Our series to date on how technology service providers such as MSPs need to shift their thinking to remain relevant as Strategic Technology Partners in the age of AI has stayed high-level and strategic. That’s helpful during the strategic reset service providers need to make, but there are also some tactical activities worth focusing on right now. Not in a panic, but with a bias to action towards becoming the STP of tomorrow.
1. Establish an AI line of accountability and an AI centre of excellence
Many service providers have so far kept their AI activity within the technology or innovation team. That’s fine during experimentation, but when AI is seen through a strategic, game-changing lens, accountability for AI-related change needs to sit with the executive team, ideally sponsored by the CEO. A member of the executive team should have carriage of the AI aspects that inform the team’s wider strategic work.
One approach is to form an AI centre of excellence (CoE). Far from being a bureaucratic, governance-heavy and theoretical drag on innovation and strategic intent, this function should be accountable to the executive with carriage of AI inputs into the organisation’s strategy. In a time of uncertainty, it can help centralise all the activity that is inevitably popping up across the organisation, likely including shadow AI projects and skunkworks that evade governance, security, risk and, importantly, ROI rigour. In a smaller organisation, the AI CoE doesn’t need dedicated people so much as representation from those overseeing the core functions – IT, risk, HR, finance and product, to name a few. By setting out a charter with the whole executive team, and making sure the CoE has the right people to make and enact decisions under it, real progress can be made quickly. As a first step, a ‘bring out your dead’ approach to surfacing every AI project across the organisation will give a quick handle on maturity, risk, spend and return.
2. Rework the tooling
A profusion of AI-enabled, AI-empowered or AI-ready platforms focused on delivering service provider outcomes to customers is upon us. While build-or-buy decisions about tooling will keep being re-examined as AI-assisted development advances, one factor to weigh is the risk and effort of migrating to a platform whose future may be uncertain. That might be a laggard in the well-established ITSM field trying to AI-wash an ageing product, or a shiny new approach deep into automation and AI, but without the track record or focus on supply-chain considerations like security and privacy.
The question of IP in how a service provider delivers customer outcomes should be raised. The service platform monoliths would like to keep owning that best-practice IP and leasing it to their service provider customers; service providers should seek to own as much of their delivery secret sauce as they can. The Goldilocks outcome is a middle position: a platform that allows rapid prototyping, testing and productionising of workflows that materially change the service equation for customers, without giving away the farm. AI-enabled tooling should fall within the AI CoE’s remit, because the investment in, and change management of, a new platform shouldn’t be underestimated. Integration with existing systems should also provide ample automation opportunities and lead to reworked processes for better customer service.
3. Rethink the offering
With 2026 flagged as ‘the year to actually do AI’, customers have a burning need to engage with their trusted service providers on the foundational components that set them up for an AI future. Flashy product sales, proofs of concept and headline-grabbing case studies are not cutting through to meet the ROI expectations of the significant, and rising, AI investments organisations are making. As trusted adviser to these customers, service providers can and should have an informed view of what they are considering. A strong, ongoing relationship with a client allows regular, frank discussion of what will and won’t work in the specific environment under management.
We see many service providers trying to unlock the sales motion with free maturity assessments, advisory sessions, round tables and so on. The problem with free is that it often has no value. Service providers can quickly shape an advisory or quick-win product with a fixed cost, rapid delivery and a clear business-value focus, and take it to customers as they engage more deeply. These often surface the larger, and often more traditional, opportunities – data management, security, reliability and cost management – that organisations now hit as they move AI proofs of concept into production. Getting an offering out there that gets customers talking with a service provider about what they want is valuable. Recent data indicates many organisations think they’re moving too fast for the business and its governance to keep up, which is exactly where a service provider’s strong, deep capabilities can add value.
Having an established framework for embracing and leveraging AI, looking at ways to implement and leverage AI in core delivery outcomes, and being agile in continuing to deliver AI-related value to customers in an uncertain time for them will help start the journey to the Strategic Technology Partner customers want, even if they don’t know it yet.
This article first appeared on LinkedIn.