At this week’s 2025 XChange Best of Breed conference, CRN asked attending executives from leading solution providers how big of an impact AI is having on their companies and their customers. Here’s what they had to say.
The wave of artificial intelligence technology development and adoption sweeping through the IT industry is certainly creating opportunities for the channel. But the rapid pace at which AI technology is evolving is creating uncertainty among solution providers and their customers.
At the 2025 XChange Best of Breed Conference, hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company in Atlanta this week, SentinelOne CEO Tomer Weingarten said AI—and agentic AI, in particular—represents a tremendous opportunity for managed security service providers.
At the same conference, IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna outlined the opportunities AI offers the channel around customer service and support, software development and enterprise automation. But he also said that “AI is not magic,” that the real productivity benefits won’t be realized for a few years, and that solution providers must understand their customers’ IT operations and needs to effectively implement AI.
[Related: XChange Panel: The Most Important Part Of AI Is Being Ready For It]
CRN spoke with executives from nine top solution providers during the conference and asked each the same question: “How big of an impact is AI having on you and your customers?”
The following is insight from these nine solution provider executives on the impact of AI.
Jason Wright, CEO, Avatar Managed Services
It’s getting to a place where it has an impact on our business. You have to start down this journey of finding the data. What silos does it live in? You have to pull it out of those silos. You have to write integrations between systems. You have to put it into a large language model before you can even start to analyze the data. You have to classify it; you have to clean it up. You have to get rid of stuff. That’s a journey we’ve been on for 14 to 16 months.
I’ve made significant investments for an MSP of our size. I’ve brought in data engineers and consultants who are working on all this, and then we had a pivot or a shift in our ideal client profile—we’ve gone upstream to a larger MSP customer—so that drove a lot of change of systems because now it’s not about a consolidated stack, it’s about best-in-class, best-in-breed solutions, so we’re bringing a bunch of these new platforms online.
Our core ITSM [IT service management] is coming online at the end of the month in October and so we think we’re going to start seeing some pretty measurable impacts in lower labor costs, not having to hire as much at certain levels, [like] at tier-one, tier-two support, in service desk, dispatching and quality assurance— those are things we all anticipate we’re going to be able to automate and see it have more than a negligible impact to the budget, maybe 8 [percent] to 10 percent to our labor expenses, which is the biggest expense in any of our businesses as solution providers.
We’ve been doing the work to get to a place where it’s going to have an impact on our business. And now, literally, in Q4 we’re going live with a bunch of these platforms and in Q1 [2026] we’ll have all of our tier-one, tier-two chatbots and some additional features there. So that’s how it’s impacting our business now.
On the macro level, longer term, once we sort of have this all built out for us, then it’s about taking the use case and applications we built for ourselves and then driving those into our client environments. Accounts receivable, accounts payable, different finance functions, customer service. We’re already automating marketing through drip sequences and content syndication, so in those areas, we’re already having an impact. But where it’s really going to be measurable is in driving down our labor costs because that’s our biggest expense.
Mark Wiener, CEO, Bizcom Global
AI is impacting us in a couple of ways. No. 1, I think it’s about trying to make us more efficient in what we do. But AI will become the most successful when we help our clients figure out how they’re going to become more productive in the process. My issue as we start rolling out is: How do we keep them safe while they become more productive? And it adds overhead that is not being counted for today in how we help them address their security piece.
The biggest thing that we’re using it for today is more sales and marketing. We’re trying to figure out how internally, how we [can] use it for productivity improvement. But again, our big focus is: How do we deliver productivity improvements for our customers?
Allen Falcon, CEO, Cumulus Global
We’re actively restructuring our internal operating systems to enable and leverage AI in a way that will expand the operations of our current teams. It won’t replace anybody, [but] it will make it easier for them to succeed in their jobs.
So leveraging AI, [along with] leveraging existing infrastructure and security, where it’s going to have the most demonstratable impact.
Brian Hill, Co-Founder, President, Imperium Data
I think for us, it’s really about understanding the use case of AI. How does it affect [the customer’s] business? How is it driving business outcomes? And then, what tools are they utilizing to build those AI engines? We’re looking at a lot of companies that say, ‘Hey, we want to invest in AI.’ They don’t necessarily know that that could mean more cloud spend, or more server spend, or more infrastructure, more network and more security requirements.
