Joe Smolarski

But for MSPs, it may also represent a significant new business opportunity.

My guest today is Joe Smolarski, CEO of WatchGuard Technology, who joins us fresh off the company's North American Partner Conference in Nashville.

Joe argues that AI governance is quickly becoming a necessary part of the MSP's portfolio and that, at least for the foreseeable future, it's something MSPs should be able to monetize a distinct managed service rather than simply absorbing into their existing offerings.

We'll discuss what that service might look like, how MSPs can demonstrate its value to customers, and why the transition from shadow AI to autonomous AI agents could make the stakes considerably higher.

We'll also get into WatchGuard's own AI strategy, including its efforts to let MSPs help shape its development roadmap, a commitment to delivering new AI agents every two weeks, and some interesting developments on the data governance front.

It's a conversation about the risks of AI, certainly, but perhaps more importantly, it's about how MSPs can turn those risks into opportunities while preparing for what comes next.

Let's get right into it, my chat with Joe Smolarski.

[upbeat music] Joe, thanks for taking the time.

Integrating deployment, visibility, and management potentially does.

The new capabilities begin rolling out this month, and we'll have considerably more from WatchGuard soon on In The Channel when CEO Joe Smularski sits down with us to discuss how AI is changing both cybersecurity and the MSP security business.

And Dell Technologies is going after one of the less glamorous but increasingly important problems in enterprise AI, getting a company's data ready for AI to actually use.

Dell is expanding its AI data platform with new capabilities around agentic context, NVIDIA-accelerated data preparation, multi-tenancy and cloud storage, including Managed PowerScale for Microsoft Azure.

Exactly.

And like the simple fishes of just someone pretending to be Joe Smolarski, WatchGuard CEO, and trying to convince people into doing stuff are really on an uptick.

And even with just recently hired employees, we had someone that's only been with WatchGuard a couple of weeks now.

report a phish claiming to be coming from Joe.