JNUC 2026 keynote recap: Power up!

Jamf Nation: "the best community in tech"

Long-time Jamf, first-time CEO Beth Tschida welcomed all attendees warmly to kick off JNUC 2026 on a sunny morning at the Kansas City Convention Center in Kansas City, Mo.

This is Jamf's 17th JNUC, she pointed out.

Her own first JNUC was in 2018.

Despite her 20 years in IT, she felt intimidated. She was walking into a room full of people who knew Jamf's products better than she did. She braced herself and walked into the Hyatt in Minneapolis. "And this community told me the truth," said Tschida. "It always does, and I'm here for it."

"This community pushes us. You hold us accountable, and you should."

Key takeaways

• Developments at Jamf this year focus on three key areas: the Jamf API, the Jamf platform user interface and AI.

• Jamf offers several new features this year, including Jamf's unified Platform API gateway. This includes a blueprints API, Device Health: a continuous record of hardware health, ring deployments and Vitals: an AI-powered diagnostic assistant built into Self Service+.

• Jamf announced useful updates to blueprints — such as a rebuilt Apps and Books as well as app management. Other updates include Jamf Routines, the extension of AI governance to the web and much more.

• AI governance has expanded swiftly with a new AI Visibility Report, AI policies, model insights, usage intelligence and on-device AI.

The desire for mutual success

What came as a surprise to her as she continued on at Jamf was this: "You all want each other to succeed," she said. "People hand over scripts to someone they just met — scripts they spent their own weekend on."

And it’s the same everywhere, said Tschida. From meetups to Jamf Nation Live events across the world. People show up to learn from each other and to challenge each other — and Jamf.

"This is the best community in tech," said Tschida, "built by all of you, with the Jamfs who came before me."

The only constant: change.

Tschida briefly discussed how much has changed in Apple device management in the years of JNUC.

All of those changes, she pointed out, landed on Jamf admins first.

And Jamf Nation rose to the challenge: creating policies, enforcing configurations and ensuring security — while adapting to the swift pace of Apple to do it again. And again.

"And now," said Tschida, "AI is running on your endpoints. Writing code, reading files, taking action. Not helping someone do it. Doing it."

Amid these exponential changes, our mission stays the same.

"New capabilities, risks, and change arrive faster than any of us can fully process," said Tschida. "And still . . . our mission hasn't changed: to help people do their best work on Apple."

Apple first, Apple best. But not only Apple.

Tschida recognized that admins today generally have to manage non-Apple devices alongside Apple devices. And those people on Android, Chromebooks, and more also need identity, network security and management.

"Being Apple first has never meant we stop there," said Tschida. "But it does mean we go deeper on Apple than anyone."

Mac is having a moment.

Demand is surging; the breadth of the Mac lineup is increasing. There is now a Mac for every job.

Organizations that ran entirely on Windows are adding Mac or switching altogether. Apple built security and compliance into the operating system itself. "The people who told you Mac wasn't ready aren't saying that anymore," said Tschida. "So, if there's a case you've been waiting to make, this is the year to make it."

When people have a choice, they choose Apple.

And now, AI is powering up Apple even further. That's what makes this moment different from every other Mac moment.

Some of that AI runs in the cloud, some of it runs locally. Some are open weight, some frontier.

AI runs better on Apple. And Apple runs better with Jamf.

That doesn’t just happen. It has to be built first.

Kansas City's Power and Light District

"There is proof of that, two blocks from here," said Tschida. "The Power and Light District."

What most people don't know, Tschida went on to explain, is how long it took to get there. It took many, many people working together for decades — and a false start or two — to make it work.

Then they built the infrastructure first. They ran the cables; they stood up the grid. And in 2008, they powered it on.

Jamf's beginnings

What started as a tool for a handful of Mac admins managing a handful of Apple devices now manages over thirty million devices for nearly eighty thousand organizations. The schools, hospitals, enterprises, and governments that run on Apple? They run on Jamf.

We built that foundation together. Managing and securing Apple devices, reliably, day in and day out. It is the grid everything else runs on.

"This year," said Tschida, "we are going to show you what happens when you power that grid all the way up."

'Powering up:' not just a metaphor

When Jamf talks about powering up, we're talking about something specific: three circuits.

• Circuit one: the Jamf API — one gateway to the whole Jamf platform. No roadmap Jamf builds will ever be fast enough, or broad enough, for every member of Jamf Nation. An API means you don't have to wait for us. You can build Jamf into what you need it to be. Today.
• Circuit two: the Jamf platform's user interface — built for how IT teams actually work. Our UI helps admins catch small problems early before they grow into much bigger ones.
• Circuit three: AI — and it's not a separate product. It's in the workflows you already run, and it gets you ahead of problems before your users feel them.

