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QUICK ANSWER: At ChannelCon EMEA 2026, the Channel Visionaries Power Panel urged MSPs to lead AI conversations with customer value, step up as cybersecurity risk advisers and lean on vendors and the wider ecosystem to stay resilient in an uncertain economy. Their top 90-day action: Create an AI use policy for every customer.
The IT channel across EMEA is moving fast, and the Channel Visionaries Power Panel at ChannelCon EMEA 2026 in London met that pace head-on. GTIA’s Carolyn April, vice president and head of research and market intelligence, moderated a conversation with four senior channel leaders: Scott Barlow of Sophos, Jo Holliday of Acronis, Peter Melby of New Charter Technologies and Rob Rae of Pax8.
April set the goal from the start: Give ITSPs a blueprint for resilient growth. Across AI, cybersecurity and the economy, one theme kept surfacing. The channel’s role is expanding, and the providers who lead with customer value will win.
The AI Opportunity: Lead with Value and the Revenue Follows
AI is levelling the playing field. Rae noted that partners in every region sit at roughly the same point in their AI journey, a first for any new technology. Barlow added another first: Customers are learning AI as fast as their MSPs are.
That changes the economics. Today, most AI revenue comes from reselling licences and tools with embedded AI. Rae called recurring revenue the MSP’s superpower and urged providers to protect it. He compared this moment to the shift from reseller to managed services, which took about ten years to win customer acceptance. AI is a change of the same scale in how MSPs engage customers, build services and earn revenue.
Melby built on that history, saying that managed services gained acceptance once the model proved its value to customers. His advice: Lead with customer impact and let your own economics follow. Barlow agreed. Add more value at your current price, and AI earns you a seat at the table when customers set their budgets.
Holliday brought the EMEA lens. UK MSPs see AI’s impact in the processes it improves, more than in the tool or licence itself. In EMEA, safe adoption matters more than sweeping transformation, so she recommends packaging small, easily measured outcomes customers can adopt step by step.
April tied it together, noting that AI opens the door to deeper, broader work in the areas you already sell, and doing AI well means strengthening all of them.
Cybersecurity: Step Up as the Risk Adviser
AI and cybersecurity go hand in hand, and the panel treated them that way. Barlow outlined three threats growing in speed, scale and scope: Direct attacks, attackers using AI and the supply chain. Helping customers understand those risks is core to why MSPs exist. He encouraged providers to act as risk advisers, work alongside the CISO and scale that expertise across their teams.
And the demand is there. April shared that GTIA research has named rising technology complexity as the top driver of channel health for three years running. Melby framed the opportunity simply: Customers are experts in their world, and they rely on MSPs to be experts in technology.
Barlow put the gap in numbers: Roughly 359 million SMBs and about 35,000 CISOs worldwide, or one for every 10,000 businesses. Vendors need MSPs to help deliver security outcomes at that scale.
Holliday sees both building in-house expertise and partnering as viable routes, provided MSPs raise their security baseline and make it standard for every service customers adopt. She also urged MSPs to treat their own environment as their crown jewel, get compliant before taking compliance to market.
The Economy: Lean on the Ecosystem and Stay Optimistic
Inflation and tariff uncertainty have made investment decisions harder. Melby pointed to supply pressure: Data centres are absorbing so much of the world’s technology that shortages now exceed those of the pandemic. His answer? Scale. Lean on vendors and the wider ecosystem to steady your business through market swings. Barlow noted that many vendors now run 24/7 security operations centres, giving MSPs a route to those outcomes through partnership.
Amidst the challenges, Rae brought the optimism, noting that SMB technology spending is at record levels, adoption is higher than ever and AI will help individuals launch new businesses that need MSP support. He sees a wave of growth ahead.
The panel also discussed consolidation. Private equity is active in the United States and expected to reach EMEA soon. Melby sees consolidation evolving toward models where scale delivers lasting value for MSPs and their customers. For MSPs facing faster growth expectations, his advice is to shift gears rather than pushing harder in the same one.
Your 90-Day Action Plan: An AI Use Policy for Every Customer
To close, April asked each panellist for one action every ITSP can take in the next 90 days. Rae’s answer stood out as the clearest quick win: Create an AI use policy for every customer. His reasoning is compelling. By his estimate, 80% of end users already use AI in some form, more than half upload data they shouldn’t and none have received training. A policy addresses that risk immediately and positions you as the trusted adviser of record. Start with the policy. It’s fast to build, it solves a real problem every customer has today and it opens the strategic conversations the whole panel called for.