Your MSP Isn't Ready for the AI Conversation. That's a Problem.

I spent part of my morning in an r/msp thread where managed service providers were openly asking each other a question that should concern every SMB owner reading this: "Clients keep requesting AI tools connected to their M365 tenants. What do we do?"

The answers were exactly what you'd expect if you've spent any time in the managed services world.

Lock down OAuth consent in Entra. Add DLP. Write an AI acceptable use policy. Recommend Copilot. Make them sign a waiver. One person suggested a product called "Hatz.ai" with no further context. That comment had negative votes.

Know what nobody in a thread of 20+ responses talked about? Implementation. Post-deployment training. Change management. Workflow integration. Actually helping the client get value from the thing they're asking for.

Not one person.

The Numbers Tell an Uncomfortable Story#

According to an OpenText survey covered by Channel Futures, 92% of MSPs report that AI interest from clients has directly contributed to business growth over the past year. Almost all of them (96%) expect that trend to continue.

Here's where it gets uncomfortable: only about half of those same MSPs feel confident guiding their SMB clients through AI adoption. That's a 40-point confidence drop from 2024, when 90% said they were prepared.

Meanwhile, 95% of MSP clients are either exploring or actively adopting AI. The demand isn't theoretical. It's sitting in their inboxes right now.

The Risk Mitigation Trap#

If you've been in IT long enough, you've seen this pattern before. New technology arrives, clients want it, and the service provider defaults to what they know: control the risk.

Lock it down. Write a policy. Bill for the compliance work. Move on to the next ticket.

This playbook made sense for a long time. When clients wanted to adopt cloud services ten years ago, MSPs who focused on security and governance provided real value. The technology was relatively contained, the risks were understood, and the implementation path was well-documented.

AI is different, and most MSPs haven't adjusted to that difference yet.

When a client asks for help with AI, they aren't asking for protection from a threat. They're asking for help with a capability. That's a fundamentally different conversation, and "here's what you can't do" is not an answer that's going to hold for long.

If you don't help them do it right, someone else will help them do it badly.

The Training Gap Nobody Talks About#

This is where the data gets really bleak.

AI tool spending across SMBs went up 23% in the second half of 2025. During the same period, AI training budgets were cut by 18%. According to BCG's AI at Work report, only a third of employees say they've been properly trained on the AI tools they're using every day.

Let that contradiction sink in. Companies are spending more on AI tools while spending less on teaching people how to use them.

The result is predictable. Marketing teams dumping client data into public models because nobody told them about data privacy settings. Finance teams trusting hallucinated numbers because nobody explained confidence levels. Operations teams using AI for the most basic tasks imaginable because nobody showed them what it can actually do with their specific workflows.

What MSPs Should Actually Be Doing#

Look, I'm not here to trash MSPs. I've spent two decades in IT across just about every vertical you can imagine, including MSPs. I understand the operational reality. You're running lean, your techs are already stretched thin, and nobody on your bench has deep AI experience past using ChatGPT to spit out a quick PowerShell script. That's not failure. It's not a shortcoming. It's operations and it's what you do.

But here's what you shouldn't do: fake it.

If you don't have AI capability in-house, the worst thing you can do is pretend you do. Clients will figure it out, usually when the implementation fails to deliver value and they start asking harder questions.

The better play is straightforward. Find a partner who actually lives in the AI space. Someone who understands the security implications (because those are real) AND knows how to build workflows, configure tools properly, and train the client's team on how to use them.

Not a 30-minute webinar. Not a PDF guide. Real, hands-on, role-specific training that connects AI capabilities to the way those specific humans do their specific jobs.

Keep the client relationship. Keep the managed services. Let the AI work go to someone who does it every day. The best version of this arrangement is one where both parties benefit, where the MSP is compensated for the introduction and the client gets genuine expertise instead of a checkbox.

The Window Is Open, but It Won't Stay Open#

95% of MSP clients are exploring AI right now. That's not a future trend. That's today's inbox. Every one of those conversations is either going to build trust or erode it.

The MSPs who build trust in this moment are the ones who are honest about what they can and can't do. The ones who say "this is outside our core expertise, but we have a partner who specializes in it" instead of cobbling together a half-baked offering that checks the box but doesn't deliver the outcome.

Five years from now, the MSPs who figured this out early will have deeper client relationships than ever. The ones who faked it will be explaining why their client's AI investment didn't produce results, and by then, someone else will already be in the room offering to fix it.

If you're an MSP looking for that kind of partner, that's exactly what I built Forged Cortex to be. And yes, I'll pay you for the referral. I'd rather see companies using AI well than see them wasting money on shelfware because nobody showed them what to do with it.

And if you're on the other side of this — you're working with an MSP and you're looking to get started with AI — talk to your provider about their real capabilities before you sign anything. Do they have someone on staff who lives and breathes this stuff? If they don't, they're already behind the curve. I do this for a living and the pace of change is so fast that it's hard even for me to keep up. But also ask them whether training and education are part of the plan. If their eyes go wide — or glaze over — you have your answer.