And they’re not thinking of the holistic approach of [how] traditional networking is not ‘dead’—it’s just evolving into this new era of AI that’s going to push traditional networking to the next level. And that’s where the traditional networking companies need to continue to evolve. You’re seeing it with Cisco and you’re seeing it with HPE and Juniper—[they are] continuing to push the envelope across that to be able to adapt to that new level of expertise that’s needed. For us, if we are able to get ahead of it, it’s an incredible advantage within the space.
Earl Foote, Founder, CEO, Nexus IT Consultants
Over the last two quarters, we’re seeing more impact than we’ve seen since GenAI hit the market. Most of our market that we serve is upper SMB to lower midmarket, and most businesses in that size range were waiting on the sidelines to see what was going to shake out and what was real.
We’re finally seeing, over the last couple of quarters, everybody quickly wanting to get serious about it and create a real AI strategy. We’ve been upleveling our business internally with AI for a number of years now—from the get-go getting teams on ChatGPT to accelerate their efficiency and make them more accurate in what they do.
We’re toying with the idea of potentially providing self-help to clients through AI. Of course, we want to do that in a mindful manner so that we don’t push ourselves out of our own contracts. But I do believe it’s only a matter of a couple of years before AI automation, especially with agentic AI, will start to replace a lot of the simple table stakes that have been part of the MSP industry. … We do think we’re likely, in the not-too-distant future, to launch AI-centric consulting and project services. We’re going to figure out if there’s a managed service model for it as well.
Jennifer Roy, CEO, Nucleus Networks
AI right now is obviously the hot topic in the industry, but it’s definitely having an impact on our business and on our clients’ business. There’s a new revenue stream for those MSPs that are looking to get really involved and dig into it and lean into AI, and there is a huge opportunity that we are all facing right now. AI is going to be something that we can utilize to actually look at some of our more junior tasks and how we can automate and use AI to replace those. It’ll allow us to do more with less, which helps with the labor market shortage.
Ahmed Mahmood, Founder, CEO, Ocean Solutions
We generated 10.5 percent [of our revenue] from AI last year, building AI applications and solutions for clients. It made us look into a different line of business, a different line of revenue. We’re trying to [be] more aggressive now. We’re basically on a journey to build more of an AI managed solution provider adjacent to the MSSP [practice] that we run.
AI actually is our biggest driver going forward. We’re investing more and more into resources because we see the race there. We’re at a point now where [AI] is more ready for the customer. For the past couple of years, they got their feet wet. But people now really need real monetization. It’s not like, ‘Hey, I can write emails better.’ That’s no longer enough. The customers that are just buying [Microsoft] Copilot and buying [Chat]GPT and getting their feet wet—we don’t mind it, but that’s not really where we bring value.
Bob Masterson, CISO, Director Of Cyber Services, Safe Harbor Data Center Services
Customers are generally confused about what AI can do for them, how it can be monetized and how it can be a benefit for them. There’s the constant ‘I’ve used ChatGPT to generate a cartoon, that means I’m using AI, right?’
As far as our business is concerned, we’re embracing it whole-heartedly, both from implementing new hardware in the data center—we’re now in the process of upgrading the hardware by adding GPUs—to literally writing code, trying to generate some agents of our own, just so that we can be subject matter experts and lead [customers] in the direction they need to be going.
We’re trying to find our own way in where [AI] is going, to be beneficial in bringing clients on board. There’s a number of GPU-related data centers out there, so somebody that really does have expertise in the AI industry probably isn’t going to use us out of the gate. But there is a niche for people who need to do proofs-of-concept, that want to be able to put AI to work in their organization, that don’t fit into the, ‘I have massive budgets and staff that’s going to do a hundred different projects’ and that kind of thing.
So we’re finding our way along the line, and [customers] are finding their way along the line. We’re trying to find use cases for both the clients and for ourselves that match up.
Mark Galyardt, President, XIOSSX
There are so many opportunities I see around what AI can do. If you look at AI avatars, for example, they can speak every language on Earth. So think of the possibilities.
[Galyardt and XIOSSX are working with RealBusiness.AI, which is developing an AI-based knowledge operating system and the Unicorn.Health AI-powered health-care platform.] Unicorn Health is patient-centric AI. With this I can help health-care providers deliver health care better, faster and at lower cost.
Kyle Alspach and Gina Narcisi contributed to this report.
