There are quarters that move the business forward, and there are quarters that move the market forward. Q2 2026 was the latter.

Across more than 30 events — from HPE/Juniper in Tahoe and the AWS Summits, to Cisco Live, NLIT Kansas City, CCISDA, NCLGISA, MTUG Mississippi, the Microsoft CIO Summit, CIO Academy, Achievers, our Mattahunt mural unveiling featured in Sports Illustrated, the Mulvineti Golf Tournament, the Redbird Roost in St. Louis, AJCU, and our flagship 4th Annual Newport Summit — we sat with thousands of customers, partners, and practitioners. And the signal we heard was unmistakable: the market has stopped asking if AI will reshape managed services. It is now asking how fast we can help them operationalize it — safely, profitably, and at scale.

Before I go any further, I want to start where it belongs — with gratitude. None of this happens without the extraordinary work of our marketing and sales teams. The events you executed, the customers you hosted, the partners you aligned, the late nights, the early flights, the on-site pivots, the post-event follow-ups — every conversation in this blog post traces back to your craft. To Kimberly, Remi, Tina, Kayla, Michael, Erik, Krista, Mandy, Melissa, Mel, Michael, Mike, Jill, and the entire field marketing, alliance, and sales organization: thank you. You didn’t just produce experiences, programs and engagement this quarter. You produced proof — proof that NWN is where the AI-managed services era is being defined.

The clearest articulation of the moment came at Newport, when Tom O’Brien, President of Palo Alto Networks East, walked our customers through the implications of frontier AI models on cybersecurity. The story he told was sobering and energizing in equal measure. Vulnerabilities that used to take security engineers two years to find are now being discovered in days. Palo Alto recently patched what would normally have been seven to eight months of CVEs in a single week across 125 products. The math is no longer favorable to defenders who rely on people and process alone. Mean time to detect and respond must collapse from days to minutes, and the only way to get there is to fight AI with AI — on a unified platform. That’s not a marketing slogan. That’s the new operating reality, and it is exactly why we have anchored our 2026 portfolio on the integration of cybersecurity, our EMP platform, and partner-grade AI.

If cybersecurity was the wake-up call, the economic case was the catalyst. Josh Laufenberg from AWS shared a number that should be on every CFO’s whiteboard: U.S. organizations spend roughly $1.5 trillion every year just maintaining legacy technology debt, with sixty to eighty percent of most IT budgets going to keep the lights on rather than to innovate. Then he gave us the proof points. Bridgestone modernized 1.2 million lines of COBOL to Java in seven months — a project the traditional integrators had quoted at seven years. Avista expanded contact-center capacity ninefold while cutting agent after-call work by forty percent. U.S. Foods compressed proposal generation from four hours to twenty minutes in a six-week proof of concept and went national in two more weeks. The message landed with every CIO in the room: legacy is something you want in your brand story — not in your IT stack.

That insight set up the closing session, and frankly the most important conversation of Newport. Brent Lazarenko, Kevin Kuning, and Alvaro Riera shared a statistic that should sober every executive reading this: eighty-two percent of AI pilots launched in the last two years failed to deliver outcomes — and the top three reasons were not data or model quality. They were speed to market, customer experience on adoption, and cost. Brent introduced a term I expect to hear repeated for the rest of the year — EBTDA, or Earnings Before Tokens, Depreciation, and Amortization — and made the case that the prevailing myth of fully autonomous, agentic automation as the path to savings is being quietly replaced by a more honest truth: well-architected, human-in-the-loop AI is more cost-effective at scale than the alternatives. The discipline he prescribed is the one we are organizing the company around: build only what differentiates you on a three-year horizon, buy what gets you to market this quarter, and never confuse a tool with a strategy.

So what comes next? Q3 is where we turn the Q2 signal into customer outcomes at scale. Expect us to lean even harder into three things. First, we are accelerating the expansion of our AI-enabled managed services bundles — the pre-configured, EMP-anchored offerings — into every vertical and partner motion we touched this quarter. Second, we are scaling our cybersecurity-and-AI platform story alongside Palo Alto, Arctic Wolf, Cisco and our broader security ecosystem, because the three-to-six-month window Tom O’Brien described is not a forecast — it’s a countdown. And third, we are doubling down on the customer and community programs that define who we are: the next chapter of our AI Labs and workforce development work, the build-up to SKO 2026, deeper field activations with HPE/Juniper and AWS, and a Q3 event calendar that will rival anything we delivered in Q2.

For our customers, partners, and employees who are looking to accelerate their adoption of AI-enabled managed services, my ask is simple. Don’t wait for the perfect strategy document. Pick one workflow — a service desk, a contact center, a modernization project, a proposal process — and pilot AI against a measurable outcome. Run a discovery sprint on the shadow AI already inside your environment. And bring us into the conversation early. We are in the top one percent of AWS partners globally, deeply integrated with HPE, Juniper, Microsoft, Cisco, Palo Alto, and Arctic Wolf, and built to do this work with you — not to you, and not for you.

Q2 told us the tipping point is here. Q3 is where we prove what comes next. To our marketing and sales teams: thank you for making the first half of 2026 the most consequential six months in our company’s history. Now let’s go build the second half.

#GrowthMode  #AI  #ManagedServices  #NewportSummit  #NWN