Pax8 Believes in Agentic Marketplaces. Ingram Micro Doesn’t.
The respectful difference of opinion concerns the viability of ready-made AI agents. There's a lot of money on the line for whoever gets it right.
Funny thing about Ingram and agents. It sees a bright future for its partners in using them. It sees no future, for them or itself, in distributing them.
“You cannot distribute agents, because agents are custom built” around very specific data, software, and use cases, Sahoo says. “There are no ready-made agents.”
If he’s right, it’s a problem for Pax8, which in June announced its intention to build an entire marketplace full of ready-made agents. Chance Weaver (pictured), the company’s VP of AI adoption, says he’s not.
“I don’t agree with that at all,” he says. “There’s going to be a huge need for agentic marketplaces.”
As his future-tense verb choice indicates, it’ll be a bit before that need materializes. In the six months since he joined Pax8, Weaver has interviewed some 600 partners. Only 13 are selling anything agentic to customers today.
“A lot of MSPs are interested in it,” he says. “It’s a very small percentage that are actually doing it.”
Part of Weaver’s job is delivering the education and resources needed to grow that percentage. Eventually, he argues, a critical mass of managed service providers (or managed intelligence providers, as Pax8 prefers to call them) will have the skills to build an agent for one of their clients in, say, the healthcare industry.
“If you build an agent for one company, obviously that is going to fit across multiple customers in your customer base,” Weaver observes, noting that the same could be true of someone else’s customer base as well.
“You can build an agent and sell it,” he says. “Another MSP that’s servicing a couple of healthcare clients now doesn’t have to go out and build an agent. They can go and take a look at all of these agents that healthcare-focused MSPs have built.”
The same principle, he continues, works horizontally as well as vertically. “Everyone has operations. Everyone has HR. Everyone has finance,” Weaver says. MSPs who successfully construct an agent in one of those fields for one of their clients can make extra income selling their intellectual property to others.
There aren’t likely to be many such MSPs, he concedes. “There’s going to be a lot more buyers than builders,” Weaver says. “Becoming a builder is very complex. But the builders are the ones that will seed those agent stores and the base of buyers, since it’s going to be significantly larger, will consume that.”
That belief and Ingram’s conviction that no such future is practical are far enough apart to suggest that only one company will be proven correct. Whoever it is stands to make a great deal of money. Whoever it isn’t stands to lose, or miss out on making, an equally great sum.