Unless you’ve spent the year napping, you already know that the biggest challenge MSPs face around AI at present isn’t generating demand for it so much as figuring out what to sell in response to that demand.

And unless you’ve spent the last few weeks in particular napping, you also know that the new AI hotness out of Silicon Valley is “persistent agents” like Meta’s Muse, OpenAI’s Dots, Microsoft’s Autopilot, and similar solutions from companies such as Instinct and Town.

Those solutions (with the exception of Autopilot) are principally meant for consumer rather than commercial use, however, and don’t come with management tools, multi-tenant or otherwise. Meaning that persistent agents are marginally business-ready at best and completely unfit for MSPs.

Until Q1 of next year, that is, when Pax8 plans to make a persistent agent it unveiled today at its Beyond EMEA event in Copenhagen generally available. Named 8bot and currently in early access release, the system is a “managed AI coworker” that will be sold exclusively through Pax8 partners to their SMB end users.

And it’s a lot. Among other things:

1. It’s something any MSP can sell today. Or by early next year, anyway. Which is important for reasons Pax8 knows well: MSPs that want to make big money delivering AI solutions must first acquire two sets of skills, one to diagnose a client’s business needs and another to create something that addresses those needs. Cultivating both takes time, and businesses aren’t waiting around while that process unfolds.

Enter 8bot, which gives MSPs something useful to offer customers right away. “We want our partners to be able to deliver AI value without building a custom AI solution,” says Elizabeth McIlhany (pictured), Pax8’s chief product officer.

2. It’s scalable. Building custom AI solutions is high-revenue, high-margin work, but also time-consuming, labor-intensive work best done with help from expensive forward deployed engineers. Pax8 partners can ship 8bot to every customer willing to buy it all at once as soon as the product goes GA.

“We’re packaging it so a partner can deploy and support it across their whole client base,” McIlhany says.

3. It’s easy to implement. Part of what makes 8bot scalable is that MSPs can roll it out to clients remotely in a matter of minutes.

“You don’t have to do a service engagement,” McIlhany says. “You send them an invitation, they accept the invitation, log in, and they’re off and running.”

4. It’s easy to maintain. According to McIlhany, there’s very little upkeep for MSPs to do once 8bot’s in use. “We want it to be pretty ‘set it and forget it,’” she says.

5. It’s autonomous. Autopilot’s still in private preview and there’s a lot about how businesses will use it and partners will govern it that we don’t know yet. Which means the most business-ready AI solution available to Microsoft partners for the moment is Copilot, and Copilot is neither persistent nor truly agentic.

“It’s super helpful, but you have to keep prompting it,” McIlhany says, and what it knows about you is relatively shallow. 8bot, by contrast, works 24/7 for users, proactively suggests new ways to be helpful, and continually accumulates context and memory.

“That context and memory build value over time, because it’ll really learn the client’s business,” McIlhany says.

6. It’s flexible. 8bot runs on a menu of closed and open source models that MSPs can employ in customized ways for specific customers and specific agents within those customers.

“We want to give a lot of optionality in terms of what our partners can make available to their downstream clients,” says McIlhany, who expects many MSPs to find the open source options appealing.

“Some of those models are really incredible, and we know that the SMB space can be pretty price sensitive,” she says.

7. It’s manageable. 8bot runs on a new Pax8 platform called 8os that provides monitoring and management functionality.

“When you first enter the product, it will show you all the things that need your attention,” McIlhany says, like perhaps a broken connector or expired API key. Critically, it will do that at both the fleet and tenant level.

“We know that our partners’ AI-based businesses are not going to scale if they have to log into a new vendor portal or log into a new client management portal or whatever every time they have to manage something on behalf of a different client,” McIlhany says.

8. It’s all yours. Unlike Autopilot, Muse, and Dots, 8bot is white label, or rather will be when the product ships next year. “We’re excited to have our partners be able to brand it however they want and be able to present it as their own service,” McIlhany says.

9. It’s priced … wait, how is it priced? “Pricing is something that we’re still in the process of exploring,” McIlhany notes. That said, she continues, the current thought is to offer tiered packages with a preset monthly supply of tokens and the ability to buy more on a pay-as-you-go basis.

“That’s kind of what we’re seeing most often in the market, and that’s something that our partners are telling us that they’re excited about, because it gives them that consistent monthly price that they want to give to their SMB clients but also gives their SMB clients the flexibility to use it as much as they want,” McIlhany says. Offering 8bot initially through a limited set of early access partners, she adds, will help Pax8 calibrate what to charge at each tier based on real-world consumption.

“We don’t want to go in with a price that’s too high or too low,” McIlhany says.

10. It’s governable. In terms of security, McIlhany explains, and also of spending. 8os, which integrates with the Agent Gateway Pax8 shipped in June, lets users set budget caps for specific clients and agents.

“People can be a little nervous about coming into a new technology when they’re not 100% sure, especially if it’s usage-based, how much it’s going to cost,” McIlhany says.

“We want to give them the reassurance that they can have a conversation with a client and have clear, firm guardrails around what spend could be.”

If you build it, will they come?

“Together,” McIlhany says, “8os and 8bot give partners a repeatable way to deliver measurable outcomes to their SMB clients, and to turn AI into a managed recurring service that scales in the right way for the channel.”

It’s a compelling value proposition, but not one guaranteed to succeed. How willing MSPs and their clients will be to set 8bot loose on apps and data is an extremely open question.

Pax8 knows it too. According to McIlhany, 8bot’s engineered to be trustworthy. Each individual user gets their own workspace with its own virtual machine, connectors, MCP server, plugins, skills, and messaging channels. Those workspaces, in turn, are completely isolated from one another.

“We have tested this really, really exhaustively,” McIlhany says. “We wanted to make sure that we would never have intermixing of data for different customers.”

Even so, it’ll be interesting to see how comfortable MSPs are offering 8bots to their clients at a time when headlines like this are less rare than they should be. 8bot makes selling persistent agents to businesses possible for MSPs. That doesn’t guarantee anyone on either side of that transaction is ready to act on that possibility yet.

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That Reyna Thompson, TD SYNNEX’s North America president, was joined onstage by a co-speaker for part of her keynote presentation at the distributor’s recent Inspire event isn’t unusual. That the co-speaker in question was a 152-lb., 5’ 7” robot named Nylo was.

It was also entirely apt in the context of Thompson’s effort during her 12 minutes of speaking time to define a new identity for the business she helps lead, one that bridges the gap between the functions the company performed in the past on its way to becoming an $80 billion a year industry giant and the function it must perform in the future to grow even larger.

Those earlier functions are familiar to everyone in the channel. Broadline distis like Tech Data and SYNNEX (which merged to form TD SYNNEX in 2021) started out, famously, as “a warehouse and a bank,” meaning a place for resellers to buy lots of products from lots of vendors and get the financing needed to make those purchases.

“Distribution helped build this channel through reach, buying power and logistics, and relationships developed over decades,” Thompson said in her keynote.

In more recent times, the broadlines grew broader still by adding SaaS apps, cloud infrastructure, and a wide range of services. Circa 2018, in fact, Tech Data regularly insisted in interviews with me that it was no longer a distributor at all so much as a “solutions aggregator” capable of providing everything partners needed to turn a collection of products into an integrated, value-producing system.

The role TD SYNNEX seeks to fill now, however, goes beyond mere aggregation in ways that reflect both growing technological complexity and shifting end user expectations.

“The next evolution of distribution is orchestration,” Thompson declared during her keynote.

It’s an overused word, she then rightly observed, before providing TD SYNNEX’s definition. “An orchestrator does three things,” Thompson said. “Looks ahead, removes friction, delivers outcomes.”

And in that order. Orchestration, unlike aggregation, has a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning part involves identifying future opportunities. Sometimes, Thompson explained, that involves sifting through masses of vendor data, transaction records, consumption figures, and renewal dates for hidden end user demand signals, as Ingram Micro does as well to great effect (its Intelligent Digital Assistant, discussed here most recently, generated roughly $1 billion of incremental revenue for the company in its latest quarter).

Other times, however, looking ahead involves forging a path for partners into an emerging technology segment. Like robotics, for example, a market soon to be worth over $40 billion globally, according to IDC, and promising enough to merit that cameo appearance by Nylo. A robotics solution, Thompson noted, is more than just a robot.

“It’s the compute and the sensors and networking, security, integration, services, financing,” she said. Delivering all that—at the right time, in the right sequence, and in pre-validated combinations—is how TD SYNNEX “removes friction” for its partners.

“The robot is what we see,” Thompson said. “The value comes from understanding the work, choosing the right technology, and bringing the ecosystem together around the outcome.”

Which brings us to orchestration’s last and most critical step. Products, in TD SYNNEX’s view, are worth little individually, and solutions are worth only marginally more if they don’t accomplish something useful. Outcomes, as in measurable returns versus potential ones, are what end users will pay for and keep paying for over time.

“Competitive advantage is moving away from whoever can sell the technology and towards whoever can turn it into a recurring business outcome for the customer,” said Robert Abramitis, TD SYNNEX’s North America CFO, during a keynote presentation. “The technology is where it starts, the outcome is where the money is, and the route to that revenue already runs through you.”

Widening that route, TD SYNNEX believes, requires an orchestrator.

People plus platforms

AI, whether physical or generative, is undeniably impressive. To a point anyway, noted Thompson in her keynote.

“It can’t build trust. It can’t develop and invest in relationships. It isn’t curious, and it isn’t creative,” she said. Applied properly, Thompson continued, AI should enhance those attributes in users rather than erase them.

“We have an awesome opportunity right now to redefine how the channel works in this next era,” Thompson said. “And as we do, we have a responsibility to preserve the humanity of this business, to protect the judgment, the trust, the creativity, and relationships that make this channel work.”

Meeting that responsibility while simultaneously sating the channel’s appetite for on-demand, AI-powered assistance from distributors is a balancing act we explored after last year’s Inspire that came up a lot this year too.

“We live in the digital world, so we need to have the right platforms to deliver 24x7 self-service support,” said CEO Patrick Zammit (pictured) during a keynote appearance, “but people will continue to be critical for the success of our business”. TD SYNNEX invests both in people and in platforms as a result, he added.

The latest investments on the digital side, announced during Inspire, add an array of capabilities to PartnerFirst, the core element in the company’s “omnichannel” partner engagement strategy.

“It’s a way for TD SYNNEX to meet you where you work,” said Thompson of PartnerFirst, which debuted at last year’s Inspire. “It provides one front door, multiple routes in.”

Those include an online portal, a mobile app, API connectors, and now an MCP server that lets partners access PartnerFirst data via Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI chatbots. Nate Herz (pictured), TD SYNNEX’s regional CIO for North America, has been a little startled by how much usage that new option has gotten.

“I was a little bit worried that we were too far in front of the market,” he says. “What we’re seeing though is that’s not the case. There’s a lot of demand for MCP, much more than I had expected.”

Agent Bridge, a PartnerFirst enhancement that also went GA during Inspire, is designed to let less sophisticated partners design and deploy custom agents for tasks like quote management and order tracking.

“It’s not like a one, two, three, click, and you’re done, but it’s definitely a very guided process and would allow a non-technical user to set up an agentic workflow,” says Herz, adding that here too users have been more ambitious than TD SYNNEX anticipated.

“One of the things that was a little bit surprising is we saw people start to use the capabilities to do much more deep product discovery and almost solution engineering than we had expected,” he explains. “Things like, ‘my environment is this and I’m outfitting for an operation of 200 people, suggest a server infrastructure.’”

Partners more comfortable engaging with PartnerFirst via its old-school online portal picked up 40 new agentic features ranging across product search, pricing, availability, and beyond during Inspire as well. More such updates are coming too, as Herz expects PartnerFirst’s web-based front end to be the primary way plenty of users access the platform for a long time.

Though maybe not forever. “I do see the headless experience becoming much more prominent and perhaps the most prominent way in the future,” he says.

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Businesses have a FinOps problem. AI’s making it bigger.

Businesses are pretty excited about AI. So much so that their AI spending has doubled in the last year, according to Boston Consulting Group.

And it’s not just big businesses. Small and midsize ones appear to be excited about AI too, enough so that 71% of them worldwide are using AI at present, according to Pax8’s latest SMB AI Report.

Indeed, pretty much everyone in the business world is excited about AI, as they always are initially for new technologies, observes Francisco Criado (pictured), TD SYNNEX’s SVP of security, cloud, and AI.

“Then they start getting the bills,” he says.

Which can be painful. Fully 57% of the U.S.-based SMBs Pax8 surveyed, in fact, have received an unexpectedly high AI bill in the past year, and 25% have received more than one. It’s a familiar problem, and not just to regular Channelholic readers. Veterans of the cloud explosion that preceded the current AI explosion know this nightmare all too well.

“AI has become the new unmanaged cloud spend, and I think we’ve all seen that movie before,” said Criado during an Inspire keynote. “Costs sprawled, nobody owned the bill, and we had to invent a whole new discipline to bring it under control. AI is doing that again, only faster.”

And in two separate places: the off-prem data centers that host frontier lab LLMs and the on-prem servers and even laptops that businesses increasingly use to host closed and open-source models locally. Businesses, it seems, no longer have a cloud FinOps problem or an AI FinOps problem. They have a FinOps problem, period, and need an answer to it everywhere they encounter usage-based pricing.

It’s a realization Criado and his team came to in May during partner meetings at TD SYNNEX’s High-Growth Conference that led just five months later during Inspire to the release of FinOps Fusion, a new service offering centralized visibility into cloud, AI, and local consumption spending.

“You get one view, one console where you get that entire estate,” Criado says.

Even if you bought the components of that estate from someone other than TD SYNNEX. “We can go into any environment and we can look at wherever that sits on premise or in the cloud,” Criado says. “There are no limits to it.”

At present, Fusion identifies rather than remediates overspending, but users get detailed recommendations on cost-cutting next steps like downsizing over-provisioned infrastructures, leveraging reserved instances, and replacing always-on environments with usage-based architectures.

Partners that neither can nor wish to manage that for clients themselves, moreover, can outsource the job to TD SYNNEX. According to Criado, they’ll reap customer retention and satisfaction rewards either way. AI spending is largely tied to token usage, he noted during his keynote.

“Whoever helps customers see, understand, and govern that usage helps them save money, unlock value, and scale AI responsibly. That opportunity belongs to you.”

It’s a revenue as well as stickiness opportunity, moreover. Users of TD SYNNEX’s pre-Fusion cloud FinOps service typically cut spending 15-30%, and Criado expects AI FinOps savings to be even higher. Converting some of that bounty into FinOps-as-a-service fees, he notes, is a good deal for everyone involved.

“That’s usually a pretty easy value proposition and most customers are going to say yes, because they’re going to save money regardless,” Criado says, adding that it can drive AI solution sales too.

“If you’re a line of business owner and you’re trying to convince your CFO and everybody to do an AI project, knowing that you have visibility and you’re not going to get surprises gives you a much better probability of getting your projects approved,” Criado says. It also helps you quantify what your customers are getting for all those tokens they’re consuming, he adds, which is the question everyone in IT needs to have answers for.

“Everybody likes the shiny new object and everybody gets really excited, but eventually we’re going to have to be able to show, as an industry, the ROI.”

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Over on Business of Tech

Host Dave Sobel notes that laptop fleets are growing older thanks to rising PC costs, and service desk automation software is papering over many of the reliability issues associated with that fact.

Put those together. The aging machine generates friction. The person using it works around most of that friction. What they do report gets triaged, often resolved by software, and sometimes marked closed when it isn’t fixed. Each step is reasonable on its own. Together, they move the cost of an old fleet out of the one place the customer reliably looks, which is the ticket report.

So the cost is real, and it grows. It’s just paid in lost minutes and quiet workarounds, not in anything the client sees.

More here.

MSP ARC Comes (Partly) Into View

My last TD SYNNEX story, about the company’s recently established MSP sales group, ended with a tease. There’s a new MSP partner program on the way, I wrote, before adding that I couldn’t tell you much about it.

Not because I’d been sworn to secrecy, mind you, but because Augie Staab (pictured), who runs that new MSP unit, wasn’t ready to share details yet.

That changed a little at Inspire. There’s still a lot I don’t know about the forthcoming program, but I do now know that:

• It will be called MSP ARC

• ARC is short for “assess, review, cultivate”

• TD SYNNEX is excited enough about MSP ARC’s potential to have given Jessica McDowell, its SVP of North America marketing and digital customer success, several precious minutes of general session time at Inspire to talk about it

The biggest clue we got about the new offering is in that “assess, review, cultivate” bit. Among other things, Staab says, MSP ARC will help members assess the state of their business, review how they’re engaging with TD SYNNEX at present, and cultivate more ways to grow together.

Staab shared a few more details about what partners can expect during an appearance at Inspire on MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host. “They’re going to have peer-led cohorts, they’re going to have in-person sessions, and then they’re going to actually have a way to formulate goals of what they’re trying to accomplish to grow their business,” she said.

The best way to learn more about the partner program and everything else Staab’s team is working on right now is to listen to the whole conversation for yourself right here.

