The 2026 State of MSP Automation: Bridging the Automation Divide

Hello and good afternoon everyone and welcome to this Roost webinar on the 2026 state of automation. Before we get started, just a few housekeeping rules. Number one, this session is being recorded and the recording will be shared with all of those who have registered and signed up after the call. So, you will be getting the the recording after this. The chat is also open. So, feel free to let us know where You're joining us from or if you have any comments um or or anything you want to share, uh yeah, light up the chat for

us. We also have our Q&A se uh section open. So, if you have any specific questions for our speakers today, that is the best place to leave those questions and we will of course have time at the end to go through those. But that is housekeeping. I'm going to pass you over to our host for today, Mr. Frank Price. Frank, take it away. >> Hey George, thank you. Welcome everybody. Um I'm Frank. I'm the chief product officer at Roost and uh excited to be here today talking about this topic. Um so essentially we recently did

a survey on the state of MSP automation and had over 300 plus folks um participate in the survey and we have a lot of uh very interesting data to share with you. uh and we want to kind of cover some of that data and just talk a little bit about automation journeys in General in the MSP space. Um what uh gets people to be extraordinarily successful in their journeys, where people get hung up along the way. Um and I'm very excited to actually have somebody here to share a story directly. Um and I'm also very

excited to have our CEO. So, I'd love to uh introduce Jennifer Roy and Aaron Churnin um and have them uh give a little bit of introduction on what they do. So, why don't we kick it over to Jennifer first. >> Thanks Frank and thanks for having me. Uh so, hello everyone. My name is Jennifer. I am the CEO of Nucleus Networks. Uh we are an MSP in Vancouver, although we operate across Canada. So, uh we operate in British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario. Um, we've been in business for for just over 20 years and um, I've

been in the MSP space for about 15. >> Hey everybody, I'm Aaron, uh, CEO at Roost. Uh, I would say my main job is Trying to predict the future, try to predict, uh, what MSPs need to help uh, run their businesses. I've been involved in the uh MSP space for the past 10 years. Uh my company before Roost was a cyber security company and now I'm focused on automation. Hello everybody. >> Well, I'll give you a little more background on me. My main job is to make sure Aaron returns from the future on occasion and

and stays with us in Present day and bring some of those learnings into what we do here at Roost. Um I've been in the MSP space for just over 10 years on the vendor side cyber security for 15 plus and just general in IT and IT services for 25 years. Excited to talk to you about this topic today. Uh looking forward to your questions. So please drop questions in. George will be uh collecting those and we'll be hitting them at the tail end. Um but I wanted to dive in a little bit more about Roost

um And then spend the bulk of the time talking about Jennifer's story. But first kind of a little bit about Roost. Roost uh has been around for just over 5 years and is essentially a vendor agnostic automation platform that is serving um the MSP community. We have purpose-built everything we do at Roost targeted for what MSPs need to move from a lot of the manual, a lot of the ways that things have been done in the previous two decades in the 2000s to Where everything is going in the 2020s and where it's heading very rapidly

um from this year on. And we're going to talk a lot about that. Obviously, you guys know what I'm talking about. So, a little bit more about Roost and and kind of our our core platform. The first thing we do is we look at what MSPs use in their tool set day in and day out. You know, what is the tech stack? You all use the core PSA, RMM, the documentation, the the even the security Uh tooling you use uh and all and a whole host of other things. We have 90 plus integrations into this.

And the reason why we do that is because we understand your whole business operates on this tech stack. We also understand what you're trying to achieve. um even though there's a lot of different flavors out there across the verticals you serve, across the regions you're in globally, that really matters to us. So we make sure that we continue to build Out a footprint that will serve exactly what you have in place. Um then essentially, you know, we take a look at where you might want to begin. What are the classic automations, the top use cases

that you have today that you want to drive more efficiency and more cost savings, maybe redeploy your employees to something of higher order. And we have so many pre-built automations, over 100, we call these crates available for you. Um, and then we think about all Those folks out there that really have those kind of custom nuances and want to make sure you can have a building experience to build automations and drive those as well. And then really that dovtales into a lot of the ways, you know, you're solving these problems for your clients and some

of the um general problems that you're trying to drive through. And now with you know uh artificial intelligence just exploding in the last couple of years we've made Sure that we baked that in very very strongly and I'll talk to you a little bit about Robo Rooie in a little bit more depth. So we jump to the next slide George. So Robo Roosti as part of this automation platform that I just did a pretty high level overview on is our AI assistant um that has been customdeveloped for MSP use. It is there to help you

understand uh not only how to get going and set up and get your Integration set up and build an automation footprint to run based on your business needs but it's helped to actually build those workflows and automations. You can use natural language uh interface to build out uh the workflows. You can troubleshoot them and understand exactly where your key decisions are, where you want humans in the loop. You can actually document those workflows for compliance purposes. you can make sure that you have that Underlying material for training purposes uh for new staff members that come

in or for your clients to understand how you do things behind the scenes. And then ultimately you can also you know really really just use it as a help center and ask Ruby almost anything to help you move forward into a very very low to no code experience in um the Roost platform. So how does this all tie to what's going on in the industry? what's going on in the space in the State of automation. Well, before we jump into more on the MSP state of automation report and some of the data, let's have Jennifer

