industryopinion
AI security handoff essential for MSPs
CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts and behavioural scientist Gleb Tsipursky says UK MSPs must establish a clear AI security handoff to the SOC to prevent gaps in oversight as autonomous agents enter frontline operations.
U
K MSPs are moving from AI copilots to systems that can investigate alerts, make recommendations, and act across security tools. PCR’s recent coverage of Huntress’s
UK distribution agreement with Giacom shows how quickly agentic security is reaching the channel: Giacom supports more than 6,000 UK MSPs, giving partners access to Huntress’s Agentic Security Platform and 24/7 AI-centric SOC. PCR also reported on Dropzone AI and QBS Software’s Agentic SOC partnership, where autonomous agents investigate alerts and escalate confirmed threats to human analysts. This is the right moment for MSPs
to define the human handoff before agents gain more authority. The handoff should answer four
“Customers are
unlikely to judge an MSP by the number of autonomous
operational questions. What may the agent do without approval? Which actions require a person? What evidence must accompany an escalation? Who owns the decision when the agent and analyst disagree? Those answers should be written into the service design, rather than improvised during an incident. The National Cyber Security Centre’s guidance on agentic AI
actions its tools can perform.”
points in the same direction. It recommends starting with tightly bounded tasks, limiting access, applying the principle of least privilege, monitoring behaviour, planning for incidents, and retaining meaningful human oversight. For an MSP, that can translate into a simple control model. Low-risk actions, such as enriching an alert or gathering context,
can run automatically. Higher-impact actions, such as disabling an account, isolating a customer system, changing privileges, or communicating a severe incident to a client, should require human approval. Temporary credentials should replace broad, long-lived access wherever possible.
36 | September/October 2026
MSPs should also keep an exception ledger. For each material case, record what the agent recommended or did, the evidence it used, whether a human overrode it, why, and what happened next. A weekly review of those exceptions will reveal where the system is reliable, where it needs tighter boundaries, and where analysts are repeatedly correcting the same mistake. This matters commercially as
much as technically. Customers are unlikely to judge an MSP by the number of autonomous actions its tools can perform. They will judge whether incidents are contained, whether service remains dependable, and whether someone accountable can explain a consequential decision. The MSP that can show a clear handoff model has a stronger answer than the MSP that simply promises more automation.
That model should also appear in customer runbooks and service reviews. If a security agent can take
autonomous action, the MSP should specify the scope, approval threshold, logging requirements, and rollback path. During quarterly business reviews, partners can report exception rates and human overrides alongside conventional service metrics. That gives customers evidence that automation remains under control and provides analysts with a feedback loop to adjust permissions, prompts, or escalation rules before a recurring edge case becomes an incident. Agentic security can help channel partners handle alert volume
and skills pressure. The competitive advantage will come from pairing that speed with explicit limits, evidence, and accountable human judgment.
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