Partnerships Unraveled

Eric Mink - How Pax8 Is Guiding MSPs to Adopt AI

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Live from Pax8 Beyond with Eric Mink on AI Powered Transformation and the Rise of the MIP

In this electrifying live episode from Pax8 Beyond, we sit down with Eric Mink - one of the first to hold a dedicated AI role at Pax8 to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the MSP landscape and why the shift to becoming a Managed Intelligence Provider (MIP) is already underway.

Eric shares how Pax8 is equipping partners with the tools, training, and mindset to move beyond managed services and into delivering transformational business outcomes through agentic workflows and automation. From no-code innovation to outcome-based selling, this conversation offers a roadmap to capitalize on AI as a revenue growth engine, not just a cost-saving tool.

In this episode, we explore:
- What it means to become a Managed Intelligence Provider and why MSPs must act now
- How AI enables 3-person teams to do the work of 10 while deepening customer stickiness
- The role of education, automation, and data integration in building scalable, outcome-focused MSP businesses

Whether you're an established MSP or thinking about launching one in this AI-first era, this is your playbook for the next wave of channel transformation.

Connect with Eric: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericwmink/

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Speaker 1:

Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford. I am the VP of Revenue here at Channingston. This week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, Eric. How are you doing?

Speaker 2:

Doing fine, thank you.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. I think you have the most important title maybe at Pax8, given the context of what we've been hearing today at Beyond. Talk to us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I'm Erik Mink, I'm based from the Netherlands and, yes, I had one of the first roles within Pax8 dedicated to AI. And, yeah, one of the first things I did was a lot of market research, of course, and talking to a lot of partners and uh, yeah, building out content and learning, uh, and guides, guides for partners. You know how to have a conversation with the end customer and, uh, we do a lot of pro services around uh, data integration, of course, really important, and uh, yeah, adding up, right.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, so you're, you're really responsible for ai adoption within the msps, right, how they build a process and monetize it, structure, go to market. That's uh, uh. We were just in the uh keynote and we were talking about uh mips.

Speaker 2:

Maybe you can explain what that is and what that, what that means, where the market's headed yeah, so mip, of course, is managed intelligence provider, and what we foresee, you know, msps transforming themselves into a lot of workflow automation, a lot of agentification of processes, and, yeah, it's our responsibility to guide these partners into this whole journey. And yeah, managed Intelligence Provider you know that's the future and it's already here, right? So there is already a lot of automation happening within end customers, maybe what the MSPs don't even know yet, right? So we see a lot of consultancy agencies spinning up, you know, and connecting directly with the end customer, and partners have to act now. That's the message, right, we have here.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so maybe, to add a little bit of context, what we're hearing a lot is that the market's going to change very. We've gone from maybe 10, 15 years ago we were selling individual vendors. Then we're selling some sort of managed service, maybe a gold package one, but now really it's another level above that where we're really trying to drive business outcomes, leveraging ai exactly, and so that that feels like a lot. That's a big jump, a big move forward. What's the response been like from the crowd today in terms of what are the questions you're hearing from the partners?

Speaker 2:

yeah, so I was also at the booth, the air booth on sunday, you know. I had a whole different conversation than yesterday, and even today is even more crazy, right. So they're all talking about automation. How can can I transform? Want to know more, want to sign up for the data and AI assessment? Right. So, where they are at that journey, and we, of course, also had a hard copy of the inflection point document. It's really being hyped right now and, yeah, it's massive energy, right, and I think that it may be clicked a bit with partners, right. So this is where we have to start and this is how Pax8 got their back right. So, all the way from simple conversational AI to complexity right?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, because I think from an end user perspective I get it right. Like hey, ai is going to be transformational to how we build and run business. We can do more with less people, which means cost is lower but also revenue potential is higher. But building a revenue motion, a practice, a security solution around that? That's complicated. Where would you advise partners to start on their AI journey?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I have some examples, you know, For example. So the Microsoft Frontier model. You know you can use a research agent in there to research your end customer, right, and it will identify a lot of automation opportunities. And just take one simple workflow automation maybe, and a PDF that comes into an email box. Take that PDF, put it in a finance system maybe it's an invoice and take these simple processes and then try to identify with the end customer the amount of hours saved, right. Try to calculate, you know, the average salary of that end customer's company and then split it in half and that's your recurring revenue. And you also mentioned you as an end user. We have been through a number of transformations already the last 25 years since I've been in the business, but this is impacting every single end user. We have never experienced that before and I'm not sure even we will experience this again. So this is a once-in-a-, once in a lifetime opportunity, at least what I think. And uh, yeah, it's.

Speaker 1:

Oh man, this makes my heart beat yeah, I, I, I'm a I'm a tech nerd and I'm a business nerd at heart, which sort of made has made the last couple of days really exciting, because there's really cool technology that I think is going to be really transformational. But there's a fundamental shift in how you are able to be successful, because we have to get to that motion where we start talking about outcomes on a much more consistent basis. How do you support partners in that journey to become much more solution and outcome orientated?

Speaker 2:

yeah, so that's, of course, a lot of it is in academy. We launched close to 100 new Academy courses and, yeah, that guides the partner all the way, you know, to having that simple conversation with the end customer and how to have the conversation and where to start. And, of course, data integration is a big part of it. It always has been maybe a bit far from a bad show from MSPs, you know, data integration, data management, data quality, and we can support them on that journey too right?

Speaker 1:

so, uh, yeah, that's that's all guided growth, and and I know one of the things that we've been talking about today is the sort of ai readiness checklist talk us through what that means and why partners should be actively participating yeah, so, uh, it's an assessment.

