Hatz AI’s Growth Driven By ‘AI Adoption And Our Team’s Speed to Ship’

‘MSPs are trying to figure out how they should adopt AI internally, what their offer is for clients, how they answer the AI question and how they stay top of mind around AI for their customers. We help them with all of the above. And most of our new partners come from word of mouth and referrals,’ says Jimmy Hatzell, CEO and co-founder of Hatz AI.

In just two years, Hatz AI has moved from early-stage startup to growing like an enterprise company, tripling both in partners and in revenue in just 12 months.

“We’re seeing unprecedented demand for AI across the board. Every month, more partners sign up than the month before,” Jimmy Hatzell, co-founder and CEO of New York-based AI vendor Hatz AI, told CRN.

Although he declined to disclose the company’s current revenue, Hatzell said Hatz AI now sits at just under 1,000 MSP partners and about 35 employees. By 2027, Hatzell anticipates partner count doubling to 2,000. He credits both broad-based adoption of AI inside managed services and a product organization built to ship quickly.

“I think it’s been AI adoption and our team’s speed to ship,” he said. “We went from startup problems to enterprise problems overnight, which is a good thing. Scaling the product and scaling the team very quickly has been a fun challenge. Our partners are what make everything possible. But what surprised me most is how much AI can help us scale quickly, that’s been the huge difference.”

Most new partners arrive via word of mouth and referrals, he said, and many MSPs are standardizing the platform as part of their customer onboarding to reduce shadow AI risk.

This year, the vendor is investing heavily in engineering, building go-to-market capabilities directly into the platform and pushing toward that 2,000-partner goal.

“Over the next 12 months, having the right partner who can help you adapt quickly as new technology and standards come out is really important,” he said. “MSPs are the right vehicle to deliver Hatz AI to SMBs because they’re the trusted advisor.”

CRN spoke further with Hatzell about the company’s growth, AI adoption and what partners can expect throughout 2027.

What’s been the biggest driver of that acceleration?

I think it’s been AI adoption and our team’s speed to ship. Our team is constantly updating, listening to our partners and responding to feature requests. We ship product updates every week and I think that’s been a huge driver for us, along with overall demand for AI.

Everyone’s trying to figure it out. MSPs are trying to figure out how they should adopt AI internally, what their offer is for clients, how they answer the AI question and how they stay top of mind around AI for their customers. We help them with all of the above. And most of our new partners come from word of mouth and referrals.

So what’s surprised you the most about the market response since launching two years ago?

I’ve never experienced the pull for new partners like we’ve seen here. I’ve seen growth over time, but it feels like we went through a five-year period of traditional fast SaaS growth in one year. We went from startup problems to enterprise problems overnight, which is a good thing. Scaling the product and scaling the team very quickly has been a fun challenge. Our partners are what make everything possible. But what surprised me most is how much AI can help us scale quickly, that’s been the huge difference.

Internally, we have a big AI-first culture. We try to prevent human bottlenecks wherever we can, because when you’re dealing with growth like this, any process can break in a couple weeks. Using AI and automation internally is what’s kept us able to stay up to speed with what our partners need, continue to ship new products, serve our customers and help them go to market. And we regularly bring the solutions we use internally downstream to our customers.

So what’s one feature or capability you’re building, or want to build, that you think the market is underestimating right now?

Over the next couple months, we’ll have a marketing and research engine fully built into the product. An MSP will be able to connect their data sources and, within a couple minutes, generate full presentations, use cases and more to present to end customers around AI. Things like what data to connect, what they should connect, what to keep secure, suggested use cases for those organizations…all of the above. A big bottleneck in AI adoption for MSPs, among their customers, is getting up to speed on go-to-market activities. AI is new, and MSPs are now needing to sell it, support it, and answer questions about it, so we want to make their job way easier.

They can plug in information about their customers into Hatz, or let Hatz discover information through data connections, and our product can help lead the way from a go-to-market perspective. A key piece is we’re purposely not building a second platform or separate partner portal. We’re integrating it into the product so marketing and sales teams can log in and do prospecting, prep and pitching right inside our platform.

Is that a challenge you’re seeing from your partners?

Sales and marketing is definitely a bottleneck for any MSP, so making that process easy and frictionless is important. It’s also coming directly from how our customers are starting to use AI. One thing we noticed through product research is a lot of resellers or sales reps at MSPs are opening our product on end-customer demos. They then, live on the call, show how Hatz works by having it build a presentation about how they should use AI and what use cases we suggest. So we want to make it a first-class feature, where it can happen in the background: identify clients that might be a good fit, identify use cases ahead of time and make those initial sales conversations a lot easier. That way, MSPs can focus on what they do best like advising, supporting and managing.

