MSP COO: AI Should Turn Knowledge Workers Into ‘Wisdom Workers’
CRN covers Nathan Phinney's XChange NexGen 2026 session on AI agents for MSPs: why the job shifts from knowing the answer to judging it, and the agents he runs for tickets, project digests, interview prep, and proposals.
By Wade Tyler Millward, CRN, October 30, 2026, covering Nathan’s session at The Channel Company’s XChange NexGen 2026. CRN printed Nathan’s title as “Nathan Phinney, chief operating officer of AllSafe IT” (as printed by CRN).
What Nathan said
“The old job was knowing the answer. The new job is judging the answer.”
“You don’t want this to think for you because it does not know what it’s saying. If you’re asking it for advice, you’re going to get consensus advice, and that is as helpful as it is dangerous.”
“This can translate your ideas, your intentions, into code.”
“I don’t have to ask anyone for that information anymore.”
“My close rates have gone way up as a result of this. Think about how you can leverage the things that AI is actually good at: attention, translation. There’s a lot you can do with those things, and we’re not doing them yet.”
Context
CRN reported the examples Nathan walked through: a daily briefing agent drawing on more than 20 newspapers, a music recommendation agent built without knowing APIs, a weekly project digest, interview prep briefs built from a candidate’s resume and profiles, summaries of tickets and transcripts before a call with an upset customer, and discovery-call transcripts turned into proposals. The piece also quotes Nigel Ziyad of Ziyad Technical Resource Consulting, who plans to use Nathan’s examples with clients.