Schedule: TechServe Executive Summit 2026

TechServe Workshop 1 - Advance Registration Required

From Staffing to Solutions: How Firms Successfully Made the Leap

Explore what it really takes to move into outcome-based work, from sales and pricing to delivery, talent, risk, and accountability.

Key Takeaways:

Understand what you need to consider when moving from placing talent to committing to outcomes.
What investments in sales and delivery capabilities are required to play in the solutions space.
Learn where firms have stumbled, and what they would do differently.

TechServe Workshop 2 - Advance Registration Required

In it With You: The New Change Playbook for IT & Engineering Staffing Leaders

IT and engineering staffing and solutions firms are rethinking how they grow. Traditional staff augmentation margins are under pressure, clients increasingly want SOW and more consultative solutions, and firms are weighing how to build more direct client relationships while figuring out if they can succeed within MSP models. Add AI changing delivery expectations, continued pressure for growth, and leaders being asked to evolve the business while still running it.

Knowing what needs to change is one thing. Getting an organization to actually change with you without stalling revenue, exhausting key teams, or losing momentum is another.

This session gives leaders a practical framework for leading change while the business is still moving. Participants will explore how to communicate when the path isn’t fully defined, create buy-in across the organization, address resistance and uncertainty, and build the accountability needed to turn strategic change into action.

Transformation doesn’t happen in a strategy deck. It happens when your team understands where the business is headed, what it means for them, and how they can help build what comes next.

The Summit Council Kickoff - Reality Today

New for 2026: Summit Councils are small peer groups of firm leaders that meet three times across the Summit. Each session has a specific focus: Reality Today, What's Possible, Accountability. You walk out at the end of the Executive Summit with real industry connections and a clear sense of what to do next.

Meet your preassigned Summit Council over breakfast and share where your firm stands today — the wins, the pressures, and the questions you brought with you. It’s the foundation for the conversations that will continue throughout the Executive Summit.

Advance registration is required.

Opening Keynote

Zack Kass - Former Head of Go-to-Market at OpenAI and Global AI Advisor at ZKAI Advisory

Zack Kass is a global AI advisor, researcher, and bestselling author of The Next RenAIssance: AI and the Expansion of Human Potential. As an executive advisor, he has personally advised leaders in 124 cities across 20 countries — working with Fortune 1,000 boardrooms, including Coca-Cola, Morgan Stanley, and Amgen to help leaders deploy AI at scale. His insights have been featured in Fortune, Newsweek, CNN, and Entrepreneur.

Attendees can expect a forward-looking perspective on how AI is reshaping business, technology, and the workforce — from the evolution of AI and what's coming next to how leaders can move beyond the hype and understand the real-world opportunities of this rapidly evolving technology.

Sponsored by Ceipal

TRANSFORM - The AI-Enabled Staffing Firm

Buying AI tools is the easy part. Turning those tools into meaningful productivity gains is much harder. The next step is moving beyond individual tools to rethink how the work actually gets done. This session explores how IT & engineering staffing firms are using AI, automation, and emerging agentic workflows across recruiting and sales to minimize manual tasks, integrate disconnected processes, and increase productivity.

Key Takeaways:

Which recruiting and sales workflows are delivering the largest measured productivity gains — and which aren't.
Which tasks and processes are ready for AI agents, and where having a human team member perform the task still matters.
Which off-the-shelf tools are actually working today, and the threshold at which building a custom agent starts to pay off.

WIN - Trust, But Verify: Identity and Credentials in the Age of AI-Enabled Fraud

As AI has made it easier for individuals to apply, interview, and unfortunately misrepresent credentials at scale, staffing firms face a new challenge: validating identity and credentials without adversely impacting the candidate experience. This session explores how firms are strengthening identity and credential verification, and the role technology is playing in the fight against fraud.

Key Takeaways:

Where AI-enabled candidate deception is actually showing up — and what it costs firms in rework, client credibility, and placement failures.
A verification standard you can adopt that protects clients without pushing legitimate candidates out of the process.
Which verification steps can be automated, and where a human still has to be in the loop.

WIN - Rewiring the Sales Engine: Roles, Comp, and AI Enablement

What should a high-performing staffing sales organization look like in 2027 and beyond? This session gets inside the modern sales operation of successful IT & Engineering staffing firms, from roles and team structure to compensation, workflows, and AI enablement. See how other organizations put it all together in practice, and leave with specific changes you can make to drive productivity and growth.

Key Takeaways:

How sales roles are being split, specialized, or consolidated — and what team structures are outperforming.
Where comp plans are breaking down as AI shifts sales productivity, and how firms are restructuring incentives in response.
What sales leaders are actually getting from their tech investments in seller capacity and pipeline — and what they'd buy differently.

