Why AI and Automation require “Productivity as a Service”

Most businesses are now spending real money on AI, modern software, and new tools. A lot of them are not getting the return they expected. Staff are using features they don’t fully understand. Platforms get rolled out and struggle to get traction. Licences sit idle. The spend goes up. The productivity gains don’t show.

First Focus CEO Ross Sardi and Chief Growth Officer Brendan Ritchie sat down recently to talk about why this is happening, why the traditional Managed Service Provider (MSP) model doesn’t fix it, and what needs to change. The short version: the job of a technology partner is shifting from keeping the lights on to actively helping a business get more out of its people and its tools.

That shift is the idea behind a new First Focus offering called CORE. It’s what the team describes as “Productivity as a Service”.

Watch the full conversation

Prefer to read? The key points from the episode are below.

The limits of the traditional MSP model

The usual MSP job is to support devices, patch servers, and fix what breaks. Some providers have answered the AI question by adding a line item to the invoice. Pay ten dollars extra a month and get “managed AI”.

Ross’s view is that this approach misses the point. Selling an AI licence is not the same as helping a business get value from AI. Solving a single use case is not the same as lifting productivity across the company.

Most MSPs in the market have not been willing to change the model. It’s hard to disrupt yourself. But the businesses First Focus is speaking to are already feeling the gap. They know they need to do something with AI and automation. They just don’t know what, or how to get a return from it.

What “Productivity as a Service” means in practice

CORE brings five things together under one service:

• AI: practical use of AI inside the tools staff already use, plus links into ChatGPT and similar platforms
• Automation: spotting manual work and building workflows to remove it
• Security: aligned with Essential Eight Maturity Level 1 out of the box. Essential Eight is the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s set of baseline security controls, and Level 1 is the entry-level maturity target most mid-market businesses are working towards.
• Data governance: including the SharePoint cleanup most customers need
• Training and adoption: so staff actually use what’s been rolled out

The last point matters the most. A tool that no one adopts is not a productivity gain. It’s a line item on a bill.

The pain point that keeps coming up

At the end of 2024, Ross asked First Focus clients what they wanted to know more about and what problems they were trying to solve. Two answers dominated: AI and automation, and “I hate how I’m using SharePoint”.

That hasn’t changed. The bulk of the uplift work First Focus is now doing with new customers is security, SharePoint, and AI and automation. The old world of “I’ve inherited three servers that need replacing” is mostly behind us.

Most organisations are using SharePoint to some degree. Almost none are happy with it. Permissions are unclear. Nobody is sure what’s being shared or with whom. The value is locked up inside a platform people don’t trust.

CORE picks this up directly, with deep SharePoint expertise inside the service rather than a surface-level tidy-up.

A different conversation with customers

CORE sits at a higher monthly price point than a traditional managed support plan. The value conversation, according to Brendan, is the easiest he’s ever had.

The framing is simple. If we save every person in your business an hour a month inside the first three months, what does that look like? What happens to your profit and loss? What else could those people be doing with that time?

When a Technical Account Manager sits down every month and asks “what are we automating this month?” and “what are we doing to improve productivity this month?”, that’s a very different relationship to the one most MSPs offer.

Enabling customers, not templating them

One debate inside the MSP industry is whether providers should build AI agents and use cases that customers can simply pick up and use. Ross’s view is that this is the wrong approach.

There’s no such thing as a templated business. The subject matter experts inside each department know what needs to change better than any outside party. The MSP’s job is to enable those people to do the work, to do it securely, and to provide the technical depth to finish the last 20 percent that the business can’t do on its own.

AI coding tools are a useful comparison. Anyone can now get to 80 percent on their own. The final 20 percent still needs real technical capability.

How the Technical Account Manager role is changing

Under CORE, the “technical” part of Technical Account Manager is almost the wrong word. The role moves closer to senior business advisor.

It’s about understanding how the marketing team actually works. Where the finance team’s islands of information are. Which workflows could be automated. Which systems should talk to each other but don’t. Why a new hire has been proposed, and whether a better workflow might do the job instead.

First Focus has a principle it calls the First Focus Method. One of its ideas is to shift thinking from “the printer’s not working” to “how do we make it so we never have to print again”. CORE applies that lens to every workflow in a business.

A good CORE customer contact is often not just the IT manager. It’s often the heads of departments who feel the friction of manual work every day and want it gone.

What this looks like in practice: the AI Investment Fund

Earlier this year First Focus ran an AI Investment Fund, putting $100,000 towards real AI projects inside the client base. More than 30 organisations submitted ideas. Five were chosen to move ahead, and the projects give a practical picture of what AI and automation look like when they’re solving real business problems rather than ticking a box.

The winning projects:

• Lipman Burgon & Partners (wealth management): an AI Due Diligence Assistant that turns a weeks-long manual review into structured output in hours. Expected to cut document analysis time by up to 80% and return more than $100,000 a year in efficiency gains.
• Billbergia (property development): an AI FAQ assistant trained on ten years of ticket history and project guides, built to handle repetitive resident queries. The goal is to grow the support model without doubling the defects team, with the potential to avoid up to $500,000 in staffing costs.
• Pengana Capital (funds management): an AI assistant built into Microsoft Outlook that helps classify and draft responses to inbound client queries, with human review kept in the loop. Projected to halve average handling time and deliver around $125,000 in annual benefit.
• Seafolly (retail): an AI support centre and retail agent for a largely casual workforce. Staff can ask plain-English questions about processes, policies, promotions, and budgets, and get accurate answers instantly.
• Business Chamber Queensland: an AI-driven executive reporting tool that automates the build of monthly board packs by pulling data from warehouses, Power BI, and Microsoft Office. Frees the executive leadership team for higher-value work.

Across all 30-plus submissions, four themes came through repeatedly: workflow automation, AI assistants, data consolidation and governance, and analytics and forecasting. Those are the same areas CORE is built around, which is the point. The winning ideas get the initial build. CORE is what makes sure they keep delivering value after the launch.

More on each project is at firstfocus.com.au/ai-fund.

Who CORE suits

CORE is a fit for organisations that:

• have rolled out, or want to roll out, AI tools to all staff
• want a security posture aligned with Essential Eight Maturity Level 1
• know SharePoint could work harder for them than it currently does
• want to see real returns from their technology spend, not just stable day-to-day support

Businesses that aren’t ready for this conversation yet can still work with First Focus on more traditional services. Ross’s view is that any business not all in on AI and automation today will be in two to three years.

Why CORE was built from a blank page

Building CORE has been a deliberate reset rather than a set of add-ons. A few of the moves behind the scenes:

• The security stack has been reviewed from top to bottom. Every product was tested against both technical fit and commercial value. Some were kept. Some were replaced.
• The service catalogue itself has been rebuilt. Rather than extending something that had been added to for more than a decade, the team has started again from today’s scopes, workflows, and maintenance tasks.
• A 10-person AI and automation team has spent the last 12 months making these tools part of day-to-day work across First Focus. That includes account managers, engineers, service delivery, and marketing, not just the specialists.
• A certification pathway is in development for Technical Account Managers, so customers can see their person is ready for a CORE engagement.

What this means for you

If your business is spending on AI, automation, and modern tools but the returns aren’t showing up yet, this is the conversation to have. The issue is rarely the technology itself. It’s adoption, data, governance, and whether the right people are being asked the right questions.

CORE is First Focus’s answer to that. Productivity as a Service, backed by a team built for the job.

If you’d like to talk about whether CORE is a fit for your business, get in touch.