Greater opportunity for MSPs as AI reaches critical inflection points, reveals Pax8 CEO

As AI reaches its critical inflection point, Scott Chasin, CEO of Pax8 believes it’s not just representing new capabilities but a new opportunity for MSPs.

When it comes to technology service providers and marketplaces, Pax8 differentiates itself by focusing on the underserved. Specifically, this means creating an opportunity for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), by enabling managed service providers (MSPs) around the world.

In Asia, the SMB market is one of the biggest and fastest growing contributors to the country’s GDPs. Statistics show that SMBs comprise over 90% of businesses in the region, providing 50% of employment, with the Micro SMB segment contributing between 30% to 53% to countries in Southeast Asia.

From cloud-native startups to mom-and-pop stores in the region, these businesses are now speeding up their tech journey with AI a key focus area in their growth strategies. For MSPs, the SMB market is a gold mine of opportunities given the nature of the business. This is also why Pax8 believes that empowering SMBs is vital, especially in ensuring they are capable of meeting the demands of the SMB market.

According to Scott Chasin, CEO of Pax8, the attraction to Asia is that it has the highest density of small businesses in the world and the backbone of the global economy.

“Asia is very much like the rest of the world in terms of the adoption of technology, specifically AI. What we're witnessing today is not a western phenomenon or something that's happening just in the West. It's everywhere. It's worldwide. And that is the birth of a new platform, a shift like we've never seen before. Artificial intelligence is here and it's continuing to scale,” he said in an interview with CRN Asia.

For Chasin, it's important for Pax8 to be in front of the transformation in Asia to essentially provide the illumination of the path to where all of this is headed for managed service providers.

“It’s an interesting journey because in a lot of ways, it speaks to an entirely different business model, an entirely different emerging industry that's going to be shaped by artificial intelligence,” he said.

With chips, infrastructure and models being the three key pillars for AI, Chasin pointed out that the fourth component that’s missing is the last mile.

“None of this matter if it's not deployed to the small businesses that power the global economy. And so, our mission here in Asia and globally, is to bring the awareness not just to the SMB that this change is coming, but to manage service providers in those that service the SMB, that this represents an amazing opportunity to get in front of this disruption that's coming. To be in Singapore and feel the energy and be face to face with our partners and prospects, it's a moment for us not just to share with them the vision that we have for this emerging industry, but also to understand where they're at in their own journey. And that's an important part of what we do at Pax8, which is really about enablement,” he explained.

Enabling MSPs in Asia

As the largest SMB marketplace, Chasin shared that Pax8 has a responsibility to essentially show MSPs what's next in the industry and to bring them to the frontier and enable them to be successful, because their success is Pax8’s success.

“The first thing is, how do we not just provide the vision and the enablement, but integrate this new opportunity into our existing marketplace? And one of the things that we announced in October in Europe at our Beyond Conference was the Agent Store,” Chasin said.

Pax8 Agent Store is the first agentic AI platform redefining how MSPs serve SMBs. The agent-focused platform gives partners a direct path to accelerate growth, unlock new revenue streams, and bring agentic AI into the hands of SMB customers.

“Pax8's agent store is a representation of opportunities for managed service providers to procure off-the-shelf agents that can be deployed into their customer environments. It starts with, how do we provide them with the discovery capabilities they need to understand how to sell an AI solution, an agent, into their customer base?” he added.

For Chasin, the last mile in the AI journey requires management, governance, security, resiliency, and education. This is what Pax8’s partners provide to customers and why it's imperative to show them the opportunity that's there for them in a new business model.

“And that's all about their transformation journey. That's all about the recognition that this massive platform shift that we're seeing is not just going to change how they operate, but it's also going to change how their business customers, their small business customers operate, and even how those small businesses are architected. It's that big of a shift. And so, we believe that managed intelligence represents not just a coined marketing term, but a new industry,” Chasin explained.

Interestingly, Chasin also shared that one of the biggest challenges partners are facing is understanding the value of AI. This is because the world has been exposed to the power of AI as essentially a chatbot that can prompt access to knowledge that is instantaneous.

“We were all blown away in 2022 with the introduction of ChatGPT. We've come a long way since then. Not only have the chips gotten faster, but the data centers have also become more prevalent, the models are more intelligent. We've seen the evolution of these models from being the curators of knowledge to time test, compute, and reasoning. And now they're taking action. And so an entirely new dimension of capability has been born around agents. And last year, we released a report called the agentic inflection point. And that really sets the foundation for this new industry. I believe we've entered a phase change, a critical moment where AI can now represent action and tooling and can do the work of what a knowledge worker can do. And so, for us, we think that this is a critical inflection point, one that not just represents new capabilities, but a new opportunity,” Chase said.

The managed intelligence industry

Looking at the speed of innovation, Chase added that Pax8 is on the mission to make sure that all service providers all over the world understand the opportunities and are preparing for it.

“Because all of their customers, all of their small and medium-sized businesses will need to re-architect around this new stack. And it's not necessarily about job displacement, right? It's about human augmentation. But it's not necessarily self-serviceable like a chatbot. These agents are now running 24-7 autonomously. And that represents something new that we're quite excited about as a core component of this new managed intelligence industry. And that is the agentic workforce,” he said.

According to Chasin, Pax8 remains focused on creating the journey and framework for how an MSP can create a managed intelligence business. At the same time, there is also a focus on serving the new AI natives that are coming into the market.

“There are 440 million SMBs on the planet, maybe about 90,000 qualified managed service providers today. There is a structural supply gap in terms of being able to fulfil and service the demand for AI. And if every small business can benefit from an agentic workforce to increase productivity, reduce cost, well, there's simply not enough service providers to be able to answer the call. And so, we think there's going to be a new category of partner that arrives that is AI native that will be managed intelligence focused, focusing on that last mile of opportunity to manage AI,” he explained.

Chasin shared that Pax8 has been sounding the alarm bell for its MSPs as it’s time to not just think about how they'll use AI to transform themselves as customer zero, but it's time to move to customer one and beyond as fast as they can. Because if they don't, somebody else will.

“We're seeing the opportunity now to rinse and repeat AI and agentic deployment within the SMB base. You're going to see through the course of this year many solutions come into the market, which will enable the foundation of managed service revenue for many of the SMBs. And that's another inflection point,” he believes.

For Chasin, it's one thing to be able to deploy a chatbot inside an enterprise or a small business, and it's another thing to deploy a persistent personal agent for every employee or task-based agent that those personal agents interact with. Chasin pointed out that these agents, which are the agentic workforce, need to be managed, governed, and secured.

“And we see the orchestration layer coming into the market, where now service providers have the tooling and the capability to be able to create a recurring revenue business from it,” Chasin concluded.