ConnectWise Exec: AI Will Evolve MSP Landscape Over Next 40 Years

‘New technology is going to come into those customers that you support every single day and it’s going to create new challenges for them, which is going to create those opportunities for [MSPs],’ said Jeff Bishop, executive vice president and general manager at ConnectWise.

AI represents the next big leap in innovation that’s going to evolve the MSP landscape over the next 30 to 40 years, according to ConnectWise’s Jeff Bishop.

AI will be a $1.35 trillion industry by 2030 and is expected to contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy, said Bishop, executive vice president and general manager of unified monitoring and management and Asio platform at Tampa, Fla.-based vendor ConnectWise. AI also has the potential to automate about 30 percent of the current job market, he said during a keynote session about AI and MSP challenges and opportunities Sunday at CRN parent The Channel Company’s XChange August conference in San Antonio.

“New technology is going to come into those customers that you support every single day, and it’s going to create new challenges for them, which is going to create those opportunities for you,” he said. “These may not be the same lines of business you have today. It may be something brand new. It's going to create new training and education that you're going to have to put into your teams. [There will be] new roles, new responsibilities and new skill sets that you're going to have to bring on board.”

There are 60,000 AI-focused technology vendors around the world today, with a quarter of them headquartered in the U.S., he added.

The questions MSPs must think about is how do customers know which AI tools to use? What products should be implemented into their business? Is it secure or not secure? And how does it impact their data?

And as MSPs start to use and test AI tools, they are finding a lot of value in hyperautomation with RPA (robotic process automation) and workflow scripts, he said.

“It’s taking that knowledge and utilizing it to improve processes and hopefully profitability in your business,” he said.

Another massive channel opportunity is cybersecurity, as AI will create security issues for customers. Hackers are creating new variants of malware and using AI to find ways to prevent it from being detected. Voice cloning and deepfakes are more and more common, and highly targeted AI-produced phishing campaigns are getting harder to spot, he said.

Bishop said it’s important to know what these threats mean and how to coach employees and customers to be on the lookout. He urged MSPs not to use AI and automation as a cost savings model, but to invest in the company and hire or train engineers to attract new business.

“The biggest thing that I've seen MSPs do is get in front of their teams and not have that tough conversation about what does this mean for their jobs?” he said. “They’re kind of just glossing over it. When that happens, these technicians start getting very nervous and start looking for other jobs.

“They understand that AI, machine learning, hyper automation and bots are going to reduce some of the jobs. Everybody sees it,” he added. “It doesn't mean that you necessarily have to let those individuals go. It means that you have a better ratio. One technician who was supporting maybe 100 or 200 endpoints can now support 300 or 400. It’s having those conversations and making sure that you're building the team, building that trust and letting them know where you're going.”

Chris Piedmonte, CEO of Austin, Texas-based MSP ServantecGlobal, echoed Bishop’s sentiment in that AI is going to become a major component of the work that all MSPs do going forward, “if we don't get ahead of that, we're definitely going to be at a disadvantage in this market.”

“I think AI is far less artificial intelligence and more like artificial intern,” he told CRN. “It's still fairly early, [and] the technologies are still evolving, they're still being developed. Although they can help us considerably, I personally don't think they're ready to be left unsupervised.”

One area that he’s focused on, as Bishop discussed, is AI’s impact on cybersecurity.

“We're going to have to learn how to defend against—and this is something in our company we've been talking about a lot—the deep fakes,” Piedmonte said. “How do we know when we receive a message that it is truly coming from one of our clients? There's a lot of work. We're all going to have to figure out not only how to use AI but how to defend against it from a cybersecurity perspective.”