Ready.Set.Midmarket! Podcast: The Midmarket's Tech Road Ahead In 2026

Executive leadership wants AI and they want it now. Successful AI implementation is on IT executives' roadmaps in 2026 and that involves conveying realistic goals to executive leadership, engaging in risk assessment, agile project management, and preparing data for AI. Midmarket IT leaders Jason Frame, chief information officer of the Southern Nevada Health District, and Grant Walsh, head of IT security infrastructure and operations at Flow Control Group, join Adam Dennison and Samara Lynn to discuss the strategies they are using to successfully implement AI in their organizations, and what they are prioritizing this year.

Key Quotes:

The full episode can be watched on YouTube and heard on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/0sjKnsI9sOk?si=IQX6AXuSJ7fKJqtv

Previous RSM! episodes are here.

https://player.simplecast.com/c879811e-77a1-45f0-8b89-75df14cbad35?dark=false

Transcript:

Adam Dennison (00:03)

Hello and welcome to another episode of Ready Set Mid-Market, the MES Computing podcast for all things mid-market IT. As always, I'm joined by my co-host, senior editor of MES Computing, Samara Lynn. Welcome, Samara. And back by popular demand, we had them last January. I have two guests of ours and two MES advisory board members. Jason Frame, he's the CIO of Southern Nevada Health District. Hi, Jason.

and Grant Walsh. He is the head of information technology, infrastructure, operations and security with Flow Control Group. Welcome Grant.

Grant Walsh (00:38)

What's up? Good to be here.

Adam Dennison (00:39)

So thanks so much, gentlemen. Again, we are now toward the second half of ⁓ January of '26. Hopefully when we get on calls, there's no more Happy New Year's. That should have ended ⁓ weeks ago. I think I'll start saying Happy Thanksgiving, and people can decide if I'm two months late or 10 months early on that. But we want to do here, it's January, so we want to kind of take a look at ⁓

what the outlook looks like for '26. Both of you joined us ⁓ last year during this type of an episode. but before we get into that, just so that the audience can get to know both of you a little bit better, why you just tell us a little bit about the organizations that you represent, what it is that you do, kind of the size and scope, and then we'll dig into, ⁓ you know, kind of the annual outlook. Jason, why don't we start with you?

Jason Frame (01:26)

Sure, thanks Adam. So I'm Jason Frame. I'm a Chief Information Officer at Southern Nevada Health District. We're the local public health agency in the Las Vegas area. So part of our role is to make sure that all the restaurants are clean. We do all the restaurant inspections. We inspect hotels. You know, a lot of people in the tech world come out to Vegas for conferences. We're the ones who make sure that the food is safe, that the food handlers know what they're doing and how to properly serve the food at the right temperatures to make sure that there are no foodborne illnesses.

We're also a primary care provider in a behavioral health. So we straddle that line between healthcare and government. And we do a lot of different, a ton of different programs. We have just over 800 people total. We have about 34 in IT and our budget annually is just under $200 million.

Adam Dennison (02:08)

Perfect. Thank you so much. Grant, why don't you tell us a little bit about Flow Control Group and your role there.

Grant Walsh (02:14)

Sure, so Flow Control Group, we're basically a sales service distribution organization. think about everything that moves within a factory. We support it, sell it, or service it. So from pumps to valves, automated assembly lines, robotics, we do little bit everything. We're a large M &A type company, so we have 110 different brands currently across the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico.

We are on a rapid &A mode, so we constantly buy new companies, roughly 10 to 15 companies a year. That growth will continue on in the near term as well. My role with Flow Control Group, as you mentioned before, head of IT for the infrastructure operations and security. if it's not enterprise applications or the overall ⁓ data side of things, that falls into my wheelhouse. So from service desk to infrastructure networking, up through all of cybersecurity across the board and compliance there as well.

Adam Dennison (03:03)

How big of a team do you have, Grant?

Grant Walsh (03:05)

We've got about just shy of 3,000 users now. Overall revenue is pushing 3 billion right now. And that will continue to grow with private equity backed as well. If you count all of IT across the board, about 50 people.

Adam Dennison (03:18)

Okay, so you were on the upper end of that mid-market for us. Yep. You're still very welcome here with MES though. So thank you for joining us. So go ahead and let's put our '25 hats on, right? So 12 months ago when Samara and I hosted this show, why don't you talk to us a little bit, you can get as detailed as you want, but why don't you tell us a little bit about '25, what that outlook looked like.

Grant Walsh (03:21)

Yeah, we're pushing that for sure.

