Thrive 2026 AI Playbook: Build Confidence With AI—From Basics to Hands-on Workshops

TL;DR:

Thrive 2026’s AI breakout sessions on October 1 in Los Angeles are built around three questions organizations are actually asking now: how do we govern AI so it can scale safely, how do we build with intention, and how do we prove it’s delivering measurable value? The lineup includes governance-focused sessions, hands-on AI Builder workshops where attendees will build a real app or agent live, and a session focused on connecting AI activity to ROI. Register today.

6 AI-focused breakout sessions to govern, build, and monetize AI

The AI conversation has changed shape. A year ago, the dominant question inside most organizations was which AI tools to try. Today, the stakes are higher, and the questions are more consequential: How do we govern AI so it can scale safely? How do we build with intention? And how do we connect AI to measurable business outcomes?

That shift is driving this year’s AI breakout lineup at Thrive 2026. Six of the planned 20 breakout sessions are built around AI, organized into three themes:

• Governing: Putting the right guardrails in place so AI can proliferate without creating new risk

• Building: Hands-on workshops where you can build real apps and agents in real time

• Monetizing: Connecting AI work to measurable outcomes, with clearer ways to prove impact and ROI

Read on for a deeper dive into the insights and value you’ll gain from these sessions.

About AppDirect Thrive

Thrive is AppDirect’s premier annual event for organizations that buy and sell technology, taking place September 29 to October 1 in Los Angeles. Roughly 1,200 leaders shaping the future of B2B commerce will gather for three days of insight, conversation, and connection.

The Thrive breakout sessions will run on October 1.

• Explore all the Thrive breakout sessions

• Register today

Govern: Put guardrails around AI, so you can scale adoption

AI is easy to start, but harder to scale responsibly. When building gets easy, uncontrolled sprawl can follow: tools multiply, data gets copied into new places, and the path from experiment to enterprise adoption gets murky fast.

The sessions in this section are for anyone who’s felt that tension: teams want to move, leadership needs visibility, and the business can’t afford an AI strategy that’s basically “good luck, everyone.”

The AI governance playbook: From internal adoption to external distribution

This session will focus on the practical mechanics of governing AI in the real world, the guardrails, access controls, and audit trails that allow organizations to distribute AI applications internally without shadow AI risks, then scale to external monetization through trusted channels. It will also explore how to turn AI pilots into governed, revenue-ready products that enterprises can trust, so you can move from “we built something cool” to “we can distribute this safely and monetize it.”

What you can expect: A clear end-to-end strategy for secure internal scaling and revenue-ready external distribution, framed as a playbook rather than a pile of best practices.

Why this matters now: Organizations don’t lose momentum because AI isn’t powerful, but because they skip the readiness work that makes AI deployable at scale. For further reading, start with AI Readiness: The DOs and Don’ts that determine success.

From AI experimentation to enterprise impact—How leaders scale adoption

This panel will shift the lens from tooling to leadership: how organizations move beyond early AI testing to broader adoption across the business, decide where AI can deliver real value, put the right governance guardrails in place, and build alignment for adoption at scale without becoming a blocker.

What you can expect: A grounded discussion of what leaders built, how they built it, what value or ROI they achieved, and what lessons helped them move from isolated efforts to a more intentional, organization-wide strategy.

Why this matters now: Scaling AI isn’t a single decision, it’s a sequence of decisions that need to hold up under scrutiny, from prioritization and governance to alignment and proof.

Evolve your MSP business—Become a managed intelligence provider

This session will bring the governance conversation into the partner operating model. Forward-thinking MSPs are moving past selling AI tools and toward managed AI services customers can trust, measure, and sustain.

What you can expect: Peer stories plus a governance-focused demo showing how an MSP can manage AI responsibly for a client, including access management, permissions and admin workflows, and governed workspace concepts, without heavy manual overhead.

Why this matters now: Governance is becoming a high-value service category, and partners who can make it practical will be the ones customers rely on long after the first AI pilot.

Build: Leave Thrive with an app, an agent, and a repeatable playbook

Governance is what makes AI safe. Building is what makes it useful.

This section is where Thrive will stop feeling like an AI conversation and move into working mode. The common thread is that creation is easier than ever, but useful creation still takes structure. You’ll see that in templates and permissions, integrations, and the build steps participants will follow in the room.

AI Builder workshop: Build business apps powered by your agents

This workshop is hands-on by design, and the flow is built for speed. Attendees will bring a laptop or tablet and a real problem, then move through a guided build process with support in the room.

• See App Builder first-hand—Intro and walkthrough

• Identify a business problem to solve—What business process is broken? What SaaS tool do you dislike? What would the perfect tool for your team look like?

• Build your app—Each participant gets support creating their app

• Show and tell—A few attendees present their app, the problems it solves, the SaaS it’s replacing, and how they will use it in real life.

What you can expect: A custom app and the playbook to deploy it, plus practical exposure to templates, integrations, deployment options, role-based permissions, and plan, chat, and execute modes.

Why this matters now: The difference between AI curiosity and AI leverage is building something that can be used, shared, and improved, not just discussed.

AI Builder workshop: Build custom agents trained on your workflows

If the first workshop is about building the tool, this one is about building the teammate: a working agent trained on your workflows that can automate repetitive tasks. It’s structured as a hackathon, with live guidance and time to build.

• Live walkthrough: Building an agent and testing it + attendee login to the platform

• Build: Support staff help with integrations, data sources, Skills, workflows, and testing

• Framework: choosing the right workflow to automate so you can measure the payoff

• Short demos: volunteers share what they built and what surprised them

• Wrap-up and next steps: resources, feedback, and how to keep building

What you can expect: A working agent ready to scale across your operations, plus a clearer sense of how to connect agents to your tools and data.

Why this matters now: Agentic workflows are increasingly becoming the difference between “we use AI” and “AI is changing how work gets done.”

Monetize: Shift AI from spend to proven ROI

Once you can govern and build, the final question gets uncomfortable fast: what did we get for it?

This is where a lot of AI narratives collapse, not because teams didn’t try, but because they never moved from tool adoption to workflow impact. Thrive’s AI monetization moment is designed to go straight at that reality.

Communicating in the AI age: Achieving ROI through agentic workflows

This panel will focus on a very current problem: the first wave of buying basic AI software is over, and now businesses are trying to get outcomes from their investments. One of the fastest paths to visible results is workflow-level change, not tool accumulation.

What you can expect: A practical blueprint for connecting agentic workflows to measurable business value, including how advisors can move beyond selling licenses into architecting higher-margin outcomes.

Why this matters now: ROI is now the headline, and immediate impact usually comes from choosing the right problems to solve first. For more context, see Fast-tracking AI value: Strategies for immediate impact.

Momentum you can carry home

If your AI efforts have felt like a string of pilots, promising, scattered, and hard to operationalize, this lineup is designed to break the cycle.

• Govern sessions will help you set the rules that let AI scale safely.

• Build sessions will put creation into the hands of the people closest to the work, with templates, integrations, permissions, and guided flows.

• Monetize sessions will force the question that matters: What outcomes are we actually producing, and how do we defend the spend?

Register for Thrive

Ready to build your Thrive agenda? Registration today.

More in this Thrive series

Check back for our upcoming blog, Thrive 2026 Advisor Growth Plays: How to Win New Business and Deliver More Value After the Sale.