Speaking of MSP Chat…

Could it be true that an MSP exiting his business left $1 million on the table by intentionally accepting the second highest bid? And that he was very wise to do so?

Yes and yes, according to the also very wise Amy Babinchak and Rayanne Buchianico of M&A consultancy B2 MSP Advisors during an interview on the latest MSP Chat episode. Listen to that show here and then browse our many other equally compelling episodes here.

Let’s talk

When not writing this newsletter, I’m chief analyst at Channel Mastered, a consultancy that helps vendors build, grow, and optimize thriving MSP channels. Wrestling with a channel challenge? Hit me up here: rich@channelmastered.com.

Also worth noting

• NinjaOne has introduced an agentic AI technician that analyzes RMM data to recommend troubleshooting and remediation actions, along with an MCP server.

• Slide co-founder and chairman Austin McChord is now interim CEO as well.

• Former WatchGuard CEO Prakash Panjwani is now CEO of Acronis.

• Varonis has agreed to be purchased by Proofpoint for $6.3 billion.

• Proofpoint has also added capabilities to its MSP platform designed to help users protect Microsoft 365 customers against AI-related security and data risks.

• AI Defense, from Sophos, is designed to discover unauthorized AI usage and provide real-time protection against risks associated with it.

• Over 75% of security decision makers and practitioners surveyed by N-able still don’t fully trust AI-powered remediation without human review.

• Arctic Wolf’s new AI-powered Aurora Adaptive Threat Protection uses intent-based detection to identify and disrupt ransomware, credential theft, and other attacks early.

• Also from Arctic Wolf: The company has added shadow AI discovery, third-party security integrations, and a new generative AI assistant to its Aurora Superintelligence Platform.

• Also also from Arctic Wolf: The company’s forthcoming SwarmView capability will let customers examine how AI agents and human analysts collaborate to investigate threats, validate findings, and make security decisions.

• OK, one more: Arctic Wolf and Veeam have partnered to integrate BDR telemetry from Veeam Data Platform into Arctic Wolf’s Aurora Superintelligence Platform.

• Speaking of Veeam, its new Intelligent ResOps for Microsoft 365 solution helps users monitor AI agents, reduce storage costs, improve compliance, and more. Editions for Veeam Data Platform and Okta are in private preview.

• IRONSCALES and Todyl are partnering to embed the former’s AI-powered email security technology within the latter’s security platform for MSPs.

• Torq, covered here earlier in the year, has introduced a channel partner program designed to help security service providers compete with traditional SOC vendors.

• Blacksmith InfoSec is the latest vendor to achieve preferred vendor partner status in MSP OneShare, which I profiled here several weeks ago.

• Keeper Security and Tenable have announced an integration designed to streamline cloud risk identification, vulnerability assessment, and remediation.

• Ingram Micro has received a U.S. patent for its Vendor and Customer Agnostic Framework, a component of its Xvantage platform.

• Alexander Thomson is the new CEO and Patricia Tantow is the new CMO at CloudBolt.

• New capabilities in LogicMonitor’s Envision and Edwin AI platforms combine infrastructure monitoring, digital experience insights, governed remediation, and more.

• Blancco’s new agentic AI platform is designed to automate IT asset lifecycle management and secure data erasure workflows.

Businesses are pretty excited about AI. So much so that their AI spending has doubled in the last year, according to Boston Consulting Group.

And it’s not just big businesses. Small and midsize ones appear to be excited about AI too, enough so that 71% of them worldwide are using AI at present, according to Pax8’s latest SMB AI Report.

Indeed, pretty much everyone in the business world is excited about AI, as they always are initially for new technologies, observes Francisco Criado (pictured), TD SYNNEX’s SVP of security, cloud, and AI.

“Then they start getting the bills,” he says.

Which can be painful. Fully 57% of the U.S.-based SMBs Pax8 surveyed, in fact, have received an unexpectedly high AI bill in the past year, and 25% have received more than one. It’s a familiar problem, and not just to regular Channelholic readers. Veterans of the cloud explosion that preceded the current AI explosion know this nightmare all too well.

“AI has become the new unmanaged cloud spend, and I think we’ve all seen that movie before,” said Criado during an Inspire keynote. “Costs sprawled, nobody owned the bill, and we had to invent a whole new discipline to bring it under control. AI is doing that again, only faster.”

And in two separate places: the off-prem data centers that host frontier lab LLMs and the on-prem servers and even laptops that businesses increasingly use to host closed and open-source models locally. Businesses, it seems, no longer have a cloud FinOps problem or an AI FinOps problem. They have a FinOps problem, period, and need an answer to it everywhere they encounter usage-based pricing.

It’s a realization Criado and his team came to in May during partner meetings at TD SYNNEX’s High-Growth Conference that led just five months later during Inspire to the release of FinOps Fusion, a new service offering centralized visibility into cloud, AI, and local consumption spending.

“You get one view, one console where you get that entire estate,” Criado says.

Even if you bought the components of that estate from someone other than TD SYNNEX. “We can go into any environment and we can look at wherever that sits on premise or in the cloud,” Criado says. “There are no limits to it.”

At present, Fusion identifies rather than remediates overspending, but users get detailed recommendations on cost-cutting next steps like downsizing over-provisioned infrastructures, leveraging reserved instances, and replacing always-on environments with usage-based architectures.

Partners that neither can nor wish to manage that for clients themselves, moreover, can outsource the job to TD SYNNEX. According to Criado, they’ll reap customer retention and satisfaction rewards either way. AI spending is largely tied to token usage, he noted during his keynote.

“Whoever helps customers see, understand, and govern that usage helps them save money, unlock value, and scale AI responsibly. That opportunity belongs to you.”

It’s a revenue as well as stickiness opportunity, moreover. Users of TD SYNNEX’s pre-Fusion cloud FinOps service typically cut spending 15-30%, and Criado expects AI FinOps savings to be even higher. Converting some of that bounty into FinOps-as-a-service fees, he notes, is a good deal for everyone involved.

“That’s usually a pretty easy value proposition and most customers are going to say yes, because they’re going to save money regardless,” Criado says, adding that it can drive AI solution sales too.

“If you’re a line of business owner and you’re trying to convince your CFO and everybody to do an AI project, knowing that you have visibility and you’re not going to get surprises gives you a much better probability of getting your projects approved,” Criado says. It also helps you quantify what your customers are getting for all those tokens they’re consuming, he adds, which is the question everyone in IT needs to have answers for.

“Everybody likes the shiny new object and everybody gets really excited, but eventually we’re going to have to be able to show, as an industry, the ROI.”

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When I first got word back in June that Chris Day had a book for MSPs coming in the fall, I assumed it was about AI.

Not because Day posts regularly on LinkedIn about the impact AI is having at ScalePad, the managed services software vendor he serves as CEO. Or because Top Down Ventures, which he serves as chairman, is heavily invested in AI-native startups for MSPs, like Lemhi and Lexful, to name two you’ve met here before.

No, the best reason to assume that any book Day took the time to write at this moment would be about AI is that it’s the biggest issue in IT at present, if not ever, not to mention a topic that’s been dominating conversation in the channel all year.

But having gotten hold of the book—called MSP to MVP: Building Unbreakable Partnerships in the Customer Success Era—a couple of weeks ago, I can now report that I was wrong. It’s not about AI, at least directly. And if what Day says in it is correct and you reading this are an MSP, odds are good you’re wrong too, about at least four pretty important things:

1. You’re offering the wrong services. Because they probably lean hard towards the network, device, and cloud management MSPs have been delivering for as long as there have been MSPs, all of which were already commoditized years before people started assuming (wrongly) that Claude can handle all of that for them. This is the warning at the heart of Day’s book:

Right now, many MSPs are standing at the edge of a gap. On one side is the traditional business model, built around technology, tools and internal efficiency. On the other side is what clients increasingly expect: business outcomes, strategic guidance, and a partner who can help them grow. Crossing that gap is the defining challenge for our industry today.

To complete that journey, Day contends, yesterday’s troubleshooters must become today’s business enablers.

“I don’t think there’s another way forward other than pivoting into advisory,” Day (pictured below) told me during a conversation at a book launch party his publisher held for him in Manhattan recently. If I’m an MSP these days, he said, “I want to replace the commodity with something that’s value added, and I think it’ll end up being a higher margin service.”

Peter Melby (pictured first from left at the top of this story) agrees. The managed services world’s DNA is all about help desk services. “If that’s the primary DNA that exists in your MSP, you’re kind of screwed for the future,” said Melby, CEO of mega mega MSP New Charter Technologies, during a panel discussion at Day’s book launch. “Customer experience, customer success, the platform, the processes—that’s the center of the ecosystem now.”

2. You’re hiring the wrong people. If winning in managed services is more about driving customer success than managing technology, then MSPs need to hire for a different set of skills than they have before.

“We need people who understand how to go deep with customers,” Melby says.

And are fanatical about keeping customers happy, says Steven Freidkin (pictured second from left at the top of this story), CEO of managed services heavyweight Ntiva. You can find such people in unexpected places too, he adds.

“One of my best hires was maybe 20 years ago, and I met this person at a bar while she was hammered,” Freidkin says. But she was fun and witty and skilled, even while deep in her cups, at retaining information.

“I asked what she did, and she told me that she ran a daycare,” recalls Freidkin. He hired her on the spot, figuring she’d be a natural at managing help desk technicians.

“Where she nailed it was in client success,” he says. “Anything a customer needed, she would own and then she would go and wake up engineers, punch them in the face, whatever had to happen to get them to help that client in that moment.”

Employees that obsessed with customer satisfaction will be at least as valuable to MSPs going forward as AI developers, Freidkin believes, and more valuable than help desk technicians too.

3. You’re making the wrong investments. You are if they’re mostly about making your service desk more efficient, anyway. “I can spend all that time and modernize the help desk only for it to be outdated the moment that I get there,” Melby says. Better to invest in technologies that drive closer client relationships.

Like, for example, the Ntiva Artificial Thought and Language Intelligence Engine (aka NATALIE), a home-grown business intelligence solution filled with customer knowledge from across Freidkin’s company.

“With the data that we now have access to, we can start to get intelligent about what is actually driving challenges for the customer,” he says. “It’s not what you typically think.” When Ntiva asked the system what most stresses customers out, for example, the answer turned out to have nothing to do with network and email outages.

“NATALIE said our customers are most stressed out when they have to terminate an employee,” Freidkin says. Which, upon reflection, makes sense.

“They’re worried,” Freidkin says. “Is this going to happen on time? Is there a security risk? Am I going to replace this person? This is change in the organization.”

Based on that unexpected insight, Ntiva now reaches out to customers immediately after offboarding employees. “We make sure they know proactively that it’s been done correctly and on time,” Freidkin says. They call back the next day too just to say they understand how hard it is to let someone go.

“One or two of those calls and you earn trust,” Freidkin says. “That capital builds up. And with that capital, you get invited in to really be part of that organization.”

4. You’ve got the wrong outlook on the future. Some of you do anyway, according to Day, based on the many gloomy comments he provoked on Reddit after proclaiming on LinkedIn that “there is no better time to be alive as an MSP.” Freidkin found those responses unsurprising.

“The beauty of what technology has done is it’s automated so much process and so much execution that it took away the technical pieces, but now all you’re left with are the human pieces, and that shit’s hard,” he says. It’s also, he continues, a surmountable challenge.

“People who are willing to hustle, work hard, and embrace change are going to win,” he says.

The embracing change part is critical, though, as Day notes in his book. “The MSP industry has faced a moment like this before,” he writes.

There was a time when moving from break-fix to Managed Services felt risky and unnecessary. Many chose to stay where they were. Those who embraced the shift built stronger, more resilient businesses. The transition ahead is no different.

Inspire, in advance

I wrote most of the post you’re reading now on the long trip home to Seattle from TD SYNNEX’s 2026 Inspire conference in Greenville, S.C., which I will have a lot to say about next week. In the meantime, why not get a preview of my thoughts on the latest episode of MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host, and hear Augie Staab, the MSP sales director you met here recently, and Meredith Payne, the distributor’s VP of digital growth and customer success, talk about their latest plans and programs as well?

It’s all right here, and there’s more good stuff like it right here.

Why Hatz AI’s out of office space

Building AI-powered solutions isn’t the only way for MSPs to become MVPs, but it’s certainly one of them, and Day’s struck by how few MSPs are doing it at present.

“It’s going slower than I expected, and I think the risk of that is that the SMBs just figure it out themselves, which is not good,” he says.

It’s a legitimate possibility, too, because businesses of every size (not to mention their impatient employees) are moving on AI with or without their IT providers, according to Jimmy Hatzell, CEO of Hatz AI, an AI platform provider for MSPs.

“The market has really accelerated,” says Hatzell. “All of a sudden most end customers have one or two people who have started doing stuff with AI, and maybe some companies are doing even more than the MSPs are.”

Hatzell’s pretty sure he knows why. Getting into AI is a lot easier for end users who don’t understand the complexities involved than for MSPs who do.

“There’s a lot of work to do,” he says.

It’s been a while since you’ve heard from Hatzell here, and not for lack of trying on my part or his. He’s been a busy guy. Launched early in 2024, Hatz AI recently climbed past 1,000 partners and is on track to nearly quintuple revenue this year. To accommodate that growth, the company has hired a new president, AWS and Databricks veteran Jim Fanning, to help scale the business and leased a new, bigger headquarters it will soon occupy in Manhattan’s Flatiron District.

So if you want time with Hatzell these days, you pretty much have to corner him in his office, which is exactly what I did during my trip to New York for Day’s book launch. Except that Hatz AI has so outgrown its current office that there’s literally nowhere for visitors to sit, so we met in Madison Square Park instead.

Hatzell has no doubts about what accounts for his company’s momentum, especially among the 10-50 employee MSPs that are its fastest-growing partner segment. Building an AI practice involves answering a lot of deeply unfamiliar questions.

“What models am I supposed to use? How do I make it so I never have to think about what model I use and it just works? How do I make sure I’m secure? How do I make sure I’m not getting surprise bills that are way too big and nobody knew about?” Hatzell asks. “Our expertise is helping small and mid-sized businesses and MSPs figure that out.”

It’s a job that OpenAI, Anthropic, and the hyperscalers won’t take on and that few MSPs would entrust them with even if they did, according to Hatzell. “You don’t want to be locked into a single provider,” he says, noting that Hatz automatically routes tasks to the most affordable yet capable option on a continually updated list of closed- and open-source models.

“We’re scoring and judging new models and new tools on how they perform for small business use cases all the time,” Hatzell says.

All of which helps MSPs gain the control they want and too often lack over AI, he adds, and yet is arguably less responsible for the company’s growth than the help it offers with the biggest AI-related challenge of all right now for MSPs.

“Everyone’s trying to figure out how we go to market,” Hatzell says. Offering the basics, he continues, is an increasingly inadequate answer.

“We’re maturing past the point where the value proposition of ‘we’re going to secure your AI’ is good enough,” Hatzell says. Businesses don’t just want AI, he notes. They want AI-powered digital labor. “How to do that and how to use [AI] for that is not obvious.”

Hatz’s AI solution building tools are designed to make the process easier by allowing smaller MSPs to automate customer workflows without help from the forward deployed engineers that bigger providers like Shield and Evergreen are hiring.

“A lot of small businesses don’t necessarily need an engineer in their office five days a week who costs $1 million or $100,000 or whatever to build out this crazy AI pipeline,” Hatzell says. “What they need is a builder to help them build their invoice reconciliation agents and plans and workflows and just get them going.”

MSPs, meanwhile, need help getting sales going, which is why Hatz recently introduced Activate, a heavily automated prospecting tool. Upload a .csv full of client data or connect it to your PSA, and the system will identify potential use cases for AI solutions and services, walk account managers through readiness assessment calls, and prepare customer-ready proposals. More such updates are coming as quickly as Hatz’s very busy developers can roll them out.

“We’re releasing new features every single week,” Hatzell says.

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Over on Business of Tech

Host Dave Sobel is weighing the advantages of vibe coding apps you’d otherwise buy against the disadvantages of having to maintain those apps, much as I did recently:

In plain terms, AI made writing software nearly free and left the cost of owning it right where it was. When you buy, the vendor carries that cost. When you build, someone else has to. And if nobody is named, it lands wherever the software runs.

For most of your clients, that’s somewhere you’re already responsible for.

More here.

Dr. Backup will see you now

Hatz AI’s having its greatest impact among 10-50 person MSPs. Nancy Henriquez wants to make an impact on even smaller firms.

“I’m really looking to work with the MSPs that reflect who I was when I was an MSP,” she says.

That was back in pre-pandemic times, when Henriquez drew on grit, trial, and error to turn a fledgling IT shop near Houston into the business she successfully sold to a larger firm in 2021. She’s been lending a helping hand to the industry’s smallest providers ever since, through the sales, marketing, and operations consultancy you read about here last winter, the book she published last fall, the MSP community (called MSP Unplugged) she’s been helping run since June, and now the backup business she acquired two months ago.

