At Pax8 Beyond in Amsterdam, Rob Rae, Corporate Vice President of Community and Partner Experience at Pax8, outlined the company’s vision for the managed services channel. As AI technologies rapidly advance, Pax8 wants service providers to evolve from Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to Managed Intelligence Providers (MIPs). That will be the next major shift in this industry, according to Rae. What does it mean, and how do you become an MIP? Listen and watch to this episode of Techzine TV.
Walking the expo floor at Pax8 Beyond, is is very obvious: most titanium sponsors of the event (the highest level) are security providers. This isn’t a coincidence, of course. “Cybersecurity has become an absolutely critical path for managed service providers and a central revenue stream,” Rae explains. Over the past eight to nine years, MSPs have grown significantly by addressing the cybersecurity needs of small and medium businesses. They used to be believed too small to target, but that has changed. There is still a lot of work to be done in the MSP landscape around security, but it is moving in the right direction.
Rae anticipates a similar transformation with AI. “You’re going to see a lot more AI vendors, vendors we have never even heard of that are going to start entering this space,” he predicts. While every existing vendor now claims to have an AI strategy for their own technology, the critical question is different: what is the AI strategy for MSPs to offer their end users?
The challenge of AI adoption for SMBs
Pax8’s Rae draws a parallel between the current AI transition and the earlier cybersecurity evolution. “We understood the urgency around cybersecurity, we understood how critical this was and that everybody was under attack, but it took a while for end users to adopt that and believe that,” he notes. AI presents a similar challenge. MSPs must pull SMB end users onto this journey, convincing them of the productivity gains, scalability, and efficiencies AI can deliver.
Pax8 Marketplace: AI-powered discovery
Pax8 has made significant investments in AI capabilities within its own platform, particularly through its marketplace. The company launched marketplace innovations approximately 18 months ago after four years of development. These AI-powered tools help MSPs discover better products, find better matches for their clients, and identify logical opportunities they might otherwise miss, according to Rae.
MCP servers and data intelligence
One of Pax8’s recent key innovations is the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server implementation. “Think of it as more like a translator,” Rae explains. “We have an incredible amount of data, MSPs have an incredible amount of data, and because Pax8 is where people come to buy and then you’ve got all these AI tools or LLMs, what MCP does is it sits in the middle of the two.”
This architecture allows MSPs to query their own data and discover insights they couldn’t find through manual analysis. By integrating with PSA (Professional Services Automation) and RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management) systems, Pax8 positions itself as the logical hub where this intelligence gathering makes sense, given the volume of vendors, MSPs, and transactional data flowing through the platform.
AI store and agentic capabilities
Beyond marketplace enhancements, Pax8 launched an AI store designed to help MSPs find AI technologies that haven’t yet penetrated the managed services space. “Pax8 is a great place for these vendors not only to come and say, hey, I want to sell into SMBs,” Rae explains. “The only way to sell into SMBs is through the MSP. So we can bring these vendors, help them develop partner programs, pricing strategies, introductions to the MSP.”
This creates a common meeting place where emerging AI vendors can connect with service providers seeking efficiency tools and new service offerings. As agentic AI and agent-to-agent (A2A) communications become more prevalent, Pax8 is positioning itself to support these next-generation capabilities.
From MSP to MIP with Pax8
Perhaps the most provocative element of Pax8’s strategy is the push to rebrand MSPs as Managed Intelligence Providers. Rae explains the rationale: “If you talk to the MSPs, they don’t like when somebody comes to them and says, hey, what do you do for a living? They’re not saying I’m an MSP. They say IT solution provider or computer solutions.”
MSP has become an internal industry term that doesn’t resonate with the broader market. “You’re not really going to run a marketing campaign to say ‘I’m a managed service provider’ because it doesn’t drill down to the core of what they do,” Rae argues. As AI becomes something end users actively seek, positioning as a Managed Intelligence Provider makes sense, according to Pax8 and Rae. The idea is that the market understands what this means: someone who manages the intelligence of a business. Whether that makes it a lot clearer is up for debate as far as we’re concerned, even if we do agree that MSP doesn’t mean a lot to organizations either.
Will Every MSP Become an MIP?
Rae acknowledges that not every MSP will make this transition. “One of the great things about our space is it’s constantly changing and it’s exciting because it’s constantly changing, it’s more interesting because it’s constantly changing, but it’s also exhausting sometimes too,” he reflects. Some business owners, particularly those nearing retirement, may choose to exit through mergers and acquisitions rather than embark on another transformation.
The parallel to previous disruptions is clear. Box movers who didn’t evolve to managed services either found a niche or disappeared. The same pattern emerged with cloud adoption and cybersecurity. “You can’t be an MSP and not offer cybersecurity these days. AI is going to be the same,” Rae states definitively.
To hear and watch our entire conversation with Rob Rae from Pax8, tune in now!
Also read: Pax8 aims to transform MSPs into Managed Intelligence Providers