AI is a Growing Business Yet Risky Bet for Channel Partners
The documentation startup aims to be the MSP world’s ultimate system of record for the age of AI. Plus: AI incrementalism from N-able and AI immaturity in the channel, according to IDC.
If maturity, as most parents would attest, is in the eye of the beholder, most channel partners are stuck in arrested adolescence.
Or they are when IDC does the beholding, anyway, based on the analyst’s recently published 2025 North America Partner Landscape study. When asked to characterize their AI business at present, just over 60% of surveyed partners said either ad hoc (“focused primarily on pilot projects and validation activities”) or opportunistic (“driven by business needs when requested by clients”). Only about 39%, by contrast, said repeatable, managed, or optimized.
Those numbers have barely budged in the last year too, notes Steve White, IDC’s program vice president for channels and alliances, suggesting that most of the channel is in the middle range of maturity, and stuck there.
“This is the third time we’ve asked this, and every time we think it’s going to dramatically increase and it doesn’t,” White (pictured) says. “I think it just reflects what’s been going on with AI honestly.”
Which is not, to be clear, an allusion to the flawed, rant-worthy reports of non-existent ROI we all read about last year. Indeed, AI already accounts for 13.8% of revenue now, according to surveyed partners, 81.9% of whom were projecting double-digit growth in AI revenue during 2025 when IDC collected its data last November.
So the issue isn’t that end users aren’t buying AI (78.8% of survey participants agreed there’s customer demand for it), or that partners aren’t selling it, or that those sales aren’t growing. Partners are stuck at the ad hoc/opportunistic stage of AI development because maturing past it requires a degree of certainty that few partners can hope to muster right now.
“It’s growing every day and it’s changing every day,” says White of AI. “They can’t keep up.”
They can’t figure out which solutions to adopt either. “AI kind of makes it 50 choices,” White observes. And roughly just as many pricing models, he adds, ranging from consumption-based to outcome-based and beyond.
“That’s been all over the map and everyone’s changing it all the time,” White says. Committing to this vendor or that solution offering just feels way too risky as a result, he continues, adding that AI is like a game of roulette for partners at present.
“They feel like they’re betting on 17, but they’d rather be betting on black or red,” he says. “We’re not quite there yet.”
In the meantime, White notes (in an echo of what Ingram Micro sees happening in AI these days as well), partners are making good money on the more familiar, less risky work of helping customers put AI-ready compute, storage, and networking in place.
“Without fail, most of them said the biggest opportunity here is modernization,” White says. “You need to have the right infrastructure.”
Maturity will follow eventually, he continues, just as it generally does for teenagers. “I think next year it should move up dramatically,” says White, who sees it headed in that direction already.
“Some of the bets are being made now and some of the winners are kind of appearing,” he says.