MSP AI Adoption That Artificial Intelligence Delivered In 2024

MSP AI adoption and benefits to managed service providers that artificial intelligence is and has brought to our industry will be the topic of today’s article.

AI MSP uptake has been quite volatile in the last few years and that it seems is due to providers dipping their toes in the water and finding out the current crop of tools are not up to standard and so cancel quite quickly. MSP AI uptake also suffers from the overhyping the media is currently engaging in and so that leaves business owners feeling disappointed in the current AI capabilities in many of the MSP tools currently available.

While my experience with Ai in the MSP space has not been as revolutionary as I had hoped, there is no doubt it is and will make certain repetitive tasks far more cost effective.

Of course a rising tide lifts all boats as they say and with every new advantage, it generally means we all end up working harder while providing a more efficient service to our MSP clients.

In this article I am going to discuss the hopes we all have had with AI, what it is and is not along with some of the issues it has begun to eliminate. I will also discuss areas it is likely to dominate with time and areas AI has failed in.

AI Use In Managed Service Providers

Having used Artificial intelligence products such as ChatGPT and Google Bard for a good year now, I am left feeling as though it is mislabeled. Ultimately there is no more intelligence in ChatGPT than there is in an SQL database. 

I admit when I was first exposed to ChatGPT, I thought it was magic and was shocked at how well it could write an article. However after being exposed to AI over a significant period of time, the cracks begin to appear and for me anyway, I am left with the impression it is not magic, it is more a box of magic tricks.

My personal view is that AI in its current form is nothing more than hype and it will remain that way for as long as it takes humans to develop true artificial intelligence which is likely a century or two away if at all and would require a number of technologies yet to be invented and for scientists to at least understand let alone reproduce an artificial self aware conscience.

This article will concentrate on the areas that managed service providers can benefit from Artificial intelligence such as chatbots and VOIP answering services which have proven themselves capable.

How Can AI Improve Your MSP Business?

As it currently stands, think of the use you get from a substandard personal assistant and that is where artificial intelligence stands, the main difference is that even the worst personal assistant only needs to be asked to do something a maximum of about 4 times before producing an acceptable outcome.

AI on the other hand can be extremely volatile in its responses and often the one thing that makes it appear so human is how unpredictable and lacking in consistency it actually is.

Asking ChatGPT to create H2 headings on an article took me 15 different prompts before I finally gave up for the day. The following day, the original prompt worked without issue 3 times before failing twice then working again. The upshot is, it took less time to just manually create the heading using H2 in html.

Problems AI Creates For Your MSP

The problems MSPs face due to artificial intelligence are primarily security related. Now where problems occur, opportunities for MSPs open so perhaps beefing up the number of staff that specialize in AI related security prevention and remediation could be a good profit generator.

Increased Threats From Incompetent Fools

The biggest issue artificial intelligence causes service providers is that the ability for individuals with no specialist knowledge along with no grasp of the English language to become a threat to both you and your clients, the risk from the incompetent has gone through the roof.

In other words, once there was the barrier of expertise and comprehension of English both written and spoken. The written word prior to AI was always the steepest learning curve as many can speak a language but are unable to write in that language as that is a far more difficult ability to obtain and usually requires years of training and exposure.

With artificial intelligence though, all they need is to be able to copy and paste a prompt into ChatGPT and they do not even have to understand what is being written. So instead of dealing with 50-100 million competent individuals worldwide who may or may not decide to join the dark side, you are dealing with billions of incompetent individuals who have access to free tools that circumvent the need for specialist skills.

Couple that with the ability for the likes of ChatGPT to create programs where the person creating them has no clue how to program and you can begin to see how the number of threats to our organizations as well as our clients are significantly increasing.

This is not overblown either, I have created many programs using ChatGPT and I have trouble changing drives using a command prompt. In other words, I have no clue how to program and yet I can get a failing program that looks like gibberish to function without issue within a short amount of time. 

Becoming a Generic No Name MSP

Becoming a faceless MSP that has as a first line, AI bots greeting your clients, it can no doubt save you money however every MSP I know is gravitating towards more automation using AI welcome bots at every entry point to their business.

It sounds efficient and effective however have a think about the last time you attempted contact with a company only to be greeted by an obvious online support bot. 

It is incredibly frustrating for the client because often they already know the bot is not going to be able to assist with the problem they have and they know 5 mins of their time is about to be wasted talking to an IT support bot that is not going to be able to rectify the problem they are having.

Sorting Reality From Fantasy

Anytime a revolutionary technology appears, there is a tendency to overhype it and suddenly we are faced with a never ending mountain of articles claiming it can undertake tasks that in reality it cannot. Artificial intelligence is no exception here.

The moment something is labeled as AI, it seems it takes on some sort of mystical aura and it is assumed to be next level. So you find almost all products now have AI either in their name or included as a feature much like during the 90s internet boom where mining companies were changing their names to take advantage of the information superhighway craze. The insanity of human nature really does amaze me sometimes.