"You will see all three circuits running underneath everything we show you today," said Tschida. "That is what JNUC 2026 is about. We are here to Power Up."

Apple addresses Jamf Nation: Jeremy Butcher

Jeremy Butcher, Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Apple, next took the stage to answer three persistent questions he hears from Apple users.

How is it going for Apple?

"Years ago," said Butcher, "Jamf predicted that soon there would be more Apple devices in the enterprise than any other brand. I'm happy to say that this has happened."

Today, MacBook Air is the most-used laptop in the enterprise and most enterprise organizations have more Apple devices including Mac, iPhone, Apple TV and more.

Why do we think it's going that way?

"We have a really unique way of investing in enterprise and education," said Butcher. "We adapt and create: We have the ability to adopt features meant for all users while also creating bespoke features for businesses and schools."

Butcher offered a few examples:

"Now," he said, "when a customer calls an AppleCare agent with an issue, they can simply use an MDM command to send that agent a log of the problem." No need to access anyone's personal account or spend a lot of time collecting evidence.

"Apple continues its multi-year investment in SSO," continued Butcher. Apple has embedded identity into the Mac login window. Their focus now is on customization of authentication methods. For instance, a student can scan a QR to log in. Businesses can use multi-factor auth.

What's next for Apple?

"We all expect the answer to be AI," said Butcher. "This is an exciting area because we're talking to a lot of customers who are putting it into action and into practice. It's a fun conversation to be a part of."

Apple believes that organizations should have the option to use AI both on the cloud and on-device, depending on what is best for what task.

"We think our platform makes for the best way to do both," said Butcher. "We continue to have these conversations, and we look forward to working with all of you to bring it to life."

Jamf throughout your day (and even overnight): Katie English

Perennial favorite Principal Product Manager Katie English was next to address the enthusiastic crowd to talk about Jamf developments this year.

"We all know the work starts before your day begins," said English. "While you were asleep, new hires enrolled in distant time zones, patches deployed to the devices that were ready and compliance checks ran and mostly passed."

Declarative Device Management

"That new hire in another time zone has a fully configured, compliant laptop because you’d already defined that compliance state with our new standard: Declarative Device Management (DDM). At one time, it felt like a distant future, but for OS 27 and key workflows like enforced software updates, it’s our only path forward."

Jamf's blueprints

Blueprints can define settings for all your Apple devices. And they remain current automatically. This allows Jamf admins to plan for new capabilities before the OS ships.

"A year ago," said English, "getting blueprints to fit your environment meant making some compromises. Today it just works — with better scoping, deeper visibility and an audit trail you trust. It’s why this morning's new hires already had working, compliant laptops before you'd had your coffee."

But a device's configuration isn’t just about settings; it's also about apps.

App Store apps

"If you've run volume purchasing at scale," said English, "you know the bottlenecks."

Assigning a license means:

• A request to Apple
• A check-in
• An install command
• Another check-in

Most of the time, these steps occur instantaneously. "But during your busiest weeks," said English — such as a big refresh, back-to-school, or the hiring of a large cohort — "those queues back up."

Sometimes, your new employee finds themselves staring at a spinner with no idea why.

The solution: a rebuilt Apps and Books

"We’ve been hard at work rebuilding Apps and Books; it’s already running inside Jamf School today, and this year it comes to Jamf Pro as a blueprints-native component," said English. "So license assignment is optimized against Apple’s updated APIs."

English introduced Consulting Engineer Mischa van der Bent to the stage for a live demonstration.

van der Bent walked attendees through how to install apps using blueprints, including Jamf's new ability to install and update binaries alongside traditional apps hosted by third-party vendors, all in the same place.

Apps and Books and application lifecycle management using blueprints are both in public beta. If you’re interested in providing feedback, join the feedback program in Jamf Account.

Where are blueprints headed?

For the full picture of everything Jamf has been working on over the past year, English encouraged Jamf Nation to attend the Platform State of the Union as well as multiple deep-dive breakout sessions throughout the week.

Blueprints API

A device staying exactly the way you defined it doesn't happen by accident.

"For years, that’s meant clicking through a console, one setting, one device, one exception at a time. And if you wanted to automate any of it, you were scripting around Jamf from the outside," said English.

For years, Jamf was the platform you configured. Now it's the platform you build on.

English and van der Bent then walked attendees through Jamf's blueprints API.

