‘IT support is becoming like a 50p tin of beans’
Damien Harrison, Operations and Marketing Director, Bondgate IT
How will the onset of AI tools that in theory make MSPs more efficient impact their pricing to customers?
IT supports is being seen more as a commodity.
It’s a utility service now; you can get IT support from ten different companies and they all do pretty much the same.
Where AI is going to make a big impact is how you work with your customers to enable them to achieve their business objectives. Rather than IT support, it’s about helping businesses achieve their business objectives, and that’s where people will start to pay more money – similar to how McKinsey and PwC work.
It can’t be just, ‘buy IT support’, because if you do that, there’s no difference between you and your competitors down the road. You’ve got to get involved with the customers. IT support is going to be a commodity. It’s not going to be something people are willing to pay for alone.
It’s about how you then add in those add-ons or business enablers – your AI automation services, how you manage 365 securely, security, the updates. If you manage all of these effectively and charge a nice price for them, IT support becomes at loss leader, like you see in the supermarket where you walk in and see a tin of beans for 50p. IT support is going to head that way.
So in a way, you think AI tools could do the opposite, namely help you charge more?
I think so. You’ve got to become more consultative in your approach. You’ve got to help businesses achieve their business outcomes and their objectives. If you don’t do that, and don’t take that approach, other MSPs will come in and do that.
What about AI tokens? MSPs might be paying for usage, and then if the price goes up, it’s costing you a lot more money. Is that something that you’re dealing with as an MSP?
Not a lot at the moment. But in the next couple of years, as people start to build their businesses around AI and automation, that could really put the cat among the pigeons if you priced it one way and you run out of tokens and suddenly the price has increased.
The other issue I see happening is that people are using AI to replace entry-level roles. But what happens when you need a second-level engineer or project engineer in the next five years? Previously, these people used to move up. If you don’t have them coming in at the entry level, who’s going to come and take that level-two, level-three or project engineer job?
Why are you here today?
I’ve worked in MSP world since 2019 and have been coming to GTIA for the past five years.
I like the community and the ability to just have conversations like this, and to understand people’s challenges and difficulties, and just reconnect with people.
Why does 18iiT’s Paul Croker think “we’ve been here before” when it comes to AI’s impact on the MSP model? See next page for more…
