Leading cloud marketplace Pax8 has released its Managed Intelligence Provider Playbook, a comprehensive report designed to help managed service providers (MSPs) transition into managed intelligence providers (MIPs).
Unveiled at the Pax8 Beyond EMEA partner conference, the playbook provides tools and frameworks for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) to leverage agentic AI capabilities and achieve greater operational efficiency.
Helping partners enter the ‘agentic economy’
According to Pax8, the playbook explains how MIPs can monetize the next wave of SMB growth, emphasizing the shift toward the “agentic economy,” in which AI agents augment human capabilities and enhance efficiency across workflows.
“We are setting the stage for partner success in the biggest tech revolution of our time,” said Scott Chasin, chief executive officer at Pax8. “This Playbook isn’t just about deploying AI tools. It’s about empowering partners to become leaders in managed intelligence by delivering massive improvements and measurable business outcomes, not just technology, to their SMB customers.”
The playbook outlines five key plays MSPs should adopt to guide their customers through AI-powered transformation: Discover, Buy, Build, Sell, and Manage.
Pax8 describes each play as follows:
- Discover: Evolve from trusted advisor to strategic partner by uncovering inefficiencies and assessing risks, then applying intelligence to solve pressing challenges and deliver measurable outcomes.
- Buy: Curate and deploy pre-vetted agents, workflows, and AI-enhanced SaaS from marketplaces like the Pax8 Agent Store, enabling rapid time-to-value and scalable digital labor.
- Build: Develop proprietary agent stacks and workflow automation pipelines to differentiate MIPs in vertical markets such as healthcare, finance, and manufacturing.
- Sell: Shift from feature-based pricing to outcome-based models, tying revenue directly to client KPIs such as cost savings and customer satisfaction.
- Manage: Deliver ongoing optimization, compliance, and lifecycle management to ensure agents remain secure and aligned with evolving business needs.
AI as the future of SMB operations
For Pax8, the MIP Playbook serves as a “practical roadmap” that complements its Agentic Inflection Point research paper, published in June 2025. The paper introduced the Managed Intelligence framework, outlining how stakeholders across the technology industry can thrive in the agentic era and defining how agentic labor will transform the future of SMB operations as we know it.
Beyond the playbook, Pax8 plans to develop and build the foundation for the agentic economy through other AI-driven offerings, including the Pax8 Agent Store, a Model Context Protocol integration framework, an agentic orchestration platform, and more.
In June, Pax8 introduced a new points-based reward system for partners, along with enhanced partner experience programs. Learn more about how these initiatives are designed to boost partner engagement and growth.