people working on more important business challenges.
I I'll say going up the chain, going up the value add a chain. Um so door works is really to address that. It's also kind of a soul sucking work. That's why I that's how I kind of explain it internally is you know is AI going to take your job? Yes. Is it going to take your paycheck? Absolutely not. What you really want to look at AI doing is find that soul crushing work that you just don't want to do. That's the thing that but it usually takes up 25 to 50% of your day.
How do you get that gone and get that gone in a way that the customer doesn't have to pay for it, right? So that that's really what was born out of this so that our guys can work on things that are more meaningful for our clients and because we've gotten rid of it because we've you know that's what kind of happened. We started seeing this in our internal uh staff and and actually we we launched our AI as a as an individual within our system. We started getting great feedback about how fast it was and then we started saying hey this is something that everybody could use because it is getting rid of all that effort.
So Neuroworks was designed to get rid of all that high cost low value labor so that as an company that wants Neuroworks they don't have to pay for that anymore. That's not what they're they're paying for a security package and all that noise at a at a consumable flat rate. That was really what Neuroworks was intended to to get rid of. When you talk about that kind of manual repetitive, to your point, the work that most people don't want to do and then on the customer and don't want to pay for and you talk about kind of freeing up your in-house staff to do that higher value work.
What is some of that kind of quote unquote higher value work that you see now you having more time for, more ability to set your team on? Could you provide a couple vague general >> general examples? often often we don't have the time to get involved in our company's businesses as much as we'd like to or when we do it becomes a very very expensive paid for process which now we're able to do as part of our services. Now we're able to go and have those discussions about how technology is either improving or getting in the way of their business.
We have that time to do it. Not only that, but the more complex problems that are difficult to solve, right? We all know those things that you know it's 10 emails back and forth between you and your client about what the actual problem is understanding it. Well, now we're not wasting the time on those those you know that 50% of the tickets that really are well defined understood. we can now spend more time and get to those problems faster which ultimately ends up in our customers getting solutions to their problem um in a much faster rate as well as because we start to have more free I'll call it brain space to to listen to what their problems are often because we're not so rushing as much as we are to go to the next thing we can ask more probing questions we can say okay well is there a better way to do this rather than just EMT their solution which you know yeah we got you past it you're fantastic everything's good and they always get the sort of yes that's okay.
Uh really we can start diving into those. Well, how do we stop those problems from reoccurring, right? Because the more complex ones you just don't get to. Now you can spend more time and and really being focused on those activities, those problems and uh and and eliminate those ones as well or at least come up with a better solution. I know MSPs like yourself, right, have been thinking through ways that AI can be leveraged internally in platforms like Neural Works as you kind of work to, to your point, move up that value chain, have those higherend, higher value conversations with customers, how has the process of creating neural works, using it internally, how has that shaped the way that you view what AI's benefits are in your kind of workload moving forward? >> Absolutely.
It's been a just like every every company out there today, AI is both awesome and scary. Like I said earlier, you know, is it could it come for your job? Absolutely. Is it going to come for your paycheck? No. It's one of the things we had to get rid of, you know, early last year. the idea that AI, you know, in this changing workforce, how are we going to manage that and and really have those honest, frank conversations internally that not just our industry is changing, but every industry out there with AI is going to be changing and just how we need to be adaptable.
The challenges we run into um are going to be constantly changing like we're we're changing them weekly if not daily. A lot of what we've been working on uh that's brought us kind of bring us to that next level uh as an example was we spend a lot more time thinking about the governance of not only AI but data in general and all the things that we do and that's what we're bringing back to our customers. That's what Neuroworks is allowing us to do is to have the discussions with our clients about not just the impact of AI but how do you govern it?
How do you protect against it in a way that you know I I we always use the example um you know we all hope for that employee uses AI to productivity right that's that guy that now becomes you know one two you know 1.5 times three times some of them really guys guys I deal with can make themselves four times more productive us using AI uh not just with like something works but other AI tools as well so a lot of what we are engaged in is really bringing that governance package into a company so that those AI I technologies, those skill sets, those building can now be protected within a company.
A do they not just need to think about AI policies and acceptable use policies, but how do they how does AI get implemented in their environment? How does that data get consumed and and put out? Uh a common thing we run into is they think I paid for chat tpt or I paid for cloud. Therefore, my information is protected because they read a little bit of the ULO and in that ULA it says, hey, guess what? your source data is not being used to train their algorithm.
They're not wrong. But if if you take that to its logical conclusion, nine out of 10 people are going to ingest the information so that they can tell the AI to give them the information that I don't have to go read a 30-page document to go get, you know, a one-page um synopsis of what I actually care about within that document. What they don't understand is in those paid for subscriptions when they're non-enterprise grade, the output is actually also is being allowed to be training those those AI agents.
So I would say that a lot of what we've spent all our extra time on is how do we manage not only uh data but how do we manage the governance of the different tools that are coming our way and and quite frankly the shifting landscape that the world is under data and we're bringing that to our clients just you know what's the appropriate use of how we how we attack these things. So outside of the neural works internally frameworks has really moved in that direction in order so that everybody in the company understands more about what's happening um and can really bring that thought leadership because it's amazing where some of these ideas come from.
Well, and to your point on building that thought leadership internally when you do take this all of this right all these conversations to customers are you finding that many of them are kind of slowly coming around to the idea that conversations around data governance etc are important or is it still a lot of in your kind of experience education coming from you into customers going >> yeah I I would say a lot of the education does come from MSPs and that's where the MSPs have to go and move themselves uh sadly they don't have time.