Which is the least likely of her ventures to date. Called Dr. Backup, the company provides fully outsourced data protection services to break-fix practitioners and MSPs too small to handle BDR on their own. Henriquez (pictured) had never heard of it when a friend told her about it, and had little interest in owning it right away either.

“Honestly, I didn’t really see myself being on this side of the MSP world,” she says, and especially not in backup. Then she took a closer look.

“It was a 20-plus year old company, and it was stable, it was profitable,” she says. It also had 100 partners with no more than a handful of employees each and a familiar set of challenges to cope with.

“I immediately saw, ‘OK, that’s where I can really help,’” Henriquez recalls.

Her unconventional plan for doing so treats backup and other services even the smallest MSP must offer as the foundation of a kind of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid for MSPs that layers on education, coaching, and peer-to-peer mentorship.

“And all of that coming up to the very tippy top of that pyramid, which is self-actualization,” Henriquez says.

The ultimate goal, she continues, is to help tech entrepreneurs who value independence over growth remain independent rather than sell to one of the many investors actively constructing MSP platforms.

“That’s not to say that growth can’t be achieved while remaining independent,” Henriquez says. “I think that it absolutely can, but it takes a community to do that.”

Which is why rolling out a partner program is priority number one for Henriquez at present. “If you resell or are one of the partners that works with Dr. Backup, our partner program will have some of the coaching practices that I have embedded into that,” she says, along with informal monthly member meetings.

“We’ll also bring in experts to help educate and encourage them in the ways that they need, whether that be sales support, whether that be marketing assistance, or whether that be operational assistance,” Henriquez adds.

Product upgrades, including integrations with popular RMM and PSA solutions and remote assistance, are on the roadmap too, along with white labeling, which Henriquez knows from personal experience matters a lot to MSPs who don’t want something as critical as backup to look like it’s coming from someone else.

“It’s their own, and we’re acting as their team,” she says.

And doing so 24 x 7, moreover. “I’m staying up at night so you don’t have to,” Henriquez says.

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Let’s talk

When not writing this newsletter, I’m chief analyst at Channel Mastered, a consultancy that helps vendors build, grow, and optimize thriving MSP channels. Wrestling with a channel challenge of your own? Hit me up here: rich@channelmastered.com.

Also worth noting

• CyberFOX has acquired Microsoft 365 tenant monitoring and hardening startup Optimize365.

• Smart move from a cyberinsurer: Cowbell has introduced Risk Advisor, which gives policyholders personalized, prioritized recommendations for reducing cyber and AI risks.

• Cisco’s new agentic collaboration features include AI teammates in Webex and a framework for giving customer service agents context across interactions.

• Arcserve has launched ransomware protection and recovery suites that combine backup, immutable cloud storage, recovery testing, and more.

• Agent adoption is outpacing agent governance: only 59% of organizations make agents obey the same governance rules they apply to human users, according to JumpCloud.

• HYCU’s free aiR Graph tool is designed to discover AI agents, map their permissions and application access, and identify exposed applications lacking independent backup.

• Don’t blame agents for everything: new data from Kaseya finds that 68% of IT professionals call human error their biggest unsolved cybersecurity problem.

• Forcepoint and BeyondTrust have introduced an integration that connects identity risk with sensitive data exposure.

• Security’s still red hot: Pinpoint Search Group reported that cybersecurity vendors raised $5.26 billion across 104 funding rounds in Q3, up 78% year over year.

• Dell’s new AI Data Platform enhancements include semantic definitions, knowledge graphs, knowledge agents, accelerated processing, and more.

• CrashPlan has added backup and recovery for Windows and Linux servers and Google Workspace to its small business data protection portfolio.

• BackBox’s network cyber resilience platform is now named Kilter and equipped with AI-assisted vulnerability remediation and automation functionality.

• TD SYNNEX has acquired BlueStar, a specialty distributor with expertise in mobility, point-of-sale, digital signage, networking, security, and more.

• Electronic signature vendor SignWell is the newest addition to TD SYNNEX’s U.S. line card.

• The new Parallels Desktop Partner Program and expanded Workspaces Partner Program are designed to help members with customer adoption, technical expertise, and service delivery.

Hatz AI’s having its greatest impact among 10-50 person MSPs. Nancy Henriquez wants to make an impact on even smaller firms.

“I’m really looking to work with the MSPs that reflect who I was when I was an MSP,” she says.

That was back in pre-pandemic times, when Henriquez drew on grit, trial, and error to turn a fledgling IT shop near Houston into the business she successfully sold to a larger firm in 2021. She’s been lending a helping hand to the industry’s smallest providers ever since, through the sales, marketing, and operations consultancy you read about here last winter, the book she published last fall, the MSP community (called MSP Unplugged) she’s been helping run since June, and now the backup business she acquired two months ago.

Which is the least likely of her ventures to date. Called Dr. Backup, the company provides fully outsourced data protection services to break-fix practitioners and MSPs too small to handle BDR on their own. Henriquez (pictured) had never heard of it when a friend told her about it, and had little interest in owning it right away either.

“Honestly, I didn’t really see myself being on this side of the MSP world,” she says, and especially not in backup. Then she took a closer look.

“It was a 20-plus year old company, and it was stable, it was profitable,” she says. It also had 100 partners with no more than a handful of employees each and a familiar set of challenges to cope with.

“I immediately saw, ‘OK, that’s where I can really help,’” Henriquez recalls.

Her unconventional plan for doing so treats backup and other services even the smallest MSP must offer as the foundation of a kind of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid for MSPs that layers on education, coaching, and peer-to-peer mentorship.

“And all of that coming up to the very tippy top of that pyramid, which is self-actualization,” Henriquez says.

The ultimate goal, she continues, is to help tech entrepreneurs who value independence over growth remain independent rather than sell to one of the many investors actively constructing MSP platforms.

“That’s not to say that growth can’t be achieved while remaining independent,” Henriquez says. “I think that it absolutely can, but it takes a community to do that.”

Which is why rolling out a partner program is priority number one for Henriquez at present. “If you resell or are one of the partners that works with Dr. Backup, our partner program will have some of the coaching practices that I have embedded into that,” she says, along with informal monthly member meetings.

“We’ll also bring in experts to help educate and encourage them in the ways that they need, whether that be sales support, whether that be marketing assistance, or whether that be operational assistance,” Henriquez adds.

Product upgrades, including integrations with popular RMM and PSA solutions and remote assistance, are on the roadmap too, along with white labeling, which Henriquez knows from personal experience matters a lot to MSPs who don’t want something as critical as backup to look like it’s coming from someone else.

“It’s their own, and we’re acting as their team,” she says.

And doing so 24 x 7, moreover. “I’m staying up at night so you don’t have to,” Henriquez says.

Share

Building AI-powered solutions isn’t the only way for MSPs to become MVPs, but it’s certainly one of them, and ScalePad CEO Chris Day’s struck by how few MSPs are doing it at present.

“It’s going slower than I expected, and I think the risk of that is that the SMBs just figure it out themselves, which is not good,” he says.

It’s a legitimate possibility, too, because businesses of every size (not to mention their impatient employees) are moving on AI with or without their IT providers, according to Jimmy Hatzell, CEO of Hatz AI, an AI platform provider for MSPs.

“The market has really accelerated,” says Hatzell. “All of a sudden most end customers have one or two people who have started doing stuff with AI, and maybe some companies are doing even more than the MSPs are.”

Hatzell’s pretty sure he knows why. Getting into AI is a lot easier for end users who don’t understand the complexities involved than for MSPs who do.

“There’s a lot of work to do,” he says.

It’s been a while since you’ve heard from Hatzell here, and not for lack of trying on my part or his. He’s been a busy guy. Launched early in 2024, Hatz AI recently climbed past 1,000 partners and is on track to nearly quintuple revenue this year. To accommodate that growth, the company has hired a new president, AWS and Databricks veteran Jim Fanning, to help scale the business and leased a new, bigger headquarters it will soon occupy in Manhattan’s Flatiron District.

So if you want time with Hatzell these days, you pretty much have to corner him in his office, which is exactly what I did during my trip to New York for Day’s recent book launch. Except that Hatz AI has so outgrown its current office that there’s literally nowhere for visitors to sit, so we met in Madison Square Park instead.

Hatzell has no doubts about what accounts for his company’s momentum, especially among the 10-50 employee MSPs that are its fastest-growing partner segment. Building an AI practice involves answering a lot of deeply unfamiliar questions.

“What models am I supposed to use? How do I make it so I never have to think about what model I use and it just works? How do I make sure I’m secure? How do I make sure I’m not getting surprise bills that are way too big and nobody knew about?” Hatzell asks. “Our expertise is helping small and mid-sized businesses and MSPs figure that out.”

It’s a job that OpenAI, Anthropic, and the hyperscalers won’t take on and that few MSPs would entrust them with even if they did, according to Hatzell. “You don’t want to be locked into a single provider,” he says, noting that Hatz automatically routes tasks to the most affordable yet capable option on a continually updated list of closed- and open-source models.

“We’re scoring and judging new models and new tools on how they perform for small business use cases all the time,” Hatzell says.

All of which helps MSPs gain the control they want and too often lack over AI, he adds, and yet is arguably less responsible for the company’s growth than the help it offers with the biggest AI-related challenge of all right now for MSPs.

“Everyone’s trying to figure out how we go to market,” Hatzell says. Offering the basics, he continues, is an increasingly inadequate answer.

“We’re maturing past the point where the value proposition of ‘we’re going to secure your AI’ is good enough,” Hatzell says. Businesses don’t just want AI, he notes. They want AI-powered digital labor. “How to do that and how to use [AI] for that is not obvious.”

Hatz’s AI solution building tools are designed to make the process easier by allowing smaller MSPs to automate customer workflows without help from the forward deployed engineers that bigger providers like Shield and Evergreen are hiring.

“A lot of small businesses don’t necessarily need an engineer in their office five days a week who costs $1 million or $100,000 or whatever to build out this crazy AI pipeline,” Hatzell says. “What they need is a builder to help them build their invoice reconciliation agents and plans and workflows and just get them going.”

MSPs, meanwhile, need help getting sales going, which is why Hatz recently introduced Activate, a heavily automated prospecting tool. Upload a .csv full of client data or connect it to your PSA, and the system will identify potential use cases for AI solutions and services, walk account managers through readiness assessment calls, and prepare customer-ready proposals. More such updates are coming as quickly as Hatz’s very busy developers can roll them out.

“We’re releasing new features every single week,” Hatzell says.

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An economist at Princeton recently wondered what John Maynard Keynes would make of AI. So he trained a model on 12,000 pages of Keynes’s writing plus a handful of recordings and asked. The response he got, from 80 years beyond the grave, wasn’t encouraging.

“Unfortunately, I see the emergence of A.I. introducing new challenges,” warned KeynesBot. “I fear you may end up with skilled and overworked professionals with money but no time, and the rest of society with time but no money.”

Actually, a lot of skilled and overworked professionals in managed services have neither money nor time right now, according to Omdia chief analyst Jay McBain.

“When you’re in front of an audience like this one here, like 1,000 people, two thirds of them are not feeling the exuberance that maybe the vendors do and maybe the new trillionaires that are being minted do,” he said during an interview recorded at last week’s MSP Summit in Orlando for an episode of MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host.

McBain doesn’t blame them either. Omdia expects most of the $85 billion businesses will spend on partner-led AI services this year to flow to sophisticated integrators with both solution-building expertise and giant managed services practices. According to McBain, that combination makes them a threat to MSPs that do ongoing management alone.

“If you want to stay in that lane, not a lot of the $85 billion today is there,” he says. “It will be in five years, but by not being in the room today before the sale, in this business-level, SaaS-level consulting, it may hurt you later on because those people are in the business that you’re in.”

That’s exactly what worries Jeff Totten, co-founder and CEO of Evergreen, the managed services giant you’ve read about here a time or two, because he’s seen it happen before. MSPs did well in the tech industry’s cloud wave and security wave, he told me during an MSP Summit interview, but pretty much missed its equally enormous SaaS wave.

“MSPs don’t really have much of a role in administering Salesforce and HubSpot and a lot of these best-in-class SaaS solutions,” Totten (pictured) said. And they’ll miss an AI wave set to top $3.6 trillion globally by next year, according to Gartner, as well if they take their time about catching it.

“If a customer doesn’t think about AI and their MSP in the same thought, that creates a risk over time,” Totten cautions, adding that Evergreen is working hard to mitigate that risk.

“We want our MSPs to be on the front lines with customers of helping them use this,” he says.

As a result, Evergreen is pushing its more than 160 MSPs to get something AI-related going with their clients—all of them—ASAP. Sometimes, according to Totten, that takes the form of a secure AI initiative aimed at ferreting out shadow usage. Other times, it begins with a leadership workshop.

“We’ll say, ‘hey, bring your executive team in. We’ll train you on how to use AI, talk about some use case that you want to work on, and maybe we’ll build something together,’” Totten explains.

Some of those projects are being delivered by the forward deployed engineers that eight Evergreen portfolio companies are currently hiring and re-training from within. “They can internally work on efficiency projects at our MSPs, but then also can go to a customer site and automate a manual process for them,” Totten says. “Those are opportunities to really embed with our customers.”

They’re also an example of what Rob Rae, corporate VP of community and ecosystems at Pax8, would like to see everyone doing.

“The one thing that I’m pushing right now really hard on is the fact that every MSP needs to be talking to every single one of their end users about AI,” he says. And they’re not.

“I’ve probably asked about 1,000, maybe 1,200, 1,500 MSPs about how many of you are talking to 100% of your customers about AI, or at least have introduced the fact that if you need anything in AI, call me,” Rae says. “It’s maybe 20% at best.”

The other 80% run the risk of losing clients to integrators, peers, and AI consultants while they perfect a go-to-market strategy.

“We know that this is going to be game changing for all of us,” says Rae of AI. “We just don’t quite know all the answers yet.”

And don’t have time to dawdle while we figure them out.

Great people? Great relationships? Prove it.

AI isn’t the only thing big-time MSPs like Evergreen think about these days. Indeed, it didn’t even come up when I asked Totten and three of his peers atop the managed services pyramid what they look for when evaluating acquisition targets during an MSP Summit panel I moderated. Except as something not to look for, that is.

“There’s so much bullshit when it comes to AI out there,” said Peter Melby (pictured), CEO of New Charter Technologies. “The reality is that AI is built by people and it should be built for people.”

Which is why he, Totten, Jim Siders of Shield, and Saurin Patel of Titan all agreed that great people and strong client relationships outweigh AI know-how as multiple multipliers right now.

“You won’t be able to do anything with AI if you first don’t have very happy customers and deep relationships,” Patel noted.

True enough, but I pushed on the topic a little nonetheless when speaking privately with Totten the next day. Veterans of the managed services scene like me have long known that if you ask 100 MSPs what sets them apart from everyone else, 95 will say great people and strong client relationships. How does Evergreen separate the MSPs that claim to have those things from the ones that really do?

Totten cited three specific metrics: net revenue retention, customer net promoter score, and employee net promoter score. The first two are proxies for client satisfaction. The third is an indicator of employee satisfaction, which tends to correspond with great leadership teams, according to Totten.

Other qualities Evergreen watches for are harder to quantify. “There’s a lot of intangibles,” Totten says, including some that can only be assessed in person.

“We show up at the offices of the company when we’re doing diligence,” Totten notes. “We can usually tell if folks enjoy working with each other or not.”

And if they enjoy where they work, he adds. A “decrepit” workplace is a usually deal-breaking sign of a management team that claims to care about its people but doesn’t.

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Abacus doesn’t do generalists

Vertical industry expertise didn’t come up as a valuation booster in my interview with Totten or during that MSP Summit panel, but for the right buyer it makes a huge difference.

Abacus, a global managed IT and cybersecurity provider, is one of those buyers. “We are maniacally focused on two verticals, the financial services vertical and the healthcare vertical,” said Jonathan Bohrer (pictured), the company’s president, during an MSP Summit conversation. “We are not a generalist.”

Which by extension means it doesn’t buy generalists either, a fact that presents both advantages and disadvantages in the M&A market. The obvious disadvantage is that great specialists are harder to find than great generalists. The chief advantage is that specialists tend to like joining forces with other specialists.

“When we get in front of somebody in the healthcare space, we speak their language,” Bohrer notes. “We become a much more compelling cultural fit.”

With an extremely compelling joint market opportunity, one might add, especially in AI. U.S. businesses spent $1.4 billion on healthcare AI last year, according to Menlo Ventures, nearly triple what they spent the year before, and healthcare organizations are deploying AI at more than twice the rate of the broader economy.

Those investments are paying off too, according to recent data from Bessemer Venture Partners showing that buyers projected ROI on healthcare AI spending within about 24 months, on average, and got it in about 12 instead. The situation is similar in financial services, where 89% of companies surveyed by NVIDIA say AI’s helping increase revenue and decrease costs.

Abacus has been capitalizing on that adoption appetite within both verticals in multiple areas, including security. Investment firms, for example, are simultaneously encouraging employees to develop custom AI-powered analytical models and worrying about the harm those models could do.

