August 18, 2025 • 31 mins
In this episode, host Karl Palachuk caught up with Dave Sobel to talk about his "explainer video" on Artificial Intelligence. Dave is the host of the Business of Tech Podcast - https://businessof.tech.
Recently, Dave posted a video describing all the ways he uses AI agents to collect articles, filter them, and give him enough information to put together a show. He also reveals all the tools he uses for database management, storage, and everything else.
This is a great example of the kinds of things IT consultants need to be helping their clients with regarding AI!
See Dave's video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXw2mrmW6lk.
Subscribe to the SMB Community Podcast at https://smbcommunitypodcast.com.
Feedback always welcome.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the SMB Community Podcastwith hosts, Amy Babinchak, James Kernan,
and Karl Palachuk,produced by Kernan Consulting
and for the international MSP community.
We are dedicated to making every ITprofessional,
a successful IT professional.
(00:23):
Hi, this is Karl.
Welcome to another SMB Community podcast.
I have a very special guest today,Dave Sobel,
And Dave is one of these people that,first of all, I've known him for a long
time, but also he's always in the earlystages, an early adopter
for new technology.
And we did a presentation,I think it was almost 20 years ago, on
(00:46):
virtualization and getting to the cloud.
It was before its time.
But even back then, Dave was alreadya Microsoft MVP for virtualization.
So once again,he's He's done it with artificial
intelligence, and I'm glad he has.
So thank you for being there.
Here, is there anything I missed?
(01:07):
You said so many nice things.Thank you, Karl.
That is very nice.
Now, of course, I'm doing the businessof tech podcast,
which I do every business day.
Ai, and you can catch allof that stuff at businessof.
Tech.
But I'm excited to come and talkto you a little bit of the AI stuff.
Very good.
So I'm going to post up a link to a videothat you made that I just love.
(01:29):
I put it in my newsletter and I've beenpromoting it, and I want everybody to go
watch this because it's a true applicationof AI that's not just, Oh,
give me a picture of a cute monkeyor make me look 20 years younger.
It's like, Okay, nobodycares about that stuff.
How do we make money in IT?
(01:50):
I think that you've givena really great example of that.
Let's start with, why did you make this,what I would call, explainer video?
Well, it was almost exactlywhat you've talked about.
I cover a ton of AI,and I keep looking and saying, Yes,
I think there is something reallyinteresting happening
here in the AI space.
(02:10):
I leaned in really hard and I startedfiguring out the areas that it would
make a difference for me in my business.
I always like to remind everybody,I run a media business now.
I was an MSP, I was an MSP vendor.
Technically, I run a mediabusiness right now.
I'm in the business of creating contenton a regular basis that I
want MSPs to consume.
But I spent a lot of time thinkingabout how that workflow does.
(02:32):
I've taken all the MSP stuff,the way about process and standard
operating procedures and the way you thinkabout that, and I've applied
it to my media business.
Well, there's always areasto make automation better.
For me, AI has been ableto do a ton of that.
As I keep reporting it,I keep hearing lots of people talking
about AI, but not enough peoplegiving me actual use cases.
(02:54):
What are they actually doing with it?
Lots of people are just out there,Oh, it's going to change everything.
Yeah, but how?That would be nice to know.
I noticed for me that itactually has changed a lot.
I really just came to that conclusion of,I bet I could just tell everybody,
and it would be super useful for themto see how a single workflow
(03:15):
can be completely transformed by the useof AI and still be really valuable
and still have all of the pieces.
It's not just magicto make everything better.
It's specific choices are made alongthe way that accelerate the process
or make my capabilities wider.
Anyway, the idea, let me show you how I doit,
because I really think that particularlyin our space, you learn
(03:38):
by modeling other people's ideas.
I hoped I would say, Here's mine.
Go forth and build on top of that setof ideas your own process.
You list out the specific tools you use,what you use them for,
the order in which you use them.
I mean, it's the whole pull backthe curtain, this how
(04:00):
the sausage is made thing.
How did you find the tools?
Did you go to AI and say,What tool would I use to find all the
articles on technology in the last week?
I have to smile and go,I made it my job to keep an eye
on what's going on in the space.
There's an element of I'mconstantly keeping up.
(04:22):
I believe anybody in their own spaceshould constantly be looking and iterating
and understanding howyour own stuff can done.
Mine It really was eachof these pieces came over time.
I mean, I've been doingthe show almost six years now.
If I go back, the processis still very similar.
The actual manual steps to do it,gather news, synthesize it, organize it.
(04:46):
But each of the way,I constantly was finding a new way
of doing that portion,that step of the process better.
I kept just chaining themtogether to make this better bit.
Each time it's the, Oh,I've seen a tool that does that.
Oh, I have this problem.
I'm going to go solve that problem,or I'm going to work on this piece.
Particularly,and I get into a lot of the specifics,
(05:06):
introducing Notion into my workflow wasa really big deal for me,
figuring out like, Oh, there'sso much I can build on this base.
For anybody in MSP land, it's going fromnot having a PSA to having a PSA.
That was Notion for me was the, Oh,I can rather than have to just use some
(05:26):
spreadsheets and I organize this, Hey,I can build a back-end for that makes
the whole platform work.
We always start with the technology weknow, which is the Excel spreadsheet.
We're on top of that,or just, by the way, process.
I laugh and go like,I'm just writing stuff.
I'm writing articles.So where did I start?
(05:48):
I wrote Word.
There's still bits that are done in Wordbecause it's just I haven't replaced that.
Now, there's a ton of automation in Word.
I've gotten way better at the scriptingand the macros and all of that.
But you just start with what is the workyou want to do, and then you figure
out how you automate that work.
(06:08):
And did you startat the end or the beginning?
They always say, Oh,so what's the final product?
Where am I going?
Actually, it's interesting.
I always start from the end.
For me, there's an element of Iknow what I want to create.
I can say for me, it's really beenvery intentional on the way that I've
(06:31):
built the podcast from day one.
I hope it comes out in the level ofpolish and professionalism
that I put into what I do.
But I've always said,I want this to be like this.
I'd envision the first show,the news show was like,
I want it to be serious, like a news show,and I want it to be tight,
(06:51):
and I want it to be scripted,and I want it to people to watch it
the same way they might watch the news.
But it's a podcast, so I'mgoing to do the audio first.
