‘Every Business Is Going To Have To Transform’: Pax8 CEO Chasin On Agentic AI’s Impact

Pax8 CEO Scott Chasin on the MSP to MIP evolution, the dawn of an “idea economy,” and Pax8’s recent leadership changes.

The MSP model is dead, long live MIPs?

During Pax8 Beyond EMEA, MSPs from all around Europe - and beyond - gathered in Amsterdam to hear about the latest updates from the industry as the organisation aims to position itself as the IT channel’s north star.

Across the conference hall, corridors echoed with the term of managed intelligence provider (MIP), a new model designed to leverage the transformations and opportunities brought by agentic AI.

These rumours were confirmed during the event’s opening keynote, where various executives, including Scott Chasin, the cloud commerce marketplace’s CEO, announced the launch of the MIP playbook, a guide to help MSPs transition into this new era.

In an exclusive interview with CRN UK, Chasin discusses how this new approach will reshape the notion of MSP, lead to an “idea economy”, Pax8’s future, as well as the announcements made during last year’s event.

How do you plan to address countries where the MSP model is still developing, compared to more mature markets across Europe such as the UK, transition and evolve toward the MIP model?

“It’s a transition that has to happen with urgency, first and foremost.

“The model, in terms of monetisation, will be different, but it’s simply building off of the foundation that every MSP - whether you’re new or you’ve been doing it for years - leverages today, which is trust.

“You are the trusted advisor for your customers, and it’s that trust which will illuminate the path on this journey.

“I don’t think that’s differentiated from what MSPs do today.

“It’s just building on that trust and leveraging it to show your customer what’s coming on the horizon.

“I don’t think it’s the tenure, in terms of how long you’ve been an MSP, that matters.

“It’s more about the sense of urgency with which you start to lean in at whatever stage you’re at in your MSP journey.

“It’s only a matter of time before you start seeing small businesses pull their trusted advisors into this conversation.

“Every business is going to have to transform because the economics are going to change.

“And MSPs are the ones that will be asked to show the way. If they’re not ready, capable, or willing, it’ll be somebody else that steps in.

“That’s the urgency I’m trying to deliver here; we don’t have that much time, so it’s important to start having that conversation.

“The beautiful thing about AI in MSPs, regardless of what stage they’re at, is that it sparks the conversation.

“It creates an opportunity to not only guide your customer into this agentic era, but it opens up all kinds of other opportunities.

“Cybersecurity is a great example.

“The impact of AI on cyber can’t be dismissed, and it’s another opportunity to sit down with your client and have a discussion around the impact of not just AI on their business, but AI in terms of their security posture, their performance, and how they can take advantage of the opportunities that exist today.

“Show them, be that partner, as more capabilities come out into the marketplace to take them into a deeper conversation and become that strategic business partner for their customers.

Speaking of business impact, you mentioned the concept of the ‘idea economy.’ What is this idea economy, and how will agentic AI propel us into it?

“I believe we will see a redefinition of what it means to be small, and we’ve already got plenty of examples of that.

“I think enterprise companies, are going to see the advantage of AI, and we’re already seeing this in terms of knowledge worker displacement in larger enterprises.

“As an optimist, I think there’s plenty of opportunity to leverage AI to build something. It’s no surprise that the SMB TAM [standing at €662bn (£575bn), according to Gartner] has now eclipsed that of the enterprise TAM.

“I see this concept of the ‘idea economy’, where anybody can build anything with the tooling that is coming out - and in some cases, already exists.

“You’re going to see the proliferation of an agent for everything, and I believe it’ll be much more frictionless to go build a company.

“If you go back to 2010 and look at the smartphone app boom, everyone had an idea for an app, but nobody could get one built because mobile development companies were completely full. Imagine taking that constraint out.

“Now, if you have an idea for an app, or, in this case, an idea for an agentically powered business, you can build it yourself.

“That’s where you’ll see an incredible expansion of the SMB TAM (total addressable market), and I think it’s going to be worldwide.

“I believe AI will power this new agentic SMB ecosystem.

“Within that, you’ll see lots of opportunities for knowledge workers - anyone with an idea will be able to execute it and use digital labour to get it off the ground.”

Do you see any specific sectors that will demand and be impacted by agentic AI more than others?

“I think every business will eventually find itself, over the next few years, re-architecting how they operate around agents.

“The economics of what it means to run a business will change. Competitive pressure will force all businesses to rethink how they deliver their value.

“This is an amazing opportunity for any business to reshape, not just for efficiency, but also for scaling into growth.

“To be able to create something and deliver it at scale agentically means you can move into markets you never thought about, where language or commerce is no longer a barrier.

“It’s going to open up all kinds of opportunities, even beyond just the inception level.

“AI in this agentic world will unleash a massive proliferation of AI-powered small businesses over the next five years.”

Could MSPs also dive deeper into the enterprise sector thanks to this transition?

“We focus on SMBs. We serve the underserved, and our partners serve the underserved.

“Is there opportunity in the enterprise? Sure, but’s not something we’re focused on today.

“I don’t think there’s any business on the planet that will be immune from this agentic opportunity.