Speaker 2:

It's 25 questions about your business, and we use that to identify where the partner is on their journey and then hook them up into the process of all of our guided growth, take them all the way up to their specialization.

Speaker 1:

And so maybe, zooming out slightly, some people here I've spoken to aren't MSPs yet. Maybe they want to be an MSP, or they want to maybe go and set up their own MSP. What would your message be to them as to why Building an MSP today, with where the market is headed, might be the best time to enter the market?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so, with all of this automation and this technology at your fingertips, that's crucial here, right? So we see a lot of workflow automation tools, authentic systems you know it's not diehard coding anymore yeah, so, and yeah, the opportunity is massive. We will see a big, massive boom of new SMB spin-ups, right, new startups. And yeah, of course, the IT market is maybe a bit slow and there's a lot of opportunity for managed intelligence providers to step up now, and I already heard a few at AI booth, a few new startup MSPs, and they were calling themselves, I think, automation service providers. And then they heard MIP and they thought, oh, that's it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, because we've been speaking a lot and I never heard managed intelligence providers. But one of the things that we were hearing was born in AI MSPs right. Yeah, we saw the transition. Freeorg, exactly. We've seen the transition. We saw what happened when people were born in the cloud, right. Suddenly, smaller teams were able to deliver more value. But the transition from that into AI, that's like another factor of difference. Can you help articulate what some of the performance differences are when you really get into the weeds of AI?

Speaker 2:

Performance difference you also mean between the different models? Yeah, so.

Speaker 1:

I think one of the things that I think is really hard for people to understand is they go. I use ChatGPT, so I sort of understand what AI is which that's like level one, but actually you can get to a process where maybe with three people we can do the work of 10 people because of all the automation. Could you just help elaborate and contextualize some of those?

Speaker 2:

improvements. So most important, of course, is security, right? So you don't want to move your data into an agentic system that's maybe outside of your Microsoft environment. No, of course, most of the people have Microsoft tenants and you want to keep your data safe in your secured Microsoft tenant. And if you use Copilot Studio, the data won't leave your hardened environment. So the models of Microsoft, they run on Microsoft infrastructure, so it doesn't leave to other external systems and you can throw really sensitive data in a public, maybe free, even chat GPT model. That's not what you want, right? So, yeah, make the decision also based on your security.

Speaker 1:

And so one of the things that I often hear people talk about when we talk about AI is hey, we're going to be able to reduce our cost. However, I think the real message from this week, the last couple of days, is actually it's not a cost reduction solution. It does do that. It's actually a revenue growth model. Right, it's how do we continue to build? Why is actually AI able to help drive revenue growth for MSPs?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so you can do 10 times more with the same amount of people. That's I think, at least. And yeah, generating new, higher margin revenue streams right, with the example that I gave, the simple workflow automation save the end customer eight hours a week. You can sell it for maybe 500% margin, right, yeah, and the customers are happy and you are happy, right.

Speaker 1:

And what does it do to the stickiness of an MSP between the NGs? If you've built all these agentic workflows, you own Managed agentic workflows Exactly and you own those workflows right. They can't just turn you off. I'm sort of equating it to be like oh, I'm just going to delete Salesforce, delete my CRM. It's just not possible. Why is stickiness so important and value so important when we talk about agentic workflows?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so this whole managed intelligence provider it's all about relationships. It's doing a lot of transformation, consulting. You have to know everything about your customer right, so all of their processes and that's where the opportunity is. So it's a really strong relationship. And, yes, you own the workflows and the workflow automation for it, so massive stickiness, yeah.

Speaker 1:

And one of the things that I think is really interesting, if I go to you mentioned, there's no hard coding anymore. If I go 10 years ago to msps, they were very, very technically led businesses. Most of the msps I speak to now are also still very technically led, but we are seeing more of a shift to more sales and marketing balanced businesses. Do you think ai is going to help speed that up?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so if you have all of this low-code, no-code technology at your fingertips, it's even visualized. Now you have all of these canvases. You can throw apps on it, you can draw lines in between. They are integrated. There's a lot of APIs going on in the back end, maybe even MCP, and, yes, of course, you don't have to hire all these really expensive tech experts anymore.

Speaker 1:

So it's available to the mass now, and one of the things I think is really interesting is I hear people talking about it as an opportunity, but also as a threat. How do you think partners should be thinking about it? Should they be viewing this as a real opportunity, or should they be very, very worried?

Speaker 2:

I think both. Yeah, but I already mentioned, you know we see already a lot of agencies spinning up, you know, consultancy agencies connecting with end customers. You know about their customer processes and the partners have to act. Now, you know and it's maybe a bit scary even for MSP, you know, to have that first conversation about AI with the end customers. That we also see a lot and that's, I think, also a big part, is on us right to train these partners to have that conversation and it's not that hard right. Once they see it, they click, you know, and then see the opportunity and then it's lift off right.

Speaker 1:

Okay, one last one. Maybe you can help elaborate for the people who aren't currently a Pax8 partner or haven't come to Beyond why they should be coming to events like these and the atmosphere that it brings.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, of course I won't be praising Pax8, you know. But yeah, the feedback I already get, you know, I've never been at an event like this with this quality content, this quality keynotes, right. So yeah, and our investments, you know, in guided growth and helping the partner on their growth and their transformation and the transformation with their customers. It's a massive investment and we don't see that with our friends from other companies.

Speaker 1:

Awesome, well said, eric. Thank you so much and it sounds like you've got an amazing responsibility helping guide the MSP community through to AI.

Speaker 2:

Yes, awesome it's been great to have you here.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for coming on. Thank you.