For managed service providers, AI represents a $276 billion opportunity. The problem? More than half of them can’t get their customers ready for it.
That’s the headline finding from new research published this week by AvePoint and analyst firm Omdia, which surveyed 333 MSPs across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific on what’s actually blocking AI adoption for their end customers.
Why customers still haven’t gotten AI governance under control
The answer wasn’t a lack of tools or technical know-how; it was governance and compliance.
Fifty-one percent of MSPs surveyed identified data governance and compliance challenges as the single biggest obstacle standing between their customers and meaningful AI deployment.
That figure dwarfs concerns about security management (14%), value realization (14%), and skills gaps (13%), suggesting an industry where the operational groundwork for AI has not kept pace with the appetite for it.
“Governance has become the primary barrier preventing customer AI adoption,” said Scott Sacket, SVP of Global Partner Strategy at AvePoint, in the report. “MSPs need unified data protection platforms that standardize governance across multi-tenant environments, transforming manual work into automated, repeatable services.”
Big ambitions, uneven execution
The research exposes a gap between what MSPs want to offer and what they can actually deliver.
While 94% of respondents said they are committed to automating AI data readiness and compliance services, only 43% said they have reached high maturity in delivering those environments to customers. That means a majority of MSPs are selling a promise they are still struggling to keep.
Part of the challenge is structural. For MSPs managing hundreds of customers, scaling governance is not simply a matter of building a workflow and replicating it.
As one MSP executive put it in a qualitative interview included in the report, “We could build automations for every single one of our clients, but we’d have to do it 700 times.”
The research found that 40% of MSPs who have not fully automated compliance services cite operational complexity — policy drift, configuration differences, and integration headaches across customer tenants — as their top barrier.
A market moment MSPs cannot afford to miss
The stakes are high. Omdia projects that compliance services for MSPs will grow by 21% in 2026, driven by regulatory pressure and rising customer expectations.
The broader managed security services market, meanwhile, is forecast to hit $106 billion this year.
Those numbers track with trends Channel Insider has been tracking across the channel. A recent ePlus survey of 150 IT leaders found that nearly three-quarters of organizations now view AI primarily as a driver of revenue growth, surpassing cost reduction and customer satisfaction as top objectives.
Yet about 80% of those same leaders worry their current infrastructure isn’t ready to support advanced AI applications, and 68% flagged regulatory compliance as a major deployment barrier.
That convergence, high ambition, shaky foundations, is precisely what MSPs are navigating on their customers’ behalf right now.
From AI governance to infrastructure needs, MSPs are at the center of digital transformation projects. To hear directly from the partner executives leading these shifts, tune into Channel Insider: Partner POV.