AI for MSPs
Four playbooks on building an AI practice inside a managed services business. Written by someone who carried the P&L, not someone describing the industry from outside it.
AI is not a threat to MSPs. It is the largest revenue expansion the managed services industry has seen. You already have the trust, the access to the network and the data, the relationship with the budget holder, and the recurring revenue infrastructure that AI services attach to.
A new AI consulting firm has to earn all of that from scratch. The series is about what to do with the head start you already have.
The four books
Each book stands alone. Together they run the arc from having no AI offering to running a governed AI practice with recurring revenue.
AI for MSPs: The No Fluff Playbook
The five revenue streams, the Foundation-Build-Transform portfolio architecture, the seven core services, pricing by client size, the AI sales conversation, the delivery lifecycle, and the build versus partner versus white-label decision.
AI for MSPs: Managed Intelligence
Defines Managed Intelligence and the five-pillar framework that makes it deliverable, then covers service tiers, pricing, the monthly operating cadence, governance policy, runbooks, and the delivery recovery playbook.
AI for MSPs: Process Intelligence & AI Readiness
The Five-Domain AI Readiness Framework, the Process Priority Matrix, process debt, the five assessment failure modes, and the questionnaires, scoring matrices, and proposal templates to run paid assessments.
AI for MSPs: Governed Intelligence
Governance as its own managed service discipline. Policy design, audit architecture, lifecycle control, and what regulated clients will ask you to prove. In final production.
Where to start
Read the one that matches where you actually are, not the one that sounds most advanced.
| If this is you | Start here | Because |
|---|---|---|
| No defined AI offering yet | Book 1 | Maps the five revenue streams and the portfolio tiers so you can pick a starting point instead of guessing |
| Clients keep asking about AI and you have no structured answer | Book 3 | An assessment is the cheapest, fastest paid engagement to sell, and it qualifies the client while you get paid |
| You have deployed agents and the work is not recurring | Book 2 | Turns deployment projects into a managed service with a monthly cadence and a contract |
| Regulated clients are asking what you can prove | Book 2, then 4 | Governance is the pillar that wins regulated accounts and the subject of the forthcoming fourth book |
Who these are for
MSP owners, presidents, and CEOs deciding whether to build an AI practice. Sales and service leaders who have to price and sell it. Operations leaders who have to deliver it without hiring machine learning engineers.
The frameworks assume a real managed services business with existing clients, existing recurring revenue, and finite engineering capacity. Nothing in the series requires a data science team.
They are deliberately not written for AI technologists, and they are not vendor pitch material. The positioning is the practitioner's view from someone who has owned a P&L, run service delivery, and closed the contracts.
What is inside
Every chapter ends with numbered Action Items you can start within 24 hours. The stated reason: information without action is expensive entertainment.
The appendices are the working material. Across the series that includes pricing tables by client size and engagement type, a governance policy framework template, an agent operations runbook, an AI readiness questionnaire with a five-domain scoring matrix, a process inventory worksheet, a workflow mapping canvas, an SOP development framework, client-facing report frameworks, proposal templates, sales conversation scripts, client communication email templates, and the 90-Day Launch Checklist.
The named frameworks stay consistent across all four books and are used in live client engagements at AiT Advisory Group. Foundation-Build-Transform for portfolio architecture. Discover, Deploy, Monitor, Govern, Optimize for Managed Intelligence. The Five-Domain AI Readiness Framework and the Process Priority Matrix for assessments.
About the author
Tony Ferrigno
Founder and Managing Partner of AiT Advisory Group, an AI strategy and go-to-market consulting firm built for the managed services industry. He defined the Managed Intelligence Framework and wrote the AI for MSPs series that documents it.
The perspective comes from operating the business, not observing it. More than 35 years in managed services leadership, carrying a P&L, owning service delivery, and signing contracts.