“While we’re not focused on it today, there’s opportunity across the board for any business to leverage AI to enter new markets, create better efficiencies, or innovate completely new areas of value.”

You also said that if MSPs fail to evolve, they could see margins fall by 30 per cent to 50 per cent by 2027. How quickly do partners have to transition?

“I think we’ll see the first real rinse-and-repeat models by the end of next year. That’s why we’re being so loud about this right now.

“As the largest marketplace in B2B SMB, we have a responsibility to bring the future forward.

“We’re sounding the alarm now because we believe that if you lean in today, you’ll be rewarded tomorrow.

“There’s still a lot of pioneering to be done, and we’re just starting to see big changes - AI moving out of the compute layer and into the application layer, and agents are the bridge for that transition.

“There will be much more of that over the next 12 months.

“I think we’ll really start to see monetizable opportunities at scale by the end of next year in terms of human workflow augmentation.

“By the end of 2027, I think we’ll be looking at completely autonomous knowledge workers - digital colleagues - that proliferate and provide greater opportunities for MIPs around management, orchestration, security, compliance, etc.

“Once you get beyond 24 months, it gets a bit blurry.

“Exponential change is hard to predict. Some of the constraints I mentioned this morning, such as the need for a real global agentic backbone and power constraints, still need to be solved.

“We’ll also likely see new paradigm shifts in scaling laws and reinforcement learning. There’s more innovation coming over the next 24 months, but beyond 2027, the crystal ball gets a little blurry.”

At last year’s Beyond EMEA, you said that within the next 24 months, one MSP in the room would reach €1bn in revenue. Has this happened?

“Yes, we did make that prediction, and it has come true; we announced it in June at our flagship event in Denver; Evergreen reached that milestone.

Do you see any more MSPs reaching this target anytime soon?

“I think there’s so much opportunity for MSPs today, whether that’s on this trajectory to become an MIP or continuing to navigate the everyday challenges of the IT stack.

“You’re going to see more consolidation in the MSP space, and you’ll see completely new partner types come into the channel.

“MIPs represent an evolutionary path - you can call it MSP 3.0 or 3.5 or whatever you want - but there will also be new partners that see the opportunity in small business transformation in this agentic world.

“That’s why it’s important for existing MSPs to start leaning in now, to start having those conversations.

“The quickest way to fall behind is to stand still.”

At last year’s Beyond EMEA, you also mentioned that technologies such as AGI (artificial general intelligence) and ASI (artificial super intelligence) would have an impact on the industry and the public. Have you seen this impact yet?

“No, but AGI is always out there.

“I think AGI, in the classic form of AI surpassing human intelligence, is something we’re seeing flashes of today across distinct domains.

“Many frontier labs talk about PhD-level intelligence, and all of the large frontier models are representing that capability today.

“There are a lot of measurements being made around AI self-replicating and innovating itself, but I don’t think we’ve seen that at scale yet.

“Once we do, because of the ‘hive mind’ capability of these models, proliferation will happen very quickly.

“When will that happen? There’s a lot of guessing out there - some say seven years, some say ten, some say five. I think between five and seven is probably right.

“I don’t think waiting for AGI means there isn’t an opportunity to start transforming your customers with agentic capabilities and workflows now.

“That’s the great thing about AI; it sparks the conversation.

“Every business has repetitive, manual processes or process debt that suffocates potential, and we’re entering a new phase where that can be addressed.

“Agents are the opportunity to not just re-engineer a process, but to redefine the outcome and create something completely new.

“That’s where it gets really exciting, and that’s where MSPs have an opportunity to transform from trusted advisors into strategic business partners that can create long-lasting relationships with their customers through this transition and beyond.”

Speaking of transformation, there’s been a lot of new additions to Pax8’s leadership team in 2025. Does this mark a new chapter for the company?

“We’re transforming ourselves in a lot of ways.

“It’s a representation of what we’re projecting to the market - we’re scaling for growth.

“We see this SMB opportunity that has been ignored forever.

“We see the opportunity, and most vendors are now awakening to it.

“We’ve been lucky to pioneer much of the reach we have and to be in this position where we have a responsibility to lead managed service providers and managed intelligence providers into what’s next.

“But to do that successfully, we have to scale too.

“We have a big vision that takes us beyond 2027, but we also need to transform to scale - and we’re doing just that.

“It’s about how we not only drive success today but also ten years from now.

“Going back to the TAM discussion, with a TAM that’s already eclipsing the enterprise TAM and poised to drastically amplify over the next few years, we’ve got some renovation we need to do to be able to transform and scale into that growth.

“We are scaling across the board. Ultimately, this is about our partners’ experience: maintaining the value and capabilities that Pax8 was founded on while scaling into the new opportunities the agentic future will bring.”

What would success look like to you in 12 months?

“We spend a lot of time thinking about what’s next, and hopefully over the last three years, we’ve shown the market how different Pax8 is from the legacy.

“We have a really exciting roadmap that we’re executing, one that speaks not only to this great transformation but also to enabling our partners’ success through it at scale.

“All I can say is: stay tuned. We’re just getting started.”

This article originally appeared on CRN sister website CRN UK.