Leveraging AI to Help MSP Clients (EP774)

[Uncle Marv]
Friends, Uncle Marv here with a very special presentation of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals, where we try to help you run your business better, smarter, and faster. And today, I have a presentation of a topic that goes a little bit beyond the traditional IT stuff that we talk about. We are going to discuss unlocking the power of data, especially what we can do as MSPs for our clients.

We're going to talk about offering some data-driven insights for them, helping them to overcome all of their disparate data sources. Some of them have data all over the place on their network. And one of the things that has come about with the idea of AI and machine learning is that we can help them put all of that data in an easily usable, readable dashboard.

And I've got a couple people to help with that today. Hopefully, we're going to get some real-world case studies that can show us how to do that. So, the first person I want to bring up is the person that reached out to me and said, Marv, I've got a pretty good idea for you and how we can help MSPs, Zulfiya Forsyth.

Zulfiya, how are you?

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
I'm great. Thank you so much for having me.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, thank you. I should let people know that you are the CEO and founder of this group. And it's going to be a little bit of an easy question, but what got you into AI and data?

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Absolutely. You know, in my olden days, I was an accountant, a corporate accountant, and I was stuck doing the same repetitive things at that time, just monthly, clothes, cleaning out the books, doing bank correlations. And I thought, there must be a better way.

There must be a better way of just doing this on a repetitive basis. And I started dabbing into Visual Basics. That was my first introduction to Syntax World.

I loved it. Spent days and nights in it. And then I kind of peeked into the IT department, and I saw what they do.

And I'm like, wow, you press F5 button, and all of a sudden, it takes millions of rows and analyzes them and spits it out some nice visuals. I want to know this. How is that possible?

So, from then on, I got a really great opportunity to move to the IT department as a system analyst. And I'm really grateful for that opportunity because I remember it today. And yeah, and just started working SQL and started kind of self-teaching myself and fixing the reports and automating reports.

And from then on, here I am.

[Uncle Marv]
So, did you work for the IT department for the same company you would do the accounting for?

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Yes, yes, absolutely.

[Uncle Marv]
That's an interesting switch.

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Yes. I was working in a senior care facility at the time, management company. And I was a corporate accountant.

So, putting together financial statements, you know, all the usual things. And then I got the opportunity to move. I was just constantly begging, please take me in.

Please. I'll do anything. I'll learn.

I'm a good student. So, and they gave me this opportunity. And then, yeah, I started basically supporting our financial team with the reports.

I started building those reports. Or if they, for example, use DRD as one of their real estate management, they have senior suite in there as well, senior management suite. So, the reports kind of broke or got clunky.

So, opening up those reports, reading through a SQL, basically script that is that long, figuring out, okay, why is it getting bugged down? Like, what's the issue basically there? And just at that time, you know, there was no AI that could help me.

There was nothing like you could just take the code or even piece of it and dump it into GPT or any other large language model, like quad, for example, and ask for direction at least. There was none of that. It's just olden days, there was a stack overflow, one of the forums where I would sit at nights and dump it down.

So, it's like all because it's all sensitive data. So, making sure it's like I can dump it down, put the synthetic data, like ask from the group and just in the morning, like anxiously looking, did someone respond? Like, what do they say to me?

Like, what do I have to fix? And just kind of like now test it out, apply it again, and just have this process ongoing until I figure it and spending lots of times at office on YouTubes and just, yeah, things are a lot different than now.

[Uncle Marv]
So, I'm assuming you had a bunch of late nights with either coffee or soda and just pouring through lines and lines of code.

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Yes, it was late nights, evenings as well. And just again, like I soft dubbed myself at SQL, like I had nothing when I got this position. I was definitely, you know, I had a team that was supportive, was helping me, but still that was just, here you go, swim.

And then, but again, I was very curious as well. Like I would sit on commute, like when I would commute to work, I would listen to some like SQL database, YouTube, short clips and stuff, like just kind of get my head around, okay, what's the foreign key? What's the primary key?

Like all those kinds of things.

[Uncle Marv]
That was your off hours entertainment and hobby, listening to SQL YouTube videos, come on.

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Yeah, yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes. But, you know, one thing that I say to everybody is like, I just, I was just so curious. I was just very curious.

And I always wanted to that, to meet that script work and kind of figure out, okay, how do you do averages? How do you do counts? How, what's a group by versus having like all those little things.