This demo revealed that Apple estate management finally lives in the same Git-and-pipeline world as the rest of your infrastructure instead of sitting off to the side of it. It's now all running on the Jamf Platform API in a single place, not through a patchwork of APIs and supporting tools.

Routines 2.0: enrollment, inventory, Slack notifications

Jamf Routines is a layer that watches for events in your environment and responds automatically, such as each time a new device enrolls.

English and van der Bent demonstrated how Jamf Routines has expanded, including:

• Searching in Apple's systems for warranty data
• Placing that information in the inventory record
• Connecting other systems, such as Slack
• Exporting device information to another system

"With Jamf Routines," said English, "you get the same builder mentality Apple admins already know, just extended." That means admins are able to connect their own systems with no coding required.

"Notice what every one of those moments had in common," said English. "They were all reactions to something that happened: an app updated, a new device enrolled, a form came in."

But what if the platform could see beyond actions in your environment and into device health?

Device Health

Well, it can. To explain exactly how, Director of Software Engineering Matt Benyo joined English onstage.

"Autonomous device management needs a nervous system," said Benyo, "a way to sense how these devices are actually doing and how to put that information to work."

Device Health keeps a continuous record of what every Mac is going through over time:

• Performance
• Stability
• Battery
• Storage

Inventory, explained Benyo, tells you what a device is. The device health record tells you what it's been going through.

Senior Consulting Engineer Dan MacLaughlin helped Benyo demonstrate how Device Health works.

"We’ve been running this health check on hundreds of our own Macs at Jamf for months," said Benyo, "and it's already changed how we operate."

Benyo shared his favorite example: Mac devices frozen on wake. The batteries were dead by morning. It was easy to assume the hardware was the culprit.

But was it?

"The data told a different story," said Benyo. "A third-party agent was poking those Macs awake every 28 seconds: all night, every night."

Ring deployments

Ring deployment — a structured approach to deployment that progressively scales rollouts to larger and larger user groups — depends on that same health data.

Benyo used a Zoom update to demonstrate.

"Let's say Zoom is on every Mac you manage and runs every meeting your company has," said Benyo. "You can test an update before you ship it, but your test Macs aren't the fleet. The only way to know how it really behaves is to put it on real machines."

"So that's what we'll do, carefully," said Benyo. "A small group of devices gets the update first. Device Health tells us whether it landed clean or caused a problem." After that, continued Benyo, everyone else either gets a good update or never experiences a bad one.

MacLaughlin demonstrated live.

He demonstrated how Routines watch a rollout. When one ring is started, it captures a baseline. Then it waits through the bake period. When that’s over, device health measures the group again and looks for anything moving in the wrong direction.

How about when an employee notices performance issues and wants to troubleshoot them before filing an IT ticket?

Vitals

An AI-powered diagnostic assistant is built into Self Service+, a place that employees are already accustomed to going for help — somewhat similar to what Jamf admins have themselves in AI Assistant. This allows a staff member to ask in natural language why something is happening on their machine and then receive an answer as well as a recommended fix, which MacLaughlin demonstrated.

"That's autonomous device management taking responsibility for the digital experience of your employees," said Benyo. "Not removing people from the loop. Removing the work people never should have needed to do in the first place. It's what Beth meant this morning when she said Jamf's here to amplify you. And that's where we're headed: not just to a device that can be managed remotely, but an intelligent endpoint."

Jamf's SVP of Engineering, Mike Campin, took to the stage.

AI Governance: Mike Campin

"Most of what we'll show you today is about getting the best from the tools you've chosen to roll out," said Campin, after greeting the audience. "But first we have to get our arms around the AI that nobody approved."

Visibility and control

98 percent of organizations have Shadow AI running on their endpoints. And most of these organizations don't realize it. Neither does the employee who introduced it.

Generally speaking, this can happen when an employee finds a tool that makes their job easier. They never mentioned it to IT, because they don't realize it could be a problem. But using AI that isn't provided by and controlled by the company means sending company data to services that haven't been vetted. It's running software you can't patch.

"AI agents raise the stakes again," said Campin. "They live on your endpoints. They can reach whatever the user can reach — and they run commands your users approve without understanding."

You can't act on what you can't see.

That's why Jamf launched AI Governance this June, which includes our new AI Visibility Report.

Since then, more than 600 organizations have switched it on, providing visibility across over a quarter of a million endpoints.

"Your feedback," said Campin, "has shaped what comes next."

We're extending AI Governance for Mac and mobile into the browser itself, offering visibility and a policy engine that controls unsanctioned AI use as it happens.

Rob Potvin, Senior Consulting Engineer, joined Campin on stage to demo Jamf's AI visibility and controls capabilities.

