ConnectWise CEO: Abundance of knowledge will create an abundance of opportunities and jobs

Manny Rivelo discusses at IT Nation 2026 why it’s important for MSPs to retrain their mindset.

As the AI revolution continues to reshape businesses globally, MSPs need to be open to retraining and learning to ensure that they don’t get left behind.

Speaking to CRN Australia at ConnectWise IT Nation ANZ, CEO of the software vendor Manny Rivelo said there is a “retraining” that needs to happen.

"Companies are going to optimise and then re-shift, there's reskilling and retraining,” he explained.

"This was said by somebody in our company, and it resonated with me, as we create and make ourselves much more autonomous and agentic, AI is not going to replace you, you not knowing AI will replace you.”

During his keynote at IT Nation in Sydney, Rivelo said the future of MSPs will be managing intelligence.

However, when asked where his Australian partners are at on that journey, he said it is still “very early”.

"We probably have another half a dozen to a dozen [partners ready]. Over the course of the last week, they are all ready to take that journey,” he said.

“It's like anything else; it'll snowball, and it'll accelerate and get larger and bigger.”

Rivelo noted that this journey is also “demystifying” what AI is.

"We have to do a better job talking about it. What we're doing is helping you do a task,” he said.

“That a human used to do, and that was the constraint. The human labour, and now you don't need it.”

Read more of CRN’s conversation with Manny Rivelo below.

CRN: How do you remove the fear from MSPs who still believe that AI will steal their jobs or make them redundant?

Throughout the last sets of industry transformations that have happened from the invention of the wheel to the industrial revolution, to what happened with tech and the internet. To what's happening now with AI, there is less unemployment today than there's been ever almost before.

The industry is going through a little rationalisation to say some of those jobs that we were doing are no longer needed. Think about the manufacturing line where there were people on the manufacturing line, and now there's robots.

Now, are humans needed? Yes. Robots aren't putting the wheels on the car or the or the doors on the car, but the humans are monitoring the robots that those wheels and doors and are being fitted correctly.

You do shift the work you do and how you do it. We have to understand that yes, some of that rationalisation is happening, but those companies are also hiring different skilled workers to maybe manage the automation.

Abundance of knowledge will create an abundance of opportunity and jobs. The question is, will we step into it? The fear is always, ‘I'm going to lose my job because there's some widget out there that's going take my job’.

The question is going to be if that widget creates that much more intelligence, how do you govern that intelligence? Why don't I become the person that is responsible for supervising that intelligence, governing that intelligence, creating value? It is a transformation. But you can't afford not to do it.

CRN: Speaking to partners about Agentic AI, what has been the consensus around the technology?

Rivelo: There's still a fragmentation around it, but the concept as we exit this year and enter next year, the concept of is AI real or not will it impact my business will go.

We're at a stage of curiosity, where people say, ‘I know I have to do something, how do I do it?’ There are folks that have started that journey probably a year ago or longer, but the market wasn't there. The offerings weren't there. What they did is they've hired some people to build some of their own stuff, they're getting some value.

I didn't talk about it today, but the market data that's out there, this is not MSP specific, it's much broader, which you could argue probably inflates the numbers a little bit more. This McKinsey data, 20 to 30 percent of all AI projects show some value, and that's a that's a pretty huge still failure rate, and transformative value, 6 percent.

You go out there, you build this agent, and will it work or won't it work? We've taken a lot of time. Every one of those logos that you saw on stage, their agents work. We create an ROI, and every day we show you what we did for you.

It is even better than asking your employees because [the agent is] telling you what the task they did every single day. That's not easy to get that transformative return on your business. There's a lot of risk.

What you'll see is we'll be a year from now, and the mass will be buying agents to consume and compress intelligence digitally to accelerate their transformation.

It is going to happen and then once they optimise themselves and they get capacity back, eventually what they should do is redirect some of that energy to help the end customer become agentic, and protect them.

CRN: Do you see agentic AI in the same lens as the cloud?

Rivelo: It is moving way faster than cloud and different. Cloud was a way of offloading the need for you to build a data centre, and instead focusing on the application. Cloud helped the software movement. When you were a couple of years back, decade or so back, Andreessen Horowitz came out and said, something along the lines of ‘software is eating the world’.

What he was saying was that software is now coming in and changing everything. You see all the apps on the phone that made us much more productive. Cloud enabled that.

It said you got infinite compute, storage, networking. On top of that, I'm going to give you all of the tools that you need to write an application, databases. It was almost like all I had to do was train you on how to use, let's say, AWS, and when you went there, all you have to do is bring your creativity.

You're a painter and you walk into a room and there's all the palettes are there with all the colours and everything you need is there. That's what AWS did and the cloud did to allow applications to be like democratize the building of applications.

That was explosive and that created a huge amount of value because it made us more productive. But the constraint was still you. The constraint was in that application. Now, agentic technology is mimicking a human and trying to get to better than a human, and as a result of that, it can work across applications.

CRN: What is something you love about the Australian market?

Rivelo: It is very progressive. When you look at the world and the adoption of technology, the Australian market led with cloud.

In the last 20 something years that I've been coming here. When I came here, I talked to the Macquarie Banks and all the other banks that were here, and they already were in cloud. All of them were in cloud.

You adopted cloud architectures very rapidly. You will adopt the next evolution of technology very rapidly, and it's part of the culture. There's innovation in this country. People are curious, and part of it might be the fact that you are on the other side of the world for most of the world.

You have to become self-sufficient. You have to progress with that. But no, that to me stands out. It is a great place to come, listen, and take back because the country in general is very progressive, and the people are very progressive. They will adopt the technology. Show them the path, and they will jump on it very quickly.

CRN: What excites you?

Rivelo: The change. I grew up in Silicon Valley with the Silicon Valley mentality. To me the most interesting attribute for an organisation or individual is curiosity, and if you're curious, you always question things around you and look for a better way.

It doesn't mean you don't appreciate what's been done, but you question things and say, 'How can we make it better? How can we do more? How do we disrupt ourselves versus somebody else disrupting you?’ And curiosity gives you that.

I'll give you an example. I have employees that have popped into my office and said, "Manny, let me show you this. We grew the business by 30 percent, as an example’. I said ‘Awesome, great job. How? Why wasn't it 50?’ Now I'm not trying to belittle that, but why wasn't it 50 percent?

What did we learn? It's one thing when the number is negative, and somebody comes in and says, ‘Well, this is what happened. What we do about it?’ But when it's positive, why don't we ask ourselves, ‘How do we put more fuel on that and ignite it even further? And by the way, how do I know 30 is good? What's the market at?’ Because when the tide comes in, all boats rise. Because did our boat rise more than anybody else, that's not a fair comparison, even to do that. Especially if you don't understand the underlying attributes of why you grew the business.

When I look at people, and I drive my team sometimes crazy, I'm always ask ‘can this be better? What do we do?’ And it's not about belittling the great work. it's about challenging the possibility of what we can do. To me, we're in a time where you've got to be curious about everything. Because everything is changing.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.