Day Two opened hard, moved fast and never lost the thread. From Nick Heddy\u2019s community keynote to Scott Chasin\u2019s visionary charge, one message cut through every breakout: the channel isn\u2019t entering a transition period. It\u2019s in a transformation period, and the difference matters.<\/p>\n
Underneath every keynote and breakout, the same question kept surfacing: what does this mean for your business right now? Here are five of the top takeaways. And be sure to check out our Beyond 2026 keynote livestreams here<\/a>!<\/p>\n Most MSPs are chasing the MIP opportunity from the outside in \u2014 looking at new tools, new platforms and new offerings. But the real barrier isn’t external. Becoming a Managed Intelligence Provider starts inside your business, and Nick Heddy spent his keynote helping partners see exactly where.<\/p>\n Microsoft Agent 365 for Managed Intelligence was the headline announcement from Nick’s keynote, giving MSPs multi-tenant governance of agentic AI across their client base through the Pax8 Agent Store in July. But Nick framed it around something every partner has felt: the gap between ambition and execution isn\u2019t a personal failure. It\u2019s legacy debt in culture, process and tech.<\/p>\n Building on that foundation, Nick introduced Outcome Leverage Efficiency, a formula to help partners identify which work is a treadmill and which is turbocharged. He also announced the Agentic Workforce Economy report<\/a>, the Managed Intelligence Provider Program and Voyager Alliance Rewards<\/a>, then introduced the Managed Intelligence Alliance to help the channel tackle that debt together. The message was clear: the debt is payable, and this community can start paying it down.<\/p>\n From MSP to MIP<\/strong>: Practical Steps to Kickstart Your Managed Intelligence Journey focused on the behavioral shifts required to actually make the transition. The message was both simple and confronting: the shift starts with mindset. And the first move is reintroducing yourself to your clients as something fundamentally new.<\/p>\n AI + Engineers 101: Reskilling for the AI Agent Era<\/strong> brought that internal transformation to the technician level. Every ticket update, asset record and documentation habit your engineers carry today is either feeding or starving the AI systems you\u2019re building. This session showed how daily work shapes AI agent effectiveness and the practical steps to improve it.<\/p>\n What this means for your business: The MIP journey starts with internal readiness. If your team is running on manual workflows, siloed tools and a services-era mindset, adding AI will only create more complexity. Nick gave partners a diagnosis, a formula, a program and a product to act on The breakout sessions showed how to shift your mindset and skillset.<\/p>\n AI is reallocating value fast, and the channel is in the middle of that shift. The businesses that move early gain leverage. The ones that wait lose ground.<\/p>\n Standing before an audience of 3,500 and hundreds more livestreaming, Scott argued that the race to Managed Intelligence has already begun. Small businesses are about to demand the same intelligence layer enterprises have been building toward, and the partners who serve them represent the last mile that makes it real.<\/p>\n He named Managed Intelligence as a new industry category born from what the channel saw that hyperscalers and frontier labs missed. While major tech companies focused on transforming themselves, few asked the more important question: how do we equip partners to transform their customers? The Managed Intelligence Provider fills that gap, governing agentic workforces, securing intelligence at scale and delivering outcomes small businesses cannot build alone.<\/p>\n He closed on a point that cut through the noise of every AI announcement this year: in a world where models are commoditizing, trust is the scarce resource. And that trust has already been earned.<\/p>\n From Titanium sponsor, Microsoft’s<\/a> Nicole Dezen called AI the biggest growth opportunity in a generation and urged partners to turn it into measurable outcomes with security and governance built in from the start. For SMBs, she pointed to Microsoft 365 Business Premium, Copilot, Purview and Agent 365 as the core stack, with multi-tenant support available now and more management capabilities coming this year. Her message echoed Nick Heddy’s: become customer zero and transform your own business first.<\/p>\n What this means for your business: The acceleration is here and the roadmap is clearer than ever. Scott framed the opportunity. Nicole mapped the tools to capture it. In a world where AI models are commoditizing fast, the trust you\u2019ve already built with clients is your strongest competitive advantage.<\/p>\n Managed Intelligence depends on trust, and trust depends on protection. Security has to evolve alongside intelligence because AI is creating new attack surfaces, threat vectors and compliance demands as quickly as it creates opportunity. MSPs that treat security as a checkbox will own the liability when something goes wrong.