AI Channel Programs Shift Forecasting Risk to MSPs as Vendor Sales Fall Short

[00:00:02] 30% of technology leaders say somebody is pressuring them to overstate how well their AI projects are going. 27% say they're seeing a real return. Five companies spent this month building programs to sell into the gap between those two numbers. This is The Business of Tech. I'm Dave Sobel.

[00:00:26] Five companies spent the last few weeks building the same thing, and the customer for it isn't your client, it's you. Start with CyberFox, which signed a North American distribution agreement with Ingram Micro, putting its privileged access management, its password manager, and its AI-powered DNS filtering onto Ingram's ExVantage platform in front of every value-added reseller Ingram serves across the continent. That is a company announcing its own deal, so read the enthusiasm accordingly.

[00:00:55] Then Intezer launched something called the Amplify Hub, a partner portal with training, deal registration, sales incentives, certification, and a hands-on demo lab built on top of the partner program that started back in May. Intezer says its AI security operations platform triages 100% of alerts and escalates fewer than 2% for a human tube review. That is Intezer's number about Intezer's product.

[00:01:22] Sophos announced a partnership with OpenAI to embed Frontier models directly into its Fusion platform and named the scale it's aiming at. More than 25,000 partners, more than 7,000 of them MSPs. Again, the vendors on release. Flamingo raised $4.5 million, led by Vertex Ventures, bringing it to $6.7 million total, to build a platform called OpenFrame.

[00:01:48] Open source tooling plus AI agents consolidating 19 categories of software with initial modules already shipping across remote monitoring, patching, remote access, and ticketing. CEO Michael Asraf says that rather than bolting another AI assistant onto an existing stack, they're rebuilding the infrastructure layer and putting the agents directly into it so the agents can actually close tickets. That one is trade reporting, not a press release.

[00:02:17] And then one that isn't an offer at all. Charles IT acquired Descent, an AI native managed services provider, and is keeping it running as an independent subsidiary under founder Steven Schragge. An MSP went out and bought the capability instead of being sold it. Five moves. Four of them are companies announcing programs built to put AI capabilities into your hands. One is an MSP that didn't wait to be offered.

[00:02:47] Five companies do not build the same thing in the same month by coincidence. Something moved underneath them. If you're listening to this and haven't hit follow yet, on Apple Podcasts, search Business of Tech. It takes five seconds and you'll get the next episode automatically. Here's a question MSPs don't ask often enough. How secure is the tool that has the keys to every one of your client endpoints?

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[00:03:43] The reason all that is being built right now is that the money it was supposed to capture never arrived where the vendors expected it. Gartner surveyed more than 1,300 leaders at companies above $50 million in revenue and found fewer than one in four has successfully scaled an AI project across multiple business units. Not piloted, scaled.

[00:04:04] At the same time, 85% of those tech leaders say they plan to increase AI investment next year and roughly 11% could not say what they spent on AI last year at all. Infosys separately found two-thirds of organizations struggle to measure the return AI generates. Read that the way a vendor reads it. The budget is real and it is growing. The deployment is not landing. And what sits between the two isn't the model.

[00:04:33] It's process redesign inside the customer's own operation, which is work no software company can perform from the outside. Now set the vendor's own cost structure next to that. Gartner's research on AI pricing finds vendors moving off flat rate subscription and onto consumption billing. More than 35% of net new corporate legal technology spend usage based on 2028. Analyst Shannon Nakamoto makes the sharp point.

[00:05:02] The fee ties to compute consumed. So the customer who gets the most out of the tool gets the biggest bill. And Bain's analysis puts a number on the direction. A typical $10 billion consumer packaged good company will see its annual IT costs rise 75% by 2035. Bring that down to a size you recognize. A client running a $200,000 annual IT budget is being told to plan for $350,000.

[00:05:32] So the vendor is buying metered and selling metered to a customer whose adoption it cannot control and whose return it cannot prove. A company in that position cannot forecast revenue per customer. What it can do is find someone who will carry the deployment work, commit to volume, and absorb the variance. That is what a channel program is for. What's being extended to MSPs this month isn't capability.

[00:05:58] It's the forecasting risk on a demand number the vendors could not convert themselves. And that risk only transfers if enough people take it. Every one of these programs is sized in the assumption that a certain number of MSPs will sign. Which means the aggregate answer decides whether they work at all. That also means each MSP gets asked alone, one at a time. Which is the condition under which the answer comes back yes.

