AI Readiness for MSPs: Jermaine Clark (EP 905)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers, where we help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. So we are here with a glorious episode and today we are going to dive deep into one of the most urgent and exciting topics facing us today, AI readiness, and with AI basically reshaping how we deliver value, how we protect client data, how we stay competitive. It's now more important than ever to get prepared and we need to do it in an ethically secure and profitable way.

So to help me do that today, I'm welcoming a new friend to the show, Jermaine Clark, senior manager of AI readiness at Sherweb. Jermaine, welcome to the show. Thanks a lot, I appreciate it.

Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I think we've been looking forward to this one and I'm looking forward to seeing what we end up with our discussion today. All right, well, let me start by asking this question.

You are the first person that I have seen with AI in their title. Do you know anybody else in the industry that has something similar? Well, that's a great question. I think because I'm in the industry and in the space, I think I could confidently say I've got at least 20 people with some form of some AI in their title.

Not necessarily just the abbreviation. I think there are many facets to it. And in the space, I know maybe another 20 people easily that I can say, hey, you and I have AI in our titles or, you know, they may start out with they are the marketing extraordinaire slash AI variant or they are a leader in training and technical learning AI variant.

You pick. It's out there and it's in a lot of titles. And I'd say my LinkedIn feed and my website feed, my email, everything I get is related to AI.

It's kind of hard to avoid those people with the titles. But, you know, I'm happy now that you've seen AI, it's like seeing a yellow car. You're going to see them everywhere now.

That is true. And since you and I first met, yeah, I've started to see it all over the place. And we've been told this was going to happen.

I mean, AI is just literally going to take over. So it's good to see that. Let me ask from your perspective, when did you first actually designate AI as the path or was it done for you? Oh, you know, I don't.

Yeah, it's kind of like climbing a mountain. I think there were all these little increments that happened over time. All of a sudden, the on-premises environment became cloud environment.

And even in cloud, there was cloud 2.0 and it was just slowly progressing in that direction. And you don't notice the little changes as you're walking around. But I would say I think it was probably around July 2022 when I had been on the Microsoft Advisory Council for SMB for a couple of years at that point.

And I got an email that said, you know, hey, we are launching an early access program for Microsoft AI Copilot. And I was like, cool, that looks fun. You're invited to be one of the company's representatives that's going to get X number of free licenses to start testing this AI.

And I think that was where I hit the peak and started sliding down the slippery slope of AI. Because from that point onwards, all of a sudden I was in the space and I had access to testing and all of this feedback from not just Microsoft, but from all the people in the industry that were testing it with me. So if I could peg a place, you know, if the robots were to go back in time to figure out how to get rid of me, you know, Terminator style, that would probably be one of the events that they'd want to revisit to see if that's where the turning point happened.

Right. Now, you mentioned the Microsoft Partner Council. So I'm going to kind of dive into your background.

We may do it in reverse because obviously you're at Sherweb and we'll talk a little bit about Sherweb. But I want to kind of get an idea of how you got here. So let me first reference what you mentioned, the Microsoft Partner Program.

How did you get involved with that? Again, these things happen, I think, as a surprise. One day I had voiced an opinion in a group of, I think, very connected people in the networking space. I used to be a part of a peer group through another distribution center.

And in one of those group sessions, I just recently read a book and I'm a fan of sci-fi. So iRobot s, Isaac Asimov, these are all fun things to look at, regardless of how much doom and gloom they share. But at that point, I was voicing my opinion in a group of maybe 50 other tech leaders in the space.

And one of them turned to me and he said, you know, I know somebody that could use that kind of feedback that you have. And I was like, great, who is that? And he said, well, there's this Microsoft Advisory Council that you should talk to. And they introduced me to the Microsoft person.

And then Bob's your uncle. A few months later, I get an email invitation to attend the council in person. So that kind of drove the impetus for it.

But in my background, just being in the MSP, the managed service provider space and growing my own knowledge in the space, I had a hunger for understanding how the businesses worked, what other people were doing. And I think communicating with those leaders in this space is what really kind of drove me in that direction. All right. 

Do you remember what those opinions were that you were voicing that caused them to think that? Well, there's one particular thing in the ecosystem of Microsoft, there are lots of memes online. There's one particular one where there is someone tending a fire and Microsoft's in the background and they kick a soccer ball and the soccer ball is flying straight to the person that's tending the fire because they're backing the ball and the ball says updates on it. So I like to reference these things because, you know, I'm a bit of a jokester in this space and I think there's a lot of crazy stuff happening in the world is very serious already.

