Solution Provider CEOs On The Biggest AI, Agent Trends: CEO Outlook 2026

‘We see 2026 as a big year of adoption for AI for our clients and we are preparing for that,’ says Luis Alvarez, CEO of Alvarez Technology Group.

The growth of agentic artificial intelligence, solution providers building and evolving their own platforms and intellectual property plus an AI-influenced infrastructure bonanza are just some of the trends leading CEOs of solution providers, MSPs and systems integrators forecast as the channel enters 2026 and year four of the AI evolution.

As part of CRN’s annual CEO Outlook, the CEOs of more than 40 companies—including members of CRN’s 2025 MSP 500 and 2025 Solution Provider 500—share their investment plans, biggest wins and biggest challenges in AI.

“We see 2026 as a big year of adoption for AI for our clients, and we are preparing for that,” said Luis Alvarez, CEO of Alvarez Technology Group, a member of CRN’s 2025 MSP 500.

He added, however, that customers are still focused on economic uncertainty, influenced by factors like global tariff negotiations. “They are being very cautious about making investments beyond what is vital,” he said.

[RELATED: Michael Dell On Biggest 2026 Investments In Storage, AI And Partners]

CEO Outlook 2026

Even with market uncertainties, tighter budgets and rising expectations, SoftwareOne Co-CEO Melissa Mulholland doesn’t see IT demand slowing down.

“CIOs will be forced to do more with less, while still delivering innovation, resilience, and measurable results,” she said.

Jim Kavanaugh, co-founder and CEO of World Wide Technology, put aside constant discussion around a potential AI bubble burst. The industry still sees a sustainable AI growth trajectory, he said.

“I’m extremely bullish about this year,” he said, pointing to WWT’s 40-plus percent growth in 2025. “I see no signs of that momentum slowing. We continue to be disciplined students of AI, and the opportunity for transformation as a result is tremendous.”

Read on for more insight from the solution provider CEOs who participated in this year’s CRN CEO Outlook. And be sure to visit other articles sharing insight from the project, including the 10 Top Cybersecurity CEOs On AI’s Impact In 2026.

The Channel’s Importance In AI

Perhaps it goes without saying, but one of the biggest patterns in this year’s CEO Outlook was an unbridled confidence exerted by solution provider leaders about the importance of the channel in bringing the AI era to life.

Growing proliferation of AI and AI agents within customer environments puts extra weight on the role of solution providers as trusted advisers.

“In a world with AI, two current challenges stand out: truth and adoption,” said Raul Fernandez, CEO of DXC Technology. “There’s no value in deploying technology alone. The real value is in getting people to actually use it. We’ve proven that to implement AI successfully, it takes more than just new tech and tools. Successful AI implementations align people, processes and technology to integrate AI across core operations.”

While many companies have invested in new technologies, a significant gap remains between adoption and measurable business value with fragmented vendors, rising security risks, talent shortages and increasing operational complexity, said Tanaz Choudhury, CEO TanChes Global Management.

“This creates a strong opportunity for a trusted partner that can integrate strategy, implementation and ongoing management under a single delivery model,” she said, noting that her company is rising to the occasion by combining AI-enabled automation and analytics embedded into everyday IT operations, managed cybersecurity and compliance services.

Bob Cagnazzi, CEO of Presidio, said customers are looking for solution providers like his that can best assist them in the entire life cycle from use case identification, execution and ongoing operations.

“AI will provide gains in employee productivity, allowing them to spend more time engaging directly with customers,” he said. “Our services teams are already leveraging AI to increase the scale, provide better customer outcomes and accelerate projects.”

Even if AI capabilities live up to all the hype, customers will still need the channel’s engineering expertise, skills and expert knowledge workforce to make that hype a reality, said Balazs Fejes, CEO of EPAM Systems.

“Implementation is not just a prompt away,” he said.

Industry-Focused AI Efforts

Multiple solution providers pointed to industry-focused approaches to spreading AI use cases in 2026.

DXC’s Fernandez pointed to health care, manufacturing, transportation and financial services as some of the industries where the company’s Xponential AI orchestration blueprint is powering real enterprise AI transformation.

“In 2026, we’ll be laser focused on applying the Xponential blueprint to projects around the world, moving enterprises beyond the AI pilot phase to real results,” he said.

In the education sector, AI is already showing up in classrooms, tools and workflows, Bluum CEO John Horton said. The company has responded with professional development focused on AI, giving teachers and leaders practical ways to explore it in their work.

“AI will continue to play a growing role in how schools operate and how we support them,” he said. “Our role is to help educators understand what’s useful, what’s responsible, and what’s worth their time.”