Adam Dennison (03:43)

What were you able to get ⁓ accomplished and very proud of and what are some of those things that you might still be working on? And if there's anything that, you know, four or five, six months in, you said, we got to stop and make a turn here for one reason or another. Why don't you kind of tell us a little bit about that? And, you know, we'll go ahead and we'll start with you, Grant, and then go over to Jason just to kind of get a sense of how '25 went.

Grant Walsh (04:06)

Yeah, I think 2025 started off a little bit rocky. There was a lot of uncertainty there around the economy. So from a business leader standpoint, just economic side of things, things kind of slowed a bit overall, performance for the company finished strong for the first half of 2025 and then the rest of '26. But that cause for caution, the first part of '25 also mostly bled down into IT. We looked at, you know, right sizing organizations from people standpoint, but also the tools we looked at and solutions.

I think there was a lot of clamor for AI tools and pushing that envelope there in a 24 or '25, but it kind of slowed down just from a cost prohibitive standpoint. Now, once we made it through the year, I think around July, everybody was really uncertain. First part, first quarter around tariffs and what that meant for our equipment and parks and all that fun stuff. But that kind of tapered out once everybody realized what was going to happen and kind of how that was going to shake out. So the first half of '25 is strong and the second half of '25 really feels even stronger for us.

in our industry. So things started to pick back up. Overall, again, the AI piece is always going to be hot. But we started to get some structure organization around what does that mean for the organization and really focus back in on some core fundamentals. from our side, infrastructure grew the team a bit, but the organization focused on how we're going to support overall data management, data control, data quality, ⁓ and how that underlies across the board for CRM or for enterprise applications for massive data management.

Jason Frame (05:12)

you ⁓

you

Grant Walsh (05:29)

to actually take advantage of some other tools when it comes to the performance of the organization. So that's kind where we pick up in '26. It's from that leeway of the second half of '25, it's really starting to get momentum there around, what are we going to do to get our data cleaned up? What are we going to do to position our business to make educated decision based on the data? So that's a little shift from when we started in '25. '25 was okay, what's going to happen? And then by the of the year, okay, we know what we got to do. Now let's get rocking and rolling with that. And getting alignment from.

for us with as many brands and leaders as we have, getting everybody in alignment going in one direction, because it was a much shorter dent in terms of like project planning and initiatives, hey, let's do six months at a time or three months at a time, let's figure out where we're going. But once we got past that and we started getting that momentum, all right, now we have a year long goal, two year long goal, really focused on driving those key core initiatives.

Adam Dennison (06:15)

Perfect, thank you. And Jason will talk about us from the healthcare vertical there.

Jason Frame (06:19)

Yeah, definitely. think I agree with Grant too. the last time we talked about this, a lot of uncertainty coming into last year, and especially in health care with a lot of changes going on to Medicaid and Medicare, all the changes going on at HHS. And so it was actually a better year than we thought. You know, being in government, we get a lot of grants and we were losing some at first, but then a lot of them that we didn't impact us as much as we thought it would. So it actually was a better year than we thought it was going to be financially in terms of the grants and then the changes to Medicare.

are still kind of coming down the pipe so that we know that those are going to hit us a little bit more. This last year, we focused on eliminating a lot of tech debt. That was a problem that we've had, and that adds a lot of risk. And so we're ruthlessly eliminating as much tech debt as we can. We're continuing that into this year. By the end of this year, we should be pretty much all modern when it comes to the equipment. We still have some apps that won't run on anything new, and we're trying to get rid of some of those. We have one that hopefully will be live by ⁓

mid-year that impacts all of our inspectors. And that's on an old legacy system right now. We're trying to get it into a new SaaS-based system, which we're looking forward to. It gives us a lot more options. It's also more secure and less risk for us internally. Another issue I think Grant said it too is there was a lot of demand for AI. And we looked at our environment and we saw that we weren't ready for it from a data standpoint. So this past year, we spent a lot of time on our data security, our data classification and cleanup.

found a great vendor who is going to actually be at MES now coming in and they've helped us out classify all our data. when we first ran their application, we found millions of files with protected information in shares that were accessed both by everyone in the department or everyone in organization, which is not good when it comes to HIPAA. So we cleaned that up. We got rights around all those. We found out where our data was.

found a lot of duplicate data that we're able to eliminate. So we're able to eliminate about 20 % of our total data size that was duplicate. And that's the instant ROI right there, saving us money, saving us time on our backups and all that. So we're going to continue on that role. we're starting to roll out some AI. Have co-pilot pilots going on right now with some people. And we're also looking at a couple other AI systems in our clinical space.

