How Solution Providers Are Putting AI Agents To Work

We are seeing rapid scale in implement and rapid scale and growth in this—we call it “managed service 2.0,” that next wave of agentic enabled managed services,’ says Patrick Pugh, PwC’s global and U.S. alliance and ecosystems leader.

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Artificial intelligence agents are spreading beyond organizations’ technical departments, with solution providers deploying the technology internally while helping customers automate and improve processes across human resources, finance, sales, project management and beyond.

Executives with solution providers that are front and center in agent-ifying client workplaces—Corsica Technologies, Perficient and PricewaterhouseCoopers—shared how they are adopting AI agents internally and with customers as AI approaches five years since ChatGPT’s general availability ushered in the AI era.

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Patrick Pugh, PwC’s global and U.S. alliance and ecosystems leader, told CRN in an interview the agentic era is about the outcomes clients want to achieve, whether their current workflows and processes are delivering those outcomes and where AI and agents can augment the work.

Gone are the days of a simple request for proposal focused on a technology implementation, with solution providers such as PwC—which has hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide—examining the human, workflow and technology layers to create holistic solutions spanning business functions and technology buyers, Pugh said.

This has also put greater attention on PwC’s managed services business, where the solution provider is going beyond traditional outsourcing to run client operations and leverage its agentic Outcomes Hub technology delivery platform.

“The traditional [advisory] space is changing quite fast,” Pugh said. “We are seeing rapid-scale [implementations] and growth in this—we call it ‘managed service 2.0’—that next wave of agentic-enabled managed services.”

The move of enterprise AI agents from first-wave assistant products to actual work execution tools puts their addressable market closer to organizations’ labor budgets, which tend to be larger than IT budgets and reflect a larger opportunity, Morgan Stanley said in a report this month.

Key questions include how AI players define outcomes and verification in contracts as workplace technology moves from per-seat pricing to usage-based and outcome-based pricing, according to the investment firm.

Perficient Uses Agents To Transform Sales, Finance, Even Meetings

St. Louis-based Perficient, No. 67 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500, is leveraging partnerships with leading AI vendors to transform its own operations with agents while reimagining customers’ front- and back-office processes.

Perficient’s Salesforce practice, as an example, has seen demand from customers leveraging agents to improve customer-facing and back-office processes, Chelsea Monda, director of agentic transformation for Perficient’s Salesforce practice, told CRN in an interview.

Perficient has been helping customers connect agents to their data, business processes and workflows while keeping a human in the loop, Monda said.

“This is not a replacement of humans,” she said. “It’s an enhancement of that human’s time and abilities. So [we’re] having human-driven decisions still made based on agent-driven insight.”

With the outcome-based approach that has been growing in demand by customers in the AI age, Perficient’s Salesforce practice has measured items ranging from increase in pipeline, qualified pipeline, the pace of when an opportunity is created to when it becomes closed, and seller productivity, she said. Customers also look to agents to help with lead generation, lead nurturing—plus automation and personalization around those activities.

“Those are all things that you can control that at the end of the day will also add up to your revenue line,” she said.

Santhosh Nair, chief partner officer at Perficient, told CRN in an interview that the solution provider is working with Databricks, for example, on an agentic office of the CFO for customers. The solution leverages agents in the finance organization to support field teams with margin leakage, order-to-cash and reducing selling, general and administrative expenses.

Internally, Perficient is exploring agents for cutting down on meetings, going from dozens of meetings over multiple days to one meeting with employees interviewed by agents and the answers correlated with project timelines and other internal data to verify everything is on track, Nair said.

“You can’t even put on a spreadsheet how much time savings that that truly is,” Nair said.

Corsica Brings AI Agents Into HR, Finance, Accounting, IT

Peter Rodenhauser, president and CRO of Fort Wayne, Ind.-based Corsica Technologies—No. 440 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500—told CRN in a recent interview that the company has partnered with clients on building agents to remove repetitive tasks from internal teams in human resources, finance, accounting and in-house IT.

