MSPs Rejoice! Build 2026 Brings Microsoft Back into the Game and AI Back On-Premises Where it Belongs

Heeding the lessons of OpenClaw, Microsoft pulls out of its race-to-the-AI-bottom with Apple, bringing partners back to their roots… along with the usual confusion.

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Hardware is back. Not as commodity refresh cycles. As local AI infrastructure that solves the biggest problems AI users and their MSPs face.

Last year’s OpenClaw explosion helped us all realize that an AI assistant running and working for us all the time would be great – but the token consumption would cost a fortune. It solved that by bringing inference back on-premises. Instead of reaching out to the cloud for every data access and every inference process, sending tons of metadata into and out of LLMs and consuming tons of tokens at ever increasing expense, we would only call out to the LLM when we needed data. Huge cost reduction. Huge advantage for your customers!

Back to the Future Again and Again

Much of what we’re seeing come out of the recent Microsoft Build 2026 conference is so familiar, so reminiscent of Microsoft events gone by.