Fleet hopes to be the MDM provider for the AI Era

Fleet, the independent, open-source, multi-platform MDM service, recently announced its new partner program for VARs and MSPs serving enterprise customers and recruited MobileIron co-founder Suresh Batchu to serve on the company’s board. With those moves in mind, I caught up with company CEO Mike McNeil to find out more about the Fleet’s plans.

Given the company’s roots in open source, working with partners is a good way to enable it to support a variety of enterprise needs, with resellers and MSPs playing an active role in customizing the core solution for those requirements.

Fleet and the Mac

Fleet is just as happy managing Macs as it is Linux systems and integrates well with existing tools — as long as they support open standards and APIs. This gives it a unique insight into Apple device adoption in the enterprise.

McNeil confirmed that both Apple and Linux systems are seeing rapid increases in deployment. “The new MacBook Neo is now cheaper than comparable PCs, so Apple adoption is increasing, but so are other OS options like desktop Linux,” he said. (Desktop Linux reached 3.16% market share in March, says StatCounter, while OS X hit 9.52% and Windows fell to 60.8%.)

That’s not to say migration to any platform is always easy. “I spoke to an IT director yesterday from a casino company whose team had bought a couple of Neos and tried enrolling them in Microsoft Intune, but gave up,” McNeil told me. This was because they hit an unrelated bug with their traditional MDM, didn’t have great diagnostics to work with, and the IT director then “assumed” that it must be because the Neo wouldn’t work for enterprise use. As it turns out, the issue was with the MDM, McNeil said.

“At Fleet, we’ve enrolled MacBook Neos ourselves with no problems, and seen customers do the same,” he said. “Enterprises are usually mixed OS environments, and [MDM] solutions limited to a single ecosystem, like Jamf that’s Apple only, are pretty restrictive.

Why partnerships matter

“Enterprises are very particular, and they often operate in vastly different ways,” said McNeil. “For example, there are many, many ways to automatically make sure employees can get on to a Wi-Fi network or a VPN on their first day at work.” 

Fleet, he said, works to balance needs between different parts of a company – infosec and IT, for example. “We optimize for baby steps, small iterations,” McNeil said, pointing out that new features are documented and explained as they are introduced.

“The first generation of device management was built for control and compliance,” said Batchu. “The next generation needs to be built for speed, automation, and how modern teams actually operate. Fleet is taking a fundamentally different approach with infrastructure as code and AI-driven workflows, and I’m excited to help shape that direction.

“In 2026, every company needs to do more with less.  Budgets are shifting towards AI and innovation, forcing leaders to extract more value from existing infrastructure. Some IT estates have been around for 20, 30, 35 years, and organizational structures, technical debt, and even entire jobs exist just to keep the lights on. But when you suddenly go from patching monthly to patching in hours, something has got to give.”

He argued that the adoption of a partnership model should help companies move through digital transformation with Fleet while maintaining tight budgets. Partners can help train employees and better understand the context of company need.

It’s also about making sure things are usable. Citing the “Concur” effect, which he describes as a product designed to satisfy high-level stakeholder requirements rather than the needs of those actually using the software, McNeil says he has a “personal vendetta” against complexity in software design.

What will enterprises need?

It’s a move to make every platform easy to manage using powerful tools optimized for the unique needs of customers. “By 2030, IT will need reliable infrastructure that works with the productivity and security tools they’re already using throughout their business.” IT and security teams won’t want separate platforms for each OS or function, and they’ll want to use chat to get projects started. 

AI is a constant. At least one current Fleet customer now has tens of thousands of computers running AI agents and recently gave each of its employees a headless “claw” — a powerful AI agent based on OpenClaw, the free, open-source AI agent software that is accessed via remote computers.

Fleet helps IT recognize the use of shadow AI tools across the business, as well as tracking other app installs, licenses, and use. “So whether you want to find out who’s using the Claude app, who’s using shadow AI tools they shouldn’t be using, or just how many extra, expensive Bloomberg terminal licenses you’re paying for that aren’t actually getting used, you can do that in Fleet, right from your MDM.” 

As McNeil sees it, the emerging AI services environment favors Linux for AI, with other platforms the province of human workers. “I don’t think we’ll see a world where most human users are running desktop Linux in five years, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft and Apple are neck and neck in the enterprise” by then,” he said.

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