TL;DR: MSPs report record growth tied to AI demand, but only about half feel ready to guide a client through adoption, down from 90% a year ago. That gap shows up in three places: tool sprawl, unscoped strategy work, and no real answer when a client asks about AI governance.
I owned an MSP for 20 years. I know exactly what it feels like when client demand for something outruns your team’s ability to deliver it well. Right now, that’s happening across the entire managed services industry, and the numbers back it up.
OpenText Cybersecurity’s third annual Global Managed Security Survey polled more than 1,000 MSPs. 92% say AI interest is driving real growth in their business right now, and 96% expect that to continue this year. That’s the good news.
Here’s the number that matters more: only about half of those same MSPs feel ready to actually guide a client through AI adoption. A year ago, that number was 90%. The readiness gap isn’t holding steady while demand climbs. It’s getting worse.
That gap doesn’t show up as a missed deadline or a blown budget. It shows up quietly, in three specific ways:
Tool sprawl – A client asks what AI tool they should use for something, ticket triage, a chatbot, document review, doesn’t matter what. Without a standard answer ready to go, the natural response is to point them at whatever tool solved a similar problem for the last client, or whatever a vendor pitched at the last conference. Multiply that across twenty clients and an MSP ends up supporting a dozen different point solutions with no consistent stack, no consistent training, and no consistent way to troubleshoot when something breaks.
Scope creep – “Can you help us figure out AI” sounds like a simple question. It rarely has a simple, billable answer. Without a defined service built around it, that conversation turns into hours of unpaid strategy work, because there’s no clean way to say “that’s a different engagement” when the engagement was never scoped in the first place.
Silence on governance – This is the one that costs the most, and it costs it later, not now. A client asks what happens if the AI gets something wrong, who’s responsible if it takes an action nobody expected, or what data it can actually touch. If nobody on the MSP’s team has a real, specific answer, that’s not a technical gap. It’s a trust gap, and trust is the actual product being sold in a managed services relationship.
What actually closes the gap
None of this means MSPs should stop saying yes to AI-related work. Clients are asking, the demand is real, and turning it away just hands the relationship to someone else. What it means is that most MSPs need to treat AI the way they already treat specialized security or compliance work: bring in a partner for the parts that sit outside their core competency, the same way their own clients rely on them for the parts that sit outside the client’s.
That’s the exact gap a partner model exists to close. It’s part of why I built AMG the way I did, as a partner MSPs can plug into for the AI governance, workflow design, and staff training work that falls outside day-to-day service delivery, without having to build that capability from scratch in-house.
If you run an MSP, the real question isn’t whether your clients are asking about AI. They already are, the survey confirms it, and so does every conversation happening in this industry right now. The real question is which of the three gaps above shows up first in your shop, tool sprawl, scope creep, or silence on governance, and what happens the first time a client asks the governance question and doesn’t like the silence that follows.
Sources: OpenText Cybersecurity, Third Annual Global Managed Security Survey, via MSSP Alert and Channel Futures
Aspen Management Group works with boutique advisory firms to clarify key workflows, improve efficiency, layer in AI where it adds value, and build governance and training around that change.
Scott spent 20 years running a managed IT services practice with law firm clients across the DC Metro area, and has worked in technology for 30 years. AMG helps boutique law firms get practical value out of AI.