Adam Dennison (08:27)

Perfect, perfect. Yeah, we're certainly hearing an awful lot, certainly around AI and AI readiness. And that ties right into the data aspect of it. And you both mentioned AI, so let's just go ahead and talk about that. And I'd like to talk about it as specific as you can. I've had the pleasure in the past six or eight months of hosting.

a couple dozen MES lunches, Jason, you were able to join me down in Dallas. IT leaders and inevitably every vendor wants to talk about AI no matter what category they're in. They want to have that discussion.

And there's a lot more people involved now. Co-pilot's coming up an awful lot. What we saw in our latest research, though, which was our 2026 outlook, ⁓ MES IT leader spending intent research. And when we looked at that from a... ⁓

an AI perspective, know, what we're seeing kind of is a, is a kind of a shift from generative AI into agentic AI

disciplines and business units. So can you kind of talk

to us a little bit about the generative versus the genetic in your organizations and what specific either business units or business disciplines are you looking at and hoping to get some return in '26?

Jason Frame (09:37)

we're still focusing a lot on just the GenAI. ⁓ That's big piece for a lot of things we do. know, Co-Pilot is, you can build agents with it, but it's not fully fleshed out right now. We're also looking at a couple of agentic AI options. And really for us, it's on the front end and back end of our clinical stuff. I think there are great use cases when it comes to healthcare with AI agents, when you're looking at prior authorizations.

when you're looking at insurance denials and fixing those claims. Going through and reading into all of our patient encounter notes and making sure that they're fully documented so when we go to send it out to the insurance, that it's a clean bill and we can actually get our reimbursements a lot faster. Another area that we're looking at agents in is our revenue cycle management. You know, on the recurring billing and those type of things where we have one person managing that and a small team that works on it.

but we can have agents do a lot of that, that work and maybe not make the decisions for them, but triage those decisions to tell them what ones they should be working on faster. Cause people right now in our organization are not comfortable of turning over full control to an agent. They still have that skepticism. And so we're saying, okay, we're going to use this in a smart way. We're going to triage it. We're going to let you work on the higher value stuff and put it in the right order. So we get the faster ROI and we get more benefits from it.

Adam Dennison (10:50)

Got it. Grant, what about over at Flow Control in terms of what areas are going to be ⁓ pointing your AI initiatives at and kind of your gen versus agentic?

Grant Walsh (10:59)

Yeah, I think for us, I mean, we've done some minor agentic stuff more so on the support side.

resources to solve their issues when it comes to ERP functionality or resources there, just to give them the sheer volume of a variety of brands that we have and what they do across the board from distribution to manufacturing or service or sales. That really gets into, makes it little easier for them to onboard there. For us really from an overall organization standpoint, think long-term there's a lot of stuff we could do on the forecasting side. mentioned co-pilot, know, really leveraging co-pilot and kind of the power BI state. Once you get that point, we get all the data in one spot for

Our leaders do then play out scenarios to see how it impacts sales, revenue, overall inventory to pull that stuff in. That's kind of the path we're going. But I think right now we look at it phases. You're kind of in phase zero, if you will, in terms of being around defining what AI is. Does it include automation? Does it include true LLM? What is actually AI? Because a lot of stuff goes, gets lumped into that whole bucket. We see it time and time again with vendors. Hey, we have AI. You just have a text search. really AI. You can do that with any sort of application.

⁓ but really defining what AI means for the organization and position positioning the core infrastructure as well as the data and position that actually maximize that. Cause we all know garbage in garbage out. So you've got to have the data in the right place and the tools in right place. think we're getting to the point now we're talking about, do we need a certain teams or specialists in house to help kind of drive that? we haven't got to the point yet in terms of defining an AI policy, what is, what is the enterprise solution for AI? still have a lot of.

Going out with chat GPT going out to Gemini going out to co-pilot wherever you want to go. We do push a lot of folks to our licensed version of co-pilot that comes with the basic e3 licensing But we're still very in the infant stage there And I think it's just because the data when you have a sheer volume of companies we have is just all over the place we try to limit what people can do in terms of loading stuff into AI so that stuff's not put out there

Adam Dennison (12:47)

Do either of you offer and or require AI training before your users start to get involved with it either from a security standpoint or just a productivity standpoint?