It was But then I added video,and if anybody watches the video,
that's why I have elements where there arelower thirds graphics, there are fly-ins,
there's that newscaster look to it.
It was all very like,I know what I want it to look like,
(07:12):
and then I worked back to,Well, how do I create that?
Well, thank you for not puttingthe Minneapolis skyline behind you, right?
Plus, that wouldn't be very authentic.
It's interesting.
You laugh aboutthe silliness of that stuff.
It's my office because I figured peoplewant to know the space I work in, right?
That just felt cool.
(07:34):
I'm going to do it in my officewith the look of my space
because I don't want to overblow.
I'm not a massive multinational,a million dollar media organization.
It's me.
I want that to convey with that, but thatdoesn't mean that I can't have the polish.
You'll know, I'm well-lit,I'm well-miked, I'm well...
(07:56):
All of the details, you go into that.
But it doesn't mean I have to goto some crazy extreme to make it.
It's not, let's just do it authentically.
It's also a great example of meshingthe online world with
the so-called real world.
You have tools and equipmentin your office.
Physically, you can touchthe microphone and the.
(08:17):
But you also have this stuff that'sonline and you rely on cloud services.
There's a lot of computing power up there.
Right.Down here.
When MSPs are thinking about this,how do they begin to get their mind
around, Okay, what doI do with my clients?
(08:39):
Because they've got technology wecontrol and technology we don't control.
How do you begin thinking about,how would you put together a way to sell
something to clients that you can usethe word AI, just
so you're buzzword compliant.Yeah.
The way I would think about it, really,is you really want to focus on, Hey,
(09:00):
what are you trying to accomplish?
We've been saying this thing for 25 years.
It's like, Well, what problemam I solving for the customer?
But the best way to do that is get reallyclose to the customer and really
understand what they aretrying to accomplish.
You asked it literally a couple of momentsago, Dave, what were you trying to create?
Well, I'm trying to createa show that looks like this.
What are the stepsthat go into making that?
(09:22):
And you get really deepinto the understanding of what
the customer is building.
And then you start going like, Okay, well,How do I use technology
to make that better?
Ai is the buzzword.
Oftentimes, I'm looking at thissaying it's just smart automation.
It's another way of thinking about this.
Now, there's elements of the generativeAI side that are pretty powerful.
(09:47):
I'm able to do stuff now with generativeAI that I wasn't able to do in automation
before, particularly when you think aboutit in terms of, remember ChatGPT,
T stands for transformer.
If you're transforming one typeof language into another,
like paragraphs into sentences orscripts into social media or whatever
(10:08):
that is, it's very good at transforming ifyou give it definitions
of the way you want it to do it.
I think that the new bit is, hey,we can take a lot of customer information
that we didn't use to be able to,and we can help them understand it,
manipulate it, work with itin a lot of interesting ways.
I went through my process because you cansee how I'm pulling information
(10:30):
from the internet, reports, news stories,and I am transforming it
into my particular style.
Like even down to the...
I talk about the fact that the promptsare, Hey, I like my news this way,
and it mustI have to summarize what the story is.
I want supporting data.
I want citations clearly definedwhere the source of everything is.
(10:55):
I have a very defined styleand it helps me transform into it.
So you think it in that wayto apply it to your clients.
Before AI, which, oddily enough,was not that long ago, but you
started with, Oh, I want to watch thatsource and this source and this source.
As a human being, there's a limit.
There's literally maybe a dozen that youcould get through in a day
(11:19):
and maybe 50 in a week.
How many sources can AI look at for you?
I mean, a lot.
I mean, it's a certain degree of process.
I'm keeping an eye on over 500 sourcesright now, and I always am adding sources.
The idea is I'm using tools, my ownautomation, to get that stuff organized.
(11:46):
It's organizing it by story so that the AIcan go, Oh, this looks similar to that.
It's doing initial grouping so that Idon't have to read the same
story 50 different times.
Maybe I'll read itfive different ways where it's saying,
Here's five sources, and then within that,you'll get the 20 different
(12:07):
versions from each one.
So that means I can go through a lot moresources because it's doing
the organization for me.
That's the bit where I find it's useful isyou're getting this organization,
pre-organization,that still requires my critical eye to go,
Yeah, that story is interesting.
That one isn't interesting.
That level is wherethe human brings value.
(12:29):
Well, what One of myconsistent themes for going out
to the world is that there's so muchinformation, and it's growing so fast
that you are either contributingto the noise or helping your
clients filter the information.
I think that's a keyrole that MSPs can play.
We do it like,if you think of a newsletter,
(12:50):
my newsletter will say, Okay,there's a billion things going on.
These are the six that you're.
So I mean, part of your goal is,All right, I'm filtering the universe.
Let's do it as efficiently as possible.
Does AI find things that you knowfor a fact you would never have seen
(13:13):
if it wasn't doing the initialsearch of 500 sites?
100%.
I'm totally seeing stuff that Imight not have seen before.
And its ability to process stuffis also part of that.
I'll just give you an example, Liz.
I challenge you to find any other MSP orsomebody focused on the MSP space that's
(13:33):
reading all the Portuguese MSP sites.
They're all in Portuguese, by the way.
But all the MSPs in Portugal are.
They totally are.
But I know most, majorityof my audience is in North America.
But by the way, there's someinteresting stuff over there.
They're having discussionsand news that is different.
I'm able to process that because the AI isdoing the translation for me, and then
(13:56):
it's also including that in the grouping.
I can watch a bunch of stuff acrossI can watch a stuff across markets.
I'm watching a bunchof stuff across Africa.
Again, I don't think most US organizationsare really thinking about that,
but I just want to keep an eye on thosemarkets to see what's emerging,
what they're talking about, and synthesizeit in with the overall coverage.
(14:16):
And by being able to do that,it can group those in, too, and then
also find like, Oh, that's an exception.
That story isn't getting coveredin the US, but I think it's interesting,
and I want to make surethat I'm pulling from that.
And so I get to see a wider setof sources,
both it's emerging stuff that I might notnotice because of the size and scale,
(14:37):
but also because I can do so many more,I'm also seeing stuff I
wouldn't have normally seen.
Now, one of the things that you doa great job of is to look at numbers.
You're big on, Okay, what are the stats?What are the numbers?
Proof.Show me what's going on.