kind of introduce Nucleus and their story. Uh, so tell us a little bit more about Nucleus, Jennifer, and we'll we'll go from there. >> Yeah, sounds great. Well, um, again, we've been, you know, we've been in business for about about 20 years. Um, we're I'll say 20, it's it's actually closer to 25. Uh but we've been we've Been incorporated for for about 20 years. Um we are a Canadian MSP. Um we're part of the Evergreen family. So we do have uh you know a larger a larger reach uh than just the three provinces that we

work in. We support about 200 businesses uh 8,000 endpoints. Um and I have a just shy of 90 staff. So we're we're a fairly mature large uh MSP in Canada. Um we focus really a lot on the client experience. Anyone who talks to me, I'm not technical and I lead the Team from the perspective of client experience. Um, I always say we are a customer service first organization. We just happen to do it through technology. Um, and uh, you know, automation and AI is in in our forefront uh, of all our service offerings and what

we're doing in in the market today. >> Great. Thanks, Jen. Um, and that that overview is a great kind of dovetail into a lot of the questions I'm going to jump into. And I'm going to do some of Them here, but I want to start out with just a a little bit of unpacking the data. So, one of the things that came back across the MSP community is that is that MSPs get it. They have to automate. They have to automate to survive. It's no longer a differentiator. It's paramount. It's table stakes. And 95% came

back and said it's essential to their strategy going forward. But what's really interesting is that half of MSPs out there are still citing this Challenge of getting off the ground, having the resources to do it, having the technical expertise, maybe even having that upfront budget or that readiness, you know, getting your shop in order to do what Aaron always talks about, which is having your processes well documented and defined so you can automate them. But AI is really helping, you know, accelerate that quite a bit. And you know, as we think about the data points

you see here, and I'm not going To walk through all of them. I I want to ask Jennifer kind of that the initial question like one day at Nucleus, you all made a decision to say, "Okay, we're going to look stronger at automation. We're going to have to see what's out there in terms of capabilities, what our internal, you know, resources are capable of." And you need to begin that journey. What led you to that point and how did you justify that investment? Yeah, great question. So, a a big piece Of this is, you know,

we we looked at what is inspiring work for our team. So, just like I said, I'm not technical. I focus on the client experience. I'm also really focused on the employee experience and what what work is inspiring for your team. Work that is repetitive and boring is not not inspiring. Um, and yes, you have to have a tier one that starts somewhere and learn something. um you know to get kind of that foundation but at the same time Is the work that we're giving them really inspiring when it's redundant and something that can be automated.

So I really started thinking about automation as a way to create more creative work for our team. So we have these, you know, incredible minds and brilliant people that work for us that are are looking to to, you know, improve their skill sets and maybe scripting or looking at, you know, and this is, you know, prius using Roost. It it was, you Know, scripting and automate. Um, they wanted to to dabble in that and learn how to do that. And that was a great way for us to be able to, you know, start to work

on automating processes. Now, it was not a long-term solution because, of course, there's, you know, way more efficient ways to do it, but it was really good for us to be able to lean into that and provide then that more creative work for for our team. And so, um, that was where we really started the The journey is saying, what is work that's not inspiring? How can we take it away and allow our people to have work that was going to get them more excited about coming to work every day? Okay. >> I I love

I love that kind of backdrop because, you know, it's interesting. I think so many MSPs and and and I don't think there's any flaw in this start thinking with the client experience. And I I think Jennifer, one of the things that was powerful about talking to you Is is that's at the forefront of your mind, but you get that starting with your employee experience, the people that serve the MSPs is exactly how to deliver a heightened client experience. So tell me a little bit about after you made that decision and you saw kind of the

employees start to embrace it and move through say you know what what the next steps were for automation what your objectives were and both in terms of internally running the company better But also how to serve the clients better. >> For sure. So we started you know with again that that piece of you know how do we make how do we take care of our employees? How do we make them happier? How do we improve our employee net promoter score? What are some of the things that we can do? And we knew if we did

that for our team, they were going to take care of our clients. Client churn would go down, retention would go Up, satisfaction would would go up, right? So we we knew that that it was an investment we wanted to make around automation. And you know, it it it really started with us identifying just a couple champions in the team, people that were, you know, kind of fascinated or interested or had some existing skill set around automation to lean into them being our our champions for our business. Um, and you know, we have one one individual

on our team. He is, you Know, he's our our scripting guru. He does everything with, you know, if we want reporting in PowerBI, he's he's our go-to. He's our go-to for bright gauge dashboards because he he just loves this stuff. So, he comes up with some really great ideas and and the other piece that we do is we we really promote the team to, you know, anybody in the company can come and say, "Hey, we should automate this or can we use AI to to improve this this process?" Um, we've actually built It into our

our PSA instance. Um, there's a little button that says automate me. Um, and so if there's a task that our techs are doing over and over again, they click that button that then goes to our uh our internal uh leadership team uh that is uh made up of it's it's not just our like our normal executive or management team, but it's our IT leadership team. Um that's made up from, you know, some of our our junior techs all the way up to our CTO. So it's a collective group that then review these processes that our

team's saying please automate and we work to improve them their employee experience that way. So it's you know I would say identifying those key champions that are going to really help your business and looking for ways um to improve the employee experience in turn that's going to actually impact your efficiencies your P&L um you know there's a ton of benefits operationally that you get from That um and you get that from having happy employees. So, it's it's a really it's a win-win. You know, obviously, um being owned by by, you know, uh by Lyra, I

