MSPs are in love with the technology. More importantly, they are in love with their relationship to it. It is a beautiful love story. Sadly, like many great love stories, it is built entirely on a delusion.
We loved making sense of the chaos. We thrived on helping a customer figure out whether they needed a Microsoft E3 license or if they should really migrate to Business Premium. It felt good. It was all wrapped up in the identity of being the absolute expert in the room.
You helped the customer navigate a long list of barely intelligible features and choose the exact “solution” that was right for them. But what did the customer actually get? Email, data storage, a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation app. All of these are wonderful tools, but at a deeper level, the specific license choice didn’t matter.
We were just organizing the digital filing cabinets.
The Cloud created increased accessibility to data, but it also delivered massive tool sprawl and user confusion. Security tools made it more difficult for malicious actors to crack the infrastructure, but they gave you a dozen more single-pane-of-glass dashboards to manage and a hundred more areas to slip up. Compliance delivered exactly what compliance always delivers: a form that simultaneously increases your liability while claiming to reduce it.
And then there is AI.
Most MSPs view AI as the ultimate macro—a tool to speed up and automate routine tasks. But that view misses the entire point. AI is not a product that you add to an existing stack. It is an opportunity to completely rethink what information is, what work is, and what actually needs to get done.
The opportunity is always there to walk through a different door. To stop charging people just to keep their computers running and start helping customers unlock the real value that is hiding inside the stack and the server closet in the sky.
But MSPs have customers and prospects who come to them with a rigid expectation of what an IT provider does. And that expectation becomes the checklist. The checklist confirms the legacy frame. The frame gets the contract signed.
So the industry stays stagnant. The next MSP inherits the same checklist, only slightly longer, slightly heavier, and slightly more irrelevant to the actual future of business.
The door is always there. The checklist is what keeps everyone standing in the hallway.