Auvik’s just-released 2026 IT Trends Report points to a familiar problem inside many organizations: Expectations are expanding faster than execution capacity. IT teams are being asked to govern AI, manage sprawling SaaS stacks, support distributed users, and show greater operational maturity, but the day-to-day realities of time, staffing, and visibility are still getting in the way.
For MSPs, it’s a snapshot of the conditions that tend to drive outside service demand, including too many tools, too little visibility, rising pressure from leadership, and internal teams that may have more budget than before but not enough capacity to absorb more operational complexity. In that environment, MSP relevance grows when providers can reduce friction, deliver consistency, and help clients translate strategy into practice.
AI policy is inconsistent with adoption
Not surprisingly, AI provides the clearest example of the strategy-to-execution gap. The report found that 67% of respondents are optimistic or very optimistic about AI, and 59% say their organization has an AI policy in place, with 28% saying a policy is still in progress. Beneath that optimism, though, lies a much weaker operating reality. Specifically, only 5% say AI is core to their IT operations today. There is also a significant awareness gap between leadership and frontline teams: 76% of IT leaders say an AI policy exists, compared with only 42% of help desk respondents. In other words, AI is widely discussed and broadly supported, but that support doesn’t necessarily translate into governance.
For MSPs, that shifts the AI conversation away from tools alone and toward governance as an opportunity. If internal teams are still struggling to align policy, awareness, and operational use, the market need is not just for AI recommendations, but also for AI readiness services. Those services might include things like policy support, user training, acceptable-use guardrails, monitoring for Shadow AI, and practical help integrating AI into workflows. When you consider that help desk teams show the strongest interest in AI training, it follows that demand for these kinds of service should be high across organizations, from the executive level to operational teams.
Shadow IT is a three-pronged problem
That operational edge is also where Shadow IT is becoming harder to ignore. MSPs ranked Shadow IT as the biggest issue business leaders are not paying enough attention to.
The scale of the Shadow IT problem is notable. Auvik reports that its customers discovered 102,939 Shadow AI applications across their networks in 2025 alone. It’s a clear sign that unsanctioned IT tools are significantly outpacing governance.
- 61% of respondents uncover unauthorized SaaS applications at least monthly
- 23% or respondent find them weekly
- 8% do not know how many SaaS applications are in use across their organizations
For MSPs, Shadow IT is more than a security concern. It’s also a supportability problem, a governance problem, and can create a margin problem. Unapproved SaaS and AI tools create downstream expectations for troubleshooting, integration, access control, and policy enforcement, even when IT never selected, approved, or deployed them. In multi-client environments, that workload compounds quickly.
IT budgets are growing; capacity is not
Despite ongoing discussion around IT teams being asked to do more with less, nearly half of internal IT respondents (49%) say their budget grew over the past year. More than a quarter (28%) saw budget increases of more than 10%. Yet, more spending has not solved the execution problem, judging from reasons for stalled initiatives:
- Lack of time (48%)
- Insufficient staff (33%)
- Budget (30%)
In other words, budget still matters, but it is no longer the primary constraint in many environments – capacity is.
For MSPs, that’s an important distinction because it points to clients making buying decisions to recover time rather than to expand their tech stacks. What it means is services that reduce operational friction, improve visibility, consolidate tooling, or offload repetitive support work may resonate more than new platform pitches.
Nearly half of respondents spend 10-20 hours per week handling end-user tickets, with reactive work being seen as an impediment to progress. When internal teams are buried in maintenance and support requests, MSPs have an opportunity to sell capacity, not just technology.
Tool sprawl is a related area of opportunity – in this case, even more for MSPs themselves than their clients. More than a third (36%) of MSPs use ten or more tools to manage their environments, compared to 26% of internal IT teams. That means MSPs themselves are not beyond the scope of the same problem they are looking to solve for their clients. The next phase of MSP differentiation may be more about operational simplification than about more technologies and solutions. The more MSPs can simplify their own workload by using comprehensive platforms instead of point solutions, the greater their opportunity to scale more rapidly and solve the same challenge for customers.
The maturity mirage
One of the most interesting takeaways from the report is what Auvik calls the “maturity mirage.” Many organizations see themselves as operationally mature, but fundamental problems continue to undercut that perception. Specifically, network visibility gaps affect 27% of respondents, alert fatigue affects 16%, and staffing constraints affect 42%. These are not isolated use cases, but baseline operational conditions. In other words, real-world conditions do not reflect executive intent – thus, the maturity mirage.
For MSPs, that may also may be the most useful data from the report. They have a real opportunity to not only provide outsourced support, but to help close the gap between what their clients believe their IT operations are capable of and what they can actually sustain. That means bringing discipline to AI governance, improving visibility into SaaS and Shadow IT, reducing the impact of tool sprawl, and creating room for internal teams to move from reactive work toward more strategic priorities. These are all areas where businesses experience challenges – and where MSP value can be clearly defined.
Edited by
Erik Linask
