AI adoption is accelerating across small and midsize businesses, often faster than the controls needed to manage it. On this week’s MSPInfluencer Primecast, Saurabh Sandhir, founder of Kipling Secure, explains why this creates both new risks and a significant opportunity for MSPs.
Here are four takeaways from the conversation.
1. Shadow AI Is Already Inside SMBs
Businesses may believe employees are using a handful of familiar AI platforms, but Sandhir says the reality is often much broader. AI is increasingly embedded across applications, creating a growing collection of tools that businesses may not even know are being used.
For MSPs, this makes visibility increasingly important. Before businesses can govern AI effectively, they need to understand where and how it is being used.
2. Sensitive Data Can Easily Find Its Way Into AI
One of Sandhir’s biggest concerns is the information employees share with AI platforms. In the normal course of trying to work faster, employees can expose financial information, PII, PHI, customer information, or proprietary business data.
The risk doesn’t necessarily come from malicious behavior. Employees may simply not understand what happens to information once it is shared with an AI system. That makes data protection a critical part of AI governance.
3. AI Is Creating New Security Threats
AI can improve productivity for businesses, but Sandhir points out that attackers can benefit from the same technology.
As AI becomes embedded in business workflows, new types of attacks and vulnerabilities are emerging. For MSPs already responsible for protecting their customers’ technology environments, AI security is quickly becoming part of that responsibility.
4. AI Governance Can Become a New MSP Opportunity
Sandhir sees an opportunity for MSPs to do more than protect customers from AI risk. Because MSPs already serve as trusted technology and security partners to SMBs, they are well positioned to provide the governance those businesses often lack internally.
That could turn AI governance and AI detection and response into new recurring services. Rather than slowing AI adoption, the goal is to give customers the guardrails they need to use it more safely.
What This Means for MSPs
AI is already changing how SMBs operate, and governance isn’t going to happen automatically. As Sandhir explains, MSPs have an opportunity to help customers bring AI out of the shadows, protect sensitive information, address emerging threats, and put smarter controls around its use.
In doing so, MSPs can turn a growing customer risk into another way to deliver value—and potentially a new source of recurring revenue.