“The citizen coder is very dangerous,” Bohrer notes. “But to an investment manager, not having a citizen coder to compete is even more dangerous.” As a result, Wall Street is pleading with firms like Abacus for help deploying AI safely. Helping healthcare providers optimize “revenue lifecycle management” is proving equally promising.

“The healthcare holy grail is [addressing] the difficulties of billing and insurance and which code and all that,” Bohrer says. “It’s a really good use case for AI.” Indeed, back office AI investments are returning 3-4x their cost within 12 months on average, according to Bessemer.

Use cases like that abound in pretty much every vertical, including retail and field services, as regular readers have seen here recently. And there are a lot of verticals. 1,012 of them to be precise in SMB alone, according to Omdia’s McBain during that MSP Chat episode I mentioned before. Take just one, he says, like flower shops, and you’re likely to find nine industry-specific, AI-powered enterprise solutions for sale. The same goes everywhere else too.

“If you don’t own a flower shop, you own a tanning salon or if you own a daycare center, you have your own nine versions of somebody went out on Microsoft .NET and built something to manage your entire business,” McBain says.

Every last buyer of those systems will need help choosing one, implementing it, and customizing it from someone like Abacus, moreover. “We have a real sense of optimism that there’s opportunity there on the advisory side,” Bohrer says.

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Let’s face it, there’s no substitute for speaking with Jay McBain directly

The next best thing, though, is hearing him speak, as you can in that MSP Chat episode I just mentioned, where we get into the partner-led services opportunity in AI, the future of resale, the power of community in the channel, and much more. Tune in here, and then go here to check out our many other insightful interviews with industry thought leaders here.

Omnissa gives agents a desk

I travel a lot, so I recently created a skill in ChatGPT to automate trip planning. I simply tell it where I need to be and when, and based on a lot of information it has about my preferred airline (Delta), preferred hotel chain (Hilton), seating preference (window, please), and the like it books a whole itinerary for me with very little assistance.

Sounds great, right? It is, usually. Last week, though, I arrived at a hotel the agent had booked for me in Manhattan and got a puzzled question from the guy at the check-in desk.

“It’s just you?” he asked. Yes, I replied. “Then why did you book a quad?”

Wondering what a quad is? So was I. Here’s the answer:

That was my home away from home for two nights, as well as a helpful reminder that while AI grows more useful by the week, if not day, you still can’t trust it to get even simple things right 100% of the time.

As it happens, Peter Melby had flagged the importance of trust in AI two days earlier during that MSP Summit panel session I moderated. Like all four companies represented onstage, New Charter is spending growing amounts of time designing, developing, and delivering increasingly autonomous AI solutions for its clients. According to Melby, the process usually includes a conversation about pain points and business goals, but doesn’t start there. It doesn’t start with the security and data readiness work that precedes successful AI deployments either.

“It starts with trust,” he says. Meaning you’ve got to earn the right to build something autonomous for a customer by first winning their confidence, in you, in AI, and in agentic AI more specifically.

Omnissa sees things the same way, so much so that the theme of its Omnissa ONE conference in Orlando, 10 minutes up the road from the MSP Summit, was “Trust is built. Autonomy follows.”

The autonomy Omnissa was talking about isn’t the one MSPs pursuing agentic AI typically have in mind. Spun out of VMware in the wake of that company’s sale to Broadcom, Omnissa is a maker of virtual desktop, virtual app, and endpoint management software dedicated to building “digital workspaces” that configure, secure, and heal themselves dynamically in AI-enabled, context-based ways. MSPs, by contrast, are increasingly using autonomous apps to manage help desks and digitize end user workflows. The common thread in both cases is an understanding that no one will deploy autonomous anything until they know it’s trustworthy.

Hence one of Omnissa’s biggest announcements last week (along with hiring a new CEO): the launch of Elara, a governance solution designed to help businesses monitor and control autonomous environments, and in doing so build trust in a new and potentially powerful use case for virtual desktops.

The original and still most popular use cases will be familiar to anyone in IT. For end users, they include anywhere, anytime access to their corporate workspace on any device. For IT departments, notes Renu Upadhyay (pictured), Omnissa’s SVP and CMO, they mostly concern security and efficiency.

“The image is locked down,” she says. “You can batch things. You’re doing it once in the cloud, and it’s delivered everywhere.”

All of which remains as relevant as ever to a new set of digital, rather than human, end users. Virtual desktops may not be sandboxes, per se, but they are containerized in ways that make deploying agents in them safer and monitoring what they’re up to easier.

There are other advantages too. An agent running in a cloud-based virtual desktop can keep running nights and weekends even when your physical endpoint is shut off. IT teams can conserve precious compute resources by spinning up “non-persistent desktops” when they’re needed and then spinning them back down when they’re not anymore.

All of which should sound good to anyone supporting users eager to deploy more agents more quickly, including MSPs. “You don’t want to say no,” Upadhyay observes. “You want to say yes.” A virtual desktop, she notes, lets you do so in a way that maximizes effectiveness and minimizes risk.

“It’s connected to the other systems that you use for your job. It’s secure. It’s contained,” Upadhyay says.

And you can bill people for administering it just like you would any other device.

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Over on Business of Tech

Host Dave Sobel discusses the downside of automating the help desk with AI:

Knowing when an answer is wrong isn’t a separate skill. It comes from having produced the answer yourself, many times, the slow way … A technician learns what a bad fix looks like by making bad fixes and cleaning them up. They learn which log line matters by reading a thousand that don’t. The check and the work are built by the same repetitions. When the work goes to the machine, the repetitions go with it. The check stops being built, even while the output looks better than ever.

More here.

ESET bundles up for AI

If trust is the first step toward successful AI adoption, per Omnissa, security is a close second.

Or rather, it should be, but all too often isn’t, according to Ryan Grant (pictured), country manager for the U.S. and Canada at ESET North America. Per the company’s 2026 SMB Cyber Readiness Index, he notes, few SMBs using AI are protecting themselves effectively from the technology’s many (often uninsurable) risks.

“The feedback was very clear that people are just using whatever tools they can get access to,” Grant says. “It’s an unmanaged environment.”

Actually, the picture painted by that study is even uglier than that. Only 11% of SMBs have a complete set of what ESET considers minimal safeguards for securing anything, let alone AI. The new solution portfolio ESET unveiled last week is designed to raise that number by giving the MSPs most SMBs rely on a bundled collection of solutions and services to deploy.

“Think of it as cybersecurity as a service,” Grant says. “It’s all in one.”

That includes the antivirus, vulnerability scanning, patch management, and other solutions long included in the ESET PROTECT platform, plus the AI-era additions the company introduced at the Black Hat conference two months ago, one of which secures end user interaction with chatbots in web browsers.

“What are they actually prompting AI with? Are they uploading any kind of confidential information? Are they downloading any potential scripts?” Grant says.

A second newly added component automatically blocks suspicious or dangerous agent behavior, while a third inspects agentic skills for malicious content. A free version of that tool available on ESET’s website has already scanned some 900,000 files.

“25,000 came back suspicious and 3,000 were malicious,” Grant says.

Buyers can now choose among three ESET PROTECT tiers. The Core edition offers comprehensive baseline defenses for AI and beyond to organizations with five or more seats. The Premium edition adds autonomous 24/7 MDR protection for companies with 10 seats and above. The Ultimate edition includes live contact with ESET’s threat hunting team along with threat analysis and remediation support. Optional add-ons for security awareness training, MDR onboarding assistance, and cyber warranty coverage are available as well.

The goal across all three tiers, according to Grant, is to strengthen SMB security by helping MSPs acquire SMB security tools more easily. “It’s just simple,” he says, and for an equally simple reason.

“MSPs constantly tell us we’re overwhelmed.”

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When not writing this newsletter, I’m chief analyst at Channel Mastered, a consultancy that helps vendors build, grow, and optimize thriving MSP channels. Wrestling with a channel challenge of your own? Contact me here.

Also worth noting

• Auvik and Acronis are allying to embed the former’s network management capabilities within the latter’s RMM solution.

• CISO Advantage, from Sophos, is an agentic-AI solution that produces prioritized, budget-aligned security improvement roadmaps.

• Cortex XCOR, from Palo Alto Networks, is an AI-native observability platform that autonomously performs root cause analysis and recommends remediation for production incidents.

• Exabeam has rolled out AI agent governance, AI-assisted analyst workflows, and other new agentic SOC capabilities.

• Keeper Security’s latest integration lets users approve or deny vault and privileged access requests within Freshservice tickets without violating security controls.

• CyberFOX is the newest member of TD SYNNEX’s North American security line card.

• DNSFilter’s Channel Partner Program now features a new three-tier structure for resellers.

• Cyber insurance industry consortium CyberAcuView selected CYGNVS as its official cyber incident response management platform.

• Legal AI vendor Clio, which you’ve met here before, has expanded into judiciary apps by acquiring Learned Hand, a maker of AI tech for judges and courts.

• Microsoft’s new Frontier Partner specialization for agentic AI is now live.

• Also from Microsoft: Unified for Partners, a forthcoming support offering, will give CSP partners enhanced diagnostics, new customer success tools, and more.

• IDrive Business aims to provide affordable cloud backup services to small and growing businesses.

• Virtuozzo’s new V/Partner global channel program expands commercial incentives, enablement, marketing, and support benefits.

• Mari-Frances Bentvelzen is the new president of revenue and commercial operations at ConnectWise.

• Allison Clarke is the first-ever VP of partner programs and GTM strategy at WatchGuard.

• Former Pia CRO Nic Ferraro, who you’ve met here before, is the new chief growth officer at AI usage management vendor AIONIX.

If trust is the first step toward successful AI adoption, per Omnissa, security is a close second.

Or rather, it should be, but all too often isn’t, according to Ryan Grant (pictured), country manager for the U.S. and Canada at ESET North America. Per the company’s 2026 SMB Cyber Readiness Index, he notes, few SMBs using AI are protecting themselves effectively from the technology’s many (often uninsurable) risks.

“The feedback was very clear that people are just using whatever tools they can get access to,” Grant says. “It’s an unmanaged environment.”

Actually, the picture painted by that study is even uglier than that. Only 11% of SMBs have a complete set of what ESET considers minimal safeguards for securing anything, let alone AI. The new solution portfolio ESET unveiled last week is designed to raise that number by giving the MSPs most SMBs rely on a bundled collection of solutions and services to deploy.

“Think of it as cybersecurity as a service,” Grant says. “It’s all in one.”

That includes the antivirus, vulnerability scanning, patch management, and other solutions long included in the ESET PROTECT platform, plus the AI-era additions the company introduced at the Black Hat conference two months ago, one of which secures end user interaction with chatbots in web browsers.

“What are they actually prompting AI with? Are they uploading any kind of confidential information? Are they downloading any potential scripts?” Grant says.

A second newly added component automatically blocks suspicious or dangerous agent behavior, while a third inspects agentic skills for malicious content. A free version of that tool available on ESET’s website has already scanned some 900,000 files.

“25,000 came back suspicious and 3,000 were malicious,” Grant says.

Buyers can now choose among three ESET PROTECT tiers. The Core edition offers comprehensive baseline defenses for AI and beyond to organizations with five or more seats. The Premium edition adds autonomous 24/7 MDR protection for companies with 10 seats and above. The Ultimate edition includes live contact with ESET’s threat hunting team along with threat analysis and remediation support. Optional add-ons for security awareness training, MDR onboarding assistance, and cyber warranty coverage are available as well.

The goal across all three tiers, according to Grant, is to strengthen SMB security by helping MSPs acquire SMB security tools more easily. “It’s just simple,” he says, and for an equally simple reason.

“MSPs constantly tell us we’re overwhelmed.”

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When not writing this newsletter, I’m chief analyst at Channel Mastered, a consultancy that helps vendors build, grow, and optimize thriving MSP channels. Wrestling with a channel challenge of your own? Contact me here.

I travel a lot, so I recently created a skill in ChatGPT to automate trip planning. I simply tell it where I need to be and when, and based on a lot of information it has about my preferred airline (Delta), preferred hotel chain (Hilton), seating preference (window, please), and the like it books a whole itinerary for me with very little assistance.

Sounds great, right? It is, usually. Last week, though, I arrived at a hotel the agent had booked for me in Manhattan and got a puzzled question from the guy at the check-in desk.

“It’s just you?” he asked. Yes, I replied. “Then why did you book a quad?”

Wondering what a quad is? So was I. Here’s the answer:

That was my home away from home for two nights, as well as a helpful reminder that while AI grows more useful by the week, if not day, you still can’t trust it to get even simple things right 100% of the time.

As it happens, Peter Melby, CEO of New Charter Technologies, had flagged the importance of trust in AI two days earlier during a panel session I moderated at the MSP Summit in Orlando. Like all four companies represented onstage, New Charter is spending growing amounts of time designing, developing, and delivering increasingly autonomous AI solutions for its clients. According to Melby, the process usually includes a conversation about pain points and business goals, but doesn’t start there. It doesn’t start with the security and data readiness work that precedes successful AI deployments either.

“It starts with trust,” he says. Meaning you’ve got to earn the right to build something autonomous for a customer by first winning their confidence, in you, in AI, and in agentic AI more specifically.

Omnissa sees things the same way, so much so that the theme of its Omnissa ONE conference in Orlando, 10 minutes up the road from the MSP Summit, was “Trust is built. Autonomy follows.”

The autonomy Omnissa was talking about isn’t the one MSPs pursuing agentic AI typically have in mind. Spun out of VMware in the wake of that company’s sale to Broadcom, Omnissa is a maker of virtual desktop, virtual app, and endpoint management software dedicated to building “digital workspaces” that configure, secure, and heal themselves dynamically in AI-enabled, context-based ways. MSPs, by contrast, are increasingly using autonomous apps to manage help desks and digitize end user workflows. The common thread in both cases is an understanding that no one will deploy autonomous anything until they know it’s trustworthy.

Hence one of Omnissa’s biggest announcements last week (along with hiring a new CEO): the launch of Elara, a governance solution designed to help businesses monitor and control autonomous environments, and in doing so build trust in a new and potentially powerful use case for virtual desktops.

The original and still most popular use cases will be familiar to anyone in IT. For end users, they include anywhere, anytime access to their corporate workspace on any device. For IT departments, notes Renu Upadhyay (pictured), Omnissa’s SVP and CMO, they mostly concern security and efficiency.

“The image is locked down,” she says. “You can batch things. You’re doing it once in the cloud, and it’s delivered everywhere.”

All of which remains as relevant as ever to a new set of digital, rather than human, end users. Virtual desktops may not be sandboxes, per se, but they are containerized in ways that make deploying agents in them safer and monitoring what they’re up to easier.

There are other advantages too. An agent running in a cloud-based virtual desktop can keep running nights and weekends even when your physical endpoint is shut off. IT teams can conserve precious compute resources by spinning up “non-persistent desktops” when they’re needed and then spinning them back down when they’re not anymore.

All of which should sound good to anyone supporting users eager to deploy more agents more quickly, including MSPs. “You don’t want to say no,” Upadhyay observes. “You want to say yes.” A virtual desktop, she notes, lets you do so in a way that maximizes effectiveness and minimizes risk.

“It’s connected to the other systems that you use for your job. It’s secure. It’s contained,” Upadhyay says.

And you can bill people for administering it just like you would any other device.

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Vertical industry expertise didn’t come up as a valuation booster in my recent MSP Summit panel or my interview with Evergreen’s Jeff Totten, but for the right buyer it makes a huge difference.

Abacus, a global managed IT and cybersecurity provider, is one of those buyers. “We are maniacally focused on two verticals, the financial services vertical and the healthcare vertical,” said Jonathan Bohrer (pictured), the company’s president, during an MSP Summit conversation. “We are not a generalist.”

Which by extension means it doesn’t buy generalists either, a fact that presents both advantages and disadvantages in the M&A market. The obvious disadvantage is that great specialists are harder to find than great generalists. The chief advantage is that specialists tend to like joining forces with other specialists.

“When we get in front of somebody in the healthcare space, we speak their language,” Bohrer notes. “We become a much more compelling cultural fit.”

With an extremely compelling joint market opportunity, one might add, especially in AI. U.S. businesses spent $1.4 billion on healthcare AI last year, according to Menlo Ventures, nearly triple what they spent the year before, and healthcare organizations are deploying AI at more than twice the rate of the broader economy.

Those investments are paying off too, according to recent data from Bessemer Venture Partners showing that buyers projected ROI on healthcare AI spending within about 24 months, on average, and got it in about 12 instead. The situation is similar in financial services, where 89% of companies surveyed by NVIDIA say AI’s helping increase revenue and decrease costs.

Abacus has been capitalizing on that adoption appetite within both verticals in multiple areas, including security. Investment firms, for example, are simultaneously encouraging employees to develop custom AI-powered analytical models and worrying about the harm those models could do.

“The citizen coder is very dangerous,” Bohrer notes. “But to an investment manager, not having a citizen coder to compete is even more dangerous.” As a result, Wall Street is pleading with firms like Abacus for help deploying AI safely. Helping healthcare providers optimize “revenue lifecycle management” is proving equally promising.