So I like to add a little bit of light humor to it. So I was referencing that point of how Microsoft released a few updates that had a zero day vulnerability on it and they hadn't told anybody about it yet. So this is the meme that came to mind was all of us in the MSP space sitting around this fire and there's the Microsoft comet coming down from space with all these updates to ruin our days.

It was all about updates and security patches and where zero trust security was going to be going. And then I started talking about the fact that they had no idea of where they were going with security or they wanting to be security first or productivity first. And I think that really kind of jive the conversation forward is who likes a boring conversation of everything's happening exactly as it's supposed to.

I think just kind of revving it up a bit around that challenge of the updates and how Microsoft was changing the ecosystem was what happened at that time. Right. OK. 

Now you've got a couple of questions, you know, banging around in my head here. So I want to ask this in the gentlest way I can. You mentioned the fact about, you know, Microsoft not understanding if it should be productivity first or security first.

I think a lot of us are in that same position because cybersecurity took over our world, you know, for a while here. Now, AI is starting to take over our world. But yet we still got all the day to day mundane crap that we got to do to support our clients.

You know, we don't know which is first. So sitting on that advisory council, have you gotten any clarity to that or is it just still the wild, wild west? So there's a lot more clarity, and I think, again, if I could pulse an image imagery out of our head here, you're on a plane. The mass come down, you hit some major turbulence, pilot says, you know, we're going to have a we're having a tough storm here.

We're going to kind of ride through this storm. If you're going to help somebody else in their seat or on the plane to be safe, you've got to get your own mask on first, because if you pass out trying to help somebody else, then two people are in trouble. And I think when we think about security, Microsoft's got it focused today.

They know exactly where they need to be because security is really the launch point for everything else you're going to do. And it's even more critical today that you start with security, because if you don't lock down that access control, the AI that you're going to implement has access to everything that you didn't lock down. And that's a little bit more scary than your intern coming in from university and having access to the CEO files.

They'd have to first know what they're looking for today with the AI. It's computer talking to computer. It doesn't care as long as there isn't something that says, hey, don't open that door or don't share that file.

It's going to go ahead and share it with anybody that asks. So that's where the real vulnerability is, because now the AI is turning anybody off the street who knows how to read and write can ask the AI for that information and it will go retrieve it and they don't need to know how it did it. Now, having said that, the guidance that we're getting from all over the place, and I'm going to go say vendors.

I mean, you're representing a vendor, but are there misconceptions about how we're supposed to bring AI, one, into our business and then two, into our client's business? I don't know if I'd call it misconceptions. I think just kind of going back to the whole structure of the stepping stones of modernizing your IT infrastructure in a business, I think it's the understandings here is that there's a whole lot to do. And I think it's being misrepresented that I need to go back now and do an entirely different project with my company or my end customer in order for them to have AI.

But really, in my opinion, a lot of this is you've been doing the stepping stones year to year. You've upgraded from older versions of Windows. You've replaced the hardware.

You've moved some of the on-prem infrastructure into the cloud. You've secured the cloud. You've been doing all of these for your customers over time.

And I think one of the things that happens is you put an insurmountable topic in front of someone and all they can see is the topic. And they've now forgotten all of the hard work they've put in over the years in order to be at the current state that the environment's in. So I don't know that it's a misconception.

I think it's more of a I don't know anything about AI. Where do I start as opposed to AI is just the eventuality of the technology growing and changing. And I need to continue what I've been doing for the last 20 years and supporting my customers in my own environment, upgrading my security day to day.

Doing my patches, replacing my outdated hardware. And if you've got one of those ERP or CRM things that somebody built in a garage in 1967, you need to get off of it or transform it into current day technology so that it functions better. So you've been doing it all the time, which is why I don't think it's a misconception.

I think it's more of a that the peak that they're looking at looks too daunting to climb. And because of that, they've forgotten that they've climbed so many other peaks before. And that they can use that experience to surmount the next one.

Yeah, but doesn't this peak seem a little more daunting because AI is already everywhere? I mean, before with all the stuff that we did, we kind of were ahead of the curve, you know, when it comes to computer support, RMM, cloud, you know, IT and MSPs. We were kind of at least ahead of our clients. It feels like we're behind the eight ball in a lot of senses.

Our clients are getting a lot more AI knowledge ahead of us. So, I mean, where do we sit there? Well, that's a really, really challenging one. So let me kind of put my thoughts together on that.

So I would say the only difference that has happened is we had time before. Before today, we had time. And I think the speed at which AI is transforming the workspace, we now can recognize the early adopters.

Previously, us as technology supporting our customers, we had, you know, five years with a server to figure out how to do all of the things. With AI, if you wait five and a half hours, something's going to change between when it was launched and when it came out. Right.

