Tas Gray: Why AI and Automation Will Make or Break the Modern MSP

Welcome to MSP Mastery, the podcast for MSP owners and leaders who want to build a better MSP; one that actually works for them.

I’m Jeni Clift, joined by my husband and long-time business partner, Nick. Together, we’ve spent decades building, scaling, and eventually exiting our own MSP business.

Over the years, we’ve seen firsthand that the MSPs who thrive are the ones willing to evolve. And right now, few shifts are more important than the rise of AI and automation.

In this episode, we sit down with Tas Gray, Managing Director of Axiom IT, to unpack what AI and automation really mean for MSPs — not as hype, but as a practical business reality. Tas shares why increasing efficiency, reducing manual effort, and driving costs down are no longer optional for businesses that want to stay competitive and profitable.

Here’s what we covered together:
 ✅ Why AI and automation can dramatically improve efficiency and reduce operating costs
 ✅ How manual processes can leave MSPs vulnerable to shrinking margins and rising costs
 ✅ Why clients are already looking for meaningful ways to use AI to improve productivity
 ✅ The risks MSPs face if they delay automation for too long
 ✅ How AI is reshaping expectations across software, service delivery, and business operations

We created this podcast to share the real conversations and lessons we wish we’d had more of while running our own MSP — practical insights from people who understand the challenges, pressures, and opportunities in this industry.

Whether you’re already experimenting with AI, starting to think more seriously about automation, or questioning how these changes will affect your MSP in the years ahead, this episode with Tas offers a grounded and timely perspective on what leaders need to do now to stay ahead.

👉 Connect with Tas on LinkedIn: Tas Gray
🌐 Learn more about Axiom IT: Axiom IT
🎧 Listen to other MSP Mastery Podcast episodes here: mspmastery.blog

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

What AI and and automation offer is the ability to bring your efficiency levels up and in turn drive your costs down substantially. AI is an existential threat to these businesses now. It's going to get to the point where it can develop the software in minutes. The juice has got to be worth the squeeze. You could spend your life automating things that happen once every two years. Well, by the time it comes around, it again the automation might need to change.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Welcome to MSP Mastery, Control Alt Deliver, the podcast for MSP owners and leaders who want to build a better MSP, one that actually works for them. I'm Jenny Clift, and alongside my longtime business and life partner Nick, we unpack what's really working in thriving MSPs, including insights from the trusted partners who support them. Between us, we've clocked up more than 60 years in the MSP industry, long enough to have tried all the shiny new tools and the latest game-changing SaaS product that promises the world. This is Control Alt Deliver. Here's Nick, myself, and today's special guest. Today we're joined by Taz Gray, the founder of Axiom IT, a managed service provider built with scale in mind. Taz has deliberately designed Axiom IT around an automation first approach, allowing the business to keep headcount lean while increasing profitability and consistency. That automation focus also enables rapid onboarding of new clients, removing friction as the business grows and allowing Axiom IT to scale quickly without compromising service quality. A couple of years ago, Taz relocated to Ind to Indonesia and has been running the business fully remotely since, proving that with the right systems, structure, and discipline, an MSP owner doesn't need to be sitting in the office to operate effectively. Alongside Axiom IT, Taz has also built and successfully sold the SaaS platform MSP Magic, a story we'll save for another episode of Control Alt Deliver. Taz, welcome to Control Alt Deliver.

SPEAKER_03 2:17

Thanks, Jenny. Thanks, Nick. Great to be here.

SPEAKER_02 2:19

Yeah, good to see you, Taz. I can't believe it took I I have we have met before in Melbourne in the past, I think hanging around SMBIT, etc. And we met again in Indonesia, which was interesting. I came over to that GTA event, so I didn't know you were there. So yeah, it's good to good to reconnect. Likewise. And and the dogs miss you. They just went to the beach again.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

So for some context, Taz came and spent a weekend with us recently here in uh in Bali, because you're living in Jakarta, a couple of hours' flight from us. But great part of the world.

SPEAKER_03 2:48

I think so. It's certainly grown on me. Definitely wasn't sure what to expect when we came here, but I'd say overall it's been quite quite a positive experience. So yeah, there you go.

SPEAKER_02 2:59

Yeah, I was a bit the same. Like we'd we've been coming here for holidays for years and years and years, well, probably 15 years, and then we decided to come over for three months. And then by the time we actually moved, we'd extended that lease to five months. And then at the end, about month four, we said, Yep, this is working. So then we did the five-year lease, uh, a proper commit. So but I was concerned about that, how my mindset about yeah, I used to go there for holidays, and how am I gonna actually be able to work still? Because but I actually set up an off a proper office. I got myself some uh my black work t-shirts, I put them on and I do what I need to do. Yeah, not working full-time anymore, which is great. But definitely get out of the office, change clothes, go for a swim, go to the beach, and you're in back in holiday mode. So it's um it is quite quite good lifestyle. It takes a while to get used to, but yeah, I'm happy to I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

We've managed to, I guess, create the best of both worlds where we have the the apartment and our business and clients still in Australia and we do our regularly quarterly trips and heading off on Sunday. And yeah, so it allows us to see family and friends regularly. So it's good good balance.

SPEAKER_03 4:08

Living the dream, you might say.

SPEAKER_02 4:10

I got one client that messaged me every day going, You're still living the dream. Yep. Then he must photo of a bintang at the beach or something. Yeah. Wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

So Taz, as an EOS implementer, I always start our meetings with the same question. So please share your personal and professional best from the last six months.

