'ChatGPT is not that useful for channel partners and MSPs' - meet the company harnessing AI for MSPs

Established last year, Neo’s founder is urging partners to adopt AI now to gain an edge over competitors

Vendors and channel partners have rushed to adopt ChatGPT and similar gen AI tools to ease the business challenges of customers, but have found themselves at a loss on how to utilise AI for themselves.

Enter Neo, formerly known as ChatMSP - the start-up, established last year, changed its name in order to differentiate itself from ChatGPT.

Nikhil Seghal (pictured) founded the London-based business alongside Transputec. Neo's headcount currently sits within single digits and is made up of mostly AI specialists and developers.

Speaking to CRN, Seghal said the goal of Neo is to help MSPs resolve service desk tickets faster using an intelligent support agent.

"What it's able to do is every MSP who has a service desk, the problem is those service desk analysts have to deal with a large amount of tickets from customer support requests on any given day," he said.

"In the field of IT support, those support requests can be pretty complicated. Which means that every analyst, for every ticket has to go through pages and pages of documentation.

"They also have to go through in some cases 1,000s of previous tickets to find out if anything occurred in the past to be able to try and resolve an issue.

"[Neo] basically does all of the above in about 30 seconds, and then provides every analyst with a resolution path to resolve every ticket.

"The goal for Neo is to allow any MSP to be able to hire a support agent that is not a human for a tenth of a cost that they would have had to pay for a human."

What led to the creation of Neo?

Seghal explained that the driving force behind creating Neo came about through the need for making service desks more productive and efficient.

"We started building this before ChatGPT was released and ChatGPT just showed that generative AI is going to make its way into a lot of enterprise workflows," he said.

"So we decided to be the leader when it comes to integrating generative AI into an MSP's workflows.

"The need was there, and then we mapped what type of technology would solve that problem. And that's how the whole company came about."

MSPs Neo currently works with include Transputec, Proactive Tech Group, Intrust IT, Bellwether, Blackpoint and Xceptional.

Explaining how Neo helps MSPs such as these, Seghal said: "If we look at Transputec as a channel partner, the immediate value for Transputec using a product like Neo is they are now able to scale their managed services business to serve more clients without hiring a proportionate amount of staff.

"This means their ROI is increased profitability, they're able to acquire more customers in any given month, they have better margins and also they reduce the risk of falling outside of their SLA (service-level agreement) contracts with customers.

"It not only increases business for them, but reduces churn, and one of the main drivers for churn is non-adherence to SLAs."

European growth

With its base of operations in London, Neo operates across the UK and US.

"We're growing about ten per cent week-on-week in terms of number of clients we're signing up," Seghal revealed.

He added the company currently does not have any European clients, but is targeting the region for future expansion.

"Europe is a massive focus for us. In fact, most of our pipeline this month has been UK customers. So we hope to beef up that number of UK customers.

"By the end of Q2 we aim to have about 30 US customers and 30 UK customers. So a 50/50.

"We are already set up to scale internationally. We have Microsoft servers in Europe, in the UK, in the US. So when I say we want 30 UK customers by the end of Q2, that includes European customers as well. I would say expansion has already started into Europe."

Tools with gen AI components, not out-of-the-box chatbots, will shape the future

Giving his prediction on where the AI market is heading, and how it will influence his business, Seghal got candid on how useful the current form of ChatGPT really is for channel partners.

"This comes down to our vision of where we think Neo is going," he said.

"Right now, I firmly believe ChatGPT out of the box is just not that useful for channel partners and MSPs.

"If you look at fundamentally what they need to do, it's just not that useful."

Instead, Seghal believes that tools like Neo, which are based on generative AI, but apply the tech to specific use cases, will pave the way for the technology's wider adoption.

"Where we see Neo going is becoming a fully autonomous agent, which is slightly different to what ChatGPT does right now."

He went on to say how most generative AI software works through a simple question and answer format, highlighting how Neo edges out the AI chatbot style.

"With Neo we have a generative AI agent (NeoAgent), which is releasing in Q3, that is not only able to answer questions, but take actions," Seghal explained.

"For example, you may have a customer with a problem with OneNote. Neo is able to not only say ‘this is what you should do', it's able to take actions to understand if the device is online or offline, it's able to look at their network traffic, it's able to perform password resets on its own.

"It's not just a simple: question goes in and an answer comes out. It is: question goes in and then NeoAgent would take various actions to actually resolve the issue in its entirety."

Seghal's message to channel

Making the case for the already in-demand, ground-breaking technology that is generative AI, Seghal tried to calm the nerves of those feeling the pressures of the tech vendor layoffs.

"AI is not going to take over jobs. It's not going to make people redundant," he said.

"But I believe that if enterprises who do not adopt generative AI technologies in the next year will be much further behind than companies that do.

"Channel partners who do adopt this, I would say in the next 12 months, will have a competitive edge and be more productive, more profitable, have better margins with customers and also have better relationships because they're able to deliver an exceptional service.

"My key message is that this space is growing fast. Neo has been built to help MSPs ride this wave so they can adopt a technology which is already pre-built and made for this specific workflow. But I would say this is not going to replace jobs, but it is going to give everyone superpowers."