Last night I sat in a room with seven CEOs.
These aren’t tech people. They’re business owners running companies with 20, 50, 400 employees. Typical MSP clients. Smart people. Busy people. And every single one of them is stressed about AI. They’re watching viral AI videos, reading AI headlines and posts on LinkedIn, and they’re thinking: I’m falling behind. I need to use AI in my business, but don’t know where to start.
I gave them a presentation I called “Cut through the AI noise.” Not a pitch. No magic demos. Just what to actually do right now.
Download the presentation I used. Take it, customize it, and use it with your own clients. You’ll also stay updated on our upcoming webinars and blog articles.
By the end of it, everyone in the room had named at least one thing they wanted to automate and was excited to get started.
That’s the opportunity MSPs and vCIOs are sitting on right now: helping our clients cut through the AI noise.
Every podcast, LinkedIn post, and vendor email is screaming about AI. The incentive for all of them is the same: make it sound magical, make you feel behind, and get the click. Business owners are drowning in it, and because of that, most of them are doing nothing. They’re paralyzed between “this is going to change everything” and “I have no idea where to start.”
They need someone to tell them what to do today. That’s where you come in as their vCIO. There are two things they need to be doing right now.
1. Get every user using AI everyday
If your clients are on Microsoft 365, they’re already paying for M365 Copilot Chat. It’s included, it’s secure, and it’s built into Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams, and PowerPoint. Most of their employees are not using it.
There’s a big adoption problem.
The shift that needs to happen inside every client is cultural. The first reflex when someone has a question should be: “Did you ask AI?” This starts with their leadership and managers.
Show them what Copilot actually does in five minutes.
Then push them on how they’re prompting. Short prompts get garbage answers, and people keep prompts short because typing is slow. Tell them to use the microphone. Talk to it like they’d brief a colleague. Give it context, tell it what format you want back, tell it what to avoid. The quality of the output is directly tied to the quality of the input.
Tell them to have their users install the mobile app and use it in their personal life too.
Show them how agents work: how they can save time by not typing the same prompts over and over. If a client is sitting on a large library of internal documents (policies, contracts, SOPs, pricing sheets), show them how quickly you can build an agent that lets any employee ask questions and get instant answers. HR agents, sales agents, operations agents. This isn’t complicated, and most clients have no idea it’s already available inside their existing Microsoft subscription.
2. Automate repetitive tasks
Tell them to stop asking “what should we do with AI?” Start asking “what are we still doing manually?”.
When I reframed the conversation in that room last night, away from AI and toward automation, and asked them to look at how data was moving between their applications, they couldn’t stop talking. Task after task they were still doing manually, things nobody had ever flagged as a problem worth solving.
That’s where the real value is. Not in some big custom AI project, but in eliminating the repetitive tasks, the stuff that eats hours and adds zero value. Tools like Power Automate, Zapier, and Make.com are simple, cheap, and require zero development. Identify one process, automate it, and make a big deal out of it internally. That first win changes how a team thinks about what’s possible.
Every client needs this conversation. Go have it.
What I saw in that room last night wasn’t unusual. I see the same thing with our clients at our MSP. Business owners are just waiting for someone to cut through the noise and tell them what to do.
The vCIOs who are having these conversations, helping clients adopt AI and automate the tasks that are slowing them down, are building a level of trust that takes the relationship to a completely different place. The kind that doesn’t get commoditized or churned.
Pick your next five clients. Book a meeting. Give them the no-BS version of this conversation.
The opportunity is right in front of you.
Download the presentation I used. Take it, customize it, and use it with your own clients. You’ll also stay updated on our upcoming webinars and blog articles.
Simon is the President of S3 Technologies, a leading Canadian MSP he co-founded in 2003. He built and scaled the vCIO team which eventually lead to him co-founding Propel Your MSP in 2018 to help MSPs with their vCIO services.
