Canalys has said (about 10 months ago) that the AI sales opportunity in the channel right now is with systems integrators and that MSPs and MSSPs would follow on in 18 months.
Maybe so, but there are plenty of vendors and MSPs/MSSPs that are working right now on how MSPs and MSSPs will help their customers implement AI and realize the benefits of AI.
One start up vendor in this area is Hatz AI, co-founded and led by Jimmy Hatzell, an alum of some of the more familiar cybersecurity vendors MSPs know including Cyber QP, Barracuda MSP and SKOUT Cybersecurity (which was acquired by Barracuda for its MDR technology).
Hatz AI released its first products in March – AI Chat and AI Application Builder.
What’s AI Application Builder from Hatz AI?
The AI Application Builder is a no-code application builder that enables MSPs to build line-of-business AI applications for their end user customers. Hatz AI currently has 50 MSPs activated on its platform from a wait-list of 300. But it’s still early days. While we all may have been playing with ChatGPT and Copilot and the rest of the tools for a little while, figuring out the business use cases and how to build the apps takes AI from experimentation to implementation. That requires different skills.
Hatz AI has released a training program with the first module called The Fundamentals of AI. Over the next few months, Hatzell told ChannelE2E, the team will be adding more educational offerings, too.
In addition, Hatz AI has created a template library with pre-built line-of-business (LOB) applications that MSPs can customize for use by their customers. There are currently about 100 templates in the library and Hatzell said the company plans to expand that number to 1,200 by the end of the summer. He’s doing that with a team of three prompt engineers. And Hatzell is also leveraging research and MSP feedback to develop the right application templates.
What LOB AI Templates are Most Popular Now
Hatzell told ChannelE2E that marketing and HR LOB AI applications have been the most popular out of the gate, probably because “they are an easy way for most companies to get started.”
Another popular application is RFPs (request for proposals) and grant proposals. Organizations can use AI to write their proposals. Hatzell said that non-profits, manufacturing and construction as well as any industry similarly focused on winning grants and bids are ideal for these early use cases.
When it comes to marketing use cases, Hatzell said that early experiments many companies have tried with AI may have shown very generic outputs for marketing content. Hatz AI has worked to make sure that's not the case with its marketing LOB application templates.
“After customization we’ve found that you can get more useable and high-quality results,” Hatzell told ChannelE2E.
Future use cases Hatz AI will target include image generation and code generation. In particular, Hatzell said that he expects a lot of customers to use AI for generating code specific to CRM.
How MSP PCH Technologies is Using Hatz AI
One of Hatz AI’s early adopter MSPs, Tim Guim, CEO of PCH Technologies told ChannelE2E that his company is currently using the technology for help with building incident response and compliance.
One of the early use cases he’s working to build for law firm customers is the intake work for class action lawsuits.
Guim expects this early MSP work on AI for customers to be focused on project work rather than managed services, and he is billing it out at the highest hourly rate his firm charges for project work. It’s priced higher than vCISO services, higher than technicians, and higher than project management.
Once the project work is completed, Guim expects data management as a service to emerge as the ongoing managed service engagement between his firm and the customer.
Guim was a pioneer as an early adopter and seller of cybersecurity services as an MSP, and he thinks AI is similar.
“It’s important to be in early, not late, for AI," he said