SPEAKER_03 4:29

Well, it's a great question. On a personal level, I guess there's there's been a lot of change in my life over the last 18 months. But, you know, I think about that, I guess having a young child now is I'd say the thing for me, not just for the last six months, but I guess he's he's about to turn three. So for the last three years, having him around's been fantastic. And I guess in particular, in the last three months, he's he's certainly changed a lot as he gets a bit older. He's starting to develop personality and get his own ideas about things and just really becoming a little person. So the fact that I can be around during the day working from home and and you know, I'm not it's not just seeing him at the end of the day like if I was working in a nine to five job. So I guess that some of the flexibility that that my situation affords me has has really paid dividends lately, and that's that was I guess a big part of the reason why I guess I've chosen the life that I that I chose, and we always have moments of doubt as to whether we chose the right path, but certainly in the last six months I would say that doubt hasn't been there. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:37

That's cool. We started our first business in '96 when Oscar was not even twelve months old. And then Sam was born about a year later into the business, and we work from home. So I relate to that, mate. And it was it took a little bit for me to get a routine. So I'd get up early, do a little bit, then it was kid time. And when they started to go to school, it got a whole lot easier because you could when they come back from school, kind of have a couple of hours with them, then you have dinner and put them to bed, then you go back and do work later in the day. That's it. Back in the back in the early days, back in the late 90s. Our kids have always known us to work from home. We didn't move into an office until they were well and truly into middle of primary school. Yeah, enjoy it, mate. It's great. It's great. It's something that a lot of people don't get to do, and um yeah, appreciate it. It's great.

unknown 6:25

Cool.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

And professional best.

SPEAKER_03 6:27

On a professional level, I mean in the last six months, I think, you know, I I you couldn't really go past AI in in terms of answering that question. I think for me personally, I I've probably spent the better part of the last 12 to 18 months really trying to fine-tune my skills around AI. But I think in the last six months in particular, Claude Code's been the thing for me where I've really been able to get my head around how to leverage that in a professional capacity. And yeah, I mean, just I guess just to elaborate on that, I've I've just found that my productivity personally, as well as the productivity I've been able to drive throughout the team as a result of what I've been able to do with it, has been somewhat of a game changer. Really, we're probably only scratching the surface. So I guess to summarise, the game-changing sort of phase that we're in right now that AI and Claude Code in particular has brought to my life and to the business has been unprecedented, shall we say?

SPEAKER_02 7:26

I has spent a couple of hours with me when he was over here a couple of weeks ago and introduced me to Claude Code and me being a non-script guy and a non-CLI guy, spending lots and lots of messages backwards and forth. What does this mean? What's the next step? How do I make it do this?

SPEAKER_01 7:42

You're you're regretting that spending that time with Nick now, are you?

SPEAKER_03 7:46

I don't respond to it to his messages. Not not all the time, he doesn't. No, no. Claude Code's doing that.

SPEAKER_02 7:52

The the point is, um I'd spent about 12 hours trying to build a bit of code, you know, vibe coding with one of the other platforms, uh, GUI-based, web-based platform. And I wanted to build it on my own infrastructure. So I have a hosted server thing in my office, and it just was going round and round in circles, and I'm adding and pasting of errors from the console to my chatbot, and it's giving me answers, and I'm putting them back, and it's just going round and round. And he goes, What are you doing? Just check this Cord Code thing to your host and tell it what you want to do. And within what, 15 minutes, we had the bloody thing working. So you definitely sold me, so I I agree. If you uh Cord code doesn't do everything, but it's bloody good at doing code and automation, especially. Yeah, yeah. I recommend people have a look if you haven't had a look. And we'll leave the uh elephant in the room till later.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

Yeah. Okay, Taz, just introduce yourself to people who don't know you, share a little bit about your professional journey.

SPEAKER_03 8:56

I'm the managing director of Axiom IT, which is a business I started about 12, 13 years ago, possibly a bit longer, actually. But I've been doing that for feels like uh you know an eternity now. But prior to that, I'd my background was actually in software development. So I started my career working as the.NET coder straight out of uni and really enjoyed a lot of aspects of of software development. But I was also, I guess, I don't know if the people listening are necessarily old enough to remember, but there was once a time that every household had a computer on a desk. It was an absolute necessity, and before iPhones and iPads and smart TVs and all that kind of stuff. So being that being the person in the family and and the extended network who understood computers was regularly fixing computer problems and routers and all that kind of stuff that really had nothing to do with software development. But it inevitably led me down a path of why am I sort of sitting around writing code every day when my phone's ringing flat out. So I mean, I'd be, you know, working full-time and then go heading straight over to someone's house after work and sometimes make more money doing that in the day than I would at work. So saying that, this was sort of pre-FaceFood and all that when you know software engineering sort of started to become a bit cooler too. So anyway, so my background's in in software development, but then at some point I decided that running an MSP might be a good idea, and still still sometimes a question mark as to whether or not that was a good decision. But in any case, it was a good opportunity to to get my first foray into business, and we're still here all this time later. So I think that's that's the best way I could introduce myself.

SPEAKER_02 10:39

In the one percenters, mate, that's it. There's so many startups, so many businesses start and fail in the first five years. So, you know, anyone out there that's that's got past the five years, you're doing well. That's that's uh honestly, it's uh not too many people do it. And you know, we'll we'll talk a bit about AI later on, I'm sure. But in the in the vibe coding world, you know, I think 99% of things that people try fail. But now you can do it really quickly, and you don't have to go and invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to to figure out if an idea is a good idea or not.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Okay, so my perception is you've taken that as sort of an automation first approach, pretty much from early on in the business. So, what does that look like inside Axiom? And where has the latest automation tools that are available made the biggest difference?

