A survey of over 3,880 business and technology leaders conducted by PwC finds that artificial intelligence (AI) is now the top cybersecurity technology that organizations are looking to managed service providers (MSPs) to help implement.
According to the survey, 38 percent of respondents are now looking to MSP to help them implement AI, followed by additional cloud security expertise (32 percent), threat management (28 percent) and data protection/data trust (27 percent).
More than half of respondents (53 percent) are prioritizing AI and machine learning tools to help close capability gaps, with the top areas of AI investments over the next 12 months being threat hunting and AI agents to automate tasks.
AI agents could be MSPs’ greatest asset
Most IT leaders recognize that AI agents will play a crucial role in automating a wide range of cybersecurity tasks, but most of them lack the expertise needed to build, deploy, manage and secure them. That general lack of agentic AI knowledge naturally creates a huge opportunity for MSPs, many of which are already at the forefront of using AI agents to automate their own internal operations.
Ideally, MSPs would naturally prefer more organizations to rely on them to provide security services that they have augmented using AI tools, but in many cases organizations are simply looking for additional external expertise that enables them to build and deploy AI agents. Of course, if an MSP helps an organization build an AI agent there’s a good chance they will contract that MSP to manage those AI agents.
However, those AI agents could potentially replace a set of tasks that the MSP currently performs. From the MSP’s perspective, AI agents could become a double-edged sword, streamlining operations while potentially replacing some of their existing services.
Why MSPs must master AI agents
Like it or not, there is no going back now that the AI genie is out of the proverbial bottle. MSPs should aggressively invest in AI agents to reduce costs and position themselves as the most trusted advisors who help organizations deploy these technologies successfully. After all, implementing AI agents is not a trivial undertaking given the level of data management, guardrails, and orchestration expertise that is required. The one thing most organizations don’t want is a set of autonomous AI agents that may be prone to hallucinate managing cybersecurity tasks.
As is always the case with any emerging technology, there are challenges and opportunities. MSPs need to clearly invest early in agentic AI to stay relevant without necessarily knowing for certain exactly what the future holds. The one thing that is certain is that the management of all things involving IT and security is about to fundamentally change. However, exactly how that change will manifest itself remains uncertain. That might make leaders of MSPs that are trying to plan for the future less comfortable than many care to admit. Nevertheless, the only real option is to keep moving forward in the expectation that as agentic AI technologies are mastered greater opportunities for MSP will soon be discovered.
Photo: Ground+Picture / Shutterstock
This post originally appeared on Smarter MSP.