Sorry to Be the Grinch Here, Folks, But There is No Agentic AI Easy Button
MSPs are going to need agentic AI development skills with or without ready-made, marketplace-ready agents. Plus: why Huntress is getting into identity security posture management.
It’s a stretch, I know, but it’s getting increasingly easy to imagine that within a few years’ time AI agents will be not just what most MSPs are selling, but who they’re selling it to as well.
Consider: According to Gartner, “at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI by 2028, up from 0% in 2024.” Is it really so hard to imagine that some of those decisions will eventually involve which IT services to buy, and from whom?
That’s one good reason to get serious about agents. All the money businesses will be spending on them is another. Indeed, while AI generally is a big opportunity for anyone in IT, it’s not nearly as big as agentic AI more specifically. According to Omdia, spending on agentic AI will grow at a 175% CAGR through 2029 versus a “mere” 90% for generative AI overall, the upshot being an end state in which sales of agentic AI solutions and services account for 31% of the genAI market, up from 6% this year.
Which raises two interesting questions:
1. Do you know anyone—I mean, anyone—selling genuinely agentic AI solutions and services to businesses today? The correct response for most readers, given that just 13 of the roughly 600 MSPs a Pax8 executive recently asked about the matter said yes, is probably no.
2. Can MSPs not selling agentic solutions and services today afford to continue not selling them indefinitely? The correct response for everyone, given that IDC says spending on agentic AI will account for 26% of all IT outlays by 2029, is also arguably no.
Lisa Lawson (pictured), a senior principal analyst at Omdia, certainly thinks as much. “I don’t see a world in which agents are not a part of the tech stack,” she says.
Which raises a third question brought to mind by a couple of Channelholic stories this year involving Pax8: Will buying ready-made agents from a marketplace or distributor be an easy button option for MSPs to get from nowhere in agentic AI to somewhere? The correct response this time, I’m afraid, is a little more complex than yes or no.
It’s worth asking anyway, because Pax8 isn’t the only company with a lot riding on the answer. “ServiceNow, Salesforce, Microsoft, AWS,” Lawson says. “They’re aggressively trying to get their partners to build agents that can be listed and sold across their customer base.”
Salesforce in particular, though, can attest to how hard getting an agent business off the ground can be. The CRM leader’s Agentforce platform, unveiled last September, had produced about 12,500 deals, some 6,000 of which were generating outcome-based revenue, as of the close of the company’s fiscal Q2 in July. We’ll get Q3 figures on Wednesday, but barring the steepest hockey stick sales spike of all time, it’s hard to imagine CEO Marc Benioff getting anywhere near his goal of having 1 billion agents in use by the end of this year.
You can write some of that off to the fact that a) Benioff has a gift for hyperbole and, b) we’re still early in act one of the agentic AI story. But there are bigger issues as well that will prevent pre-assembled agents from making agentic AI success simple for MSPs.
For starters, businesses aren’t generic, so generic agents sourced as-is off a marketplace won’t do most businesses much good in a lot of situations. Will companies use them to automate simple processes? Sure, Lawson says.
“Will they use off-the-shelf agents for more proprietary data workflows? Probably not,” she continues. “Those might need to be customized.”
Which requires skills that few MSPs have even begun acquiring. “There’s a readiness gap,” Lawson notes. That’s not a problem yet, she continues, because there’s not much demand for agentic solutions among SMBs at present.
“But there will be in the next five years,” Lawson warns, and MSPs unable to satisfy it risk ending up marooned in the most commoditized, least profitable corners of the managed services landscape. Ready-made, marketplace-listed agents offer a head start toward avoiding that fate, but they don’t eliminate the danger altogether.
“MSPs need to start getting trained, they need to start developing those skill sets, they need to start hiring for it,” Lawson says.
Reselling agents isn’t a no-brainer either
OK, so maybe marketplace agents won’t make getting into agentic solutions a friction-free process. Could they be a revenue opportunity for MSPs just the same?
Pax8 certainly thinks so, as Chance Weaver, the company’s vice president of AI adoption, made clear in a recent interview.
“You can build an agent and sell it,” he said. “Another MSP that’s servicing a couple of healthcare clients now doesn’t have to go out and build an agent. They can go and take a look at all of these agents that healthcare-focused MSPs have built.”
Lawson agrees. “I believe marketplaces are a way for them to actually sell that IP that they’ve made for very niche use cases for very niche verticals,” she says. “MSPs aren’t doing this yet, but they will.”
West McDonald, founder of AI consultancy GoWest.ai, is less sure. Already, in the three short years (officially, as of today) since ChatGPT’s debut, aspiring vendors have introduced solutions designed to do things the leading LLMs couldn’t, like extract information from PDFs or read video, only to have the next model update render those products irrelevant.
