Kim Simmons is CEO en oprichter van Cloud Contracts 365, een juridisch platform waarmee MSP's hun contracten maken, laten toetsen en beheren. Ze bespreekt de juridische risico's voor MSP's: producten van derden doorverkopen, cyberincidenten, licentieverbruik en nu AI-agents. Haar advies: laat de voorwaarden van je vendors doorlopen in je eigen contracten, en wees eerst zelf customer zero.
So, Kim, maybe a first introduction for the people who are watching us? Well, firstly, thank you for having me. Really appreciate it. So my name is Kim Simmons. I'm the CEO and founder of Cloud Contracts three six five. Do you want me to do a quick intro as to what the platform does? Yeah. So it's a legal platform for MSPs, and it specifically helps MSPs create their contracts. So things like a master service agreement, NDAs, those kind of things, employment contracts, all the way through to reviewing contracts for legal risk. So it has an AI review tool. All the way through to managing the contracts through esignature, integrations with PSAs, automatic renewal reminders for contracts, and we do all the updates and maintenance. So when the law changes, we update those contracts. So what was the biggest trigger for you to basically found the company? Oh, such a good question. So my background in... And I still run my law firm today, but my law... I have a law firm as well. This is second... It's my first business, and that's been going for thirteen years. And it has, obviously, lawyers and, you know, humans in the loop. But about five years ago, and this is kind of just before Chatuchi PT, I looked at how I can serve my SMB community more because for them, it's expensive to go to lawyers. It's time consuming. They don't always know, does the lawyer understand my industry? You know, what's going on with that? And it can take two weeks for a lawyer to produce documentation, and these guys need to get going with with documents. So I looked at how the lawyers were doing things, and I wanted to automate a lot of that work. So we were doing this before ChatGPT for LLMs. We're making it through machine learning, NER, NLP, and we built the platform based on that. Obviously, now it's been supercharged, and it's doing even more things. We're gonna be creating even more, you know, parts of the product. But that's kind of the journey. So I really kind of went, okay. As a law firm, how do we automate? How do we get the right service to the SMB MSPs? And how can I deliver that so they can self serve? So what do you think are the biggest legal challenges that the that MSP struggle the most with? So because they have such a unique industry, you know, they have... They're they're mainly resellers in the sense that they are reselling a lot of third party products. So this challenge on what's the risk allocation when you've got third parties that you're working with, and then how do you kind of manage that with your customers? What what is where does your role start and stop? Then you have cybersecurity incidents, and, course, we are getting more and more of that. So how do we manage and protect our business as an MSP from cyber attacks from happening? What can we do to mitigate that risk? You've got the licensing world like CSP or NCE as it's now known, so the the cloud solution provider program. And how do you mitigate against license consumption? You know, when the customer comes to you and they're like, we didn't know we were gonna rack up this huge bill. Where do you kind of, you know, have... Mitigate that risk? And now we're going into agents and AI, and we're going into the world of what does this mean for my business, for me? What does this mean for my customers? What are the things I need to start asking in order to have really good governance, and how does that interplay with what I'm doing? And I kinda feel we're still in this phase where we're focused on what what does it mean for me. Right? I think the next step is gonna be for my customers, but I don't think that we're really there yet in the landscape. I think there's... And it's interesting listening to the keynote today at Paxate because what they were saying is that it's customer zero first. You... Are you doing things internally to use agents or using AI internally that you can replicate for your customers? And understanding that journey will enable you to understand the governance aspect of what your customers are gonna be requiring of you, and then it's replicating that for your customers. So I think it's gonna be an interesting field that we're all going into. Yeah. So what's your expectation moving forward? What will be the biggest challenges or things that we're gonna see? I mean, in terms of... So, obviously, as a lawyer, have to think of risk. That's, like, where my head goes. In terms of risk right now, I think it's using AI without understanding where the data resides, how confidentiality is treated, where's the intellectual property gonna sit. If I'm building something, is this my intellectual property? Is it the third parties? Is it the customers? There are some questions you have to start asking. And then it's about preparing good documentation so that when your customers come to you and go, we wanna use copilot or we wanna build agents, what is the first thing we have to think about? You are prepared to explain that to the customers, and you can help them with the documentation journey. But customer zero. Right? The first thing you do is put yourself as the guinea pig for the customer's journey, and then you know what questions you had to ask, and, therefore, you know what your customers are gonna ask, and you can anticipate that. So do you think that the documentation or legal documentation is still very underestimated? 100%. Yeah. And I've actually seen I think it's getting a lot better. That's the positive news. So I think MSPs are definitely thinking about, okay. Now I know that there's this... All this risk. Now I'm doing a lot more than I used to do. There's gotta be more exposure. How do I think about the exposure, how do I mitigate that? Think cybersecurity is the biggest concern because we are using tools that are maybe outside of our control, they are outside of our control. So how do you manage that and how do you, you know, put that those things together for for the customer not to come after you? And I there's a lot more emphasis now on, are my contracts built to hold my business up when this happens, when an issue occurs? And it will happen. Right? I mean, it's it's an it's a when, not an if. So when is it gonna happen? It's not if it's gonna happen. It's when it's gonna happen. So, yeah, 100%. So prepare yourself now so that you have a thriving business going into the new evolution of AI. So if I would be an MSP owner, what would your advice be to me? Where would I start? It's it's... Well, for... With the AI journey, I think if if this is what you mean, or just in general, maybe, is a good starting position. In general, think about what you're reselling. Think about the vendor contract terms. Think about the gap between what they are promising you in the contracts and what you are promising the customer. Make sure there's no there's no change in that. It's It's the same. What we call flow down, it flows from the vendor terms into your terms. So you're always ring fencing them. I think then managing, you know, what is it... What's your identity? What's your USP? Are you going to start building agents? Are you starting to use agent... Like AI for your ticketing issues or your service desk or anything like that? How do you then prepare good governance for that? Where do you start with that? Those are the starting positions to then know where you need to go.
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