Automation 101 for MSPs with Autonomate’s Jamie Claret
Hands up, MSPs: how familiar are you with automation? Are you automating within your own business yet? Better still, are you selling automation as a service to your clients?
These are the questions Jamie Claret, CEO of Autonomate and 2024 MSP Global keynote speaker, asks when he hosts sessions on AI automation for MSPs. The results—see below—may surprise you.
AI-driven task automation has become an essential tool in MSPs’ drive to improve efficiency—cutting operational costs by 25% while improving service delivery speed and increasing profit margins by 19%, according to Lansweeper’s 2025 AI Adoption in Managed Services report.
So why isn’t everyone doing it? Here, Jamie shares his need-to-knows, top tips, and first-class analogies to help explain the transformative power of AI automation and illustrate how you can harness it for growth.
Over to you, Jamie!
The Brain-in-a-Jar Problem
Ever since ChatGPT came along, AI has been the buzzword. The consensus is that AI is automation. I think of AI as a brain in a jar. The problem with the brain in a jar is you can interact with it—like you can have conversations with ChatGPT—but it can’t do much on its own. Hands are the automation. When you join up the brain with the hands, that’s when you get the real power.
Already Automating? Start Selling It
MSPs should want to use automation and AI to improve their own internal systems. Those repetitive tasks—such as back-up checks, reconciling monthly invoices—should be automated.
MSPs have a massive opportunity to sell this to their customers as well. What’s always interesting when I do a session is only 5% or 10% ever put their hands up and say: “We’re selling this as a service.” As an MSP, you are one of the very few trusted advisors in a business, so you absolutely should be talking to them about automation and helping them to deliver it. If you can’t help them, someone else is going to help them—either an automation company like us, or an MSP who does do automation and AI.
Automation isn’t MRR—but You Need to Get Over It
There are many reasons why MSPs don’t sell automation. It’s not break-fix and it’s not technical support—it’s development, project managers, business analysts. But the other reason they’re really scared of it is it’s not a monthly recurring revenue—and as MSPs, we all love monthly recurring revenue. Automation is more project-based and consultative. And that’s a challenge.
It’s All in the Mindset: From Problem-Solver to Trusted Advisor
MSPs may not think of themselves as break-fix shops anymore, but people still call when there’s a problem, even if you’re proactively managing those problems. The difference with AI automation is that the proactivity comes later, once you’ve implemented some form of automation. AI automation is a different skillset. You need project managers and business analysts, which most MSPs have never worked with before.
The shift is from, “There’s a problem, we fix that problem,” to looking at a challenge your client has and saying, “Okay, how can we streamline that? How can we make that better with AI and automation?” And you need experience of doing that. The MSPs that rush into AI and automation—the reality is, that will break very quickly and very easily. You want something that’s robust, so that you can set and forget.
The Headcount Problem
A big thing in MSPs now is roll-ups, convergence, and buy-and-grow. You end up with lots of different systems then pile more people into the problem. But some MSPs are starting to really slicken up what they do—for example with AI automation—and they’re going to keep their headcounts lower. That means that they can charge much less for their services, be far more profitable, and then reinvest.
Start with a Cup of Tea
Before an MSP goes headfirst into trying to solve clients’ problems, they need to solve their own. It’s what I call the Cup-of-Tea Problem. Look at your business and a particular process—let’s say Dave running the back-up checks. Dave runs through a spreadsheet, marks if they’ve worked or not, and the spreadsheet creates a ticket if it doesn’t work. Which is like making a cup of tea: you boil the kettle, put the tea bag in, fill up the cup.
That’s very simple from a human point of view, but from an AI or automation point of view, it’s trickier. The kettle may not switch on—what do you do then? What if the teabag breaks? Where do you keep the milk? When you try to explain a human process and map that out into an intelligent automation process, there’s a lot of questions like that.
MSPs should look at a particular problem, imagine it’s making a cup of tea, work out all the things that person must think about, and then map it out. The best projects to start with internally are those that have the fewest steps and the fewest possible problems.
The Importance of What-Ifs and Maybes
MSPs really need to think about all the things that could happen. What might happen is you set up an automation for a process, and then an exception occurs—the email you’re looking for doesn’t arrive, or it comes in a totally different format. It can get very disheartening. But time spent at the beginning anticipating those exceptions will make the whole process better going forward.
Meet Your New Best Friends
There’s a technology called Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which forms the fundamentals of automation. MSPs who want to get into this space should start thinking about recruiting someone who’s got experience in RPA. They’ll likely have worked at a larger company—it tends to be larger companies that have used this type of technology—but they’ll have the mindset and the experience to know the ins and outs of automation.
The second hire would be a business analyst. I only found out when I started an automation company what business analysts were, but they are your best friends. They’ll ask a few questions and you’ll be off, chatting away about your process or problem; and they just smile, but their fingers are typing at 100 miles an hour mapping out the entire process into swim lanes and workflows and so on. They’re fantastic.
The Prime Targets for AI Automation
AI automation suits manufacturing and construction, particularly manufacturing production. Often these businesses have done their Lean Methodology to save costs and boost efficiency, but engineering minds are always keen to make their business even more efficient. Businesses with a heavy finance function that do a lot of transactions on a regular basis are also very good candidates for automation.
The biggest success story I have first-hand experience of is in the care sector. A large provider in the UK had a massive team of people—hiring 300 to 400 people every month. They had a team of eight processing the background, DBS, and care-quality commission checks. It was completely manual—logging into one system, logging into another system, then saving it down. Now the entire process has been automated, those people are doing different—and most likely more rewarding—jobs within the company.
If I Could Give MSPs One Bit of Advice…
…it would be this: Test automation within your own business first. Do that, and you’ll have the ‘A-ha!’ moment. You’ll say: “If it could do that, could it do this?” Hopefully you’ll then have the second moment that I had, which is: “Why is everyone not doing this?” Then you can think of your clients. Speak to them, even if you’re not able to deliver this service yet, because they’re just as befuddled, overwhelmed, and confused as you are. And this will start the conversation before someone else starts having that conversation with them.
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