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As a general statement, artificial intelligence (AI) has not had much of a role to play in the birth or growth of the managed services profession. MSPs have long been considered an evolutionary business model to the break/fix and professional services IT consultants of the 1990s.
Break/Fix business models relied on technology and human intervention. Time and materials billing models were standard in this business model, which is one of the reasons break/fix companies wanted to become MSPs. The allure of touching more customers, delivering more services, and achieving higher margins and revenue using the same headcount was, and is still today, very powerful.
The New MSP Growth Barrier
Today, MSPs are dealing wiht a new obstacle in their quest for growth: human capital. Along with tightening labor markets across most sectors of the economy, IT specific unemployment is very low. A tight IT labor market means acquiring new human talent is becoming challenging, at the very moment where demand for managed services is increasing globally.
MSP expansion and growth within a tight labor market might seem challenging. We have explored options for MSPs to deal with this labor shortage in other articles. What I would like to explore today is the idea that AI could become one possible solution for MSP scalability.