MSP Automation Isn’t Optional, But it Isn’t the Answer to Everything

Raise your hand if you’ve fallen victim to a vendor-led conversation around their latest AI-driven platform over the past calendar year. Keep it up if the pitch leaned on “next-gen,” “market-shaping,” or “best-in-class” while they nudged another product into your stack. If your hand is still up, you are not alone. MSPs are the target because you sit between shrinking budgets and rising risk.

The right automation helps you scale. The wrong automation buries judgment, creates blind spots, and adds one more dashboard you will not have time to watch. This article draws a line. Automate the repeatable, demand explainability, and keep humans accountable for decisions that touch money, identity, and reputation.

Start With the Facts, Not the Hype

According to the ConnectWise 2025 MSP Threat Report, attackers are explicitly targeting MSPs as leverage into many SMBs, and they are switching tactics faster than teams can patch or reconfigure. The same report underscores three realities MSPs must plan around: evolving threats, targeted attacks on MSPs, and the need for continuous, proactive monitoring.

Edge appliances and remote access tooling remain hot targets. Since early 2024, there has been a flood of alerts tied to edge device vulnerabilities across major brands. VPNs, firewalls, and gateways are still prime initial access points. Patch cadence and layered defenses matter.

EDR evasion is getting better. Adversaries are more willing to disable or sidestep endpoint controls after landing, which keeps persistence and lateral movement under the radar. Prevention needs help from solid detection, triage, and response.

“Drive-by” techniques are alive and well. Tactics like ClickFix trick users into pasting commands rather than downloading files, which can bypass basic reputation checks. Awareness, policy controls, and rapid signal correlation are essential when malware delivery looks like “copy, paste, and go.”

Bottom line: automation must carry more of the load, but it cannot replace judgment. The report reminds MSPs that effective security is layered, and time is your scarcest resource.

Where to Automate For Efficiency

If you are running a modern, multi-tenant practice, here is what should be automated with human-approved guardrails. These are repeatable, high-volume tasks where machine speed reduces toil without sacrificing control.

• Signal collection and enrichment: Pull context from email, identity, and endpoint telemetry, normalize it, and map it to user and tenant baselines automatically.
• Detonation, rescans, and retrospective hunting: Auto-recheck links and attachments post-delivery, sweep history when new intel lands, and pull look-alikes across tenants without manual hunts.
• Clustering and deduplication: Group “many alerts, one incident” into a single case so the SOC fights the campaign, not hundreds of duplicates.
• Auto-remediation with rollback: Remove confirmed bad messages across mailboxes and tenants immediately and revert safely on false positives.
• User-driven workflows: Make it one click for users to report suspicious messages, then automatically route, label, and enrich those submissions.

Taken together, these automations shrink noise, shorten dwell time, and give analysts back hours for the judgment work that actually changes risk.

Where Humans Stay in the Loop

There is a class of decisions you should not fully hand to a machine. These items carry business impact and rely on context that models cannot always see.

• Business-risk calls: Payment or banking changes, vendor impersonation, VIP spoofing, or anything touching revenue or reputation belongs in a guided review queue.
• Policy exceptions: Executive travel, new partners, and cross-border suppliers often break baselines by design, so a human needs the last word.
• Tenant-wide blast-radius judgments: Before you purge across dozens of clients, verify impact and timing.
• Training and cultural reinforcement: When users fall for a lure, close the loop with targeted coaching.

Keep these decisions human-guided with AI as context, not the decider, so accountability and outcomes stay aligned with client expectations.

What Human-in-the-Loop Looks Like for MSPs

Practical operating model:

1. Automate first pass. Let AI collect, enrich, cluster, and propose actions.
2. Review explainable decisions. Analysts see why the model flagged an item, including content, behavior, sender history, and user-specific baselines, before approving scoped remediation.
3. Feed the loop. Analyst decisions and user reports tune future detections and policies across tenants.

Non-Negotiables for MSP Email Security

Explainable AI and agentic automation. The value is clarity and control. If AI suggests an action, analysts can see why, approve it, tune it, or override it. That builds trust with clients and speeds decisions without guesswork. Agentic automation then handles the repeatable work like classification, clustering, and remediation, which cuts toil and shortens response times while still reflecting your policies.

Inbox-level protection without MX changes plus real visibility. The value is safer deployment and better coverage. API-based protection installs in minutes with no MX record changes, no agents, and no reroutes, so you reduce risk instead of introducing it. Mailbox-level visibility treats internal and external traffic the same, builds baselines and social graphs, and catches the subtle lures that look ordinary but are not.

Humans in the loop with a stack that works together. The value is better outcomes with less swivel-chair. User reports and SOC feedback continuously sharpen detections, so the system keeps learning from real activity. Integrations with SIEM, SOAR, and XDR keep response fast and aligned to how you already operate, letting people focus on the judgment calls that protect revenue and reputation.

A Quick Playbook MSPs can Steal

Use this short playbook to put practical guardrails around automation in a multi-tenant environment. It is meant to be actionable on day one.

• Codify tiers of automation: green light for auto, amber for auto with notify, red for always review.
• Set tenant-aware guardrails: never auto-purge VIP or finance mailboxes without review.
• Instrument copy and paste pathways: reduce PowerShell or Run abuse where possible, and train on ClickFix-style lures.
• Close alerts with learning: every analyst decision updates future detections across tenants

Treat this as a baseline. Tune thresholds and exceptions per client, measure impact on response time and false positives, and review quarterly to keep pace with change.

Sanity Check your Coverage: 90-Day Health Check

Want proof over promises. Run a 90-day health check to surface threats hiding in mailboxes and establish a clean baseline for your clients. It is a fast way to validate where automation is working, and where human review needs to step in.

Conclusion

Attackers will keep shifting tactics, from edge exploitation to EDR evasion to drive-by compromises. The answer is not more tools. It is smarter automation with humans in the loop, so you move faster on the 99 percent and think harder on the 1 percent.

What will you choose to automate, and what will you insist remains a judgment call you can explain to a client and your future self?

If you want to talk through your AI journey, and how to keep your analysts sane and your clients happy, reach out to us. We will compare notes, share what works, and help you chart a sensible path forward.