AWS Summit 2026: The economic impact of AI, and what it means for partners

What AWS’s flagship UK Summit reveals about AI adoption, economic impact, and new opportunities for channel partners

AWS is hammering home its message on AI and the economic value it can bring to the UK. But with the skills shortage acting as the main barrier to adoption, how can channel partners plug the gap?

CRN was at Excel London this week for the 2026 AWS Summit.

Opening the event was the hyperscaler’s VP & MD of UKI, Alison Kay, who gave the audience an insight into the latest AWS research on AI adoption.

She revealed that nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) of UK organisations are now using AI.

However, the study found that many businesses are stuck at the most basic stage of adoption, like using AI for routine tasks, with only one in five (24 per cent) using it at advanced levels.

Moreover, the UK could unlock £35bn of productivity gains by 2030 if basic adopters moved to advanced AI, Kay told attendees.

But what does this mean for AWS channel partners?

CRN sat down with AWS UKI director for partners, Joe Carroll, to find out.

What did AWS reveal about AI adoption at the 2026 AWS Summit?

Closing this gap between basic and advanced AI adoption and unlocking £35bn in UK economic growth, roughly the equivalent of the economy of the City of Manchester, sounds like an opportunity for channel partners.

Carroll tells CRN he thinks exactly that.

“It absolutely does. Yesterday, we had our London Partner Summit, where we held about 1,200 partners to talk about the very topic of that opportunity.

“We work with partners of all shapes and sizes, all the way from advisory firms like McKinsey, BCG, Bain, PwC, to large GSIs, like Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, IBM, and then some of the smaller SIs as well as technology partners, all of them trying to address the same thing, which is helping customers to see the economic impact of AI in agentic use cases.

“We work with all of them to frame the value that agentic solutions will bring to them. They might be operational improvements. It might mean new product builds. It might be looking at how all work gets done slightly differently.”

Carroll goes on to explain how AWS actively funds and encourages partners to go out and do so.

He details how the Amazon subsidiary has invested in what it bills “commercial and technology accelerators”.

“‘Agents of processes’ is one of them where we’ll support partners in the identification of high-value business impact projects with customers.

“When a partner goes to a customer, we help to make sure we can fund the early identification of those use cases. We help to build prototypes to showcase the art of possible with the partners, as well as moving through to production and benefit realisation.

“It is super important when customers build what we sometimes call an AI factory. That concept of an AI factory is really exciting because it means for a single customer, they can build a framework where use cases are identified with partners. We invest in those in terms of the projects and the early-stage identification.

“We then help the partners to make sure they can securely govern and put those use cases into production, and then the most important part for our customers is then to realise the benefit to the P&L. So, as we fund that process, along the way, we've got programmes like ‘agency process’ which will help to accelerate those.”

How is AWS helping partners close the AI skills gap?

According to AWS research, what’s holding a lot (50 per cent) of businesses back from AI adoption is a skills gap.

The lack of AI and digital skills is viewed as the top barrier to adoption, which has grown from 46 per cent year-on-year.

Carroll also believes this presents an opportunity for AWS partners.

“We focus heavily on the skills agenda.

“My role, leading all the partners of all sizes, is to make sure the hundreds of thousands of technical resources that sit within our partner ecosystem are skilled in the services that we have.

“We have certification programmes, we do things like game days, hackathons, and deep dives. We use processes, things like experience-based accelerators as well, where we bring our architects into our partner buildings to show them the art of the possible.

“Products like Kiro, Agent Core and Transform, are really changing the game in regard to how our partners can bring value, and it can really accelerate some of those initiatives with customers.

“It's a big and important part of the strategy. AWS have got our own employees, both in commercial and technical roles, but our partner organisations have hundreds of thousands of talented folks around the whole of the country, which is where the opportunity sits.”