“The healthcare holy grail is [addressing] the difficulties of billing and insurance and which code and all that,” Bohrer says. “It’s a really good use case for AI.” Indeed, back office AI investments are returning 3-4x their cost within 12 months on average, according to Bessemer.

Use cases like that abound in pretty much every vertical, including retail and field services, as regular readers have seen here recently. And there are a lot of verticals. 1,012 of them to be precise in SMB alone, according to Omdia’s Jay McBain during a recent interview on MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host. Take just one, he says, like flower shops, and you’re likely to find nine industry-specific, AI-powered enterprise solutions for sale. The same goes everywhere else too.

“If you don’t own a flower shop, you own a tanning salon or if you own a daycare center, you have your own nine versions of somebody went out on Microsoft .NET and built something to manage your entire business,” McBain says.

Every last buyer of those systems will need help choosing one, implementing it, and customizing it from someone like Abacus, moreover. “We have a real sense of optimism that there’s opportunity there on the advisory side,” Bohrer says.

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Let’s face it, there’s no substitute for speaking with Jay McBain directly

The next best thing, though, is hearing him speak, as you can in that MSP Chat episode I just mentioned, where we get into the partner-led services opportunity in AI, the future of resale, the power of community in the channel, and much more. Tune in here, and then go here to check out our many other insightful interviews with industry thought leaders here.

It’s easy to get distracted by the numbers surrounding Shield Technology Partners.

Like the $100 million of funding from Thrive Holdings and ZBS the company launched with last year, and the additional $100 million Thrive poured into the company this February.

Then there are the results Shield has gotten from the AI-powered managed services platform it built with some of that money. Called Forge, the system currently resolves half of all “actionable” tickets (i.e. service-related versus purely informational ones), and does so without a human in the loop 92% of the time. Forge closes comparable tickets 25 times faster than flesh-and-blood technicians do, moreover, with a median resolution time of 16 minutes.

All very impressive (though not wildly different from what Atera’s reporting) but potentially misleading as well if you end up concluding from such stats that Shield’s plan is to convert capital into AI, AI into productivity, and productivity into profits.

“The point of Forge is not efficiency,” says Mayank Jain, Shield’s head of technology.

Indeed, the longer you talk with Shield the clearer it becomes that the most critical piece of its operating model isn’t AI at all. It’s people.

“We, as a company, are long humans,” says Jim Siders (pictured), Shield’s CEO.

Make no mistake, they’re long AI too. An “AI operating system for IT services” in Shield’s description, Forge is a sophisticated and therefore expensive home-grown platform created by equally expensive developers. Still evolving, the system currently includes an agent that automates the help desk, another that automates project management, and a third that automates account management, as well as a fourth component for building custom skills, agents, and runbooks.

All of that draws on an underlying context layer packed with client data and operating knowledge plus integrations with a stack of RMM, PSA, and other tools that portfolio MSPs can customize to their own preferences.

As Siders and Jain alike emphasize, though, what Shield is building is ultimately less about AI than about three sets of people:

1. The people who use Forge. Technicians are valuable people in the current labor market. Forge makes Shield’s technicians more valuable still by freeing them up to anticipate problems rather than fix them. Help desk staff reacted to disk space alerts before, for example.

“Now we’re actually creating fewer disk space alerts in the first place, because our technicians are solving the core root cause,” Jain says.

That’s an example of what Siders calls “human-computer teaming,” a critical part of Shield’s strategy in which “computers do what they do best, increasingly skillfully, and let the things that are special and irreplaceable about our human engineers and technicians come to the fore.”

Which, of course, requires special and irreplaceable humans, so Shield is investing both in AI and in people. “If what we’re trying to do is human-computer teaming at the highest quality level, like the best in the world, we want the best computer,” Siders says. “We’re also looking for the highest quality humans.”

2. The people Forge benefits. Clients, needless to say, are even more valuable to Shield than technicians. Keeping clients happy by closing their tickets faster and more effectively is a big part of Forge’s mission.

“A lot of the threads one could pull through Forge and all of the research that we’re doing and all the R&D that we’re doing is around not just automating things and making them faster and more efficient and more profitable, but with an eye foremost to quality—quality of the interaction, quality of the problem solving,” Siders says. “That speaks directly to how deeper relationships are built and what earns us the right to harder and more existential problems in the customer’s problem space.”

3. The people who implement Forge. Forge has plenty of built-in AI, but so do other managed services platforms these days. What few of those other platforms have, however, are the forward deployed engineers Shield dispatches to new portfolio additions who spend weeks onsite heavily customizing Forge implementations.

“They’re hands-on-keys technical talent, world-class technical talent, but they’re really just a conduit for what our IT providers are looking for and wanting to do their job the best way possible,” Jain says. Shield can offer that conduit to its MSPs, he continues, because it only has 19 of them to scale across at present rather than thousands, like a managed services software maker.

Actually, it’s not 19. Miami-based Nerds Support became the 20^th firm in Shield’s portfolio last week. One imagines its technicians worrying about the future that awaits them after Forge is doing work they used to do. They needn’t, in part because while the percentage of tickets Forge resolves is climbing, it will never reach 100%, according to Jain. Which from Shield’s perspective, perhaps surprisingly, is good news.

“That’s the beauty here,” Jain says. “You need human judgment and technician judgment to be able to do these tickets. I don’t see that ever not being the case.”

Lighting an AI fire for customers

That said, Forge is closing a lot of tickets now and will close even more in the future, which means the humans in Shield’s “long human” vision will have more bandwidth for something else. To watch Siders’s face light up when you ask him what that something will be is to understand the real strategic heart of Shield’s plan. The better Forge gets, the more capacity Shield’s MSPs will have for higher-impact, higher-margin, growth-generating client projects.

Some of which will involve customer-facing AI services. Shield won’t say much about those services right now, except that a) defining them is the goal of a project code-named Ember, and b) it’s 100% confident there will be demand for whatever Ember produces.

“The clients are screaming for it,” says Siders of AI-based transformation, “and nobody knows how to deliver it. A software company can’t. A giant platform can’t. OpenAI tried. They can’t. So who’s going to do it?”

How about a thoughtfully assembled collection of MSPs with a growing supply of technician capacity, thanks to Forge, and access to leading-edge AI?

“We have a few different irons in the fire,” Siders says. “A lot of them are a little early to talk about, but it’s definitely something that’s on our mind.”

And it’s “reasonable,” he adds, to think we’ll get our first glimpse of Ember’s irons next year.

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Teaching and learning from OpenAI

Don’t take Siders’s skepticism about OpenAI delivering end user solutions as a broader judgment on the company. Shield and OpenAI have been working closely ever since the frontier lab bought a stake in Thrive Holdings last December and Siders considers their relationship a competitive advantage.

“There’s literally OpenAI engineers embedded with our teams,” he says.

They’re learning as much as they’re teaching, he adds. “We feel that the current LLM landscape isn’t actually well suited for doing very nuanced differential diagnosis or troubleshooting of most IT issues,” Siders says. “That’s something that we have an open dialogue with OpenAI about.”

And yes, if you’re wondering, they also have an open dialogue about the many, many, many security incidents OpenAI models have been responsible for in recent months.

“We want them to create great tools, and some of the anxiety that’s out there in the mass media right now is not in the direction of great tools for our businesses to use to bring better and more impactful solutions to our customers,” Siders says. Shield isn’t shy about telling OpenAI that.

“If there’s something that we can add to that conversation for everybody’s benefit, we have a responsibility to do that,” he says.

New on the MSP Chat podcast: Service as a software

Remember Treeline, the unconventional, AI-forward, venture-backed Shield competitor a whole lot of you have interest in judging by the response to my two articles on the company? Its chief growth officer, Jeff Gaines, was our interview guest on the latest episode of MSP Chat, and he had plenty to say about AI in managed services. Tune in here to listen, and then drop by this page to check out our many, many other insight-laden interviews.

GTIA and ASCII meet in the community middle

Veterans of the channel and long-time Channelholic readers, along with ConnectWise, TD SYNNEX, and many others, know that community is more than just a feel-good concept in managed services. It’s a critical growth engine that has helped newcomers launch businesses and veterans grow them for more than 20 years.

It’s also, however, a somewhat vague term, as three conversations concerning four very different organizations (all of which are, in one sense or another, communities) have made clear in recent weeks.

Let’s start with two of those organizations, GTIA and the ASCII Group, which GTIA recently acquired. Both are communities, but in different ways to different degrees and at different scales. GTIA, though it maintains global member communities, is an industry trade association with its finger in things like regulatory and standards initiatives.

“We are industry advocates. We invest at the industry level,” says Nancy Hammervik (pictured), GTIA’s chief channel officer. “We’re identifying trends. We’re trying to help the industry manage challenges.” The ASCII Group, on the other hand, focuses on individuals.

“The intent is to help the individual member grow,” Hammervik says. Put differently, she continues, GTIA serves the channel top down while ASCII serves it bottom up. Everyone benefits, in Hammervik’s view, where the two meet in the middle.

For ASCII Group members, the biggest of those benefits are financial, beginning with lower membership fees and extending from there. “We have a marketing team. We have an operations team. We have an education team. We have a research team,” Hammervik says, all of which ASCII has long wanted but couldn’t previously afford. “Now they’ll have more opportunity to do those things and add more value to their members.”

GTIA, meanwhile, now has more members to serve. One third more, to be precise. According to Hammervik, buying ASCII grew GTIA enrollment from 3,000 to 4,000 overnight.

“Our mission is to connect every member of the channel with the resources and the people that they need to advance their careers or their businesses,” Hammervik says. “The acquisition of ASCII helps to expand our footprint in how many practitioners we’re actually helping and how many practitioners we can represent and be advocates for and engage with to drive the industry forward.”

Most ASCII members are comfortable being part of GTIA so far, according to Hammervik. But not all.

“Some people may be a little bit skeptical and taking a wait and see approach,” she says. Here are a few things GTIA is telling them:

1. Almost everything you like about ASCII is staying just the way it is. “Our intention right now is to do no harm, leave everything intact, and continue to operate ASCII as it was,” Hammervik says. “All of the programs, all of the events, all of the resources that they offer are going to continue.”

Former ASCII CEO Jerry Koutavas (last seen here in Channelholic a few months ago) will continue to lead the group, she adds, reporting to MJ Shoer, GTIA’s chief community officer.

2. ASCII’s buying consortium is sticking around too. One of the big differences between what community means to ASCII and what it means to GTIA is that ASCII’s definition since the late Alan Weinberger helped found the group 42 years ago has included leveraging collective bargaining power to secure reduced pricing on software and hardware. That will remain true going forward, according to Hammervik, and apply to the same vendors as before, whether or not they’re GTIA members.

3. Every ASCII member gets a GTIA membership too now at no extra cost. Every GTIA member can join ASCII as well for a discounted fee. Except vendor members, that is.

“We’re going to protect that ASCII is practitioner only,” Hammervik says.

4. ASCII will remain independent. Or rather, quasi-independent, just like GTIA’s regional member communities. “Nobody’s really independent,” Hammervik says, but everyone has a voice in shaping the association’s shared priorities. ASCII will be no different.

“They will still have their advisory committee that they always had, the same individuals. Two of them will now sit on the GTIA Global Leadership Committee,” says Hammervik, who spent part of last week listening to and reassuring members at the group’s first post-acquisition event in Chicago.

“Our intent is to take good care of them,” she says.

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MSP OneShare’s whole different community paradigm

Reduced product pricing is one reason MSPs join the ASCII Group, even after ASCII’s acquisition by GTIA. It’s very nearly the only reason they join MSP OneShare.

ASCII is a onetime for-profit community now owned by a nonprofit trade association. MSP OneShare, which parent organization International Business Products Inc. (IBPI) launched in March, is something altogether different, a 100% member-owned and led community dedicated chiefly to securing lower prices on software and hardware.

“It’s a whole different paradigm,” says Lynn Williams (pictured), OneShare’s director of MSP partnerships and programs.

Indeed. For one thing, there are no fees involved in joining the group or renewing membership. MSPs pay $500, one time only, to buy one share in the community, which is all they’re ever permitted to buy and the inspiration for the group’s name. Members receive their share certificate on paper through the U.S. mail.

“If they ever sell or merge with another company, they sign the back like a check and they actually get their money back,” Williams says. By virtue of owning one share in the organization, moreover, members get one vote in the group’s decision-making.

“They are truly in control,” Williams says.

Among the biggest decisions made by members is who sits on OneShare’s board of directors. The board, in turn, decides who qualifies to be among OneShare’s “preferred vendor partners,” of which there are presently 39.

Vendors, which pay a one-time $5,000 fee to attain preferred status, are obligated to match or beat the lowest price they offer any other association and to give members what Williams calls “the little icing on the cake” that comes with being OneShare owners: an annual rebate on all the purchasing they do.

“We always pay in April right after taxes,” Williams says. This year’s checks, calculated against the roughly $7.5 billion members spent with partners in 2025, totaled $1.27 million.

Much of OneShare’s purchasing happens at membership meetings, which occur annually now and will become semi-annual next year. Neither OneShare nor IBPI makes money on them.

“Our vendors pay enough to feed and house the members that come, but we don’t take a profit off of that,” Williams says. The idea is to prevent cost from reducing partner attendance.

“The better we can help them form relationships with our members, the more we engage, the more we buy, and the more buying power we have,” Williams explains.

And with that goal in mind, OneShare gives vendors at its events a kind of speed dating service with members versus a booth in an expo hall.

“We bring eight business owners to their table every 14 minutes,” Williams says.

Members profit from another set of relationships as well, she notes. IBPI’s original mission was serving managed print providers, many of which now wish to provide managed IT services too without investing in new tools and people. Via OneShare, IBPI can help them create go-to-market alliances (backed by signed non-compete agreements) with MSP partners.

“They share their trusted clients,” Williams says, along with their MRR. “It’s on average a 20% profit share between the two.”

One can imagine that and everything else about OneShare sounding a bit mercenary to MSPs who value communities principally for the peer-to-peer support and business growth advice they provide. I regard it as a reminder that there are lots of ways to define and profit from community in the channel, most of which have something to offer.

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Central Mafia User Group keeps it in the family

And then there are communities that really, truly are just about people helping people, like Central Mafia User Group. Juan Mack, who is technology and business operations manager at Jasper, Ind.-based MSP Matrix Integration, has been an enthusiastic member since he first came across it 15 years ago.

“It was very eye-opening when I first started going how the MSP community is so open to share their success and how they achieved that success,” he says. “It’s amazing when you get in a room and you get them talking what they will share.”

Manny Rivelo had nearly the exact same reaction when he became ConnectWise CEO, and it’s not Central Mafia User Group’s only tie to ConnectWise. The group originated as a ConnectWise partner community until ConnectWise launched its IT Nation community and CMUG became an independent, vendor-neutral organization dedicated to member education and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. It kept the moniker ConnectWise gave it back in the day, for reasons lost to time, though.

“Central Mafia is a super cool name, so we always call ourselves the Central Mafia,” Mack (pictured) says.

That was possibly the easiest choice the group made after going out on its own. The harder ones involved determining how to turn what started out as a peer group that met once or twice a year into a full-fledged, year-round, member-led community. Mack and fellow member Sean Lardo, a ConnectWise exec who leaves his corporate ID badge at home when engaged with CMUG, leaned into the challenge.

“We just got a group of MSPs, a group of friends that we’ve made there, together and we just started talking,” Mack recalls. We need a newsletter, they decided. We need to livestream meetings every month and create a Slack channel to keep people engaged between livestreams.

And yes, they agreed, we need in-person meetings. These days, they host several of them regionally, like the one coming up in southern California early next month. Attendance is free for MSPs thanks to fees paid by sponsoring vendors, who speak onstage but not about themselves.

“They’re not promoting their product,” Mack says. “That’s something that we specifically ask the vendors: If you’re going to present, please do not pitch your product.”

Not because members don’t use or care about products, of course, so much as that they participate in CMUG in the hope of learning very specific lessons about very specific issues, like going to market with AI.

“MSPs are struggling on how to resell and package AI services to their clients,” Mack observes. “How am I going to provide a solution that is flexible for them and make it repeatable, which is the secret of the MSP?”

People appear to be satisfied with the answers they’re getting to such questions through CMUG, because what started out as a roughly 120-member organization currently distributes its newsletters to nearly 10,000 MSPs.

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Over on Business of Tech

Host Dave Sobel must be running out of industry luminaries to speak with on his weekly live shows, because his most recent one featured a repeat appearance by me. Tune in on demand to hear us explore Flamingo’s per-token pricing model, tokenomics more broadly, Integris’s CORE solution, and more.

Also worth noting

• Barracuda AI Data Security combines AI use visibility, sensitive data protection, threat defense, policy enforcement, and compliance capabilities in one package.

• More from Barracuda, and it spells opportunity for smart MSPs: 38% of organizations the company surveyed lack the skills or expertise needed to secure and govern their AI tools.

• Agentic Data and AI Security, from Proofpoint, is a unified agentic system designed to treat data and AI security as one discipline instead of two.