AI policies, model insights and usage intelligence

"Controls only decide what your people can't use," said Campin. "Configuration makes your approved tools work well using AI policies."

Configuration puts the following in place:

• Compliance guardrails
• An excellent onboarding experience
• Your approved tools, configured and ready for work at enterprise scale

Potvin demonstrated how this works as Campin continued.

"Most organizations know roughly what they spend on AI," he said. "What they don't know is which models burned the tokens, or the work they were used for. Once an AI tool is configured using AI Governance, you can use our new on-device AI gateway to get deeper insights into how the tokens are actually being used."

Model insights

Model insight reports show detailed token usage, which can be split out by:

• Device
• Provider
• Model
• App

Along with token count, it shows cost at published pricing and gives admins insight into what is trending at their organizations.

Usage intelligence

Reports based on usage intelligence provide a breakdown based on the type of work staff is asking the AI agent to do for them. This helps admins understand if they are offering the right model for the right job.

This can lead to better management of approved AI models as well as cost containment. By controlling the type of AI service that users can access and providing them with on-demand access to blocked capabilities that they need to do a particular job, IT can keep management and staff happy.

On-device AI

A new approach to AI that’s getting a lot of attention right now is on-device AI: the AI model, rather than running in the cloud, runs on the Apple hardware you own.

"The potential of on-device AI is significant," said Campin.

• Specialized models can provide for new use cases
• IT can reduce costs without cloud-based tokens
• IT can keep organizational data more secure by processing sensitive data entirely on-device

"Our customers exploring it have all said the same thing," said Campin. "The value is real. Getting it deployed, configured and compliant is where it gets hard."

That's why we are extending the Jamf platform to make Apple on-device AI work at enterprise scale.

A simple top-level workflow:

1. Deploy apps and AI models through blueprints
2. Connect them with the on-device AI gateway, which routes prompts to the right place — every time.
3. Govern it all with AI policies and use Model Insights and Device Health to stay informed.

"It's not one feature that makes on-device AI work at scale," said Campin. "It's the whole platform."

Model management and AI policies

Campin and Potvin demonstrated how to work with model management on-device: deploying the model itself and adding it to a blueprint. They also demonstrated how to use an AI policy to configure Claude Desktop to connect to the AI model they had deployed to the same device.

AI gateway

"Wherever you are on your AI journey," said Campin, "whether you’re just starting with visibility and controls, expanding into configuration, or looking to unlock new advanced use cases powered by on-device AI, Jamf is the partner for you."

"What we’ve shown you today," he continued, "hasn’t been about stopping your people from using AI. Instead, your team becomes the reason the answer is yes."

Leadership in AI governance needs strong partnerships.

Senior Vice President of Enterprise Products and Solutions Engineering Matt Vlasach then sat down to interview two of our most important partners: Siva Raghupathy from AWS and Scott Munson from Anthropic.

Full speed ahead

To send attendees off to their respective breakout sessions, CEO Beth Tschida again took the stage.

"I told you we'd show you what happens when you power that grid all the way up," said Tschida. "You can define the state you want. Roll out change without breaking anything. Say yes to AI — without losing control."

And, she pointed out, you can build on all of it. "That’s the grid, powered all the way up."

Remember the Power and Light District that Tschida mentioned earlier? Once somebody finally built the right infrastructure, the lights came on.

"But the lights aren't what brought that district to life," said Tschida. "People did. That's true of everything you just watched us build."

Tschida suggested some ways to support and connect with people this weekend. "Spend time with a MATTER Career Readiness Institute student between Wednesday and Friday," she suggested. "Buy from Threads for Good; our foundation matches it. Scan the code on your way out to donate, and we'll match that too. And if you skipped your swag at registration, we already donated what it would have cost."

Join us and let us join you.

"We are more than our work," said Tschida. "Without people, you can run every cable and stand up the whole grid and still have nothing but powered-up empty buildings."

"Which is why we are here this week," continued Tschida. "Find me — find any Jamf — and tell us what you need from us. Our roadmap is built from those conversations. That's where a lot of what you saw today started."

Mark your calendars for a celebration

JNUC 2027 will be in Anaheim, California, October 26-28. "That one is also Jamf's twenty-fifth year, so come ready to celebrate!" said Tschida.

We thank you

Tschida thanked all JNUC sponsors, especially Jamf's Premier sponsors: Galide, 1Global, Serval and Zero Touch.

"Thank you, Jamf Nation," Tschida concluded, "for trusting us with your environment and for everything you do to help people do their best work on Apple. Here's to a great JNUC. Let's keep powering up, together."