I was just kind of always curious. I was like, all right, how else can I summarize this? How else can I do this?

Like I can grab from here and there. Just, it was always kind of, it's one thing after another. And just like, it felt natural to me.

[Uncle Marv]
Right. Okay. Now, how long after you made the leap into the IT department, did you actually start to come across these large language models and realize that you could put these all together into a single dashboard and make it all work?

How long did that take?

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
So, yeah. So let me a little bit clarify on that. And so with large English models, right.

We started, so I started my company and after COVID, just kind of freelancing, I still have a full-time job, but I started kind of like, you know, I got as, as everyone, probably most people I got laid off during COVID. So I started kind of like getting into freelancing a little bit, trying to get, you know, see how that works and then still looking for full-time jobs. So I kept on going.

I got my full-time job and I still had like a little freelancing on the side. So on that end, I was doing a lot more like data analytics, basically just working with different types of systems, data sources. Some of them, a lot of them will silos, for example, operate.

They don't really talk to each other. And then developing these dashboards. And I'll tell you something.

Oh my gosh, the progress is so during COVID, I taught myself, taught myself Power BI. And then I took the certification from Microsoft and got certified. But before the Power BI, you still use the earlier days that I remember, you will still have a SQL database.

You'll create these data sets, but you deploy them to Excel and you create those visuals on Excel, like those graphs and basically the backgrounds, the whole thing. But once the Power BI came in, oh my gosh, like the life got so much more easier. Like all the formatting that you have to do.

And also like building the data modeling, making sure that it can also help to scale the report. So the users can go back like one year, two years, three years. We have clients that have data since 2012, for example.

There's no way Excel could handle so much of data. It will just break down and will not give you any of those abilities. So with language models, we started working in 2023, started building out an in-house automation in terms of, okay, well, we have these processes, workflows, how can we automate now and have conversations basically.

Now, for example, I'll give you an idea. One of the projects that we started working on was onboarding, HR onboarding. Because every time when I hired a new team member, we had a checklist.

For example, the person will have to go through and then I thought, wouldn't it be awesome if we have some type of, and that was early stages, kind of like something that we did in-house, wouldn't it be awesome that instead of me constantly checking, okay, do you have any questions? Is this done? Where are you at?

Create some type of a tool where it will notify both of us where that person is, or kind of will give us, or if they have any questions based on information that was exposed to them, instead of asking me, they would have this tool help them to basically. And those were internal documents, for example, that they can, just very simple, very basic, basically.

[Uncle Marv]
Something to guide people as to everybody knows where we are in the onboarding process.

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Exactly. And everybody, exactly. And everybody, and then if you have any questions regarding this checklist that you're exposed to, they can also get an idea.

And after that, we started getting contracts where actually you did the AI multi-agent chatbots. Now that will help companies do, their users ask questions, their customers ask questions about billing, and also about the customer service. So then we got more and kind of into the weeds of large-language models, and now we're here, now we're building actually multiple solutions in that field.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So that's kind of interesting. Now I'm going to, we've got somebody else in the green room, so I want to let people know, first of all, we do have somebody else coming who's going to give an MSP perspective on that.

But before I do that, I want to hear from you, what was your first foray into thinking that this would be something that would work for an IT company, managed service provider?

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Absolutely. So we just, by surprise, you know, it was like an amazing experience that we had. We would help our client.

I just had a client coming to me and asking me, can you help us to automate our reporting? Can you help us to build business intelligence reporting? As I was working on a client, I had no idea that they had managed service providers basically as part of their vendor.

So the managed service provider saw all the work that we did, and they're like, hmm, this is awesome. Can you help our other clients with this thing? And then we started kind of this partnership that's been going on now for over a year, and helping their clients when they have these systems and workflows that are repetitive and redundant, either helping to assess what is the right solution for you?

Is it the right solution for you to build out the business intelligence report, data analytics report, which is the same thing, or would you like some AI automation or AI agents, depending on the solution that is needed. So we come in, work with MSPs, and we become their trusted partner to help their clients to stay efficient and kind of help them to get that lift off their shoulders.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So let's go to the next step here, and let me bring to the stage Dmitry Rudman. And Dmitry has a MSP SafePoint IT out of Chicago.

And Dmitry, welcome to the show. Hi, Marv. Thank you for having me.

