“What have we discovered this week that has the potential to be automated?”
That’s the question Shane Naugher asks his team every week.
The president of DaZZee I.T. Services, an MSP in Branson, Missouri, says he’s building an internal culture of continually examining mundane, repetitive, and low-value tasks that can be automated, and then layering in artificial automation to maximize team effectiveness and make their daily tasks more enjoyable. DaZZee uses a board inside their PSA for the team to submit ideas for automations. “One of the requirements for that is you can’t automate a process that doesn’t exist,” Naugher says. “So you’ve got to have a formal process documented to attach to that. Then weekly we vote on which one we feel like is going to be the best use and the highest ROI for us.”
He adds, “It’s not about eliminating people or positions. It’s about elevating what they are having time to focus on.”
That’s the promise of AI and automation that has dominated the headlines and taken center stage at many channel events in the past year or so. For Naugher, that promise is starting to come to fruition, but is he the exception or the rule? Our latest MSP Success reader survey dove into the state of AI and automation adoption among MSPs.
Here’s a look at how far along the adoption scale MSPs in general are, what they’re using the technology for, and how they are benefiting from it.
Shifting Gears: Embracing Automation For A Smarter Future
When we asked readers how they are using automation in their MSP today, their top response (71%) was for routine tasks like automated patch management, backups, and onboarding. That was followed by ticketing chores such as routing, management, escalation, etc. (58%), and marketing activities such as routing inbound leads and executing email campaigns (46%).
Other duties being automated include research, tuning data sheets, customer correspondence, list building, and creating and designing marketing content.
Only 15% of respondents said they’re not using automation currently. Their reasons range from not having the time to understand and utilize it to not having a use case yet.
“We are using as much automation as we can and we’re trying to find more [ways to use it] wherever we can,” says Jeremy Colwell, founder and managing director of The Human IT Company, an MSP serving SMBs in the greater Vancouver area. “Whether it’s the built-in automation that comes with our PSA software, which helps with things like ticket handling, CSAT surveys, and so on. Or something like Power Automate as part of the 365 suite. Or even scripting that’s being done with our RMM tool.”
Automation In Action
Like Colwell, 70% of respondents to our survey say they’re currently taking advantage of the automation features in their PSA and RMM (84%). Nearly half (47%) are writing scripts and using APIs. And a quarter (25%) are using a third-party robot process automation (RPA).
Sean Fullerton, CEO and founder of NSN Management, an MSP in Bixby, Oklahoma, says his company has been automating routine tasks that “will save my engineers time by not having to sit there and watch software install or watch a patch update. He is using features in his RMM to do so. “And then if the RMM doesn’t have all of it, we’ll augment it with scripting.”
NSN is also utilizing the automation features in the Keap CRM when they land a new customer. “We flag them as a new customer and then there’s a whole series of emails that go out.” This includes a welcome from Fullerton, information on how to reach them, and a form from accounting to gather new customer information.
Mike Mullin, president and CEO of Integrated Business Systems, an MSP in Totowa, New Jersey, does some scripting in his RMM. He has also implemented some of the RMM’s out-of-the-box automation for routine tasks, such as receiving automated emails if a network event happens overnight, such as a server going offline.
He’s in the midst of converting from his current RMM to Kaseya 365, so expects to do more after the migration is complete, he says.
“The automation would be to help us scale more without having to bring on more technicians,” says Mullin.
For Fullerton, staffing was an issue during Covid. After he was unable to find and hire a marketing admin, that’s when he first turned to automation, not to “eliminate the need for that position, but at least take care of a lot of the functions.” He used the built-in automation capabilities in his CRM and leveraged some AI tools. “What we found was that through automation, we did not have to actually go out and hire for that position.”
Naugher uses several RPA tools. However, notes that it does require an investment in time and training and now has two dedicated automation engineers. “It takes time out of billable work that we measure against, but it is that technology that we feel is going to be valuable for us going forward.”
Unlocking The Benefits
As Fullerton and Mullin note, the ability to scale and grow the business without staffing up is one key benefit of automation, according to 66% of our reader survey respondents. “The 14-person company can feel much bigger because there’s so much this technology can do for us,” says Mullin.
