New platform and partner academy help MSPs discover the AI already running inside their clients’ businesses, manage the risk it creates, and turn it into new revenue
Portal26 launched its Managed Intelligence Platform (MIP), giving managed service providers (MSPs) a system to discover AI usage across every client, manage the resulting security and compliance risk, and turn that intelligence into billable services spanning license optimization, cost management, and AI advisory. Alongside MIP, Portal26 is launching Point2 Academy, the partner program that trains MSPs to sell, deploy, and support Managed Intelligence services.
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“We built Portal26’s Managed Intelligence Platform because we kept seeing the same gap: small and midsize businesses are adopting AI faster than they can govern it.” said Arti Raman, CEO of Portal26.
The Shift from MSP to MIP
AI adoption inside small and midsize businesses is already happening – often outside IT’s visibility, as employees use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other tools with no centralized oversight. Most of these businesses have no budget to hire the expertise to manage that risk themselves, they rely on their MSP.
Guided by MSP customers, Portal26 built MIP on the observation that in the fast-paced age of AI, the MSP relationship is being asked to grow into a critical new role – the Managed Intelligence Provider. Where a traditional MSP manages infrastructure and uptime, a Managed Intelligence Provider manages a client’s AI footprint — what’s being used, whether it’s safe, whether it’s paying off, and how to leverage it to maximize business impact.
“We built Portal26’s Managed Intelligence Platform because we kept seeing the same gap: small and midsize businesses are adopting AI faster than they can govern it,” said Arti Raman, CEO of Portal26. “Their MSP is the one relationship already in place to help — trusted, embedded, and already paid to look after their technology. What MSPs didn’t have was the platform to see what’s actually happening, or the training to turn that into a real practice. Portal26’s MIP and Point2 Academy give them both: the ability to walk into any client with evidence of what’s happening in their business and deliver significant value by solving it.”
“Portal26 changed the client conversation completely,” said Jack Wilson, CEO of Cinch IT. “We’re not describing a hypothetical risk anymore — we’re showing clients exactly what’s happening in their own environment, and what to do about it. That evidence is what sells the next service: security, compliance, cost control, all of it.”
Visibility, Security, and Value Realization
MIP delivers all three through one system:
- Visibility — Where is all the AI being used at the company?
- Security — What should you do to ensure it’s used safely?
- Value Realization — What should you do to create value from AI?
All three run through a single control plane, built for how MSPs actually operate.
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