Good. So let me ask you, before you met Sophia, what was it like for you in IT, and what led you to kind of look for help with a solution?

[Dmitry Rudman]
Yep. So we've always been interested in business intelligence for our clients. Just never got around to finding anyone good that we could work with.

And of course, it's not something that we do in-house. So, yeah, like Sophia mentioned, it happened by a complete accident where one of our clients brought in a vendor, which was a monthly group, started working with them, and then that's how our relationship started. In order to facilitate the project, there was some technical requirements that needed to be met.

Specifically, Sophia needed a data warehouse that needed to be set up. So we worked together with her to create this environment that she would then utilize to pull the data into and start building the dashboards, the BI dashboards.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So up to that point, had you done anything? And if I stay within the Microsoft suite, had you done stuff with Power BI before or even Copilot since it's been out a little while?

[Dmitry Rudman]
Yeah. I mean, we've done some things for ourselves, us being in the MSP industries. There are some platforms such as BrightGauge.

Everybody knows about it. So we've done something for ourselves where we needed a tool like BrightGauge in order to be able to pull the data from the systems that we use, such as ConnectWise, QuickBooks, and then display that real-time data. Though we haven't explored anything like that for our clients and we felt that it was certainly a need.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So it sounds like, Sophia, you engaged with this client. They had an MSP that could help with all of the technical stuff that you needed done.

So that sounds like a very good synergy. But in a situation like this, a lot of MSPs are going to come into this without much knowledge at all. So let me ask the question of how do you help educate us as IT service providers about the opportunities, the things that we can do, or the things that we should know by now that we could do to help our clients?

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Absolutely. So in my experience, working with clients that come to us for either business intelligence or AI solutions, is that what we're hearing is they most of the times have MSP working with them, or they might have some internal IT services that help them to set up the environment. But in a lot of cases, we have the companies that come to us, they have nothing, no business intelligence reporting set up, they're ground zero.

And they might have some MSP that's helping them, for example, with making sure that basically they have a safe environment, securities and cloud maintenance. So these MSPs might see all the systems that this client is using. And I'm also hearing that sometimes MSPs have their maybe annually or quarterly meetups with their clients where they can ask them questions.

All right, well, I see that you have all these systems, how do you run your reporting? Do you have any type of, let's say, processes that are redundant and repetitive that you would like to improve on? What is taking really a long time from you?

And in terms of the workflows that you have, do you even have any type of a centralized database or data lake where you're collecting these systems that you're using that right now operating on silos? I think asking those questions will unveil a lot of insights, even asking them, all right, do you use, for example, do you use Excel for your reporting? Do you have to manually pull Excel from different types of systems and maybe run some type of macros on it or some type of formulas?

How long does that take you? Is it something that you have to do weekly, monthly? Is it a lengthy process?

So asking questions like do you have a, for example, tap on knowing where your numbers are at all times, where your business is at across all these different systems, because a lot of these, what I've noticed is a lot of systems in these applications that businesses use, they all have reporting out of box. But also what I'm noticing that majority of people not using those reporting out of box, because every business is unique, they have their own customs, metrics that they're looking at, how they report on things. And sometimes they want to see, all right, well, I want to look at my payroll data with my, for example, patient data.

Why? I want to figure out what's my revenue and my financial data. What's my revenue for this employee, for this patient?

Something of that nature. But now for them to achieve that goal, they would have to manually pull from each system, do some type of Excel flips and flops and hope that the formulas are correct and then the file doesn't get corrupted. And they don't have to constantly do this.

If their leadership is asking them, hey, can you run these numbers again? They have to again, manually do this process, which it's kind of only good at that point, only gives you them a point of time.

[Uncle Marv]
And it sounds like there's probably a lot of times where people don't even know that systems will talk to each other. So that's a good start. Dmitry, let me ask you this.

So when you first met Sophia and you worked through that first project, what was it that made you think to ask, hey, can you do stuff like this for our other clients?

[Dmitry Rudman]
Yeah, absolutely. So we as an MSP, we have technology business reviews with our clients where we meet on a regular basis and have business conversations to figure out how the technology can help their business. And when talking to clients, we hear the same things that Sophia is describing.

It's a lot of the different software or systems that they utilize on a day-to-day basis. They don't have any real-time reporting. So if you're looking to get the data out, you have to run an export.

