Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with numerous MSPs at our North American and EMEA Peer meetings, as well as Kaseya Connect in Vegas. There’s a lot of optimism in our industry. Everyone seems excited about where things are heading. SMBs, our customers, continue to invest more in technology, and more companies are outsourcing. The growth opportunities feel endless right now. I love it when people have higher expectations.
However, when I ask about the future changes that are coming and how they’ll impact our business model, I feel that people are underestimating the impact of what’s to come. Most of the conversations I’m having suggest leaders are thinking about small adjustments, not the massive shift that’s actually coming. I believe we have experienced an evolution of our business model up until now, and a revolution is on the horizon.
Over the past decade, our industry has evolved. Many MSPs have matured operationally, while the security landscape has changed tools and technology. We’ve weathered economic ups and downs, figured out remote work, and adapted to countless new technologies along the way. These evolutions have resulted in more MSPs becoming larger and more profitable. But through this, the basic structure of an MSP is the same, with support being the foundation of cost and value. We have piled a lot of tools up, but our foundation has remained. Whether it’s RMM, PSA, security tools, or backup solutions, we’ve basically been stacking more stuff on top of the same core business. Your team closes a lot of tickets and deals with a lot of alerts.
Over the next three to five years, advancements in AI and automation will dramatically change what we have known as support. We’re not talking about simple chatbots here—this is AI that can actually diagnose problems and fix complex issues. There will be fewer tickets and alerts, and AI and automation will accomplish an increasing percentage of support noise. Password resets, software installs, network tuning, system maintenance—all of it happening without your techs touching anything. This will be the first fundamental reshuffling of the MSP industry.
I don’t think the leaders I have spoken to over the past few weeks fully realize what this shift will mean to their business and, more importantly, what they need to do to succeed in this transition. The technology is already here, and some MSPs are using it now, which means this is happening faster than most people think.
I’ll discuss more in the future about what you need to do to make the first real revolution in our industry a huge opportunity, but for now, start to think about what your business, your operations, your packaging and pricing, your value proposition—all of it—will look like when support is a small percentage of what it is today.
The MSPs who figure this out early will have a huge advantage over those who wait.