Solution Providers Build Platforms, Intellectual Property

In the AI era, solution providers building intellectual property and their own platforms will stand out in an ever-crowded space while potentially benefitting from the economic benefits their software vendor partners have long enjoyed.

Asif Hasan, co-founder and CEO of Quantiphi said the company is focused on leveraging its Agentic AI Factory as a differentiator with platforms including Codeaira for software development and Baioniq for knowledge workers.

“We will move AI from a tactical experiment to a core engine of enduring value creation for our customers,” he said. These platforms “are proving to be our engine for creating a new kind of services company—one with the scalability and margin profile closer to a world-class software business than a legacy professional services business.”

DXC’s Xponential AI orchestration blueprint aims to provide enterprises with a proven framework that integrates people, processes and technology to deliver measurable results, Fernandez said.

The goal for Xponential in 2026 is to continue to “accelerate modernization, and enable businesses to operationalize AI securely and responsibly,” he said.

For Caylent, the solution provider’s key investments this year focus on agentic delivery platforms and AI-native IP, including Caylent Accelerate and agent-ified managed services, CEO Lori Williams said.

“These systems allow AI agents to assess complex environments, surface risks and execute tasks within defined governance,” she said. “What differentiates this approach is the ability to layer in bespoke guidance based on a deep understanding of each customer’s business, systems, and operating context. That institutional knowledge does not exist in AI models by default.”

WWT’s Kavanaugh held up his company’s Advanced Technology Center and AI Proving Ground as an ecosystem where emerging technologies can be tested, validated and scaled.

“This allows us to move beyond theoretical capabilities to demonstrate practical, production-ready implementations,” he said. “This is further enhanced by our investments both internally and externally in AI solutions and AI-native development and engineering, ensuring we remain at the forefront of technological advancements.”

The AI Infrastructure Boom

With growing investment and interest by enterprises and organizations into AI comes the growing need for greater capabilities around networking, storage and other parts of data center infrastructure.

Garrette Backie, CEO of Clutch Solutions, called the convergence of AI infrastructure and advanced cybersecurity the company’s biggest opportunity in 2026.

“As enterprises move from AI pilots into full production, they are discovering that their data centers were never designed to handle the power, thermal and security demands AI introduces,” Backie said. “Clutch Solutions is addressing this gap by securing the entire AI life cycle, delivering high performance infrastructure from partners like HPE, Dell, and Nvidia, combined with the security controls required to protect enterprise data from emerging AI driven threats such as prompt injection and data poisoning.”

In the rush to adopt AI, the lag in investment in the foundation behind the applications has opened up a big opportunity for the BlackHawk Data, CEO Maryann Pagano said.

“Networks, data centers, security, power, and operations must be ready to support AI at scale,” she said. “Companies that invest now in resilient, secure and high-performance infrastructure will move faster, reduce risk, and gain a lasting advantage. In 2026, success with AI won’t be defined by who experiments the most, but by who builds the strongest, most reliable technology foundation to support what comes next.”

As AI adoption accelerates, customers are quickly realizing their existing environments were designed for human-to-system interaction, not continuous system-to-system compute, said Jon Groves, CEO of Logicalis.

“That gap creates a major opportunity for partners to modernize infrastructure, power and architecture to support AI workloads, while embedding security and compliance from the start,” he said. “Over the next three to four years, infrastructure will be the foundation that everything else depends on, and partners who can deliver it thoughtfully will win.”

New-age data centers put the deployment of GPUs and the management of power efficiency front and center, said Mike Strohl, CEO of e360.

“There is a strategic shift from simply offering GPUs as standalone products to delivering them as a service,” he said. “This transition aligns with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as the growing complexity of the cybersecurity landscape. The transformative potential of these integrated technologies is substantial, indicating a future progression toward quantum computing.”

About 80 percent of IT leaders are concerned about whether their infrastructure can support advanced AI applications, said Mark Marron, CEO of ePlus. The solution provider has leaned on its AI Experience Center to provide customers with an AI environment for safe AI infrastructure exploring and evaluating.

“This underscores the opportunity for ePlus to help customers scale securely and effectively,” he said.

AI Governance A Major Push

Assisting customers on their AI journeys, preventing AI agent sprawl and unwanted data access by adding orchestration and governance to the AI technology stack are some growing opportunities for solution providers in 2026.

Corey Kirkendoll, CEO of 5K Technical Services, said the company is ready to help clients meet the internal expertise, governance and security frameworks required for responsible AI deployment.