Now, once you run an export, you have to format it a certain way. Sometimes you have to merge the data with another report from another system. That all takes time.

By the time you are finished, the data is outdated. And then there's also room for error because it is a person that's working, combining these reports and working with the data. Mistakes can happen.

I mean, we're all human. And essentially, by utilizing a BI platform that is able to automate this process with no mistakes and provide this real-time data, it's really helpful. And we thought it would be a huge benefit to our clients to be able to make business decisions real-time.

[Uncle Marv]
Right. So if we're talking your typical QBR or TBR, as some would call it, this goes beyond just pulling all of our inventory and our 365 licenses and trying to project the IT spend over the next three to five years. What other things were you trying to bring into those reports besides those basics that we all know and love?

[Dmitry Rudman]
I mean, we were trying to become the strategic advisors and find the gaps that our clients might have. Where if we fill those gaps, it'll allow them to become more productive, more efficient. So these are the things that we look for and those are the types of conversations that we're looking out for.

[Uncle Marv]
Right. I understand, Sophia, that we have a presentation or dashboard where we can kind of get a visual idea about this because I know that a lot of us as techs, yeah, we think a lot of stuff on our minds, but sometimes we got to see it. So is that something we're ready to get into?

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Sure.

[Uncle Marv]
All right.

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
All right. Fantastic. So what are you looking right now at?

We're looking at the Power BI report. And again, this is all done with using synthetic data. So there's no confidential data just for demo purposes.

And I just want to show you. So on this dashboard, you could see, for example, for medical history insights, and it's fully interactive. So what I mean by that is that you can just click on one specific department and now the data changes and kind of gives you the breakdown.

Then you can also analyze it further by kind of saying, all right, what is my proportion here if I just click on total patient by department, for example, and then all of these metrics get updated. So this is very useful. And then in this case, you can also add, for example, right now it has a patient data.

But as I mentioned, you can also add here, let's say your payroll data or where you can show, well, what's my overhead looks like? What's the capacity of my clinic looks like, for example. And this could be done for anything, for dental clinic, veterinary clinic, or any type of an e-commerce shop as well, where they have the customers coming into the door and buying things and they want to know, all right, well, what's my volume like around what time, what period, when is it dropping?

For example, why is it dropping? Or especially really good if they have multiple facilities and they really want to scale, for example, and see what are the hours that are the busiest compared to the others. When should I staff people?

So it helps to answer all of those questions. You can also see, for example, here, yeah, what is my busiest times during weekday or weekends? All of these things to, again, help with making sure that the business is running efficiently.

And then another thing is you can also set up alerts. For example, some of our clients like to sell alerts. If certain KPIs are down, they can get alerts either on the emails or their mobile phones because Power BI has a mobile application as well.

And then they can get alerted. And so they can, the idea is not looking at your numbers at the end of the week or at the end of the month, but taking action now and have ability to fine tune any type of strategies, let's say marketing strategies or customer relational business or product development strategies and improve your metrics on the spot.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So let me ask this because the dashboard looks nice and having all that information that is clickable and real time. I guess the first thing is the company has to be collecting this somehow, right?

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Yes.

[Uncle Marv]
And in terms of a typical business, how is this data normally tracked across different platforms?

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
I see. Sure. So usually what we do is, again, we work with Metri, for example.

They come in and help to set up the data warehouse environment where the data gets connected either through, for example, a lot of the systems that have API calls or they also give us server information and then login and password. Now that we connect to the, let's say, Microsoft Management Studio, we have that data available and then we can pull that data into our Power BI. Power BI is a web cloud-based tool.

For development purposes, there's a desktop downloaded version, which we usually, again, we operate within the client local environment that MSP usually sets up for them anyways. And then they would help us to download, for example, Power BI desktop version so we can build the data model, again, locally on the client's premises. We're not building anything on our OMABI premises, everything on the client premises.

And then they have integration. Power BI has integration with Salesforce, for example, but also has ability to integrate with SQL databases once you enter your credentials. If you have a single sign-on, then it kind of works seamlessly there as well and then has ability.

What you're looking right now at, it's a certain type, obviously, the colors and the visuals, but we have clients that, for example, prefer more in a table format. It has so much flexibility in terms of visual. And as long as you have the API access, you can basically use this tool and connect the data to it, build the data model on backend.