GROW - Staffing to Solutions: Do You Make the Leap?

Conventional wisdom says shifting client expectations make a solutions practice an existential imperative for IT staffing firms. In reality, it is the right move for some firms and the wrong one for others. This session brings together owners and executives on both sides: those who have committed to solutions and outcome-based engagements, and those who have chosen to stay with traditional staff augmentation. Each shares the reasoning behind their choice — where they think client demand and buying practices are heading, and how they thought through the economics and delivery risk. Also, hear for those that want to take the plunge, what it takes to get there: hiring internal talent with genuinely different skill sets, as well as the capital and organizational changes required.

Key Takeaways:

Hear the case for moving into solutions alongside the arguments for sticking with staff augmentation.
The four factors to consider before making the move: client credibility, internal capability, capital, and owner risk tolerance.
How the economics compare against staffing — pricing, margin, and payback period if you take the leap.

GROW - High-Opportunity Verticals Driving Revenue & Margin Growth

While there is a general uptick in demand in many, but not all industries, the strongest growth opportunities are increasingly concentrated in a handful of specialized markets. This session explores where demand is accelerating, from healthcare IT and data to cybersecurity, AI, and other emerging areas, what it takes to compete credibly in those markets.

Key Takeaways:

Which verticals still carry a real margin premium, and where competition has already eroded it.
What buyers in these verticals accept as proof of credibility — certifications, reference work, and specialist recruiters — and how long it takes to build.
How to overcome the challenge of filling high demand roles and what firms are doing to build a specialist bench before they sell into a new vertical.

TRANSFORM - The Tech Stack Reckoning

The tech stack of most firms has typically evolved by adding one tool on top of another without any coherent strategy or intentional design. As AI continues to bring even more tools into the mix, many firms are in need of a holistic assessment of their tech stack along with an objective evaluation of each tool’s ROI. This session provides a framework for evaluating your tech stack: what to keep, consolidate, replace, or eliminate and where to invest in the future.

Key Takeaways:

A framework for evaluating your tech stack on adoption, integration, ROI, and business impact.
A keep / consolidate / replace / eliminate call on every tool you own — and the evidence needed to defend each one internally.
Where redundant, underused, or disconnected tools are quietly adding cost and complexity without delivering commensurate value.
Where firms are investing next, and how they are funding it from what they cut.

LEAD - Navigating the “Dirty Dozen” and the Feds: Where Compliance Risk Runs Highest

With most IT & Engineering staffing firms operating in multiple — sometimes dozens of — states, multi-state compliance is an unavoidable part of doing business. This legal panel breaks down the state and federal issues creating the greatest challenges for staffing firms, including independent contractor classification, liability for recruiter overtime, immigration, and the new compliance challenges created by AI. Leave knowing where your exposure is rising and how to tighten compliance without building a bigger back office to carry it.

Key Takeaways:

The states and legal and regulatory issues creating the greatest compliance exposure for staffing firms.
Where your exposure lies on IC classification, recruiter overtime liability, and the obligations that attach to using AI in hiring.
Where immigration policy now stands for high-skilled talent, and what it means for skill sets that are heavily visa-dependent.
How to tighten compliance without adding headcount — what firms are automating and outsourcing.

WIN - Rewiring the Recruiting Engine: Roles, Comp, and AI Enablement

What should a high-performing recruiting organization look like in 2027 and beyond? This session examines how firms are rethinking recruiting roles, team structure, compensation, and workflows as AI changes how candidates are sourced, screened, engaged, and matched. Better understand how AI-enabled recruiting workflow that is technology-enableed adds recruiter capacity and where human judgment and relationships still create the most value.

Key Takeaways:

How recruiting roles are being split, specialized, or consolidated — and what team structures are outperforming.
Where comp plans are breaking down as AI shifts recruiter productivity, and how firms are resetting performance expectations.
What an AI-enabled recruiting workflow looks like end to end — sourcing, screening, engagement, and match — and which steps firms are automating first.
A framework for redesigning your own recruiting organization — roles, capacity model, and comp.

GROW - Where Talent Comes From Next

Where will the talent your clients need come from next? Demographic shifts, restrictive immigration policy, AI, and changing workforce dynamics are reshaping traditional talent pipelines. While some trends are constricting supply, nearshore and new global delivery models are expanding the talent pool. This session explores how the talent landscape is changing and what staffing and solutions firms should be preparing to source and deliver talent in the future.

Key Takeaways:

How demographics, immigration, and AI are reshaping both the demand for and the supply of talent.
Where nearshore and new global delivery models are expanding access to critical skills.
When it makes sense to build global delivery capabilities internally versus partner with an established provider.
How your talent strategy needs to evolve as traditional pipelines contract.