“Our greatest market opportunity in 2026 will be scaling AI-driven managed services for small and mid-sized businesses,” he said. “5K Technical Services is positioned to deliver turnkey AI automation, cybersecurity augmentation, and business-process optimization as fully managed services. This approach allows customers to realize measurable value from AI without the burden of additional staffing or infrastructure.”

Presidio’s Cagnazzi said a lack of clarity around readiness, governance and which use cases will generate measurable returns can even stop customers from knowing where to start and how to scale with AI in a way that delivers real business value.

“They also need to choose and deploy the right platforms across on-prem, hybrid and cloud environments using a clear unit-economic model,” he said. “The winners will be those that take a disciplined, outcome-driven approach to AI rather than chasing experimentation for its own sake.”

Caylent has been helping its customers through the management of cost, usage and value as AI moves into production, Williams said.

“We help organizations put the right guardrails in place through thoughtful operating models and token economics, so AI delivers lasting impact, not short-term experimentation,” Williams said.

Look to more AI capabilities integrated across FinOps offers from SoftwareOne, Mulholland said. The solution provider aims to combine automation, analytics and governance to help customers and partners better manage cloud and AI spend.

“Together, these investments ensure we are not only driving innovation but also embedding financial discipline and operational excellence at scale,” she said. “These investments will be supported by continued enhancements to our cloud infrastructure to ensure scale, reliability and performance.”

AI Revolutionizes Security

AI is revolutionizing the cybersecurity field by arming tools with better ways to prevent attacks and remediate exposures—while empowering threat actors with larger scale and more personalized efforts to infiltrate solution providers and their clients.

DXC’s Fernandez said that the company has introduced agentic AI into its Security Operations Center that functions as a junior-level analyst, handling entry-level work like classifying alerts and documenting findings. This approach has helped cut investigation times by 68 percent and reclaimed 224,000 analyst hours.

“Not only did this approach make us more efficient, it freed analysts up to redirect their expertise to higher-value work, such as complex investigations and fine-tuning systems to catch emerging cyberattacks,” he said.

5K Technical Services’ Kirkendoll said that AI will strengthen the company’s cybersecurity posture through faster, more accurate threat detection.

“Our clients will benefit from predictive analytics, proactive support and tailored solutions,” he said.

Clutch Solutions is focusing investments in 2026 on security operations and AI-ready infrastructure, Backie said.

“We are significantly expanding our managed security capabilities with AI driven threat detection and automated incident response,” he said. “At the same time, we are continuing to invest in advanced engineering expertise across data centric architecture, autonomous data centers, and edge AI. These investments ensure that every infrastructure deployment we deliver is supported by long term operational and security expertise.”

AI will augment security teams by improving detection, prioritization, and decision-making while reducing noise, said Kevin Lynch, CEO of Optiv.

“More importantly, AI will push us toward continuous, risk-based security models where trust is evaluated dynamically rather than through static controls,” he said.

Outcomes Grow As A Pricing Model

This notion of the channel evolving from reselling to managed services to now add outcomes as a driving pricing metric for solution providers arose in some of the CEOs’ answers.

Long View Systems isn’t interested in short-term, transactional business, said Brent Allison, CEO of the company. Allison pointed to the company’s Net Promoter Scores verging on 80 points for the rolling 12-month average as a signal of the long-term relationships Long View seeks to build.

“We want to stay and solve problems with our clients,” he said. “We’d like even closer collaboration with our partners in the trenches to ensure we better understand our clients’ unique challenges and opportunities. If we get this right, we can design and implement the solutions that will build greater prosperity across North America.”

Quantiphi’s Hasan said the company plans to double down on its transition toward "tech services as software," a model where the company helps customers accelerate their digital transformation through output or outcome-based models rather than traditional head count or billable hours.

“We will roll out innovative commercial structures where clients pay for specific outputs and business results, decoupling growth from human labor,” he said.

Quantiphi’s commercial models are centered on outcomes and outputs such as price per document processed, per call contained or as a subscription to platforms.

“This aligns our success directly with our customers’ success and gives them the predictability in their spend,” he said.

TanChes’ focus in 2026 is not just on deploying technology, but on owning the outcomes through improving customer efficiency, reducing risk and enabling scalable growth, Choudhury said.

“This shift toward fully managed, business-aligned technology services represents the most significant growth opportunity for our company and the market as a whole,” she said.

Emphasis On ROI

In year four of the generative AI era started with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, solution provider customers further along their AI journeys want to see measurable returns on their AI investments to justify continued experimentation on where else AI can optimize their businesses.