I'm it's important I'm meeting my financial obligations, but in addition, if I can do that while my employees are happy, that's that's a win. >> That's great. Um and and Jennifer, I want to bring Erin into the loop here on this conversation because although you know the automation journey for Roost Began when you know he and a few others got in a room and said there's an opportunity here and a need to serve the MSP community and created Roost. He's he's been driving some transformation inside the company that would be interesting to reveal that is

associated with this data especially around the AI portion. And Aaron, my my question for you is if you think about like, you know, the company you've built, so much of Aaron's kind of Background and drive as a leader parallels Jennifer, what you talked about the culture of Roost matters tremendously for him. The engagement with the employees and and the the open door, how he pops in on any employee and works with all different levels of Roost. But but there was a challenge that kind of Aaron brought into Roost over the last couple of years and

you've seen it play out. Talk Aaron a little bit how you know for Roost how you've Taken just the advancement in the models of artificial intelligence and just thought we need to innovate and change and Roost and stay at the forefront of you know the market here with our capabilities. Talk to us about like what drove you to kind of really drive that change internally inside of Roost. Um I think every CEO um at least today needs to become an AI expert. Um how can you lead a business Transformation of all parts of the business

going to AI unless you understand what AI is? Um, and if you don't understand what AI is as a CEO, how can you prove that the teams that said they've implemented AI actually have done it? Um, and it doesn't matter if you're a technical CEO or a sales CEO. um you know when there's a dramatic change in a team that you do understand and any team that takes AI first Um will change dramatically. Uh I know it's risky. Automation was risky years ago. Um, folks tend to focus on the risk they understand. If you go

to a cyber security person, they're going to focus on cyber security risk. That's the only risk they're going to look at. If you go to a an accountant, they're going to focus on the, you know, the cash risk, the revenue risk, right? So, as the CEO, You need to be able to look at the risk holistically. So for example, sure there is a cyber security risk with adopting automation or AI but there's a bigger risk if you don't right there's the if you don't if you don't adopt automation there's a risk that uh your competitors

may deliver services quicker to their customers right so yes while there is risks all around we need to look at the risk holistically uh the same goes for AI, we can continue To ignore it because there are some risks around it. Um or we can embrace it because we realize the risk of inaction is much bigger. Um so within Roost uh every single team is becoming an AI first team. Um and every team that has successfully implemented this within Roost, the outcome of the teams h has been dramatically better and quicker and folks are enjoying

this environment. Folks that would never get to touch AI Because their job as an engineer um or their job is an AI person um they're getting to experience it. They're getting to learn it. They're getting to master AI in their domain. >> Yeah, Erin. And it draws me to this this, you know, kind of statistic that came out of our report. This 41% of MSPs using AI for decisions reported significant revenue growth. Which makes me either ask that we're just still early in the adoption. Um the true Adoption, not just the the co-pilots that help

you navigate something a little easier with a conversational approach, but you know, talking about what we're going to dive into in a minute, like we're seeing the change in real time. Um or many are just doing the spend and going through the motions and they haven't found a way to measure it yet or recognize it. And and one of the questions I have for Jennifer comes from a conversation we had about one of your MSPs um you know and I know this is probably less of an AI story but transforms into that you know was

you said was onboarding like 3 to 400 um employees a year and you talked to me a little bit about the just the change automation made um and you had to have some technicians behind the scenes because user onboarding is a pretty you know um beefy workflow automation to put in place. Talk talk to us a little bit About the impact just to that single client of putting that automation in place and then maybe we'll talk a little bit about how AI is going to make that even more uh lightning fast for other MSPs down

the road. >> Yeah, you bet. So we we have a nonprofit that um is a lot of seasonal work and so they onboard and offboard about any any given year depending on government funding 3 to 400 users. Um and they are um usually last minute um hey we've Hired someone and they start tomorrow uh or they are uh you know this person offboarded last week can you please close their account? Um, so we we don't get a lot of notice from them despite, you know, lots of coaching and training that we try. Um, but they're

a great client otherwise. So we we put up with the the limited um time that we get on on those user onboardings and offboardings. And and you know, we thought about again this is not Inspiring work for anybody to do. Creating a new user, decommissioning a new user is not something that people wake up and think, man, I really love my job. Um, and so, you know, we were looking at how do we make this a better user experience for our client and how do we make it a better employee experience? And so our CTO

who's absolutely brilliant was like you know we can automate all of this including you know if we work with the right Partners we can we can also get it so that it connects to our clients HRIS system and we'll onboard the user for them and eliminate a ton of work for their HR team. So not only will we do all their technical onboarding but we can do it through their HIS as well. and um you know so I had to make some investment up front to to get the right partners in place and and get