I say something, but here'sa number to back it up.
(15:00):
One source might say, Oh,here's the numbers,
and they give you literally numbers,and the next source is going to give you
statistics or first, second, third,and they give you an ordinal ranking,
and don't mention the numbersuntil the last pair aircraft.
Does AI help you figure out, Okay,somewhere in there, there's two different
versions of reality,and which one is my...
(15:22):
How does it help you?
It totally does because builtinto the prompts are my lens.
I want I first source data.
I express it the things I'mlooking for in your example.
I want sourced data.
I want it to come from primary sources.
I want it to benot comparative as much as absolute.
(15:45):
I have certain rules that are builtinto the way that I look at it
so that I can get better data.
Again, you can alwaysplay with this stuff.
The interpretation of the datais the interesting thing.
I so lean into data becausefrom my opinions, everyone has one,
and they're better with data.
(16:06):
That if my opinion, backed up with data,goes against your opinion
that has no data, I win.
Just flat out.
My opinion is better becauseit is informed by data.
I want to give those informed opinionsto solution providers and MSPs so
that they can do it from that perspective.
(16:26):
I use the AI to make sure that I'minterpreting it correctly and that it
is doing that primary source data.
All right, let me shift for just a minuteand talk about the business of tech.
So for those people who are not familiarwith it, you started out as a five-minute
podcast, and now you reallyare a the news source.
(16:48):
I don't know if anybody else who triesto be the news source is
not owned by a big corporationthat doesn't actually care about SMB or
a vendor who is only goingto their view of the world.
It's hard to find a really good unbiased,and I can't promise you're unbiased,
but willing to- Well, I'll smile and go,I am totally biased, but I try and be
(17:12):
really transparent about what my bias is.
Thank you for saying that.You're right.
That is literally the mission is the, Hey,I want to be the one sticking up for MSPs.
I always talk about beingthe voice of the solution provider.
I think a lot about my audience as thosepeople, and I want to be the most
valuable 10 minutes they spend in the day.
That literally is justthe way I think about it.
I want to deliver more insightsand analysis in 10 minutes than they
(17:36):
can get anywhere else in their day.
That's what I'm trying to do.
So when big news hits in the SMBITcommunity, you want people to say,
I wonder what Dave says about this.
A hundred %.
And I actually also then temperthat by immediately saying,
And I don't have to be first.
I want to be informed,not necessarily first.
(17:57):
Amusingly, I look at what we do and I go,Very little is super urgent.
There's an element of, I'm going to say,security stuff is super important,
and I hope I am not yourprimary source for breaches.
Because that shouldbe CISA or That should be CISA.
But what you want from me is the analysis.
(18:19):
In order to do that,sometimes it has to breathe slightly to
make a moment of like, Okay,I'm going to look at everything.
I'm going to synthesize the information.
I'm going to make sure I'm well-informed,and then I'm going to present a good idea.
I really do think about itexactly the way you described it.
I really hope that people go,I wonder what Dave thinks.
And not to be right,just to give a good informed opinion
(18:41):
so that you can then form your own.
So business of tech,you have the Daily Podcast.
Then you have interviews,you got a Patreon so that people can get
certain things a littleearlier than others.
What else is going on at MSP Radio?
Because you've got a site that lookslike a news site, to be honest with you.
Well, so businessoff.
Tech is the news site you want to begoing to, and that is designed to be that.
(19:03):
You can get everything that I do eitherby subscribing to the YouTube channel or
by subscribing on yourfavorite podcast player.
I do three kinds of shows that aredistributed on both of those platforms.
The first, as you mentioned,is the news show.
Every business day, roughly 10 minutes,usually 12 now or so, but roughly 10
minutes of news, and why do we care?
(19:25):
I do interview shows where the premise is,you're an MSP,
you don't have time to go seek outinteresting voices that you want to get
alternative insights from,I do that work for you to try and bring
on voices you may not normally hear.
Then the third type of showI do is I do live shows.
I do those generally Wednesdays,3: 00 PM Eastern.
If you want to show up and ask questions,it's a great place to do that where you
(19:48):
can get live or you can listen to thatcontent when it drops immediately
on the YouTube channel or makeit available on the podcast feed.
And on that show,I like to have other journalists
and analysts on where wherewe bounce around ideas.
And it's a good space to ask us questions.
So that's the bit.
You can also follow me now on LinkedInif you want to get all of the content.
(20:09):
And I'm starting to put out on Fridays,I put out a summary newsletter of,
Here's everything we covered this week,so that you can get a sense of like, Hey,
I want to dive in and out of the content.
And do you maintain somedatabase that you continually train your
AI on things that are changing or tweaksto the system or anything like that?
(20:30):
The answer is yes, I do.
In fact, what I've been building out isin my back end,
there are several databases that track allthe stories that I'm tracking, all the MSP
discussions, all the vendor announcements.
I have all of that stuff in a giantdatabase so that when I need to do
analysis, I have all of the historicalcontext to be able to ask about.
(20:53):
So something happens, I don't wantto just be trying to remember it all.
I've got databases that can do that.
You can appreciate that there are alsoopportunities for me to do specialized
research or if somebody comes to mewith a very specific question,
I can dive into that and actually havedata and analysis to be
able to present around it.
Well, and if a story that maybe you didn'tthink was important three months ago
(21:17):
suddenly bubbles to the top, you're like,Oh, I've actually got
information about that.A hundred %.
In fact, I keep my rejected storiesbecause not everything makes the show.
I have lots of things that I throw in thedatabase thinking, Oh, that could be...
That's interesting.That's interesting.
That's interesting.That's interesting.
Bunch of stuff gets cut.
That doesn't mean it gets deleted.
It gets held on to because there wasa reason I thought it was interesting.
(21:38):
That's probably...
And then I become very generous to myselfof like, Just throw
that stuff in the database.
It's okay if you don't cover it,it might be useful later.
And do you think agentic AI saying, Hey,go get me these stories,
put them in this database, and then I'lldevelop the next step in the automation?
Is the agentic piece probably the easiestplace for people to get started?
(22:03):
So it depends on where, right?
Because the interesting thing about whatyou wanted to talk about is,
I want the agent to show me as manystories as possible
and my human insights be the filter.
I don't want the agent to get too smarton the filter because some
of it's just intuition.
You want my decadesof experiences in the mix there.
