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.
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.
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.
Taken together, these automations shrink noise, shorten dwell time, and give analysts back hours for the judgment work that actually changes risk.
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.
Keep these decisions human-guided with AI as context, not the decider, so accountability and outcomes stay aligned with client expectations.
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.
Use this short playbook to put practical guardrails around automation in a multi-tenant environment. It is meant to be actionable on day one.
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.
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.
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.