Practical AI talk for MSPs, with the human first.
Adam Walter and Skip Ziegler host Humanize IT, a loose, conversational show about putting AI to work in MSPs and other businesses. Its range runs from starting over with AI tools to AI agents for network management, and on to Anthropic's line on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
PRESS PLAY
Humanize IT is a technology podcast hosted by Adam Walter and Skip Ziegler that treats AI as an everyday working problem for businesses, with MSPs and IT teams at the center. Its stated aim is to keep the human first. The conversations fit that aim: informal, a little jokey, and focused on what a team can try now. The pace of change comes up again and again. An episode titled 'How to start with AI...again...' goes back to basics because advice the hosts gave only two months earlier needed a refresh. The core of that advice still holds: start by asking an AI questions. The update is to think in workflows, look at how a day is actually spent, and ask which tasks could be automated, with Perplexity offered as a starting point. The hosts also warn against getting too attached to any single tool, comparing vendor loyalty to a workshop where every battery has to be the same color. Guest John Capobianco appears across a two-part VibeOps conversation. One of those episodes includes the argument that vibe coding may now just be called coding, since developers already install packages and libraries without reading every line inside them. It also recalls the pride that once made people ask whether .NET counted as real coding. The other episode turns to network management and virtual employees, meaning agents that can notify the lead tech of the day or review OSPF. The useful idea there is abstraction. Once one of these agents exists, staff can see what is possible, where an open-ended AI can feel like an overwhelming playground with no obvious place to start. There is also a joke that techniques like Ralph loops will look dated a month from now. Ethics are part of the mix. 'AI and Skynet: Navigating AI Ethics' covers Anthropic refusing to support mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons while saying it is willing to help with other defense uses. The hosts call those limits reasonable and then raise a harder question: what should the legal process be for using AI to monitor US citizens? A joke about getting red-flagged for complaining about Skip Ziegler thirty times makes the stakes concrete. The hosts are also upfront that the news they discuss may be old by the time an episode airs. In '(Updated) AI: A practical guide on how we use it', they look at how AI has changed their own company over six months, and one host admits to being jaded about new technology for a very long time. What a listener gets is a hands-on, plain-spoken read on AI from people who use it in their own business, delivered as conversation rather than lecture.
Made for: Suits a listener who works at an MSP or in business IT and wants plain-spoken, practical talk about adopting AI tools, agents and automation, and who is comfortable with advice that gets revised as the tools change.
What sets it apart: It openly revisits its own advice as AI shifts, going back to beginner basics after just two months, and it pairs hands-on talk about virtual employees and VibeOps with frank discussion of AI surveillance and autonomous weapons.
MSPs will bridge the gap between business and technology with Humanize IT — a fun, educational podcast that will keep your MSP relevant, maximize your value and help your clients see you as a trusted partner. In each episode, hosts Adam Walter, Skip Ziegler and other industry experts will show MSPs how to excel with a new, more conversation-based approach to technology!
A boardroom Wi-Fi check becomes your permission slip to ask the network in plain English.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded entry point on AI ethics, surveillance, autonomous weapons, and the cost of adopting systems before their limits are clear.
Humanize IT turns Anthropic's refusal of two DOD terms into a practical question about where AI should stop: mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
A plainspoken discussion of AI ethics, surveillance, military use, and the cost of rushing new tools into place.
Humanize IT frames a newsy AI ethics dispute as a question about everyday judgment, not just policy posture. Adam Walter and Skip Ziegler discuss Anthropic rejecting DOD terms tied to mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, while noting that the company was already…
A practical AI reset that puts workflows ahead of platform anxiety.
Humanize IT frames AI adoption as something worth checking again, not a decision anyone makes once and locks away. Adam Walter and Skip Ziegler start with a GitHub project built around agentic AI and sub-agents, then bring the conversation back to everyday work: what AI might do…
A grounded look at turning network scripts into useful AI-assisted virtual employees.
Humanize IT's AI agents discussion starts in familiar territory: a Cisco network, a handful of scripts, and not much DevOps structure underneath.
A clear, grounded setup for Vibeops, anchored by office Wi-Fi, package abstractions, and natural-language operations.
Humanize IT begins its two-part look at Vibeops by following the idea from DevOps into a newer question: what happens when infrastructure work can start with natural language instead of a script.
Specialists walking through software's tradeoffs, one system at a time.
Founders and engineers on AI coding agents like Claude Code, and supply chain security.
Hosts discuss how MSPs should prioritize and handle customer feedback to improve their software and services.
Hosts discuss Anthropic's refusal of DOD terms on ethical AI use and its implications for consumers and MSPs.
Hosts discuss Anthropic's refusal of DOD terms on ethical AI use and its implications for consumers and the tech industry.
Hosts discuss the rapid evolution of AI and introduce agentic AI with sub-agents for MSPs.
Hosts discuss practical steps for network engineers to integrate AI and DevOps into their environments using free open-source tools.
Hosts interview John Capobianco about his journey from engineering to VibeOps and how DevOps is evolving.
Adam Walter and Skip Ziggler of Humanize IT define agentic AI as the step beyond traditional tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot, which return an output, because agents do ongoing work such as finding dental-office leads daily.
Humanize IT hosts Adam Walter and Skip Ziggler argue that MSPs should stop asking clients whether they use AI and ask "how" instead, since Claude moved from Opus 4.5 to 4.6 within weeks.
Hosts Adam Walter and Skip Ziggler compare today's AI tool boom to 1990s Microsoft Access databases, which turned power users into full-time SQL administrators.
Hosts discuss how their company and the MSP industry are using AI to save time and generate ideas.
Hosts discuss how MSPs should prioritize and handle customer feedback to improve their software and services.
Hosts Adam Walter and Skip Ziegler discuss confirmation bias and how IT professionals can avoid assumptions by seeking more data.
Hosts discuss the Island Enterprise Browser for MSPs, exploring its features and use cases for IT and cybersecurity.