While the ChannelCon 2025 Channel Visionaries Power Panel was meant to explore the leading forces—plural—affecting the channel, one force dominated the conversation. Can you guess which?
It was indeed the topic of AI—the splash it’s made, the promises the companies behind it are leading with, some possible use cases and tactics to avoid and more.
Moderated by Carolyn April, vice president research and market intelligence at GTIA, the panel convened top tech executives Chris Day (ScalePad), Nick Heddy (Pax8), Jason Magee (Cynet Security) and Austin McChord (Slide) who explored AI’s rapidly evolving role in the IT channel.
The panelists openly—and refreshingly—discussed AI’s practical applications, potential pitfalls and strategic opportunities, offering invaluable insights on leveraging technology while maintaining essential human relationships.
Getting Real About AI’s Current Limits
The tech industry's conversation has shifted unmistakably toward AI, and from the outset, McChord challenged attendees to approach AI realistically, cautioning that despite its hype, AI is surprisingly shifty and can resist corrections and insist on replicating its mistakes.
"AI sucks,” McChord said, laughing. “It's actually really bad at math… AI cannot learn from its mistakes in most implementations. You run into a lot of those challenges. There's a big risk of rolling it out too soon.”
McChord's point wasn't to dismiss AI outright, however. Rather, he advocates for careful adoption. As he put it, it's wise to leverage AI for tasks we haven't mastered yet ourselves while keeping expectations grounded.
Magee echoed this sentiment humorously, observing that even AI's mistakes sometimes accidentally make us "look better”—business headshots being his example—underscoring the experimental phase the technology currently inhabits.
Beyond the Hype: Practical Adoption Strategies
Panelists broadly agreed that much like the dot-com boom, AI's rapid rise is causing both excitement and confusion. Yet, McChord warned against fear-driven paralysis: "The problems are real," he said, "but don't hide under your desk."
Embracing proactive engagement, Heddy, agreed, stressing that IT service providers (ITSPs) must confront AI's reality head-on—albeit cautiously.
"AI will never be as bad as it is today," Heddy noted, underscoring that the future is bright even while urging ITSPs not to prematurely deploy underperforming AI solutions that could jeopardize client relationships.
For Day, AI anxiety within tech companies stems from the current inability to fully operationalize its potential. Day sees AI applications as still largely siloed experiments without clear demonstrations of full agent-based solutions. His advice to ITSPs? Recognize that a comprehensive AI strategy involves meticulous training at the individual, team and organizational levels.
April steered the conversation toward AI's practical implications: Will AI primarily boost revenue growth or streamline internal operations?
Magee quickly responded, "All the above," predicting that successful ITSPs would evolve toward SaaS-like operations, driven by monetizing AI's efficiency gains. However, he stressed incremental adoption: Breaking a company’s exploration of AI potential into manageable pieces, mastering each element internally before testing a public/client-side deployment.
"Early adopters are going to pave the way… Imitate, then innovate. Learn what they're doing, take a bit or two, chunk it up, step by step," he said.
McChord emphasized internal efficiency as the foundation: "Don't sell it until you understand it," he advised.
This sentiment resonated deeply across the panel.
Magee added that ITSPs must deeply understand AI to maintain credibility and prepare their internal cultures to fully capitalize on time savings and productivity boosts. Without this cultural shift, AI-driven efficiencies could easily be wasted.
Despite widespread caution, panelists saw immense opportunities.
Heddy noted ITSPs' enthusiasm, mentioning that Pax8's AI training modules have seen massive uptake, highlighting an eagerness to learn despite what might be perceived as broad skepticism. He encouraged ITSPs to blend AI into existing workflows proactively, leveraging curiosity and continuous learning.
AI and Cybersecurity: A Double-Edged Sword
Yet even as AI dominated discussion, cybersecurity emerged as a crucial complementary theme.
McChord warned AI's growing sophistication, mass and fast rollout complicates cybersecurity, with threats increasingly targeting human vulnerabilities through hard-to-combat social engineering.
Generally, the panelists noted that AI’s evolution is rapidly expanding the digital attack surface. With increasing discussion and deployment of agentic AI, there is an increasing risk of threat actors targeting AI systems themselves, using tactics like data poisoning, adversarial manipulation and the compromising of automated processes.
As these AI-driven threats grow sophisticated, organizations must rethink their cybersecurity strategies to defend not just users, but also the AI tools integrated deeply within their operations.
Magee candidly admitted that "threat actors are the ones getting it right" because they bypass governance hurdles that constrain legitimate businesses. He recommended collaborative approaches, advocating that ITSPs align closely with trusted platforms, vendors and peers to fortify defenses.
Day underscored the business opportunity in security compliance—an area where ITSPs can notably differentiate themselves, especially given SMBs' general lack of preparedness. He argued ITSPs are uniquely positioned to guide smaller businesses through the complexities of AI-enabled cybersecurity.
The Human Factor: Relationships Still Rule
Turning briefly to broader market insights, Day highlighted the ITSP industry's remarkable resilience, consistently maintaining around 15% growth through economic fluctuations since 2002.
Heddy advised ITSPs to build AI strategies centered around essential customer concerns like compliance, governance and security, highlighting documentation and hiring the right talent as keys to success.
McChord offered another optimistic insight: Widespread layoffs at large tech firms have created a burgeoning talent pool. This talent is increasingly launching ventures or joining SMBs ripe for ITSP support services. The landscape is shifting, McChord pointed out, urging ITSPs to strategically position themselves for this incoming business wave.
Wrapping the discussion on this front, Magee emphasized that despite technology's critical role, relationships remain paramount. "You're the keeper of the relationship," he reminded ITSPs, reinforcing their importance as trusted, human intermediaries between vendors and SMBs.
April concurred: "Humans are really going to be the engines behind a lot of this—people skills, collaboration and community."
Positioned for Growth: ITSPs at the Crossroads
In the end, panelists agreed: AI is the disruption to focus on and contend with, and it represents a transformative force, offering extraordinary opportunities but demanding careful management, realistic expectations and deep organizational commitment.
But, again and again, the panelists came back to a vision of a future that is human-centric and ITSP driven.
"The innovation is going to come from small businesses who are trying to solve a problem, who have a smart MSP to help them think about that problem and how technology can assist," Heddy said.
Day concurred but flipped the script.
"If this is hard for us, imagine how hard it is for the average SMB… Somebody's going to shepherd that in… MSPs are the only organizations that can actually do that."
So, what’s the one takeaway from a talk trying to help listeners navigate the rapidly shifting channel landscape?
Heddy summed it up well: "Lead with humanity, scale with intelligence."