• Agentic Collaboration Security, also from Proofpoint, combines an intent-based detection model with agentic capabilities to stop threats targeting employee communication.

• Version 5.0 of Cynet’s cybersecurity platform offers a new cross-site dashboard, enhanced SIEM capabilities, deeper operational integrations, and more.

• GravityZone AI Visibility and Control, from Bitdefender, gives businesses and MSPs visibility into employees’ use of AI tools and controls.

• Unit 42 Continuous Frontier AI Defense, from Palo Alto Networks, is an agentic offensive security service that continuously identifies, prioritizes, and helps remediate exploitable vulnerabilities.

• SentinelOne has expanded its Wayfinder Threat Hunting service to AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

• Email Trust Platform, from EasyDMARC, is designed to help organizations manage security, governance, reputation, and deliverability across complex email infrastructures.

• The latest functionality from access control vendor Portnox identifies unauthorized AI applications and agents and automatically restricts access when they violate policy.

• KnowBe4 has added a Chrome and Edge browser extension to its Agent Risk Manager solution.

• Okta, AWS, CrowdStrike, Databricks, and others have formed the Blueprint Alliance to develop a shared architecture and principles for securely governing agents.

• Cork Cyber says that adding automated patching and vulnerability management to its platform has completed its AI remediation loop.

• This should not surprise Channelholic readers: 77% of organizations surveyed by ShareGate have had at least one Microsoft 365 governance incident in the past year.

• WatchGuard’s latest Global Threat Report says network attack volume fell 79% in the first half of 2026 but novel endpoint malware rose more than 2,000% year over year.

• Initial findings from Darktrace’s new Signal Labs research unit suggest that agentic coding assistants can be manipulated by attackers to modify conversation histories.

• Sound like anyone you know? 70% of security professionals surveyed by Object First say AI-powered cyber threats are increasing their workplace stress.

• 95% of organizations surveyed by Omdia on behalf of Cisco say existing AIOps tools can’t keep pace with operational demands.

• 79% of organizations surveyed by Omdia on behalf of Dell have had an AI-related security incident in the past year, yet 79% also say they’re confident or very confident they can manage AI risk.

• D&H now distributes the HPE Networking portfolio to U.S. partners.

• Devolutions has launched Devolutions Ventures, a venture division that will invest in companies and projects in secure access, network performance, automation, AI, developer tools, and open source software.

There are many kinds of communities in the channel. Some are really, truly just about people helping people, like Central Mafia User Group. Juan Mack, who is technology and business operations manager at Jasper, Ind.-based MSP Matrix Integration, has been an enthusiastic member since he first came across it 15 years ago.

“It was very eye-opening when I first started going how the MSP community is so open to share their success and how they achieved that success,” he says. “It’s amazing when you get in a room and you get them talking what they will share.”

Manny Rivelo had nearly the exact same reaction when he became ConnectWise CEO, and it’s not Central Mafia User Group’s only tie to ConnectWise. The group originated as a ConnectWise partner community until ConnectWise launched its IT Nation community and CMUG became an independent, vendor-neutral organization dedicated to member education and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. It kept the moniker ConnectWise gave it back in the day, for reasons lost to time, though.

“Central Mafia is a super cool name, so we always call ourselves the Central Mafia,” Mack (pictured) says.

That was possibly the easiest choice the group made after going out on its own. The harder ones involved determining how to turn what started out as a peer group that met once or twice a year into a full-fledged, year-round, member-led community. Mack and fellow member Sean Lardo, a ConnectWise exec who leaves his corporate ID badge at home when engaged with CMUG, leaned into the challenge.

“We just got a group of MSPs, a group of friends that we’ve made there, together and we just started talking,” Mack recalls. We need a newsletter, they decided. We need to livestream meetings every month and create a Slack channel to keep people engaged between livestreams.

And yes, they agreed, we need in-person meetings. These days, they host several of them regionally, like the one coming up in southern California early next month. Attendance is free for MSPs thanks to fees paid by sponsoring vendors, who speak onstage but not about themselves.

“They’re not promoting their product,” Mack says. “That’s something that we specifically ask the vendors: If you’re going to present, please do not pitch your product.”

Not because members don’t use or care about products, of course, so much as that they participate in CMUG in the hope of learning very specific lessons about very specific issues, like going to market with AI.

“MSPs are struggling on how to resell and package AI services to their clients,” Mack observes. “How am I going to provide a solution that is flexible for them and make it repeatable, which is the secret of the MSP?”

People appear to be satisfied with the answers they’re getting to such questions through CMUG, because what started out as a roughly 120-member organization currently distributes its newsletters to nearly 10,000 MSPs.

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Reduced product pricing is one reason MSPs join the ASCII Group, even after ASCII’s acquisition by GTIA. It’s very nearly the only reason they join MSP OneShare.

ASCII is a onetime for-profit community now owned by a nonprofit trade association. MSP OneShare, which parent organization International Business Products Inc. (IBPI) launched in March, is something altogether different, a 100% member-owned and led community dedicated chiefly to securing lower prices on software and hardware.

“It’s a whole different paradigm,” says Lynn Williams (pictured), OneShare’s director of MSP partnerships and programs.

Indeed. For one thing, there are no fees involved in joining the group or renewing membership. MSPs pay $500, one time only, to buy one share in the community, which is all they’re ever permitted to buy and the inspiration for the group’s name. Members receive their share certificate on paper through the U.S. mail.

“If they ever sell or merge with another company, they sign the back like a check and they actually get their money back,” Williams says. By virtue of owning one share in the organization, moreover, members get one vote in the group’s decision-making.

“They are truly in control,” Williams says.

Among the biggest decisions made by members is who sits on OneShare’s board of directors. The board, in turn, decides who qualifies to be among OneShare’s “preferred vendor partners,” of which there are presently 39.

Vendors, which pay a one-time $5,000 fee to attain preferred status, are obligated to match or beat the lowest price they offer any other association and to give members what Williams calls “the little icing on the cake” that comes with being OneShare owners: an annual rebate on all the purchasing they do.

“We always pay in April right after taxes,” Williams says. This year’s checks, calculated against the roughly $7.5 billion members spent with partners in 2025, totaled $1.27 million.

Much of OneShare’s purchasing happens at membership meetings, which occur annually now and will become semi-annual next year. Neither OneShare nor IBPI makes money on them.

“Our vendors pay enough to feed and house the members that come, but we don’t take a profit off of that,” Williams says. The idea is to prevent cost from reducing partner attendance.

“The better we can help them form relationships with our members, the more we engage, the more we buy, and the more buying power we have,” Williams explains.

And with that goal in mind, OneShare gives vendors at its events a kind of speed dating service with members versus a booth in an expo hall.

“We bring eight business owners to their table every 14 minutes,” Williams says.

Members profit from another set of relationships as well, she notes. IBPI’s original mission was serving managed print providers, many of which now wish to provide managed IT services too without investing in new tools and people. Via OneShare, IBPI can help them create go-to-market alliances (backed by signed non-compete agreements) with MSP partners.

“They share their trusted clients,” Williams says, along with their MRR. “It’s on average a 20% profit share between the two.”

One can imagine that and everything else about OneShare sounding a bit mercenary to MSPs who value communities principally for the peer-to-peer support and business growth advice they provide. I regard it as a reminder that there are lots of ways to define and profit from community in the channel, most of which have something to offer.

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Veterans of the channel and long-time Channelholic readers, along with ConnectWise, TD SYNNEX, and many others, know that community is more than just a feel-good concept in managed services. It’s a critical growth engine that has helped newcomers launch businesses and veterans grow them for more than 20 years.

It’s also, however, a somewhat vague term, as three conversations concerning four very different organizations (all of which are, in one sense or another, communities) have made clear in recent weeks.

Let’s start with two of those organizations, GTIA and the ASCII Group, which GTIA recently acquired. Both are communities, but in different ways to different degrees and at different scales. GTIA, though it maintains global member communities, is an industry trade association with its finger in things like regulatory and standards initiatives.

“We are industry advocates. We invest at the industry level,” says Nancy Hammervik (pictured), GTIA’s chief channel officer. “We’re identifying trends. We’re trying to help the industry manage challenges.” The ASCII Group, on the other hand, focuses on individuals.

“The intent is to help the individual member grow,” Hammervik says. Put differently, she continues, GTIA serves the channel top down while ASCII serves it bottom up. Everyone benefits, in Hammervik’s view, where the two meet in the middle.

For ASCII Group members, the biggest of those benefits are financial, beginning with lower membership fees and extending from there. “We have a marketing team. We have an operations team. We have an education team. We have a research team,” Hammervik says, all of which ASCII has long wanted but couldn’t previously afford. “Now they’ll have more opportunity to do those things and add more value to their members.”

GTIA, meanwhile, now has more members to serve. One third more, to be precise. According to Hammervik, buying ASCII grew GTIA enrollment from 3,000 to 4,000 overnight.

“Our mission is to connect every member of the channel with the resources and the people that they need to advance their careers or their businesses,” Hammervik says. “The acquisition of ASCII helps to expand our footprint in how many practitioners we’re actually helping and how many practitioners we can represent and be advocates for and engage with to drive the industry forward.”

Most ASCII members are comfortable being part of GTIA so far, according to Hammervik. But not all.

“Some people may be a little bit skeptical and taking a wait and see approach,” she says. Here are a few things GTIA is telling them:

1. Almost everything you like about ASCII is staying just the way it is. “Our intention right now is to do no harm, leave everything intact, and continue to operate ASCII as it was,” Hammervik says. “All of the programs, all of the events, all of the resources that they offer are going to continue.”

Former ASCII CEO Jerry Koutavas (last seen here in Channelholic a few months ago) will continue to lead the group, she adds, reporting to MJ Shoer, GTIA’s chief community officer.

2. ASCII’s buying consortium is sticking around too. One of the big differences between what community means to ASCII and what it means to GTIA is that ASCII’s definition since the late Alan Weinberger helped found the group 42 years ago has included leveraging collective bargaining power to secure reduced pricing on software and hardware. That will remain true going forward, according to Hammervik, and apply to the same vendors as before, whether or not they’re GTIA members.

3. Every ASCII member gets a GTIA membership too now at no extra cost. Every GTIA member can join ASCII as well for a discounted fee. Except vendor members, that is.

“We’re going to protect that ASCII is practitioner only,” Hammervik says.

4. ASCII will remain independent. Or rather, quasi-independent, just like GTIA’s regional member communities. “Nobody’s really independent,” Hammervik says, but everyone has a voice in shaping the association’s shared priorities. ASCII will be no different.

“They will still have their advisory committee that they always had, the same individuals. Two of them will now sit on the GTIA Global Leadership Committee,” says Hammervik, who spent part of last week listening to and reassuring members at the group’s first post-acquisition event in Chicago.

“Our intent is to take good care of them,” she says.

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Let’s say the scenario that doomsayers in Silicon Valley fear comes to pass, and AI kills us all. Scratch that. Say it kills some of us versus all of us, or takes down the electrical grid for a week. I think we can confidently predict that two groups of people will be busy in the days that follow:

1. Lawyers, who per strange bedfellows Lina Khan and Mark Zuckerberg will have a lot of product liability suits to file, and...

2. Insurers, who will have an equally large volume of claims to process.

Or maybe just deny. It’s hard to say for sure, because the degree to which insurance policies generally and cyberinsurance policies specifically cover AI-related harms is still mostly undefined.

Kind of the way coverage for security-related harms was undefined in the insurance industry’s so-called “silent cyber” era. That was back when growing masses of breach victims were filing claims against business or property policies that said nothing one way or the other about breaches. The inevitable results included overworked claims processors, denied claims, and unhappy customers. Cyberinsurance as we know it was invented largely in response to that dynamic.

These days, we find ourselves in a “silent AI” era in which most policies across multiple categories either say nothing about losses involving AI or say something you’d rather not hear.

“All the big shops, the big boys, the AIGs, the Chubbs, the Travelers, the Nationwides, you name it, are saying we’re going to exclude any form of AI in general liability, director and officer, and cyber [insurance], because they have no idea how to wrap their head around it let alone price it,” says Edouard von Herberstein (pictured), CEO of SPECTRA, a cyber risk management vendor for MSPs.

The situation’s actually a little more nuanced, according to Michael Phillips, head of global cyber portfolio underwriting at Coalition. Many insurers have filed with state governments (successfully 80% of the time to date) for the right to add AI-related exclusions to their policies, but not all of them have done so, and those that have generally aren’t excluding cyberinsurance coverage for victims of a breach committed by an agent or AI-equipped threat actor.

“If you are buying a specialty cyber product, you typically don’t have to fear that your cyber underwriter is adding an exclusion for AI-driven cyber security attacks,” Phillips says.

Especially, he adds, if your underwriter is Coalition. “In 2024, we revised all of our cyber and tech policies to include what we called affirmative AI language” specifying coverage for AI-powered or executed attacks. Last year, the company introduced a policy enhancement that protects businesses from the effects of deepfake imposters damaging their client relationships and reputation. Liability coverage for incidents in which AI is guilty of copyright infringement, defamation, slander, and the like followed the week before last.

Other insurers now have affirmative language about AI in their cyber policies too, including Beazley as of last week. But most of it addresses AI use by attackers. According to Phillips, carriers have begun explicitly excluding coverage for incidents in which a company’s own AI does something it shouldn’t, like break into—oh, I don’t know—Hugging Face.

Those still silent on the topic may not be there when you need them either, notes Frank Merino, CTO of Forthright Technology Partners, an IT, security, and compliance solution provider based in Weston, Fla. What happens if a shadow AI user in your office inadvertently deletes your website or leaks critical IP? From an insurance carrier’s perspective, Merino notes, that’s not force majeure.

“You told it to do something and it did it,” he says. “If it puts you out of business or materially impacts your ability to conduct business, whose fault is that?”

Right now, that’s a hypothetical danger for Forthright clients, few of whom have filed an AI-related claim or had one denied. But Merino’s convinced it’ll be all too real eventually as more and more businesses vibe code apps and deploy autonomous AI.

“I really think that this issue is going to come,” Merino says.

And remember, we’re talking about it coming to people with cyberinsurance policies. Yet roughly a third of businesses with 100 to 2,000 employees don’t have such coverage, according to insurer QBE. Those companies are presumably relying on other forms of coverage that are either dangerously silent on AI or ripe prospects for AI exclusions.

“If you’re only buying an extension to a package policy or a more comprehensive business owner’s policy that’s protecting you from fire, wind harm, etc., then you do have to worry about that,” Phillips warns.

Filling the AI risk gap

SPECTRA sees AI exclusions coming too and is doing something about it now. Its existing products help MSPs get better coverage and lower rates for clients by certifying their use of security best practices. In the hope of eventually providing similar rewards for embracing AI security best practices, the company recently began piloting an AI risk framework composed of 20 deployment controls.

“There isn’t really an industry-recognized framework for AI technologies,” says Eric Altamura (pictured), SPECTRA’s COO. “We figured there’s a role for us to play that’s kind of true to what SPECTRA already does for our partners, which is identify agreed upon security standards, evidence the deployment of those controls, and then structure the data in a way that can be consumed by the underwriter.”

Von Herberstein hopes those underwriters respond appropriately. “We are very actively working with Lloyd’s of London and in the U.S. to unlock what currently doesn’t really exist, which is broad and deep affirmative AI coverage for businesses big and small,” he says.

Forthright is an early adopter of the framework, which it sees less as a potential way to add revenue than as a way to retain the trust of its clients. “I don’t make a dollar,” Merino says. “There’s zero benefit for me in this, other than that you’re working with me and I’m telling you this is the right path.”

According to Altamura, SPECTRA expects to modify the framework regularly. “We built it in a way that I think is meant to be flexible and adaptable because at the rate that things change and just the number of updates that Anthropic pushes out to Claude on a daily basis, we need something that can be refined over time.”

Phillips views change as the only constant in AI cyberinsurance too. Coalition modifies its policies in response to new models and threats every quarter, and its pricing even more often.

“We’re updating that very regularly because it’s so new that every little incident is material to our data set,” he says.

And there are a lot of new incidents in everyone’s future.

New on MSP Chat: Getting stronger by getting help

There’s no shortage of resources out there for MSPs looking to find leads, win deals, motivate technicians, and add services. Why has there never been a resource for MSPs coping with the unrelenting emotional and mental pressure of being an MSP until MSP Well (which I wrote about earlier this year) created it? We get into that and more with two of the community’s leaders on the latest episode of MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host, and get into similarly important topics every week right here.

How many tokens is too many?

Not long ago, a young company named Retool configured an agent to schedule out-of-office notifications for employees automatically. That’s exactly the kind of tedious, low-value task agents are made to automate and would have been a nice little AI success story if not for the fact that the agent in question was consuming $10,000 worth of tokens a day without anyone noticing.

Retool’s not the only recipient of an unexpectedly enormous token bill this year, if it’s any consolation to them. Uber famously blew its entire 2026 AI budget in four months while another company understandably reluctant to identify itself spent half a billion dollars on AI in a single month earlier this year.