the right people working on that but now that it's operational um and you know it's right Now one client with three to 400 users um a year we're we're able to save you know one and a half FTEES um that again I'm not displacing anyone but I can have them now doing proactive work or I can have them doing more inspiring work or doing more training and development because there's bandwidth to be able to do that. Um, and the client is, you know, that stickiness that we now have with that client, they, you know, they're

not going to go anywhere. We've, We've got them baked into, we've just made it so that their HR team is more efficient. They are now, um, you know, what used to spend a few hours a week doing, they've gotten that time back. Um, and and so now we're like, okay, we've got this, it's live, it's working. How do we then roll that out to the rest of our clients? Um, and so that's what we're working on right now is rolling that out across the board because again, all of those efficiencies mean that we Can focus

on our AI service offerings and how do we get to um, be able to develop more AI for our clients and how do we make our QBRS better because we have more more time to put into those QBRs that obviously we know QBRs equal NRR. So, how do we spend that time that we're getting back from this automation and AI? Um, and that's where the really cool interesting stuff happens because we've got, you know, we've got tier ones coming to us with ideas and they're Like, "Hey, have we ever thought about doing this?" And we're

like, "Great idea. Let's add this to, you know, an idea bank and and we'll go through it." So, um, it's it's been a really cool thing to see us doing over the last um, few months. >> Yeah. And I love that that last part about QBRS too because you know you talked about a very specific you know kind of IT service that you provide all of your clients and how impactful it was To one client and now you take that across all your clients and then you multiply that by all kinds of use cases. You

could put you know you can have offboarding, you can have password resets, you can have all kinds of security alert automations in place. It's it's pretty endless what we've seen especially on the Roost weekly open mic when MSPs present. But then you talked about QBRS and you talked about you know basically going back to those clients And having that conversation to understand their needs to show the value you've been serving them and even that process took some time internally at Nucleus um that you used automation to accelerate and make it easier and simpler. Talk a

little bit about how an internal process to have a better client experience saved you time and money and probably had you guys all showing up better for the client with better data. Yeah. So last year at the end of the Year, we made a decision. Um uh we had a a group of client success managers and they're they were traditionally not salespeople. They were um you know technical people that had some good soft skills um that were doing our QBR processes. And so they were meeting with the clients and and of course because they understood

technology they were able to give a road map and and talk about you know the good, the bad and the ugly of the infrastructure and what Clients needed to budget and spend money on. Um but again they were not very inspired to do their work because they weren't salespeople. So they liked the solutioning side of it but they didn't like going and asking the client to sign us out. Um and so you know we we made a decision that we were going to change that role fundamentally. Um, and we were going to take uh we

we also we operate our service desk in pods. And so we were going to take our pod managers and our Client success managers and we were going to combine that into one role called a service experience manager. We were going to have more pods that were smaller by design to give more of a boutique intimate experience to our clients. So smaller group of techs that work exclusively on their accounts, smaller book of clients for that service experience manager. And they were only focused on relationship. So, we took these these uh six individuals that were Doing

scorecards all day or QBRS or EBRs or whatever anyone wants to call them. Um, and we instead we've now shifted those that work over to two people. So, we have two people that are now focused on that. And we were we're able well we have one right now. I'm getting a second person. Um, but we were able to make the role of six people that didn't love doing what they were doing to have one to two FTEs doing it instead. Um, and we did that through automation. So, our Goal is to fully automate the QBR

process so that you just have um, you know, someone in our business transformation office review the document, ensure that it's accurate because of course we don't want to trust everything AI puts out for us or everything the automation puts out. You got to do your checks and balances, right? Double check the document, make sure everything looks good, and then they have more facetime with the client Versus all the administrative and and paperwork that we were doing and, you know, going to it glue and pulling here, going to Lion Guard and pulling here, going to, you

know, all these different resources to get information for one for one document. So, instead, let's automate it. let's use AI create it as as much as possible from uh that standpoint and then the human interaction is the humanto human piece not doing paperwork that again is not Inspiring for anybody to do. >> That's great. And I think you know George and I had a lot of conversations prior to this too just talking about the human element in all this even though we're going to say AI quite a bit but I think Jennifer talking to you

that's it really really shines through how the capabilities and the tooling really makes the human experience better not worse and um and that being such a core mission I think has driven Nucleus to Think about using all the technology both Roost and other other um techn technologies in the tech stack and AI in a in a very creative way. And and my question for Aaron here would be like thinking about Jennifer's story, thinking about the MSPs you talk to day in and day out, you know, you get this where we're talking in this state of

automation and in the MSP space about an automation divide, right? This I get it, we need to do it. They there's still a Chasm there that is perceived and they're looking at it going, I don't have the resources, I don't know where to begin, I don't have the individuals. talk a little bit about how you know automation is is actually that divide is should be actually shrinking down with AI and what you see because it's not just about going into chat GPT or clawed LLM and having a dialogue there's so much more capabilities around um

external MCP servers around uh aenta Capabilities that are coming to life AI is being embedded in almost every technology in the MSP stack and And all that's fine, but who's going to maestro this? How does it all come together where you do the process discovery and you actually understand and identify opportunities, build the automations, get them tested, running, and and maybe a human's not even involved in that. Talk Erin about that vision and and where that could go. >> I mean, it starts by um understanding the buzzwords. So since AI and automation are um the

hot things right now, um all the vendors in the space use a lot of buzzwords and it gets confusing. It sounds exciting, but it's confusing, right? So I'm going to make it super simple to determine between AI and automation. Um, AI thinks, automation does stuff, right? So, a good example of that, if You want to put this to the test, is go on chat GPT and ask it to do something automatically when a PSA ticket comes in. It's not going to be able to do anything. It's going to tell you how to do it, right?

