Ben Kessler is the CEO of 66degrees, the Chicago Google Cloud AI and data consultancy, and a former McKinsey associate and finance chief who rose through the firm’s CFO, COO, and president jobs before taking the top role in March 2024 (AIM Media House; 66degrees).
From philosophy in St. Paul to McKinsey in Chicago
Kessler earned a BA in philosophy and business administration from the University of St. Thomas and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and he speaks English and German (AIM Media House). He worked as an associate at McKinsey and Company in Chicago, ran an acquisition search at Braxos Capital, and spent nearly four years as CFO and vice president of finance at 7Summits before joining 66degrees in 2021 (AIM Media House).
Taking 66degrees into agentic AI
At 66degrees he moved from CFO to COO and president, and chairman Jeff Rich credited him with turning the company “into an AI-led company with superb data science, data engineering, and cloud engineering capabilities” when he became CEO (66degrees). Under him the firm has pitched itself as a builder of what it calls the agentic enterprise, and in April 2026 it won Google Cloud’s Partner of the Year award for Artificial Intelligence (PR Newswire). “With gratitude, today we pause and celebrate the remarkable people of 66degrees,” he said of the award (PR Newswire). AIM Media House put him on its Next 15 AI CEOs in America list for 2026 (AIM Media House).