GTIA Launches Tremendous AI Initiative for MSP Education & Support at ChannelCon 2026

Last year at ChannelCon 2025, I watched various “experts” present “information” to attendees about the newly exploding opportunities generated by AI. I was mortified to hear how much of what they were saying was inaccurate, low-level, and seriously misleading.

However, the members attending the sessions were lapping it all up.

As a long-time channel citizen, a lifelong technologist, and a passionate observer and advocate for improving the professional services that we, as a community, deliver, I  couldn’t stand still and let this misinformation flow.

The keynote addresses, with their near-total focus on AI initiatives, were nothing short of thrilling for me personally, especially in light of my experience last year.

Six incredible AI initiatives were announced at the keynotes:

• Local Chapters
• The CompTIA AI Essentials partnership
• The Managed Intelligence Alliance
• The Consortium for Responsible IT Services (CRITS)
• The UN AI for Good partnership 
• The Annual GTIA Innovate Awards

Three top-level GTIA leaders each built extensively on that excitement:

1. Dan Wensley, CEO, GTIA, opened by framing why AI is no longer optional talk: "When every employee, customer, partner, competitor, and our kids are talking about the same thing, that's not hype anymore. That's our reality." He followed that with key governance gap statistics: "Ninety-seven percent of MSPs already claim to be using AI internally. But only 20 percent have real governance around it. And only 25 percent have turned it into a formal revenue-driving strategy." On the full slate of initiatives, Wensley said: "Even in the era of AI, trust, standards, and community remain the grounding elements of success. The initiatives announced this week will help the industry lead responsibly, create new opportunities for our members, and keep the IT channel at the center of helping businesses adopt and manage emerging technologies with confidence." 
2. MJ Shoer, Chief Community Officer, GTIA, introduced the Managed Intelligence Alliance directly by naming the gap it fills: "Right now, there's no common framework for what 'good' looks like in this space." The Alliance's stated mission from that announcement is to make managed AI delivery repeatable, governable, and trustworthy at scale. Pax8 is the Alliance's charter member, so this isn't just a GTIA concept; it already has vendor buy-in on day one. 
3.  Kelly Ricker, Chief Operating Officer, GTIA, spoke to why customers are pushing MSPs toward this role in the first place: "This new GTIA research tells us definitively that customers are embracing AI. They don't know what they're doing. They are looking to you for guidance on everything from tool selection and employee training to governance, security and implementation. This is a tremendous opportunity for everyone in this audience who wants to lead as a trusted advisor."

GTIA's extensive ongoing channel research, headed by Vice President, Research and Market Intelligence Carolyn April,  is the starting point for all of this.

I then sat down with Nancy Hammervik, Chief Channel Officer at GTIA, and MJ Shoer, Chief Community Officer at GTIA, after ChannelCon 2026 wrapped in San Diego and posed a simple, straightforward question to them:

“If you ran into me at a show and I said I'm only focused on AI this year, why should I join GTIA?” Their answers were pretty enlightening.

Nancy Hammervik walked me through how GTIA arrived at this point.  "When we asked our members how many are engaging with AI, using it in their business or with their partners, 98 percent said yes. When we asked how many have a formal governance policy, training, or strategy, it dropped right down," she said. That gap is the whole reason GTIA restructured its AI programming this year. They're no longer trying to convince you AI matters. You already must know that. By focusing on the business, financial and operational requirements of using AI, they're working to close the distance between adoption and competence.

Their bottom line is that customers will be turning to their trusted MSP for the guidance they need internally to optimize their integration of AI services and systems.

MJ Shoer put it very simply when I asked what GTIA offers that's different from the noise everywhere else. "If you're looking for practical tools to help you understand how to implement AI, both internally and with clients,” he explained, “we've got them, and those tools are built by practitioners, based on real-world experience." The AI Implementation Guide, built by one of GTIA's advisory councils, lays out the risks and opportunities from the lens of somebody who actually has to deploy this stuff, not somebody just theorizing about it.

GTIA also partnered with a parent company, CompTIA, to bring the AI Essentials Library into the member portal, a full set of on-demand courses covering technical, sales, marketing and leadership tracks. Members can earn CompTIA competency certificates by putting in the hours and passing the assessments. It's included with your GTIA membership, so there’s no extra fee for this valuable training.

