Between chatbots, LLMs, other GenAI tools, the new wave of agentic AI innovation hitting the market, and more, the channel has seemingly been overtaken by discussion around artificial intelligence. We caught up with several vendors and channel partners to learn where they see the AI market headed and what MSPs and others need to know.
GenAI might be relatively new, but automation isn’t
Pia CRO Nic Ferraro told Channel Insider the company was founded with a mission to bring automation capabilities to MSPs years before GenAI brought the topic front and center.
“We set out to create an automation company inspired by everything we learned from starting and running our own MSP,” Ferraro said. “We’ve chosen to become an automation platform, and where we had to really explain and educate MSPs about that when we started a few years ago, that conversation has changed now that AI is talked about more frequently.”
Pia’s platform includes several AI-based solutions to automate help desk tasks and save MSPs and internal IT teams time, which they can invest back into their business operations.
For project management automation provider Moovila, AI has been the foundation of the company’s offering for longer than the buzz around GenAI tools.
“We have leveraged artificial intelligence from the beginning, but we focus on the deterministic and more traditional models to build the capabilities within our platform,” Founder and CEO Mike Psenka told Channel Insider. “The benefits of automation have been around for a long time, and artificial intelligence itself isn’t new, even though the generative and now agentic forms of it are recent innovations.”
Psenka also said his team continues innovating with generative AI models to provide the best product for MSPs and customers.
“How can you combine the benefit of GenAI with the safety of deterministic tools? That’s what we’re addressing now,” Psenka said.
Communicating and differentiating in a crowded market
For vendors who have been in the automation game for several years now, the recent popularity of and demand for GenAI has sparked more awareness of the value of their solutions, even if the market has gotten a bit more crowded in the process.
“Certainly, MSPs are more educated about the need to automate, and the conversation now is especially strong about using things like agentic AI to do that,” Ferraro said.
Psenka highlights that while AI-enabled solutions are fueling efficiency gains, the real story in the channel is how that efficiency enables MSPs to provide more for their customers over time.
“AI is awesome, automation is awesome, but this is still a relationship business, and it probably always will be,” Psenka said.
Ferraro, too, wants to keep MSPs and the benefits they receive top of mind. For Pia, that means staying focused on what they provide, and what they don’t provide, to the market.
“We’ve chosen a very specific path to not be an RPA player,” Ferraro said. “We have the automations ready to run straight out of the box, so partners can scale at speed without additional resources. They don’t have to build anything, but they also can build on top of our platform if they choose to.”
Psenka and Ferraro both said their companies aim to help MSPs with common pain points so they can spend more time working with clients as trusted partners and advisers, and less time getting bogged down in repetitive tasks that could be easily automated at scale.
Why data readiness still determines AI success
While MSPs are gaining efficiencies through their own adoption of AI-enabled tools, many of their clients are still trying to address data problems that keep them from realizing their investments’ full potential.
“Ultimately, the first step is to ask the right questions around access, security, and data governance. It doesn’t matter how many tools you have or which AI products you use once the guardrails are in place,” Sherweb’s Senior Manager of AI Readiness, Jermaine Clark, told Channel Insider earlier this month.
EncompaaS provides tooling and support to enterprises facing difficulties with structured and unstructured data within their organizations. David Gould, EncompaaS’s Chief Customer Officer, shared three key pieces of advice for those organizations and channel partners with whom they might work.
“The three things companies really need to remember is that not all of their data and content is structured, that the unstructured stuff matters just as much to successful AI use as the structured data, and that getting your unstructured data in order is going to require different tools and approaches,” Gould said.
How MSPs can stay ahead of the curve for their clients
By now, nearly all MSPs have had to think about AI in one form or another, if not for their internal operations, then because customers have asked for support. Executives around the channel think this moment presents an opportunity for channel partners to meet customers’ needs in a new way.
“We’re at a really interesting point in the MSP industry,” said Ferraro. “We’re at a moment of transition, where the MSPs of the future are more efficient and therefore are maturing faster. It’s exciting to see what this industry can become.”
XTIUM’s Kevin Sullivan told Channel Insider this month that efficiency gains through automation and a maturing market allow organizations to better support young talent by giving them time to upskill and pursue additional education opportunities. For Sullivan, this will also unlock the next generation of tech leadership.
Similarly, Gould says he has seen enterprises shifting budgetary resources from their traditional technology spend to invest more heavily in AI solutions as the demand comes straight from the top.
“This is the first time I’ve really seen CEOs and boards of directors ask how to use a technology to improve their productivity and efficiency, and then actually be expected to prove that adoption and value quickly,” Gould said.
Psenka cautions that MSPs who want to leverage clients’ demand for AI as a business opportunity to build managed offerings for clients need to do so strategically and invest when necessary.
“If we want to play in this game, we’re going to have to put up some at-risk capital at this to build out what we need,” Psenka said. “If you aren’t going to do it right and build to scale, there’s probably a time to say don’t bother doing it at all.”
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