WatchGuard Introduces Rai — The Agentic AI Digital Workforce Designed Specifically for MSPs
Managed service providers have long operated at the intersection of relentless demand and finite capacity. The volume and complexity of cyber threats targeting their clients continues to escalate, yet the economics of MSP growth have historically been constrained by a single bottleneck: people. Hiring, training, and retaining skilled security analysts is expensive, slow, and unpredictable — and no amount of tooling has changed the fundamental equation. Until now. WatchGuard Technologies, the global leader in unified cybersecurity for MSPs, has launched Rai™ — a new agentic AI digital workforce built specifically for the MSP market.
Unveiled at the company's EMEA Impact Partner Conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia, Rai is an always-on digital worker that operates as a true extension of the MSP security team — detecting, correlating, and responding to threats across client environments before human intervention is required. The launch marks a deliberate shift in WatchGuard's AI strategy: from assistive AI that helps human operators work faster, to autonomous execution that operates independently at machine speed and scale.
"This is a fundamental shift in how cybersecurity gets done. For too long, growth has been constrained by people — how many analysts you can hire, train, and retain. Rai changes that equation. It enables our partners to operate continuously, act instantly, and scale far beyond the limits of traditional security teams."
— Joe Smolarski, CEO, WatchGuard Technologies
From Assistive AI to Autonomous Execution — Why the Shift Matters for MSPs
The MSP security market has not been short of AI-assisted tools. For years, detection and response platforms have incorporated machine learning to surface signals, reduce noise, and prioritise alerts. But assistance is fundamentally different from autonomy. An AI that helps an analyst work faster still requires an analyst to be present, alert, and available — which means the underlying staffing constraint remains unchanged. Rai represents a categorical departure from this model.
Rather than augmenting a human operator, Rai acts as an autonomous digital worker — continuously monitoring client environments, identifying threats, and taking authorised action in real time without waiting for human instruction. This distinction is commercially significant: MSPs can now extend coverage, improve response consistency, and absorb more client accounts without the headcount investment that has historically been the ceiling on growth.
The timing of the launch reflects broader pressures on the MSP market. Alert volumes are rising across every category of client environment, staffing costs continue to increase, and clients are demanding 24/7 coverage that smaller MSP teams cannot sustainably deliver with human-only operations. Rai is positioned as the solution that breaks the link between coverage and headcount — enabling partners to grow their managed security business without growing their analyst team at the same pace.
Rai's Three Roles — A Digital Workforce Expanding Across the MSP Operation
Rai is structured as a multi-role digital workforce, with each role designed to take on a distinct category of work that currently consumes MSP team capacity. The architecture reflects a deliberate design choice: rather than deploying a single monolithic AI, WatchGuard has built Rai as a set of specialised functions that can be expanded over time as autonomous capabilities mature across different operational domains.
Analyst Role — Available Now: Always-On Detection, Investigation & Response
The Analyst is Rai's first available role and its most immediate operational impact. It delivers always-on detection, investigation, and response across endpoint and network activity — acting as a first responder so MSP partners are no longer required to manage alerts around the clock. By handling the first-response workload autonomously, the Analyst role frees security engineers to focus on higher-value priorities: strengthening client relationships, solving complex problems, and driving business growth.
Auditor Role — Coming Soon: Continuous Compliance & Configuration Governance
The Auditor role will extend Rai's capabilities into the compliance and configuration governance domain — continuously identifying compliance gaps, flagging misconfigurations, and resolving issues such as firewall rule conflicts while maintaining comprehensive audit trails. For MSPs managing multiple client environments simultaneously, this level of continuous compliance monitoring is transformative: it replaces periodic manual reviews with persistent, autonomous oversight that catches issues before they become incidents.
Admin Role — Coming Soon: Operational Task Automation Across the MSP Estate
The Admin role will address the operational burden that currently consumes significant MSP engineering time — handling tasks including patch scheduling, certificate rotation, maintenance windows, and partner communications. These are the repetitive, time-consuming operational tasks that slow teams down and divert attention from strategic and client-facing work. By automating this layer of the MSP operation, Rai ensures that human expertise is directed where it creates the most value.
"Cyber threats are increasing in both volume and complexity, and organisations need AI that is built to work continuously across every client."
— Ben Oster, VP of Product Management, WatchGuard Technologies
WatchGuard Insights Hub — Governance and Visibility at AI-Driven Speed
A core concern for any MSP considering autonomous AI operations is the question of control. Partners are accountable to multiple clients simultaneously, and a poorly governed automated action can create risk across an entire managed estate in moments. WatchGuard has addressed this directly with the new WatchGuard Insights Hub — a centralised governance and visibility layer that makes Rai's every decision transparent, auditable, and configurable.
The Insights Hub provides centralized dashboards offering estate-wide context, with the ability to shift from a high-level MSP view to detailed, client-specific insights with a single click. The built-in Daily Brief delivers a concise summary of actions taken, items requiring attention, and real-time protection status across all managed environments. Controls are highly configurable — ensuring partners maintain complete oversight while operating at AI-driven speed and scale.
"What stood out right away was how quickly everything came together in one place. Instead of jumping between tools or piecing things together, the experience made it easier to understand what was happening and what needed attention."
— Michael Ruffolo, Senior Cyber Security Engineer & Analyst, eSecurity Solutions
What Rai Means for the Future of MSP Security Delivery
Rai's launch is part of a broader trajectory in managed security services that has been building for years. The economics of MSP growth have consistently run into the same constraint: delivering comprehensive, consistent security across a growing client base requires either proportionally more headcount or a fundamentally different operational model. Rai represents that different model — one where AI agents handle the volume, velocity, and consistency demands of multi-client security operations, while human engineers focus on judgment, strategy, and client value.
Future enhancements to Rai will include a natural-language, intent-driven interface that enables partners to interact directly with Rai — further reducing the technical overhead of configuring and directing AI-driven operations. This roadmap reflects WatchGuard's view that the MSP of the future will manage AI workers as actively as it manages human ones — directing, configuring, and holding AI agents accountable for outcomes across the client estate.
Key Takeaways
WatchGuard Technologies has launched Rai™, an agentic AI digital workforce built specifically for MSPs — unveiled at the EMEA Impact Partner Conference in Dubrovnik and representing a fundamental shift from assistive AI to autonomous execution in managed cybersecurity.
Rai's Analyst role is available now, delivering always-on 24/7/365 detection, investigation, and response across endpoint and network activity — with Auditor and Admin roles coming soon to extend coverage into compliance governance and operational task automation.
The new WatchGuard Insights Hub provides centralised, estate-wide visibility into all of Rai's actions and decisions — with single-click drill-down to client-level detail and a Daily Brief summarising actions taken, items requiring attention, and real-time protection status across managed environments.
Rai is designed to break the link between MSP growth and headcount — enabling partners to extend coverage, reduce operational burden, and scale their managed security business far beyond the limits of traditional analyst-dependent security team models. Learn more at watchguard.com.
The launch of Rai signals something important about where managed security is heading. The question for MSPs is no longer whether autonomous AI will become part of their operational model — it is how quickly they can adopt it and how well they can govern it across their client base. WatchGuard's answer, with Rai and the Insights Hub, is a platform built with MSP-grade governance at its core: autonomous where the workload demands it, configurable where the partner requires it, and transparent at every level of the operation.
To learn more about Rai and how WatchGuard is redefining MSP security delivery, visit watchguard.com.