Grant Walsh (12:58)

We haven't done much on the training side outside of acceptable use policies around what you should and shouldn't do, we think long-term, think some of our, I guess I mentioned that kind of an AI team, if you will, I think a lot of that will probably come from the business power users. You can go out and try to hire IT folks, sure, but the folks that use it each and every day and have maximized it for their use case in their day-to-day lives will end up being kind of our, quote the tiger team, but the team that really drives that forward.

Adam Dennison (13:02)

Yeah.

Grant Walsh (13:23)

Obviously with guidance from executives, legal, IT to make sure things are done in a proper manner, but we haven't really rolled out any training yet outside of like, out of the box Microsoft training for copilot. Here's how you best practices to get the most thing. Here's how to create a master prompt, things like that, really basic stuff. For us, we haven't formalized that just yet.

Jason Frame (13:41)

Yeah, we haven't required any training yet. We've offered a lot of training. We had the prompt engineering workshop that we offered. Our partners from InfoTech came in and did that. And I was surprised. I didn't know how many people would join it. I just put it out as an open invite. And we had almost 80 people from around our district show up. And we had nurses, had front office staff, we had front line staff.

We had janitors joining it. there's a lot of interest there. And so what that told us is we needed to start offering more training. So we're putting together more training on what AI can do and how to use it. We also have some policies. We have an AI acceptable use policy that's going through approvals right now, along with a AI ethical use policy, because we, know, people here are very concerned about the ethics of it. So we're really in the acceptable use talking about what you can do with it and how to use it.

Adam Dennison (14:25)

Got it. So, Samara do you have any questions around the AI topic before I move on to a couple other areas?

Samara Lynn (14:30)

Yeah, Service Now the cloud automation provider, came out with a report this week saying that AI - fueled risks are pretty much going to skyrocket this year. and these aren't just cyber risk, the report cited operational risks, economic risks, regulatory risks. So

as an IT leader in the mid-market, I imagine there's some pressure from executive leadership to get going with AI, but how do you do that? prepare your data to be AI ready, do a thorough risk assessment, and also keep a control of shadow AI. it seems like you're juggling a lot of plates.

Jason Frame (15:00)

Thanks.

Grant Walsh (15:06)

Yeah, I think a lot of times you do get the executive leadership team. It's the buzzword. We want AI. We want it now. What do you want to do? We don't know what we want it, right? So, um, it's really defined and working with them to understand what we want to do. And on the AI side, cause the risk is there where that means from cybersecurity standpoint is high. But if you have developers and you're using certain things from an AI to create your code, is that pulling from somebody else's code to create your development product or your application?

There's some IP data you gotta worry about. You're not self built per se. Same thing for decisions, you gotta be wary of that. if you go across the various platforms from an AI standpoint, ask it the same question, you'll get different answers depending on what you're asking, just based on the data being pooled.

Even with all the data, you're still getting different answers based on the algorithms and the tools within the AI system itself. You're just trying to get your arms around it. A lot of that's going to come from relationships with the business to make sure it's not big bad IT trying to crack down and take away a tool that helps them do their job day to day. You know, if it's, we want to help you and understand how you're using it and improve on it, maybe give some enhancements, some best practices and become a partner.

That does help open up those channels of communication visibility into how folks are using AI. So hopefully, you know, with those relationships, you know, you can drive down some of that shadow AI use. But yeah, it's definitely something that we are, the organization takes seriously from a risk standpoint because people do take stuff. Hey, take this spreadsheet of people's salaries and give me the estimate of blah, blah, blah. Well, that just went into the wide open. Thanks for sharing that.

our end users, are trying to make their lives easier, trying to do it more efficient because they're being asked a hundred different things, but just more so that collaboration opportunities there. we're here to help. We're not here to slap your hand. We may point you in a different direction to something a little more secure, but that's for us really what's at work so far.

Jason Frame (16:34)

Yep.

I know for us, we're trying to do a lot of risk minimization wherever we can. There's a lot of risk with AI. Talk about shadow AI and people going out and using ChatGPT, Gemini on their own. It's funny, I've been in talks before, been in meeting our groups and we talk about it some people, yeah, we just block AI. And so our people aren't using it. I'm like, no, they're using it. You just don't know about it anymore. And you don't know what they're using or how they're using it. So it's putting in those tools. It's the training on the risk and teaching people.

Samara Lynn (17:06)

Okay.

Jason Frame (17:12)

You know, one of the things that we also do that we're in a proof of concept right now, it's a browser plugin that when you try to paste something into chat GPT or Grok or any of those, it checks it. And if there's a protected health information, if there's PII, anything that's sensitive, it won't let it go up. And not just, it doesn't just block it. It tells the person why they're not allowed to put those prompts in. If it tries to upload a file, it looks at the tags that we have on our, on our data files.