The frontier AI labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others, announced their intention to add massive deployment teams this year. That meant thousands of consultants were needed to implement AI for enterprise clients. This must be viewed as a decision to replace the MSP channel in these critical projects.

Interestingly, OpenAI reportedly hired only a fraction of the 10,000 they initially said they wanted. Nobody seems eager to take on that role, which leaves a continued opportunity for the MSP and ITSP community to appropriately occupy that critical position.

When asked about this development, and whether that opening rightfully belongs to MSPs, MJ Shoer didn't hedge or hesitate. "Without neutral standards, what are those engineers going to be pushing? They're going to be pushing whatever benefits the company that's hired them and is deploying them, and that's not necessarily a good thing for the global consumer base," he told me.

That's the fundamental thinking behind the Managed Intelligence Alliance, GTIA's new member-driven program launching in Q3 2026 to build shared specifications, capability standards and accreditation for managed AI services, a category that currently has none of that.

GTIA also announced the Consortium for Responsible IT Services with Texas A&M's Global Cyber Research Institute, aimed at building an industry-led self-regulatory framework before regulators do it for you. Kelly Ricker stated the stakes plainly when she told ChannelCon that customers are already leaning on their MSPs for guidance on tool selection, training, governance, security, and implementation, whether MSPs are ready or not. "This is a tremendous opportunity for everyone in this audience who wants to lead as a trusted advisor," said Kelly Ricker.

It’s strategically important to recognize that the biggest names in AI are trying to but can't staff their own deployment arms, and GTIA is stepping into that vacuum, which could define how AI gets delivered across the entire channel for the next decade. This is not a small bet, friends. This is the kind of positioning that either pays off enormously or gets forgotten. Right now, it's paying off. Taking advantage of these GTIA AI Initiatives is your most available strategy for making that continue for the foreseeable future.

GTIA is now the US and UK partner for the United Nations' AI for Good program, run through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Every solution submitted has to map to one of the UN's 17 sustainable development goals, which include things like clean water, healthcare access and poverty reduction.

GTIA will run virtual submission events in both countries, select a delegate from each, and send them to compete on a global stage at the annual summit in Geneva. This is far more than just a nice charitable gesture. It puts GTIA in the room with the UN and the ITU as it works out global AI standards, which means members get the visibility they'd never usually get on their own.

GTIA also relaunched local chapters this year, with more than 20 already active globally. Rather than relying on a single chapter president whose departure can collapse the whole thing, GTIA structured each chapter around ten committed member champions, spreading leadership so no single person's exit sinks it. Having lived through chapter collapses in a past association, I pushed hard on this point, and I think they've built in real redundancy that most associations never bother with.

The thing Nancy Hammervik said that has stuck with me most is that MSPs are now running into competition from unexpected places. An accountant's intern building an inventory system with agentic AI, a client's attorney selling budget tools on the side. The lines around who provides what have blurred completely when it comes to AI solutions.

"We're selling trust, and we're selling relationships, and we're selling solutions," she said, and that's exactly right. Products got relegated to being simply project enablers a long time ago. What separates MSPs who thrive from MSPs who fade out is whether they actually understand their customers' business processes well enough to know where they and AI add value.

That's also why vendor satisfaction among MSPs dropped 20 points in this year's State of the Channel research, the first real drop after years of stability. MSPs are leaning harder on vendors for training and governance help, and most vendors don't know how to deliver it. GTIA sees that gap too, and it's part of why they're not just working with MSPs; they’re working with the vendor and distributor side of the ecosystem as well to bring both together more effectively.

If you're already a GTIA member, you're paying for ready access to extraordinary research, training, and standards work that's genuinely ahead of where most of the industry is right now. Many of you either aren’t or are under-using it.

Do yourself a huge favor. Go look at the AI Implementation Guide. Get your team into the AI Essentials Library. Find your local chapter or help start one. Take the fullest advantage of everything GTIA has built and continues to build for you.

If you're not a member yet and you're serious about building AI into your MSP business, rather than just talking about it, this is the year to make that decision. The frontier labs don't understand the channel. The standards bodies haven't caught up. GTIA is trying to become both the trusted resource and the convening authority before anyone else claims that ground. You can watch that happen from the sidelines or be part of building it.

Posted by Howard M. Cohen on September 03, 2026