What is the future of business communication look like when AI is answering, routing and acting on calls in real time?

It takes a lot of imagination to figure out how things work in a post-AI world. There’s a tendency to think, ‘AI is going to replace human work.’ I don’t think that’s the right frame. What you really need to do is look at a problem from its core and ask, ‘How can we change the way we solve this problem now that we have this magic box that can answer basically any question in 30 seconds? ’ From that perspective, maybe we should rethink a lot of the processes we have.

When you give people a really good experience and get answers quickly, they’re satisfied talking to AI. When the experience is bad, people get frustrated very quickly. We still crave human connection, but once you experience getting the information you need extremely fast, powered by AI, and it’s the right information, it can become the default. In those scenarios, you might even prefer AI. Think about common questions about a business, internal operations or reporting on a previous quarter, when AI has the right connections and gives you the right information, that becomes the default for humans.

When AI makes mistakes, isn’t configured correctly or isn’t used correctly, people reject it right away. So I think a lot of the areas where AI falls short are shorter-term problems that we’ll work through, and a lot of them are being solved and will continue to be solved over time. To get back to your original question, I think it’ll fundamentally change how we go about work. Things that used to take weeks—process, gathering information, building expertise to make a decision—can now be done very quickly.

So what is Hatz AI investing in this year?

Ultimately, we’re focused entirely on the product. We’re designing the team in an engineering-first way. Instead of building out a large operations team, we’ve hired engineers to work on internal operations we can deploy into finance, marketing, sales…different departments. We chose that route to force ourselves to rethink how an organization functions in an AI-first way. So we’re very focused on product and engineering, and that’s where we’re investing the overwhelming majority of our resources.

What’s coming over the next 12 to 18 months? Anything you want to tease?

Where we’re really focused is putting partners and their customers in control of AI. AI can feel scary and out of control. A lot of people are seeing runaway spend because of how fast and expensive models can get, but there’s also the question of how much intelligence you actually need for a task, and what models and tools are required. We try to make everything easy out of the box so someone can get going right away, while still providing fine-grained controls over tools, security, intelligence and costs.

Where do partners make the most money with Hatz AI?

We’re seeing a big wave where partners are standardizing Hatz as part of their MSP offering. The reason is shadow AI. The market MSPs touch most of the time is a heavy prosumer market. People might think, ‘Oh, we have this AI platform or that AI platform,’ but the reality is a lot of SMBs are using personal AI subscriptions for business use cases. That creates data risks.

What we’re seeing is partners going to customers, proactively identifying where they are with AI and mandating, or heavily suggesting, that customers standardize AI tooling, approved use cases and approved information. Then they roll out Hatz, even if it’s a smaller package, to all users just to get them started somewhere secure, safe and manageable in one place.

Customers benefit because people are craving something official in AI, something they’re actually allowed to use. And the MSP gets to be in the business of managing AI adoption, which is a great place to be. In summary, MSPs make the most money by reducing shadow AI and security risk, and by positioning themselves to drive AI adoption tied to business outcomes and value.

Hatz AI recently partnered with OpenText. How are you thinking about partnerships going forward, and how important are they for your growth?

We’re really excited about our partnership with OpenText. The team there has been nothing short of amazing and has moved very quickly. We see AI as a huge opportunity for partners, and we’re trying to reach as many partners as possible. So when we evaluate a partner, someone like OpenText with a distribution relationship, we ask, ‘Can they move quickly, will they serve partners in a great way and can they reach the scale where it makes sense for us to partner deeply?’ We’re open to more partnerships in the future, but we want to make sure they’re the right ones for our MSP partners.

You’re only two years into Hatz, but do you have a long-term strategy? Do you want to keep growing it, go public, be acquired, acquire—have you thought about the long-term path for Hatz?

Aidan [Kehoe] and I, my co-founder, have talked about this a lot. We think Hatz can be, and will be, a really big company, and we’re planning accordingly. Going public is something we’ve definitely discussed and Aidan and I are aligned in our thinking there. But I’m not announcing anything, we just intend to build Hatz into a very big company and we believe it has the potential to do that.

What’s next for Hatz AI in the next 12 months? What should partners be paying attention to?

AI is changing extremely fast. Over the next 12 months, having the right partner who can help you adapt quickly as new technology and standards come out is really important. MSPs are the right vehicle to deliver Hatz AI to SMBs because they’re the trusted advisor. That’s a layer we want to keep emphasizing in these conversations, that we understand and respect where MSPs are in this AI-as-a-service transformation.