MSPs Hit The Agentic AI Jackpot: How They Are Making Money Right Now

‘We have agents for just about everything,’ says Sandy McGrath, president of MIPGlobal. ‘It’s such a broad range of where we’re saving money. We’re finding opportunities to make money or to go after opportunities that we didn’t have time or people for before.’

Tanaz Choudhury was robbed outside her Houston-based MSP in 2025. While she struggled to fight off the man who got away with all her valuables, she remembered specific details, like the make, model and markings of the car he had followed her in.

From there, an idea was born. Instead of simply moving on from the experience, she and her team began building an AI agent designed to help police track suspects in real time.

The agent is being developed in partnership with law enforcement officials and detectives, although Choudhury declined to disclose specific implementation details because of the ongoing nature of the work. However, she said there’s early interest from her law enforcement clients.

“It’s actually a very powerful tool,” Choudhury, president and CEO of TanChes Global Management, told CRN. “We’ve already ideated with police chiefs and other law enforcement organizations. Multiple cities have looked at it and liked it.”

The goal, she said, is to reduce dangerous police pursuits and improve public safety by allowing officers to monitor suspects remotely.

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“The police officers don’t have to run a chase,” she said. “They can wait for this person to stop somewhere. This way, police lives are not at stake. Civilian lives are not at stake.”

Across the IT industry, some MSPs are seeing success in the early rollout of AI agents for their clients, and the next step is monetizing them. Some are deploying AI agents internally to reduce labor costs and improve operational efficiency. Others are packaging them into entirely new client-facing products and recurring revenue streams. Many are doing both simultaneously.

And almost all of them admit they are still figuring it out in real time.

‘We Want To Go Live And Start To Receive Income From This’

Melvin Williams, CEO of Blue Bell, Pa.-based M&N Communications, is developing three core AI agents: an HR agent, a virtual receptionist agent and an on-boarding agent for employees.

“We followed up with one of our best clients and said, ‘Hey, listen, this is what we’re trying to do in reference to building out this bot from an HR standpoint. Would you like to be part of our pilot program?’”

The client is now preparing to commercialize those systems, “We want to go live and start to receive income from this,” Williams told CRN.

But unlike traditional software rollouts, he argued that MSPs must learn where guardrails on agents need to exist.

“We won’t start charging yet until we make sure that all of the guardrails are put in place,” he said. “The No. 1 driver of revenue for the next quarter, in our opinion, is going to be micro certifications and AI training.”

Paul Vedder, co-founder and CEO of West Palm Beach, Fla.-based VXIT, said the MSP recently made one of its biggest AI bets yet by hiring a dedicated executive whose sole responsibility is understanding how AI agents will reshape the business.

“We actually brought an old employee back,” Vedder told CRN. “His job is literally to figure out what AI is going to do for us, for our industry and for our clients.

“We’re just going to see what we can do to make our own business more efficient,” he added. “We’re going to eat our own dog food and build it internally first.”

That internal-first strategy is becoming more and more common among MSPs as many say they want to prove ROI internally before selling AI agent services. Vedder described AI’s purpose as a wormhole, referencing the movie Interstellar and how it will “collapse workflows” to reduce repetitive labor and eliminate unnecessary operational steps.

“If you collapse the wormhole, it collapses the distance between that space,” he said. “What we need to do as an industry, as IT people, is we need to actually look at people’s workflows. There’s workflows and there’s data, and we need to be able to collapse those workflows with AI. That way we can figure out, ‘Hey, this thing made us more efficient. Can we package this and then resell it to our clients?’”

AI Agents Are Increasingly Becoming Employees

For other MSPs, AI agents are already functioning less like software tools and more like digital staff members.

“We have agents for just about everything,” said Sandy McGrath, president of MIPGlobal, a Calgary, Alberta-based managed intelligence provider. “It’s such a broad range of where we’re saving money. We’re finding opportunities to make money or to go after opportunities that we didn’t have time or people for before.”

Internal agents are already handling accounting reconciliation, service management analysis, dispatch operations and executive assistance tasks. McGrath said the company’s accounting agent now handles almost a full-time employee’s worth of reconciliation work, saving about $50,000 a year in payroll.

His service desk is also seeing similar results, with AI already handling part of what a service manager would normally do and saving about $30,000 a year.

Dispatch operations are even closer to full automation, he said, but are not replacing his staff. While AI agents could handle most of the workload, the company still keeps human dispatchers for the customer experience.

The larger business impact, though, is scale.

“We’re saving probably six figures or more on salaries and creating capacity to take on that much more in revenue,” he told CRN.

The company could potentially double in size by the fall without adding head count, he added, noting that the financial case for AI agents is becoming harder for businesses to overlook.

“For $20 in token costs, I can get something in 15 or 20 minutes that would have taken two days before,” he said.

Bill Campbell, CEO of Waldorf, Md.-based MSP Balancelogic, has spent the last six months building a network of internal AI agents that function like departments inside his business. The agents handle marketing operations, proposal generation, SEO management, sales reporting, compliance documentation and even acquisition analysis.