(22:27):
And of course, I trainthe agents as much as I can about
the way that I want on the filter.
But I don't want to push myself so far outof the loop that you lose
the human insight element of it.
It's an interesting balance of I wantthe agents to present me more so that I
can be the filter as opposedto it acts too much as the filter.
(22:48):
Well, now,let's talk about MSPs and what they would
do to build a business orat least an offering around this.
You have a background in computers.
You have a degree and you know a littlebit about scripting and programming.
You may know a lot about all of thosethings, but do you need that in order
(23:09):
to use this stuff to be really good at it?
No, but it does help.
What's interesting is most of thesetools have gotten to be really smart.
I ultimately think that what more usefulskill that I bring is a little less the I
know how to code and a little more the Iknow how to think
in logical process steps.
(23:31):
I ultimately think that's the real elementof what I'm doing, which I think
most MSPs would be quite good at.
A lot of customers not always so goodat that, and particularly not good
at translating processes intotechnology automation.
For MSPs, there's an element of like, Hey,you've been really good at standard
operating procedures, thinkingabout this in repeatable formats.
(23:55):
Take those skills and apply them here isis the best match that I can think of.
And so I would think it's likea muscle you're used to flexing.
Right.
Well, we had a generation of peoplewho basically their entire job was taking
paper and turning it into zeros and ones.
We had We digitize the universe.
(24:16):
We put everybody online.
We got them connected to the cloud.
And some MSPs are a little bit boredbecause it's not really as exciting as it
used to be when weactually solve problems.
Too many people are selling,Okay, here's my checklist.
Pick one of these and we'llimplement it this afternoon.
When an MSP is looking at offeringsomething, what would you recommend?
(24:38):
Because you have the MSP background.
How do I go to a client and say,What problems do you have?
Don't think about AI.
Just what problems do youhave that I can help you with?
And get back to that conceptof solution providers.
We want to solve problems becauseultimately, that's where
the good, juicy money is.
(24:58):
I would Let us flip the way you havethe conversation because the way you
discussed it was a little bit like,Hey, I want to do...
I want, I want, I want.
People love talking about themselves.Right.
And your customers are proudof the businesses they have built.
Give them an opportunity to tell youabout the business they have built.
(25:20):
And just let them talk.
Let them talk and then askgood follow-up questions.
I will smile and go like,I always think this is an I continue
to learn, listen to good interviewersand listen to some of how
they ask more questions.
Sometimes they're really simple.
Tell me more.
(25:41):
Just tell me more about that.
You get further and furtherdown into understanding it.
Amusingly, the other bit about this iscustomers are passionate
about what they do.
They want to share it.
They get excited about that stuff.
And when someone is genuinely interested,which if you're a trusted advisor,
(26:02):
I hope you are genuinely interested,you'll learn a lot.
This is the joy of learningportion of this.
If you're bored, go learn stuff.
Go learn more about yourcustomers and what they do.
Then the more you learn about it,the more you'll discover,
just by tripping over it, oh, they dohave stuff that doesn't work very well.
(26:26):
And by the way, the more you ask,the more they'll start telling you
about the bits that don't work.Right.
I mean, one of those questions is,obviously, so what are the challenges?
Or that must be difficult.Right.
Or as simple as, that sounds hard.
We almost overthink the questioning.
Some of the best questionsare super simple.
(26:46):
Tell me more.That sounds hard.
How do you do that?
How does that work?
How does that make any money?
Sometimes put yourself back into yourinner eight-year-old when you
Little kids are great at this.Why?
Why?Why?
Why?But actually, they're learning, right?
(27:08):
You want to sit in that space.
And the joy of an eight-year-oldalso is they genuinely want to learn.
They're trying to fill their brain with asmuch stuff as they can,
channel your inner eight-year-old a littlebit, and you'll be
fascinated by what you learn.
So everyone should watch this video,and that's step number one.
(27:29):
I honestly believe.
Even people who are not in tech,it gives a really good overview of
AI is more than just the generative, Hey,write me a poem and put
it in a iambic pentameter.
It's way, way, way more than that.
And that's been the publicface of AI for a long time.
(27:49):
So what's the second step?
What should an MSP do afterthey watch your video?
I think the second step is you wantto start thinking about
how it could help yourself.
I I'm going to use the drink yourown champagne version of this.
You get good at this by actuallyfiguring out some of yourself.
You have things that it can help with.
(28:10):
You can have it help with,can it transform incoming tickets?
Your vendor is They start applying this,understand a little bit about how
that works so that they can comein a bit of a standard format.
Customer is a littlemessy with their writing.
Wouldn't it be great if itcame in a standard format?
Wouldn't it be great?
And then also you probably cando some of the initial bit.
Maybe you can pull some initial researchfor you and prepare and do
(28:33):
some of the prep for you.
Think about the ways that itcan help with your own.
How can I use it to communicatewith my customers a little better?
How can I make it to run it through tests?
I write a lot of validationtests in the way that I do.
One of the bots I mentioned is that I haveone that's literally asked,
Is this story complete?
Did I get everything?
You can use that on your own stuff.
(28:56):
Did I write this in a waythat a non-technical user will
understand my explanation?
I like that what's missing?
What did I not get in?
What did I not do?
It's a useful tool to bounce those thingsoff, and that's where it starts getting
(29:16):
into, Hey, I can start infusingthings into my process.
Don't worry so much about,Is this fully automated?
Right now, is it making everything better?
When you figure as anybody who knowsprocess does, the moment you figure out
the process,then you'll figure out the repeatable
nature of it and how to doit over and over again.
(29:38):
Then you're moving into a agentic.
Right.Very good.
Well, I appreciate your time.Final question.
Why do we care about this?
That's a great question.
Ultimately, I think we'regetting back to the core.
We're in the business of helpingcustomers with their technology.
This is clearly a change in the waywe're going to be delivering technology.
(30:00):
Technology.I'm not sure it's all shaken out.
I think we don't necessarily knowif all the ways this is going to go.
I'm not exactly sure all these companiesare going to make a lot of money,
but I know a transformativetechnology when I see one.
I saw it in the internet.
I I saw it in cloud, I saw it in mobile.
The pieces are here, and right nowwe're in the let's figure it out stage.
(30:21):
I think the best way to do it is bothon yourself, but then also help clients
figure out the waythat they can do it well.