That was back in the “tokenmaxxing” era though, when at least some businesses briefly decided that burning more tokens faster is always, inherently better. These days, the tide has shifted toward tracking, controlling, and optimizing token consumption. The memory of those earlier headlines lingers nonetheless.

“Those stories created anxiety,” says Shane Cronin (pictured), head of FinOps & ITAM services at tech solutions giant SHI. “Then that anxiety accelerated the need for a lot of people to come together and try and find a way to solve for this more broadly.”

Come together they did too last month, when 44 organizations ranging from Accenture and SHI to ServiceNow and SAP formed the Tokenomics Foundation, an offshoot of the non-profit Linux Foundation dedicated to “establishing open industry standards, benchmarks and best practices for the economics of AI.”

And not a moment too soon either as organizations find themselves using AI more but struggling to measure, let alone manage, the spending associated with that usage. Indeed, nearly 47% of businesses surveyed by Futurum came in over budget on AI in the first half of this year even as per-token prices are plummeting. Just 5.6% came in below.

If the Tokenomics Foundation’s mission was simply helping decision-makers get a grip on all that spending, it would be doing good work. What it’s really up to, though, is even harder, more interesting, and more needed. Businesses, the foundation believes, can’t right-size their investment in AI without first understanding their return on that investment, and they can’t determine that return without first determining both what they’re spending on AI and how much value that spending is getting them. That last part in particular is a real problem for most companies, Cronin observes.

“They’re trying to calculate this and they’re trying to find a defensible position to the CFO, but almost nobody is really meeting that quality threshold,” he says.

The foundation, whose work on the topic is still very much in progress, aims to help close that gap by developing more rigorous techniques for measuring AI’s cost and value. On the cost side, that involves looking past token spend alone to what the foundation calls TCA, as in total cost of AI.

“We have to think a bit more broadly about the real cost of AI as being everything that actually goes into energy, capital, silicon, data centers, software licensing, and the labor that’s required to actually build and review and supervise AI,” Cronin says.

The value side of the equation is even more thorough, encompassing ten categories across three groups. “Direct dollar wins” assesses things like revenue added or costs reduced. Labor weighs capacity gains and workflows either augmented or fully automated. And “reported outcomes” quantifies product quality, speed to market, risk reduction (think IT outages or compliance issues avoided), and new capabilities, as in the newly acquired ability to accomplish things you couldn’t do before AI made them possible.

It’s a complicated formula, but an immensely valuable one if it holds up for MSPs evaluating value-based AI pricing schemes that businesses will embrace only if the value they’re paying for is precisely defined and demonstrated.

Learning how to achieve that precision will take time, but MSPs who complete the journey will have not only a powerful tool for selling high-margin AI services but a new service offering potentially as well. Businesses desperately want help justifying all of their AI bills, not just the one their IT provider sends them every month.

“If we can master that, that’s a huge opportunity for MSPs,” Cronin says.

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Outcomes are golden in AI

A lot of people in a lot of places have told you that data is gold in AI over the last few years, and I’ve been among them.

We’ve all been wrong.

Well, not wrong exactly. You do need clean data to get good output from AI, and having a lot of it usually beats having a little. It’s just that calling data AI gold distracts attention from what makes AI monetizable for frontier labs, software makers, and MSPs alike. Businesses have plenty of data and don’t want more, observes Mike Sanders (pictured), a former C-suite executive at Kaseya who’s now CEO of Upshop. “What they want is for that data to provide something that can be executed at whatever level it needs to be executed to offset a bad outcome.”

Or produce a good one. Upshop’s AI-powered software for food retailers does both, according to Sanders, by turning data into intelligence and intelligence into action. Say you’re a grocer and the deli counter’s bread delivery came in lighter than expected.

“If I’m only going to make a certain amount of sandwiches, which sandwiches should I make?” Sanders asks. “What’s the most likely thing to sell? What gives us the best profitability? Or what’s going to allow us to get the most coverage so we disappoint the fewest amount of guests?”

Or say instead that a bunch of milk in the dairy aisle will reach its expiration date in two days. Data tells you how many cartons are involved and what they’re worth to you. Intelligence tells you how much milk you would normally sell in two days and exactly how much you should lower your price by to sell everything at risk of expiring instead. An intelligent system of action, meanwhile, arms managers to put that price into effect automatically.

“You’re not just cutting the price in half or giving [milk] away for free,” Sanders says. “You’re making the best possible decision that you can to sell as much of it as you can while maintaining as much margin as you possibly can.”

Outcomes like that are more exciting to grocers than data, or AI for that matter. “They’re able to drive quite a bit more growth because they have the right products at the right time on the shelf,” Sanders says.

Software vendors and MSPs can learn a few things from Upshop. The company offers an industry-specific SaaS solution, for example, at a time when vertical specificity is one of the best forms of SaaSpocalypse insurance available, and it has more than just large volumes of data. It has large volumes of targeted, contextual data with a lot of retail-specific scaffolding around it.

“We’re allowing that larger data set to drive smarter decisions and smarter outcomes as a result,” Sanders says.

Which points to the biggest moral of Upshop’s story, especially for managed service providers remaking themselves as managed outcome providers: AI client conversations should more or less always center on increased sales, decreased waste, stronger margins, or something else tied to making more or spending less rather than AI itself.

Data makes AI work. Outcomes are what businesses buy.

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Over on Business of Tech

Host Dave Sobel is pondering a topic on my mind lately too. What happens when help desk techs are no longer graduating into engineers because AI has replaced all the help desk techs? Sobel provides two options:

Manufacture the engineer. That means deliberately holding back work the AI in your own stack could already close — real tickets, on real clients — and routing them to a person who needs to learn on them … Or buy the engineer. Which means competing on salary against vendors, against integrators, and against your own clients, who are all hiring the same person you are … Pay for seniority in margin now, or pay for it in salary later. One of those you can budget.

More here.

Also worth noting

• GTIA has acquired 42-year-old MSP community the ASCII Group. More to come next week.

• NinjaOne has added browser management to its Unified IT Operations Platform.

• Addigy’s new Intelligence Suite is an AI layer within its Apple device management platform designed to make Apple expertise and execution available on demand.

• MSP360’s Backup for Proxmox Community Edition is now generally available.

• OpenAI’s vertical AI push pushes on. Last week it was financial services. This week it’s legal. Next week?

• Mailprotector now has a partner success team tasked with helping MSPs navigate an evolving email security threat landscape more profitably.

• Aurora MDR Connect, from Arctic Wolf, is an MSP-exclusive tier of the company’s MDR service designed for faster deployment and broader attack-surface visibility.

• Stellar Cyber and ESET have formed a technology partnership integrating ESET Threat Intelligence with Stellar Cyber’s Open Threat Intelligence Platform.

• Keeper Security and SailPoint are integrating to combine the latter’s identity governance and administration technology with the former’s Identity Security Platform.

• IDrive’s Microsoft 365 Backup offering now includes Microsoft Entra ID backup.

• Devicie, who you’ve met here before, has added AI-assisted application management to its management and automation solution for Microsoft Intune.

• ThreatCaptain, who you’ve also met here before, is the newest addition to the North American line card at TD SYNNEX.

• Actually, it’s a tie for newest addition between ThreatCaptain and Hammerhead AI.

• Ramp is the newest addition to Ingram Micro’s North American line card, and also now available on Microsoft Marketplace.

• 84% of MSPs expect demand for CISO-level services to increase during the next 12 months, according to Sophos.

• 48% of security leaders said AI agents with excessive, compromised, or unintended access are their organization’s greatest threat, according to Exabeam. Just 28% cited external threat actors.

• New research from GoTo suggests workers are taking the good with the bad on AI. The good: it saves them an average of 2.3 hours a day. The bad: 83% of them worry they’ll be blamed or fired if it makes a mistake.

• Version 4.0 of MSPAlliance’s Unified Certification Standard for Cloud and Managed Service Providers adds AI governance requirements among other things.

Not long ago, a young company named Retool configured an agent to schedule out-of-office notifications for employees automatically. That’s exactly the kind of tedious, low-value task agents are made to automate and would have been a nice little AI success story if not for the fact that the agent in question was consuming $10,000 worth of tokens a day without anyone noticing.

Retool’s not the only recipient of an unexpectedly enormous token bill this year, if it’s any consolation to them. Uber famously blew its entire 2026 AI budget in four months while another company understandably reluctant to identify itself spent half a billion dollars on AI in a single month earlier this year.

That was back in the “tokenmaxxing” era though, when at least some businesses briefly decided that burning more tokens faster is always, inherently better. These days, the tide has shifted toward tracking, controlling, and optimizing token consumption. The memory of those earlier headlines lingers nonetheless.

“Those stories created anxiety,” says Shane Cronin (pictured), head of FinOps & ITAM services at tech solutions giant SHI. “Then that anxiety accelerated the need for a lot of people to come together and try and find a way to solve for this more broadly.”

Come together they did too last month, when 44 organizations ranging from Accenture and SHI to ServiceNow and SAP formed the Tokenomics Foundation, an offshoot of the non-profit Linux Foundation dedicated to “establishing open industry standards, benchmarks and best practices for the economics of AI.”

And not a moment too soon either as organizations find themselves using AI more but struggling to measure, let alone manage, the spending associated with that usage. Indeed, nearly 47% of businesses surveyed by Futurum came in over budget on AI in the first half of this year even as per-token prices are plummeting. Just 5.6% came in below.

If the Tokenomics Foundation’s mission was simply helping decision-makers get a grip on all that spending, it would be doing good work. What it’s really up to, though, is even harder, more interesting, and more needed. Businesses, the foundation believes, can’t right-size their investment in AI without first understanding their return on that investment, and they can’t determine that return without first determining both what they’re spending on AI and how much value that spending is getting them. That last part in particular is a real problem for most companies, Cronin observes.

“They’re trying to calculate this and they’re trying to find a defensible position to the CFO, but almost nobody is really meeting that quality threshold,” he says.

The foundation, whose work on the topic is still very much in progress, aims to help close that gap by developing more rigorous techniques for measuring AI’s cost and value. On the cost side, that involves looking past token spend alone to what the foundation calls TCA, as in total cost of AI.

“We have to think a bit more broadly about the real cost of AI as being everything that actually goes into energy, capital, silicon, data centers, software licensing, and the labor that’s required to actually build and review and supervise AI,” Cronin says.

The value side of the equation is even more thorough, encompassing ten categories across three groups. “Direct dollar wins” assesses things like revenue added or costs reduced. Labor weighs capacity gains and workflows either augmented or fully automated. And “reported outcomes” quantifies product quality, speed to market, risk reduction (think IT outages or compliance issues avoided), and new capabilities, as in the newly acquired ability to accomplish things you couldn’t do before AI made them possible.

It’s a complicated formula, but an immensely valuable one if it holds up for MSPs evaluating value-based AI pricing schemes that businesses will embrace only if the value they’re paying for is precisely defined and demonstrated.

Learning how to achieve that precision will take time, but MSPs who complete the journey will have not only a powerful tool for selling high-margin AI services but a new service offering potentially as well. Businesses desperately want help justifying all of their AI bills, not just the one their IT provider sends them every month.

“If we can master that, that’s a huge opportunity for MSPs,” Cronin says.

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A lot of people in a lot of places have told you that data is gold in AI over the last few years, and I’ve been among them.

We’ve all been wrong.

Well, not wrong exactly. You do need clean data to get good output from AI, and having a lot of it usually beats having a little. It’s just that calling data AI gold distracts attention from what makes AI monetizable for frontier labs, software makers, and MSPs alike. Businesses have plenty of data and don’t want more, observes Mike Sanders (pictured), a former C-suite executive at Kaseya who’s now CEO of Upshop. “What they want is for that data to provide something that can be executed at whatever level it needs to be executed to offset a bad outcome.”

Or produce a good one. Upshop’s AI-powered software for food retailers does both, according to Sanders, by turning data into intelligence and intelligence into action. Say you’re a grocer and the deli counter’s bread delivery came in lighter than expected.

“If I’m only going to make a certain amount of sandwiches, which sandwiches should I make?” Sanders asks. “What’s the most likely thing to sell? What gives us the best profitability? Or what’s going to allow us to get the most coverage so we disappoint the fewest amount of guests?”

Or say instead that a bunch of milk in the dairy aisle will reach its expiration date in two days. Data tells you how many cartons are involved and what they’re worth to you. Intelligence tells you how much milk you would normally sell in two days and exactly how much you should lower your price by to sell everything at risk of expiring instead. An intelligent system of action, meanwhile, arms managers to put that price into effect automatically.

“You’re not just cutting the price in half or giving [milk] away for free,” Sanders says. “You’re making the best possible decision that you can to sell as much of it as you can while maintaining as much margin as you possibly can.”

Outcomes like that are more exciting to grocers than data, or AI for that matter. “They’re able to drive quite a bit more growth because they have the right products at the right time on the shelf,” Sanders says.

Software vendors and MSPs can learn a few things from Upshop. The company offers an industry-specific SaaS solution, for example, at a time when vertical specificity is one of the best forms of SaaSpocalypse insurance available, and it has more than just large volumes of data. It has large volumes of targeted, contextual data with a lot of retail-specific scaffolding around it.

“We’re allowing that larger data set to drive smarter decisions and smarter outcomes as a result,” Sanders says.

Which points to the biggest moral of Upshop’s story, especially for managed service providers remaking themselves as managed outcome providers: AI client conversations should more or less always center on increased sales, decreased waste, stronger margins, or something else tied to making more or spending less rather than AI itself.

Data makes AI work. Outcomes are what businesses buy.

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My job involves talking to a lot of people. And because the people I talk to know that I’m talking to lots of other people, they not infrequently ask me what everyone else is saying about something.

Lately, the something they most often ask about is tokens.

Or more specifically, charging for tokens, the way software makers ranging from GitHub to Atlassian to SAP increasingly do. MSPs ask because they fear that vendors they buy from will soon adopt the same model and make budgeting for software difficult. Vendors ask, I suspect, because a) collecting predictable margins on AI-infused products without token-based pricing is difficult, b) MSPs could resist token-based pricing should it come, and c) it sure would be convenient if someone else would test how much resistance we’re talking about before they do.

And it turns out someone has, a young startup named Flamingo you first read about here in January that thinks a little differently about a lot of things. Michael Assraf, its founder and CEO, knows that his hybrid per-seat/per-token pricing scheme is a rarity among vendors that sell to and through MSPs. He’s also pretty confident that will only be true temporarily.

“For the longer term, I think that the entire industry is going to go that route,” Assraf (pictured) says.

So, apparently, do a few other people, because investors have just supplemented the $2.2 million of seed capital Flamingo raised last October with another $4.5 million. Their reasoning, like Assraf’s, begins with the undeniable fact that at a time when AI coding tools have radically shortened development times, the software moats innovators have long enjoyed are largely a thing of the past. Indeed, it took all of six weeks for Flamingo to build an RMM solution from scratch, and an even shorter five weeks to build an accompanying documentation and password management system.

“We care about the software and we’re going to build very good software, but it’s not where the big opportunity is,” Assraf says. “You’re not going to make money out of tooling revenue.”

You will, or at least can, make money on the labor AI-based tooling replaces. In the case of Simpro, per a recent story, that’s tasks like scheduling field service jobs. In the case of Upshop, per a forthcoming story, it’s tasks like managing a supermarket’s inventory. In the case of Flamingo, it’s tasks like running the help desk.

“For every dollar spent on software, there are five to six dollars spent on the people that click those buttons,” Assraf says. “So if you spend half a million on software for the IT department, you’re going to invest much more on the people and the labor that actually operates it and answers support tickets. Same for MSPs.”

By Assraf’s logic, the more his partners spend on AI labor the less they spend on labor overall and the more tokens they consume, in a value exchange that grows both the MSP’s bottom line and Flamingo’s top line.

Hence the vendor’s pricing scheme, which combines flat-rate software fees with usage-based token fees. The flat-rate part of the equation reflects Assraf’s take on what code is worth these days: Users pay $1 per device per month for RMM, PSA, remote access, SIEM, and four other platform modules or 80 cents a month on an annual contract. Those are prices Flamingo can afford to charge, according to Assraf, because its software is all either homegrown or open source.

“Even on 80 cents, we still make money,” he says.

But only a little. “We don’t make a lot of money on the tooling,” Assraf says. “Most of the money that we’re making is from the AI tokens.”

Flamingo’s monthly plan comes with 10 million of those; its yearly plan includes 25 million. Anything beyond that is billed at a pay-as-you-go price synced to match roughly what Anthropic and OpenAI are charging.

“You will pay us whatever you’re going to pay for tokens if you’re [working] directly with the LLM providers,” Assraf says. Except that Flamingo manages token consumption more efficiently than most MSPs, so it profits modestly on each token a partner uses.

At present, most of Flamingo’s roughly 400 early adopters are burning through 10-20x their monthly token allotment and paying accordingly. So far, according to Assraf, no one’s complaining or canceling as a result.

And that’s now, he adds, when Flamingo’s relying on frontier lab LLMs. The company will roll out LLMs of its own hosted in a SOC 2, Type 2 virtual data center by the end of the year, at which point partners will get twice as many tokens for the same price.

