“MSPs succeeding with AI aren’t boiling the ocean”: ConnectWise senior director

As more partners take advantage of AI, they are doing it in particular ways to become specialised.

As more MSPs continue to embrace AI in their day to day, it is better for them to use it for specific instances rather than for every part of their businesses, according to Brian Troy, senior director of product marketing at ConnectWise.

Speaking to the audience at Xchange in Denver, Troy told attendees the habits of successful MSPs using AI.

“The MSPs succeeding with AI are not trying to boil the ocean,” he explained.

“They're starting small, they're automating a ticket summary, they're using it to help them draft content and they're reusing successful promise.”

Troy said half implemented AI is only going to be half effective.

“Identify the small issues that you have within your business, the repeatable processes that you want to eliminate a human from having to do and pick one that's low risk to get started,” he added.

As MSPs deal with multiple tickets in a manual disconnected way, Troy noted the need for automation and AI. However, he said AI by itself, doesn't solve the execution gap.

“It needs orchestration, it needs coordination, it needs intelligent action. This is where we introduce a new model, autonomous service,” he explained.

“It's not just automation. It's frictionless detection, resolution and restoration done at lightning speed without having to have someone sitting in a swivel chair in your office.”

He noted that this is the rise of agentic AI, which are autonomous systems that act proactively to enhance service delivery.

Operational efficiency, talent and new business are some of the top issues MSPs are facing. But Troy highlighted that AI is now a new issues MSPs need to tackle.

“However, this past year, we saw a new challenge enter the equation, and that's the utilisation of AI,” he told attendees.

“Both within your business as a service provider and with your SMB customers, and if you think about it as if your teams didn't have enough already that they had to worry about now they're trying to figure out how they fit in this autonomous service age.”

Using agentic AI

Agentic AI can be used in three ways, through automation, intelligence and co-pilots. Troy broke down how these are all being used by MSPs.

“[Automation] is where you're using AI or auto categorisation, ticket summarisation, AI generated scripts, RMM, auto remediation,” he said.

“Many [MSPs] are probably already using some version of AI to do this today.”

“The next tier is intelligence, this is where we're talking about predictive maintenance, pattern detection, alert correlation, proactive asset lifecycle management, all the way through the entire lifecycle club.”

The final tier, Copilots, is where MSPs are moving quickly, Troy noted.

“These are your virtual assistants, where your teams are using natural language queries for documentation where you have an AI augmented NOC or SOC within your organisation,” he said.

Xchange is run by CRN Australia’s parent company, The Channel Company. Xchange is coming to Australia in 2026.