Giant Rocketship founder and CEO Dustin Puryear brought his session, How AI Is Breaking MSP Pricing and What to Do About It, to the stage at the Service Desk Show at ExCeL London.
A former MSP owner and software architect, Dustin is known for tactical insights, clear frameworks, and a no-nonsense approach to IT service management, and this talk took aim at one of the most uncomfortable questions in the channel right now: what happens to your pricing model when AI quietly removes the labor it was built on?
For two decades, MSP pricing has rested on a simple assumption, that delivering service costs technician hours, and those hours can be billed per seat, per device, or by the hour. Dustin's argument is that AI is breaking that assumption. As agentic automation absorbs Tier 1 work, password resets, account changes, routine triage, Knowledge Base lookups, the cost to serve a client drops, and the link between "hours worked" and "value delivered" starts to come apart.
The session unpacked what that means in practice:
- Per-seat and hourly models start working against you. When AI handles a large share of routine tickets, billing tied to headcount or time no longer reflects the value you deliver - and it leaves margin on the table.
- Clients will eventually do the math. As AI-driven service becomes the norm, customers will assume delivery is cheaper and push for lower prices - unless MSPs can clearly show the value behind the service.
- The fix is outcome-based pricing. Dustin's case: move away from task-based and hourly billing toward pricing tied to results uptime, responsiveness, resolution speed, so margin is protected even as the cost-to-serve falls.
- Get your own house in order first. AI only pays off on top of clean data and consistent processes. Automating internally - ticketing, routing, documentation, is the prerequisite to repricing externally.
The talk landed at a moment the wider industry is wrestling with the same shift. A ChannelPro feature published during the show noted that analysts argue MSPs will need to move away from task-based billing and hourly rates, instead adopting outcome-based pricing tied to uptime guarantees, mean time to resolution, and security outcomes. The same piece warned of a widening divide between automation-first MSPs adopting agentic AI to scale operations without linear headcount growth, and labour-heavy MSPs tethered to traditional, ticket-heavy models.
That's the divide Dustin's session was built to help MSPs get on the right side of and it's the same problem Giant Rocketship was created to solve: turning reactive, ticket-heavy help desks into predictable, automation-first operations.
