The Three Markets Forrester Says AI Will Actually Grow

AI is not disrupting managed services evenly. Forrester's new AI Disruption Model, built from more than 200 technology and service markets, finds traditional technology services under real pressure while infrastructure, data and AI, and cybersecurity are positioned to grow. MSPs that reposition their service mix toward those three categories now will hold pricing power longer than the ones defending the old model.

What Forrester's AI Disruption Model actually measures

Forrester introduced the model in August 2026, scoring 17 technology and service categories that span more than 200 individual markets. Each market gets sorted based on whether AI is expected to accelerate its growth, reshape how it gets delivered, leave it largely untouched, or expose it to real disruption. The point of the exercise is not to predict which vendors win. It is to show where the economic value in technology and services is moving as AI adoption shifts from pilots to production deployment across enterprises of every size.

The headline finding matters for anyone running a services business: labor-intensive knowledge work carries the highest disruption risk. That includes categories MSPs have leaned on for decades, from implementation and integration labor to generalist technical support billed by the hour. Forrester's framing is blunt about why. When a task depends mainly on trained people applying repeatable expertise, AI narrows the gap between an expert and a generalist faster than it does in categories built on physical infrastructure, data rights, or regulatory trust. A cloud region or a compliance certification isn't something a language model can replicate. A technician resetting a password or clearing a routine alert is doing exactly the kind of repeatable task AI already handles well.

This isn't a Silicon Valley abstraction. It's a direct read on where technology buyers, including the small and midsize businesses most MSPs serve, will spend their next dollar. Forrester built the model by looking at how AI changes the economics of delivery in each market, not by surveying opinions about AI. That distinction is what makes it useful for planning rather than just interesting to read.

Which parts of your service catalog are actually exposed?

The exposure isn't abstract. It falls hardest on services sold as hours of human judgment applied to routine problems, which describes a large share of what a typical MSP still bills. Tier-one support, standard onboarding labor, routine patching and monitoring oversight, and generalist advisory work all sit closer to the disrupted end of Forrester's model than most MSP owners would like to admit.

That doesn't mean those services vanish this year. It means the margin they carry is the part of the business most likely to compress as AI tools make routine execution cheaper for everyone, including competitors who haven't repositioned. Forrester's model treats this as a market-level shift, not a company-specific risk, which is exactly why it applies whether or not your firm has adopted AI internally. The pressure comes from what your buyers can now get elsewhere, not from your own tooling choices alone.

Think about what a client's finance team sees when they compare quotes. If a competing provider can deliver the same tier-one coverage at a lower price because AI is doing more of that work on their side, your hourly-labor pricing model becomes the thing you have to defend in every renewal conversation. That's a weaker negotiating position than owning a category the buyer expects to keep paying more for over time.

The three categories built to grow

Against that pressure, Forrester names three categories expected to benefit as enterprises move from AI experimentation to production deployment:

• Infrastructure providers, covering cloud platforms, data centers, and storage.
• Data and AI providers, covering AI models, AI platforms, and data management and governance tooling.
• Cybersecurity and identity providers, covering Zero Trust architecture and the newer category of AI agent security.

None of these are foreign to a managed services business. They map closely to lines most MSPs already sell in some form: cloud management, backup and data governance, and the security stack. The strategic signal is not "build something new." It is "stop treating these as add-ons to the labor-based core business and start treating them as the anchor."

Each category also has a distinct reason it holds up. Infrastructure spend keeps growing because AI workloads themselves need somewhere to run, and that demand doesn't slow down even as the labor around it gets cheaper. Data and AI governance grows because every client deploying AI internally now needs someone accountable for how that data is managed, which is a new compliance and oversight burden most SMBs have no internal staff to own. Cybersecurity and identity grow because AI expands the attack surface as fast as it expands productivity, and a Zero Trust posture or an AI agent security program isn't something a client can defer once a competitor's breach makes the local news.

Why the at-risk services won't disappear overnight

Forrester is careful to note that disrupted categories don't collapse on a fixed timeline. Embedded workflows, regulatory requirements, switching costs, and ongoing demand for orchestration, governance, and trust all slow the decline. A client with a five-year-old ticketing and documentation workflow tied to your service delivery doesn't rip it out the week a competitor launches an AI agent that can do the same tier-one work for less.

That is a grace period, not a reprieve. The MSPs who use it well are the ones shifting their new bookings and their pricing conversations toward the categories AI is growing, while letting the legacy labor-based work fund the transition rather than define the next five years of the business. The ones who don't use it end up defending a shrinking margin line with more urgency every renewal cycle, discounting to keep accounts that were never going to be the growth engine in the first place.

How should MSP leaders actually reposition the business model?

Start with an honest audit of the current service catalog against Forrester's three growth categories. For each service line, ask whether it is sold primarily as hours of routine labor or as an outcome tied to infrastructure, data governance, or security. The answer tells you which lines to defend on price and which ones need repackaging before a competitor does it first.

Treat security and data governance work as anchor recurring revenue, not upsell add-ons pitched after the core contract is signed. That shift changes how you price, how you staff, and how you train technicians, since selling and delivering governance and Zero Trust work requires a different skill set than resetting passwords and patching servers. Building that bench takes deliberate investment. Programs like Forge University exist specifically to move technicians from generalist support work into the certified, higher-margin categories Forrester's model says are actually growing, rather than leaving that transition to on-the-job trial and error.

Sequence the shift instead of trying to do it all at once. A realistic first move is picking one growth category, usually security since most MSPs already have some foothold there, and rebuilding its packaging and pricing before touching the other two. Once that line is generating recurring revenue on its own instead of riding along with a managed services contract, the same playbook applies to data governance and then infrastructure. Trying to reposition all three simultaneously without dedicated ownership of each is how good strategy turns into a slide deck nobody executes.

It also helps to see where your current mix stands before you commit resources to a shift. Running your service catalog through the stack builder gives a faster read on how exposed your revenue is to the disrupted categories versus how much is already anchored in the ones built to grow, so the sequencing decision is based on your actual book of business rather than a guess.

None of this requires building every capability from scratch. MSPs repositioning toward infrastructure, data governance, and security are increasingly buying white-labeled tools built for exactly those categories rather than assembling each one internally, which is a large part of why the Actiforge product catalog exists in the first place.

The business model question for 2026 isn't whether AI changes managed services. Forrester's data makes that assumption unnecessary to argue. The real question is whether your service catalog is already weighted toward the three categories that grow, or still concentrated in the one under the most pressure. See the full stack.

Sources: Forrester ("Beyond the SaaSpocalypse: Introducing the Forrester AI Disruption Model" and related August 2026 press materials) | Kaseya 2026 State of the MSP Report.