But it's not going to do it because it's AI. It's thinking about the problem and proposing a solution. Um the same goes for automation. Go into an automation platform um and tell it to write a poem for you. It doesn't think an automation system isn't AI unless it's developed to use it um to write a poem. Uh so what does all this mean and why does it matter? Well, an automation system, someone has to tell it what to do. There's you've got two things. Someone has to tell it what to do. Someone has to go

make it do that thing, right? And so typically you want the business to know what needs to be automated. Um, and then you need an engineer Um to go and make those automations. Well, now with AI, your engineer can make a decision. Do I want to make this automation by hand? Um, or do I want to ask AI to make the automation for me? Um, and that's what we've spent a lot of time on over the past year is making it so the engineer can simply ask uh what we call robo reesty our AI agent

um to go make an automation, go make a Workflow, can you fix this workflow, why did this workflow fail um without having to spend as much effort. Um, so the ri one of the risks for doing automation was always, hey, I'm going to have to spend a little more so I can save a lot. Um, right? I'm going have to spend a little more by either taking an existing tech and saying, "Hey, I'm going to pull you off ticket work to do automation." Um, or take a dedicated tech and make Them do automation. There's some

risk there. So, we're going to reduce that risk by saying, "Hey, look, this tech doesn't have to spend as much time to build an automation. It can use AI to do it." >> Yeah. And and Erin, I would add, it's it's upon us now that it goes beyond the engineer now, right? It goes to the technician. It goes to the person in finance that Jennifer was referring to to to build out their own billing Reconciliation automation. It's that the CEOs can start to engage and discover automation opportunities and and AI is leveling the playing field

for any expert, any person that understands the MSP business, understands their clients needs to create and and bring opportunities forward. And that divide in in some ways is shrinking because of AI um across the entire tech stack and and in roost with revi. But it's also, I think, interesting. My observation is That the gap might increase because I think of MSPs like Nucleus and many of the others that we talked to that engage heavily with Roost and I think they're accelerating ahead because they're better positioned to take advantage of all the AI capabilities that are

out there than the ones still trying to figure out, you know, some of the basic automation capabilities that are out there and available to them in the tech stack and with the power of Roost. And it's a it's really a call to action to like to jump in here because MSPs in my mind are going to become more profitable, be able to compete better on price, serve the client faster, improve that experience, reduce the errors in that experience, satisfy and delight their employees more, and give them a better day day in the life of in

all their roles. And all of that now with a layer of AI on it is just going to accelerate them forward. So you know This is why when we see in the state of automation report this data it feels like their intent is there but you know what's your advice Aaron for people to get started those that have struggled or those that have you know tried and said oh this is too complicated or I think code is needed and and and we don't have the people for that. What what's your advice today that might have

been different than just a year ago? >> Um, I'm going to have a unique response here. Uh, to get started, you just need some ideas of things to automate. Automation is like 50% just simply having the idea. Um, and unfortunately as an industry, we've been trained that automation is simply something that an RMM does on an endpoint. Um, and so because of that, that gives us such a narrow view of what automation really can be. Automation should be Something that occurs before a ticket opens all the way to beyond the ticket being closed through the

QBR process as Jennifer was talking about. So with that you can understand that 50% of the problem is just coming up with the idea. So if you want to get started now, start thinking about things from the very beginning of the problem through beyond the solution of what can be automated. And then the last half is attempting to execute. Um and that's Where AI becomes important because even if you don't know how to automate um you can simply say hey go make me this automation and AI like robo roost within roost will go do it

and even if you can't come up with the idea cuz maybe you don't have the vision uh because we're stuck in this narrow automation is something an RMM does on an endpoint you can ask the AI I hey look at these boards for the past number of days and tell me What can I go automate? Um it won't be perfect but we'll get you into the thought process of you know what is your potential future. Um and Frank when you're done I want to talk about Lewis's post to everyone there uh when you're ready. Yeah,