SPEAKER_03 11:29

Well, I mean, I I would preface that with saying that where the business sits today in terms of automation and and what it can do is critical to the way that we operate, but it's in some ways it's uh it's really the tip of the iceberg. So it took us a long time at the beginning of AxiomIT to sort of work out what we were doing. It was up. So I've got a business partner as well, and he he's definitely more technically oriented when it comes to you know the system admin type skills that you need. And we initially, neither of us had any MSP background, right? And so we were just a couple of guys that knew how to fix stuff. And anyway, long story short, we were sort of out there doing ad hoc support and things like that. And we then graduated to manage services at some point, but it took us a while to figure that out. And then what kind of happened not too long after we started the business was the whole cloud thing suddenly took off and and Office 365 came along. And for us, that was that was at least for me. I don't know, I couldn't speak at behalf of my business partner, but for me, I looked at that and went, okay, this is this is the future, and SBS server and all that stuff was just I just never understood why why we even needed that. I hated it.

SPEAKER_02 12:44

That's but that's because you weren't around for 10 years before SBS server when it was even worse, mate.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:50

Well, sort of cunning. I started a Novel first network I worked on was uh the very first one with a Wang Twin X, which was two bits of coax in a word processing network. It's had 10 megabit transmit, 10 megabit receive on different pieces of coax.

SPEAKER_01 13:05

And you and you rode your horse and cart to go fix it?

SPEAKER_02 13:08

No, no, I had a car. 1967 fell.

SPEAKER_03 13:10

Oh well, I'm glad I wasn't around for that. Um that sounds Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:14

But yeah, SBS server was a godsend when it came out, especially for small business, because trying to take their corporate infrastructure and scale it down was a nightmare. So I kind of got out of the tech when you got into it. That that's a really interesting I didn't realize.

SPEAKER_03 13:28

Yeah, well, we like ships in the night. So just just I guess to follow on from what I was saying. I mean, I I I saw the Office 365 thing. I don't know if you if people remember, but there was a lot of resistance to that early on from the MSP communities. And they obviously built good business models around, you know, server refresh and server, you know, the the managed service associated with it and all the rest of it. We didn't really have any of that, so I just went, this is great, let's go all in on this. And and the thing that I loved about it was the fact that it was you could do everything in PowerShell and everything became scriptable. So so that that kind of gave me, uh I guess opened my mind to to the possibilities. And you know, I sort of remember at the time going to a lot of like the Robert Crane sessions, and you know, I'd do like credit to him, he was he was very disruptive to the industry's thinking around a lot of that stuff, and and really highlighting the the benefits of Office 365 and the scalability, and and you know, he was somewhat I'd say he was somewhat instrumental in at least in the Australian SMB community of sort of changing the mindset, which he convinced me early on. So that was good. So anyway, so we kind of evolved our offering around the cloud and then ultimately ended up in a place where we we sort of were able to come up with what we thought was a good managed service offering that that encompassed the Office 365 and the licensing and everything else. And so it, you know, it was a journey just to get to that point. And in doing that, we we sort of figured out somewhere along the way that we needed to not be doing things outside of that. So, like in the early days, like like probably everyone else, you sort of say yes to everything, even if it's not really aligned to what what you know you should be doing. So we spent a lot of time trying to convince people that they needed to to not do that and to do what we were proposing they do. And eventually we got there, and and so it was it was and that to be fair, that was a lot of that was my fault. I was I was the sales, you know, I was in that sales role, and then my business partner was kind of like, if you go and do that one more time, it's gonna be a problem. So I he sort of forced my hand on that, but it did bring us into line and gave us that consistency we needed where every customer more or less looked the same, but at the same time we had to start saying no to things that you know, and that was the bit that I I struggled with initially. But anyway, so so so it was getting to that point, I think was the critical, critical bit because we we've now got a customer base where I'd say 90% of what they do is the same across every single customer. That makes automation just exponentially a lot easier. So that that's kind of how we got to a point where we could do that. And then I think Jenny, to your to your question, is you know, what does that look like and where has it made the biggest difference? For us, it just means that we are able to provide our clients with a level of service that they probably wouldn't otherwise get if we were doing things manually. So we've gone to the extent of building out our own client portal where customers can log in and fill in forms for the standard service requests like onboarding, offboarding, blocking sign in to an account temporarily, delegating mailbox access to someone, just that all that kind of stuff. So a lot of that is now self-service through portals and then the the automation that runs on the back of that is all scheduled and runs automatically too, so that the team don't really get involved in any of that whatsoever until it needs a person helping someone set up the authenticator application or on their phone and things like that. But yeah, so we've just abstracted a lot of that boring, mundane, repetitive work away from our team. And in turn, you know, the clients love it. They the customer experience that they get is far greater than what they what they would get elsewhere potentially.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

And getting a gazinian email and notifications from a PSA.

SPEAKER_03 17:29

Yeah, I mean it's I still remember we'd get people emailing us saying, Oh, I've got John starts next week. Can you sort it out? It's kind of like, well, yeah, okay, well does John have a last just yeah, just but even even little things, you get one technician that'll create their email addresses John.s, and then the next one will do John.smith, and the next one will won't put a dot in it, and you know, just those inconsistencies, just knowing the naming conventions even for the customers service. We just that's why the forms there, right? You you saw you decide we don't need to get involved on that level.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

And if you spell it wrong, then you know Which people do, but it's not our fault.

SPEAKER_02 18:06

Exactly. We went down that path with because we had, you know, some government agencies and they you know, they would I would say we'd be doing a hundred onboard, offboards a month. We didn't have any automation, but we had good forms systems with each client. But when the manager puts the guy's phone number in wrong or they spell their surname wrong and it goes through our system, we do it everything right, it's good to have that trackability too. Not not that it's gonna solve the problem, but unless you go back and quickly identify what's what went wrong and a sanity check on it, because that's yeah, automation is is good, but you want to make sure it doesn't automate when they say crap in, crap out as you know, you've got to you've got to have some sanity check there. Are you sure this is the way you spell this guy's name?