<\/p>\n The CrowdStrike Titanium Sponsor Panel: The AI Frontier Challenge brought that urgency to the mainstage. Matt Lee, Security and Compliance Senior Director at Pax8, joined Daniel Danielli, VP of Global Scale Partnerships at CrowdStrike<\/a>, Jordan Silva, Director of Managed Services at Mirazon<\/a>, and David Lewien, Founder and CEO at Go West IT<\/a> to examine how MSPs and MIPs can help SMBs navigate AI-driven threats. The panel highlighted emerging risks, the gap between enterprise-grade protection and SMB realities, and the shift to collaborative, AI-powered security. The takeaway: platform-based, machine-driven security is no longer optional. For MIPs, it is the baseline.<\/p>\n Inside a Live Security Consult<\/strong> put a real security hygiene consult onstage with a mock client. It offered an unfiltered look at how experienced providers uncover risks, guide the conversation and turn technical findings into business decisions. Partners saw the exact questions, frameworks and communication techniques used to build trust and drive next steps. Not theory. A repeatable motion they could use the same day.<\/p>\n Attacking AI pushed further into new territory, sharing case studies, tactics and methodology from AI assessments conducted in 2024 and 2025. If AI is in your stack, understanding how it can be attacked is no longer optional. The session\u2019s seven-point methodology for assessing AI-enabled systems, including a prompt injection taxonomy, gave security-focused partners a framework rarely found in the channel.<\/p>\n What this means for your business: Security and intelligence aren’t parallel tracks; one enables the other. Clients will only trust you to deliver Managed Intelligence if they trust you to protect their business first. In a world where AI is creating new attack surfaces daily, “we handle your IT security” is no longer a complete answer.<\/p>\n Time is the most finite resource in your business. Right now, most of it is being spent on manual coordination, reactive dispatch, misaligned service agreements and processes that were never designed to scale. Before you can operate like a MIP, you have to free up the capacity to think like one.<\/p>\n Building Agents Is Not That Scary: Hands-on Agent Development<\/strong> was so popular it ran twice. The workshop broke down agent creation into simple, practical steps and participants left with a functioning AI agent prototype. The barrier to building is lower than almost every MSP in that room expected, and making that barrier visible was the whole point.<\/p>\n The Service Manager Survival Guide<\/strong> returned by popular demand with practical guidance for structuring the day, prioritizing competing demands and creating systems for consistent execution, while showing how AI can make the role more manageable without replacing what makes great service managers irreplaceable.<\/p>\n Outcomes over Effort: Strategic Account Management<\/strong> reframed account management as growth leadership. Clients renew because they trust you to drive measurable progress through meetings that create momentum, business reviews that lead to decisions and AI that surfaces expansion signals early.<\/p>\n What this means for your business: Operational transformation and intelligence transformation are the same track. Every friction point in your service delivery is a place where AI can create capacity. And capacity is what allows your team to do the work that actually makes you a MIP: strategic client guidance, outcome delivery and trusted advisor relationships that no competitor can easily replicate.<\/p>\n Referrals and founder hustle got you here. They won’t get you to where MIPs need to be. Sustainable, scalable growth requires intentional client selection, a defined go-to-market motion, pricing that reflects real value and financial visibility that goes beyond gut instinct.<\/p>\n How to Stop Losing Deals You Should’ve Won<\/strong> introduced an AI-enabled go-to-market framework that aligns sales, marketing and customer experience into one growth engine. Real-world examples and templates showed how AI can target the right accounts, personalize outreach at scale and spot churn early.<\/p>\n Breaking the Cycle: How Smart Client Selection Transforms MSP Growth<\/strong> used two simple visual models \u2014 the Cycle of Sadness and the Cycle of Happiness \u2014 to show how desperation-driven client selection creates poor margins and burnout, while intentional selection drives profitability and scalable marketing.<\/p>\n The Vertical Advantage: Why Specialization Beats Generalization and the Industry Intelligence<\/strong> panel made the case that true vertical expertise, including a deeper grasp of workflows, regulations and pain points, creates premium positioning that generalists can\u2019t match.<\/p>\n What this means for your business: You cannot build a MIP on a broken growth engine. The intelligence era rewards providers who show up with intention: intentional client selection, intentional pricing and intentional go-to-market. Every session in this cluster was a tool for increasing momentum. If you only implement one thing from Day Two, make it a system.<\/p>\n1. Build AI Internally Before You Sell It Externally<\/h3>\n
2. The AI Market Is Shifting Now. MSPs Can’t Wait.<\/h3>\n
3. AI Is Making SMB Cybersecurity More Complex and More Urgent<\/h3>\n
4. Operational Efficiency Is the Path to Managed Intelligence<\/h3>\n
5. Sustainable MSP Growth Requires Systems, Not Hustle<\/h3>\n
Gold Sponsors Rapid Fire Pitches<\/h4>\n