Data modeling is a very critical step because this is where the knowledge on how to unify data across many different platforms is key because you gain primary keys, foreign keys, how these tables talk to each other from different systems to make sure that you have this dashboard or this report that is wholesome. Also, with Power BI, it's not as expensive. It starts with $9.99. It scales up to $19.99 per license. So it's not something that you need to... It's not like a software that you need to... Yeah, from what we've seen right now, it's $9.99 per user or $19.99 if you have a lot, lots of volume of data. But it's pretty easy to install. It's lightweight, I would say, and it also gives you ability if you have older data so you don't have to refresh all of it. There's incremental refreshes as well.

So you can still see the dashboard for many years, for example, and have no problem with that.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So I know that a lot of us might be familiar with Power BI but might not be using it, might not even know how to connect things to it. Of course, you've already mentioned SQL.

Dmitry, you mentioned BrightGauge as something that we're kind of familiar with. What else? You mentioned Salesforce.

So all of these things can kind of talk together and the Omadli group can put together this dashboard that helps put all of this into a nice, pretty format, right?

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Yes. I also want to point out, for example, we have clients that use AWS. They're not on Microsoft environment.

They're on a Google environment. And for AWS, we also well-versed in QuickSight. That's another business intelligence tool, but it's for Amazon users.

So it has same capabilities, Power BI, although their visuals are a little lag behind, I'll be honest, just because Power BI has a bigger, I think, also support forums as well, just have more preference. But we do have clients that are on QuickSight. Same thing.

You've got to also connect. Either you have S3 bucket or you have Redshift, and then you connect data. And you can also bring connection to these data through SharePoint as well, for example, or Google Drives, or some type of a JSON file that you have that you want to integrate within your dashboard.

You can also do that as well.

[Uncle Marv]
So if we're connecting it to SharePoint, what would be a sample of something we pull out of SharePoint? Absolutely.

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Let's say you have a data that is not in-house that you're getting from somewhere. Let's say some type of stats numbers that you would like to know, and you would like your dashboard to be some metrics devaluated against. Let's say you have some type of benchmarks that are within your industry, and you get it from some type of association.

So what you could do is you can house them on SharePoint because they're static, or they might be renewing, let's say, every quarter or every year. So you can house them in SharePoint, and you can connect SharePoint to your Power BI so every time the new data gets updated in the same format that's the key, then your dashboard will be pulling that new data with the refresh.

[Uncle Marv]
Interesting. Dmitry, how did you decide to use this for your QBRs? Were you just connecting?

You mentioned ConnectWise. Where were you connecting all your data from?

[Dmitry Rudman]
Yeah. I mean, we as an MSP, we have a ton of different data sources. ConnectWise is the primary one where we have all of our tickets, hours, client information.

Then we have the data coming from Ninja. We have financial data coming from QuickBooks. Then you might also want to combine the leads data from Salesforce or from HubSpot.

That's the cool thing about Power BI is that it's literally able to pull the information from any data sources. Anything that supports API, that's the easiest way to do it. Some applications, they might not have the API capability, but there's still ways to pull the data out of there.

As an example, some of our clients, they're running ERP or EMR systems, which have SQL database backend. Those systems, they don't have native API capability, but because there's a way to establish the direct connection to the database, you're still able to pull the data out from there and display it inside of the Power BI.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Then one quick question before we move on. What is the startup time for something like this?

I imagine that there's got to be a lot of investigation as to, first of all, does the product have an API? If it doesn't, how do we do that? The dashboard looks fast.

How long does it take to get to that point?

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
It depends on the scope of the project, because again, if you have, let's say, a small project, you're only connecting one data source, either for the direct connection to the database or just API access, then it's a quick project. I would say scope of work, one week of figuring out, maybe two weeks of connecting the data, and then building out the data model would be probably, I would say, three, four weeks. I'm getting more time, because again, data modeling, here's the thing.

If the clients have a really good roadmap, and majority of clients don't, from my experience, meaning roadmap is, let's say they're using the system, and they have this ERD, kind of like a, what is it, enterprise diagram, right? The relational diagram here. If they have that, where it shows, okay, well, if I have patient, patient records connecting to this table, like patient treatment table, and patient treatment to insurance table, they have this clear ERD map, great.