And that's where that's that's kind of what was born on this side. The number of customers I've had discussions with that have an acceptable use AI policy finally. I mean, it's one out of 10. >> Um, not to mention, do they have any kind of protections? Do they have any training? Do they have any policies that say what is good, what is bad usage, what are you allowed to update? Like, you know, obviously the big companies typically will have these.
I don't know how well they're adhered to. uh that's a whole another question but some of those efforts are about how much AI is used in the business I think every business owner we've engaged and talked about them most of them will say no AI is not used in our environment so we always challenge that and say you know we'd like to block AI or or create a counter and and the amount of AI that's used in these businesses is insane and the amount of information that's being dumped out for them to do their jobs you know a lot of their IP has already been left and they don't even know it.
It's always a bit eye opening for them. And then even when they've either accepted that they don't care, which is a common response I get particularly in small business, is ah my information is not that special. >> That's okay. But what they're also giving away is to their competition, their own their own information. But then we have that discussion about I kind of alluded to it earlier. Joe who's in your department now is using AI. Fantastic. Joe leaves tomorrow and you go find a new Joe and all of a sudden you realize that, you know, Joe was four times more effective.
You have to go hire four four of those people to replace what he was doing and you didn't even know it. And that's a big danger, right? So, that's where we're going to be going in this world. And that's, you know, some of these protectionisms and and uh services we're trying to do as add-ons because a lot of companies don't realize that when that individual leaves, they're on the hook to go find somebody who can do the same amount of work. And uh often they don't know how much AI was solving them.
Best case scenario, Joe was uh using all that free time to do Saduku um and then they only have to hire one more Joe. But uh you know that's often not the case, right? Most people come to work wanting to work and uh want to do better. And so you end up in this position where you have no idea just how much AI is influencing their ability to do their work. Well, Dan, I'm curious then kind of moving forward, looking forward right now that Neural Works has been announced and is in use internally, you're bringing it to market as well.
Uh, what excites you about kind of the the future state of more people using the platform, you continuing to leverage the platform internally, and how much of a a relief is it maybe that it's kind of finally at a go live state? >> Uh, it it's actually really exciting. Um, it's been kind of like I said, it was internally used and then we we kind of soft launched it, not so much soft launched it as we ran it against our clients actually and and showed them because we actually treated it like a human and that was kind of exciting because many people started getting got all these compliments on on the AI was kind of interesting.
But as we kind of move forward uh as as it now it's sort of unveiled and and shown and everything else uh I'm really excited that the smaller companies are able to get the security they need as well as the support they need. Often their requirements aren't as as steep as what a full MSP would be, but the security tools is where it kind of lives and dies. Not only the AI is helping that area, but it's also bringing forth the us as an MSP. The way we treat security is obviously a lot more seriously than than the average sort of you know guy who's driving around his car reselling software.
Um and we bring that to everybody um regardless of whether they're neural works or full frameworks 360. In fact the same teams support the entire security stack uh regardless of which which solution they are. Interestingly enough nine out of the 10 clients who have as we've been soft launching neuro works they all want the full managed service. They're excited because we're we're really separating the field of what is an MSP in terms of uh the governance side and and the technology alignment and I'll use that because it's a common term out there.
Um what is those activities that we need to be doing? Those are not being done in Durworks and that's actually been the biggest complaint for smaller businesses that they want to guide their own journey. They want to they want to um run at their own pace. Um whereas MSPs typically are running with a with a group of companies that are typically moving a bit faster. Um Neuroworks allows them to pick their own pace but still get the protections of what they're doing.
And the other interesting things that's happened for us is like I said nine out of 10 clients ended up wanting our full frameworks managed services package because they know that Neuralworks is part of it. Um but because of neural works we've actually been able to reduce our pricing um that is typically done because labor getting rid of that that service test labor that is very expensive to get good people in there you know and allowing us to redirect some of that money um towards that governance side that that technology alignment that the customers want.
We always start that conversation of here's what it is and then after we sort of show them what governance is they're like well that's the thing we want. I'm like, >> "Yes, fantastic. We can absolutely provide that to you." But after we kind of show that how it's being provided, it's been a bit of a game changer out there in my opinion in terms of MSPs because a lot of the MSPs will tell you what they're doing. >> And often they they want to do the things, but they're aspirational, right?
They they aspirationally say, "We're going to give you VCIO services. Have you defined what that actually is?" That's not a that's not a life cycle management of your technology where you know equipment has to be replaced but that seems to be what's common in the industry and uh really kind of dividing those two uh we're going to see that bifurcation of of how MSPs run right are you going to be going up the value chain and and helping small businesses and medium businesses grow uh through technology adoption and alignment or are you just going to solve I'll call it you know no offense to Walmart provides a great product at a low price, right?
And that's what really Neuroworks is there, right? I mean, it's not designed to tell you what to do, but it is going to it is designed to provide an acceptable level of protections that will meet pretty much any cyber insurance audit. That's the whole purpose of it is to give them that capability a little bit more so too, as well as set them up for the things that they should be doing and uh and ideally they will be doing in a way that doesn't feel like it's breaking the bank for them. >> Well, Dan, thank you so much.
I appreciate the time you did spend kind of breaking down the platform announcement and and talking a bit more broadly about the industry. If people want to learn more about frameworks or about neural works, where should they go? >> Well, of course, I'm going to point you to both frameworks and neural works. So, Frameworks, of course, uh the company is is www.frameworks fmex.ca. You'll see the works is all over our stuff. And of course, neuro works is uh neur.ca. in order to find out more about what security tools are part of the solution as well as the AI service desk. >> And if you want to learn more about either of the products solutions that we've talked about today or more broadly about the channel industry, head to channelinsider.com. Dan, thank you again so much for taking the time. >> Thank you so much, Victoria.
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