What MSPs Can Do in 2026 to Help Customers Navigate AI

Heading into 2026, MSPs are watching a tsunami of changes across the IT landscape as AI use, integrations, and pressures grow, and customers seek even more help to resolve a broad range of AI-related technology needs inside their business operations.

For MSPs, that means a raft of new opportunities to grow their revenue while building closer relationships with their customers.

But what it also means, according to Rob Rae, the corporate vice president for community and ecosystems at Pax8, is that MSPs must continue to evolve and grow the internal services, skills, and processes needed to fulfill these growing customer demands.

That will include, he said, an MSP-wide move to become managed intelligence providers.

“We are calling it the agentic inflection point,” said Rae. “The way in which you buy technology is going to change. The way in which you sell technology is going to change, and who you are selling it to.”

Rae made his remarks about this changing MSP environment in late October at an ASCII Edge conference series meeting in Philadelphia, where he shared his insights on how MSPs need to transition to new roles as “AI agent” practices. As 2026 arrives, Rae’s words are prescient.

MSPs Will Become Managed Intelligence Providers

“We do believe everybody, at some point, will be a managed intelligence provider,” said Rae. “I want to help you on this journey, because we do believe that the managed service provider will continue to be the center of everything that is AI, everything that is going to change, and everything that you are going to build. All the value that you are going to be adding, and the relationships that you have, they are going to continue to be the center of everything.”

Preparing for all of these coming changes and the continuing maturity of AI will be critical for responsive MSPs, he said.

“So, when [your clients] are finally ready, they know it is you that they need to call,” said Rae. “All these things are going to impact your business, and we are going to have to transform the way in which we work, and the way in which your end users work.”

MSPs will use AI to build and customize services and applications for customers using AI agents, but even more importantly, MSPs will gain new revenue by providing the ongoing management of that work while staying on top of new technologies that are coming, said Rae.

“That is our goal, to find these new technologies and bring them to you faster, so we are not all sitting here waiting like we have had to do for the last number of waves that have come through,” he said. “The way in which we make money is going to change. You cannot do a per-seat or per-device [price] anymore. We have to be per outcome.”

Analyst Steven Dickens, CEO and principal analyst at HyperFRAME Research, agreed that MSPs must be nimble in the new year.

“As MSPs look to build a tech stack, they will rotate toward open source as a way to ensure that they have the ability to drive both differentiation while avoiding lock-in from key players in the stack, such as NVIDIA,” he said.