LEAD & GROW - The M&A Calculus: Buy, Sell, or Invest?

In today's M&A market, many owners are at a key inflection point: acquire to add scale and capabilities, invest further in their existing business, or exit. In this panel discussion, you will hear from M&A advisors and a leading attorney regularly engaged with both buyers and sellers and examine what's driving deals and valuations, and how to assess the best move for you and your firm.

Key Takeaways:

Understand what's driving valuations in today's M&A market for IT and engineering staffing and solutions firms.
How the three paths compare on the numbers that matter to an owner — proceeds and risk.
What impacts the desirability of an acquisition the most — growth profile, client concentration, gross margin, and strength of the internal team— and where deals most often break.
What to fix now if you expect to transact in the next two to three years.

WIN - Building High-Performing Sales & Recruiting Teams

What do high performance performing sales and recruiting teams look like now? In an era where the traditional sales and recruiting processes are being upended, how do you hire, train the team, and measure their performance? This session will examine what predicts success in today's sales and recruiting roles, how long new hires should realistically take to ramp, and how AI is changing productivity expectations.

Key Takeaways:

The skills, behaviors, and attributes that predict long-term success in sales and recruiter roles.
Realistic ramp and performance milestones for new sales and recruiting hires.
How AI is shifting productivity and performance expectations.

TRANSFORM = Moneyball for Staffing Leaders: Achieving Success through Data-Driven Management

What metrics actually matter in driving peak performance? Using data from the industry’s most comprehensive benchmarking tool, the newly reimagined Operating Practice Dashboard (OPR) and BenchmarkPro, the new monthly automated service benchmarking key operational metrics, this session explores how leaders of top-performing firms use data to make smarter decisions to drive growth and profitability. Learn which metrics matter the most and how to better lead through data-driven management.

Key Takeaways:

The metrics that belong on your leadership dashboard.
What actions to take in response to the numbers.
How data-driven management drives top performance.

LEAD - Leading the IT & Engineering Staffing and Solutions Firm in 2029: The CEO Mindset Shift

The firm you will be leading three years from now is likely to look very different from your firm today. AI, an uncertain economic landscape, new business models, changing client expectations, and an evolving talent pool will require IT & Engineering Staffing Executives to lead through constant change. Building on the ideas generated from the Firm of the Future Think Tank, this panel examines what CEOs need to rethink — and what they should start changing now.

Key Takeaways:

Which long-held assumptions about margin, headcount, and how work gets sold no longer hold — and what replaces them.
How to prepare your leadership team for a firm that will not run the way you operate now.
Where the CEO's own job changes — what to stop owning, and what only you can own from here.
The two or three decisions to make in the next twelve months that shape what the firm looks like in 2029.

GROW - Beyond Staffing: Building a True Consulting Capability

While building a true consulting practice promises new client opportunities with greater margins, it is a significant undertaking for any traditional staff augmentation firm. This session explores what it takes to launch a true consulting practice from the investment, risks, team skill sets, and challenge of client acquisition in wholly new market.

Key Takeaways:

Understand the risks and upside of going from a staff augmentation to true consulting.
Identify the internal expertise needed to establish credibility.
Assess the leadership and delivery capabilities required to successfully deliver on consulting enggements.

TRANSFORM - Finding Margin in the Back Office: What to Automate, Outsource, or Stop Doing

Back-office functions — payroll, billing, compliance, background screening, and HR administration — consume significant firm resources while generating no revenue. They are often an afterthought — but executing them poorly puts the firm at real risk. This practical session examines how firms are automating, consolidating, and outsourcing these functions — cutting cost and internal drag without compromising service or compliance.

Key Takeaways:

A diagnostic for pinpointing which back-office processes are consuming the most time, headcount, and margin.
A decision framework for what to automate, what to outsource, and what to stop doing altogether.
Where other firms are recovering cost through vendor consolidation and elimination of redundant tools and services.
How firms have taken cost out of the back office without taking on new compliance risk.

WIN - Cutting Through the Noise: AI-Enabled Outreach That Actually Converts

AI makes it possible to prospect at a scale and level of personalization that wasn't possible before — but more outreach is not better outreach, and volume alone doesn't produce meetings. This session explores how staffing firms are using AI, automation, and data to identify the right prospects and personalize engagement at scale — without losing the human element that closes business.

Key Takeaways:

Where AI measurably improves targeting, personalization, and follow-up — and where it just adds volume.
How firms are coordinating sales and marketing so outreach lands as one relevant sequence rather than competing touches.
Criteria for evaluating AI outreach tools against your existing CRM, workflows, and sales strategy.
The metrics that separate real outreach performance from activity — response rates through meetings booked and pipeline created.