Other top benefits, according to survey respondents, are increased efficiency (76%) and lower labor costs (40%). Nearly a quarter (26%) of respondents, however, say the benefits are “too soon to tell.”
Fullerton adds consistency of results as another benefit. “Let’s take marketing or our new customer [automation]. We know that the messaging is going to be the same every single time. Same thing [with] PC deployment. When we do those, we know that it’s going to be consistent.”
Colwell is currently using scripting to create an automation to upgrade Windows 10 PCs to Windows 11. With Windows 10 end of life just over a year away, “we don’t want to wait until the last minute,” he says. “But we also don’t want to sit there and manually upgrade literally hundreds of computers. So if we can find a way to automate that and make the whole process happen with minimal human intervention, that’s going to make our lives better, and it’ll make our customers’ experience more positive.”
AI In Action
Using AI together with automation is where the real power lies, says Naugher.
Currently, just 17% of respondents are not using AI at all, citing reasons such as lacking the time and resources to learn and integrate it in their processes, lack of trust, and concerns that’s it’s “just a fad.” And 25% say staff are experimenting with AI but not yet using it for “real work.”
Those who are utilizing AI are using it to aid with scripting and coding (36%), to help lower-level techs with ticket resolution (32%), as a creative jump-start for customer communications (56%), and marketing (49%).
In addition, MSPs are taking advantage of AI features in their tool stack, such as RMM (24%), PSA (25%), and cybersecurity tools (25%).
Fullerton says he recently employed ChatGPT to help him write a compensation plan for a salesperson, a position he is looking to hire. After prompting ChatGPT with the task of creating the plan, “It asked me questions, I give it answers, and it came up with the really good comp plan that I had been struggling to try to figure out how to articulate.”
Naugher uses ChatGPT for sales as well, with a customized GPT that they trained to act as a Sandler sales coach. “We take the transcript from [sales] calls and feed it into that GPT and say, ‘Tell us how we did on this sales call and what areas we may have missed that we can improve upon and give us the action steps to go back to this prospect and follow up.’ It does an amazing job.”
However, he adds, “We still work with the Sandler sales coach as well, but they can take this and it streamlines and gives us much higher value with them when we sit down and say, ‘Here’s what we did and here’s the feedback. What would you suggest? And how do we make sure that from a training perspective, our team continues to improve upon these things?’”
Changing the MSP Landscape
The benefits of using AI mirror the benefits of automation, according to survey respondents. Sixty-one percent point to increased efficiency as the top AI benefit, followed by lower labor costs and the ability to scale and grow the business without staffing up (both at 41%).
No surprise since AI is newer than automation, but there is still some skepticism as to the benefits, with 39% of respondents saying it’s “too soon to tell.”
Not so for Fullerton, who after attending TMT’s recent MSP Marketing Roadshow, which included several sessions on AI tools. He can already see the potential of “what we can do with video.
That’s going to change how I can create video content without having to sit down and create video content every day.”
Mullin says helping customers on their own AI and automation journey is a potential opportunity. “I’ve got a meeting this afternoon with a customer that would like to do some AI around customer service. Certainly in the commercial real estate market, both residential apartments and offices, those owner operators are trying to do a lot with AI around streamlining people. If they’re running a 450-unit apartment complex in the middle of the country that takes a staff of 10 people, if they could get that staff down to 8 people, they’d be much happier.”
While Mullin says we’re still a way from common usage of AI in business, he says the potential is exciting. It’s one of the reasons he still loves running his MSP. “As more bots get created and can be deployed relatively simply, it will help small and midsized businesses take care of their customers better. So I think that would be exciting.”
For Naugher, AI and automation are the future. He is in the process of spinning out a sister company that will partner with MSPs to help them leverage the technology.
“There’s just so many things that when you start looking at efficiency [and] putting AI in the mix of it, it enhances what you can do. There’s a misconception that AI is going to replace everyone. I think it’s really more about AI may replace people that don’t know how to use AI.”
If you missed our last reader survey, check out MSP Owners Reveal Their Exit Strategies: Will They Cash In or Hold Out?
