By: Alex Mercer – SeaPRwire – MSP operators already know the AI tools exist. The pain sits elsewhere. They still lack a clear path to deploy them without wrecking margins or burning the team. Most conferences sell the vision. Build IT LIVE is selling the build. Zack Kass walks into that room on day one. The question is whether the operators walk out with working systems.
Zack Kass, former Head of Go-To-Market at OpenAI, headlines the opening day of Build IT LIVE 2026. The event is IT By Design’s eighth annual conference for managed service provider leaders. It runs August 3 through 5 at the Hyatt Regency Jersey City. More than 500 MSP founders and decision makers will attend. Kass helped shape the commercial strategy that brought ChatGPT to enterprise buyers. On the mainstage he joins IT By Design founders Sunny and Kam Kaila. The room itself is stacked: 92 percent C-suite attendance. The person in the next seat is making the same buying and implementation calls right now. Days One and Two run four tracks—AI & Future, Leadership, Operations, and Growth & Sales—with more than 40 breakout sessions. Day Three is the AI Accelerator. It opens with a mainstage keynote and a live AI panel. The room then splits into three consecutive rounds of hands-on workshops across morning, afternoon, and late afternoon. Owner-operators build. Senior executives map strategy. Every attendee is supposed to leave with working tools rather than slides: N8N workflow templates ready to deploy and a pricing guide for reselling AI services to clients. The day closes with the ITBD Partner Awards, followed by a Great Gatsby-themed night at the New York Stock Exchange. Before the event, attendees can take the AI Index, a short self-assessment that scores an MSP’s AI maturity and flags the biggest gaps. IT By Design built the agenda around that score so operators can match their level to the right Accelerator track. Sunny Kaila, Founder and CEO of IT By Design, said understanding AI was never the bottleneck for the industry. Knowing how to build the team and the culture around it is. That is the gap the event was built to close. Ed Pawlowski, COO of Meriplex, said the biggest value each year comes from the relationships, the conversations, and the collaboration with other MSPs that shape new ideas and long-term direction. Full agenda and details sit at itbd.net/live. IT By Design itself operates as the operating partner behind MSPs that run technology for small and mid-size businesses across North America. The firm builds and runs global delivery teams, 24×7 NOC and SOC operations, AI automation, and performance management systems for those providers.
The official framing is operator-led sessions and a hands-on Accelerator. The industry subtext is simpler. MSPs sit between enterprise AI hype and the actual daily work of keeping client systems running. Most have already tested tools. Few have turned those tests into priced, repeatable services that protect margins. A keynote from the person who commercialized ChatGPT for enterprises can surface the commercial patterns that worked at scale. The real test is whether the three workshop rounds produce deployable N8N templates and a usable pricing guide before the awards start. If the AI Index correctly routes each operator to the right track, the day can close the gap between knowing and shipping. If the workshops stay surface-level, the event becomes another expensive conversation. The practical move for any MSP still sitting on unused AI experiments is to score the AI Index now, pick the matching track, and treat the workshops as a production deadline rather than a listening session. That is the only way the room turns a former OpenAI commercial leader’s appearance into working systems instead of another set of notes.
Author bio: Alex Mercer, technical director and geek analyst inside major Silicon Valley engineering organizations focused on infrastructure and operator-scale AI deployment.
source https://newsroom.seaprwire.com/press-releases/technologies/openais-former-gtm-lead-walks-into-500-msp-founders-will-they-leave-with-tools-or-just-another-keynote/