Smarter Support: HitWit’s AI Advantagen (EP 874)

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. Well, here we are, folks, it is July, which means another day, another Pitch It vendor profile. Yes, we are in the midst of Pitch It season here, the IT Nation Incubator Program, and one of these vendors will be lucky enough to be on stage in November at IT Nation Connect.

I will be there in person in Orlando with a set of steak knives for the lucky third place winner. But they're all hoping for either first or second place because that's where the money is. Let's go ahead and move along. 

Today, I have with me, Bhadri Varadarajan with HitWit. Bhadri, how close did I get? I'll give you a 9 out of 10. Beautiful. 

Beautiful. There are days when I don't get my last name right. All right. 

So let's see. HitWit here is your guys' platform is leveraging generative AI to streamline knowledge and empower us to share knowledge both internally and externally, right? That's exactly right. Yeah.

Okay. Now, let me ask this because I saw a couple of references to enterprise in there. Is this something that started at the enterprise level and you're trickling down to us as MSPs? A little bit of that, yes. 

So we do sell to very large companies which are setting up their partner programs and helping enable channel partners and so on. But the idea to go towards MSPs is really that if you want to sort of look at a broader term, forget about us as a company, what some of these newer AI technologies are helping companies do is to basically create departments within themselves that you would only imagine a larger company doing previously. So for example, think about how you do training. 

So if you're a large company, you would hire a chief learning officer and you'd create a training program and you do that and you do this. And in the end, all that that's trying to do is it's trying to get your people to understand what they need to do their job and keep at it and keep refining their insights and their knowledge. AI basically lets you do that because it acts as some form of a translation layer between the basic facts and what you know today, what you need to know now and what you need to know in the long term. 

And that's effective. I'll give you one example. Think about marketing, for example, really all it's doing is it's taking your content and creating various different assets out of it that you can send out to people. 

That used to be a department. Today, that's one person who can sit and use tools well. And that sort of insight is that you can, as you exactly said, you can go down from the enterprise down to the level of a small business. 

Okay. So let me ask this question. Everybody is, you know, integrating AI into their product. 

Everybody's trying to figure out a way to use this. What makes HitWit the best option for people? A good question. So just to be clear about what we do as well. 

So we don't help you automate your existing processes. That's not our value prop. Our value prop is that ultimately as an MSP owner, you probably have a team of at most 20, 30 people, that's it, right? And your success depends on your customers being able to use the products that you are reselling, managing and deploying for them. 

And that means the people that you have employed need to be experts at whatever they're maintaining, and they need to be able to communicate that in the right time at the right format. So the real problem I'm getting at is that this is a human problem, not just a tools and automation. Okay. 

And that's what we do is we are sort of putting the people at the heart of this to say, how do they acquire the skills in any new product that you want to manage? How do they communicate it when they're trying to support this and so on? And how do you sort of just answer customer's questions when it comes up? Okay. So a much better knowledge base, I guess, is one way we're looking at it. You mentioned using it for onboarding and stuff for training, I guess, interactive learning, right? Yeah, that's right.

And then of course, customer engagement, is that a piece of it as well? Yes, it is. And again, as you said, the key thing here is that at some level, if you want to sort of draw the information graph here, something started out as somebody's product document, and it ended up with something that your customer is seeing, they have an issue, they want to ask a question and get the answer. They don't want to look at the manual. 

They ideally don't even want to talk to people. They're like, hey, just get me unstuck here, and I want to move on. And through this chain is one of your people who needed to understand that product. 

They needed to translate that into a configuration that needed to go to a customer, and that customer is using this. And we are dealing with what people are understanding out of this on how we can help them get to the next step. Gotcha. 

So I understand you are the founder and CEO. So that means you're the person that came up with the aha moment to make this happen. Can you tell me when that was? And what was it that pushed you to really get started? This is going to be a weird founding story. 

So I used to be CTO at a private equity company, and we were running some schools in Texas at the time, and now it's sort of grown into Florida and Utah and so on. And the whole idea of the school was that kids would learn their common core curriculum in just two hours, and they would learn it entirely from educational apps. And they'd spend the rest of that time doing projects with their teachers and guides.

And it sounds like some weird tech bro fantasy, but actually it turns out that doing it this way helped them do better in their courses themselves. And that's basically because instead of a teacher lecturing at 30 students, common core is a standard thing, right? I mean, that doesn't change from day to day. It's the curriculum is the curriculum.

It turns out apps are good at teaching that because they'd sort of hit each student where they live. If they have a problem with multiplication, and that's why they're not able to do algebra, the app can sort of diagnose that and say, hey, really, what you need to get unstuck here is that you need to get the multiplication rule, and then you'll understand algebra. Now, we were trying to do that also for workforce training in our private equity company, and it was a miserable failure. 

