The Role of the CAIO in a Managed Service Provider - with Jim Piazza, CAIO Ensono

**Ray Rike** (0:08)
Welcome to today's episode of the AI to ROI podcast. Today, I am joined by Jim Piazza, the Chief AI Officer at Ensono. I'll be covering four main topics with Jim today. First, the role of a Chief AI Officer in a managed service provider.
Second, how to measure the impact of AI investments in an MSP.
Third, two customer success stories of any ROI of Ensono customers. And fourth, Jim's lessons learned as a Chief AI Officer. So with that, Jim, could you please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the AI to ROI podcast. Yeah.

**Jim Piazza** (0:52)
Thanks so much for having me on, Ray. I really appreciate it. My journey is a little bit different, I think, than some. I started off as a programmer way, way, way back in the early 90s, and eventually found my way into data centers and network and all kinds of things. Eventually, I found my way and found that I really just liked connecting things. At the end of the day, I wanted System A to talk to System B, and I wanted to make sure it was fast and efficient and secure.
I spent a good almost 10 years at Facebook, now Meta, working in data center operations, where we started off with a number of systems in place with a number of people, and we had our Vice President of Infrastructure come to us and say, hey, we really need to scale operations. Can you help me do that? And we used machine learning back then to do it. Now, we all love and appreciate with AI.
And so we were able to 13x scale the number of devices we were able to support while we only scaled the number of people by 4x. And so it was really an interesting journey in doing all that. And that's sort of what led me to Ensono, is that they have the same sort of aspirations from a managed services provider, and that's what we're building here today.

**Ray Rike** (2:17)
Okay, well, deep background in operations and data centers. So tell me a little bit about, you know, what are the top responsibilities of the Chief AI Officer and an MSP, and maybe a little bit about how the role came to be at Ensono?

**Jim Piazza** (2:34)
Sure, sure. Yeah, absolutely. So I started off as VP of Predictive Systems and Machine Learning here at Ensono, a really small team.
And when we were able to demonstrate some of the capabilities and things that we were able to do, we decided to expand the role and make the team a little bit larger. So your first question, though, around sort of, you know, what is the role of the Chief AI Officer? You know, it's funny that when people ask me that, I say it's a little bit of this and a little bit of that. It's a little bit of sort of the Chief Digital Officer kind of role, a little bit of the Chief Information Officer role, and a little bit of the Chief Technology Officer role, kind of all rolled into one with, you know, an AI slants to it. So, you know, the role in an MSP of the Chief AI Officer is really about connecting AI strategy and to like operational reality.
It's not often, you know, if I should say this, it's not often enough, you know, just to ask, what can AI do? The better question is, where can AI improve service delivery, customer outcomes, financial performance? So a big part of the job is just prioritization, sort of separating ideas from the valuable ones, quite honestly.

**Ray Rike** (3:53)
Well, this is the AI to ROI podcast. So I want to try to segment this conversation into two different perspectives. So first of all, the internal use of AI and Ensono and how you're measuring it. So maybe you can talk about one or two examples of how you're leveraging AI inside of your own company, not customer use cases, and how do you measure the benefit?

**Jim Piazza** (4:19)
Great question. I will tell you that one of the overarching lessons that I think we realized early on. Number one, you need to decide what your value metrics are before you put hand on keyboard one. That's really, really important. And it's really important also that you have the alignment with each of the business units that you're working with before you try to do any type of technology implementation. And that might be a little kept and obvious, but I think it's really important to sort of reinforce that.
As I think about sort of how we're leveraging AI internally to your question, we decided on those value metrics almost immediately, and we sort of understood what they were. The biggest thing I'll say on that is, you have to align them back to core business metrics, and we'll talk more about that for sure later.