>> we we have one more piece we'll we'll we'll cover and then we'll go into the questions. So, if you George, if you want to flash the slides up, go to that last slide which has the one two three On it. Um the treat automation as a business strategy, not a tool. Um, you know, we talked about this quite a bit, so I don't want to, um, Jennifer make you retread over this ground, but, you know, we do spend a lot of time at Roost talking to the folks that are in the plat in the

platform every day, the automation platform, but it's refreshing to have the conversations with you because it showed how much your role was part of the decision-m you know, we Understand, you know, your CTO and your automation engineering team are are in this and fully committed, but so are you. And you've seen that vision from the beginning for both your employee experience and your client experience and that team buyin. Any kind of last thoughts or words on just the human element of this and how much it matters for us to have uh in this world like

alignment between the folks running the business involved and engaged and And on board um versus just the technical folks saying hey I want to automate I want to drive this more maybe maybe say a little bit more about that. Yeah. So I think um you know mo most of the the CEOs I'll say the CEOs that are not you know the the technical founder CEOs um you know I don't I'm not a shiny object person. My CTO is he'll be the first to say he is. Um, so I I think that there's a lot um

that doesn't make it necessarily to get the view at the CEO level if if they're not someone who's really fascinated by, you know, the shiny objects because um they just see it as a cost. It's a cost of my P&L. It's an expense that I don't want to have to absorb. Um and I think the reality is is you need to look at it as an investment. It's not a cost. It's an investment in your business. If you are spending the money to create automation, whether that's hiring somebody that's going to be focused on automation,

Because I'm I'm going to go back to what what Erin had said earlier about, you know, either identifying somebody on your team that is is ready to take that challenge on or, you know, hiring somebody for it, but also, you know, looking at at at the report that you produced, um, you know, 96% of organizations say they know they need automation, but only 50, what is it, 58% have a dedicated automation platform. Um, so that's, you know, again, an Investment, finding the right partner, spending the time and money to on board, get the tool, get

your team behind it. And I think that once you once you empower your team to come to you with those ideas, like Erin said, it's just coming up with those ideas, but empowering everybody in your organization to come up with the ideas. It's not just my CTO who comes up with ideas. He comes up with brilliant ideas, but some of those ideas that he executes On are actually driven from those tier ones that are in in the, you know, ticket queue. I would say talk to your dispatchers, talk to your uh your service managers. Ask

them what are the things that you're seeing constantly in your ticket queue. Um talk to your finance team. What are things in finance that could use automation? You know, nobody likes billing reconciliation. How do we automate that so that a physical person doesn't need to do that and They're not inspired to do that and then give them more creative work to do like looking for cost savings on your P&L somewhere else. So um that that would be you know my my big thing is is find you know find the people in your team that are

really going to champion it support them. um of course make them do the work with the business case of why they want to you know but the reality is if 96% of MSPs know that they need to invest in automation you you need to find that That platform and and make it an investment in your business it's not a cost it's an investment >> great appreciate that Jennifer and and with that I think we do have some good questions popping up maybe it's time to dive into some of those do we want to uh George

do you want kind of um fire away and uh any one of us can jump in and and comment on them. >> Yeah, sounds good. I will kick one straight back to Jennifer. Uh I think There was a lot of people uh had their curiosity peaked by your QBR process. Lauren would like to know at Nucleus, what platform are you using for your QBRs? >> So, we're using a a combination. We're working with Roost and Cynthrio um to build that. Yeah, I think that's that's kind of the the delight of automation is it's giving you

the ability to pull in information from a variety of your tools and create the outcome that you want. Right. >> Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, we're we're really trying to make it so again we can have our our team spend more time face to face with the client versus doing the administrative work. Um and so we're you know we're we're working with our our partners super strategically on how we do that. And Aaron, I know you saw uh Louiswis's comments as well. We definitely want to take some time to uh circle back to those, but just

going to Hit a couple other quickfire ones. Uh another question that came in was, "It is my understanding the goal is to have Robo Roosti be more involved and users to interact with it more. What is the best way to use Robo Rooie and to get support with Robo Rooie when if it breaks?" Frank, maybe that's a good one for you to to answer. >> Yeah. Well, there's a couple of ways. So we have uh internally we have something we call the rock which is the robbo Robotic operations center but that's our our frontline support.

They're amazing at getting back to you. We primarily use discord but there's other ways to communicate with them. We also have a customer success team and automation uh solution folks that can help a lot with Roost overall. But just general support in automation. I mean anybody at Roost loves this topic and is willing to engage. Um if you are uh a customer of Roost, you know, reach out and we will Get um people all over it to kind of support you. We do understand that, you know, AI is is closing that gap tremendously, but we

still love as people to jump in and help people out. >> Aaron, do you have anything to add on that? um just that we have a very vibrant community, right? And uh if my support can't get to it quick enough, you can always post your Robo Rei questions right in our public discords to get Response from users. >> Awesome. Okay, Chris, I see your question as well, but I'm going to circle back to uh Lewis's first. So for those watching in the future that said Aaron once upon a time uh that was correct in uh

