‘Customers don’t care about the jargon. They don’t care about EDR, XDR, or whatever acronym we come up with next. They care about one thing: ‘Is my business going to keep running?’ That’s it. That’s the outcome,’ says John Pagliuca, N-able CEO.
MSPs are staring down a new reality where there will be an explosion of AI agents moving faster than humans can keep up, forging a mental reset towards an AI-driven cyber resiliency mindset.
That’s the message N-able CEO John Pagliuca delivered during the Burlington, Mass.-based vendor’s Empower conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, this week, making a comparison between resiliency and health tracking devices.
“They’re pulling in thousands of data points from your sleep, your recovery, your activity and turning it into something you can actually act on,” he said. “But here’s the thing, nobody really cares about the raw numbers. They care about the outcome. They care about longevity.”
That framing, over solely monitoring metrics, is becoming the blueprint for MSPs navigating a complex security landscape.
[Related: Driving AI Transformation: The 2026 CRN AI 100]
“What those companies figured out is exactly what we as an industry have missed for too long,” he said. “Customers don’t care about the jargon. They don’t care about EDR, XDR, or whatever acronym we come up with next. They care about one thing: ‘Is my business going to keep running?’ That’s it. That’s the outcome.”
Much like smart watches providing a 360-degree view of a person’s health, MSPs are being pushed toward delivering what Pagliuca described as a “full-stack, end-to-end resilience experience,” one that spans before, during and after a cyberattack.
“Resiliency is not a product,” he said. “It’s an integrated experience. And if your tools don’t talk to each other, if they don’t form that ring around your customer, you’re not delivering resilience. You’re delivering fragments.”
And resiliency will come into play with the rise of AI agents, as the CEO predicted that each human will have 85 agents, all operating across environments.
“Let’s just do the math,” he said. “If your Level 1 technician today can handle 200, 300, maybe 400 endpoints, great. Now multiply that by 85. That’s not a tooling problem anymore. That’s a math problem. And you don’t solve a math problem by throwing more humans at it.”
This is where autonomous coworkers and assistants can help with tasks like patching, vulnerability management and remediation without constant human input. The goal, Pagliuca said, is to drastically expand what MSPs can manage without increasing headcount.
“We should be asking ourselves, ‘Why not 2,000 endpoints per technician? Why not more?’” he said. “If we fully embrace automation and AI as a resilience engine, that’s not unrealistic. That’s where this is going.”
To further help partners on their AI journey, N-able announced its new Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and its in-product AI assistant, N-zo. The MCP server securely connects tools like ChatGPT and Claude to live UEM (Unified Endpoint Management) data in N-central and N-sight enabling real-time, governed actions and flexible AI workflows.
N-zo delivers guidance within the platform helping teams resolve issues faster, reduce risk and streamline operations.
Partner Michael Cervino agreed with Pagliuca’s message on AI driving delivery gains, sharing that he has a goal within his MSP to increase endpoints per tech.
“Our personal goal is 1,000 endpoints to one tech,” Cervino, co-founder and CEO of Radnor, Pa.-based MSP Circle Square Consulting, told CRN. “We’re currently at 400 to 450 to one, and AI helps a lot with that.”
For Cervino and other MSPs willing to adapt, Pagliuca said that amplification could redefine not just how they deliver services, but how they measure success.
“Stop selling the cholesterol numbers,” Pagliuca said. “Start selling the outcome: resilience.”
