01732 759725 magazine 31 Alt-Tech in Canada, one of the most advanced AI MSPs we have in our portfolio, has already created 1,000 agents. They have started creating agents to control agents, because some of the agents were being abusive to each other. If you don’t have a great foundation in place, how do you control that, how do you manage that, how do you set the workflow and orchestration in the right way? Another key feature of AI Studio is that we are not trying to close it down. Some vendors say the best way to use their AI is to make sure you use their services. Right now, this is such a large, undefined ecosystem I don’t believe closing things down will enable you to serve customers in the best possible way. The concept with all our services is to make sure third-party agents or services can be connected to us. We know there are 150,000 to 200,000 MSPs out there and we have 20% of them. The remaining 80% have different technologies and they should not have to give them up but be able to integrate them in some way. That is even more important from an intelligence layer perspective. You hear a lot about how AI will help you to make more sense of the data you have in your company. But AI is not about intelligence. AI is not about an AI platform that can scale with whatever you would like to do in the future. JG: Having created an AI‑first platform, you have now launched Cyber Studio and Cyber Intelligence. What is their value to your partners? JJ: Cyber Studio is a no-code AI platform on top of our core platform that creates the automation needed for whatever you would like AI to do. Let’s say you would like to develop an AI agent to optimise a recurring workload or recurring task. You need to learn how to create an agent, then figure out which code you would like to use or which kind of programme. You need to make sure it’s implemented in your daily operations. You need to make sure it’s compliant, secure, backed up – all those key things that are going to be incredibly important to ensure you don’t create an agent that goes rogue. Cyber Studio does that in a very simple way. It helps you to create the agent that will then be able to serve as a productivity enhancement in your company. It also has a catalogue of predefined agents developed by third parties. In the future, we won’t be speaking of ten or one hundred agents, but one thousand agents. you can do for yourself, but in what you can do for your customers. MSPs need to become trusted advisors on how to use AI and operate in an AI-first world. In our industry everybody talks about what they are going to offer, what they are going to implement, what agent they are going to build. Nobody is talking about how they are going to solve the fundamental problem that there will be thousands of agents that will all need to be orchestrated. That’s the biggest challenge we have: how are we going to help MSPs manage, orchestrate and control not tens, not hundreds, not thousands, but tens of thousands of agents and workloads and different types of services? Right now, everybody is desperate to get started. The risk is that they forget the foundational things that Acronis has always tried to do. In providing services like backup, MDR, XDR, ransomware protection and so on, we always come back to the fact that the key element that differentiates us is that everything is connected. We have one platform and, regardless of what you offer on the front end, all the orchestration, the automation, the security, the compliance is at the platform level. We’re very excited about the advantages this gives us at a time when things are moving so fast. JG: How else is Acronis adapting its offering to help businesses benefit from AI? JJ: Over the last two decades, we have been through multiple transformational shifts. We started as a backup company in 2003. Then we entered the cloud space. Then we went into the cyber protection space. Then we added management and automation. The next generation is our AI‑first platform. As we have done in the past, we have completely rebuilt our core Cyber Protection platform from scratch to facilitate an AI-first approach. We’re not trying to bolt on something and later put AI on top of it. We’re trying to tackle it from the outset. It took a little bit longer to get there, but we believe that having an AI-first foundation is the best way to ensure you have Q&A continued... Acronis receiving the TR Award for the Use of AI at the Technology Reseller Awards 2026
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