Evergreen’s Budding AI Playbook
The managed services giant is seeing early success with forward deployed engineers and workflow automation, and AI’s increasingly factoring what it pays for acquisitions.
Treeline isn’t the only MSP getting a steady stream of end user calls about AI at present. Lyra Technology Group, per a recent post, is too. And as anticipated in an even earlier post, it’s experimenting with a variety of ways to satisfy that demand.
One in particular is “really taking off,” according to Ramsey Sahyoun, co-founder and M&A partner at Lyra parent Evergreen. Eight of the company’s 120-ish MSPs have begun embedding forward deployed engineers (three of Silicon Valley’s five favorite words right now) with clients to turn clumsy manual workflows into speedy agentic ones.
“It’s like a really skinnied down version of the Palantir model,” says Sahyoun (pictured). And clients, like a manufacturer Lyra supports that no longer takes orders by hand and an engineering firm that now uses AI to extract project data from blueprints and the like, are loving it.
“You’re saving the customer more money than they’re spending for managed services,” Sahyoun says. “It’s game changing if we can make it repeatable.”
Two lessons stand out already for making it work, he continues. First, talk to a client’s executives rather than line workers to identify workflows in need of automation. “It’s very top of mind for them,” Sahyoun says.
Second, don’t assume any old tech on your team will make a good forward deployed engineer. Evergreen’s been onboarding newcomers for FDE gigs using one specific employee as a model for the skills they need.
“Basically, we found we had one business where there was a person doing this really well for customers, so we interviewed him,” Sahyoun says. “We’ve been hiring based on him to a certain extent. It’s a lot of people early in their career.”
Lyra, which has hired 16 FDEs in all to date, usually assigns them to customers in pairs. “You need someone that’s a little more technical and then someone that’s a little more business process and can be a consultant to the customer,” Sahyoun says, adding that one such duo is all most MSPs need. Palantir’s FDEs can spend months onsite with the enterprises they serve, he notes.
“With smaller businesses where there are probably simpler processes, a team of two can work across a bunch of different clients.”
The AI multiple in MSP M&A
You don’t need to be deploying FDEs like Evergreen as an MSP right now, but having something in AI to offer customers is increasingly what separates winners from losers in managed services, according to Ramsey.
“You’re kind of seeing it show up in the financial results,” he says. “I’m seeing a lot of MSPs that are growing really quickly and I’m seeing a lot of MSPs that are just stagnant for the last few years.” The growing ones tend to be embracing AI. The stagnant ones tend not to be.
Not surprisingly, then, AI maturity plays an increasingly important role in the valuation process at Evergreen, which bought 33 MSPs last year and expects to buy even more in 2026.
“The biggest thing when we do the customer diligence is are they in that conversation with their customers around guiding them on AI or are they being left out of that conversation?” Sahyoun says. “If you’re getting cut out of these conversations around how we implement AI in our business, that’s dangerous, because then you could just be a commoditized help desk.”
Other, more traditional, variables factor into Evergreen’s calculations too these days. “We spend a lot of time on the revenue mix, the organic growth trajectory of the business, and we spend a lot of time on diligence in customer health and customer satisfaction,” Sahyoun says. “The way you get burned in acquiring these businesses is not retaining the customers.”
Not that Evergreen or anyone else purchasing MSPs can afford to be as choosy as they might like right now. “It’s a real seller’s market,” Sahyoun says, less because the supply of MSPs is shrinking than because demand for MSPs is rising at a time when six mega mega MSPs and some 75 private equity platforms are chasing after the same businesses. All that competition has Evergreen looking beyond the $8 to $10 million firms it normally wants.
“We’ll go as small as $3 million in revenue,” Sahyoun says, adding that its EBITDA range has widened too. When Evergreen first opened its doors in 2018 it wanted at least $2 million.
“Then we got into the space and found the slim pickings at that size and we adjusted,” Sahyoun says, first down to $1 million and then to $500,000. It doesn’t seem to have hurt the company much.
“We ended last year at a billion and a half of revenue, $250 million of EBITDA, and double-digit organic growth,” Sahyoun says.
Are SMBs cyber ready?
ESET’s Tony Anscombe has been one of my go-tos on security for years, so it’s hard to believe it took me this long to get him on MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host. Check out his take on ESET’s 2026 SMB Cyber Readiness Index on the latest episode.