Aaron's uh note or or nod towards kind of AI thinks automation acts but now with MCP servers connectors AI can and will go and do it for you. I believe it as we know it is dying. Computer use from claw GBT and Gemini is Is improving every week. I foresee help desk customer service etc will be turned over on its head. How do you guys feel about this where a user can pull up Claude if they're having an issue with a machine and Claude takes over the PC and fixes it for them? >> Um, this

is both uh, you know, stressful for businesses and business owners, but it's also a huge opportunity. Um, Every company, whether you're a PSA vendor, um, Microsoft, an automation vendor, an MSP, um, needs to be thinking, um, how do we still provide innovation to our customers um, in a fully AI embraced world? Um, we do believe that we found um a recipe for that and I'll be announcing it at uh at least for Roost. I'll be announcing that at Flow. So, I'm going to plug Flow. Um, I think it's MSP Flow.vents. George, you can drop it

in chat. Um, but it's not just for roose to figure out. It's for MSPs, too. um h you know be thinking about how can you provide a level of service that's higher and better quality uh than asking an AI agent. Can you do it? Yes. Um, and the MSPs that sit around and Think about this all night long every day will be victorious in a very big way. >> Yeah. And and George, I'll add a little bit to that too. You know, I mean, it's happening very very quickly and I think that reality and that

question, it's a great question, is is coming fast. But I think the the surface area it's going to serve the fastest is probably the area that a lot of the humans that are in these technician roles or in any IT Services role surrounding serving the client are going to actually benefit tremendously for Jennifer's testimony from having a lot of uh AI take away you know that those questions. I mean, I remember doing lots of ride alongs with support and security companies I worked on and half the questions that came in were, you know, questions that,

you know, were weren't even about the product we served. It was their Wi-Fi was down and the and the customer didn't Know it. Um, or they didn't know they had a touch screen. I mean, granted, that was in consumer world, but I'm guessing a lot of MSPs are dealing with a lot of clients that are asking some very baseline questions that have very baseline needs. And why not let AI take care of all those needs, take care of that huge surface area and bring them to a higher order. And secondly, there's a new opportunity and

I know we have a slide on it later, but in the kind of Automation kind of maturity model that Aaron talks about often like why not get to a place where we're serving MSPs from Ruse, but MSPs are serving their clients needs beyond IT services. They're serving the unique needs within their vertical. They're actually bringing both automation and AI capabilities to bear for their clients on very specific use cases that go beyond IT services use cases and are specific to each client and have that be a topline item and Actually drive it as a revenue

driver, not just an internal efficiency and cost driver. Thank you both. Uh, we also had a question come in from Chris who asked, "How can someone who is not only brand new to Roost but also an automation role effectively use your platform to get up to speed to help their organization automate not only tedious tasks, but tasks such as billing reconciliation, which is obviously a much more complex Beast." I'll I'll take that one, but I'm I'm guessing Aaron will want to add a little bit to it, but um we have a number of resources available

for folks. Most notably is just the the the sales engineering and um individuals that help get folks kind of initially engaged with Roost are always going to be there for you. We have automation solution specialists internally that you can meet with and set up sessions. They do Facetoface sessions at Flow here um in June in Nashville, but we also have an entire education platform um that has every aspect of the platform uh covered in all different parameters and there's plenty in what we call cluck you can go in and do and and most notably we

have Robarooi. Now, our AI assistant is very powerful in being able to dialogue with and help you get up to speed, get set up, build automations, discover processes, and then Aaron mentioned the Community uh as a tremendous resource, but I I know Aaron's thinking like he said, you know, we brought him back from the future. He's thinking more even beyond on how easy it's going to become to get engaged with Roost, to get engaged with automation in general. And maybe Aaron, you want to talk a little bit about that vision and where it's going to

go for the maybe the non-automation engineers right around the corner. Come to flow, Frank. Uh, and I'll tell you what's going to happen for the nonautomation folks. But, um, uh, is this Chris's question that we're answering right now? Anyway, Chris, uh, ask Roboie what the same question you asked us and see what it says. Um, also jump in your Discord channel. Um, and uh, ask to speak to someone about where to start. Um, if uh no one responds or talks to you, Please ping me and I'll make sure it happens. Um, but our goal is

to make uh building automation. remember you've got I think it was Lewis Lewis and I racking our brains non-stop trying to see how our businesses excel um in an AI world. Um and the number one thing that all of us can do is make our products simpler, easier to use. Uh I'll give you an example for an MSP. Uh, I really like Reading Lewis's posts in there. Um, I foresee a world where all of our customers, like if I was an MSP, all my customers are going to have something like Claude code that they use

all day. The accountants will be using their Cloud Code to make um, financial reports. the marketing folks are going to be using their cloud code, air quotes cloud code, whatever competitor uh to come up with new marketing campaigns to do copywriting and word Smithing, right? This is not just a developer thing. And so, do you want to be the company product and service that the user has to leave cla to go use? Right? If they're in clog code all day to use your MSP, they're going to jump out of that and make a phone call.

How that's like taking a step back in time 40 years, right? So, how can you make it so your business is still providing value when your customer is in cloud code all day? I know I saw Lewis Mentioned MCP. What's interacting with an MSP like using MCP? I don't have the answers, but I'm sure you folks can um get to it through some research and some brain racking over time. >> And Chris, we've just got up shared there um some ideas for both immediate and long-term success. Uh, Jennifer, just curious from someone who's a self-confessed

non-technical person, you're hiring people to to do that. Um, what are you looking for as a as a CEO From your your automation builders? How can they present value to to you? And what would you recommend um, not just as that that leader, but as an MSP uh, owner and operator in general for other people to get started from automation? Well, for any role I hire culture first. Um, you know, I kind of, and I'm I'm going to use a bad word here, but I have like a no role. So, you know, culture first always.