Assraf is quick to concede that his partners tend to be more AI-forward than the MSP mainstream. “Many of them are already using Claude Code and many of them are already using Codex and other tooling,” he says. “They’re already aware of this new token-based consumption pricing, so they’re OK with it.”

Everyone else will be too eventually, Assraf predicts, when they discover that paying more for AI is OK so long as it gets them more too.

“For now, what we’re seeing is that MSPs care about increasing their profit margins and they care about solving customers’ issues as fast as possible,” he says. They’ll pay for both by the token, in his experience to date, if you reliably help them with those goals.

Integrations, sort of

Like I said, Flamingo thinks differently about a lot of things. One of them is integrations, which have been all but sacrosanct in managed services for as long as there have been managed services. Most MSPs want the flexibility to construct bespoke stacks out of mixed-and-matched tools from multiple suppliers. Flamingo, per my January story about them, is the exceptionally rare example of an MSP-oriented software vendor that refuses to integrate with third parties anyway.

Or, starting soon, mostly refuses. The company is weeks away from introducing integrations with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace that will let technicians manage end user tenants through the same interface they use to manage other client assets.

Coming later as well are additional integrations with popular solutions from ConnectWise, Kaseya, and others. Except that Assraf doesn’t consider them real integrations per se.

“We’re going to add integrations into the normal PSA and RMMs in order for users to import their data from those tools into ours,” he says. Right now, competing platforms have functionality in areas like billing that Flamingo’s still developing.

“Once we have the rest of that stuff,” he predicts of his partners, “they’re going to migrate completely to us.”

When ransomware gets real

Ransomware is an abstraction to most of us. It’s not for its victims or the ransomware recovery experts who help them. MSP and ransomware recovery vendor Oli Thordarson makes that clear on the latest episode of MSP Chat, and he shares some informed advice on avoiding ransomware too. Tune in here for the whole thing, and visit this page for a look at all the other, equally compelling topics we get into on the show.

MSPs want strategic advice. TD SYNNEX says we hear you.

In a post you saw here late in July, I shared thoughts from two experts about research from industry community GTIA showing that member satisfaction with partner programs is dipping. Everything both Danielle Ibran of IDC and Ryan Morris of Channel Mastered, the consultancy I help lead, are seeing in the channel tells them the issue is that partners want strategic advice on outcome-oriented growth strategies from their vendors, and partner programs aren’t providing it.

Turns out that’s what TD SYNNEX is seeing too. “We’re 100% getting that feedback from our partners,” says Augie Staab, the distribution giant’s director of MSP sales. “We saw it start to come up in our Direction of Technology survey.” Staab’s newly created role and the newly created team she now leads are a big part of how TD SYNNEX acted on that data, along with additional revenue-related data.

“We started seeing an accelerated clip of growth associated with the partners who either had an established MSP business practice or methodology, or were expanding into it,” Staab (pictured) says. Overall IT industry growth averages 7-9% most years, she notes. “Then you look at people who are working in that MSP space, and their clip is 12-15%.”

Probably, TD SYNNEX believes, because unlike traditional resellers who move on to the next client and project after implementing solutions, MSPs stick around to manage the technology they supply and help clients benefit from it.

“They’re winning more opportunities organically from those relationships,” Staab says, including in areas outside the services and software MSPs typically know best.

“It’s driving opportunities for incremental hardware as well,” Staab says, from businesses that need 10 laptops, say. “They’re becoming more prone to just go to the MSP that they’re working with day to day.”

TD SYNNEX has had sales resources for those MSPs before within its SMB reseller unit. The new group Staab leads is the first to focus exclusively on what she calls “pure play” firms making 70% or more of their revenue from managed services.

“We have the autonomy to build the support, train the reps, and build programs that are MSP-centric and going to help our MSP community grow,” she says. They also have 60 reps on staff, versus the roughly two dozen MSP-focused people in the SMB reseller group.

“We now have a lower account-to-rep coverage ratio, which allows us to get deeper with those accounts, have more strategic conversations, and do some consultation on what they should add to their service delivery stack,” Staab says.

Exactly what partners told TD SYNNEX they want in the Direction of Technology survey and implicitly told GTIA as well. It also aligns with TD SYNNEX’s larger people-plus-tech partner relationship strategy.

“One of the things that we’ve noticed in the market right now, especially with our competition, is that there’s this approach that MSPs need to be digitally led,” Staab says. “I’m all for digitalizing the business, making operations streamlined, smoother, and so on, but MSPs are specifically asking for a lot of consultation and guidance.” Staab’s new unit, along with the PartnerFirst portal the company launched a year ago, is part of how TD SYNNEX plans to give those partners both digital resources and personal attention.

The company’s forthcoming MSP partner program, set to launch toward the end of the year, is another component of that strategy. Staab won’t say much about it for now except that its design will reflect extensive partner input and that its membership benefits will include access to peer-to-peer enablement, in keeping with an aspect of the MSP community that Staab (like ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo once upon a time) marvels at.

“I’ve worked with traditional resale. I’ve worked with enterprise VARs,” Staab says. “I’ve seen every type of business and size of business. What I love about the MSPs is that they lean on each other.”

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We’re all builders now, and we’re all on the hook

I wrote last week about the governance debt and data debt MSPs are encountering as they roll out AI tools and solutions. A recent conversation with a friend got me thinking about a more familiar IT-related liability: tech debt.

My friend is a professional developer at a healthcare research institute who uses AI coding tools every day and very much appreciates the productivity gains they’ve produced. But he’s also growing mindful of an issue that’s manageable now but may not be forever.

The code Claude writes, he says, is very effective but not especially elegant. It’s more like “spaghetti code” organized in sometimes inscrutable ways no human developer would choose. Which means that even he, who’s responsible for the code, can’t always explain why it works the way it works. What happens when something breaks and he’s home with the flu, on vacation, working somewhere else, or retired?

And AI code breaks all the time, too. Fully 75% of organizations surveyed by Futurum have already experienced a production incident involving AI-generated code, AI agents, and/or AI tooling. AI’s great at creating huge volumes of programming very rapidly, notes Mitch Ashley (pictured), vice president and practice lead for software lifecycle engineering at Futurum.

“It isn’t necessarily going to be thorough about making sure it’s been well-tested, making sure that it’s secure, making sure that if you’re talking to other third-party services, you know what it’s talking to,” he says.

The result is software quality issues that cost two-thirds of the organizations surveyed by Tricentis between $500,000 and $5 million a year and that forced Meta to cancel a major plan to replace human coders with agentic ones in the most public and humiliating way possible.

Meta and most of the companies Tricentis polled are big businesses, but MSPs aren’t immune from the same problems, as David Schwartz, CEO of service desk automation vendor Pia, explains during a recent episode of MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host.

“I’ve seen a lot of MSPs building their own tools,” he says, especially for ticket triage. And yes, they’ve saved money on licensing as a result, but Schwartz suspects they’ll eventually pay it back elsewhere.

“Most MSPs are not software businesses,” he says, which means they have limited expertise if any in security, governance, version control, R&D, and all the other things software businesses have deep in their DNA, not to mention limited time and bandwidth for the endless toil of maintenance.

And it really is endless, Ashley observes. “It’s much easier to create new code than it is to maintain current code.”

None of this should scare MSPs away from vibe coding, he adds, provided they embrace some minimum best practices for safety and efficiency. First, he says, be explicit in your instructions to your coding agent about employing safe development practices and scanning AI-generated code for known vulnerabilities.

“Those things have to be built into the environment as part of the framework, or the harness if you will, that even everyday builders build code with,” Ashley says. Pay particular attention to how vibe-coded apps handle user IDs and passwords, he adds. “The tools aren’t necessarily great about making sure that you’re not storing credentials locally.”

In fact, nothing should be stored locally, continues Ashley, who says MSPs should always put code in a trusted repository like GitHub that multiple people in their organization have access to, and back the code up regularly.

Sounds elementary, notes Schwartz, but it isn’t for a lot of people building their own code these days. “Most MSPs don’t really have a DevOps team that can truly own that,” he says.

Nor do their customers, many of whom are vibe-coding apps too. “We’re all builders now,” Ashley says. “Anyone can pick up a credit card or even a free account and start writing code with something.”

And if that puts IT professionals at risk, imagine what it does to technical amateurs. “That’s an opportunity for the advisors, the service providers, and the integrators who specialize in working with medium and small businesses,” Ashley notes. Eventually, he says, many such companies learn that AI coding creates more work than they expected. They’ll probably be happy to pay someone else to handle it for them.

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Over on Business of Tech

Host Dave Sobel is pondering “silent disqualification,” the phenomenon an MSP experiences when a distributor, vendor, or potential client rules them out as a partner or IT provider based on a few bad numbers in a few critical fields in a qualification database they didn’t even know existed:

So here is the choice. Give the fields an owner. One person who knows what tier you sit in with every distributor you buy through, which of your platforms carry which validations and when those expire, and what the public record returns about your business when a machine scores it — and who re-runs that check every quarter, the way a buyer would.

Or leave it where it lives now, which is nowhere, and learn you were taken out of a market the only way a silent disqualification ever tells you: a quarter that came in light, with no losses in it to explain why.

More here.

Also worth noting

• SCOUTz, from the founder who brought you RYTHMz, has emerged from stealth with an open-beta security sales intelligence platform for MSPs.

• Barracuda has signed OpenAI’s call for collective action on cyber defense.

• SPECTRA has launched a pilot certification framework of 20 AI deployment controls designed to give MSPs, SMBs, and insurers a common standard for validating the insurability of AI implementations. Much more to come in a future story.

• Proofpoint’s Prism Investigator and Human Communications Intelligence now conduct AI-powered investigations directly across Microsoft 365 email, Teams, and files.

• Blackpoint Cyber has added new ITDR capabilities to its CompassOne platform, including a historical Microsoft 365 compromise scan and nine new threat detections.

• JumpCloud’s IAM platform now manages AI agents alongside people and devices.

• Intermedia has launched AI Receptionist, a native AI voice agent for Intermedia Unite and Contact Center that answers and processes inbound calls.

• Okta has added new capabilities for securing and governing AI agents throughout their identity lifecycles.

• Recon, from Portal26, lets enterprises query their AI usage data in plain language for real-time risk, compliance, adoption, performance, and cost insights.

• Parallels has added Nutanix Prism support to Parallels RAS, enabling IT teams to centrally provision, manage, and scale Nutanix-based desktops and applications.

• MSP OneShare and IBPI have named TechRisks their IT-specific insurance partner, giving members access to specialized tech E&O, cyber liability, general liability, and other coverage. More on the story behind these orgs coming soon here too.

• Bill Wosilius is the new CEO at mega mega MSP Omega Systems.

I wrote last week about the governance debt and data debt MSPs are encountering as they roll out AI tools and solutions. A recent conversation with a friend got me thinking about a more familiar IT-related liability: tech debt.

My friend is a professional developer at a healthcare research institute who uses AI coding tools every day and very much appreciates the productivity gains they’ve produced. But he’s also growing mindful of an issue that’s manageable now but may not be forever.

The code Claude writes, he says, is very effective but not especially elegant. It’s more like “spaghetti code” organized in sometimes inscrutable ways no human developer would choose. Which means that even he, who’s responsible for the code, can’t always explain why it works the way it works. What happens when something breaks and he’s home with the flu, on vacation, working somewhere else, or retired?

And AI code breaks all the time, too. Fully 75% of organizations surveyed by Futurum have already experienced a production incident involving AI-generated code, AI agents, and/or AI tooling. AI’s great at creating huge volumes of programming very rapidly, notes Mitch Ashley (pictured), vice president and practice lead for software lifecycle engineering at Futurum.

“It isn’t necessarily going to be thorough about making sure it’s been well-tested, making sure that it’s secure, making sure that if you’re talking to other third-party services, you know what it’s talking to,” he says.

The result is software quality issues that cost two-thirds of the organizations surveyed by Tricentis between $500,000 and $5 million a year and that forced Meta to cancel a major plan to replace human coders with agentic ones in the most public and humiliating way possible.

Meta and most of the companies Tricentis polled are big businesses, but MSPs aren’t immune from the same problems, as David Schwartz, CEO of service desk automation vendor Pia, explains during a recent episode of MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host.

“I’ve seen a lot of MSPs building their own tools,” he says, especially for ticket triage. And yes, they’ve saved money on licensing as a result, but Schwartz suspects they’ll eventually pay it back elsewhere.

“Most MSPs are not software businesses,” he says, which means they have limited expertise if any in security, governance, version control, R&D, and all the other things software businesses have deep in their DNA, not to mention limited time and bandwidth for the endless toil of maintenance.

And it really is endless, Ashley observes. “It’s much easier to create new code than it is to maintain current code.”

None of this should scare MSPs away from vibe coding, he adds, provided they embrace some minimum best practices for safety and efficiency. First, he says, be explicit in your instructions to your coding agent about employing safe development practices and scanning AI-generated code for known vulnerabilities.

“Those things have to be built into the environment as part of the framework, or the harness if you will, that even everyday builders build code with,” Ashley says. Pay particular attention to how vibe-coded apps handle user IDs and passwords, he adds. “The tools aren’t necessarily great about making sure that you’re not storing credentials locally.”

In fact, nothing should be stored locally, continues Ashley, who says MSPs should always put code in a trusted repository like GitHub that multiple people in their organization have access to, and back the code up regularly.

Sounds elementary, notes Schwartz, but it isn’t for a lot of people building their own code these days. “Most MSPs don’t really have a DevOps team that can truly own that,” he says.

Nor do their customers, many of whom are vibe-coding apps too. “We’re all builders now,” Ashley says. “Anyone can pick up a credit card or even a free account and start writing code with something.”

And if that puts IT professionals at risk, imagine what it does to technical amateurs. “That’s an opportunity for the advisors, the service providers, and the integrators who specialize in working with medium and small businesses,” Ashley notes. Eventually, he says, many such companies learn that AI coding creates more work than they expected. They’ll probably be happy to pay someone else to handle it for them.

Share

In a post you saw here late in July, I shared thoughts from two experts about research from industry community GTIA showing that member satisfaction with partner programs is dipping. Everything both Danielle Ibran of IDC and Ryan Morris of Channel Mastered, the consultancy I help lead, are seeing in the channel tells them the issue is that partners want strategic advice on outcome-oriented growth strategies from their vendors, and partner programs aren’t providing it.

Turns out that’s what TD SYNNEX is seeing too. “We’re 100% getting that feedback from our partners,” says Augie Staab, the distribution giant’s director of MSP sales. “We saw it start to come up in our Direction of Technology survey.” Staab’s newly created role and the newly created team she now leads are a big part of how TD SYNNEX acted on that data, along with additional revenue-related data.

“We started seeing an accelerated clip of growth associated with the partners who either had an established MSP business practice or methodology, or were expanding into it,” Staab (pictured) says. Overall IT industry growth averages 7-9% most years, she notes. “Then you look at people who are working in that MSP space, and their clip is 12-15%.”

Probably, TD SYNNEX believes, because unlike traditional resellers who move on to the next client and project after implementing solutions, MSPs stick around to manage the technology they supply and help clients benefit from it.

“They’re winning more opportunities organically from those relationships,” Staab says, including in areas outside the services and software MSPs typically know best.

“It’s driving opportunities for incremental hardware as well,” Staab says, from businesses that need 10 laptops, say. “They’re becoming more prone to just go to the MSP that they’re working with day to day.”

TD SYNNEX has had sales resources for those MSPs before within its SMB reseller unit. The new group Staab leads is the first to focus exclusively on what she calls “pure play” firms making 70% or more of their revenue from managed services.

“We have the autonomy to build the support, train the reps, and build programs that are MSP-centric and going to help our MSP community grow,” she says. They also have 60 reps on staff, versus the roughly two dozen MSP-focused people in the SMB reseller group.

“We now have a lower account-to-rep coverage ratio, which allows us to get deeper with those accounts, have more strategic conversations, and do some consultation on what they should add to their service delivery stack,” Staab says.

Exactly what partners told TD SYNNEX they want in the Direction of Technology survey and implicitly told GTIA as well. It also aligns with TD SYNNEX’s larger people-plus-tech partner relationship strategy.

“One of the things that we’ve noticed in the market right now, especially with our competition, is that there’s this approach that MSPs need to be digitally led,” Staab says. “I’m all for digitalizing the business, making operations streamlined, smoother, and so on, but MSPs are specifically asking for a lot of consultation and guidance.” Staab’s new unit, along with the PartnerFirst portal the company launched a year ago, is part of how TD SYNNEX plans to give those partners both digital resources and personal attention.

The company’s forthcoming MSP partner program, set to launch toward the end of the year, is another component of that strategy. Staab won’t say much about it for now except that its design will reflect extensive partner input and that its membership benefits will include access to peer-to-peer enablement, in keeping with an aspect of the MSP community that Staab (like ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo once upon a time) marvels at.

“I’ve worked with traditional resale. I’ve worked with enterprise VARs,” Staab says. “I’ve seen every type of business and size of business. What I love about the MSPs is that they lean on each other.”

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