AI tools - headache or relief for MSPs?

One MSP argues the benefit has been marginal rather than transformational, while another views the time savings as highly valuable

Is AI just a minor efficiency improvement for managed service providers, or a massive resource liberation?

More MSP tool vendors are integrating AI into their toolsets, beyond the questionably useful chatbots.

Kaseya has left its paw print with Cooper AI, ConnectWise is soaring to new heights with Sidekick, and N-able opened a new gateway with its Developer Portal.

But these shiny new AI-driven tools mean providing the technical support to enable AI from MSPs.

So is it a help or a hindrance? CRN canvassed six MSPs to hear how they’re handling the technology.

Russell Crampin, MD, Axians UK

It seems like everything is AI now! I thought AI washing was a problem five years ago, but we really are at the zenith of it now.

So, yes, we are seeing more AI integration across MSP toolsets, and it’s had a real impact. Chatbots and AI-driven support have long since automated basic troubleshooting and ticketing, freeing up our teams to focus on more complex work. This has improved efficiency and response times.

However, for us and our customers, AI tools are better deployed at the back end of solutions, helping to identify and fix potential issues before they become a problem.

Chatbots are nothing new, and have now become better, but I see them more helpful for consumers rather than for our customers. When our customers need us, it’ll be because they really need help, and they want to talk to a human that hopefully they already have a personal relationship with and we’re very proud to offer this.

Geoff Kneen, CEO, Advania UK

The impact of AI integration has been huge for us. We've rolled out Copilot to every team member in our UK business and embedded AI and automation across our security and risk mitigation capabilities, particularly in threat detection. This has significantly enhanced the speed and effectiveness of our managed services.

Beyond internal tools, we've developed a full catalogue of AI services for clients. These include private ChatGPT solutions hosted on Azure, secure AI search within business data, and productivity tools like Copilot. We're not just embedding AI into our ITSM and security platforms, we're helping clients harness it across their environments.

A major focus for us has been user enablement. We've run ‘promptathons’, workshops, and hands-on training to help people understand how to interact with AI tools effectively. Writing good prompts isn’t always intuitive, so upskilling our clients has been key to unlocking value.

In terms of measurable impact, our analysis shows time savings of 30 to 40 minutes per user per day. That’s not just about working faster—it’s about freeing people to focus on more strategic, high-value tasks. Ultimately, our goal is to help clients boost productivity and turn AI into a real competitive advantage.

Stephen Richardson, CEO, Digital Origin Solutions

Many of our core toolsets - PSA, RMM, cybersecurity tools - are starting to integrate AI-powered features such as intelligent ticketing, chatbots, predictive maintenance, and workflow automation.

So far, the benefit has been marginal rather than transformational. AI chatbots, for instance, will reduce the number of level 1 interactions our service desk needs to handle, but the management overhead of the AI tools themselves means we cannot yet see it freeing up large pools of resources.

It’s a case of gradual efficiency improvements rather than massive resource liberation. Over time, as these tools mature, I expect the productivity gains to compound, but businesses need to be prepared to manage and optimise AI tools actively, not just switch them on and hope for the best.

Oliver Spence, CEO, CybaVerse

From the MSP point of view, I think you've got to be really clear with the vendors that you're working with on what AI they are using, where and how.

The term ‘AI’ gets thrown around a lot these days and because it can be utilised in so many different areas, it's quite difficult to pinpoint.

AI can be a perfect support product when you can train it on all of your own business materials. There's no risk from a data perspective, and you can just feed [information] back to your customers a lot quicker.

That's one level, which is on the vendor space or business content or public information. But then you’ve got to look at whether AI is being used by these vendors for customer data specific requests as well, or is it actually just to speed up and enhance vendor tooling?

If AI is being utilised just on the tooling level and it's not touching any customer data then fine. There’s no issues or risks there.

But the moment it starts pulling in customer data, or their clients data that's where MSPs need to be a bit more aware or understanding of what's going on.

Lee Robinson, co-founder & director, Meta Eagle

We've been doing work with AI integrations and everything else. We do have a chatbot, but that comes through to people, because we're more about relationships, and people want to talk to us.

I use the term AI loosely because it's not intelligent, it's just a bunch of rules and algorithms, and it comes with a certain output at the end. It's just allowing us to work a bit smarter internally.

Case in point, we’ve got a ticketing system, a PSA system. What we do is we have our own instance in Azure AD, a privatised version of AI, which will then analyse the tickets for a particular customer, see if there are trends in a particular problem or device, even go through and look at the historic tickets for similar issues and steer us in the direction of where it thinks we should go in order to resolve the problem.

What we've done with AI and automation is just effectively work smarter and be able to automate things and link systems.

That means tasks that are repetitive are automated which frees up time. It also allows us to be very quick and analyse a whole bunch of data to then come up with a response or a fix, and again, that saves time.

Geoff Wing, CRO, Arc

The key challenge this presents is maintaining control over business data. The use of platforms like ChatGPT necessitates clear internal AI policies to ensure staff use these tools responsibly and to prevent data leakage or unauthorised access to sensitive information.

Our approach is to retain AI capabilities within our own ecosystem, enabling us to safeguard data while still harnessing the power of AI. We also support our customers in building out their Microsoft 365 and Azure environments to effectively adopt and maximise the value of Microsoft Copilot.

By aligning these platforms with best practices in security, governance, and user enablement, we help organisations unlock productivity gains while maintaining full control over their data and compliance posture.