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What two days at the MK Link National MSP Conference taught us

BlueCloud Digital CEO James Durrant attended the MK Link National MSP Conference in Cheltenham on 3 and 4 June 2026. Here is what he took away.

MK Link, run by Mike Knight, is an annual conference for MSP IT support business owners and senior leaders. No vendor theatrics. No inflated promises. Just honest, peer-to-peer conversation about what it takes to run and grow a managed IT support business in the UK.

It was good to be in the room.

Seeing our engineers at work

Several of the MSPs at MK Link are businesses we work with directly. They rely on BlueCloud Digital engineers embedded within their teams as full-time contracted staff.

Seeing those businesses in that room, talking about growth, strategy and the future, was a reminder of what we are actually part of. We are not just a staffing solution. We are part of how these businesses operate day to day.

That matters to us.

The sessions worth paying attention to

The agenda covered a lot of ground. Exit planning. Operational frameworks. The customer journey. How to structure a business that is worth something when the time comes to move on.

Good, practical content. The kind that sticks.

On AI: not a threat to MSPs, but a challenge for the businesses we support

There was plenty of discussion around AI at MK Link. It is hard to avoid right now.

Our view is straightforward. AI is not a threat to MSPs. If anything, it creates more opportunity. As businesses adopt AI tools, they introduce new complexity, new security risks, and new dependencies on reliable IT infrastructure. That is where MSPs come in.

The real challenge is for the businesses we support. They need guidance on what AI means for their operations, their data, and their security posture. They are looking to their IT partners for answers.

That is an opportunity, not a threat. And it is one we intend to lean into.

What we took home

MK Link is the kind of conference that reminds you why the MSP model works. Businesses that commit to it, build the right team around it, and stay close to their clients, tend to grow.

We left Cheltenham with a clearer picture of where the market is heading and a stronger sense of what our clients need from us next.