Day Three had a different energy.
The industry’s biggest questions were still on the table, but the conversations became more action oriented. The focus shifted from possibility to progress, with partners exploring how to turn momentum into action by building AI capabilities, strengthening leadership, improving profitability and helping clients navigate new risks.
If Day Two was about understanding the opportunity, Day Three was about building toward it.
Here are the four ideas that defined Day Three at Beyond EMEA.
1. The MIP Journey Becomes Real When You Start Building
By the final day of Beyond EMEA, one message had become impossible to ignore: managed intelligence is no longer a concept. It’s becoming a workable operating model.
Building Agents Is Not That Scary challenged one of the biggest assumptions holding partners back from AI adoption. Through hands-on exercises, attendees moved beyond theory and built functioning AI agent prototypes, gaining confidence in how agents can be developed and deployed to solve real customer challenges.
In Owning the Last Mile: Where Insight Becomes Income, Pax8 Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Ryan Walsh highlighted the widening gap between growing small and medium-sized business (SMB) demand for governed AI and declining MSP readiness. He then outlined five moves partners can make to turn that opportunity into income. With SMBs outspending enterprises on IT for the first time and MSP readiness to guide them falling sharply, Walsh positioned this gap as a major opportunity for partners.
The clearest picture of that future came from Chief Product Officer Libby McIlhany and Pax8 Chief Technology Officer Avery Moon, who showed partners what running a managed intelligence practice looks like in action. Their keynote featured 8os, Pax8’s agentic workforce operating system, and 8bot, its managed AI coworker – two products designed to give partners a repeatable, billable way to deliver AI to every client. Building on Pax8 Global CEO Scott Chasin’s message that software delivers value but intelligence compounds it, they demonstrated how 8os learns each client’s business over time, while 8bot turns every employee it supports into a recurring revenue opportunity. For partners, the promise is straightforward: deploy an AI coworker in minutes, govern agents across the entire customer base from one place, and turn AI consumption – both your own and your clients’ – into a recurring service with margins you control. Together, 8os and 8bot provide the foundation for making managed intelligence operational, measurable and scalable.
Beyond the Keynote extended that vision into a hands-on session that showed how partners can deploy 8bot for everyday challenges such as inbox overload and inventory management while governing repeatable, autonomous agents through 8os. Attendees were encouraged to visit 8os.com to start building and deploying agents and to explore the technology further at the Pax8 Managed Intelligence booth.
The live demos proved very popular, with crowds gathering to see agentic AI in action and explore how it could address everyday business needs. Attendees responded favourably to the real-world examples, reinforcing demand for accessible, governed AI solutions that partners can deploy at scale.
What This Means for Your Business
Managed intelligence is already taking shape. The partners who start learning, testing and deploying now will be better positioned to capture the opportunity ahead.
2. The Future Belongs to Businesses That Invest in People
Technology may be changing rapidly, but Day Three repeatedly reinforced a simple truth: people remain the ultimate differentiator.
Leading an MSP: The Lessons No One Teaches You offered a candid look at the leadership decisions that shape business outcomes, from hiring and delegation to creating alignment around purpose and long-term goals. It reinforced that sustainable growth depends on leaders creating clarity, empowering their teams and making intentional decisions as the business evolves.
Service Manager Survival Guide explored how leaders can create structure, consistency and efficiency while navigating increasingly complex workloads. Building AI-Native Teams: From Projects to Products tackled a question partners are already hearing: “Can you build us an agent?” The answer starts with small, cross-functional teams that unite software engineering and service delivery around a sharp product brief – shared context for both people and agents. The message was clear: prove value for one client before scaling, measure return on investment from day one and plan for token costs, data residency, retention and long-term ownership. Building is cheaper than ever; owning the outcome is not.
What This Means for Your Business
AI improves productivity, but leadership, culture and trust still decide how far a business can go. The organisations that invest in their people today will be better prepared for lasting change.
3. Trust Remains the Foundation of Transformation
Every conversation about intelligence eventually leads to trust.
In the Titanium Sponsor keynote, CrowdStrike brought the AI security challenge into focus, showing how adversaries exploit trusted tools and identities to move from endpoints into cloud and SaaS environments. For partners, the priority is connected visibility and rapid response across AI tools, identities and cloud environments, supported by Falcon Guardian, now available through the Pax8 Marketplace.
In I Am an MSP. Now What? Navigating the Age of AI, Hornetsecurity Chief Product Officer Adrien Gendre showed how AI is amplifying familiar attacks through greater scale and sophistication. For partners, the priority is strengthening the fundamentals by tightening sharing permissions, automating reported-email analysis and making security awareness more actionable so customers can adopt AI securely.
What Would You Do? Turning Cybersecurity Conversations into Business Conversations showed how MSPs can move beyond traditional security presentations and create more meaningful customer engagement. Built around a gamified workshop, attendees worked in groups to discuss real-world scenarios, challenge assumptions and uncover hidden risks. The session reinforced that trust is built through conversation, rather than instruction.
What This Means for Your Business
Customers don’t need more alerts. They need trusted guidance. Partners that can translate technical risk into business decisions will continue to strengthen their role as strategic advisors.
4. High-Performing Businesses Are Built Intentionally
Growth wasn’t framed as something that happens by accident. It was presented as the result of deliberate decisions made consistently over time.