Samara Lynn (17:34)

Hmm.

Jason Frame (17:39)

And if it's a sensitive or business confidential or whatever the ones that we don't want an AI, it won't allow it. then it alerts us in IT so we know we can go do more training, but it also lets them know and it gives them a message. This, you're trying to upload sensitive data and then we don't allow that. And so it gets around some of that risk and tries to minimize some of that risk. But a lot of it, I think I love the way Grant said it is having that relationship with your users. You know, when it comes to AI, the thing I told my staff a long time ago, when I first saw chat GPT come out,

back in late 2022, so probably early 23, we're talking. I said, we don't want to be the department of 'no' when it comes to AI. We want to show our teams how they can use it effectively, how they can use it safely, and what we can do to help them. And so one of the things before we had our policy is people ask us, can we use AI? And we let them know if you're doing public stuff, you're doing nothing potentially sensitive and all that, feel free to use it. If you have a question, contact us. Because if you do,

Samara Lynn (18:14)

Yeah.

Jason Frame (18:35)

and we help you out and something goes wrong, we'll take on that risk. But if you go out there and do it on yourself, you're taking on that risk yourself. And we have a very risk averse staff, know, you know, being in healthcare is, very focused on, HIPAA and minimizing that data risk. So they would come to us and we have built that relationship over the last - fueled years where they know that they're gonna come and we're not gonna say, no, you can't use it at all. We're gonna show you, okay, this is the way to use it. This is how you can do it properly.

Samara Lynn (18:51)

So, thanks a lot.

Jason Frame (19:01)

We're gonna protect our patients information, but we're also gonna make you more effective in your job.

Adam Dennison (19:05)

Are either of you at a stage yet where you're measuring the ROI, the return on AI? And if so, can you share a little bit of that with us? And if not, when do you think you're either going to be asked or demanded to be at that stage? And how are you going to go about that?

Jason Frame (19:20)

I know we're not measuring any ROI right now. We haven't made huge investments in AI yet. We're in that process. And so I know coming into, you know, probably later in '26, but more likely in 27, we're going to be worried more about that ROI and how to track it. And so for us, it's, know, it's on our minds as we're starting to roll out copilot right now. We only have two people using copilot and both of them are in IT to get a handle on it and just double check the settings. But we know that that's something we have to do. And the hard part is, you know,

Adam Dennison (19:25)

Yeah.

Jason Frame (19:48)

How do you judge how much more effective someone is? One of the things though, we are a little bit different, you being in government, the way we measure ROI is different than what enterprises do. The way we, think AI usage in government is fundamentally different than what enterprise AI would be or even mid-market AI would be. Cause our motives are different. You know, you're a lot of the enterprises, they're focused on profit as a motive. They're focused on, you know,

more faster ROI and all that, we're more focused on how does it impact our constituents. So ROI has never been as important to us as it is to other agencies, but we do track as much as we can and where we can.

Adam Dennison (20:16)

Mm-hmm.

Grant Walsh (20:24)

Yeah, I mean, for us, we're still early on right now, but I can see it coming in the next 18, 24 months as we kind of get things in order to look some larger tools and really build out more so on that, said on the the MDM and the data, data like data warehouse type space where we start leveraging the data we have in place to make informed decisions today. Again, it's more personal use.

Copilot license is very limited in our environment. Today it's like the biggest piece. like, want to transcribe or record teams meetings and get things to follow up. It's very basic. But yeah, that will increase I think in the next 20, 24 months as we do some of the larger initiatives there as it really becomes a business value. Then we got to kind of say it's value, is it based on what we're paying for the tools and functionality, is it there? So we see that coming down the pipe and that's definitely something on our radar.

Adam Dennison (21:08)

Those would be the fun IT projects to work on, right? That you don't have to show an ROI for 18 to 24 months.

Grant Walsh (21:14)

Yes,

but it's coming, it's coming.

Adam Dennison (21:16)

Things are going great. ⁓ So another question I have is,

Samara Lynn (21:18)

Yeah.