We just couldn't get anywhere until this AI stuff came along. And when you get right down to it, what it's good at is it can take any given product documentation or process and sort of convert it into a curriculum, right? It can take that and say, hey, these are the key facts. This is what, I mean, it can listen to you describe it and say, okay, I understand what you know. 

This is what you need to know next. And that's exactly what we did with the kids. So my aha moment was when we got our training programs to work using AI. 

And I'm like, okay, this is great. Everybody should have this. And so I started a company to make that possible.

All right. So I'm going to ask this question in a weird way, only because it's how I'm thinking of it. Curriculum, training materials, knowledge basis, those have all been around for ages. 

What was it about AI that actually made that turn or that change to make what you were doing productive? Interestingly, it's not the generative ability that makes it better. It is the listening ability. These, when you sort of get to what a knowledge base used to be, you could type a question, get an answer. 

But the technology behind it was not good at measuring what that meant, you know, and what you need to know next. And it turns out AI, while we use it to create chats and documents and so on, it actually has another element to it, which is it can analyze that conversation and say, okay, what is it you know well, and what do you need to know next? And so it's able to do two things, analyze what your state of mind is, and then call another function, if you will, and say, okay, given that this is what this person knows, what do they need to know next? What do you want them to know next? And it's good at doing those two things. And it's good at doing those two things, not just in words, but one of the principles we apply is anything that we say, we'll say it in three different formats. 

We'll put it in text, we'll create an image, and we'll create an audio or a podcast or something. So whichever way you want to consume that information, you can. Hmm, okay. 

Now, let me ask this question, because I'm trying to understand how AI knows what I know. And, you know, I can't type that into, you know, the next follow up question, you know, that shows up on the AI screen and stuff. So is there a component that helps translate what I'm typing, or is there an oral part of it where I'm able to talk back and forth with AI to do that? Great question. 

And I think you've got the gist of it. It's a bit of both. So when you start, what does the AI know about you? Nothing, right? I mean, it just knows your name, right? But as you're talking to it, it's effectively looking at your, while it's responding to your conversation, you asked a question, it will answer that question. 

It's also sort of taking this and saying, okay, if I were a neutral observer, just listening in that conversation, can I build up a cognitive map of Mark, what he knows about this topic? And every now and then, it will throw you a question, say, does that make sense? Do you want to play that back or something like that? And as you play it back in your own words, it's like, okay, all right, it gets what you know, and then it's sort of trying to get you to do the next thing, right? Okay, got it. Now, from an MSP perspective, how are we using this in our organizations? Because we talked about, you know, making stuff available both internally and externally. And you talked about, you know, doing these training programs. 

What is it that you think MSPs will be able to use most with HitWit? Yeah, good question. And I'll sort of step back and answer it from another perspective. So if you sort of surveyed MSP owners, what they likely tell you is, sorry, if you surveyed MSP customers, what they likely tell you is the thing that they value the most from their MSP is fast, knowledgeable response. 

So that's what MSP customers want. And if you look at what MSP owners want, what they want is to grow lines of business. I don't know if you saw the ConnectWise survey of the most profitable MSP model is a mixed model where you're selling infrastructure services and the type of services and so on and so forth.

And if you look at sort of what's common between these two, if you can provide your customers with fast, knowledgeable service and also show them, by the way, that, hey, you're doing all of this using AI, you get a seat at the table when they're talking AI transformation. So I'll give you the short term answer to your question. How do MSPs use it? That's very simple.

Basically, we will help you create a customer support and customer success widget right away. And we'll help you create training programs for your teams, which are not like training programs, but rather 10-minute games that they can play. And as they do it, they become better at this.

So you're building up their expertise and you're answering customer questions fast. So you address customers' immediate needs. But what it also allows you to do is you're building up an AI muscle because at the end of this, the only way you get good at this is by managing your data.

The secret about AI is that it's only as good as the data that you get into it. So when you get good at doing this, at managing data, at understanding, okay, hey, a customer asked this question, so I need to go update my knowledge base to do something. That gives you the right to do the same thing for your customer as well. 

So you get to open a new line of business where we let you white-label our product, where it'll be MB systems managing a customer's data for them. It'll be MB systems sort of even deploying a customer support widget on your customer site. So it lets you open up that line of business as well. 

So there's a short-term and a long-term answer to that. All right. So internally, I get it. 