Very good.Thank you for your time.
And we're going to sendeverybody to businessof.
Tech.
Thanks, Karl.It's been great chatting with you.
Thank you for tuninginto the SMB Community podcast.
(30:43):
If you found this useful, interesting,or fun, please subscribe,
share with your friends, and give usa thumbs up on your favorite social media.
Please check out the shownotes at smbcommunitypodcast.
Com, and give us your feedback.
Welcome to the SMB Community Podcastwith hosts, Amy Babinchak, James Kernan,
and Karl Palachuk,produced by Kernan Consulting
and for the international MSP community.
We are dedicated to making every ITprofessional,
a successful IT professional.
(00:23):
Hi, this is Karl.
Welcome to another SMB Community podcast.
I have a very special guest today,Dave Sobel,
And Dave is one of these people that,first of all, I've known him for a long
time, but also he's always in the earlystages, an early adopter
for new technology.
And we did a presentation,I think it was almost 20 years ago, on
(00:46):
virtualization and getting to the cloud.
It was before its time.
But even back then, Dave was alreadya Microsoft MVP for virtualization.
So once again,he's He's done it with artificial
intelligence, and I'm glad he has.
So thank you for being there.
Here, is there anything I missed?
(01:07):
You said so many nice things.Thank you, Karl.
That is very nice.
Now, of course, I'm doing the businessof tech podcast,
which I do every business day.
Ai, and you can catch allof that stuff at businessof.
Tech.
But I'm excited to come and talkto you a little bit of the AI stuff.
Very good.
So I'm going to post up a link to a videothat you made that I just love.
(01:29):
I put it in my newsletter and I've beenpromoting it, and I want everybody to go
watch this because it's a true applicationof AI that's not just, Oh,
give me a picture of a cute monkeyor make me look 20 years younger.
It's like, Okay, nobodycares about that stuff.
How do we make money in IT?
(01:50):
I think that you've givena really great example of that.
Let's start with, why did you make this,what I would call, explainer video?
Well, it was almost exactlywhat you've talked about.
I cover a ton of AI,and I keep looking and saying, Yes,
I think there is something reallyinteresting happening
here in the AI space.
(02:10):
I leaned in really hard and I startedfiguring out the areas that it would
make a difference for me in my business.
I always like to remind everybody,I run a media business now.
I was an MSP, I was an MSP vendor.
Technically, I run a mediabusiness right now.
I'm in the business of creating contenton a regular basis that I
want MSPs to consume.
But I spent a lot of time thinkingabout how that workflow does.
(02:32):
I've taken all the MSP stuff,the way about process and standard
operating procedures and the way you thinkabout that, and I've applied
it to my media business.
Well, there's always areasto make automation better.
For me, AI has been ableto do a ton of that.
As I keep reporting it,I keep hearing lots of people talking
about AI, but not enough peoplegiving me actual use cases.
(02:54):
What are they actually doing with it?
Lots of people are just out there,Oh, it's going to change everything.
Yeah, but how?That would be nice to know.
I noticed for me that itactually has changed a lot.
I really just came to that conclusion of,I bet I could just tell everybody,
and it would be super useful for themto see how a single workflow
(03:15):
can be completely transformed by the useof AI and still be really valuable
and still have all of the pieces.
It's not just magicto make everything better.
It's specific choices are made alongthe way that accelerate the process
or make my capabilities wider.
Anyway, the idea, let me show you how I doit,
because I really think that particularlyin our space, you learn
(03:38):
by modeling other people's ideas.
I hoped I would say, Here's mine.
Go forth and build on top of that setof ideas your own process.
You list out the specific tools you use,what you use them for,
the order in which you use them.
I mean, it's the whole pull backthe curtain, this how
(04:00):
the sausage is made thing.
How did you find the tools?
Did you go to AI and say,What tool would I use to find all the
articles on technology in the last week?
I have to smile and go,I made it my job to keep an eye
on what's going on in the space.
There's an element of I'mconstantly keeping up.
(04:22):
I believe anybody in their own spaceshould constantly be looking and iterating
and understanding howyour own stuff can done.
Mine It really was eachof these pieces came over time.
I mean, I've been doingthe show almost six years now.
If I go back, the processis still very similar.
The actual manual steps to do it,gather news, synthesize it, organize it.
(04:46):
But each of the way,I constantly was finding a new way
of doing that portion,that step of the process better.
I kept just chaining themtogether to make this better bit.
Each time it's the, Oh,I've seen a tool that does that.
Oh, I have this problem.
I'm going to go solve that problem,or I'm going to work on this piece.
Particularly,and I get into a lot of the specifics,
(05:06):
introducing Notion into my workflow wasa really big deal for me,
figuring out like, Oh, there'sso much I can build on this base.
For anybody in MSP land, it's going fromnot having a PSA to having a PSA.
That was Notion for me was the, Oh,I can rather than have to just use some
(05:26):
spreadsheets and I organize this, Hey,I can build a back-end for that makes
the whole platform work.
We always start with the technology weknow, which is the Excel spreadsheet.
We're on top of that,or just, by the way, process.
I laugh and go like,I'm just writing stuff.
I'm writing articles.So where did I start?
(05:48):
I wrote Word.
There's still bits that are done in Wordbecause it's just I haven't replaced that.
Now, there's a ton of automation in Word.
I've gotten way better at the scriptingand the macros and all of that.
But you just start with what is the workyou want to do, and then you figure
out how you automate that work.
(06:08):
And did you startat the end or the beginning?
They always say, Oh,so what's the final product?
Where am I going?
Actually, it's interesting.
I always start from the end.
For me, there's an element of Iknow what I want to create.
I can say for me, it's really beenvery intentional on the way that I've
(06:31):
built the podcast from day one.
I hope it comes out in the level ofpolish and professionalism
that I put into what I do.
But I've always said,I want this to be like this.
I'd envision the first show,the news show was like,
I want it to be serious, like a news show,and I want it to be tight,
(06:51):
and I want it to be scripted,and I want it to people to watch it
the same way they might watch the news.
But it's a podcast, so I'mgoing to do the audio first.
It was But then I added video,and if anybody watches the video,
that's why I have elements where there arelower thirds graphics, there are fly-ins,
there's that newscaster look to it.
It was all very like,I know what I want it to look like,
(07:12):
and then I worked back to,Well, how do I create that?