It speeds up the process, but majority of clients that we work with, sometimes they might not have it. And then if you have multiple systems that you are actually plugging and playing with, and then you would need to use user interface to kind of figure things out, where they are in the back end, if that makes sense. So, those instances just take a little bit more time than the others.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Yeah, I just wanted to bring that out, because most of the time, there's not going to be a template ready to go that, you know, we can just throw in and say, in a week, have everything ready for. So, okay.

So, what else in this presentation can you show us?

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Sure. I can show you the case study, for example, that we did on automation report.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay.

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
So, I can, we worked with one of the real estate companies, and they were utilizing Yardi as a property management software company. So, part of their reporting was, actually, they would do weekly report, they would have to report to the investors and to the leadership team on what's the occupancy like, what's the performance like of their portfolio. And that was a 17-page Excel report that it would have to update every week.

So, when we had first how it usually goes, they show us, they usually show us, okay, this is the Excel report that I would like to automate. So, initial kind of discovery calls, and when we, or the initial discovery calls, a setup process where we identify the project that we want to automate. So, when they show us 17 pages, and it would take them, let's say, like, because they've been doing for a long time, say, five hours, because they would, what they would have to do is they would have to populate the 17-page report every week to go, like, run all these individual reports from Yardi, clean them up, because, again, when you download those reports, most of the reports that you download from any type of systems, they don't really come nicely or neatly, or you don't really use all of the information, you only use part of it.

So, you have to clean up, do some type of Excel manipulation, then populate this. So, when we came in, right now, so, we basically, now the time that they have to devote to this report, to putting it together on a weekly basis, is zero. So, nobody's touching it anymore.

If the before was, like, four, every week, there would be, you know, three to four hours spent on it, and if there's new persons touching it, forget it, they will sit there and do this a day, because, you know, if they, let's say, if they have a new person coming in, a new staff member, and not sure about the business, you know, it will take them longer, basically, before they are, before they can get a grasp on it. But, right now, once we automated that report, we built it in Power BI, we have all these, actually, now, from 17 pages, it went to, shortly, even 10 pages, because we can, the data is, what was happening in that report, basically, we can summarize some of data, and group some of this data, and kind of, even, like, a presentation-wise, which was much more cleaner, and another thing was very useful, is that, Power BI report, for example, if you have certain metric, you can drill there, you can right-click on it, and there's ability to drill down, meaning, if you drill down, it will give you all the transactions that's making up that amount. Excel cannot have ability to do that, because in Excel, you're going to have to go, like, how did you get to calculate this number? Let me see the formula, where is this coming from?

You still have to go look the details, and pull the report, most of the times. But, in Excel, in the Power BI, it gives you ability to, kind of, right-click on it, and see the, now, details of making up that number.

[Dmitry Rudman]
Yeah, it's a great, great feature.

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Yeah, it's a great feature, and then, another thing is, like, in Excel, you can't really, pick the timeline that you really want to focus on. Here, you can also do the same thing. So, we took that, basically, we undertook 145-hour project, and now, got to zero hour spent.

So, now, nobody's touching it, and lives of its own. We, once we build the report, basically, it's, that weekly report, now, sent out on automated, like, get sent out on scheduled time, every week, to the responsible parties that want to view that report, and that's it. So, usually, what happens, once we build the report, there is a maintenance that comes with it, but maintenance is very minimal, just because, you know, looking for any server outages, or if something happens, the refresh stopped, then, we take a look at it, but it's very, very minimal, most of the time.

So, I would say, like, three to five hours a month.

[Uncle Marv]
So, this, to me, sounds like we're talking automation on steroids, with reporting, because you've taken, literally, a manual process, and automated it. My guess is, let's see, I know that, if you're listening to the audio, I'm going to encourage you to go to the video, at least at this point, to see what we're talking about, but the increased efficiency, the immediate time savings, the enhanced decision-making, I want to go down to number five, accuracy and operational improvements. I have to imagine that, if somebody's creating a report in Excel, manually, every week, there's going to be mistakes.

So, I, this sounds like it would eliminate 98, 99% of those mistakes.

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
And that report was giant, I mean, 17 pages, and imagine if they looked at this report, and they made changes, and, let's say, in their records in Yardy, and now, they have to, like, let me look at this again, let's recalculate all of it again. So, now, the person has to, again, download it, refresh this report, so they can see the numbers better, because, let's say, the numbers on tenants, on their, let's say, rent, will be calculated in the average rent spent calculation for the entire portfolio. So, things of that nature, definitely, yeah.