Externally, so are we sharing? Because we're not going to share our knowledge base with clients and stuff. So are we talking really just about that customer engagement point? I know that you've got some integrations with Slack and Teams and that sort of thing. But is that channel back and forth between the MSP and the customer what we're really trying to maximize? No, that's what I'd call the internal use case for yourself. 

What I'm talking about is, I'll give you an example of one of our customers is a larger MSP. They're, I think, pushing a hundred million in revenue right now. So it's a slightly larger MSP. 

But what they do is they use us for their internal productivity. Then they tell their customers, hey, their customers come to their site and they get instant answers now, not just answers, but case studies, videos, everything that sort of walks them through how to do it. And their customers are like, hey, what technology are you using for this? And how do you do this? And then this MSP gets to tell that customer, hey, we can give this technology to you. 

You can have this customer support widget for your site. And to make it work, we'll have to manage your data for you. We will decide what goes into the knowledge base that answers these questions. 

And it's not just a one and done thing. You need to monitor that and say, okay, so one of the things that, to go back to your earlier question, when a customer asks a question, if you remember in the old customer support widgets, there's a thumbs up or a thumbs down thing. That kind of sucks because most of the time you give thumbs down, not because you didn't, not because, I mean, there are two reasons to give a thumbs down, right? One, your question wasn't answered. 

And the other is you got the answer. You just didn't like it. In both cases, you're going to say thumbs down. 

With conversational AI, you don't need to rely on the thumbs down or thumbs up because the AI will look at the conversation and say, yeah, yeah, I answered the question, but if I were a customer, I wouldn't like this because you know the tone of the customer's question as well. And you know what they ask next. That gets surfaced to you on your dashboard to say, hey, your customers are asking about this and you don't have a good answer to this. 

Let's say they want you to support Google Cloud or some particular thing that they want. It will surface that to you and you get to go back and either update your product offering or your product documentation or something. Imagine you were doing that for your customers. 

That's what that MSP is doing. They're paying the customer. We will deploy this for you and we'll manage that for you.

Nice. Now does that provide an opportunity for a revenue stream? It does. That's exactly what I mean is that they are reselling this and they obviously get a discount when they resell our product. 

But what they're also doing is they're charging services because they're actively managing the data. It's not just the tool that they're selling, but the data management service. Okay. 

All right. Well, Badri, I've asked the questions here. We've gotten a little bit of knowledge. 

I want to give you the opportunity to leave us with your first pitch as if you were getting ready to either go on stage or whatever. If you were to take whatever time you need here, I'm going to step back. I'm going to be quiet and let you pitch it for us. 

Go. Okay. All right. 

That's good. Maybe the way to think about this is we are entering what I might call the third technological transformation of our times, and they're coming thick and fast. I'm going to date myself now and say I saw the first digitization efforts where people would go from paper files to computerized files. 

And the second big transformation was when they went from files sitting in their computers to files sitting in the cloud. And we are at the start of the third transformation, which is AI systems that are able to communicate with us as humans might, except that they're also knowledgeable and trained on products. So it's like you can hire an expert for 10 cents a message instead of $65 an hour or however much it is that an expert costs.

Now, as MSPs got started with the very first technological transformation, and they've sort of morphed into the second one as well, the opportunity right now in front of MSPs is that they can be part of the third transformation. Instead of they can adopt it internally, but really the bigger price is that they get to be the AI transformation experts for their customers. And that's our mission is to enable that. 

And we do one part of this. The AI transformation is going to be huge. It's going to be trillions of dollars made. 

The part that we help you with is the human interface part of AI. There is another part, which is the automation, but what we will focus on is help your people understand what there is in your products. Your people communicate that better and eventually help you be the company that's helping your customers adopt that same technology. 

Because make no mistake, they will. In 10 years, you're already going to see in the next two years, customer support moves into conversational AI. In five to 10 years, what's going to happen is product management, sales, marketing, all of these functions are going to get AI augmented and MSPs have the opportunity to be the people who are leading that charge rather than being left in the wayside. 

And that's what we hope to do. All right. There you have it, folks. 

Badri Varadarajan. I almost had it. With HitWit, the company that helps you enhance your productivity, conversion rates, reduce customer churn. 

This is a platform to really do a lot of stuff, organize, enhance, and distribute knowledge in innovative ways. Badri, good luck and hope to see you in Orlando on stage. But of course, we'll see you at IT Nation Connect either way, right? Yep. 

I will. Yes. And one more reason to not give me steak mess is that I'm vegetarian.

There you go. We wish you the best there, folks. Be sure to keep listening for these episodes as we go through the contestants here with the Pitch It program for IT Nation. 

And we are moving on to Orlando IT Nation Connect. That's going to do it, folks. We'll see you soon. 

And until next time, Holla!