EP305 - The 2026 State of the Channel – What Every MSP Needs to Know with Carolyn April and Ian Luckett

In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, I sit down with Carolyn April, VP of Research at GTIA, to unpack the 2026 State of the Channel report and what it means for your MSP right now. We hear plenty of opinions at industry events about where the channel is heading. This conversation brings something different to the table, real data from across the entire channel ecosystem, built on fifteen years of research. If you want to understand the forces shaping your business over the next twelve months, this is one to listen to with a notebook in hand.

Carolyn April opens by explaining how the State of the Channel began as a pulse check on the health of the industry, back when GTIA was the association arm of CompTIA. The sample goes well beyond membership, covering MSPs, ITSPs, resellers, consultants, vendors and distributors. That breadth gives the findings real weight, and it means the trends we discuss reflect what is happening in businesses like yours.

The first big theme is confidence. MSPs are feeling optimistic, and that optimism is tempered with caution. AI brings huge opportunity alongside a significant business shift, and the wider economic and geopolitical picture makes forecasting harder than ever. I shared a conversation with an MSP owner who has lost seven good clients this year because those businesses closed their doors. Nothing to do with the service they delivered. Carolyn April explains why resilience matters so much here. The MSPs that came through the pandemic in good shape were the ones with strong operational fundamentals already in place, healthy cash flow, lines of credit and a clear view of their numbers.

This links directly to something we see every week inside The MSP Growth Hub. So many owners believe a couple of new clients will fix everything. When we relaunched our account management framework with 55 MSPs in the room, not a single new sales tactic was needed to give them nearly two years of valuable work. The data backs this up. The companies ahead of plan, who track their margins and know their numbers, are the same companies doing more with AI, doing more with cybersecurity and setting higher growth targets.

We then explore what surprised Carolyn April most this year. For the UK and Ireland, workforce and skills gaps came out as the number one challenge, the only region to rank it first. We talk about the lasting effects of Brexit on skills mobility, the growing maturity of offshore service desks and account management, and the leadership challenge of managing remote teams well. Around 65 to 70 percent of the conversations we have inside The MSP Growth Hub come back to leadership, so this one landed close to home.

AI adoption is where the gap becomes really clear. The study found 98 percent of channel companies are using AI in some form. Only 20 percent have a strategic approach with governance, policy and a named leader responsible for AI. That maturity gap is immense, and Carolyn April makes a strong case for getting your own house in order before taking AI services to market. The opportunity is huge. Complexity is the number one driver of channel health, and customers who dive in too quickly, or not at all, need a trusted advisor to guide them. That is why consulting is on the rise.

We also tackle pricing. Token based AI costs are already causing sticker shock at enterprise level, and traditional per user and per device models are starting to feel out of step. Consumption and outcome based pricing are on the horizon, and nobody has the blueprint yet. My advice is simple, approach with caution and avoid embedding every tool so deeply that you cannot unwind it.

The biggest surprise of all was vendor satisfaction. In the UK and Ireland, the share of partners who were very satisfied with their vendors fell from 37 percent to 19 percent. Programme changes, a heavier sales focus and the disruption AI is bringing have all played a part, alongside a wave of new AI vendors competing