Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Adam Winston, Field CTO, WatchGuard
For the past few years, software companies have led with “AI” in their headlines, despite little discernible change in their core products. By 2026, touting AI as a differentiator will be as meaningless as saying they use electricity. As LLMs, machine learning, and agentic workflows become native features across modern software, companies will face a simple reality: evolve their products or risk becoming irrelevant.
As first movers, managed service providers (MSPs), companies that manage and support other organizations’ IT systems, are rapidly adopting AI software, with 49% already using AI in their operations in 2025. While current advances in AI significantly impact IT services, such as help desks and software development, the question remains: how will the MSP model sustain itself after these changes?
Those leading the AI revolution suggest that intelligent systems will eventually replace everything we rely on today, from operating systems to applications and even human users. That vision gets abstract quickly. It imagines a world where AI agents file tickets to other AI agents, all overseen by AI manager agents.
The reality is much simpler. Even the most advanced forms of AI will still require a governing entity to define objectives, apply constraints, and oversee operations. Even in Star Trek, the ship still required orders to engage, as well as engineers to tend to its systems.
Assuming that over the next few years, AI systems will begin handling IT service requests independently, then the group of people responsible for the outcomes is our AI-literate MSPs. However, there’s no question that with AI’s capabilities and efficiency, there will be fewer people needed to carry out narrow tasks. In the optimistic version, humans move into higher-value work and flourish, much like in Star Trek. In a pessimistic scenario, poor governance pushes us toward a dystopian world, much like the one depicted in The Matrix, before Keanu Reeves arrives.
However, in either outcome, there will be competition at this stage between MSPs for market dominance and an opportunity to leverage this new scale to their advantage. The key to successfully navigating that competition will be focusing on outcomes.
As AI becomes the standard, a new divide will emerge between solutions that merely utilize AI and those that deliver measurable, operationally meaningful results. The real question is no longer who uses AI, but rather who uses it effectively and how they utilize it. What tangible outcomes does it produce? How does it make operations faster, smarter, or more profitable?
For MSPs, that distinction matters more than ever. Every product in the tech stack now claims to be “AI-powered” or have some form of “AI capabilities,” but few can clearly articulate the value that intelligence brings to partners and their customers, or how they plan to work with the agentic world. The conversation must move beyond features and toward results: measurable improvements in speed, accuracy, and scale.
Why 2026 Raises the Stakes for AI
In 2026, the cybersecurity landscape is approaching a new inflection point: moving from the first end-to-end breach executed entirely by autonomous and agentic AI systems to becoming the dominant attack. These systems can handle reconnaissance, vulnerability scanning, lateral movement, and exfiltration, all at machine speed. For security teams that already struggle to contain advanced persistent threats, this wave of automation will push them under even greater pressure.
This changes the tempo of security operations. MSPs cannot rely on AI that simply enhances visibility or generates dashboards. They need AI that meaningfully reduces investigation time, correlates signals across the stack, and begins containment actions before human analysts can even swivel their chairs.
This need for speed and precision becomes even more critical, as ransomware operators are predicted to abandon encryption altogether in favor of pure data theft and extortion. With no locked files to recover, early detection becomes the only defense. Only organizations that have AI-driven defense tools capable of detecting, analyzing, and remediating at the same velocity as attacker AIs will stand a chance.?
Agentic AI Delivers Power, But Introduces New Risks
Agentic AI isn’t futuristic anymore; it’s a practical evolution of how a modern SOC functions. These systems can triage alerts, recommend actions, and even initiate containment. However, as defenders increasingly rely on automation, attackers will look for ways to compromise or manipulate those same systems. The lesson for 2026 is that governance must evolve alongside capability. MSPs cannot simply “turn on” automation and assume safety. They must evaluate how AI agents authenticate, interact with APIs, and make decisions that affect customer environments.
AI as an Equalizer in a Rapidly Shifting Threat Landscape
2026 will also bring larger environmental shifts that increase pressure on MSPs. Deepfake voice and video attacks are predicted to become standard in social engineering campaigns. Software supply chain compromises are expected to surge, particularly through poisoned open-source packages that propagate downstream. Legacy VPNs will continue to be frequent breach entry points, accelerating the broader shift to zero trust network architecture.
Against this backdrop, AI becomes an equalizer. MSPs cannot manually match the speed or scale of these emerging threats, but AI-driven correlation, automated triage, and unified visibility allow them to deliver enterprise-grade outcomes without enterprise-level staffing. The value comes from improved detection times, fewer false positives, faster containment, and clearer prioritization.
The Real Need for MSPs in 2026: Proof of AI Efficiency
As AI continues to accelerate the cybersecurity landscape, the industry will feel the impact far beyond technical operations. In 2026, AI fluency will shift from a desirable skill to a requirement for security teams. Offense and defense are moving to an AI battleground, and professionals who cannot harness automated detection, adaptive learning models, and agent-driven response will fall behind. At the same time, the financial consequences of inadequate AI-driven security will become unavoidable. For many organizations, cyber insurance will evolve into a privilege reserved for those who can demonstrate resilience, rather than a standard safety net.
For MSPs, the benefit is straightforward. AI enables MSPs to deliver enterprise-level protection to their customers without requiring the same level of staffing or tooling typically associated with enterprise-level protection. The real differentiator is not the presence of AI on its own, but the outcomes it enables: faster detection, quicker response, fewer false positives, and ultimately, higher margins and customer trust.
In short: stop seeking vendors who use AI, and instead seek AI implementations that are measurable and deliver outcomes that matter.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Winston is a seasoned cybersecurity leader with over 20 years of experience building and scaling Security Operations Centers (SOCs) and cyber defense programs. As Founding CTO of IntelliGO Networks, he developed a next-gen Managed Detection & Response (MDR) platform that was acquired by ActZero, where he later served as Chief Security Officer. There, he helped launch a fractional CISO program, guiding clients through complex frameworks like HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI, CMMC, and FedRAMP. Now serving as Field CTO of Managed Services, Adam continues to drive innovation in threat detection and SOC efficiency using AI and automation. He advises organizations across healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and privacy sectors on strategy, compliance, and risk, while securing environments across AWS, Azure, Windows, Mac, and Linux. His expertise spans firewalls, EDR, SIEM, and SOAR, and his leadership has enabled rapid ransomware response, achieving sub-hour remediations and 10ms system reaction times.