Well, thank you for not puttingthe Minneapolis skyline behind you, right?
Plus, that wouldn't be very authentic.
It's interesting.
You laugh aboutthe silliness of that stuff.
It's my office because I figured peoplewant to know the space I work in, right?
That just felt cool.
(07:34):
I'm going to do it in my officewith the look of my space
because I don't want to overblow.
I'm not a massive multinational,a million dollar media organization.
It's me.
I want that to convey with that, but thatdoesn't mean that I can't have the polish.
You'll know, I'm well-lit,I'm well-miked, I'm well...
(07:56):
All of the details, you go into that.
But it doesn't mean I have to goto some crazy extreme to make it.
It's not, let's just do it authentically.
It's also a great example of meshingthe online world with
the so-called real world.
You have tools and equipmentin your office.
Physically, you can touchthe microphone and the.
(08:17):
But you also have this stuff that'sonline and you rely on cloud services.
There's a lot of computing power up there.
Right.Down here.
When MSPs are thinking about this,how do they begin to get their mind
around, Okay, what doI do with my clients?
(08:39):
Because they've got technology wecontrol and technology we don't control.
How do you begin thinking about,how would you put together a way to sell
something to clients that you can usethe word AI, just
so you're buzzword compliant.Yeah.
The way I would think about it, really,is you really want to focus on, Hey,
(09:00):
what are you trying to accomplish?
We've been saying this thing for 25 years.
It's like, Well, what problemam I solving for the customer?
But the best way to do that is get reallyclose to the customer and really
understand what they aretrying to accomplish.
You asked it literally a couple of momentsago, Dave, what were you trying to create?
Well, I'm trying to createa show that looks like this.
What are the stepsthat go into making that?
(09:22):
And you get really deepinto the understanding of what
the customer is building.
And then you start going like, Okay, well,How do I use technology
to make that better?
Ai is the buzzword.
Oftentimes, I'm looking at thissaying it's just smart automation.
It's another way of thinking about this.
Now, there's elements of the generativeAI side that are pretty powerful.
(09:47):
I'm able to do stuff now with generativeAI that I wasn't able to do in automation
before, particularly when you think aboutit in terms of, remember ChatGPT,
T stands for transformer.
If you're transforming one typeof language into another,
like paragraphs into sentences orscripts into social media or whatever
(10:08):
that is, it's very good at transforming ifyou give it definitions
of the way you want it to do it.
I think that the new bit is, hey,we can take a lot of customer information
that we didn't use to be able to,and we can help them understand it,
manipulate it, work with itin a lot of interesting ways.
I went through my process because you cansee how I'm pulling information
(10:30):
from the internet, reports, news stories,and I am transforming it
into my particular style.
Like even down to the...
I talk about the fact that the promptsare, Hey, I like my news this way,
and it mustI have to summarize what the story is.
I want supporting data.
I want citations clearly definedwhere the source of everything is.
(10:55):
I have a very defined styleand it helps me transform into it.
So you think it in that wayto apply it to your clients.
Before AI, which, oddily enough,was not that long ago, but you
started with, Oh, I want to watch thatsource and this source and this source.
As a human being, there's a limit.
There's literally maybe a dozen that youcould get through in a day
(11:19):
and maybe 50 in a week.
How many sources can AI look at for you?
I mean, a lot.
I mean, it's a certain degree of process.
I'm keeping an eye on over 500 sourcesright now, and I always am adding sources.
The idea is I'm using tools, my ownautomation, to get that stuff organized.
(11:46):
It's organizing it by story so that the AIcan go, Oh, this looks similar to that.
It's doing initial grouping so that Idon't have to read the same
story 50 different times.
Maybe I'll read itfive different ways where it's saying,
Here's five sources, and then within that,you'll get the 20 different
(12:07):
versions from each one.
So that means I can go through a lot moresources because it's doing
the organization for me.
That's the bit where I find it's useful isyou're getting this organization,
pre-organization,that still requires my critical eye to go,
Yeah, that story is interesting.
That one isn't interesting.
That level is wherethe human brings value.
(12:29):
Well, what One of myconsistent themes for going out
to the world is that there's so muchinformation, and it's growing so fast
that you are either contributingto the noise or helping your
clients filter the information.
I think that's a keyrole that MSPs can play.
We do it like,if you think of a newsletter,
(12:50):
my newsletter will say, Okay,there's a billion things going on.
These are the six that you're.
So I mean, part of your goal is,All right, I'm filtering the universe.
Let's do it as efficiently as possible.
Does AI find things that you knowfor a fact you would never have seen
(13:13):
if it wasn't doing the initialsearch of 500 sites?
100%.
I'm totally seeing stuff that Imight not have seen before.
And its ability to process stuffis also part of that.
I'll just give you an example, Liz.
I challenge you to find any other MSP orsomebody focused on the MSP space that's
(13:33):
reading all the Portuguese MSP sites.
They're all in Portuguese, by the way.
But all the MSPs in Portugal are.
They totally are.
But I know most, majorityof my audience is in North America.
But by the way, there's someinteresting stuff over there.
They're having discussionsand news that is different.
I'm able to process that because the AI isdoing the translation for me, and then
(13:56):
it's also including that in the grouping.
I can watch a bunch of stuff acrossI can watch a stuff across markets.
I'm watching a bunchof stuff across Africa.
Again, I don't think most US organizationsare really thinking about that,
but I just want to keep an eye on thosemarkets to see what's emerging,
what they're talking about, and synthesizeit in with the overall coverage.
(14:16):
And by being able to do that,it can group those in, too, and then
also find like, Oh, that's an exception.
That story isn't getting coveredin the US, but I think it's interesting,
and I want to make surethat I'm pulling from that.
And so I get to see a wider setof sources,
both it's emerging stuff that I might notnotice because of the size and scale,
(14:37):
but also because I can do so many more,I'm also seeing stuff I
wouldn't have normally seen.
Now, one of the things that you doa great job of is to look at numbers.
You're big on, Okay, what are the stats?What are the numbers?
Proof.Show me what's going on.
I say something, but here'sa number to back it up.
(15:00):
One source might say, Oh,here's the numbers,
and they give you literally numbers,and the next source is going to give you
statistics or first, second, third,and they give you an ordinal ranking,
and don't mention the numbersuntil the last pair aircraft.
