Be Your Customer’s AI Cost Savior - Part II
There are real skills MSPs can acquire that will enable you to offer high-value cost control services to your AI customers. Here are some of them.
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A Quick Note on Open-Source Models
The introduction of new open weight AI models like Moonshot’s Kimi K3 are closing the performance gap between the open and the frontier models. The costs appear at first to be significantly lower, but further exploration has demonstrated that they often use twice as many tokens to accomplish tasks. This often balances out the cost difference, and the frontier model makers continue to be superior at actually delivering the services consistently and securely.
By contrast, many experts anticipate the open models to better enable cybercriminals to attack other users with fewer guardrails and other limitations in place to restrict them. Before recommending these growing entries to your customers be sure to research thoroughly to determine if you are really saving them any money in the long term.
Controlling AI Spend
Here’s a rundown of the real levers MSPs have available to them to help clients control AI spend. These are organized roughly from “quick wins you can implement this week” to “strategic plays that take longer but ultimately bring greater pay-off.”
