Stephen Eiting

VCPI

Sales Operations Manager 

Stephen Eiting, a sales operations manager at VCPI – a Milwaukee-based managed service provider (MSP) whose vendor partners include Microsoft, Citrix, Cisco and N-able – told CRN in an interview that he’s used ChatGPT to write a project charter, change orders, user guides and even a program script for Microsoft’s PowerShell task automation and configuration management program.

“It saves me endless hours every single week,” Eiting said.

For the project charter, Eiting fed ChatGPT stakeholders, project managers and information on the risks involved to get usable text.

“I learned from that experience that as you become more conversational with it, it really presents a really good result,” Eiting said. “And I wasn’t able to just take that. It wasn’t complete. But it did 70 percent of my work for the project charter (in), I don’t know, 45 seconds. Which is great.”

Eiting, who also maintains a personal blog about technology, has been impressed by its ability to generate posting ideas and to write the actual entries.

He said he hopes OpenAI, Microsoft and other AI vendors maintain guardrails around the potential to use ChatGPT to produce malicious content and malicious code.

“They are walking a very fine line,” he said. “And I really hope that it continues to be used in a positive way.”

Nick Ross

Sourcepass

Vice President Of Product Development

Nick Ross, vice president of product development at Sourcepass – a New York-based MSP that works with Acronis, Dell technologies, VMware, SentinelOne, Microsoft and Fortinet – told CRN that he uses ChatGPT to help translate concepts and ideas into writing.

He’s used ChatGPT to correct his grammar for posts on his MSP-focused blog, for creating templates for email and marketing campaigns, and even for low-level programming.

“I’d love to have it a little bit more rolled out and baked in certain ways than it is, but, I mean, it’s a game changer,” he said. “It’s a technology that has the excitement of a blockchain or crypto, but actually has way more applicability to businesses and the things that we do to reshape the world.”

Programmers’ jobs are still protected by the need to explain what a user wants, the ability to read code and the ability to troubleshoot, he said.

“It’s not going to go out and build you a full front-end and back-end that you can maintain,” he said.

Still, Ross sees ChatGPT as a helpful tool for translating jargon from product managers and developers.

For small MSPs limited by employee count, in theory, ChatGPT can write a business plan, do the market research based on information at its disposal, and use virtual agents for sales calls, he said.

“There‘s the limitless possibility to being able to scale out a business, at least in the forefront,” he said.