Manny Rivelo on Evolving Channel & How MSPs Can Get Ahead

ConnectWise is bullish on AI solutions within its portfolio, and CEO Manny Rivelo has been evangelizing his company’s approach to “Industry 5.0” for over a year. We spoke with Rivelo about where he sees the channel in the current moment and the future as AI continues to impact every facet of how channel partners operate and succeed.

Why early AI adoption matters for MSP growth and SMB success

“Industry 5.0” is Rivelo’s way of explaining a feeling many partners are experiencing: the channel is changing, and AI is one of the key reasons why it feels like the market is changing so quickly.

Rivelo thinks the industry is still early in the long journey AI will take everyone down, but warns that MSPs need to act now to set themselves up for long-term success.

“AI is progressing very quickly, and adaptability is key right now,” Rivelo said. “Every decade or so, new tools and organizations emerge, and we’re in another moment of that change. The biggest lesson is always that people should adapt as they start to explore new things.”

“We have to proceed with a level of caution, but at the same time the power now available to us is immense,” he continued.

The AI opportunity, according to Rivelo and many others, is twofold for partners: they can leverage the tools internally, and their clients likely need their support more than ever before, especially in the SMB market.

“End customers have to use AI to remain competitive in their markets, but SMBs won’t be able to do this alone,” Rivelo said. “MSPs are the vehicle for the SMB to adopt AI and to do so securely. The capabilities are there for MSPs to offer managed services and be the reason SMBs aren’t left behind.”

Where early adopters are already seeing efficiency gains

The ConnectWise Asio platform unifies RMM, PSA, security, and other capabilities MSPs rely on as core functions of their businesses. Rivelo says partners who have already moved to incorporate more automation, through RMMs and other solutions, into their operations have shown faster adoption rates in leveraging AI.

“Those who have already done that and embraced automation are much more inclined to move on and experiment with other technologies, like AI,” Rivelo said.

For those early adopters, and for partners in ConnectWise’s vast ecosystem already seeing the results, automating routine tasks has severely decreased the amount of time technicians spend on level one tickets. That allows partners to shift their workers to higher-priority tasks and frees up time to devote to innovation and future-proofing the business.

While this may seem daunting for some technology partners still trying to determine how to meet the AI moment, Rivelo says peer groups like ConnectWise’s own IT Nation Evolve offer resources and a guiding hand from others in the same position.

“A lot of it is, don’t try to do it all on your own. What I’m really proud of about Evolve is that it’s a very open community. MSPs support each other quite well, and share success stories and how they’ve done things in the past,” said Rivelo. “AI is moving so fast you can’t possibly do it all alone, so I encourage partners to leverage their peers and resources in figuring out how to get started.”

Inside ConnectWise’s AI Center of Excellence and strategy

Rivelo points to ConnectWise’s internal AI Center of Excellence as a cornerstone of the company’s own AI plans. The cross-departmental team, Rivelo says, ensures ConnectWise continues to leverage AI in its internal operations while delivering AI-infused products in its portfolio.

The team focuses on risk and compliace-related concerns while also addressing potential use cases and needs both internally and for MSP customers using ConnectWise products.

“I want us to be an AI-centric business and to see a problem and first think through whether we can use AI to solve it,” Rivelo said. “We present to our board on our AI strategy every month, and we are building an AI-minded focus. I want to see our partners seriously exploring AI and starting to determine their own use cases and opportunities, too.”

To build this muscle, Rivelo says his team has worked on hard on better understanding how AI capabilities can enhance existing capabilities within the platform and shaping an AI strategy nimble enough to keep up with ongoing advancements and new agentic offerings.

The role of interoperability in future MSP and AI platforms

Another core component of ConnectWise’s approach to the channel is what Rivelo calls its “open ecosystem” approach. This year alone the company announced a new collaboration with Pax8 and made several enhancements to its PSA and RMM solutions within Asio. The moves highlight the consolidation of channel tech onto unified platform experiences, and those platforms now play a pivotal role in AI adoption.

While the company has been committed to collaboration for a while now, Rivelo says the increasing adoption of agentic AI is pushing vendors towards interoperability as those agents perform more functions for partner and customer businesses.

“The key is going to be how multiple vendors work together, and whether agents can work across products,” said Rivelo. “I think everybody’s leaning towards things like the MCP to be more interoperable. You need data and context for AI to be successful … I think we as an industry need to make it easier for MSPs to adopt AI.”