Rewst FLOW 2026, Nashville – As
Aharon Chernin, the CEO of automation platform vendor Rewst, watched the AI market take off over the past year, he began thinking about how Rewst could make it easier for MSPs to help their SMB and enterprise customers grow their use of automation in their business applications and operations.
For MSPs, a huge roadblock to scaling automation services for customers is the training required to build those automations. There are around 80,000 MSPs around the world, and only about 1,000 automation engineers who have the skills to do this work for those MSPs, according to estimates provided by Chernin. That is a striking shortage of automation engineers in the global marketplace, which makes it harder for MSPs to scale these services for customers.
"What do the other 79,000 MSPs do?" Chernin asked in an interview with ChannelE2E at his company's
third annual Rewst FLOW conference in Nashville in June.
With so many MSPs and so few automation engineers, Chernin began asking whether Rewst could help close the gap.
"It was really about how do we enable everybody and not just a select few, " said Chernin.
That's when he started thinking about how
MCP Server (Model Context Protocol) could help solve the conundrum.
Solving the riddle
"I was racking my brain for months on how we not just survive but thrive," he said. Soon, he began discussing the situation with some of the 1,500 MSPs that work directly with Rewst to sell and provide its services.
"What I went through with MSPs was the same thing I [saw], watching the AI market take off, and [worrying] about the impact on knowledge work, because you need knowledge work to use Rewst," said Chernin. "And I realized that if we made the MCP Server ... into the core part of the product, where the product is actually the MCP server, then it all made sense to me – that we actually make AI better, and then that is how we thrive."
How MCP server helps rewst
As he thought about the challenge, Chernin began looking at the idea of reengineering the Rewst automation platform to integrate the MCP Server to bring powerful and flexible AI agents into the automation building process. With MCP Server integration, MSPs and their customers could streamline their automation building and make the task simple enough for non-technical users to quickly create their own useful automations using prompt suggestions. This solves the problem of the huge global shortage of automation engineers, according to Chernin.
"We had to reengineer it because, as I started with in my keynote here, you can either be upset about AI, or mad about it, or try to ignore it, or you can thrive," he said.
Not looking to replace automation engineers
But even as the new, reengineered, MCP Server- and agentic AI-integrated version of Rewst arrives later in 2026, Chernin told ChannelE2E that his company is working to ensure that the existing automation engineers do not feel threatened by its new capabilities.
"It is a balancing act," he said. "You do not want to get in front of a room full of automation engineers and MSPs that do not have automation engineers and make either side feel alienated," explained Chernin. "So, it is really about getting the automation engineers excited that they can do more now, which has actually been really easy," based on conversations he had with many of them at the Rewst conference. "They totally see the vision, and they do not feel alienated. They are probably the most excited, and they were the ones I was worried about the most. The MSPs without automation engineers get it, because they understand prompts, they … use ChatGPT … this is just like that for them, but with automation."
Through the new version, existing automation engineers can also be more productive in their jobs, he added. "They can do more and get more done. They can maybe build 10 automations a week instead of one."
This next version of Rewst, which was opened to further testing to a broader number of Rewst MSP partners in early July, will be generally available later this year, according to the company. Rewst has been testing its new version with about 30 MSPs since spring.
The new Rewst version will center around an AI Agent tool that will allow users to describe a process they want to automate. The agent will then automatically build a workflow for the process that can be seen, edited, and approved by the user. These capabilities will make it easier for people without deep automation skills or training to create useful, more complex workflows.