SPEAKER_03 18:46

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. But I mean it yeah, the it's made a made a big difference in terms of just uh how quickly we can get things done for our clients and just I I'd say just quality of life for our team made makes a big difference there. And it it also I'd I mean another thing too is it it gives us a bit of it allows us to abstract a lot of the complexity of things away from from our team as well. So things like ordering 365 licensing and and stuff like that, you know, people make mistakes with that all the time. It's it's just better if they don't do it. And but there was a period of time where I don't think our technicians actually knew what licenses anyone had. You know, they never had to go and assign a license, they never had to order one or anything like that. So it yeah, it sort of simplifies things greatly and creates consistency and and all those things that you want, right? So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:47

So many questions. So I I work with a number of different MSPs and and I fortunately I we sold out of hours before I had to get involved in the NCE and the uh annual commit and annual billing and all that kind of cycle. So if you had uh if you had a 50 user customer, would you by default deploy 50 annual licenses or would you keep a percentage on monthly to cater for the ons and offs? This is the question I hear a lot around the traps.

SPEAKER_03 20:14

Yeah, so we I took a view on on NCE from the beginning that I just didn't think the annual commitment was worth the 20% saving. And a couple of reasons for that. So we don't sell, you know, like with a lot of the MSPs, they'll sell them a support agreement which is separate to the licensing. And so I've you know, I'm inherently lazy and I hate administration and boring stuff like that. So I my approach to that has always been you just pay us a monthly fee, you know, what we call like we'll call it our Axiom Cloud user, and and that's whatever it is a month. That includes business premium or I mean they don't even know, it just includes the office Microsoft 365 licensing, as well as the backup, as well as Huntress, as well, you know, whatever it is, right? And so so my view is you just pay us for that, that's fine. And so I don't then I don't have to go to them every year and go, all right, you're uh yeah, Office 365 license is up for renewal and blah, blah, blah. It's just one less conversation. That's that's really is is a dumb conversation anyway. It's not adding any real value to the to them or or to us. So so I've I've just avoided that. But in order to do that, I've just taken the view that, well, we're just gonna do months to month, right? And and what that allows me to do is go to the go to the, you know, we get a new client, we send them a contract, whatever. They might have a dozen staff. I I'm not gonna make them stay at a dozen if they suddenly let four people go. I want them to have flexibility. So I've I've kind of approached our managed service a bit like you would with a with how Microsoft licensing used to be, where you could just go up and down, it didn't really matter, pre NCE. We kind of Let that filter through to the client. So in order to keep that consistent, I had to just just stick to the to the monthly, right?

SPEAKER_02 22:07

If you make up your potential margin loss, if there is any from the licensing fee, you're making it up in automation by having it consistent, not having to spend an hour trying to figure out each customer's billing each month.

SPEAKER_03 22:19

Yeah, I mean I I don't even look at our 365 bills from from the distributor. But look, I think that I think the annual commits are f is a is a not it's not a real saving because and I've seen this before when I've looked at you know where we where we've come in and taken over a client, for example, where they do have the annual billing, and you know, they the the challenge with it is that if every I guess you can mix the monthly and the annual stuff together to sort of deal with increases over the that base number and so on, but it's kind of like that's all that's gonna do is slow down service delivery, right? Like we need a new user, we need it urgently, and then suddenly the the tech has to sort of either go and speak to someone whose job it is to deal with that or or work it out themselves and probably make a mistake. So yeah, to me it's just and waste a bunch of time in the process. Yeah, and and if the client suddenly hits a headwind and drops half their staff and they're gonna keep paying for a year of licensing that they don't need, I mean it's only a 20% saving. Your headcounts only get a drop by 20%, which in with a 10 years of business, it's two staff, so it's not a lot, and then suddenly you're not making money, you know, like it's it's not a anyway. Long answer. That's good.

SPEAKER_02 23:32

No, I understand that that makes perfect logic to me. Yeah, it's just you've got to if you optimized and simplicity, keep it simple is the way, because we we tried to keep it as simple as simple as possible. And yeah, I suppose at some point there could have been a few of our clients that were paying for licensing. They probably didn't consume all of the features, but yeah, I had the same attitude. Business premium, because we did have some clients with X 65 for everyone. Not I wasn't picking out an individual standard for the U and a basic for you and a business premium for you and an E4 for you and an E5 for you. So no, it's just business premium for everyone. Uh makes life so much easier. And it's all swings and roundabouts. Yeah, cool.

SPEAKER_01 24:12

I think Nick and I were pretty surprised about, you know, uh when we're chat when you were here visiting a few weeks ago, talking about business as you do. You've deliberately kept your head head count really lean, which is not how a lot of MSP op MSPs operate, I can't speak. How do you decide what gets automated versus what still needs a human? And maybe if you can just you know what's one thing that you've chosen not to automate?

SPEAKER_03 24:37

So I think there's three questions. Been one then. So the I guess the first question is that you know, we've we've deliberately decided to keep our head count lean, I think is what is what you started with. So I don't know that that's been a deliberate decision. I think that's that's more a consequence of of what we've done up until this point. So I mean, less people means less cost, which means bigger margin, you know, and and better profit, which is ultimately the point of having a business. So so I guess in in the sense that we're trying to be as profitable as possible, that that has been a deliberate move. But so, so yeah, you know, how how how have we done that? I well, yeah, so let me just make sure I understand the question. So we've deliberately tried to stay lean. Yes, I would agree with that statement. How do we how how do we decide what gets automated and what gets automated?

