Why AI’s Next Wave Runs Through The Channel: ‘MSPs Already Live There’

‘MSPs are already inside these businesses. They’re the trusted advisor. They help with the data, the security, the infrastructure…everything that needs to be in place before AI can actually do anything useful,’ says Joel Abramson, managing partner at Top Down Ventures.

Tim Guim has been selling AI solutions since mid-2024, and demand has surged since.

Guim, CEO of New Jersey-based PCH Technologies, said the shift has accelerated as clients move from AI curiosity to adoption. And at his MSP, AI has shifted from an add-on to a core service.

“We’re even taking on new clients that are strictly AI-only clients,” he told CRN. “They already have an incumbent MSP in place, but they’re coming to us specifically for AI. In 2026, SMBs are understanding more that they really need to take advantage of AI, and use AI securely.”

Michael Cervino sees the shift happening a little differently. In his view, it won’t be the traditional MSP industry driving adoption but rather the forward-thinking MSPs pushing the market forward.

That perspective shapes how Cervino, co-founder and CEO of Radnor, Pa.-based Circle Square Consulting, approaches AI with customers. Instead of pitching AI tools, he starts with business problems.

“We’re not talking about MSP services,” he told CRN. “We’re having a conversation with leadership: ‘What are the biggest problems in your business right now? What’s the one thing that, if you solved it, would completely change your business?’ Then we try to solve that.”

AI becomes the mechanism for building the solution, he said, as his team develops both internal and customer-facing tools using AI, creating custom systems for specific workflows.

And for those business outcomes conversations, Cervino’s team runs discovery sessions with clients, analyzes the conversations with AI and generates potential solutions and ROI models. Then they build a quick proof of concept.

“We take the highest-priority problem, the thing with the most return that’s easiest to build, and we let AI help us create a working proof of concept,” he said. “Once they see it, that’s when the conversation really changes.”

In many cases, SMBs are already experimenting on their own by buying tools, testing ideas and building small projects before an MSP ever enters the conversation, according to Sandy McGrath, co-founder and president of Canada-based managed intelligence provider MIPGlobal.

Where MSPs, or managed intelligence providers, add value is helping businesses turn those early experiments into something structured and sustainable.

“What we’re able to bring is stability and clarity to the customer’s AI journey,” McGrath told CRN. “They can get access to experts, knowledge and thought leadership that helps clarify their vision around what they’re trying to do. A lot of them have already used tools like ChatGPT or [Microsoft] Copilot. But now they’re trying to build out corporate structure and compliance around it. How do they make use of it? How do they stay safe and secure? How do they meet regulatory requirements?

“We’re not necessarily the ones introducing AI,” he added. “We’re the ones helping them implement it properly, add structure and actually get value and ROI out of it.”

Long responsible for keeping SMBs running, more and more MSPs are now emerging as the primary pathway for AI adoption in the SMB market, one report suggests.

As most SMBs lack the expertise, resources or appetite to build their own AI practices, they’ll be looking to their IT providers for guidance, making MSPs even more valuable to investors, according to “The State of the MSP Capital in the Age of AI” report, curated by venture capital firm Top Down Ventures.

The report, released last year, frames AI as the latest technology wave to depend on an intermediary layer, much like systems integrators in the mainframe era, resellers in the PC era and hyperscalers in the cloud era. In this latest evolution, MSPs play that role, the report suggests.

[Related: From Experimentation To Execution: How MSPs Are Using AI Agents Today]

And each MSP can become a distribution point for AI, deploying tools for security, compliance or fraud prevention simultaneously, a model becoming increasingly attractive to investors.

Joel Abramson, managing partner at Top Down, said that dynamic stems from the proximity to the customer.

“I think it’s because they’re close,” Abramson told CRN. “If you look at how companies like Microsoft distribute technology, they serve the S&P 1,000 incredibly well. They’re working with big enterprise companies every day. But they’re not talking about the long tail of the market. MSPs already live there.”

That proximity breeds trust.

“MSPs are already inside these businesses,” he said. “They’re the trusted advisor. They help with the data, the security, the infrastructure…everything that needs to be in place before AI can actually do anything useful.”

But exactly how AI will take over SMBs, and how MSPs will solve that last-mile challenge remains unclear, according to Abramson. “We’re still in the trial phase. There’s going to be a lot of experimentation over the next couple of years, figuring out how AI actually gets deployed in small and midsize businesses.”

Investors are paying close attention, though, as the upside is huge. Some industry forecasts even predict SMB spending on IT services topping enterprise spending for the first time, possibly by the end of the year.

“The SMB economy is massive, and it’s been hiding in plain sight,” he said, “If that market is now larger than enterprise IT spend, then the channel that serves it, the MSP ecosystem, becomes incredibly important.

“They’re not just building technology in a lab,” he added. “They’re deploying it with real customers and seeing immediately whether it works or not.”

One area where AI could have a particularly large impact is labor efficiency.

Abramson said the modern workplace as divided into three types of work: high-impact “hero work,” support work that enables it and a third category that rarely gets done at all.

AI, he argued, is perfect to tackle that third, overlooked category.

“When we ran our MSP, we had 500 people and still could have used 500 more to do all the proactive tasks our customers needed,” he said. “If digital coworkers start picking up that third bucket…the things that should be done but aren’t, it makes the hero work dramatically more effective.”

By 2030, the report estimates that the global market for managed AI services could reach $1.3 trillion. For Abramson, he believes the transformation will be gradual rather than revolutionary.

“I don’t think the world looks completely different,” he said. “But I think we’ll all be a lot smarter about how to use AI as digital infrastructure.”

And the trusted MSPs who once rebooted servers and repaired office printers may end up guiding SMBs through the next technological wave.

“They’ll still fix the broken printer,” he said. “That’s why they’re trusted. And because they’re trusted, they’ll also be the ones guiding SMBs through AI.”