As small and midsize businesses rapidly adopt artificial intelligence on their own, MSPs are under increasing pressure to move beyond AI experimentation and to build formal strategies to help customers deploy, secure, and manage the technology.
Hatz AI CEO Jimmy Hatzell told Channel Insider that customer demand has accelerated dramatically in 2026, leaving providers to catch up with AI adoption, driven by both the executive suite and employees.
“Business integration is happening before security and controls,” Hatzell said. He added that MSPs need plans both for advising customers on AI and for improving their own operations with the technology, a combination he said “could be existential over the next two years for a lot of MSPs.”
AI adoption flips the traditional technology rollout
Unlike cloud migrations, VoIP deployments, or other major technology shifts MSPs have navigated, Hatzell said AI adoption is unfolding simultaneously from the bottom up and the top down.
Employees can begin using generative AI without an organization-wide deployment, sometimes developing more expertise with a particular use case than their technology provider has.
That dynamic leaves MSPs with an opportunity to bring structure to adoption across an entire customer organization, Hatzell said, including training employees and managing security, cost, and appropriate use.
“At the beginning of 2026, an end customer might have said, ‘Hey, we tried AI,’ or ‘We’re interested in it.’ Now it’s hard to find a customer who has never used an LLM,” said Hatzell.
The trend reflects broader findings in Channel Insider’s reporting this year. MSP executives have repeatedly described SMB customers as moving quickly toward AI while looking to their providers for governance, strategy, and support.
“Who else has been there any time a small business, a medium-sized business, needed help with technology? It’s been MSPs,” Hatzell said.
Security and utility require a balancing act
Hatzell said Hatz AI is building its strategy around helping MSPs maintain control over three areas: security, spend, and scope.
That becomes increasingly important as businesses prioritize the productivity benefits of AI even when security teams or MSPs have concerns about privacy and data exposure.
“You can’t go to a customer and say, ‘You can’t use AI,’” Hatzell said. Instead, providers need to identify controls that preserve the utility customers want while reducing risk, such as read-only access, restrictions on model training, and clear data retention agreements.
Hatz AI plans to keep expanding through MSPs
Hatzell said Hatz AI’s roadmap will continue to focus exclusively on helping MSPs sell, deliver, and manage AI for customers, with additional products possible over the next 12 to 24 months.
The company has also been extending its channel reach through partnerships, including its involvement with Lyra Cloud Services and Anthropic technology on AWS.
For MSPs still determining how aggressively to pursue AI services, Hatzell’s message is straightforward: customers are no longer waiting for providers to figure it out.
“Customers want AI solutions. The demand is like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” he said. “And if you can’t offer the solutions that they want related to technology, that’s a real gap.”
MSPs seem to be heeding that call from Hatzell and others as the channel continues to build new approaches to AI demand.