Day 1 at Beyond EMEA 2025: Building from Within
How Pax8 is proving the Managed Intelligence Provider model by living it first through Customer Zero.
3 min read
Day 1 at Beyond EMEA 2025: Building from Within
The first day at any Beyond event always has a particular energy to it. That moment when thousands of partners, vendors, and Pax8ers come together and realise they’re all part of the same story. This year, though, it has felt different. There’s a sense that we’ve collectively crossed a line. The conversation has moved from what AI might do to how we’re actually using it.
For me, that’s the real theme of this week: proof, not promise.
We’ve spent the last year turning theory into practice, not by selling AI to others but by running it ourselves. That’s the heart of Customer Zero. Before we ask our partners to adopt an idea, we have to live it first. If it doesn’t stand up inside Pax8, it has no business in our ecosystem.
Building a Managed Intelligence Company, the Hard Way
The Agentic Inflection Point report we launched earlier this year set the stage, describing how managed service providers evolve into Managed Intelligence Providers (MIPs). At Beyond EMEA 2025 we’re showing what that looks like in real life. We’ve built the infrastructure, the governance, and the operating patterns that make this model real.
Inside Pax8, that means:
- Running agentic workflows across billing, support, enablement, and security
- Treating our internal systems as a living testbed for the Agent Store, the MCP Server, and the Marketplace Chat announced this week
- Measuring success not in automation rates, but in time returned to humans — the hours teams can reinvest in creativity, problem-solving, and partner engagement
Customer Zero isn’t a marketing phrase; it’s a forcing function. It exposes friction early. It makes you own your own governance. It forces a company to integrate, not bolt on, intelligence.
When we deploy a new agent to reconcile billing data or generate partner insights, we’re not doing it in a lab. We’re doing it on live systems, at global scale, under real-world constraints. That’s what makes the feedback real and the learnings transferable.
From Platforms to Patterns
The conversation with partners today isn’t about another tool. It’s about patterns — reusable, governed, measurable ways to apply intelligence.
The MIP Playbook unveiled this week gives that structure:
Discover → Buy → Build → Sell → Manage
It’s how we operationalise intelligence as a business model, not just a capability. The same five-part motion we run internally, from identifying inefficiency to managing digital labour, is the one partners can run for their own clients.
That symmetry matters. It means when a partner asks, “How does this work in practice?” we can literally point to the Pax8 organisation as the reference design.
The Point of Doing It First
Being Customer Zero isn’t comfortable. It means we hit every edge case before anyone else does. It means our engineering, operations, and support teams get to live the pain that our partners would otherwise inherit. But it also means that when we publish a guide, release an integration, or stand on stage to talk about an agentic workflow, it’s built on truth.
And truth scales better than hype.
If you want to lead this next wave, start by leading yourself.
That’s what I’m doing at Pax8, building the future of managed intelligence by living it first.