Businesses are racing forward with AI adoption, despite security lapses and cost concerns. The Global Technology Industry Association warned at its annual ChannelCon event that IT service providers are in danger of being left behind as customers buy into AI. Partners are feeling the heat.
“I have gotten a lot of projects from clients that have become extremely urgent because they've discovered some new AI tool they want to implement,” Jeremy Grissom, professional services manager at STR Technologies, said. “It's completely pedal-to-the-gas.”
Cloud and internet technologies are useful corollaries for how AI adoption is reshaping the managed services landscape. AI is just moving faster.
“We're going to have to start addressing these things more quickly,” GTIA VP of Research and Market Intelligence Carolyn April said during a press conference last week. “The adoption of managed services went very slowly. I don't think we can move at that pace when it comes to AI … and that's just a reality.”
The trade association rolled out numerous initiatives last week geared toward developing industry standards for securing AI and managed IT services in general.
GTIA also announced the Managed Intelligence Alliance which will develop standards, accreditations and specifications for partners that manage AI services. Pax8 originally popularized the notion of managed intelligence but was compelled to push it out to a third party.
“As awesome as I think my organization is, we're not neutral,” CVP of Community and Ecosystems Rob Rae for the cloud commerce platform, said in the same press conference. “We have MSPs that do not and will never use us. This idea is bigger than us. It's bigger than Pax8.”
GTIA is already lined up to be the trade association partner for the Consortium for Responsible IT Services recently launched by Texas A&M University's Global Cyber Research Institute. The organization, which includes Pax8, New Charter Technologies and The20, wants to create IT industry regulations before the government steps in.
“Regulation is coming, and it'll either be forced upon us or we will build it,” GTIA CEO Dan Wensley said. “We have the resources to be able to do this. We have members who are experts in this industry. We need to do it.”
Government officials won’t necessarily mandate AI compliance, according to IntegraMSP President Jennifer Gilligan. She suggested that cyber insurance companies will take the lead.
“[Insurers] are the ones that are taking the brunt of it at the front end for payouts for anything AI,” Gilligan said. “They're already starting to inject those questions into the renewals. What is your stance on AI? Are you using it? Do you have an acceptable use policy? That's already starting.”
Two paths for AI
When IntegraMSP faced a choice last year between building AI or securing it, the company opted for the latter.
Gilligan said the firm lacked the developer bench to code AI tools for clients. Instead, IntegraMSP played to its strength in cybersecurity.
“It felt like [building] it was going to be kind of a run to the bottom because somebody's going to do it faster, cheaper, bigger than I can, whereas I already am well-established in security protocols,” Gilligan said.
Other partner firms have taken a different tack with clients who want an MSP that can build and govern AI tools.
“If you get to a massive client like the state of California, their request might be that you train a large internal model for them, but I'm not sure that's going to be done by an MSP,” Oversee My IT President Jack Skinner said. “It depends on the client, depends on the size of your organization.”
IntegraMSP starts with an AI readiness assessment to assess the state of the client’s data and identify which LLMs its employees prefer and use. It builds an acceptable use policy that the client can take to its insurer and that employees can train on.
The goal, Gilligan said, is to stay with the customers beyond the initial project to help them with continued adoption.
“The real value is the advisory that you offer on top of a tool,” Gilligan said. “Anybody can sell a tool, but how can you use that and then use it to help move the discussion from a whole business perspective, not just tech?”
One of the first AI governance steps for MSPs is to stop customers from feeding company data to public chatbots. Reports that shared Claude chats have appeared on Google searches have raised the level of concern. Craig Fulton, M&A advisor at Evergreen Services Group, has warned MSPs that commercial AI models are not a safe place to share M&A roadmaps.
“I call it the five-year-old kid that's hearing everything you're saying as an adult,” he said. “Then they repeat something. You're like, ‘Where’d you hear that?’ ‘Dad, I heard you say that on the phone.”
