That 56% of MSPs now consider themselves ready to deliver AI services suggests, logically speaking, that 44% still don’t feel ready. Which further suggests that many of the 84% of end users who told Omdia they trust their MSP to implement AI have misplaced their trust.
The frontier labs and other AI giants are painfully conscious of the gap between what businesses think their partners can do with AI and what those partners can actually do. Per a story here six months ago, moreover, they’re not waiting around for partners to close that gap, mostly because they can’t afford to, according to Omdia chief analyst Jay McBain (pictured).
“This could be a $20 trillion bubble bursting if they don’t get this thing right,” he says.
Which is why OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft, AWS, and other big names in AI are collectively spending billions of dollars on people who can be trusted to implement AI, highly skilled, highly coveted (see the recently published chart below from Lenny Rachitsky), and extremely expensive forward deployed engineers they can parachute into businesses months at a time to implement and optimize AI-based solutions.
The channel hates the whole thing, notes Omdia senior analyst Bill Dannenmaier. “Nobody wants the vendors to actually start taking services,” he says.
Nor do the vendors want that, McBain adds. All of those massively funded FDE programs are basically holding actions aimed at buying time (and revenue) until partners are trained up to take over, a prospect the big names are spending heavily on as well.
“None of these companies that are investing billions of dollars want to be direct services companies,” McBain says.
Conversely, he continues, few managed service providers want to be FDE companies. Or should, anyway. Maybe it’s just semantics, but while MSPs like Evergreen and Innovative Solutions have FDEs on staff now and others will surely follow, no one focused on SMBs will ever really do what the Accentures and Deloittes of the world bill clients $1,000 an hour for, assuming anyone’s still willing to pay that two years from now.
“They don’t have the operating model, operating layers, to do that and they’re just not in front of customers who would ever pay that amount,” McBain says.
Dannenmaier agrees. “I don’t think that we’ll see many small SMB partners have an FDE,” he says. “By the time it hits SMB, there’ll probably be another word for it.” And it might be a familiar one at that.
“That partner who’s in house working alongside [clients], that won’t be an FDE in the future,” Dannenmaier predicts. “That will be just another MSP.”
And now, a word from The Futurum Group
Why limit yourself to wisdom from one great analyst organization this week when you can also hear Tiffani Bova of The Futurum Group discuss that company’s recent AI workforce report and much more on MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host? That episode is located here, and the rest of our equally thought-provoking episodes are located here.