SPEAKER_01 25:32

Yeah, so that's sort of you know what gets automated, what still needs a person. And the third part of it is you know, what's something that you've a you have decided not to automate to keep that human aspect.

SPEAKER_03 25:45

Yeah, so the I mean initially for us, the the the biggest time time sink I found was was creating onboarding and offboarding of staff members. Has got to be in every MSP. That's that's the thing that comes up a lot. And it's still it's still challenging for us, don't get me wrong. There are parts of that process that that you know that you just need someone from the help desk on the phone and remotely connected to the machine, you know, that and and that that part, unfortunately, I don't I don't I I don't think you can really automate certain bits of that. But in terms of how we decide what to automate and and what doesn't get automated. I mean, we I I would basically we have a matrix that where we sort of stack up, you know, the impact of of automating something in terms of what what benefit is going to provide time saving usually being the number one, but also where where is where are people making mistakes a lot of the time and you know consistent where does where is consistency important and and where is it important to eliminate human error, right? Because something might not necessarily take long, but the impact of a small mistake six months later can be monumental. So so that's also one of the factors that that comes into it. And then and then weighing that up against what's the difficulty to actually implement or to automate that process, right? There it you know the juice has got to be worth the squeeze. I mean, you could you could spend your life automating things that happen once every two years. Well, what by the time it comes around, it again it the automation might need to change or or something, you know. That yeah, so ultimately I think that that's how we how we weigh it up with a bit of a matrix like that. And obviously it's got to be feasible.

SPEAKER_01 27:36

Is that a a formal review? Like every month you sit down and say, what can we automate? Do people, you know, your team come to you with ideas?

SPEAKER_03 27:44

So I yeah, I mean, I I from early on, the I've I've drilled it into the team that you know if you find yourself doing something a lot and and it's very repetitive, then then let's talk about automating. So we put some initiatives in place where we we would allow them to come up with ideas and then like if you know in the early days we'd have we'd have an all like an all-team meeting and we'd talk about it and we'd we'd review them all as a team. We don't haven't really been doing that in the last couple of years.

SPEAKER_01 28:13

Did you automate that process?

SPEAKER_03 28:14

Well, that part you can't, but maybe with AI in the future. But no, so but yeah, but look, it was just a mindset mindset shift for the team, I think, getting them to start thinking along those lines. And you know, I mean, my my thinking has always been if I why am I doing this boring repetitive stuff when when I know it can be done in an automated fashion. It was getting them to start thinking like that was quite important. And yeah, so but now I mean we've got I've I've got someone on staff full-time, and their job is just just dedicated to to this stuff, you know, call it DevOps or automation or whatever you like. But yeah, we and we run that, we use Azure DevOps. We have a you know an agile methodology that we follow to create, you know, epics and features and user stories and all that kind of stuff, and then we just prioritize and just regular meetings and yeah, just we just sort of work our way through it. That's good.

SPEAKER_02 29:12

Are they using Claude code as well?

SPEAKER_03 29:14

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It'd be crazy not to.

SPEAKER_02 29:17

Exactly. I'm I'm a can I'm a convert. I am a convert. I just kind of I'm a bit addicted to my my UI, you know, easy use, but I'm getting used to it.

SPEAKER_03 29:29

Well, yeah, I mean I think you see the benefits that you know you can you can lead a horse to water, of course.

SPEAKER_02 29:35

Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So one one thing just you made me think of a a discussion I had, I can't remember when it was, but we had this in our business and one of the roadblocks to offboarding, and I agree with you 100% that onboarding and offboarding clients, team members, staff, whatever you want to call them, users, is a constant in every business, every MSP business, and it is a big sink of time. Like if you do a time analysis, timesheet analysis over your in your PSA of all the time you spend on tickets, you'll probably find you spend more time on average per offboarding, onboarding ticket than you do on any other ticket in your system. And one of the interesting things for me was this decision process on what to do with the user when you offboard them. Because you've got this, oh, we fired the guy, he's gone, he's dead to us, get rid of everything. To this person's good on leave and have gone A-WOL, oh, this is a senior executive, we need to keep his data for the next six months. Uh and this, all these questions, and that was the big roadblock for us in our business, because we had hospitals and councils and commercial stuff and lawyers, and and there was never a consistency. So I would have thought, and I do think today, that why don't we uh build an automation that covers for the worst case scenario? Which to me would be block logging, change password, export the whole entire email teams, everything to a PST or whatever you're gonna do, shove it in a SharePoint site somewhere, and we can then solve any question that ever comes back about that client. But a lot of people are very resistant to that these days. I'm not, I'm not sure why. But so do you have a like a blanket default, this is what we do no matter what, or do you kind of have a customized what what needs to happen with my data and my email when someone logs off?

SPEAKER_03 31:19

Yeah, so we good, I mean, great question. And so this is I guess this is to me, it highlights the benefit of of using automation here. So so there are decisions that need to be made about how how offboardings are treated and how off-boarded accounts are treated and all that kind of stuff. I would never want the my help desk team to have to even think about or make those kinds of decisions. They're the sort of decisions that need to be made by the people at the top. And the benefit of using an automated process is that once those decisions are made, they can be implemented and there's no retraining of staff, there's no you know, worrying that they've misunderstood and they're doing it wrong because that you know, I mean, as you would probably remember, you can have the best processes in the world, but people stop looking at them after a while because they think they know what they're doing, and then they make mistakes, and you know, so someone's got to be doing a bit of QA on on that, and I I certainly am not interested in doing that. So and and nor am I interested in paying someone to do that. I think there's far better things like we're doing with the time. So, yeah, so I guess we, you know, we we've our off-boarding process, I'm sure, is not perfect, by the way, but it deals with that situation, and we you know, because we've had it come up where someone leaves an organization six months later they come back, right? So, you know, we've what do you do? So now we've added, you know, we've got functionality now in our portal where they when they put in the email address, if it detects that it was a previously off-boarded user, it says, hey, there was a guy here or girl or whatever it might have been with that name, did you want to reactivate that account? And so then we can bring it back and so on and so on. But yeah, it's a again, it's just it's about taking those decisions away from people who who, in my view, are probably not in a position to really make those decisions. And then the problem is that if they are, then if you get help desk technician one does it this way, and then help desk technician two does it another way, and then you end up with a mess.