And we as a group in the technology space, we don't have access to controlling the dissemination of those updates, the challenges that those would put in space. And when we think about that, I think it puts us back into the learning curve of our customers. Because I'll tell you, it's the same thing that happened when we first had, you know, email hosting in the cloud.

There was a customer that came up and said, hey, I want email hosting in the cloud. I heard about it somewhere, but it was one customer or two customers out of your group of 100. So it gave you time to go investigate it, put it into place internally, trial, test, train your team, and then deliver it to the rest of your customer base.

Today, there's probably only one customer that hasn't heard of AI in your base. And they're like, hey, when are you going to do this? When are you going to do this? When are you going to do this? And they're pressuring you now to do it. Meanwhile, you're still operating in the space of, well, I have some time to think about this.

But I think that's where the disparity is coming now, because we're learning and accessing this at the same pace as the customers are. And because of that, they're outpacing us in how they're using it. Do you think, and I should, I mean, obviously, the audience has kind of figured out, we didn't prep you for a lot of these questions.

So we're thinking on the fly here. But does it seem as though AI is basically the next version of the Internet? So going back years, you mentioned we've been doing these things along the way. We had time to figure out computers before we gave them to our customers.

The software, we had time to play with them and learn them in every step of the way. When the Internet came along, it made it easy for customers to go to the Internet to find their answers before they came to us. And then we could go to the Internet and kind of catch up or be on the same page.

AI is a little different. It's the Internet being pushed to our customers now. Do you see it that way? I would agree with you on that.

Absolutely. I think it comes back to speed and networking and control. When the Internet came out, there was a small subset of people that had access to it and it was expensive.

It had a short range and the information on it was very well curated at the beginning. When it became public to everyone and the launch of different browsers and the launch of search engines, your Bings and your Googles of the world. When you think about that, that brought so much more information to the end user that we were, again, trying to catch up to.

Well, where did you find that information? Let me go validate it and come back and help you with that. But at least at that point, it was a dial-up speed. You know, you were lucky if you had 10 kilobits on your dial-up speed to do that.

Today, you've got 1.5 gigabits or 3 gigabits on your network. You could download things faster than you could type the request in the search bar. And now it's being like, hey, everywhere you go, every browser you have, your Google, your Chrome, everything has AI on there.

Hey, why don't you click me and ask me about it? So to your point, it's being shoved at everyone. It's being advertised to everyone. And it is literally a click away with an upload and download speed of the current status of the Internet.

But now it's widespread. With what the Internet hubs were 50 years ago, today, you've got triplicate of data centers and routing centers that are pushing the Internet. It can't even go down because of there's multiple upon multiple upon multiple backups to ensure that you can get traffic to and from your location.

So I think it's the same thing. It's just happening at lightning speed. Yeah, almost too fast to some degree.

But so let me ask you this, I wanted I want to try to, you know, get into this framework of work of what this means to us as MSPs. But I want to kind of give the listeners an idea of your background, because I'm going to ask you some big questions when it comes to that. But I also find it interesting your background.

You didn't start out as a tech geek like a lot of people. Now, I'll admit I did not start out as a as a geek either. I was a sports guy.

I kind of ended up here. You were in a completely different space. You were doing biology, chemistry, and your master's degree was in what? So, yeah, you know, it's true when they say, you know, the old saying life's too short, but really what they mean is life's long enough for you to do a lot of things.

And I used to be a field biologist for about 12 years. That includes my study time. So, yeah, I started out trying to save the world, trying to save the planet and specifically trying to save sea turtles, believe it or not.

And during that time, I went to my undergrad and I specialized in sea turtles. And then I did all this research, wrote a few papers, things like that. And then in my postgrad, I decided, hey, you know, I was doing some training, some external field researchers that came in from the UK to South America.

And one of them said, you know, you've got about as much field experience as my professor, but you don't have a degree or PhD or a master's on that. And I was like, well, yeah, but I mean, you know, I've been doing this for years. I don't want to be sitting in a classroom.

I want to be out here in the field, seeing the animals, doing all this stuff. And they said, you know what, I'm going to send you an email when I get back to the UK. And the person sent me the program details of everything they were doing at the Oxford program in Brookes.

And they said, look, I filled out all your information here already and why I think you should do the program. And I was like, whoa, whoa, that's a bit aggressive. And then I looked at the program and it actually looked a lot fun.

So I actually applied and went to went to the UK, did my master's, ended up going to Peru and studying monkeys in the jungle in the Peruvian Andes learning Spanish. It was a weird lifetime experience. But then when I moved to North America, I decided to immigrate to North America a few years back.