Does AI help you figure out, Okay,somewhere in there, there's two different
versions of reality,and which one is my...
(15:22):
How does it help you?
It totally does because builtinto the prompts are my lens.
I want I first source data.
I express it the things I'mlooking for in your example.
I want sourced data.
I want it to come from primary sources.
I want it to benot comparative as much as absolute.
(15:45):
I have certain rules that are builtinto the way that I look at it
so that I can get better data.
Again, you can alwaysplay with this stuff.
The interpretation of the datais the interesting thing.
I so lean into data becausefrom my opinions, everyone has one,
and they're better with data.
(16:06):
That if my opinion, backed up with data,goes against your opinion
that has no data, I win.
Just flat out.
My opinion is better becauseit is informed by data.
I want to give those informed opinionsto solution providers and MSPs so
that they can do it from that perspective.
(16:26):
I use the AI to make sure that I'minterpreting it correctly and that it
is doing that primary source data.
All right, let me shift for just a minuteand talk about the business of tech.
So for those people who are not familiarwith it, you started out as a five-minute
podcast, and now you reallyare a the news source.
(16:48):
I don't know if anybody else who triesto be the news source is
not owned by a big corporationthat doesn't actually care about SMB or
a vendor who is only goingto their view of the world.
It's hard to find a really good unbiased,and I can't promise you're unbiased,
but willing to- Well, I'll smile and go,I am totally biased, but I try and be
(17:12):
really transparent about what my bias is.
Thank you for saying that.You're right.
That is literally the mission is the, Hey,I want to be the one sticking up for MSPs.
I always talk about beingthe voice of the solution provider.
I think a lot about my audience as thosepeople, and I want to be the most
valuable 10 minutes they spend in the day.
That literally is justthe way I think about it.
I want to deliver more insightsand analysis in 10 minutes than they
(17:36):
can get anywhere else in their day.
That's what I'm trying to do.
So when big news hits in the SMBITcommunity, you want people to say,
I wonder what Dave says about this.
A hundred %.
And I actually also then temperthat by immediately saying,
And I don't have to be first.
I want to be informed,not necessarily first.
(17:57):
Amusingly, I look at what we do and I go,Very little is super urgent.
There's an element of, I'm going to say,security stuff is super important,
and I hope I am not yourprimary source for breaches.
Because that shouldbe CISA or That should be CISA.
But what you want from me is the analysis.
(18:19):
In order to do that,sometimes it has to breathe slightly to
make a moment of like, Okay,I'm going to look at everything.
I'm going to synthesize the information.
I'm going to make sure I'm well-informed,and then I'm going to present a good idea.
I really do think about itexactly the way you described it.
I really hope that people go,I wonder what Dave thinks.
And not to be right,just to give a good informed opinion
(18:41):
so that you can then form your own.
So business of tech,you have the Daily Podcast.
Then you have interviews,you got a Patreon so that people can get
certain things a littleearlier than others.
What else is going on at MSP Radio?
Because you've got a site that lookslike a news site, to be honest with you.
Well, so businessoff.
Tech is the news site you want to begoing to, and that is designed to be that.
(19:03):
You can get everything that I do eitherby subscribing to the YouTube channel or
by subscribing on yourfavorite podcast player.
I do three kinds of shows that aredistributed on both of those platforms.
The first, as you mentioned,is the news show.
Every business day, roughly 10 minutes,usually 12 now or so, but roughly 10
minutes of news, and why do we care?
(19:25):
I do interview shows where the premise is,you're an MSP,
you don't have time to go seek outinteresting voices that you want to get
alternative insights from,I do that work for you to try and bring
on voices you may not normally hear.
Then the third type of showI do is I do live shows.
I do those generally Wednesdays,3: 00 PM Eastern.
If you want to show up and ask questions,it's a great place to do that where you
(19:48):
can get live or you can listen to thatcontent when it drops immediately
on the YouTube channel or makeit available on the podcast feed.
And on that show,I like to have other journalists
and analysts on where wherewe bounce around ideas.
And it's a good space to ask us questions.
So that's the bit.
You can also follow me now on LinkedInif you want to get all of the content.
(20:09):
And I'm starting to put out on Fridays,I put out a summary newsletter of,
Here's everything we covered this week,so that you can get a sense of like, Hey,
I want to dive in and out of the content.
And do you maintain somedatabase that you continually train your
AI on things that are changing or tweaksto the system or anything like that?
(20:30):
The answer is yes, I do.
In fact, what I've been building out isin my back end,
there are several databases that track allthe stories that I'm tracking, all the MSP
discussions, all the vendor announcements.
I have all of that stuff in a giantdatabase so that when I need to do
analysis, I have all of the historicalcontext to be able to ask about.
(20:53):
So something happens, I don't wantto just be trying to remember it all.
I've got databases that can do that.
You can appreciate that there are alsoopportunities for me to do specialized
research or if somebody comes to mewith a very specific question,
I can dive into that and actually havedata and analysis to be
able to present around it.
Well, and if a story that maybe you didn'tthink was important three months ago
(21:17):
suddenly bubbles to the top, you're like,Oh, I've actually got
information about that.A hundred %.
In fact, I keep my rejected storiesbecause not everything makes the show.
I have lots of things that I throw in thedatabase thinking, Oh, that could be...
That's interesting.That's interesting.
That's interesting.That's interesting.
Bunch of stuff gets cut.
That doesn't mean it gets deleted.
It gets held on to because there wasa reason I thought it was interesting.
(21:38):
That's probably...
And then I become very generous to myselfof like, Just throw
that stuff in the database.
It's okay if you don't cover it,it might be useful later.
And do you think agentic AI saying, Hey,go get me these stories,
put them in this database, and then I'lldevelop the next step in the automation?
Is the agentic piece probably the easiestplace for people to get started?
(22:03):
So it depends on where, right?
Because the interesting thing about whatyou wanted to talk about is,
I want the agent to show me as manystories as possible
and my human insights be the filter.
I don't want the agent to get too smarton the filter because some
of it's just intuition.
You want my decadesof experiences in the mix there.
(22:27):
And of course, I trainthe agents as much as I can about
the way that I want on the filter.
But I don't want to push myself so far outof the loop that you lose
the human insight element of it.
