Don’t Blame AI for Sliding Partner Program Satisfaction
Experts say it’s been deteriorating for a while, and AI’s just making it worse.
Back in March, I shared some then barely public research from GTIA that included a troubling fact: partner satisfaction with their vendors is declining.
Not to a degree worth panicking about, mind you. 74% of the partners GTIA surveyed called themselves satisfied with their vendors. But that’s down from 88% just a year earlier, and the percentage of partners describing themselves as very satisfied has dropped by more than half, from 39% to 18%.
The question, of course, is why, and GTIA can’t say conclusively yet. Carolyn April, the group’s vice president of research and market intelligence, has a hypothesis though, and it touches on vendor partner programs.
“It’s about alignment and the changes that are going on in the marketplace today with AI,” she says. “The types of priorities that are important to [IT solution providers] and the things they want to see in a partner program, for instance, they’re different now.”
I’ve had a chance in the past couple weeks to test that theory with two people who spend most of their time studying and optimizing partner programs. Both concur with April’s suspicion that growing dissatisfaction with partner programs is responsible for growing dissatisfaction with vendors. Neither believes AI is the problem with partner programs.
“I don’t believe that AI is causing discontent,” says Ryan Morris (pictured), chief channel program strategist at Channel Mastered, the consultancy I help lead. It’s exaggerating discontent that was already there.
Danielle Ibran, senior analyst for infrastructure channels at IDC, agrees. “We can’t blame it all on AI,” she says, or even most of it. Satisfaction with partner programs, as others at IDC have discussed here in recent years, is wobbly these days for a number of reasons, including the facts that vendors don’t reward them for influencing versus closing deals and continue to slot members into function-specific buckets like reseller, solution provider, and software developer even though the average channel partner, according to IDC data, identifies with 2.8 such labels.
“They’re all doing a little bit of everything,” Ibran says. “That’s where the issue with the programs is today.”
Agentic security startup 7AI, which launched a multi-model partner program last week, gets it, as do companies I’ve written about here before like Cisco and Barracuda. Cisco, however, is a good example of why you don’t see more tech companies following suit. Building the Cisco 360 program was the kind of deeply complex, inevitably controversial undertaking that large vendors especially are understandably slow to take on.
“These programs, obviously, are humongous and they manage on a global basis,” Ibran observes. Changing them takes time.
Which gets to a larger point helpful in understanding the partner frustration GTIA is registering. Vendors almost universally offer product-related training. But AI isn’t a product, or even product category. It’s a huge, complex, and radically new technology category that will leave behind anyone in the channel unwilling to embrace an equally new outcome-oriented, consultative business model. Pax8’s among a still modest number of companies that know it.
“Nobody’s teaching that stuff,” Morris says. “Almost everybody’s pretty good at product training. Many have gotten pretty good at services training. Few have ventured into the business model training.”
Or kept up with an ongoing shift in the channel toward new, higher value, stickier revenue streams, adds Ibran, noting that 55.7% of the money partners make globally today comes from their own IP.
“Partners are seeking higher margins and defensible differentiation,” she says. “AI plays a key role here.”
Ibran would like to see more vendors reflect that fact by offering AI-specific education in areas like FinOps as well as managed service blueprints for recurring IP-led revenue in fields like AgentOps. Measuring partners more for delivering verified end user business results versus accumulating certifications would be helpful too, as would rewarding them more for pre-sales functions like solution scoping and design.
Morris, for his part, has another suggestion for vendors: Stop using AI as a substitute for people.
“More and more of the partner community and more partner questions are being dealt with by an FAQ bot as opposed to a real human,” he says. That works fine (and sometimes better than fine) with consumers, he notes, because they only need help occasionally.
“A partner doing business with a vendor has interactions every single day at some level,” Morris says. “If you put half or more of your question base into an automated response, a partner will get an automated response every single day from you, which is a really clear indication that you’ve disconnected from me in the relationship.” The better path, as some in the industry understand, is to augment and enhance person-to-person relationships via AI instead.
“Don’t get rid of your channel account managers. Empower them with AI to do even more and to automate manual tasks so that they can spend more time doing human touch with the partners in the relationship,” Morris says. “A partner’s going to feel that they get more human attention than they did in the past, not less.”
Get ready to think through similar issues more or less indefinitely, Ibran warns channel chiefs. AI moves fast and changes continuously.
“You almost have to get into a startup mindset,” she says. “Things are going to evolve, and I think you’re going to have to evolve with the market.”
What’s MSP as a Service?
So much was going on at Pax8’s Beyond event last month that we didn’t get a chance to air the interview Erick Simpson, my business partner and co-host on the MSP Chat podcast, recorded there with Juan Fernandez about his new MSP as a Service venture until this week. Worth the wait, IMO. Check out the whole episode here and all of our other equally interesting episodes here.
