With technology evolving almost daily, small businesses often struggle to keep up and remain competitive with larger businesses that have the budget and skilled staff to handle all their IT needs in-house.
But with today’s generation of managed service providers, they don’t have to worry about having the staff to do the work because many are taking advantage of what these MSPs have to offer. According to a survey by JumpCloud, 88% of SMEs use an MSP or are considering using one in the near future.
MSPs allow these businesses to harness the power that comes with these technologies to do many things, including making better decisions, lowering costs, and optimizing their operations. With the rise of AI, many businesses are turning to managed services for assistance in this quickly evolving field. In this article, we’ll look at how they can choose the right one.
Why Do You Need an MSP for AI?
Deploying an AI model that performs well and provides accurate results is not an easy task. You need staff who know the technology and how to use it correctly to get the desired results. They also need to know when a model is not performing well and how to improve it. This doesn’t even get into the complexity of server setup and model deployment.
These are just some causes for businesses choosing to outsource IT to a managed IT service provider. Here are some more reasons:
- Infrastructure and resource management: AI applications require a lot of computing power, storage, and network solutions to run effectively. The team you choose for technology consulting can build you cloud solutions that not only don’t have to worry about but will scale as your business needs grow.
- Security and compliance: The IT consulting team you choose knows that they often must deal with sensitive data and the ins and outs of the regulations they must comply with and can implement robust security measures to protect against data breaches and unauthorized access.
- Continuous innovation: An MSP with expertise in AI will keep up to date with the latest developments in the industry and ensure that the solutions they bring you will help you stay ahead of the curve.
- Application support and maintenance: AI solutions need continuous monitoring to ensure that they perform well and provide valuable results to your business. An MSP will provide proactive monitoring and fix any anomalies in your AI system before they affect your business.
- Focus on core business objectives: AI done right takes a lot of work and time. By outsourcing this work to an MSP, you and your team can focus on improving customer experiences and achieving the primary objectives of your business.
How an AI-Enabled MSP Can Help Drive Business Success
While some things AI can do seem miraculous, the end goal of using machine learning and AI in business is to make mundane tasks more efficient and secure and aid in decision-making. Here are some ways a technology consulting firm can use AI to help your business.
Cybersecurity
If there is one thing businesses learned during the pandemic and the years after, it is that malicious actors never rest and are constantly creating new techniques to steal data. If your network or systems have security holes or bugs, someone will find them and exploit them.
AI and machine learning are at the forefront of protecting businesses from data breaches. In the past, we could only fix vulnerabilities in systems once found, and by then, everyone knew, including hackers. With AI, however, we can detect potential security issues and lock them down before anyone outside your business knows.
AI-Driven Automation
Automation has always saved companies time and money they could use on more important tasks. Manufacturing already uses automation heavily to optimize assembly lines, in data entry to reduce errors, and in finance to facilitate invoice processing, but when combined with AI, it can do even more.
Traditional automation is rule-based. It will eventually work how you want it to, but this requires tweaking the system’s rules. With AI-enabled automation, the system can optimize itself. AI-driven automation systems can continuously learn and improve based on feedback and the new data they ingest daily, which means even less human intervention is necessary.
Supporting Decision Making
Modern businesses use data to make decisions. Before AI, this involved getting a data scientist up to speed with the business you do, giving them time to explore the data to find the type of insights that will help it improve, and building a business intelligence dashboard to present this data in a way that stakeholders can understand.
AI can now do at least some of the work of a data scientist by uncovering hidden patterns and insights in your data that would not have been apparent through traditional data analysis methods. And in some cases, you can even skip human interpretation of this data to make decisions and allow AI-enabled tools to decide for you.
How to Select the Right Managed Services Provider
Choosing an AI-enabled managed service provider is similar to choosing any other MSP. Here are some tips to follow:
- Identify the needs of your business and gaps in your business processes and match them to what MSPs have to offer.
- Look for experts in the industry by reviewing references from previous clients and case studies.
- Ask questions to determine what type of services and the level of support and maintenance they provide.
- Agree on a flexible contract because AI technology can change quickly, and you’ll likely want to add or remove services as the project progresses.
Robust Network Solutions has provided solutions to its clients for over 20 years. Its team of experts understands the best ways to leverage cloud technologies to help your business run more efficiently. If you aren’t using AI to improve business processes, you can be sure some of your competitors are, and we can help you level the playing field. Connect with Robust Networks Solutions today to see how we can help.