‘The AI workforce is a genuine development path for us’: Itcom Services boss on tech opportunities
Jean-Benoît Carsin reflects on AI-driven transformations, the language barrier, and the benefits of the holocratic model
Jean-Benoît Carsin, CEO and founder of Itcom Services, launched his company 14 years ago.
The organisation, which now delivers £2m in annual revenue, has stayed sharp in adapting to emerging technologies throughout this time.
These technologies have not only impacted its offering but have also changed the structure of the organisation.
AI impact, in and out
Besides ramping up demand for its cybersecurity offerings, AI is also reshaping the company internally.
While Itcom Services needs to communicate in English with partners such as Kaseya, Microsoft, and Malwarebytes, it faces difficulties when recruiting it comes a French bilingual workforce.
To solve this issue, the MSP has created a subsidiary to develop a conversational agent, built in C#, hosted in Azure and powered by OpenAI, which integrates into Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, and more.
“Clients submit all their requests through this bot. They can speak in English, German, Spanish, and it replies in their language, while internally it creates the ticket in French.
“That’s a genuine development path for us. It’s been in production for a year now and could also open us up internationally. “
It is also developing a voice bot to add more empathy to AI conversations, to replace the first level of human support.
“This helps me prioritise incident requests better,” Carsin tells CRN.
Meaning, autonomy, and challenges
The MSP chief highlights that his workforce is strictly made up of engineers from different walks of life, such as people who retrained, qualified engineers, and former professors who hold science PhDs.
The company also runs on what Carsin describes as a “holocratic” structure, a model which relies on management in circles.
“Each team is autonomous.
“My two pillars are meaning and autonomy. giving purpose to the work and independence to the teams.
“Each team recruits for itself, hiring is usually by word of mouth, decided unanimously by the team.”
He adds that Marseille is progressively catching up on Paris in terms of attractivity, as salaries are getting closer to the capital’s standards.
On the other hand, the MSP has been shaken by US tariffs, which led vendors to raise their prices massively, he says.
“We’ve had to deal with huge waves of price hikes from them, which we had no choice but to pass on to clients.”
In France, the economy weakening post-COVID has impacted the sector, according to Carsin.
He explains that French SMEs took out government-backed zero-interest loans to support cashflow, which led many struggling to repay MSPs such as Itcom.
“Our main issue is clients having difficulty paying us for the recurring services.”