Adam Dennison (21:22)

kind of around, you know, thinking about '26 and you mentioned things were kind of murky in '25 and let's face it, there's a lot going on in the world right now. Things are changing, not just quarterly, monthly, even weekly, there's something new is happening in some other part of the world or here just in the US. When you sort of set that plan for '26 and then something pops up that, hey, we think we might want to...

want to do this. How does that work within your organizations to be able to take on unplanned IT projects? And do you have an appetite for that? And does something have to get put on hold? do you, how do you work that in if you think collectively we really should be making this bet here? We might not have said it back in January or whenever your fiscal is, but now we think we should make this move. And how are you able to go about that?

Grant Walsh (22:11)

I think for us, we've been moving so fast as an organization. Again, like I said before, we're private equity backed So we're in that second half of that phase with a PE firm. Things have begun so fast through growth and just, I won't say it's the Wild West, but a lot of initiatives there. And we're finally starting to put some structure and order around that, but we're still agile enough to kind of move and pivot into tackle those large objectives. But as we kind of built out the leadership team, built out some of brand leadership, put some structured organization around that side of things.

Adam Dennison (22:19)

you

Grant Walsh (22:39)

We are starting to see a of a collaborative approach to what are the priorities. And then when a new priority comes up or we want to do X, Y, and Z, or we're doing a large acquisition or the case may be, we're able to kind of pivot with the understanding that there's only so much time and resources to go around. Something has to give or something that has to change. We can't tackle everything at a hundred percent. So that we have gotten better at that. And I think that'll continue to go throughout 2026. I

Jason Frame (23:02)

For us, we're a little less agile, but we do make room. I purposely budget for contingencies. Last year, I was told I was the only one who budgeted for tariffs, because I saw that coming down the pipe. So I put in 5%, 10 % in different categories for tariffs to affect us. So I try to keep abreast of what's going on out there and plan for it. We do have some times where things change real quick.

So we're actually right in the middle of our budget cycle. I think the first drafts are due on the 30th of the month. And so we're looking at, what it's going to look like going forward. And we started making our plans for the year. And this year, thankfully, we're kind of on a flat budget. not looking at a decrease yet, but we're going to start off with that. But another thing that we've done too recently as an organization, not just IT, is we've changed our strategic planning cycles. We used to do a three-year plan every and then go back and revisit every so often.

Now we're doing a 12 to 18 month plan because things are moving so fast, you know, with AI especially, but just in the environment, we need to be more agile as an organization. So we've changed our strategic planning model and been, you know, looking at shorter terms and being more effective in those shorter terms.

Adam Dennison (24:08)

Smart.

Samara Lynn (24:09)

looks like, strategic planning, risk assessment, and just prepping for AI are some of the big, you know, touchstones on ⁓ IT leaders roadmap this year. ⁓

Jason Frame (24:19)

Yeah,

definitely.

Adam Dennison (24:20)

I guess my parting question, I don't want to spend a lot of time on it because I want to keep this within the timeframe that we asked. a couple of years ago, talent was something that was talked about an awful lot and it hasn't really for the last 10 years or so. And I'm not hearing about that as much. Can you just in a tight, you know, yes, no, or sentence or two, let us know, are you dealing with, you know, the same IT talent issues that you were?

12, 18, or let's say more like 18, 24, 36 months ago,

Grant Walsh (24:50)

I think it took some time for candidates to realize it shifted. It was in a candidate-empowered mode two years ago, a year and half ago, and now it's employer-empowered mode. there's a lot of talent. There's been a lot of technology companies that folks go, which has really shifted the dynamic of who's out there. So for us, it hasn't been a problem lately.

Jason Frame (25:06)

Yeah, I agree with Grant. hasn't been much of a problem. like you said, that shift has happened. But what I'm also seeing now is there's now a new shift of having that AI experience. And, you know, a lot of people are now coming in and realizing they need to have it. And it's the, you know, in general, it's the newer employees that have this experience and the legacy employees don't have it as much and they're having a harder time adopting it.

Adam Dennison (25:27)

So to your point, Grant, the talent's kind of getting, you know, coming back out into the market there. I to thank you so much not only for joining Samara and I today on Ready Set Mid-Market here, but again, for everything that both of you do for MES being part of our

advisory boards. We certainly hope to see you both coming up either in Jacksonville for our security event in March or down in Houston for our spring event or both if you both are so inclined to be there. And with that, we'll say, you know, a great kickoff to your year. And I hope everyone is going to be as busy as Samara and I are clearing a couple of feet of snow up here in the northeast over the next couple of days.

Jason Frame (26:08)

Glad we don't have deal with that down here in Vegas.

Adam Dennison (26:10)

Thank you so much, guys.

Grant Walsh (26:11)

Thank you.

Jason Frame (26:11)

Thanks,

everyone.