AI as a service begins with education
As businesses ask more serious questions about AI, they’re turning to you, their MSP, for answers. That puts the responsibility back on the entire industry to answer questions like:
- Where do we start?
- How do we structure this?
- How do we sell it?
There’s already a name for what customers are asking MSPs to provide: AI as a service (AIaaS). But the phrase is moving through the channel without a shared definition. That’s why this is the moment to get specific about what it should mean.
The heart of AIaaS is being the ally that your clients need to adopt AI in a way that’s both useful and secure. That job sits squarely in the MSP wheelhouse.
MSPs already train whole client workforces to spot phishing, use MFA and handle email securely. Helping those same people learn to use AI is the same work, just one layer up. The MSP is the guide and the safety net, and the service reaches the entire workforce, not just a handful of power users.
What it looks like in practice
When AIaaS has structure, enablement becomes something you can teach, price and repeat. The delivery model can be described in three tiers, borrowing from how the channel already thinks about skill levels.
- 100 is literacy. How do you get a non-technical employee comfortable opening ChatGPT for the first time? This is the AI version of teaching people not to click the link. They need to know:
- What the tools are
- Where the traps are
- What does and doesn’t belong in a prompt
- How to tell a useful answer from a confident but wrong one
- 200 is productivity. Now you’re helping people do real work: drafting proposals, building spreadsheets, running research and turning a blank page into a first draft. This is also where connectors come in, carefully. Wiring AI into email and Microsoft 365 so it can act on real data is where the value grows, and where the guardrails have to grow with it.
- 300 is building. Technical clients learn to create by automating workflows via skills, connecting tools and standing up the small internal apps that used to require a developer. Done well, this is where an AIaaS program moves from saving minutes to changing how the business runs.
Tyler York
Literacy, productivity and building are ways to frame the definition of AIaaS. Clients have a ladder to climb, and MSPs have something tangible to deliver at every rung.
Governance is part of the service
Adoption needs a foundation. The first piece is a companywide policy on AI use. Before clients start trying tools on their own (and they will), they should know which ones are approved, what data can go where and who to ask when they’re unsure.
From there, both the business and the MSP need visibility into what’s actually being used, plus sensible defaults that protect client data. You don’t have to build that layer alone. Channel companies can help MSPs set an AI policy and enforce it across every workstation, with client-ready usage reports built in.
WYRE AI is building the connection and governance layer with Conduit, and the framework above is where we believe AIaaS begins. What’s still unsettled, for us and everyone else, is the harder part: how the channel packages this and turns it into a standard the whole industry can run on. Let’s find the answers together.
Coming down the pipeline
A few pieces of the AIaaS question are still taking shape, and they’re worth naming, even though they’re not where we should begin. Model and token management is one. Clients will eventually expect their MSP to help procure and run AI the way we handle every other license.
Angela Wade
For example, “How do I buy Claude?” is already a real question. Some solutions do exist, but the channel is still trying to solidify best practices.
Monetization is the other piece. How do you actually price AIaaS? One possibility is that you charge for the connections and the management, wrapped around the real cost of the licensing underneath. That’s a product you can build a service on. The exact model is still forming, though.
The industry builds the definition
No single company gets to decide what AIaaS means. The real definition will come from the providers delivering it and comparing notes on what works and what doesn’t.
Tyler York is co-founder and CEO of WYRE AI, the team behind Conduit. Prior to co-founding WYRE Technology in 2021, he held positions ranging from cybersystems operator in the U.S. Air Force through enterprise cloud engineering and Fortune 500 consulting. Angela Wade is chief marketing officer of WYRE AI, where she built Conduit’s go-to-market strategy from the ground up and leads all post-launch marketing.
Featured image: SYCREATION — stock.adobe.com