So, it helps a lot.

[Dmitry Rudman]
Yeah. Some of these reports, Excel reports, they can get so big that it starts slowing down on the computer, where it's, like, it's almost impossible to operate things or do things inside the Excel, so that's another issue.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, I'm thinking, right off the back, I have a law firm client where they need to run billing reports, and we actually had to dedicate a separate computer for the billing reports, because if somebody did it on their own station, they couldn't do any other work, and it would take, you know, six to eight hours, so, basically, a work day, and this, I mean, if I could find something, you know, a solution built around this to help them do that, that would be awesome, because, one, there's a computer sitting unmanned just to do this thing, so that people can keep working, and you're right, after the six to eight hours, they make a change, they've got to rerun those reports, so there's multiple times in a month that they're doing that, so huge.

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Yeah, so then, once it's built, you still monitor these reports, because it's, you don't let them kind of float around. There is a refresh time. The refresh time gives the ability to put the names and emails of people that the notification should be sent if, should the refresh stop, for example.

Refreshes usually stop, let's say, there has been, like, server outage, something like that, so once the refresh stops, you get notification, and then immediate attention to kind of look into what happened, and most of the times our team does that, we get notified, and then we get back to the client saying, or we get back to Dmitry and say, oh, this refresh stopped, we're looking into it, we'll let you know what happened, because we're working with Dmitry's clients, we go through SafePoint to kind of communicate that, and then let them know once it's all set, and what happens as well.

[Uncle Marv]
Right, and before we go on, Dmitry, you made a great point earlier that this is basically a dual product for you, because not only can you use it for your internal stuff, it's now a tool that you can use for clients and charge them for those services, right?

[Dmitry Rudman]
That is correct.

[Uncle Marv]
Nice. All right, Sophia, anything else on the screen here with this case study we need to know? No.

Okay, let me go ahead and, are we done with the presentation?

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Yes, we're good with the presentation.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, take that off for us here. So, all of this really sounds absolutely fantastic. The one question that I want to ask that I'm sure some of my listeners are, this sounds like this would be something that the larger the company, the better the opportunity, but is this something that could work for smaller companies, smaller MSPs, price point-wise, how are we looking?

[Dmitry Rudman]
So, Sophia?

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Yeah, I'll have Dmitry to answer, and then I'll add on.

[Dmitry Rudman]
Okay. Yeah, smaller companies can definitely utilize this technology. It all depends on what type of systems they are, that they're using, where we need to pull the data from, how important it is for them to look at this data in real-time status.

Price points, I mean, it differs. Some projects, they can be as little as 20 hours, 30 hours. Some could be hundreds and upwards.

So, it really depends on the amount of data sources, what kind of reports you want to build, how much stuff do you want to automate, if there's any type of alerts that you need to set up for KPIs, so that without looking at the report, you could get an email notification or a text message when something goes wrong, so that you can take immediate action. So, really, it varies from client to client.

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Yeah, and I want to add on to it, the clients that we work with, we work with wide range. We work with clients that are small business, we automate this reporting for them, and so they can, because all the businesses, they want to scale, they want to grow, they want to be more efficient, cut the cost, and cut the time. They're all running, it's interesting, the majority of them are strapped for time.

So, this is a great solution to kind of get them off from admin work of putting these reports and have that so they can open up their time and, yeah, and focus on things that drive their business. And another thing is that for Power BI data analytics is that once they have, the experience that we've been seeing is that once they see the power of automation, when it comes to reporting, or when it comes to, for example, other workflows that they have, that are repetitive, the light bulb starts kind of working, they're like, Oh, what else can I save time on? It's never just one project.

Dmitry and I have been working on one client for over a year and plus, it all but it all started just like, hey, can you just want this quick report? And then now, you know, we've been working with this client for a year plus. And we also like, okay, what's another thing?

Well, now with the data analytics, we're cutting edge. And now the clients are asking us, how do we do AI? Like, what do we do with AI?

How do we what can we do? How can we how we can help our business, for example, can you help us? So it's now that we have the data, now we know the pain points, we know how the business is run, we say, Okay, well, this solution is really good for you, for example, like either it's a reporting automation, or is it AI solution, so we can advise them and help them navigate, especially with AI being on everybody's mind right now.