How to Break Through Your Next Business Plateau encouraged partners to look beyond revenue as a measure of success and focus instead on business maturity. Pax8 VP of Partner Enablement David Schafran introduced four stages of growth, each defined by different leadership structures, processes and operating models. The key message was that many growth challenges are actually maturity challenges, and breaking through the next plateau often requires changing how the business operates rather than simply pursuing more revenue.
Marketing that Moves the Needle showed partners how to turn marketing into measurable growth. The formula: define your ideal client, balance long-term nurture with short-term demand capture and stay consistently visible. Vendor marketing development funds can fuel bold experiments provided partners bring a clear audience, message, plan and reporting framework.
Great Client or Terrible Profit Trap? How to Find and Fix Hidden Profitability Gaps showed partners how to assess the profitability of fixed-fee agreements. Using complete time entry and the fixed fee effective ratio, the session offered a monthly process for identifying patterns and addressing issues in training, documentation, standardisation or pricing before adding headcount.
Even sessions centred on growth and visibility, including Your Power Move: Pax8 Premier Sports Marketing Panel, reinforced a common theme: differentiation matters, and thoughtful investment can create a meaningful competitive advantage.
What This Means for Your Business
The strongest businesses don’t leave growth to chance. They build repeatable systems for profitability, marketing, leadership and customer success that continue creating value over time.
Vendor and Partner Awards Announced
We celebrate the partners and vendors that have excelled through their Pax8 partnership. Check out the full list of winners below.
Partners
| EMEA Partner of the Year | Air IT Group |
| EMEA Managed Intelligence Partner of the Year | CMS Group Ltd |
| EMEA Peak Performance - Baltics | ABIAN |
| EMEA Peak Performance - UK & Ireland | Air IT Group |
| EMEA Peak Performance - Continuity | Apex Computing Services |
| EMEA Peak Performance - Network and Communications | Apex Computing Services |
| EMEA Peak Performance - DACH | Brack Alltron |
| EMEA Peak Performance - Nordics | developit |
| EMEA Peak Performance - Benelux & France | TCC smart IT solutions |
| EMEA Peak Performance - Security | Logiq |
| EMEA Peak Performance - Operations | Nebula IT Services Ltd |
| EMEA Peak Performance - Infrastructure | Niteflite Networxx GmbH |
| EMEA Peak Performance - Productivity | Nostra |
| North American Partner Collaboration Recognition | Integritek |
| APAC Partner Collaboration Recognition | Pit Stop Technologies |
| EMEA Nonprofit Partnership | Qlic IT |
| EMEA Women in Technology | Rachael Swanwick-Smith |
| EMEA Pax8 Hall of Fame | Redinet Limited |
| EMEA Pax8 Champion | SuitIT |
| EMEA Social Impact | Think Cloud |
Vendors
| EMEA Vendor of the Year | SentinelOne |
| EMEA Managed Intelligence Vendor of the Year | Microsoft |
| EMEA Partner's Most Valuable Vendor | Check Point |
| EMEA Most Valuable Vendor - Security | CrowdStrike |
| EMEA Breakthrough Vendor | Cybersentriq |
| EMEA Peak Performance | Hornetsecurity by proofpoint |
| EMEA Most Valuable Vendor - Productivity | Microsoft |
| EMEA Most Valuable Vendor - Infrastructure | Nerdio |
| EMEA Most Valuable Vendor - Continuity | NinjaOne |
| EMEA Most Valuable Vendor - Operations | Rewst |
| EMEA Collaboration Award | usecure |
The Championship Mindset: A Fireside Chat with Peter Schmeichel
Closing out the day, Marc Groetelaars, SVP of Sales and Marketing for EMEA, sat down with Manchester United’s and Denmark’s legendary goalkeeper, Peter Schmeichel, for a conversation on what it really takes to win.
Schmeichel shared how he arrived at Manchester United as the final piece of a championship puzzle, and how Sir Alex Ferguson’s deep due diligence and trust in his players turned exceptional individuals into a true team. His lessons translate straight to business: be crystal clear on the job, trust your people to deliver it and own your mistakes when they happen.
Most of all, he reminded the room that success is built long before the final whistle. As Peter put it, “The trophy is what people see, but what is really interesting is what happens in the pivots.”
Our Closing Party Was a Hit from the Ground Up
Beyond EMEA 2026 was packed with exciting product announcements, so it seemed more than appropriate that our special musical guest, Basement Jaxx, had us all pondering the question “Where’s Your Head At.”
Carrying the Momentum Forward
After three days of keynotes, breakout sessions and meaningful conversations, one thing was clear: the future of the channel will not be shaped by technology alone.
Across Beyond EMEA, partners saw managed intelligence move from ambition to action. Pax8 President and Chief Commerce Officer Nick Heddy challenged attendees to address the culture, process and technology debt slowing transformation. Pax8 Global CEO Scott Chasin outlined the market forces raising the value of trust. Libby McIlhany and Avery Moon showed how partners can start building, governing and scaling managed intelligence in practice.
The opportunity is no longer theoretical. The tools are emerging, and the infrastructure is taking shape. The partners ready to act now will help define where the channel goes next.
We’ll see you next year in Madrid!
