Everyone Needs AI Transparency
With all the hype around AI it’s too easy to become seriously misinformed. It becomes worse when you pass that misinformation along to clients. Who’s shining you on and who gives it to you straight?
Please Note: Once again this is a particularly long post, so subscribers will find the emailed version of this issue cut off at the end. Please go to the web version for the complete version.
If You Find AgenticMSP Valuable: Please recommend AgenticMSP to your friends and colleagues. Also, please offer up your comments, observations, questions, or any other responses in the chat below. Let’s get a hearty conversation going!Their messaging has just not been the best. Most of the people who are working at the frontier model-makers are engineers and developers. Only Anthropic has launched a channel partner program and none of them has distinguished themselves with awesome advertising.
AgenticMSP was born when I attended a channel conference and sat in on a few sessions the various marketers in the channel were giving. One after another their presentations came around to talking about AI and how MSPs should be approaching it, using it, and selling it.
I found myself aghast. (I’ve always loved that word “aghast…”))
Some of them reflected the popular hype about AI. Others characterized the images AI could create making men look tougher and women more attractive. Invariably, they touched upon how it could write your emails for you, do your research, and everything else except get you coffee. (There’s s DoorDash/AI interface lurking there…)
There was absolutely no meat on any of their bones. No substantial information that the attending MSPs could find actionable. Many really trivialized AI. None really seemed to know what they were talking about.
Then I turned around and saw the enraptured faces of the MSPs lapping this stuff up.
They clearly needed a resource that would bring them the straight story, the advantages they could enjoy incorporating AI into their own operations, and the incredible incremental income they could drive from AI-powered customer solutions.
AgenticMSP was born.
You Need Transparency. Your Customers Need It Too
Most MSPs define their role as being primarily consultative. Your clients depend upon you to keep them informed about the latest technologies that could benefit them. They trust you to design and deploy solutions based on those technologies. Over time, they have pushed out the “90-miles-per-hour” slickster salespeople and driven you to put truly knowledgeable people in front of them. We should be grateful they did.
You depend most on the actual makers of the AI products and services you recommend to give you the straight story. You need their honest evaluation of how everything is progressing, especially when everything is progressing so fast. A big part of preparing to produce and publish AgenticMSP was and still is constantly evaluating all the sources of supposed news and figuring out which are real and valuable.
In turn, your customers depend upon you. They hear all kinds of things on the news, in magazines (several of today’s articles are from publications like The Economist, Forbes, and Fortune) from their friends and more. You need and want to be the one source they know they can turn to for honest evaluations and explanations. The one they trust.
Trust
Many of the articles in today’s MSP AI News focus on the relationship the frontier model makers and MSPs enjoy. You will quickly see one of them stand out above the others in terms of how transparent they try their best to be. The current news is full of articles expressing concern about Sam Altman’s trustworthiness. Google is Google and will continue to maintain its levels of excellence.
But most of the articles about transparency focus on Anthropic, which just emerged as the top moneymaker in AI development today. Created by people who left OpenAI to do something better, they have gone from small player to leader in a remarkably short time.
Anthropic Founder and CEO Dario Amodei has distinguished himself amongst his peers as a remarkably honest and open observer of how AI is evolving all around us. He has not hesitated to issue well-written warnings about the potentially devastating consequences we could face if we don’t develop AI responsibly. Many question how he could expose such concerns when they could adversely affect sales of his products. The one word that instantly occurs to me is “integrity.”
Anthropic has done more to be transparent than any competitor. They refused to allow the Pentagon to use their technologies for surveillance or attack. They settled in copyright violation cases. If you want to ground yourself in AI safety and sanity, go Google Dario Amodei and read his essays. Every company should have so thoughtful a leader.