[Uncle Marv]
Right, I was just thinking in my head here, for Dmitry. So everybody's talking about copilot, and how MSPs should be using that as something in the pocket. Is that something that you've looked at with, with a modeling?

[Dmitry Rudman]
Yes, we have been working a little bit with the copilot. And it's, it's definitely a great tool, especially if you are using the Office 365 ecosystem. So some of the examples of what we've done for our company is create a SharePoint site where we store a lot of the supporting documentation for our clients or companies, handbooks, policies, SOPs.

And whenever there's a question, instead of having to go and look for the document or do a search, now you can interact with a copilot and just ask a question. So like a perfect example, one of our employees had a question regarding the time off policy, and they asked my partners, like, you know, what's the situation with this? And like, he's like, I don't remember.

Let me go and try and find it. And he just ended up asking the copilot that question, because the copilot had access to the employee handbook. I was able to answer it right on the spot, which is another cool thing about it.

This is something that an employee can do directly themselves without even having to go to HR or somebody higher up and inquiring about that information.

[Uncle Marv]
Now, with that example, I know that some clients have SharePoint, and you think that, oh, I'll just do a search in SharePoint. So how much faster or how much more accurate would this process be using a modeling group?

[Dmitry Rudman]
Yeah, it's a lot faster, because the copilot is available right in the Office 365 portal, versus if you have to browse a specific SharePoint site, find exactly where the data is located and do a search, the search doesn't come back with a result, you have to navigate to another location. It could become time consuming versus you have an agent that you can just ask a question. Right.

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Okay. And I want to add on to that. So me, Dmitry and I actually, we were also trying to do for, for example, Dmitry clients, right?

Like, we do the analytics, but we also do AI solutions in terms of, all right, we'll look at their clients and see what are their, how they onboarding beyond copilot, because copilot is good for internal, say, SharePoint files, or your emails. But for example, what if you have other data sources that are coming with systems that are using, how can you utilize that tapping into that? Now, this is beyond copilot, this is now custom, either AI agents that are kind of autonomous now on your behalf, craft those messages, craft those emails, having the context of your data sources, for example.

So now, for example, the clients are not spending time on, okay, well, how do I follow up with this customer, for example, what was the last time I talked to them? What's their payment like? What was the, do we have outstanding payment?

So having the AI basically have the access to these data sources, whether it's financial data sources, customer relation management data sources, and now craft email for them, or users kind of just review and then head send, even discussing those opportunities as well.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, well, you have certainly given me something to think about. I remember that when we first got in touch, I'm like, hmm, I don't know that this is going to work for my show and listeners, but I think it's going to fall right in line with where things are going for us. I mean, data is going to be the place where we spend a lot of our time.

So thank you very much for sharing that with us, and I want to make sure that I give you both the opportunity to let people know that if they hear this, they see this, and they want to reach out, Dmitry, I'm going to start with you. If somebody wants to follow up with you and say, hey, I'm an MSP, I want to see how you're using this and how we can do it, where can they reach out to you at?

[Dmitry Rudman]
Yep, the best place to contact me would be either email or my direct phone line. For the email address, you can use Dmitry R, that's D-M-I-T-R-Y, and then the last name initial R at safepointit.com, or call my direct, which is 847-850-7819.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, and Sofia, you are the architect of all of this. Where can people go if they want to get in touch with you?

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Sure, absolutely. They can get in touch with me at my handle, at Sofia Forsythe. You can find me on LinkedIn, also any other social media.

You can also, my phone number is 617-680-1682, would be happy to help. And if you are reaching out, maybe you want to write Uncle Marv, so I know, and I will send you my free AI assistant guidebook on how to create your own AI, just under five minutes.

[Uncle Marv]
Oh, okay.

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Yeah, I would love to share that.

[Uncle Marv]
That'd be great, thank you for doing that. And we'll make sure to have all of that in the show notes, so you can do that. Sofia, Dmitry, thank you guys very much for coming on and doing this.

[Zulfiya Forsythe]
Thank you.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, folks, that is going to do it for this special episode of the IT Business Podcast. If you want to provide some more data services to your clients, this might be something for you to look at it, so check it out and let me know. And of course, reach out to Sofia and tag your email, Uncle Marv, so you can get that free AI guide.

That's going to do it for this episode, folks. We'll see you back here soon. Until next time, holla.

Thank you.