“I have so many agents that I name them,” Campbell told CRN. “George is my marketing manager.”

According to Campbell, George acts as a lead AI agent overseeing a team of other marketing agents. One handles social media content creation, another manages SEO, another oversees email campaigns and reporting.

The social media agent generates blog posts, LinkedIn content and campaign copy, staging everything for review before publication. The SEO agent runs weekly reviews across the company’s websites, audits SEO settings, pulls ranking data, flags areas for improvement and can automatically update SEO configurations on the sites.

The system then sends Campbell reports comparing weekly search performance, identifying what strategies worked and what didn’t.

The most dramatic efficiency gains, he said, is the agent for proposal generation, which integrates with his CRM and design platforms. After Campbell meets with potential clients, the agent assembles a fully branded proposal using client data, templates and custom content.

“All I have to do is say, ‘Create proposal for this client for an AI and automation CRM system,’” he said. “It goes into my graphic design system, creates the cover page and in 10 minutes I have an entire customized proposal. Usually a proposal by the time we started it until the time we sent it to the client was four days.”

And the difference is getting noticed. One customer, he said, was impressed with a compliance remediation plan generated with AI assistance.

“She said, ‘In 20 years of government work and working with all kinds of contractors, I’ve never seen a proposal so in-depth and so beautiful in my career,’” Campbell said. “I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s validation right there.’”

His favorite agent, though, is for his board of advisors. The agent analyzed a potential MSP acquisition, reviewing financial and operational data before producing a recommendation report.

“I gave it all the financials and information, and it told me whether it was a good acquisition decision or not … the amount of money I saved on an attorney or an M&A advisor [was impressive],” he said.

The AI agent on the board even suggested he sell marketing services from his agentic marketing team to clients. “It worked here, now we’re going to take it over there,” he said.

AI Agents For Verticals

Executives at Houston-based MRE Consulting are seeing early gains with agents in industry-specific verticals like oil and gas.

Shayon Mazumder, managed IT services practice leader at MRE, said the MSP has already built an AI agent to help energy firms analyze geophysical and telemetry datasets used in oil exploration. Other agents help with energy analysis, maintenance operations, contract compliance, commodity trading and well-log analysis. The goal is to help companies determine which wells are most likely to produce oil profitably.

MRE has even segmented AI offerings by upstream, midstream and downstream energy operations.

“We’ve built a landing page around AI demos,” Mazumder told CRN. “There’s drill maintenance AI, land operations AI, P&L-specific trading platforms, contract compliance, gas optimization and AI bid agents.”

Going forward, MRE’s agent monetization strategy consists of education, demonstrations and helping clients understand what agents are actually capable of.

“What we’re trying to do is show the art of possible,” he said.

Brandon Sanford, senior consultant, cloud engineering and architecture at MRE, said agent work increasingly involves connecting AI systems into client infrastructure, CRMs, accounting systems and APIs.

“At this point, we’re graduating from [Microsoft] Copilot,” he told CRN. “We’re getting into Foundry, creating projects and being able to actually build out a custom solution. It actually functions more as a co-worker at that point.”

TanChes’ Choudhury is building out industry-specific agents as well. Outside her work with law enforcement, her MSP is building agents for health-care clients that will automate intake processing, payment collection, reminders, missing document detection and case status tracking.

“It does everything all the way from a person making the first call to the final payment on the case,” she said.

The MSP monetizes the platform through subscriptions and hosting. “We sell this as a subscription to them and we host the information in our data center,” she said.

Another agent acts as a portable medical intelligence profile. “It’s like a medical shadow for you,” she said.

The agent stores allergies, medications, Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) instructions and medical records that emergency responders could potentially access during emergencies.

“You should never have to repeat all of your surgeries and medical history every single time,” she said. “If your system absorbs this, you never have to do that again.”

The Future of the Agentic Workforce

One of the biggest changes MIPGlobal’s McGrath is seeing is the rise of AI-native companies building teams of agents before hiring employees.

“They are building out all the AI platforms and services to have everything running,” he said. “Marketing agent, accounting, dashboards, all this stuff. Before you actually hire frontline staff, you have a whole team of agents.”

He recently met with a company operating with just three employees while handling workloads that would require 40 to 50 people before the rise of AI agents.

“One client told us they’re building all the AI platforms and services first,” he said. “Then, once they actually need people, their second and third hires are humans, not their first.”

That’s where M&N’s Williams is focusing on training.

“There’s a lot of shadow AI going on,” he said. “We need to make sure our people are properly trained on what AI solution they should be using for their particular industry.”

To help, M&N is investing in AI workforce development and certifications, which Williams expects to become a new revenue stream.

“We’re looking at a 30 percent revenue increase because everything we’re going to be doing moving forward is going to have an AI component to it.

“The great masses of laying off employees has already started,” he added. “Now we have to make sure people have the skills needed to work these new bots that are being spun up every minute of every day.”