‘I’m genuinely concerned that if MSPs don’t own this conversation, someone else will. An AI consultant will walk into the CEO’s office, build that trusted relationship and then eventually add managed IT services. Or customers will increasingly solve their own technology problems with AI and stop picking up the phone. If we don’t move up the value chain, we risk becoming less relevant,’ says John Harden, co-founder and CEO of Lemhi.
That’s the premise behind Lemhi, a new software startup aiming to help MSPs build repeatable, recurring AI services instead of relying on one-off readiness projects or custom consulting engagements. The platform helps MSPs package, sell and manage AI transformation as a repeatable service, focused on governance, strategy and adoption.
Co-founder and CEO John Harden says this challenge facing MSPs today reminds him of a famous moment in American history.
“The name Lemhi actually comes from Lemhi Pass, which is tied to the Lewis and Clark expedition,” he told CRN. “When they reached that point, the maps they had been given were wrong. They had to decide whether to carve a completely new path forward or turn around and go home. We think the MSP industry is at a similar moment right now. MSPs have to decide if they’re going to embrace AI and help their customers navigate it, or if they’re going to stick to traditional managed IT and cybersecurity services.”
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Lemhi’s first offering, Engage, helps MSPs package and sell what Harden called “managed AI” as a recurring service.
According to Harden, most MSPs currently monetize AI by either selling AI readiness assessments and implementation projects or building custom AI agents and workflows for individual clients.
“The problem is neither approach scales particularly well,” he said. “Project revenue isn’t recurring revenue. It comes and goes, it requires consulting resources, and most MSPs can’t get every customer AI-ready every year. They can’t build custom agents for 100 percent of their clients. We wanted to create something repeatable.”
The platform provides MSPs with frameworks, assessments, roadmaps and customer engagement tools to help account managers discuss AI strategy without needing deep technical expertise.
“What we’re hearing from early design partners is confidence,” he said. “Most MSPs only have one or two people who can really talk AI. Everyone else is afraid they’ll get asked a question they can’t answer. We’re giving account managers and sales teams a repeatable playbook so they can have meaningful AI conversations without needing to be experts.”
One of Lemhi’s early partners said the platform is already helping solve one of the biggest challenges: having consistent, meaningful conversations with customers around AI.
Robert Cioffi, CTO and co-founder of Yonkers, N.Y.-based Progressive Computing, said AI discussions today are “highly manual and often depend on a small number of specialists within the organization. That creates bottlenecks and makes it difficult to scale AI services across an entire customer base.”
“Lemhi is going to allow us to scale that AI enablement conversation with our clients. Up to this point, it’s been a pretty cumbersome conversation,” Cioffi told CRN. “It’s very manual, it’s very tedious, but the structure the platform provides helps us have meaningful conversations with our clients about AI instead of just meandering all over the place.”
One of the biggest benefits, he added, is that the platform gives MSPs a repeatable framework for customer engagement, allowing account managers and other team members to lead AI discussions with confidence.
“In many MSPs, you have somebody like me who’s been around forever and can have those conversations,” he said. “But as we grow, we need other people to be able to do it too. Our account management team isn’t always comfortable having deep AI discussions. Lemhi gives them a process and a prescriptive plan they can follow.”
Lemhi plans to launch a second product, Compass, later this year to help MSPs manage AI programs across their customer base, track adoption, monitor governance and provide guidance as a virtual chief AI officer.
“I’m genuinely concerned that if MSPs don’t own this conversation, someone else will,” Harden said. “An AI consultant will walk into the CEO’s office, build that trusted relationship and then eventually add managed IT services. Or customers will increasingly solve their own technology problems with AI and stop picking up the phone. If we don’t move up the value chain, we risk becoming less relevant.
“I don’t want MSPs to get left behind, but I also don’t want SMBs to get left behind,” he added. “If businesses aren’t adopting AI, they’re going to be at a competitive disadvantage. MSPs are uniquely positioned to help them, and they should be the ones delivering that value.”