“Will agents be the same?” West (pictured) asks. “Will AI be so smart, will it be so incredible at being able to build these agentic flows with guidance from a human being, that really you’ll just need the major players to do those? I don’t know, but I lean in the direction of that’s how it’s going to happen.”
Indeed, Gartner expects at least half of knowledge workers to have some of the skills required to create AI agents on demand for complex tasks by 2029. Who’s going to pay an MSP for work that GPT-6 arms them to do on their own?
AI assessments for all
As it happens, that last question is precisely the kind of thing anyone building a business around generative AI needs to be asking constantly, according to West.
“Always in AI, you’re thinking about how you put yourself out of business,” he says.
In West’s own case, that’s meant thinking about how to put himself out of the AI assessment business. Right now, clients pay him up to $12,000 to do that work on a one-off, highly manual basis. Soon they won’t need to, thanks to BizVantage.ai, the automated assessment solution West introduced earlier this month.
“MSPs can go to their customers, just conduct some very structured, simple interviews, and BizVantage takes complete care of the output, including what the most critical workflows are, what potential AI solutions could help with those workflows, and really importantly, the cost, complexity, and value to the client,” he says.
Which will result in BizVantage partners typically charging something like $3,000 to $4,000 for assessments, according to West, “with really healthy margins.”
Currently in soft launch, he says, the product will be generally available in about two months.
Huntress hits the accelerator on identity security posture management
Avid Channelholic readers may recall how badly CEO Kyle Hanslovan wanted to tell me about the “big stuff” Huntress has brewing with Microsoft back in July, along with how frustratingly disciplined he was about not spilling the beans.
I know I’ve been more than a little curious about the matter since then anyway. So you can imagine how interested I was a couple of weeks ago to learn that Huntress has acquired Inside Agent, an identity security vendor for Microsoft 365 environments. Was this the next step in an unfolding master plan?
Yes, but not the one Hanslovan hinted at last summer.
“It’s all in line with our overall strategy of being the best-in-class security solution for the Microsoft ecosystem,” says Huntress chief product officer Prakash Ramamurthy (pictured).
It aligns as well with Huntress’s ongoing pivot toward identity security, which has origins extending back to the November 2023 launch of the company’s Managed Identity Threat Detection and Response solution and Hanslovan’s observation at the time that the increasing effectiveness of endpoint security solutions and the increasing importance of SaaS applications had made identities the hot new attack surface.
“The threat landscape where the endpoint was king still exists, but there’s new beachfront property,” he said.
Hackers continue to covet it too, according to the 2025 Huntress Managed ITDR Report, which said that identity-based attacks presently account for 40% of all security incidents and that 67% of organizations have seen an increase in identity-related incidents over the past three years. An even higher 68% of survey participants, furthermore, called themselves unable to detect these identity-based threats until after they’ve achieved persistence. No wonder Huntress’s managed ITDR service, per Ramamurthy, has been a hit.
“It’s one of our fastest-growing products,” he says. “We’re protecting north of about 8 million identities today.”
Of course, the thing about ITDR is that it’s a right-of-boom solution. Given the continued threat posed by identity-based attacks, Huntress reasoned, there ought to be something the company could do to mitigate vulnerabilities left of boom too by, for example, automatically enabling MFA at companies not using it.
“We thought we should be able to do more for our customers and help them manage their configurations upfront so that they can reduce the risk of some of these compromises happening,” Ramamurthy says.
Hence the company’s twin decisions to a) create an identity security posture management solution, and b) acquire Inside Agent to accelerate the development process. Which has apparently worked, because an early edition of the new offering is slated to arrive in a matter of weeks.
“We want to get this in the hands of early adopters by January of next year latest,” Ramamurthy says.
And that “big stuff” Huntress has coming with Microsoft? It appears likely to remain a mystery for longer than that.
Two last notes about that identity security posture management solution
1. When it enters general availability early next year, it will sell as a separate SKU priced on top of existing Huntress products, including ITDR.
2. If it sells well, Huntress is open to the thought of combining it with ITDR in a single SKU.
“We’ll learn from it next year and make sure we feel good about the product offering,” Ramamurthy says. “If we see more and more customers buying both of them together, that will be the leading indicator to say, ‘Hey, maybe we should offer it as a bundle.’”
My podcast is 100 episodes old!
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Also worth noting
MSP360 has launched a native integration with fast-growing PSA platform HaloPSA.
Trend Micro’s new Trend Vision One AI Security Package is a centralized AI risk management offering for the entire AI application lifecycle.
SaaS management vendor Augmentt has closed a CAD $18 million Series A funding round led by Camber Partners.
Neon Cyber has released an integration that brings its identity-based threat telemetry to the Elastic Security platform.
ManageEngine has enhanced its CloudSpend cost management platform with a new multi-portal architecture designed to unify oversight across all clients and business units.