[00:06:24] Which raises the only question worth answering before anybody signs anything. So the commitment is fixed and the demand behind it is one number nobody in this chain can hand you clean. Here's the most recent attempt to measure it. TechCrunch reported on spending data from RAMP, drawn from 70,000 companies.

[00:06:46] Among the top 1% of AI spending firms, spend per employee fell almost 10% in August, down to $7,205. Purchases of AI products across RAMP's whole base reached 56%, up four tenths of a point from July. And the Census Bureau survey puts business AI use at 22%. Now, the caveat is because they matter.

[00:07:11] RAMP's customer base skews technology heavy, so it overstates the broader market. August is a vacation month. Token prices fell over the same period. From a peak of $1.15 per million, down to $0.68. So some of that decline is the same work, costing less. RAMP sells spend management software. And this data is how the company markets it.

[00:07:36] RAMP's economist Ira Krazan asked whether we dare call it a blip, then named what sits underneath it. Price competition between OpenAI and Anthropic, driving spend down at the top 1% of companies the market was counting on for growth. Which is the honest read. Nobody can tell you, yet, whether August was seasonal or structural. Then, the second number. The Futurum group surveyed 775 technology leaders.

[00:08:05] And Futurum sells advisory work on this exact problem, so weigh it accordingly. 30% said they feel pressure to overstate the success of their AI projects. 27% said they see a real return. Put those two together. The spending signal can't be read cleanly, and the success reporting comes from people who just told the surveyor they're being pushed to inflate it. So here's the choice.

[00:08:32] Build the demand number out of your own book before you sign anything that has fixed cost behind it. Count the clients who have moved an AI capability past a pilot and into standing operation with a changed process behind it. Not the ones who asked about it. Not the ones in your pipeline. And let that count size what you're willing to commit. Or size it off the vendor's forecast.

[00:08:58] Which is the forecast that didn't convert when the vendor owned the customer directly. And there's a reason that count is worth more than the one decision it protects. The MSPs who win the next three years won't be the ones who added the most AI tools. They'll be the ones who cut through the noise and build a cleaner, more capable practice. PAX8 is the platform to do it.

[00:09:23] Unified marketplace, SMB-ready agentic solutions, and clear monetization pathways. 47,000 MSPs can't be wrong. Head to PAX8.com That's PAX8.com Why do we care? Because the account you just built is a competitive asset. Almost nobody in your market has one.

[00:09:48] The MSP who can say out loud how many of its clients run AI in standing operation is the only one at the table who knows what a distribution commitment is actually worth. And the only one who can walk away from a good looking one without flinching. Everybody else is bidding against the vendor's number. And the vendor already knows the number that didn't work. What to consider? Define the count before you go looking for it.

[00:10:16] The temptation is to count anything AI adjacent, which is how you end up with a number that happens to justify whatever you already wanted to sign. Write the test down first. A process changed, a person is doing something differently, and it held for a quarter. Then apply it across your whole book in a single pass this month before any program conversation starts. Bring the number into the distribution conversation as your opening position.

[00:10:44] The vendor or distributor will lead with their forecast for your market, because that is the only number in the room until you produce one. Put yours on the table instead and make the terms a function of it. If you count four clients, you are negotiating a floor you can actually clear rather than a tier you will miss and pay for missing. Watch the shop that bought instead of signing.

[00:11:08] Craig Fulton’s acquisition of Descent is the one to track over the next two quarters, because it is the only version of this where an MSP put the capability on its own balance sheet and kept the team intact. If it works, the buy path gets validated for shops your size. And if it stalls, the MSPs who sign commitments instead will get the same answer, just after they are already obligated.

[00:11:29] If this trend continues by the middle of 2027, the partner programs launched this quarter will be publishing their first attach rate and partner count results. And the MSPs who committed against a vendor forecast instead of their own book will find their renewal terms set by a tier they never reached. This is the business of tech. Want to go deeper than the news?

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[00:12:18] The Business of Tech is written and produced by me, Dave Sobel, under ethics guidelines posted at businessof.tech. Thanks for listening. I'll see you on the next episode. Part of the MSP Radio Network.