Build IT LIVE is IT By Design’s annual conference for MSP owners and executives, and this August marks its eighth edition. It has grown every year into one of the few rooms in the industry where the person next to you is working through the same decision you are, not pitching you a product from a booth. No theoretical frameworks, no vendor keynotes dressed up as thought leadership. Just operators running $10M+ businesses sharing what’s working, what’s broken, and what they’re building next.
Most MSPs still send one person: the owner or the CEO. That person comes home with a notebook full of ideas and no one on the team who was in the room when the idea landed. Three weeks later, half the energy from the conference has already faded into the day-to-day.
The agenda this year runs across four tracks. AI and the Future of MSPs covers where automation is actually headed and how to build a roadmap instead of running one-off pilots. Leadership focuses on the harder parts of running a growth-stage business: building your next layer of managers, holding the culture together as headcount scales, and making decisions under pressure. Growth and Sales looks at pricing, retention, and the mechanics of moving upmarket. And then there’s Operations, the track built specifically for the people running delivery day to day, and the clearest case yet for sending more than one person from your business.
Why the delivery team belongs in the room
Your COO and delivery leads are the ones who actually run the machine every day. They feel margin compression before it hits the P&L. They know which SLA is slipping before the board does. They’re the first to notice when a process that worked at 30 engineers starts to break at 60.
The Operations track this year is built around exactly those pressure points, and it pays off far more when the person hearing it is the one who can act on it Monday morning. A CEO can bring home a new pricing philosophy. Only a COO can walk in Monday and actually change how tickets get routed.
What’s on the Operations agenda
PSA in the AI Era looks at how AI is changing ticket routing, dispatch, and workflow inside the platforms your team already runs every day, whether that’s ConnectWise, Halo, or Autotask. Practical, not theoretical. The session is built around what’s actually deployable this quarter, not a five-year vision.
Tiered Delivery breaks down how growth-stage MSPs structure L1 through L3 engineering talent to keep quality high while scaling headcount responsibly. It’s a direct look at where tiering pays off and where it just adds handoff friction that slows tickets down instead of speeding them up.
Scaling Without Breaking Margins is the session most delivery leads ask for by name. The real payoff shows up in where automation actually protects EBITDA and where it quietly erodes it, with real numbers instead of vague promises about efficiency.
The KPIs That Actually Tell You If Your MSP Is Healthy closes the track with the metrics that matter and the ones that lie to you. This is one of the most requested topics on the whole agenda, and for good reason: most delivery dashboards are full of numbers that look fine right up until they don’t.
Beyond the sessions
Coaching Corner runs alongside the Operations track with 30-minute one-on-one sessions with MSP leaders speaking at Build IT LIVE on AI operations, team scaling, and cybersecurity strategy. It’s a natural extension for a delivery lead who wants to work through a specific bottleneck one-on-one rather than in a session room. And Tuesday evening’s topic-based sponsor dinners give delivery leaders a table to keep the conversation going well past the last breakout of the day.
Send more than one person
A CEO walks away with strategy. A COO walks away with an execution plan. Bring both, and the two conversations happen on the plane home instead of three weeks later over a fragmented recap. Teams that send their delivery leads alongside leadership tend to move faster on what they learned, because the person who needs to build it heard it firsthand, asked the follow-up question in the room, and can start the Monday morning conversation from the same starting point as the CEO.
Build IT LIVE 2026 runs August 3 through 5 at the Hyatt Regency Jersey City. Registration is $1,495 per person and covers all three days, including the AI Accelerator on August 5. Bring your COO. Bring your delivery lead. The room is built for exactly the decisions they make every week.
