When it comes to enabling secure AI usage for SMBs, Liminal fills a major need for MSPs that are looking to stay relevant in the AI conversation, an MSP executive tells CRN.
Secure AI platform Liminal is expanding beyond the enterprise in a bid to help MSPs enable secure adoption of LLM-powered tools among SMB customers—an area that has often proven challenging for MSPs in the past, executives told CRN.
Liminal provides a workspace that supports usage of numerous AI models in a manner that meets security and data governance requirements, with capabilities that include sanitizing sensitive data before it reaches external LLMs.
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The benefit for SMB customers is a “very secure, consolidated platform for your business to engage in AI activity—without the potential for leaking all your internal data to the world,” said Tait Covert, president and CEO of Sentry Computing, a Seattle-based MSP that has been working to bring Liminal to its clients ranging in size up to 100 employees.
The bottom line for SMBs is that “your employees are already using AI at some level, and you’ve got to rein that in as much as you can,” Covert said.
Liminal provides a massive productivity boost as well by bringing together all of the different AI models that an organization’s employees are likely to be using in one place, he said.
“It is potentially a platform to run your business from,” Covert said. “You open this program up, and it is the interface into just doing your job.”
At the same time, MSPs that serve smaller businesses have frequently run into a major issue when it comes to AI adoption: Lack of relevance.
That’s according to Jason Makevich, a longtime MSP CEO who is now also the founder and CEO of PORT1, a company that is working to help bring Liminal’s platform to the MSP space.
“The problem with MSPs and AI is the relevance factor—the lack of relevance for the MSP,” Makevich said.
Much of the current discussion around the AI opportunity envisions MSPs becoming something akin to business consultants, but that is not realistic for a large number of MSPs, he said.
“The general MSP is going to struggle immensely with that. It’s hard to scale that kind of service,” said Makevich, who is also the founder and CEO of Greenlight Cyber, an Irvine, Calif.-based MSP.
Liminal, on the other hand, is a platform that MSPs can very naturally build a managed service around, he said.
Liminal offers flat rate, per-seat pricing that provides unlimited access to all the latest models from AI providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Perplexity, according to Marc Jacocks, chief marketing officer at Liminal.
While Liminal has focused on the enterprise so far, the move to work with MSPs clearly fills a major need for smaller customers and is something the company is deeply committed to, Jacocks said.
“We want everybody to be able to access this,” he said.
Overall, the potential with Liminal is to provide SMB clients with a platform to use AI safely and with greater productivity, Makevich said.
“MSPs are great at platforms,” he said. “Managing and delivering platforms is their bread and butter.”
PORT1, which was initially launched to deliver MSP enablement around the Island secure browser, recently began an effort to do the same with Liminal and has already seen strong interest from MSPs, according to Makevich.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” he said.
For Sentry Computing’s Covert, there’s no question that many SMB customers are looking for help with getting a handle on AI.
And it’s also clear that finding the right platform is going to be the answer, he said.
“The MSP’s role here has to be to help guide them through this journey to getting a platform. And we also need to stay relevant in that conversation,” Covert said. “Products like this, if done successfully, can not only make the customer secure, but sticky, which is always a super important thing for us.”
Ultimately, “I do think without a good MSP, so many of these small businesses are not going to be successful in what they’re trying to do from an AI perspective,” he said. “If you try to go through this journey without an MSP that is educated in the AI platform, you’re going to have worse problems.”