It's an interesting balance of I wantthe agents to present me more so that I
can be the filter as opposedto it acts too much as the filter.
(22:48):
Well, now,let's talk about MSPs and what they would
do to build a business orat least an offering around this.
You have a background in computers.
You have a degree and you know a littlebit about scripting and programming.
You may know a lot about all of thosethings, but do you need that in order
(23:09):
to use this stuff to be really good at it?
No, but it does help.
What's interesting is most of thesetools have gotten to be really smart.
I ultimately think that what more usefulskill that I bring is a little less the I
know how to code and a little more the Iknow how to think
in logical process steps.
(23:31):
I ultimately think that's the real elementof what I'm doing, which I think
most MSPs would be quite good at.
A lot of customers not always so goodat that, and particularly not good
at translating processes intotechnology automation.
For MSPs, there's an element of like, Hey,you've been really good at standard
operating procedures, thinkingabout this in repeatable formats.
(23:55):
Take those skills and apply them here isis the best match that I can think of.
And so I would think it's likea muscle you're used to flexing.
Right.
Well, we had a generation of peoplewho basically their entire job was taking
paper and turning it into zeros and ones.
We had We digitize the universe.
(24:16):
We put everybody online.
We got them connected to the cloud.
And some MSPs are a little bit boredbecause it's not really as exciting as it
used to be when weactually solve problems.
Too many people are selling,Okay, here's my checklist.
Pick one of these and we'llimplement it this afternoon.
When an MSP is looking at offeringsomething, what would you recommend?
(24:38):
Because you have the MSP background.
How do I go to a client and say,What problems do you have?
Don't think about AI.
Just what problems do youhave that I can help you with?
And get back to that conceptof solution providers.
We want to solve problems becauseultimately, that's where
the good, juicy money is.
(24:58):
I would Let us flip the way you havethe conversation because the way you
discussed it was a little bit like,Hey, I want to do...
I want, I want, I want.
People love talking about themselves.Right.
And your customers are proudof the businesses they have built.
Give them an opportunity to tell youabout the business they have built.
(25:20):
And just let them talk.
Let them talk and then askgood follow-up questions.
I will smile and go like,I always think this is an I continue
to learn, listen to good interviewersand listen to some of how
they ask more questions.
Sometimes they're really simple.
Tell me more.
(25:41):
Just tell me more about that.
You get further and furtherdown into understanding it.
Amusingly, the other bit about this iscustomers are passionate
about what they do.
They want to share it.
They get excited about that stuff.
And when someone is genuinely interested,which if you're a trusted advisor,
(26:02):
I hope you are genuinely interested,you'll learn a lot.
This is the joy of learningportion of this.
If you're bored, go learn stuff.
Go learn more about yourcustomers and what they do.
Then the more you learn about it,the more you'll discover,
just by tripping over it, oh, they dohave stuff that doesn't work very well.
(26:26):
And by the way, the more you ask,the more they'll start telling you
about the bits that don't work.Right.
I mean, one of those questions is,obviously, so what are the challenges?
Or that must be difficult.Right.
Or as simple as, that sounds hard.
We almost overthink the questioning.
Some of the best questionsare super simple.
(26:46):
Tell me more.That sounds hard.
How do you do that?
How does that work?
How does that make any money?
Sometimes put yourself back into yourinner eight-year-old when you
Little kids are great at this.Why?
Why?Why?
Why?But actually, they're learning, right?
(27:08):
You want to sit in that space.
And the joy of an eight-year-oldalso is they genuinely want to learn.
They're trying to fill their brain with asmuch stuff as they can,
channel your inner eight-year-old a littlebit, and you'll be
fascinated by what you learn.
So everyone should watch this video,and that's step number one.
(27:29):
I honestly believe.
Even people who are not in tech,it gives a really good overview of
AI is more than just the generative, Hey,write me a poem and put
it in a iambic pentameter.
It's way, way, way more than that.
And that's been the publicface of AI for a long time.
(27:49):
So what's the second step?
What should an MSP do afterthey watch your video?
I think the second step is you wantto start thinking about
how it could help yourself.
I I'm going to use the drink yourown champagne version of this.
You get good at this by actuallyfiguring out some of yourself.
You have things that it can help with.
(28:10):
You can have it help with,can it transform incoming tickets?
Your vendor is They start applying this,understand a little bit about how
that works so that they can comein a bit of a standard format.
Customer is a littlemessy with their writing.
Wouldn't it be great if itcame in a standard format?
Wouldn't it be great?
And then also you probably cando some of the initial bit.
Maybe you can pull some initial researchfor you and prepare and do
(28:33):
some of the prep for you.
Think about the ways that itcan help with your own.
How can I use it to communicatewith my customers a little better?
How can I make it to run it through tests?
I write a lot of validationtests in the way that I do.
One of the bots I mentioned is that I haveone that's literally asked,
Is this story complete?
Did I get everything?
You can use that on your own stuff.
(28:56):
Did I write this in a waythat a non-technical user will
understand my explanation?
I like that what's missing?
What did I not get in?
What did I not do?
It's a useful tool to bounce those thingsoff, and that's where it starts getting
(29:16):
into, Hey, I can start infusingthings into my process.
Don't worry so much about,Is this fully automated?
Right now, is it making everything better?
When you figure as anybody who knowsprocess does, the moment you figure out
the process,then you'll figure out the repeatable
nature of it and how to doit over and over again.
(29:38):
Then you're moving into a agentic.
Right.Very good.
Well, I appreciate your time.Final question.
Why do we care about this?
That's a great question.
Ultimately, I think we'regetting back to the core.
We're in the business of helpingcustomers with their technology.
This is clearly a change in the waywe're going to be delivering technology.
(30:00):
Technology.I'm not sure it's all shaken out.
I think we don't necessarily knowif all the ways this is going to go.
I'm not exactly sure all these companiesare going to make a lot of money,
but I know a transformativetechnology when I see one.
I saw it in the internet.
I I saw it in cloud, I saw it in mobile.
The pieces are here, and right nowwe're in the let's figure it out stage.
(30:21):
I think the best way to do it is bothon yourself, but then also help clients
figure out the waythat they can do it well.
Very good.Thank you for your time.
And we're going to sendeverybody to businessof.
Tech.
Thanks, Karl.It's been great chatting with you.
Thank you for tuninginto the SMB Community podcast.
(30:43):
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