Customers have used agents to build out common FAQ documents and answer common requests, with Corsica—which has a focus on Microsoft and the tech giant’s Copilot AI assistant—building the guardrails and governance to protect any sensitive data involved in those tasks, he said.

“They don’t necessarily have the capacity to build those agents internally,” Rodenhauser said. “So they’re partnering with us to identify, scope out what the requirements are, and then we can deploy that. And that’s across different parts of the business.”

Corsica has focused on building agents with individual customers rather than publishing them for public consumption, he said.

He’s seen clients’ risk tolerance for AI and agents growing as they become more comfortable using the technology, with AI still being so new that clients are leaning on MSPs to guide the adoption and match agents with front-of-mind business problems and bottlenecks in the client organizations.

“As organizations get more comfortable with AI, they’re going to be willing to deploy a little bit more,” he said. “But where we have a responsibility as much as anyone is making sure that they don’t move too fast, we don’t move too slow, and vice versa.”

As customers have grown more comfortable with AI, Corsica has also seen the agentic era deepen clients’ trust in the solution provider and their appreciation for how broadly IT touches the business, Rodenhauser said.

“As we’re leading with those business conversations, we’re seeing a reaction from our customers where they’re saying, ‘Oh, wow. You guys really do understand our business more than we thought you did,’” he said. “So that’s a level of trust that we are earning through this journey as well. And that’s pretty powerful.”

The agent work Corsica has done internally has helped prepare the company for working with customers on their own agents, he said. Internally, agents have helped Corsica employees access more information and better serve customers.

The company has about 200 employees nationwide, and they are leveraging agents to do more with less, Rodenhauser said. Agents have served Corsica outside core service delivery, even helping the finance and accounting groups conduct financial planning and analysis.

Corsica’s internal deployments and customer engagements have created a feedback loop, with lessons from each helping improve the other, Rodenhauser said.

“We’re adding these new customers [and] we’re not having to add staff as rapidly as we had in the past,” he said. “As we’re working and partnering with our clients, light bulbs are going off even for ourselves, saying, ‘Oh, wow. We could we could really improve our own operation doing this as well.’”

In this AI age, customers can almost look to MSPs as a utility for their business, he said. “Think of us as plumbing, electricity, you name it,” Rodenhauser said. “We want to make sure that when we flip the switch, there’s power coming on. There’s IT working. Our business is protected. … The outcome is to make the back-office IT, cybersecurity a nonevent. We are doing it. We are managing it. We are taking a lot of that heavy lifting off of your team so that your team can focus certainly identifying value-add opportunities.”

PwC: Rethinking Work Around Agents

London-based consulting giant PwC is bringing together agentic capabilities, deep partnerships with AI vendors and domain expertise in areas like tax and finance transformation to differentiate itself.

The solution provider’s Workday practice, for example, allows PwC to bring its entire value chain to clients, from advise through operate, Claudio Valera, PwC partner and global Workday practice leader, told CRN in an interview. PwC also leans on vertical expertise in areas like tax and finance transformation to take clients to the next level.

“Getting outcomes and value from those agents—if you start with that conversation, the agents will naturally come,” he said. “They’re a result of what you’re trying to accomplish, and they have great capabilities. And they [Workday and other agentic AI vendors] continue to invest and develop a lot of capabilities with agents. But working with someone like PwC on what’s the outcome in the industry [you] need gets you to the answer versus trying to get to the answer before you know the problem.”

An outcome focus also helps clients better understand a consumption-pricing model for agents. Hours saved, for example, isn’t always the right measure for showing the value of agents, he said. Accretive outcomes driving business value and transparency around how agents use credits are key.

PwC has approached clients of its Workday practice starting upstream, focusing on outcomes and the operating model before moving into enabling the technology. PwC educates customers on agents that come out of the box and agentic capabilities that come with coupling Workday with other vendors including Claude maker Anthropic and ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

Inside PwC is the Apollo program for consultants to become agentic AI architects and better understand which business processes need to stay human and which ones can be offloaded to agents, he said.

“You just need to understand the trade-offs,” Valera said. “There are cost implications. There is architecture. There are all of those things that come into play.”