Leading voices in the IT service provider channel are championing managed intelligence (MI). Its most ambitious proponents suggest MSPs should reinvent themselves as “MIPs” and reshape their businesses entirely around AI. Techzine spoke with key figures behind the newly formed Managed Intelligence Alliance, led by GTIA and focused on the SMB market in particular. What do we make of it? How mature are managed intelligence and its providers?
The Managed Intelligence Alliance, referred to simply as “the Alliance” from here on, aims to make AI delivery repeatable. There’s a lot to that mission statement. After all, who’s to say how IT service providers will deliver AI in the first place? What is required to happen for them to be anything more than last-mile providers of someone else’s AI solution? We’ve seen every IT vendor under the sun come up with a platform, an assistant, a swarm of agents, you name it, and these vary tremendously based on context. While common practices such as MCP connectivity exist, standards are hard to come by. The Alliance is looking to change that. MSPs stand to gain from this setup, if they are ready for it.
Carolyn April, Vice President, Research and Market Intelligence at GTIA, tells us that the education level between MSPs and clients are closer than ever when it comes to AI. Whereas the channel as the vendors’ effective sales arm was clued in early on matters like security and SaaS, this is not the case here. Intelligence on AI is everywhere.
AI as an MSP opportunity
Pax8 coined the term “managed intelligence” a year and a half ago and has since built much of its marketing around it. However, the company felt the need to expand the concept into common standards, and began collaborating with the non-profit GTIA to do so. Carlo Tortora Brayda, VP of Industry Standards and Director of the Managed Intelligence Alliance at the association, leads the Alliance day-to-day. Pax8 is the charter member, with Microsoft, CrowdStrike and NinjaOne among the founding parties, but the group describes itself as fundamentally vendor-neutral. Housing it in a vendor foundation would be “too close to comfort for neutrality,” Tortora Brayda says. The attraction is plain as day: there are apparently organizations numbering in the high dozens looking to join.
Rob Rae, Corporate Vice President of Community & Ecosystems at Pax8 and chair of the Alliance, spoke to us at Pax8 Beyond. He tells us incorporating AI is an “everybody problem, including for our competitors”. It’s also a huge opportunity for the 96,000 MSPs in the world, he notes. “Our data says that 80 percent of small businesses are actually using some form of AI, but only 5 percent of those end users have been talked to about it from their MSP.” Pax8’s published Pulse survey of US SMBs puts active AI use at 61 percent, rising to around 90 percent when businesses still experimenting are included.
There are theories around why. We’ve covered many creatively worded AI integrations (platform, OS, et cetera), and vendors seem keen to blur the line between their own solutions and an organization’s broader AI plans. Harmonize the two and you capture the market right as it starts to mature. Another avenue is the end user bypassing all channels and simply using shadow AI with a personal Claude or ChatGPT subscription. The risks are manifold in either case: further lock-in in this new AI age in the former, or data security thrown out the window as your workforce uploads sensitive information to the AI providers in the latter.
Also read: Rapid AI adoption increases risk of shadow IT
As for SMB customers and their stance on AI, “they know they want it and they need it,” Tortora Brayda says. “They have an idea of how it could unite business processes, drive efficiencies, drive growth.” What they lack is a “trusted advisor to show them the map of where it could go.”
After all, as Carolyn April notes, there are “a million unseen issues that are going to arise, and a bunch of unintended consequences that companies are putting in place now.” As soon as standardization is implemented, this harm can be reduced.
We’re in the early days
The Managed Intelligence Alliance launched on October 19, after a preview at GTIA’s ChannelCon in August. Given we’re only three weeks out from the launch, it should be emphasized that the Alliance is in its early days. Alongside it, GTIA and Texas A&M University’s Global Cyber Research Institute have set up the Consortium for Responsible IT Services. Its aim is a self-regulatory organization (SRO) framework for IT services, with GTIA as the eventual SRO, and the Alliance’s accreditation programs are to be developed with it. In the words of GTIA’s CEO Dan Wensley, the goal is to “regulate this industry ourselves before it is regulated for us”. Are we looking at another ISO standard? In spirit, yes, Wensley agrees, adding that “GTIA will own that standard and deliver it to the market on a global basis.”
This is normally the part where we get into the nitty gritty: what specific standards, how is data security ensured, what guardrails do the MSPs apply? The problem is that the Alliance simply hasn’t reached these specifics yet. They’re set to come out of member working groups, and GTIA expects mature standards to take several years. Vendor choice is left to the service providers themselves. “Who they decide to go with from a vendor’s perspective is for them to determine, not us as the trade association,” Wensley says. Companies like Pax8 compete on being “MSP-centric”, as Rae characterizes it.
To deliver on that, the Alliance must succeed where the channel has failed before. As Rae puts it, the channel let governments write the rulebook on IT security. And truth be told, security is still a pain in the neck, even for fundamentals like MFA and air-gapped backups. Wensley admits as much: “We’re in our infancy still in cyber.” The Alliance would do well to prevent another security-esque fight in the mud, this time over AI mishaps.
Rae notes a key advantage for MSPs, but only if they’re willing to engage. According to him, AI breaks the pattern of SMBs waiting for enterprise technology to trickle down to them. It is enticing enough for them to re-engineer processes on the fly. Tortora Brayda wants that energy channeled into a framework anchored in non-negotiable and clear definitions, such as human dignity and security guardrails, with agile rules around them. He hopes to work with standards bodies such as the ITU and ANSI, as well as universities. That should deliver better outcomes than the impromptu shadow AI emerging today.
MSPs need to find another gear
Here’s a stat to throw a wrench in the works. As of June, only 17 (!) out of roughly 600 partners personally interviewed by Pax8’s head of AI adoption met the bar Pax8 has set for managed intelligence. That’s four more than in November 2025, but hardly the kind of progress needed. Pax8’s own program for would-be MIPs starts with an AI maturity assessment, and the company advises partners to align their AI governance services with frameworks such as the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and ISO/IEC 42001.
If MSPs don’t meet these standards and become MIPs, as Pax8 calls them, new rivals will emerge to beat them to the customer. Tortora Brayda expects AI boutique consulting companies to enter the MSP space, calling it “kind of an overwhelming shift.” He also worries that not all MSPs are “geared up yet mentally, psychologically, and in terms of even understanding the full business process complexity of how to re-engineer a business.”
Adoption can be swift
The Alliance is yet to make its defining move. That is to say: it is gearing up for something, a defined solution to a problem common to MSPs, or perhaps a set of standards to stick to around AI integrations. More than that, though, the Alliance will have to present daylight between its managed intelligence notions and those of Pax8. If they are similar but not the same, it would be a good sign of a value-add with the setup. Perhaps Pax8’s integrations with its own AI operating system, 8os, are right on the mark. In that case, academic research will essentially prove a blueprint that is already in the market.
We think the managed intelligence idea has a fundamental strength and a potential flaw. The former is that clients are clamoring for AI adoption and would dearly love to move well beyond experimentation. MSPs are not as far ahead compared to their clients as in earlier technological evolutions, April notes. Herein lies the potential flaw: AI adoption is moving so fast that MSPs will need to catch up before they are funneled into consolidated AI plays from vendors. The technology, as this year has proven, cannot be left an unmanaged frontier.