Peter Melby, CEO of an MSP portfolio company that includes a raft of successful companies, pronounced IT Services exciting yet dangerous in his preview of what he expects in 2026.
New Charter CEO Melby’s Executive Forecast: Business Technology Changes that Actually Matter in Q1 2026 on LinkedIn, covered how technology is changing and providers need to change with it to succeed. Melby will speak at Channel Partners Conference & Expo April 13 at Las Vegas on challenges and opportunities that define today’s MSP market. His New Charter portfolio includes nearly two-dozen companies that made the 2025 MSP 501 list of the world's best IT service providers. That includes NetSource One, which New Charter acquired in January, 2026.
“IT can be boring,” Melby said. “It's boring because for the last 25 to 30 years, it's really been underperforming as a category for what our clients, for and businesses in our world need to get from their technology. IT has historically been good at solving technical problems—setting up the technical equipment, doing the technical support for users. But what we're looking at in the future is managing a lot of uncertainty and managing a lot of change with technology, and that should be the role of IT.”
New Charter CEO Peter Melby
However, he said IT is boring no more. And that may not be a good thing.
“This is the most exciting time in IT that I've ever experienced, but it's also, in my mind, the most dangerous time,” Melby said. “And not dangerous in the sense that I think that AI is going to overtake our world this year. It’s dangerous in the sense that I think what businesses need in IT, the IT services industry is not prepared for. And so that's where we need to come together and strategize together. We need to listen to our customers, the businesses in the market, and we need to be able to share what we're seeing as well.”
Much of what makes IT exciting and dangerous is AI, which Melby characterized as “transformational."
“It will change a lot in the way that we operate,” he said. “But we're not seeing a lot of actual real-world, significant, broad category change from it yet, because it's actual businesses that have to get in and grasp and understand that.
“As an IT provider, one of the first things that happens when there's a big inflection point and a big change—like what has come with AI—is that people start to ask us, ‘Hey, what do we do next?’ And as soon as there are those questions, there's often someone who rushes and says, ‘Well, here's a service that we can sell you. Here's an AI service that we can sell you. We can supply all this, we can deliver AI for you.’"
But he said MSPs need to take a different approach with AI.
“AI is massive. AI is infused in everything that we're doing, everything you're doing as an organization, or will be in the future,” he said. “It's going to shift. It's not going to just be something that we can look at and say, "Here, we're going to sell you this."
IT Change is Opportunity
Melby summed up an MSP’s mission as: “to really reframe and change what businesses can expect from their IT department, from their IT provider. And it starts with this: your technology will change, your business needs to change with technology. But if you don't have the right resources to do it securely, to do it quickly, to do it with agility, then you're going to lag behind your competitors. You're going to lag behind your market. You're going to miss the opportunity.
And so that's what IT is—it needs to be a value supporter. It needs to be a value creator, not just the thing you think about when you mutter some four-letter words under your breath when things don't work.”