The GTIA Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council mapped where AI shows up across a business. Seventeen functions, roughly fifty use cases. It is a good map of the territory.
It is also a menu, not a plan. You have 10 to 20 people and no spare capacity. If you read that list top to bottom and try to work it, you will start four things and finish none.
So here is the same map, sorted by what actually happens at your size.
Start here
Three use cases pay back inside a quarter at a shop your size. Everything else waits.
Proposal and quote generation. Sales function on GTIA's map. Nothing touches production, nothing touches client data, and you see the result in two weeks. If you write more than four proposals a month, this is your first pilot.
Knowledge management and documentation. Categorizing, retrieving, and maintaining what your team already wrote down. Techs spend a real share of their day hunting for SOPs, scripts, and client details. That is unbillable time and it is the largest single pool of waste in most shops your size. Completely internal, so a bad output costs you an eye roll, not a client.
Ticket routing and summarization. Customer service on GTIA's map. Your PSA vendor probably already ships this. Turn on what you are paying for before you evaluate anything new.
Pick one of the three. Run it for 60 days with a named owner and written kill criteria. Then pick the next one.
Worth a look once the first three are working
Personal productivity. Email triage, meeting summarization, document review. Low risk, immediate, and the adoption curve teaches your team how to prompt before you point them at anything that matters.
Predictive maintenance and early issue resolution. IT and technology on the map. Useful, but this is a buy, not a build. Check what your RMM already does.
Security event correlation and false positive reduction. Same answer. Evaluate what your existing security stack offers before you add a vendor.
Bookkeeping and reconciliation. Finance on the map. Real hours, and your accounting platform may already have it.
Not at your size
I am including these because the list will tempt you and I would rather tell you why to skip them.
Client facing chatbots. Touches client users directly and fails loudly. Wait until you have a signed policy and one successful internal pilot behind you.
Revenue forecasting, pipeline scoring, campaign prediction. These need volume to be worth anything. At your deal count you have better instincts than a model trained on thin data.
HR screening and attrition prediction. You hire a handful of people a year and you already know who is unhappy. This solves a problem you do not have, and it carries employment law exposure you do not want.
Legal document review, compliance monitoring, policy recommendation. Tempting because it looks like billable work. The failure mode is telling a client something wrong about a regulation, which is the one category where being wrong costs you more than the hours saved.
Supply chain, quality management, change management, research and development. Written for manufacturers and enterprises. Not your business.
The client side of the map
Read the same list a second way. It tells you what your clients are already trying to do, whether or not they told you.
Someone in their finance department is running invoices through a chatbot. Someone in HR uploaded the employee roster to a screening tool. Someone in sales connected a note taker to the CRM. Nobody approved any of it and nobody at that company can name half of it.
That is not a reason to sell them AI. Half their vendors are already doing that and their inbox is full of it. It is a reason to sell them the thing that has to exist before AI is safe to use, which is a much easier conversation because the client already feels the risk and nobody has offered to take it off their plate.
The whole map, for reference
Sales, marketing, operations, customer service, IT, finance, HR, legal and compliance, project management, change management, risk management, quality management, supply chain, business intelligence, knowledge management, research and development, and personal productivity.
Seventeen functions. You are doing three of them this year.
Talk it through
Pick one. Run it 90 days. Measure it against a number you already pull from the PSA. Then pick the next one. The harder question is which one, and that depends on where your margin is actually leaking, which is rarely where owners think it is.
Everything above is a template. Run it yourself this week and never talk to me. What I will not do is hand you a system and tell you your shop is wrong for not matching it.
Not sure this is your actual constraint? Take the MSP Owner Reality Check. Five questions, nine minutes, and it names the two or three things quietly capping your growth. https://themsphero.com/resources/msp-owner-reality-check-assessment
If you already know what is broken, book a 30 minute fit call at https://letschat.themsphero.com
Mike Kolb The MSP Hero
Source: GTIA Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council, Top AI Use Cases. The function map is theirs. The sorting, the skip list, and the opinions are mine.