Josh Dinneen, CEO of Blue Mantis, predicts a seismic market shift from the experimentation phase to one where true operational impact is the mandate.

“Midmarket organizations will shift 40 percent of their budget from traditional IT spend to AI initiatives in 2026,” he said. “This creates a huge opportunity. Blue Mantis will respond by working with our technology partners to ensure clients continuously attain real and measurable outcomes such as faster service delivery, stronger and more comprehensive security operations and real improvements in service quality.”

DXC research found that 77 percent of technology decision-makers call AI a strategic board-level priority, yet 94 percent face significant challenges implementing it, Fernandez said. The company’s Xponential blueprint is one of its differentiators for moving enterprises beyond the AI pilot phase to real results.

“We’re seeing increasing pressure to show AI productivity gains, yet we’re still seeing enterprises launch AI pilots without first aligning on a cohesive strategy that connects AI to their people and processes,” he said.

Syreeta Johnson, CEO of Redd Solutions, sees customers experiencing change fatigue as they balance innovation with security, compliance and workforce adoption, making the role of a trusted solution provider all the more important.

“The toughest challenges our customers will face in 2026 include doing more with limited resources, managing growing data complexity, and adopting AI responsibly,” she said. “The challenge is not access to technology but implementing it in a way that delivers measurable outcomes.”

ePlus’ research shows that about 73 percent of IT and industry leaders now prioritize revenue growth as the main driver of AI initiatives, surpassing cost savings and customer satisfaction, Marron said. The solution provider leveraged offerings such as its GenAI Accelerator 30-day engagement to allow organizations to test drive a use case in a development environment before deploying to their organization.

The accelerator is “helping them either fail fast or succeed confidently and ensure a faster return on their AI investment,” he said.

Growing Use Of AI Agents, Agentic Systems

The growing usage and expectation of AI agents as a part of a solution provider’s workforce in 2026 and a toolset for decreasing operating costs while driving revenue-generating opportunities emerged in this year’s CEO Outlook.

Agentic AI will increasingly orchestrate complex workflows, not just assist with isolated tasks, predicts Martin Schroeter, CEO of Kyndryl.

“That will transform how solutions are built, delivered, and operated, enabling faster outcomes with less manual intervention,” he said. “At the same time, it raises the bar for trust, governance, and transparency, which will be just as critical to success as performance gains.”

DXC’s Fernandez said to expect AI infused in multiple workflows across industries, automating tedious tasks and freeing teams to focus on more high-level, strategic work in 2026.

“We will begin to truly realize the promise of AI in which agents start to act as digital coworkers, allowing us to spend more time on strategy and executing that strategy,” he said. “Without a clear plan, agents risk becoming the new legacy technical debt. We must be intentional about how we build for the future or risk adding more technical debt.”

Agents next to great, local people will allow Long View to continue its high touch, high impact model as it grows with clients, Allison said.

“We want our engagement scores to continue to reflect that as we grow to be a $1B business,” he said. “With the geopolitical changes and the potential of AI and Agentic solutions we believe that strong change management practices will ensure our [clients] can maintain and grow strong cultures.”

AI Automating Lower-Level IT Work

Solution providers big and small are exploring the ways AI can automate lower-level IT work, changing the definition of tier one IT work and allowing partners to scale without adding new employees.

5K Technical Services’ Kirkendoll said that AI will automate more than 40 percent of his company’s routine IT tasks, enabling the team to focus on advanced engineering and strategic advisory services.

“For our customers, AI becomes a competitive equalizer by providing enterprise-grade capabilities without the enterprise overhead,” he said.

Alvarez said Alvarez Technology Group rolled out a service automation system that leverages AI to improve outcomes and client experience, allowing techs to spend more time on higher-level, client-facing tasks that generate better returns.

“We are also investing in AI education and training for our technical team so we can be ready to help our clients when they are ready to embrace AI internally,” he said.

Along with agentic AI acting like a junior-level analyst in DXC’s SOC, the solution provider is looking to increase automation across the software development process with tools and platforms that automate routine coding tasks so that engineers can focus on architecture, safety and innovation to meet client needs, Fernandez said.

“By testing our solutions in-house, we are investing in building new and different capabilities tailored to help organizations across a range of industries address complex challenges while driving reliable results,” he said.

Automation through AI puts greater importance on the human touch a solution provider’s flesh-and-bone workforce can deliver as it grows its digital workforce, said Nyasha Tunduwani, CEO of Real Impact.

“Our focus is to leverage AI to improve our client and team experience,” he said. “The ultimate objective is use the technology to increase the amount of human-to-human time that our team can connect with our clients.”