Um, and then from there, you know, I'm always looking for Someone with a a curious mindset. Um, ask questions, you know, wants to to learn more, understand more. Um, and then the creativity piece is huge. I am not a creative person. Um, so I try to really hire people that, um, comp, you know, complement what I don't have. Um, so I know, you know, it's I I'll use Carl, my CTO, as an example again. I am more of a visionary, high level. He is great with attention to detail. So when a document Comes through that

has a ton of detail in it that I have to sign, I will read it. Um, I'll probably open it like 17 times before I actually sign it because I will procrastinate because it's not it's not my strong suit. And then I'll send it to Carl and say, "Hey, I found these four things that I think um I want to change, but can you double check and do, you know, a sanity check for me on this document?" Um, so, you know, I would I would say find people that are Different than you. Um, but for

especially for automation, creativity and curious, those are going to be the two biggest um, skill sets that you're going to want. I mean, obviously you want somebody that's got the technical chops, but the reality is is, you know, you can teach a lot of that, but you can't teach someone how to be curious. You you've really got to focus on culture first. >> Yeah, good advice. We see that too as Well. Sometimes people who have been um a technical operator for a few years or or decades even have a certain way of doing things and

maybe are set in their ways. So yeah, finding people with that natural curiosity is big. Uh if you do have any more questions folks uh drop them in the chat. Now is the the time but we are approaching the end of our webinar. So just a couple of things I wanted to highlight. one next month uh in June our webinar is in partnership With Cyber Drain and specifically CIP. So we'll be diving into how you can use Roost and SIP together to automate your multi-tenant and 365 security. So if you are still struggling as many

of us are with Microsoft and all of the lovely things that they provide us with and the uh the challenges from day to day uh please join myself and Kelvin and some other MSPs. Uh that'll be a a demoheavy session. If you're look interested in in use cases and how-tos, please check that Out. I will drop the link in the chat. And while I do that on the next slide, Aaron's already mentioned it a couple of times, but uh we have Flow coming up uh in just under a month down in Nashville. Aaron and Frank,

do you want to tell folks a little bit more about Flow, what we do, what what they can expect to see there? >> I can start. Uh my favorite part about flow is that it's a bunch of automation people Getting together to talk automation. Um and unlike uh like a cyber security conference uh there are like 30 different verticals and you don't know who you're going to approach. Oh, I don't do vulnerability management. I do compliance. Or I don't do compliance. I do threat assessment. like you don't have that in automation. You're either the person

automating or you're the person doing something manual. Um and so it's actually a group of hundreds of people who all have the same automated vision uh getting together. Um and you can go up to anyone and ask them an automation question and have a cool discussion over it. Um, that to me is my favorite part about Flow. >> Yeah, I'll just add it's it's, you know, I've I've attended um nearly all the major security conferences over the years and so many of the MSP vendor conferences. And one of the things I Just love about the

MSP community is how engaged everybody is, how collaborative, how supportive and sharing um despite competitive natures being inherent in it. It's it it breaks down at all those MSP conferences and even more so at flow. It it is just a place where I see so many different folks um come and not just kind of the conferences that cater to the leadership. Sorry, Jennifer. You're very welcome to come to Flow, but I love it when you send some of the People that you have lit up with curiosity doing cool things, send them to Flow, too, because

they open laptops, they sit around, they are are doing great things for their businesses, and it's happening in real time. Um, and, you know, everyone's very approachable and, um, we'd love to see you join us. >> Absolutely. uh to answer one of the questions that came in the chat. Yes, the agenda is up and available online on that uh mspflow.events Website. So, take a look at some of the sessions that we have there. As Frank and Aaron mentioned, some great talk tracks, whether it's focused on operations and strategy and you're a leader and want to

learn how you can scale your business. We have one of the questions in here earlier about use cases. There's a whole track dedicated to I did this thing, here's how it works. And as Frank mentioned at the end there, bring your laptops because There's how-to workshops as well. You're actually learning how to build things while you're there. So, strokes for different folks and something for everyone. Uh, but Frank, I will pass it back to you to close us out. >> Yeah. And and one last thought on on Flow and then I'll close us out and

and I think it's worth ringing the bell on this again. It's it's truly vendor agnostic. It is meant to be for anything you're doing in the MSP space on any bit Of technology. We want to help you find a path to greater efficiency and automation within it. Um, you know, some conferences it's, you know, a little bit more of a closed network. There's not everything out there that's available. We know there's big competitors in the space. You know, you know, Roost and Flow is really meant to serve MSPs no matter what technology and what processes

you're driving. Um, but with that, you know, I want to take it back To the MSP state of automation report. Uh, this is something all of you can gain access to. There's great data and information. We didn't do it justice today. You can dive in in really deep there. Um, I am so appreciative of uh, Jennifer, your time with us today. Um, thank you so much. The Nucleus story is impressive and you being here with us today is just a true gift. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. >> Yeah. >> And Erin,

thank you for traveling back in time to be with us today. Um I look forward to uh seeing you again in person at FLO. Um and you know, everybody, if you have questions of any of us, I'm sure we're more than welcome to get pinged on LinkedIn or anywhere else and help out. We're we're one community. So, thank you very much.