ATLANTA (Sept. 22, 2026) DataTrends Technology Corporation has been named a top-ten finalist in the AI Powered category at the 2026 MSP Titans of the Industry Awards. The winner will be announced at a gala in Beverly Hills, California, in December.

The Titans are the highest honors in managed IT services. Presented by Kaseya, they draw entries from providers across North America and around the world. A managed services provider, or MSP, is the outside firm that runs a business’s technology, cybersecurity, and help desk, either alongside an in-house IT team or in place of one. For many small and mid-sized companies, that firm acts as their chief technology officer.

Kaseya recognized DataTrends as an MSP Industry Leader at the 2025 awards for its work with construction and engineering firms. This year’s finalist spot is for the way the company helps clients put AI to work inside their operations without opening a back door to their data.

“AI technology is smart, but it lacks wisdom, and without the proper checks and balances, it can become catastrophic,” said Kevin Dunn, founder and CEO of DataTrends.

Where the harm actually is

Dunn is quick to say the technology is neutral. The harm, he argues, comes from what people have handed it, and from what has been taken from people in its name. Most of that harm traces to generative AI, the kind that writes, answers, and acts on instructions.

Over the past two years, businesses wired AI assistants and “agents” into their email, calendars, payment systems, and customer records, usually through a single permission screen, and rarely with anyone asking whether the connection was secured, where the data goes, or who else can reach it. The same access that lets an assistant act on your behalf lets an attacker act as you. Criminals moved faster than the companies they target: phishing emails without the telltale typos, cloned voices on the phone, fake invoices that match the real ones. Dunn says he has seen substantial sums lost to changes in ACH bank payment details that “seemed” legitimate.

Then there is the quieter problem of trust, and it runs both ways. People trust what AI tells them: it will invent a statistic, a legal citation, or a client detail and deliver it in the same tone it uses for the truth. And people trust it with what they tell it: an employee who pastes a client contract into a free chatbot to save ten minutes has handed it to a company that may keep it, train on it, and serve it back to anyone who asks the right question.

The costs are no longer hypothetical. DataTrends has watched clients it served for decades, law firms in particular, lose ground as AI undercut the work they billed for. It has watched people lose jobs to software that was sold as a replacement for them.

“I don’t want to dismiss that real people have had their lives turned upside down by this, and a lot of those decisions were made on promises the technology has not kept,” Dunn said. “The discernment on which tools are truly worth the buy-in is still as prevalent a conversation today as it was two years ago. Take ChatGPT. It was hyped for excellent copywriting and marketing, and now we are inundated with AI slop, copy that talks in circles and leaves you wondering what, who, and ‘why did I just waste my time.’ When we ask how this happened at such a scale, it reveals a huge gap in the race to AI victory: who is responsible for the output? Who owns the decisions your AI agent is making?”

Moving AI from neutral to good

DataTrends’ position is that AI becomes good for a business through the humans who decide what it may touch, check what it produces, and stay accountable for the result, including to the people whose work it changes. In practice, the company encourages clients to ask three questions about every AI tool: What does it have access to? What happens when it is wrong? Who answers for it, and for the people it affects?

DataTrends is open about where it draws its own line. AI helps produce its marketing, strengthens its security defenses, and is built into the monitoring and services it offers. It does not answer a client’s email or pick up a support call. The person on the other end should never have to wonder whether they are talking to a person. That approach is paying off in an unexpected way: this year, the company’s largest source of new client inquiries is people who were referred to it by an AI assistant.

“In a world of robots, use the robots, but be a human,” Dunn said. “That is the whole strategy. The tools are going to keep getting better, and your discernment has to keep pace with them.”