Artificial intelligence remains the topic that refuses to cool off. The technology is advancing and proliferating so rapidly that vendors, partners, and customers alike are struggling to keep up.
Vendors, however, are increasingly frustrated with their channel partners. Despite research from Channelnomics, Cisco, Dell, and others showing that partners feel confident and prepared to take on AI-related opportunities and challenges, many vendors report they’re not seeing partners rush to deploy AI solutions.
While vendor complaints about AI-apathetic partners are often situational and specific to individual companies, there’s some validity to the concern. Partners are indeed adopting AI products and services, but not necessarily the ones vendors are prioritizing.
From what Channelnomics is hearing, partners remain focused on selling and supporting the products and services they’ve already invested in over the past several years. Their attention is on maintaining, renewing, and expanding existing accounts — often by driving higher levels of service utilization or increased cloud-resource consumption. If AI becomes an added feature as a result of those efforts, all the better.
Mainstream partners are capitalizing on the AI wave, just in different ways. Many are building agents for their customers, and some are developing general-purpose agents for sale through hyperscaler marketplaces and e-commerce platforms.
Partners pursuing the “build” rather than “sell” opportunity fall into two broad categories. The first includes systems integrators, resellers, and managed service providers with the technical capabilities to design, deploy, and support agents at scale. The second is a fast-growing cohort of AI consultancies — thousands of start-ups worldwide, many spun out of custom application development shops.
In both cases, these AI-focused partners are seizing a massive opportunity rooted in market confusion. Customers have embraced the promise of AI, but the technology often remains more of a concept than a defined product. While AI platforms can deliver significant efficiency gains, they must typically be customized to fit the unique workflows and use cases of each organization.
Rather than selling a vendor’s out-of-the-box AI product, these partners are building tailored agents to automate tasks for individuals and teams. These agents serve as a bridge to a more AI-driven future. As systems and applications evolve — and the industry continues its march toward general artificial intelligence — agents offer a lightweight, accessible means of delivering practical value from large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, and generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs).
The rise of agent development — what some in the industry refer to as agentics — is particularly good news for AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft. These hyperscalers benefit from the increased consumption and stickiness that agentic applications generate on their platforms, resulting in deeper customer investment and stronger revenue growth.
For other vendors, however — those hoping partners will prioritize selling their AI-infused products and platforms — this shift can be both a distraction and a divergence from strategic objectives.
Agent development is attractive to partners because it gives them full control over the value chain: They own the customer relationship, define the use case, set the price, and maintain the intellectual property. Margins are often higher, and the risk of channel conflict is lower.
But the opportunity may prove short-lived. Many developers are struggling to determine how to price agents relative to their perceived value, and the tools required to build them are becoming increasingly accessible to internal IT teams and individual contributors. If AI agents become easy to self-produce and self-manage, buyers may bypass partners altogether, further eroding demand for packaged AI applications.
For vendors hoping to drive partner engagement around AI, the takeaway is clear: Meet partners where they are and align with the way they want to engage. That starts by embracing the agentics model rather than resisting it. Vendors can take several practical steps to support and benefit from this shift: