Build IT LIVE 2026: A Full Day Across Four Tracks

Day 1 gave the room a framework. Day 2 handed them a schedule with no easy answers: four rooms running at once, every forty minutes, all day long. No mainstage to default to, no single story everyone shares. Just five rounds of choosing, back to back, from 9am to 5pm. By the time breakfast plates were cleared, the choosing had already started. 

9:00: The Morning Rush

The first slot set the tone for what kind of day this would be. Down one hallway, Rich Carlton and William Flannery took the hardest possible opening question head on: will AI make MSPs obsolete? No hedging, no reassurance lap, just an honest look at where the model holds and where it doesn’t. A few doors down, Paul Redding had a packed room working through RMM strategy, the unglamorous platform decisions that quietly determine how well everything else in the stack performs. Wilfredo Santiago made the case that cybersecurity in the AI era isn’t a cost center anymore, it’s a value proposition, if MSPs are willing to sell it that way. And in the room built for founders drowning in data, Joshua Oakes gave operators permission to admit they have more dashboards than insight, then started fixing that. 

9:50: Round Two

By 9:50, the day asked the same question again: stay in the room you’re in, or move. Baxter Lanius broke down exactly where automation shows up in EBITDA and where it just shows up on a slide, a session that turned “AI ROI” from a buzzword into a spreadsheet. Ahmed Elattar and Zak Pearlman built out what an autonomous workplace actually looks like day to day, less about robots, more about who’s making which decisions and why. Courtney Cress, Jason Borzik, and Wesley Brown tackled the tiered service delivery model, the structure that lets an MSP scale without the owner personally approving every ticket. And Bill McLaughlin returned to the stage, this time on the buy side, walking through what actually goes wrong when one MSP acquires another. 

11:00: The Specialists Take Over

Late morning belonged to the people who go deep rather than wide. Shahin Pirooz walked through securing AI agents with the same rigor as any other identity on the network, a session that landed hard given how many rooms that morning had just talked about deploying agents without a second thought for what happens when one gets compromised. Cooper Edmunds returned to go further into MFA bypass and token theft, a sharper, more technical cut of the thread he opened on Day 1. Darren Strong, Habib Malik, and Michael Strong compared onsite, nearshore, and offshore staffing models with real numbers instead of assumptions. And Kevin Mann and Roli Points made cyber insurance sound like an opportunity instead of paperwork, framing it as one more thing an MSP can sell rather than merely survive. 

11:50: The Late Morning Push

The last round before lunch went sharper still. Jeremy Williams, Ken Goldstein, and Melissa Bryant took on the hardest conversation of the week: how to tell your team, and your clients, that AI is changing the job without triggering panic on either side. Michael “Yaro” Yaroshefsky made the case for saying yes to AI without losing control of it, a session built for the leader caught between excitement and liability. Ed Pawlowski and Brent Whitfield walked through what a genuinely useful advisory board looks like, not a ceremonial one. And Alexander Gertsburg brought the legal lens, the fine print MSPs are agreeing to without reading closely enough. 

1:30 and 2:20: The Afternoon Turn

Lunch broke the day in half, and the tone shifted with it. This was where the business questions got sharpest. Will Nobles opened the afternoon with a straight answer on how top MSPs are actually using AI to win more clients, not theorize about it. Chris Savage, Kevin Mann, and Michael Strong worked through the mindset shift from technician to CEO, the identity change that trips up more founders than any technical hurdle. Then came the money conversations: Dan Ruhl and Timothy Britt broke down exactly what private equity screens for in an MSP acquisition, and Chris Caprio, David Bennett, and Paul Nebb coached the room on getting the C-suite to talk business instead of tech, a skill that closes more deals than any product demo. David Powell cut straight through the AI tool hype with something operators could actually deploy Monday morning, and Amy Sellers showed what a PSA looks like once it stops being a ticketing system and starts being operational intelligence. 

One room ran on its own schedule entirely. From 1 to 4:15, the Tech Advisory Sponsor Shark Tank pulled participating sponsors into a closed-door session, pitching and stress-testing their platforms in front of each other rather than a general audience. Invite-only, and a different kind of value than a breakout, but part of what made the afternoon feel like more than one conference happening under a single roof. 

3:30 and 4:20: The Close

By late afternoon, the last rooms turned reflective. Jacob Hart and Jordan Hart made the uncomfortable point that most AI underperforms because of what never got documented in the first place, garbage in, garbage out, still true. Brent Whitfield and Rob Koch closed out the Leadership track with the long view: building a business that runs without you, not just one that survives you. Cosmo Mariano made the case for becoming AI native as an operating model rather than a feature toggle. And Jimmy Hatzell closed the day with maybe the boldest reframe of the week: MSPs are already the forward-deployed engineers of SMB AI, whether they’ve branded it that way yet or not. 

The Evening

Then the day exhaled. The Solutions Pavilion Pub Crawl opened at 5, the same easy wind-down that closed Day 1. By 6:30, the room scattered into small-group dinners across Jersey City, the conversations from twenty different rooms finally converging into a few, over a meal instead of a slide deck. 

One day left. Day 3 brings the AI Accelerator and the Great Gatsby night on the NYSE trading floor. 

The Full Day, By Track

For anyone who wants the complete lineup rather than the highlight reel, here is every session from Day 2, organized by track. 

AI & Future Track

Leadership Track

Operations Track

Growth & Sales Track

BUILD IT LIVE 2027

Registration is open, and early bird pricing is live at $199. Lock in your seat before the rate moves. 

Register for Build IT LIVE 2027 →