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MSPs that Adopt AI by End of 2026 'Are Going To Grab So Much Market Share'

• By Gladys Rama
• May 13, 2026

At this month's NerdioCon event in Palm Springs, Calif., one theme predictably dominated hallway conversations and keynote sessions alike: AI. For Nerdio, best known for its Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 expertise, the question is no longer whether the managed services ecosystem will embrace AI, but how quickly MSPs can turn it into something profitable.

Will Ominsky, vice president of MSP sales at Nerdio, sat down with Redmond Channel Partner during the conference, which drew just shy of 1,000 attendees, to explain why many MSPs are still struggling to monetize AI, how shadow AI and AI sprawl are creating both risk and partner opportunity, and why Microsoft's identity and security stack may ultimately give Redmond the upper hand in the enterprise AI race. Below is the interview, edited for clarity and length.

Ominsky: One of them is from the MSPs directly, which is: They haven't figured out how to make money with it. I think AI presents an amazing opportunity for MSPs to be able to actually turn it into something where they are trusted advisor -- which kind of goes along with what Microsoft is looking for MSPs to do more and more and more of.

But I think it's a very slippery slope, almost like Microsoft 365 was. If you think about the evolution of Microsoft 365, MSPs were offering unlimited support and outsourced IT support, and their customers bought Microsoft 365 so they just started kind of managing it. And then over time, it's like, "Now we're expected to do it." And then MSPs were struggling with, "We need to charge for it, because this is becoming this big thing." And they were in this weird rut. AI could easily be there.

So what we're talking to MSPs about is, "How can we take this and make it a product, make it something for you to sell around?" Protecting against shadow AI, doing things like managing security, data protection, making sure your data is not getting out there.

We hear about MSPs using it in two different ways. Mainly, right now, we're seeing a lot of MSPs that are "playing with it" internally to figure out how to optimize their internal processes, how to better discover trends within their customer environments, how to triage tickets, how to provide support faster, those types of things. [...]

In some ways, [AI] is being forced upon them by their vendors. Like, "Hey, we're adding AI into this product." Nerdio, we're a very AI-forward company. We use AI extremely heavily internally at Nerdio, but we're also being very thoughtful about how we put it into the product and not make it so it's just hype, but actually something that's going to help them [partners], help them either become more efficient or better protect or make their end customers more efficient.

Most of it is not today. It's really about getting the data in. Because when you think about like the AI journey, it's really about making sure you have your data in your house up to date, making sure you have the security protections around it, and then it becomes safe to introduce AI into it to do something with the data. So all the really new reporting capabilities we have are opening up the doors to be able to then introduce AI and say, "There's 256 data points in here. I don't have time to go look at every single one of them. Let me use AI intelligently to filter this out, to figure out where to spend my time."

And then, I would not be surprised for Nerdio to start now integrating AI directly into that data point so an MSP can say, "These are the things that I need. Look for the trends here. Look for the trends at this customer uniquely, but also look at the trends across all of my customers in different segments, maybe like healthcare or something."

The Microsoft 365 and even Microsoft virtual desktops, both AVD [Azure Virtual Desktop] and Windows 365, laid the foundation for success with AI because it's all about the data governance. When Nerdio itself was looking at implementing AI ... the very first thing we asked is, "Is this secure?" And Microsoft creates this ecosystem, and then Nerdio bolts or layers on top of it to be able to more easily and effectively manage it, and be able to sleep well at night.

It all starts with the identity. Really, Microsoft identity is where it starts. And then you can go further and deeper into security with things like virtual desktops. Nothing's floating on my device here, or if people need to bring their own devices, you can now Intune-join them and provide clear security guidelines and restrictions on those devices so AI can be run responsibly and in a way that protects the business. [...]

I think if you look at the past 12 months, we've proven that Nerdio is not just a depth company when it comes to Microsoft, going very deep in AVD, but also a breadth company. We can cover all of the different components -- Copilot, Defender, Intune, application management, Windows 365, all of those. I think that gives our partners some level of confidence that we are anticipating what they're going to need in the future, and we're already talking about that, we're already building that into our product. So as that becomes a core of their business, Nerdio is that partner they can look at to continue to support the [AI] evolution.

We know AI is changing everything so fast. Claude's kind of the hot new thing. But who knows, there might be some other new thing six months from now.

I don't think Claude is the one necessarily. This is just me, with my experience, but I think Microsoft's really the one to watch long term, because Microsoft has a unique position for owning the identity. Microsoft has the security layers built in that things like Claude ChatGPT do not. And Microsoft's making some amazing moves by making Anthropic models available within Copilot. [...] So for me, Microsoft's long-term bet, especially in the MSP space, because of the security side.

I think shadow AI management is a massive opportunity for MSPs, because first, you need to be able to protect or secure that. You need to be able to give your customer the peace of mind that some employee that you just hired isn't taking all of your customer data and putting it into an AI so they can do their job more efficiently. So the opportunity is being able to protect that, being able to have oversight on it.

The other thing is spend. With shadow AI, you have shadow AI spend that comes along with it. You might have somebody paying for a personal Claude license while the company is also paying for Claude and Copilot, and you want to be able to control that -- not just govern your systems, but also be able to share resources. For example, you can share things like skills in Claude across multiple teams. So I only have to build one skill [and] now everybody gets to share and get the benefit of that, instead of one employee doing something really cool and not sharing it with everybody else. So there's a big opportunity.

And that's something that kind of going back to the Microsoft story. Not a lot of people know that Microsoft has some really powerful components within Business Premium, E5 and now E7 that you can actually tweak to control and see what applications are installed on people's machines. What Web sites are they going to? Maybe I want to block my users from going to ChatGPT. I want them only to use Copilot. Or maybe I've centered on something like Claude and I only want them to be able to use this. There are controls in there, but it's not approachable for most MSPs right now. They're running their businesses. They're doing their day-to-day. That's where Nerdio has an opportunity to provide to the market and say, "Hey, we can give this to you in a very easy point-and-click manner, like we've done with AVD and Windows 365 and Microsoft. 365."

I would say the biggest winners of the [AI] opportunity are going to be the MSPs that figure it out between now and the end of the year. I think those are going to be the people who, if they can figure it out between now and the end of the year, they're going to be able to grab so much market share from the other MSPs who are not figuring it out now. It doesn't mean that people that take a year or two years or whatever to figure it out are going to be completely left behind, but I think it's going to be really important for people to have that strategy.

Also, when I talk to MSPs who are not making money on it, they're ignoring it. It's not an opportunity for them. What they do is, they go to their customer and say, "We're scared about your use of AI. We need you to sign a waiver." That's really what's happening out there day to day. A lot of MSPs are saying, "We don't really have a way to manage this. You want to use AI. We're going to recommend stuff. You may or may not listen to us. Sign this, releasing us from liability." Instead of the other ones that are saying, "You want to use it [AI]? Let's embrace it. I have an AI managed service where I'm charging you $5 a user a month, and I'm protecting against all of the things that we just discussed."

I almost relate it to dark Web ID monitoring. In the early days, you had Dark Web ID. They came out, they did all these great events [where] they'd show your e-mail address [and you'd be able to see if] you've been included in all these different breaches. They had a real strategy for it. And then other MSPs took time to catch up. Lots of other companies came out with dark Web monitoring. It's in so many tools now. This is an opportunity just like that, except it's AI.