And I got up to North America and I was like, well, I mean, there are primates here, you know, all the human primates sitting around. But there are no monkeys to hang out with. So I started a new career and I ended up meeting an MSP in kind of twenty, twenty fifteen.

And they said, look, we're looking for someone to come in and do some sales. And I was like, I have no experience with computers or any of this stuff. Do you have any monkeys? And they laughed and said, no, no monkeys.

But sometimes the technicians do act funny. So that was twenty fifteen. I joined the MSP as a shipping receiving clerk at one point.

And then over the years, I just developed as like, oh, well, now I know something about computers. Now I know something about servers. Now I know a little bit about the cloud.

Let me see how I can help the team. And the more I help the team, the less the team wanted me to go do something else. So eventually they said, well, look, you know, how would you run these operations and help us with our professional services and do all this other stuff? And that's how I ended up in the MSP space.

It kind of just happened. I started with some shipping and receiving and then it happened. And now, you know, 12 years of the biologist and now I'm 11 years in the technology space of which I think I've been contributing to some of the change in the last, I would say, six.

OK, that's a big jump. And I was looking for the masters and primate conservation. And here's why that struck me.

And most people don't know this because I don't always share my stuff. So the initials that are behind me on my bookshelf, my best friend from college who passed away recently, her degree was in biology and some weird thing. And she worked at a place called the Wildlife Conservatory.

And there was a place here in West Palm Beach where they literally would bring in endangered species and keep them here at this wildlife place. It was literally just outside of Palm Beach. You wouldn't know it was there unless you knew to make the right turn to go look.

And it was doing something to that effect where he was dealing with just, you know, those rare breeds that were endangered. So that caught my attention. Yeah, there's a few of us out there.

Yeah, I think, you know, thankfully, my new IT tech career helps me to contribute more. I volunteer still, which gets me out to some of the sites. So I went and did some conservation work with the condors in Argentina a couple of years back.

So it's good to hear because, you know what, there's a lot to do and it's nice that you're that close to it. That's just two degrees. Right. 

Yeah, it is cool. All right. So then you made the jump into I.T. So you started off in shipping, receiving, starting to do stuff there.

Do you remember was there an interest that drew you into spit? You know. I want to say drew you into managed services or I.T., because it sounds like your friend dropped you there. But when did you start getting this interest into the A.I., the iRobot stuff? Was that always there or did it really, you know, get brought out when you joined the MSP? So it was always there. 

I mean, I'm a huge techie fan. I watch every movie that has ever existed, all the way back to the old Keanu Reeves, Johnny Mnemonic, where he's like, oh, I don't have enough brain space to carry this data. I've got to inject a 320 gig hard drive to carry the data.

Like I've watched pretty much every movie. But for me, the passion was entertainment. It was this is so far out that I don't foresee this happening anytime soon, at least not in my lifetime.

So, you know, you think about that and you've seen you've seen Blade Runner, The Terminator. You've seen Johnny Mnemonic, The Matrix. And you know, when The Matrix first came out, I went inside 23 times in movie theaters.

Right. Like I wasn't even joking. I was so perplexed in the theater 23 times.

I was so perplexed that what was happening in this movie that I couldn't understand all of it. So I went back to it. And I think if I were to pin down when I really started thinking about, you know, wait, hold on a second, what's happening with this A.I. and what could it really do? It was thanks to the Wachowski brothers at the time and The Matrix, because I was like, oh, my God, I could literally learn how to fly a helicopter by uploading the schematics to my brain.

I need to be able to do this. So I think that was kind of the transformative time when it turned into from entertainment and passion into I think that this could be a real thing. Let me go see what else is out there.

So it's a I think it's just on the line of when you like to learn and you find an interest, you go and you dig into it or go down the rabbit hole, so to speak. All right, so I'm going to take a quick sidebar here, because I want to ask you, since you're that big into The Matrix, the last matrix resurrections. Yeah. 

Did you see it? I did. Of course I did. What did you think about it? So and again, this is only my opinion.

You must caveat it with that. I think I think bringing back the whole balance of The Matrix to love and the fact that anyone could have been the one was really reaching out to the people that were well tired of. There's just this one epic hero that always kind of comes up and saves everyone.

But really, it could have been anyone at that point that the machines chose and could support it. But I think overall, just kind of attacking the external media of all the reboots and rehashes and everything that was happening at the time. I mean, I remember complaining myself about this thing.

Can they just go ahead and invent a new movie, something fresh that nobody's seen? We spent so much time doing that. Now I feel like everything is a 10 year reboot of some movie that was has already existed for the last 35 years. Like, let's do something new.