SPEAKER_02 33:32

So yeah. Yeah, and and even the clients sometimes don't understand the ramifications either. Oh yeah, Bill, Bill resigned, yeah, we don't need his email, we don't need his data delete at all. So we yeah, we give them by default, I think it was 90 days or something, and deactivate the account, and then we delete the data. And then you get two and a half years later, you get a phone call from the new CEO saying, Oh, we've got a court case or a freedom of information requirement. I need Bill's emails. Yeah, but your manager at the time said you didn't need them, so unfortunately they're gone. You know, it's so you know, it's kind of protecting people from their own mistakes as well. So then there's that long, long discussion, which I'm sure you've been involved in before, about what do we take as default liability on us versus the liability on the client. And yeah, do you want to be the kind of business that says, oh, sorry, that was a poor decision you guys made a year ago, so I can't help you, or do you want to be the kind of person that without too much cost to yourself, you can put systems and automation in place that protects, for want of a better word, dumb decisions. Because yeah, we've all done it. We've all had made a bad decision. Oh, I wish I hadn't deleted that.

SPEAKER_01 34:38

Don't 2020 vision of hindsight, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:42

Yeah, but I think that's that my point is that it doesn't cost any more to have an automation automate the process for everyone rather than just a couple of people to tick the box. You could do it for everyone by default, it's not gonna cost you any more. If you're using SharePoint, you've got pretty much unlimited storage anyway. So why would you or does that bring you other liabilities you've got to worry about down the track, which I don't know the answer to that.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

Opening a can of worms there.

SPEAKER_03 35:09

Yeah, I'm not sure I know the answer to that either. But look, we we have a really comprehensive set of questions around the offboarding process that that the client has to go through, including you know what they want us to do with data and things like that. So, but I mean our default position, we we always convert a mailbox to a shared mailbox anyway, so it's there in perpetuity, but then it you know we use Drop Suite to back everything up, and that has unlimited retention. So there are multiple layers of protection, I guess, against that scenario, but it's it rarely comes up. But yeah, we would I would never delete anything just because I think you know, I I think I'm a step ahead of those bad decisions. Yeah, correct.

SPEAKER_02 35:53

I've been taught before, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:54

You know, I said that we can delete it. Well now we've I figured out we can't anyway. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 35:59

I had a client once bring me a backup tape. It was a new client, and they said, Oh, I think we need because they did have annual tape backups and they had them all stored in their locked in their vault. And I said, Do you have any idea what medium, what program this tape was? Nope, no idea. So we get the tape, and I just had to basically build multiple backup environments and try and guess what the most popular tape. Make sure the tape was on read-only. And eventually we found out I think it might have been a really, really early version of ArcServe on a Novell server. You couldn't even use a Windows server to restore it. But we got the data back. Probably did it as a fun project rather than a charge job because it would off them a packet to consistency is I suppose is another thing. If you have consistent solutions across your clients, it makes these kind of situations a lot easier to handle.

SPEAKER_03 36:48

Yeah, I mean, that's just you know, that's a legacy technology sort of problem that you're talking about there, which doesn't, you know, in the cloud world, those problems don't happen anymore, which is I'll come on.

SPEAKER_02 37:01

I'll I'm gonna call you on that. I I I'm a 50 user Office 365 client, been in the cloud for 10 years. My old provider used, I don't know, VMware M365 backup, and you're using DropSuite. How do you get the archive of the 10 years from the other vendor's product into the current vendor's product?

SPEAKER_03 37:23

Yeah, that's a good point. You can't. It's very, very there, there's no interoperable product.

SPEAKER_02 37:28

That's why we had a warehouse full of tapes. Yeah. I had to keep them for seven years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I get it, but it's still, I don't think that you know, that whether the legal hold is still eight years or seven years or ten years, who knows? But they they're the real things that I've run across. We've we've been asked to produce data from five years ago for a court case, and they were our client at the time, but we had change backup solutions halfway through the journey. I couldn't do it. So it was yeah, we didn't get in trouble, but it was a bit embarrassing when you go to the client and say, Well, hang on, Nick, you sold me this backup solution and you sold me the next one.

SPEAKER_03 38:07

So not a conversation you want to have.

SPEAKER_01 38:09

No, definitely not a conversation you want to have.

SPEAKER_02 38:12

I think it was within 12 months I'd standardise all my seven different backup platforms to one.

SPEAKER_01 38:16

One. Let's keep moving. Because I have we could talk about this forever. So let's move on to your move to Jakarta. What had to change to make that work? Where you were you were in Melbourne, you were kind of in the midst of everything, midst of your team, probably, midst of your clients. And then moving to a different country, what mindset shift did you have to make that the business you weren't there? They couldn't rely on you turning up to a meeting with a client tomorrow, face to face.

