Ben Kessler

Chief Executive Officer 66degrees

Last Reviewed: September 26, 2026

Executive Summary

Ben Kessler is Chief Executive Officer of 66degrees, a Chicago consulting firm that builds AI, data and cloud systems on Google Cloud for large enterprises. He came up through finance and operations rather than sales or engineering. He joined the business as CFO of its predecessor, Cloudbakers, in 2021, then became COO and CFO, then President and COO, and was promoted to CEO in March 2024. On his promotion, chairman Jeff Rich credited him with turning 66degrees into an AI-led company over the previous three years. As CEO he has moved the firm into agentic AI and a forward-deployed engineering model, and in April 2026 it was named Google Cloud Partner of the Year for Artificial Intelligence.

Career Highlights

• Chief Executive Officer of 66degrees since March 2024, responsible for all aspects of the firm’s global operations.
• Earlier President and Chief Operating Officer, and from May 2022 COO and CFO, of 66degrees.
• Joined Cloudbakers, the Google Cloud consultancy that became 66degrees, as Chief Financial Officer in February 2021.
• At 7Summits, helped build one of the largest independent Salesforce consultancies in the US, leading finance, HR/recruiting and operations.
• Earlier worked at McKinsey & Company and the investment bank Lincoln International.

Professional Journey

Kessler started in advisory and finance, at McKinsey & Company and Lincoln International, the mid-market investment bank. He then joined 7Summits, where he helped build one of the country’s largest independent Salesforce consultancies and ran its finance, HR, recruiting and operations. That experience of scaling a cloud services firm around one platform is what he brought to Google Cloud.

In February 2021 he joined Cloudbakers, a Chicago Google Premier Partner, as Chief Financial Officer. Founder Mitch Greenwald had bootstrapped it about a decade earlier. Later in 2021 Cloudbakers and Qwinix combined under the 66degrees name, backed by the private equity firm Sunstone Partners. In May 2022 Kessler was promoted to Chief Operating Officer while remaining CFO, with responsibility for strategic planning, finance, sales and delivery operations, HR, IT, legal and facilities. He later became President and COO. In the same period the firm acquired Pandera Systems, an Orlando data analytics firm, which added data and machine learning to its cloud work.

In March 2024 he was promoted to Chief Executive Officer, responsible for all of the firm’s global operations. Chairman Jeff Rich said Kessler had transformed 66degrees over the previous three years into “an AI-led company with superb data science, data engineering, and cloud engineering capabilities”. Since then he has built out the leadership team, hiring a President and COO in 2024 and a CTO, a CRO, a Chief Delivery Officer and, in September 2026, a Chief People Officer. He has also expanded delivery in India, with offices in Bengaluru and Pune, and opened a global headquarters and client innovation centre in Chicago.

The firm now describes itself as a full-stack, AI-native delivery business. It combines industry and business-process expertise with Paradigm, its own agentic platform, and forward-deployed engineers placed inside client operations and trained through its FDE University. “The FDEs we place inside a client’s operations create the client’s experience of 66degrees,” Kessler said in September 2026. In April 2026 66degrees received its fourth Google Cloud Partner of the Year award, this time for Artificial Intelligence.

Education

No first-party record of his education was found. Unconfirmed degrees reported by aggregators are listed in the verification notes.