The New Digital Backbone: Hatz AI Arms MSPs to Scale AI for Main Street

NEW YORK, NY – August 04, 2026 – The promise of artificial intelligence has, for many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), been a chaotic and risky affair. While enterprise giants build bespoke AI systems, the backbone of the economy has been left to navigate a Wild West of consumer-grade tools, creating a pervasive "Shadow AI" problem that exposes company data and creates untold liabilities. The critical missing piece has not been the AI itself, but the delivery mechanism—a secure, scalable network to bring its power to Main Street.

Today, New York-based Hatz AI announced a significant move to build that very infrastructure with the launch of Hatz Activate. Billed as a "rollout command center," the new platform is designed to empower the army of Managed Service Providers (MSPs) that form the trusted IT nervous system for millions of SMBs. It gives them a single, unified system to deploy, manage, and secure AI adoption across their entire client base, transforming a manual, one-off process into a repeatable, industrial-scale motion.

The Shadow AI Dilemma and the MSP Bottleneck

For years, the narrative has been that MSPs are the key to unlocking technology adoption for SMBs. They are the on-the-ground strategists, the trusted advisors who manage everything from cybersecurity to cloud migration. Yet, when it came to AI, this critical channel became a bottleneck. While their clients, eager for a competitive edge, began using public AI tools for everything from writing marketing copy to analyzing sensitive financial data, MSPs lacked the tools to manage this new frontier at scale.

This unmanaged adoption, or Shadow AI, represents one of the most significant invisible threats to the modern SMB. Proprietary data fed into public models can become part of their training sets, intellectual property can be compromised, and compliance with regulations like GDPR becomes nearly impossible to guarantee. MSPs found themselves in a reactive posture, discovering risky behavior only after the fact. Onboarding clients to safer, vetted AI solutions was a painstaking, manual process involving scattered spreadsheets and disconnected systems, reaching only the most proactive clients while the rest remained exposed.

Hatz AI, founded in 2023 by veterans of the MSP channel and cybersecurity space, was built to solve this exact problem. "Everything we build at Hatz starts with our partners," said Hatz CEO, Jimmy Hatzell, in the official announcement. "MSPs are the most trusted technology advisors small businesses have, and they've been asking for a real way to bring AI to their entire client base, not one account at a time." With Hatz Activate, the company, which secured $2.5 million in seed funding in early 2024, is delivering on that promise by providing the infrastructure to turn the MSP channel from a bottleneck into a high-speed conduit for safe AI.

A Command Center for the AI Economy

Hatz Activate is more than just a dashboard; it is an operating system for the mass deployment of managed AI. Integrated directly into the Hatz Admin panel that MSPs already use, it acts as a central nervous system for what was previously a chaotic, decentralized process.

The workflow begins by unifying the MSP’s client data. By syncing with Professional Services Automation (PSA) systems—the core operational software for most MSPs—or importing a simple CSV file, Hatz Activate creates a single, comprehensive view of the entire client base. The platform then automatically enriches this data, identifying each client's industry and generating tailored, practical AI use cases. This crucial step ensures that an accounting firm isn't met with a blank page, but with specific AI applications for financial analysis, while a marketing agency sees prompts for campaign generation.

From this unified command center, an MSP can orchestrate a sophisticated, multi-stage rollout. The platform’s Shadow AI detection capabilities can scan client networks to surface risky usage of consumer AI, providing the MSP with concrete data to begin a conversation about security. They can then dispatch AI Readiness Assessments at scale to qualify clients and help them understand where AI can have the most impact.

When it's time to deploy, the process is reduced from hours of manual work to a few clicks. MSPs can select entire cohorts of clients and send tailored invitations, with the platform tracking the full lifecycle of each activation. A real-time KPI dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of the entire operation: total customers, invites sent, activation rates, and overall conversion. This transforms AI deployment from a series of disjointed projects into a continuous, measurable business motion.

From Ad-Hoc Adoption to a Managed Service

The strategic implication of this platform is profound. It marks a shift from AI as a consumer product to AI as a managed, professional service. For MSPs, this opens up a significant new revenue stream and deepens their value proposition. Early partners are already reporting tangible benefits. One early adopter MSP noted a "20% boost in efficiency" for their own support teams using the Hatz platform, a productivity gain they can now systematically deliver to their clients.

By providing a secure, multi-tenant environment where MSPs can control access, manage costs, and route tasks to the most appropriate AI models (from powerful options like GPT-4 to more economical ones for simpler tasks), Hatz is creating a defensible business model for its partners. This stands in stark contrast to both enterprise-focused automation platforms like UiPath and the direct-to-consumer chaos of unmanaged ChatGPT usage. Hatz is betting on the channel, providing the tools for MSPs to build, sell, and scale their own AI practices.

This channel-centric strategy is what sets Hatz AI apart. Rather than trying to sell directly to millions of disparate SMBs, it is equipping the existing, trusted network of MSPs to do it for them. It’s a classic infrastructure play: build the rails, and the operators will run the trains.

Building the New Digital Backbone

With Hatz Activate, the company is laying down a critical piece of the digital backbone for the next era of the economy. Just as fiber optic networks enabled the cloud revolution, platforms that can safely and efficiently distribute AI capabilities will underpin future business innovation. Widespread, secure AI adoption at the SMB level is a prerequisite for more advanced, interconnected systems, from automated supply chains to intelligent urban services.

The launch of Hatz Activate is a foundational step in a larger vision. The company has already outlined plans for AI-powered customer service agents and tools for managing custom large language models, indicating a long-term strategy to build a comprehensive AI operating system for the entire SMB economy. By placing the MSP at the center of this ecosystem, Hatz AI is not just launching a product; it is formalizing an invisible network and empowering it to securely guide millions of businesses into the age of AI.