EDGE 2025: AI disrupts the MSP business

Managed service providers (MSP) are in the middle of a disruptive era as they were called on at EDGE 2025 to adapt business models to artificial intelligence (AI).

During the first day of the event, keynotes, panels, and discussions urged partners to provide innovative solutions and to understand the significance of customer needs. 

With the rapid growth of AI, there was a need for change management, ethical frameworks, and continuous learning to stay relevant in the AI era. 

Former Facebook Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) CEO and current Omniscient Neurotechnology CEO Stephen Scheeler kicked off the opening keynote with his presentation: The Impact of AI on Tech Buying and the Changing Buyers, telling a full room of channel partners that everything was changing quickly. 

“There’s one thing I would capture about logistic AI, which really kind of sums it up for me,” he said. “It gets me [my people] to what matters faster, because bullshit takes the friction out of so much stuff.” 

“The challenge is, it’s not just me that’s using [AI]. It’s customers that are using this now.” 

Scheeler said the buying landscape has changed, and nobody cares about the product or having a relationship with sellers when they’ve got the internet and AI. 

“They don’t care about you talking about your product,” he said. “They care about self-exploration and understanding for themselves.”

The buyers’ journey showed they don’t care about engaging with suppliers, said Scheeler. 

“They’re making all the decisions based on what they find and what they do … using AI,” he said. “The truth is that more than half the time, buyers prefer not to talk to you in their decisions and gather information.” 

Microsoft global black belt for Copilot and Microsoft 365, Stuart Moore, took Scheeler’s keynote speech further in his discussion: Microsoft: AI-Powered Business Transformation: Partnering for Opportunity and Growth. 

Moore said Microsoft’s research in the A/NZ market showed 68 per cent of the Australian workforce said they struggle to have enough time and energy to do work; they’re tapped out.  

But at the same time, 64 per cent say they’re willing to adopt AI to help get work done. While 75 per cent of Australian leaders think they’ll tap into agentic workforces in the next 12 months — using digital assistants to help with low-value or delegated tasks 

“Customers are asking me for AI strategy and agentic frameworks — how to build an agent, improve call handling times, get faster customer response, and improve first call resolution,” he said. “They want partners to help build frameworks that bring agents into organisations and scale them.  

“They also want agentic solution development, responsible AI assurance and advisory for governance and ethics, and help with adoption and workforce upskilling.” 

However, for partners to capture opportunity in the AI era, there needs to be a shift from service provider to solution provider. 

The panel From Services to Solutions: The AI-Powered Partner shift, SixPivot founder Faith Rees, PartnerElevate chief partnership officer Desmond Russell, The TSP Advisory chief strategy officer James Davis, and Truis managing director Norm Jeffries highlighted the importance of partners bringing solutions that address customer problems. 

“Today, customers want us to come up with solutions to problems that they already know they have, but they don’t know how they’re going to address them,” Rees said.  

PartnerElevate’s Russell said he didn’t believe that AI would “actually destroy business” but the shift in models that was causing disruption and traditional ways of making money was being challenged, “driving down costs” and “exposing weaknesses in current models”. 

“For the partner, it’s the business model and looking into action now, before you start to think about actually getting something for a customer,” he said. 

For Davis, this means there needs to be deep introspection from the partner about where they want their business to go. 

“They hold onto the old vision of who they are, even as clients evolve,” he said. “Instead of clearly communicating their voice, they’re still either clinging to a past identity or feeling completely lost. 

 “It’s a major transformation step, with the most successful partners learning that the key was simply to reach out — even if it’s just to share something positive.” 

Truis’ Jeffries added that partners should be consistently more aligned with customers because they are important.