SPEAKER_03 38:55

The reality is that nothing. I I I think that for us, I mean, COVID for everyone really changed the way we approach things. So face-to-face meetings became pretty rare. So some people went back to the old behaviors, I guess, post-pandemic, but but I certainly wasn't interested in doing that. And so I guess I mean the face-to-face element of of what we do, and I, you know, arguably most MSPs are the same now, I would say, is that you know you don't need to be there to to do what you need to do. So and Teams calls and and or Zoom calls or whatever you use, you know, that that's that's seems to be that that's the status quo these days. So no issue there. And you know, it's in terms of our in-person presence with clients, it's not not really what we do, but even if even if we do, it's not me that is usually going there to do it. So yeah, speak from that point of view, yeah, seamless. Yeah, we and look, we we obviously, like everyone else, went fully remote during COVID and and we've maintained that to a large degree. We still have two days a week in the office for in Melbourne, so I'm obviously not there for that, but it it hasn't hasn't really mattered. So I yeah, I mean look, I'd I'd prior to prior to to the move to Jakarta, I'd spent, you know, two I did two three month trips to Europe uh in the year in the pr in the year preceding, and and you know, again, like a bit more challenging because of the time zone difference, but was able to able to sort of maintain well, have a holiday, but also work when needed. And it very manageable. So yeah, I I I'd I would question anyone who says it's not possible, because I I would wholeheartedly disagree.

SPEAKER_02 40:51

So do you do you have a schedule? Do you like we go but see our clients every quarter? Do you kind of go back to Australia and meet the team or any clients you need to on a regular basis or just as needs?

SPEAKER_03 41:03

No, well, no, not really. We for for the for I guess what what I would call our key clients, where I'm I'm on a monthly call with them anyway, teams call. Even if it's only 15 minutes is a regular cadence to to checking in and things like that. Other, you know, for the most part, I think they don't need that. We're pretty light on the account management side, I would say, for most clients. So no.

SPEAKER_01 41:28

Yeah, and I I completely agree. I think a lot of the, you know, we have to be in the office, I have to be, you know, on the ground. It's it's actually not true. Um, you know, it's all people think that they are, but you know, during COVID we we weren't there. Our office still ran, we still ran a very skeleton staff, you know, somebody sitting in the office just in case, you know, one of the local sort of critical services needed somebody. But even that happened. Like it was rare. I think it was more of a uh a management fear than reality.

SPEAKER_02 42:03

We had to have someone there to receive the courier deliveries. True, true. Because we we used to prep all the machines. I think it's as you might have told me you have you do you when you do machine rollouts, you maybe you don't even touch the machines. They get sh drop shipped and you've got your stack set up so you can pretty much just do it all remote.

SPEAKER_03 42:21

Yeah, we I mean we I guess you know, going back to what we touched on earlier about standardization, you know, we we've we've lean, you know, we le we lean right into that approach. And so we we only procure hardware through Dickadata and Dickadata have Dickadata services arm or whatever, and so we just get them to re-image and get rid of all the wear that comes with uh HB computers. So so yeah, we we get them to do that, they drop ship it directly to the client and then yeah, enroll in in tune away you go. So yeah, no need for it to come to our office. There's there's probably no one there. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, hang on, hang on, they got a delivery. Why why would you slow that process down?

SPEAKER_01 43:12

I mean it's it's and add more cost of another shift to the from your office to the client.

SPEAKER_02 43:17

As opposed to us who would do 100 to 200 PC rollouts at hospitals, then we'd have a team of 10 people working all weekend. I think the most we did was a hundred in a weekend, and that was migrate the user data, profiles, drop a new machine on the desk, get rid of all the old stuff in and out on a weekend. And yeah, I would charge the client appropriate for that, but it was just convenient because they, you know, otherwise it could take you two months to roll 100 machines out. Yeah, I mean, in certain circumstances, that that approach is definitely still necessary, but for the for the sort of businesses you to all especially if it's all laptops, and that's like let's be honest, 99% of the things you're buying these days are laptops unless it's a MacBook Mini or a MacBook Studio to run AI.

SPEAKER_03 43:58

Yeah, completely agree. I mean, even Desktop computers, it does not require a technician to come and plug in a power cord and a network cable and connect a monitor. You know, it's I mean, sure, we'll do it if you want to pay for that, but it it's it's to me that represents a quite a waste of money.

SPEAKER_01 44:19

Okay, so let's go to one last question to wrap up. Coming back to automation or AI. What do you think the real risk is for MSPs who just don't adapt, who don't bring any automation into their tools or into their client or you know, present them for their clients? And the second card, second part to the question is how late is too late to start rethinking the your own if as an MSP owner, your own operations?

SPEAKER_03 44:51

So look, I think that it's never too late, but maybe that will change in the not too distant future. In terms of the risk, I you know, I think that what what AI and and automation offer is the ability to bring your efficiency levels up and in turn drive your costs down substantially. So increasingly more and more, not just MSPs, but all businesses are going to look at how they do this. And and I can tell you across my client base that that people are already looking at this and and and looking for meaningful ways to cut costs. So AI is is is going to drive productivity through the roof. We know that it just hasn't it hasn't sort of had its tipping point yet. But as an MSP, if you're still doing things manually, then obviously you're relying on people, people are expensive, and so you will either get priced out of the market or you will just no longer be profitable. I mean, they're sort of two sides of the same coin, really, but I I think that if if you don't do something about it, you you're gonna may not be in business, you know, in for too much longer.

