Nina Schick, a globally recognized expert on AI, geopolitics and power, will connect those dots at her Sept. 16 MSP Summit keynote, titled “The Industrialization of Intelligence: The New Age of AI Power.”

I recently interviewed Schick to preview her keynote, which ties the global importance of AI to what she calls “the biggest opportunity of our lifetime” for managed service providers. “You can't divorce anything that happens in the business environment from the global geopolitical picture,” she said.

DeMarzo: Nina, I would like you to share a few insights and thoughts about what you're going to be sharing with our audience of channel leaders and managed service providers of all kinds. What are you going to be telling about the industrialization of intelligence and this new age of power?

Schick: Well, I think the top line is that when it comes to AI, it's an even bigger deal than what we thought so far. It isn't just about efficiency or automation. It's really about this new era for intelligence. The quest for artificial intelligence has always been, can we somehow build non-biological intelligence? And not only are we at the point now thanks to AI scaling laws where AI’s capabilities are becoming increasingly better, but the costs of actually running AI, building transformative AI applications across industry and across society are dropping. They’re in freefall.

So what that really means is that this non-biological intelligence is becoming a scalable and essentially cheap commodity, a utility that can be put into everything. Just like everything was digitized, everything now is going to be run on intelligence. This is an absolutely fascinating technological acceleration, something that we've never seen in history before. So it's completely going to rewire the global balance of power from a geopolitical perspective, but from an economic perspective, it's going to rewire entire industries and create new industries as well.

DeMarzo: Nina, you talk a lot about the balance of power -- United States, China, Russia, and maybe other world powers that need to take the lead in AI, right, in terms of infrastructure and support. How critical is that and where do you think the balance of power is right now?

Schick: It's absolutely critical because you can't divorce anything that happens in the business environment from the global geopolitical picture. And what's happening now on the global picture is that there is an understanding that the economies that are going to be dominant and the countries that are going to be dominant in the 21st century need to be technological powerhouses. Only if you have competence and capabilities in manufacturing and an industrial base can you then support the compute and hardware and the kind of software and applications that we're talking about when it comes to AI and actually being able to deploy intelligence at scale so that it does have this transformational impact on society and the economy.

Two countries have understood this, and those two countries are China and the United States. And they are also the countries that actually have the vertically, integrated stack to have those capabilities and are building those capabilities. What that means for the rest of the world is that they are going to run on the infrastructure that's built by these two AI superpowers.

So there’s a huge opportunity not only from a geopolitical perspective, but also from an industry perspective. If you are building in the country that the whole world is going to build and run on your infrastructure, that is the biggest business opportunity you can possibly imagine.

DeMarzo: Let’s talk about big business opportunities and unlocking the superpowers of managed service providers. You speak at a very high level. The business executive might be sitting there and saying, ‘OK, what does this mean to me managing a business that could be in the Northeast United States and the West Coast or somewhere? Maybe I'm a $5 million MSP, maybe I'm $100 million or larger organization. Localize it a bit if you can.

Schick: Well, the global is local, right? Because there are these seismic forces right now that are unwinding this geopolitical competition. The sheer amount of CapEx means that the business environment that you operate in is changing very, very quickly. And that means as an MSP, this is the biggest business opportunity in our lifetime because not only has the administration made AI technology and American dominance and technology No. 1 priority, we are seeing historic amounts of CapEx. I'm talking about hundreds of billions of dollars being flooded into creating intelligence as a commodity at scale.

What does that mean in terms of MSPs? I mean, the number of people of companies, of entities of countries that are going to need these services is just going to explode and balloon overnight. So even if you're servicing clients at a very, very local level, these forces that are being unleashed at the global level, unlike anything we've seen before will create so much opportunity even at the local level.

So this is the biggest business opportunity of our lifetimes.

DeMarzo: MSPs are sitting on the biggest growth opportunities. We call this MSP 3.0, the march to a trillion dollars.

Schick: That is within reach, even exceeding it is within reach.

Watch the video at the top of the page.