When Rania Succar took to the stage at the Kaseya Connect 2026 conference, she didn’t just talk about rolling out new products. She painted a picture of the IT industry’s likely future. One where the tedious busywork that bogs down IT professionals today will be handled by agentic AI.
“Autonomous IT is coming. There’s no doubt about it. But it won’t happen overnight. Instead of it being a big bang, it’s going to be a ramp. A ramp that gets steeper and steeper. We’re at the very early part of that ramp right now,” CEO Succar told a packed audience of IT professionals during her main stage keynote.
MSPs are already leveraging machine learning to automate simple tasks, answer questions, and brainstorm. But in the coming years, managed services work will be augmented on a larger scale. MSPs will regularly use purpose-built AI tools instead waiting for the technology to be bolted on. Eventually, systems become capable of predicting, fixing, and even preventing issues with minimal human involvement.
Agentic AI Powered by Kaseya Intelligence
Rania Succar
Kaseya Intelligence is the technology engine at the heart of the company’s next step in the AI journey. It brings together data from across an organization’s IT environment, including help desk tickets, security events, endpoints, and backups.
“Three exabytes of backup data, a billion help desk tickets, and data from 17 million endpoints. This is the backbone of Intelligence,” Succar said.
What makes it different is not just the analysis, but the ability to act. Kaseya Intelligence is built with an execution layer that can carry out tasks automatically across connected systems. It also includes safeguards like confidence thresholds and human-in-the-loop controls, so actions can be reviewed or adjusted when needed.
Agentic AI Attacks the Pain of Ticket Triaging
Kaseya’s move is “a really good step forward,” according to Frank Merino, chief operations officer at Weston, FL-based MSP Forthright Technology Partners. Succar was wise to focus on the platform’s new, AI-powered ticket triaging capabilities, Merino noted.
Frank Merino (right)
“I’m actually one of the early adopters for [the triage agent], and we’ve seen some early signs of success. I look forward to some of the iterative changes that are coming,”
One of the most labor intensive processes that MSPs and MSSPs face is ticket assignment. Now, Kaseya partners have access to a “digital specialist” that can route requests to the right person.
The system evaluates multiple factors, including technician specialization and capacity, to make accurate decisions, ensuring tickets go to, in Succar’s words, “the best technician on your team to resolve it.”
At the same time, she emphasized that the system is designed with safeguards. When AI’s confidence is lower, “there’s a human in the loop,” allowing teams to review or adjust recommendations.
The result, she explained, is a faster, more efficient process that reduces errors while still maintaining control.
MSPs Weigh in on the Future of AI
James Sanford
For many attendees, the announcements matched what they are already seeing in their own businesses. They described both a hunger for efficiency gains and the concerns that business owners have over this transformative, new technology.
James Sanford, president of Teamspring, a Metro Atlanta MSP, said the shift toward AI is already shaping how his clients think about IT services. “I’m building out tools and use cases for my customers to be more competitive,” he added. “If I can do that, then my customers win, they grow and then I grow.”
Merino agreed, though he pushed back on the common fear that automation will replace entry-level IT roles. “It’s not an elimination, it’s a maximization. Agentic AI means everyone becomes a 10x or 100x version of themselves.”
Security and resilience take center stage
Kaseya also used the keynote to highlight major updates to its cybersecurity approach, centered on making detection and response faster and easier for IT teams.
A key announcement was the general availability of Kaseya SIEM, a system designed to bring together data from across endpoints, networks, cloud systems, identity platforms and email into one place. The platform correlates signals from dozens of sources and presents a unified view of potential threats. The goal is to reduce noise, improve visibility and allow teams to understand and respond to incidents more quickly.
On the data recovery side, Kaseya introduced a more unified approach to cyber resilience. The company combined backup solutions across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments into a single platform. This will make it easier for IT teams to manage and verify recovery processes.
New capabilities, including AI-powered backup verification and expanded support for cloud workloads, are designed to increase confidence that data can be restored when needed.
Together, these changes aim to simplify operations while improving reliability, giving organizations a more complete and integrated way to protect and recover their data.
A changing role for IT teams
The message from the stage and from attendees was consistent. The role of IT is evolving. Instead of spending hours on repetitive tasks, teams are expected to focus more on strategy, growth and helping customers succeed.
Automation is not replacing IT professionals, but it is already changing how they work in significant, far-reaching ways.
“MSPs aren’t going away. They’re becoming more strategic,” Succar said in her keynote. “We are on the precipice of possibly the largest change, the largest transition in the history of business.”
But human intelligence will always be at the heart of managed services, Sanford insisted. He tied his business success to events like Kaseya Connect and his partnership with the vendor itself.
“You make the best relationships with people throughout the Kaseya universe at events like this. I’m grateful because it has made me millions and millions of dollars.”
Jonathan Browning is executive director of content and engagement for The ChannelPro Network. He has been a leader in the IT channel for close to a decade. He’s an avid fan and early adopter of technology and believes that the managed services industry is the most important driver of economic growth and human innovation.
Images: LinkedIn, Jonathan Browning/ChannelPro