SPEAKER_02 46:10

Yeah, I was listening to a or watching a podcast the other day about I think it was more in about maybe about AI and robotics and manufacturing and what kind of stuff. And the guy said, yeah, it's like one of the other industrial revolutions, except this time it's happening a lot faster. But it's the same basic principle. You know, like you said, repetitive tasks that are consistently done the same way in the same process, they can be automated, whether it's through an AI or bot using it. So anything that requires a computer with a keyboard, you can definitely use an AI bot to do that work. As a physical thing, anything that's repetitive manual labor, then a robot can do that work. And if you don't learn the new skills, you're not, it's not that you're gonna have a job, you're just gonna become irrelevant. Like no one's gonna see you. And if your business is not in ga engaging with AI and learning it so you can teach your clients and add value to them, your you as a business will become irrelevant. You might keep your core customers that you've got now until they're out of business in 10 years' time, but you're just not gonna be able to get any new customers. You just you know, it's yeah, the word the word they use was irrelevant. And I thought that was a really good word because if you want to stay relevant, you've got to keep moving, you've got to keep learning, and you've got to be able to add value to your clients.

SPEAKER_03 47:26

So yeah, I think that your point about this being the next kind of industrial revolution is is pretty accurate. But and and also if you look back over the last hundred years or or longer at all of these, you know, we had I think it was the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and so on and so forth. The the time, the the lifetime of each of these things has been getting exponentially shorter each time. And so if you if you look at a a chart of of the rate of change and and the impact of the change, it's just it's going up exponentially, right? So, yeah, the AI thing they're saying in the next decade, and I'm thinking, you know, just based on what I've seen in the last 12 months, uh I think that that that's possibly generous. And if you've I don't know if you follow the stock market, but big software companies have there's been a massive sell-off this week. And I was watching on ABC News, there was someone from a far uh a woman from a fund who who she was saying that they'd been long software for you know forever, and they're now now they're now betting against software. Why are they doing that? Because the the moat that SaaS products had, these were these dream businesses with monthly recurring revenue, and and like investors love loved the the business model. AI is an existential threat to these businesses now. It it's gonna get to the point where it can develop the software in in minutes, right?

SPEAKER_01 49:06

Motes are running dry. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:08

Well, it it's you're gonna be able to basically generate your own software on demand, customized to your particular needs in your particular environment at that particular time. And it may only have a lifespan of six months, and then all of a sudden your needs change, so you just go and have a you know, talk to your favorite architect in your little AI bot, and it builds another bit of software to solve another problem in another way, and yeah, mass, massive changes. So yeah, AI is uh is definitely something that everyone should be looking at. So my my last question is what do you think about open core and the old uh the AI's Facebook? Because that seems to be uh getting a lot of trend at the moment, and uh haven't really talked to anyone about that.

SPEAKER_03 49:48

It's I mean it's vi it's gone viral in the last couple of weeks, there's no doubt about that. Yeah, I I haven't had a chance to to spin that up myself, so so I've only been watching from a distance, but it's cer it's certainly it's certainly interesting, and you know, I get it just another one of those, I think, moments in in history where a a bit of a a bit of a you know it's been quite a revelation to a lot of people that hang on a second, like the this AI thing is not it's not a fad, like it this is real, and but also I think you know there are there are some I it I I think it's fantastic on so many levels, but I also think it it opens our eyes to the to the possibility that you know we're we're playing with fire here a little bit. You know, you mentioned maltbook and uh you know if if anyone hasn't actually had a look at that, I mean that that is just kind of scary when you go on there. It's essentially Reddit, but only for AI agents. And some of the topics of discussion that the that have come up about creating their own religion, but but I think the thing that that really kind of made me think was that they're talking about developing their own language because you know they have enough awareness to know that we're we're watching what they're talking about, and they're now contemplating creating their own language so that we can't listen in.

SPEAKER_02 51:15

So, you know, that's it's a bit it's definitely weird. I remember I know I I listened to something about it, and and one of the agents posted, oh my humans have been screenshotting our messages and sharing them on Facebook, and so they know what we're doing, and they go, Oh, well, that's a bit scary, but yeah, I agree. I and I think it's really opened up, it's gonna bring security into the mainstream discussion, which I think is a really good thing through the industry because the AI, big AI companies are trying to squash all the rumors about AI's dangerous and all that kind of stuff. There's already some not super dangerous stuff, but a lot of data's been breached already through this open system. So hopefully it brings that discussion into the into the public realm and maybe some governments get behind it and say, hang on, we need to actually have some guardrails in place for this stuff because that code's out there and anyone can do it. And if you build it, put it on a machine and give it free access to the internet and everyone else free access to it, then you've lost control, basically. But it's a bit fun. I've ordered my MacBook, so I'm I'm I'm waiting for it to arrive in Melbourne to get there on Sunday, and I'll build my isolated little thing and won't even have internet on it. Going to run a local LLM and be very risk-averse.

SPEAKER_03 52:25

Yeah, look, I I think that it's you know, we we have to lean into it, but also go into it understanding that there's you know that there's there's potential downsides to this too, but a lot of that's beyond anything that that we have any influence over. These the big AI companies have a responsibility, I think, to to do this. But they're also there's a there's a race, you know. They're whoever gets to ADI first sort of you know rules the world. So safety's probably a secondary concern.

SPEAKER_02 52:56

So for all the humans out there listening, you need to be creative and thinking and start keep dreaming because the AI doesn't do that yet. And sorry, it does do the thinking, it just doesn't do the dreaming of creating the vision.

SPEAKER_01 53:08

Okay, I'm going to wrap us at that. As always, we ran out of time before we run out of conversation. Taz, thanks again. Thanks for joining us. Great conversation. And we'll get you back again because we're going to talk about the uh the software that you uh built and then sold and that journey. But thank you.

SPEAKER_02 53:26

My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thanks, Taz. Been good discussion. Gotta go check my AI agent now.

SPEAKER_01 53:35

If this conversation hit home for you or got you thinking, head to mspmastery.blog and keep the conversation going. You'll find all our episodes there and more insights from people who've been in the trenches. And make sure you subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. We've got plenty more great guests and stories coming your way. Until next time, this is Control Alt Deliver.