The best way to overcome this avalanche of information is to ask questions in forums where there is a significant concentration of MSP owners such as the MSP subreddit or Sys Admin subreddit as they tend to be highly critical of products and services that are hype and do not live up to expectations.

Security Issues And Liability

Most staff if allowed to use AI in the workplace will use something like ChatGPT and this causes a significant security concern because I would assume that at least some of the items they are inputting into ChatGPT are going to be confidential and sensitive.

There is no doubt in my mind that hackers smarter than I will ever be are sniffing out ways in which they can leverage these types of information leaks in a new generation of corporate ransom demands. 

Make sure whatever version of AI you use, you keep it offline and that your MSP does not sign away the rights of either your information, your clients information or the correspondence between you both otherwise you probably need to double check the quality of your cyber security insurance policy because at some point it is going to be needed.

Certainly and especially if you are using AI for responses to paying clients and it gives a response that ends up causing damage then it is likely your cyber insurance will have to pay out.

Solutions Artificial Intelligence Solves

Below are some of the solutions that MSP AI either already solves or is coming close to solving.

Documentation Within An MSP

Helping technical staff create documentation is one of the bigger tasks that AI is solving to a level that can be considered effective although a strict framework is required to ensure this is undertaken effectively.

Help Desk Ticket Entries

This has been a problem for as long as help desk systems have existed and that is help desk technicians either not entering any detail, not enough detail or pointless details in a ticket.

Ticket entries are for historical as well as fault finding purposes, specifically for other help desk engineers so that they can follow the steps taken and ideally use the notes to rectify future issues or problems that still exist.

It is infuriating to see entries like “started working on ticket” or “Claudia rang and began assisting with her problem” First there are time stamps so by recording they started working on something is redundant and second the ticket is recorded under the staff members name in most cases and is also redundant.

Artificial intelligence can help substandard technicians to record the steps taken because it can do 90% of the written work. Because ticket entries are about the steps taken, it does not matter that they appear to be repetitive, using the same words every time because the purpose is not to look good, it is functional in nature.

I strongly recommend either training your own version of ChatGPT or using a help desk system that has an AI component that does not use pointless flowery language where 100 words are used to say something that could have been written using 8 words.

Email Communication

This is a tricky one because artificial intelligence is actually pretty easy to detect once you have even a small amount of exposure to it so I would not want to be in a position where I am having delicate discussions with say an MSP client for them to catch me using AI in my replies.

Using it for internal communications or with some vendors is ok however whenever I have discovered someone has been using AI in emails to me, I feel cheated and any future correspondence between that person is devalued automatically in my mind and it is a judgment made that I have no choice in.

I do not use AI in emails unless I really do not care if the person on the other end realizes that this is occurring. Examples would be an inquiry to a potential vendor or asking a number of questions to a mechanic about tasks on my car that need rectifying.

I would definitely give careful consideration about using AI in client correspondence both in and out of the service desk environment.

Information Tagging

There are AI products on the market that are competent in their ability to tag knowledge base articles or standard operating procedures to service tickets using artificial intelligence.

AI munches through all of your information and gives it an appropriate tag and I will say, this is an otherwise labor intensive task that without AI is almost always never undertaken and yet brings significant improvements to information discovery.

Dispatching Duties

AI is becoming proficient enough in the role of help desk dispatching that from what I have seen, it can eliminate around 70% of the workload of a single dispatcher without staff realizing their dispatcher is now an AI support bot.

AI achieves better outcomes because once set up you can prioritize and categorize service tickets automatically. I have not tested this on anything other than HaloPSA with a third party application so you would need to check if your PSA is capable of integrating this automation.

Summary

My view is that people want to work with people. Developing a cutting edge AI based MSP that costs almost nothing to run sounds good in theory however surely we have already learnt that you can throw guide after guide at a client and it can be perfect in every way along with being easy to find.

The client still ends up creating a ticket. That trend is not going to change. AI however is starting to become useful and cost effective for simple repetitive tasks on the MSP side of the equation, so the back end operations where the client does not need to know.

Think of how techs since the search engines were invented, being asked a question and then googling the answer. Doing that in front of a client is not a good look but we all do it. Perception is what MSPs deal in and relying on AI should not be something your MSP client either needs to know about or needs to be exposed to.

Finally, if you come across posts or an MSP owner telling you how much they rely on artificial intelligence to run their business, be highly skeptical because from what I have seen, the highest level of AI use is probably getting it to write a powershell script or automate scheduling because in its current state, AI is not able to reliably and consistently undertake anything close to a complex task.

We have a number of other MSP And Tech Consulting articles listed below that will provide you with more detailed information on a number of related topics:

https://optimizeddocs.com/blogs/consulting/consulting-index-page-01

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