By: Douglas Tait

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are at a pivotal moment as rapid AI adoption on cloud infrastructure is driving major changes across the industries they serve. These technologies open exciting new opportunities by simplifying complexities and unlocking the transformative power of AI. But, as the demand for AI-driven solutions grows, the challenge arises to integrate AI voice services into diverse cloud infrastructures, legacy systems, UCaaS, CCaaS, and fixed wireless networks. This means confronting entrenched silos, legacy systems, regulatory obligations and a shifting landscape of customer needs. 

At the same time, hyperscalers and new market entrants are raising the bar, delivering streamlined, high-value services at scale. This puts pressure on traditional MSP business models that are often reliant on manual processes and less differentiated offerings. To meet these challenges, MSPs must move beyond simply delivering technology and focus more on continuous innovation and sustainable business value.

With the right technologies, MSPs are positioned to lead by delivering seamless AI-powered communications that give clients and their own businesses a competitive advantage.  By enabling advanced, integrated and highly efficient voice services, an MSP raises their standing, transforming from a commoditized provider into a strategic partner.  Consistent innovation—coupled with secure, automated service delivery—can dramatically elevate customer experiences and create clear differentiation in an already crowded marketplace.

Orchestration as the Cornerstone of Modernization

At the heart of this evolution is orchestration, which centralizes and streamlines communications, enabling the flexible combination of voice, cloud, and AI functions. Orchestration creates a powerful operational base that allows organizations to launch, adapt, and capitalize on new offerings. This delivers higher efficiency and accelerates business outcomes such as faster time to market and richer customer experiences.

Orchestration is also the foundation for rapid AI enablement, allowing MSPs to seamlessly link communications with AI capabilities, speed deployments, and evolve with emerging innovations. But without a cohesive approach to orchestration, AI adoption can falter, operational complexity can grow, and business opportunities may slip. In addition, the increasing demand for integrated, real-time analytics and rapid feature updates introduces a new level of urgency for reliable orchestration.  MSPs must ensure both flexibility and stability as they adopt new technologies or respond to competitive pressures, accentuating the business imperative for a unified orchestration strategy.

Without the means to orchestrate, the communications landscape is challenged by entrenched legacy equipment, incompatible interfaces, and manual operations.  This leads to slow and error-prone onboarding processes as each client or feature demands unique configurations.  Integrating new AI services can further complicate matters, increasing the risk of delays, errors, and elevated costs.  In a market where speed and accuracy are paramount, these obstacles can directly affect profitability.

Orchestration Fundamentals

In this new world order of AI, an orchestrator shifts the paradigm.  Now, we can move from the traditional network service model to a unified, multi-tenant, vendor- and cloud- agnostic environment, empowering MSPs to oversee all clients from one centralized platform. To provide a comprehensive suite of communication services, the orchestrator requires a library of ready-made service components that manage functions like call routing, fraud prevention, transcription, and compliance monitoring. With full network interoperability of services, this approach streamlines onboarding and activation, improves reliability and security, and frees resources. Instead of custom-building every network function for a client, the MSP simply drags and drops the required pre-built, pre-integrated network function into the client network schema, then provisions and activates the service for the client network.

The outcome can be significant like shrinking feature rollout timeframes from months to days.  MSPs who leverage orchestration can launch more value-added services annually and see reductions in manual errors and support costs. With an orchestration library of pre-integrated solutions, users can avoid vendor lock-in and keep offerings current as technology evolves.  A cloud-based orchestrator provides automated rollouts of features and policies that ensure stability and reduce disruption in evolving technology and business environments.  This can expand a client base and increase revenues while reducing operational costs and rapidly responding to shifting industry demands.  As an added benefit, orchestration harmonizes the operation of disparate technology stacks across different regions, enabling quicker scaling and more precise management of multi-client environments.