Let's do something fresh. So I think it hit home on all of that. From a satire perspective, I think it definitely did what it was meant to do.

I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. It was a bit more quirky than I was expecting it to be.

But I definitely enjoyed it. All right. OK, it was it was interesting, in my opinion.

I did. I it was funny. I didn't like it the first time I saw it.

But as I watch it, you know, more and more, I kind of appreciate it a little each, you know, a little each time. The fact that, you know, Neil is not as powerful as he once was. So it works.

All right. So let's get this back to MSPs and the techs that are listening to the show in terms of A.I. Let's go ahead and start to preface. So I should let the listeners know here we're already we already knew we were going to do a two part-er.

So we're not going to try to wrap all of this up here in the next few minutes. But I do want to ask you the question in the sense of. What does A.I. readiness for MSPs mean to you? And I know you're coming at it from the viewpoint of a vendor as well.

But in terms of what we need to be looking at, what is A.I. readiness really mean? So I'll throw a third wallop in there. I think coming at it from the vendor perspective, which is my newest perspective, the MSP perspective. But then as a consumer and a user, I think part of A.I. readiness really does mean it's for me a couple of things.

One is as a user. I think it really means the opportunity for me to be more successful with things that were overloading my inbox and inundating me as a professional that I can now get through all of the mundane, rote tasks at a at a speed that helps me to barely keep up now. Now, I say that I'm not keeping up prior to.

I think for me, that readiness means understanding my job and being able to use A.I. as a user to become as fast as the inbox is filling up at answering and delivering my service delivery to my customers, my partners. So that's as a user. As a as a distribution and as a vendor here, it's really a part of, well, how do we help from an A.I. readiness perspective? What are the key aspects that everyone needs to know, which is data governance, security and productivity? How do we govern those three things to ensure that they are at a stage where you can comfortably release something with all access into that space and not be worried about consequences of data leakage or identity mismanagement and so on? And then as an MSP, it's how do I from a readiness perspective is how do I take this internally, get my team active on it so that they can now troubleshoot and support my end customer? Is my own security and data governance actively functional in place? And do I trust it? And have I done and then this comes back to kind of as that MSP, have I done enough to stay relevant to my customers? So from an MSP perspective is have I done enough to stay relevant? Have I implemented the right security data governance practices internally so that I can release the A.I. and have I done enough to empower my team so that they can utilize it and train so that they can support my end customer base? So those are kind of the three facets I would split it into.

From that A.I. readiness perspective. OK, now I want to use that to springboard into our next conversation, which we will go a little bit deeper into that. But I want to make sure that we do a little bit of proper recognition of Sherweb as the vendor here.

I believe this is the first time I've had somebody from Sherweb on the show. The last mention of Sherweb was me doing an AppRiver versus Sherweb comparison show, which really only focused on the Microsoft 365. However, Sherweb is more than 365.

So quickly, can you run us through what Sherweb offers for MSPs? Yeah, I appreciate you doing that and thank you for having us on the show. Without our team, our PR firm and our internal marketing team, we would never have met. So I'm very happy that we were able to do that.

And for Sherweb, we are a cloud market space first off, which there are a lot of those out there. We sell, we package and resell for the technology space, all of the software licensing required to run your practice. That goes down to security.

It's all of the Microsoft and continuity practices, as well as backup disaster recovery licenses for cloud space. So we are a cloud market space at heart. But outside of that, where the real Sherweb lives is with our subject matter experts in all the different areas that we support.

So for everything that we do in our cloud market space, we actually train in-house experts on that technology. How it would be applied so that we can empower and inform our MSPs on how we do that, how they can utilize it and what would make the most sense for their business. So case in point, myself, I'm the AI subject matter expert for Microsoft Co-Pilot at Sherweb.

And I do public speaking, partner enablement training, as well as I support our partners by attending their events and giving the overhaul to their end customers so that they get an understanding of how the MSPs run their business. And how it's relevant to them in that space. All right, great. 

And thank you for that. We will have a link to Sherweb folks in the show notes. Sherweb.com. Be sure to check them out.

And we're going to take a quick break here and get ready to record part two. Jermaine, thank you very much. Thank you for having me on the show.

All right. And listeners, if you are looking to future proof your business and make sense of the AI landscape, be sure to connect with Jermaine and check out Sherweb's resources. We'll get more into those on the next episode.

But everything can be found over at the website ITBusinessPodcast.com. Don't forget to subscribe. You can do all those things like leave a review and be sure to be notified anytime the podcast release is released. That'll do it, folks. 

We'll see you next time. And until then, holla!