The carpet of Caesars Forum has absorbed a lot this week. Four days of keynotes, product launches, analyst briefings, and hallway conversations about what AI is about to do to this industry. Today is the last day of Enterprise Connect 2026, and I’m sitting in the press area trying to figure out how to write about two things that don’t quite fit together — but that I think you need to hear at the same time.
The first is what was on stage. The second is what wasn’t.
What was on stage
Every keynote at Enterprise Connect this year delivered a version of the same thesis: AI is now being held accountable for real outcomes.
This is actually a step forward. Last year’s show was full of demos and ambition. This year, the conversation shifted to execution. CIOs and IT leaders pressed vendors — not aggressively, but persistently — on the same questions: Where does this actually deliver? Who is accountable when it doesn’t? How do we justify the spend?
The vendors who answered best were the ones who came with specific numbers and specific customers. The ones who answered worst were the ones who came with more demos.
The framing I heard from multiple analysts at the show: AI that doesn’t move a metric is no longer viewed as innovation. The agentic AI accountability gap was the central tension of Day 1. It’s viewed as risk. The “resolution economy” concept that Zoom introduced earlier this week captures it well — stop measuring whether AI contained the call, and start measuring whether it actually solved the problem.
That’s a meaningful shift in how enterprise buyers will evaluate everything your customers are being pitched right now.
The other thing that became clear by Wednesday was that the lines between unified communications, contact center, and security are gone. Not blurring. Gone. Voice is an attack surface. AI agents make that surface bigger. The vendors who understand this — who are building authentication, deepfake detection, and compliance into the communications layer instead of bolting it on afterward — are playing a different game than the ones still pitching collaboration as a standalone value.
Five days ago that might have sounded like analyst speculation. After this week, it’s just the market.
What wasn’t on stage
Here’s what didn’t make the keynotes: a Service Leadership report released on March 11, the day Enterprise Connect started.
ConnectWise’s Service Leadership division released its 2026 Annual IT Solution Provider Compensation Report — the industry’s benchmark for MSP and VAR compensation data. And it contains some things worth sitting with if you’re early in your channel career.
MSP and VAR leaders expect only 8.1% of salary increases to exceed 6% in 2026. Last year, 16% of salary increases exceeded that threshold — double what people expected at the start of 2025. It’s a significant pullback. Three consecutive years of wage growth normalizing after the 2022 peak.
That’s the headline number. But the more interesting data is in the breakdown.
The most profitable MSPs — the firms you probably want to work for — actually pay less than their less profitable peers. Service Leadership has found this “consistently” across years of data. More profitable firms experience more employee churn, rely on upskilling and variable pay instead of raises, and are apparently fine with it.
PE-backed firms are the most extreme version of this. Fifty-four percent of private equity-backed IT solution providers lost more than 10% of their workforce in 2025. The report notes that PE firms have “organized their operations to accelerate hiring, training, and onboarding processes to address these trends.” Which is a polite way of saying: they’ve accepted high turnover as a structural feature, not a bug.
And then there’s the AI angle. More MSPs and VARs decreased headcount in 2025 — 36.4% — than had done so in 2024 — 35.7%. Meanwhile, the firms that increased headcount dropped from 51.2% to 43.5%. Service Leadership suggests AI may be filling open roles instead of new hires. Not replacing people exactly. More like: not replacing people who leave.
The two things that don’t fit together
Here’s where I get stuck.
Every keynote this week told a story about transformation and opportunity. AI is reshaping every workflow. New platforms are emerging. The skill set required in this industry is evolving in real time. If you’re young and you want to be at the center of the most interesting technology disruption in a generation, there’s a case that the channel is exactly where to be.
That’s all true.
And also: the labor market is tighter than it was. The firms with the most money are the stingiest on salaries. The most profitable MSPs run lean and burn through people. PE firms specifically have turned talent churn into an operational process they’ve optimized — which means that as a 23-year-old walking into a PE-backed MSP, you are the process.
I don’t think these two things cancel each other out. I think you can be genuinely excited about the opportunity and genuinely clear-eyed about the terms.
The clearest signal in the data is that the firms paying the most aren’t the ones growing the fastest or making the most money. If salary is your primary filter for evaluating a job at a channel company, you might be optimizing for the wrong thing. Upside at MSPs tends to come from variable comp tied to performance, from promotion velocity, and from the skills you build that become valuable to customers.
But — and this is the part I want to be honest about — if you’re at a PE-backed firm with high churn and you’re not getting trained and promoted within 18 months, you’re probably just being run through the machine. And the report is pretty clear that a lot of companies have automated that machine.
What I’d tell someone just starting out
Understand who owns the firm you’re walking into. If it’s PE-backed, ask directly: what’s the tenure of the team you’d be joining? What’s the path from your role? What does variable comp look like in year two versus year one? PE isn’t automatically bad. Some of the most interesting, fastest-moving shops in the channel are PE-backed. But the ones that have optimized for churn over growth aren’t investing in you. They’re betting you’ll train quickly and either promote fast or leave, and either outcome works for them.
If you’re at a company that’s genuinely investing in upskilling — particularly around AI, around the architecture skills that clients can’t find anywhere else — stay. That’s the scarcest commodity in the market right now. Not headcount. Not certifications. The ability to walk into a customer meeting, understand their actual problem, and architect a solution that involves AI models, security frameworks, and application integrations that they haven’t even thought to ask about yet.
That skill is worth more than any base salary adjustment.
The keynotes at Enterprise Connect were right about one thing: the next two years will separate the organizations that can actually execute on AI from the ones that just presented slides about it. The same is true for the individuals in those organizations.
Build the execution skills. Ask better questions about the companies you join. And keep reading the data, even when it doesn’t fit the narrative on stage.
Enterprise Connect is over. Time to get back to work.
Sources: Channel Dive — Channel partners curtail salary increases · GlobeNewswire — Service Leadership 2026 Compensation Report · UC Today — Top trends at Enterprise Connect 2026
Emma Cross is ChannelPulse’s Culture & Careers Reporter. She covers event floors, early career realities, and the industry through the lens of the people just figuring it out.