Partner Ignite Executive Dinner: how vendor leaders are rethinking AI and communicating value to partners

What happens when you put a small group of senior vendor leaders around one table, take away the presentations and sales pitches, and give them the freedom to talk candidly about the challenges they are facing? CRN shares some of the themes from our first private executive dinner

There is real value in getting the right people in a room together.

That was the thinking behind our first vendor executive dinner in London called Partner Ignite.

We invited a select group of senior vendor channel and marketing executive to join us at The Greenhouses in the City. The evening wasn't about presentations or being sold to. It was about giving leaders a space to feel at ease with their peers, and discuss topics that can sometimes be difficult to get into elsewhere.

We wanted the experience to be warm, welcoming and enable the sharing of industry best practice in a private dining setting.

The entire discussion was held under Chatham House Rules.

Our broad theme for our first dinner was AI-native businesses and how their emergence is shaping the channel. But it quickly took us into much wider conversations about trust, authenticity, partner value, enablement and some of the internal challenges AI is already creating.

How do you win trust and partner attention in a sea of AI?

This was one of the biggest questions of the evening.

The global AI market is set to smash through the $3tn mark by 2033, and partners are hearing about it from almost every vendor in their tech stack. Meanwhile, as partners continue to tell CRN, many of their customers are still trying to understand where the practical value lies.

That creates a real challenge for vendor marketers: how do you stand out when everyone is talking about the same topic?

One leader raised they are under increasing pressure at every stage of the sales cycle to more clearly differentiate itself against competitors.

Others around the table were wrestling with similar questions.

We talked about this as “the battle for partner attention” and whether the sheer volume of AI messaging is actually making that harder.

Simply adding AI to your marketing message isn't enough. Partners need to understand what's different, what it means for their customers and where the commercial opportunity is for them.

Several attendees shared anecdotes about their top partner accounts of partner leads “checking out” from opening emails they suspect is written by AI.

When there is so much content in the market, having an actual person attached to an opinion matters. Some of the discussion touched on senior decision-makers taking more of a lead and adding their name and tone of voice to comms, to give a recognisable human voice to what their companies are communicating. Video shorts and marketing on platforms such as Tiktok and YouTube, perhaps not previously considered, was also discussed.

“Bizarrely, we’re finding that sometimes not having the slickest video editing is working in our favour because it can appear more human, and therefore less like AI-generated content” one CMO shared.

As CRN reported from our flagship EMEA partner event in the Netherlands earlier this year: “For channel partners, building trust is becoming just as important as deploying new technologies.”

AI lets us create more content. But is it better?

That took us naturally into a conversation about content.

There was no argument about whether AI can help marketing teams work faster. The more interesting question was what happens to the quality of what businesses are putting out as a result.

If everyone can produce more and more copy more quickly, how much of it is actually saying anything new?

This didn't feel like an abstract concern around the table.

Some leaders talked about the practical challenge of receiving briefs and requests from other parts of their own businesses that had clearly been created with AI. The problem wasn't the use of AI itself. It was that information could be inaccurate or inconsistent, and different departments weren't necessarily approaching the technology in the same way.

“This is actually creating more work for me and my team,” one attendee added ruefully.

“If I’m getting three briefs displaying stats that don’t add up or align, I then have to chase, what is the single source of truth here?”

If AI saves one team time producing something, but another team then has to check the facts, correct it and work out what was actually intended, that's not necessarily an efficiency.

It raises another question which I think businesses are going to have to address: who actually owns the way an organisation uses AI?

Who owns AI internally?

We spoke about whether businesses need clearer accountability for how teams use AI internally.

That doesn't necessarily mean every organisation needs an “AI person”. But there was a feeling around the table that somebody needs to set expectations around accuracy, quality and what good use of the technology actually looks like.

This is actually one of the main pieces of advice MSP bosses are getting from industry events such as the MSP Show and InfoSec.

Appoint a clear owner for AI within the business, and build governance around how it is used.

Using the analogy of cybersecurity due diligence and governance, some partners are creating new policies, workflows and approved tools to be defined in the same way they approach their cybersecurity practices.

Without that internal discipline, businesses may risk undermining their own credibility.

Or putting it another way, using AI shouldn't mean lowering the bar for accuracy or authenticity. If anything, when everybody has access to tools capable of producing enormous volumes of content, those things matter more.

It was telling that content authenticity, differentiation and governance were among the themes highlighted again in feedback after the evening.

[On page 2: How are vendors defining a successful partner and what does partner marketing need to prove?]

Who gets partners AI-ready?

Partner enablement was another area where there was plenty to discuss.

One of the questions submitted ahead of the dinner was whether partners should be responsible for training themselves on AI, or whether that responsibility should sit with the vendor.

There isn't an easy answer.

But it opened up a wider conversation about what good partner enablement looks like now.

Vendors are asking partners to understand increasingly complex propositions, articulate their value and then turn them into repeatable customer opportunities.

At the same time, partners have multiple vendor relationships competing for their attention.

Training therefore can't just be about teaching somebody what a product does.

Partners need to understand the opportunity. Where can they make money? What problem are they solving? How do they take that conversation to their customers? And what makes this proposition different from everything else being put in front of them?

During CRN’s global content project AI Week, we spoke to several partners who are turning AI initiatives into repeatable, revenue-generating success stories.

This shows that the discussions around the table are being had in multiple parts of the channel.

How are vendors defining a successful partner?

Another really interesting conversation was whether the way vendors assess their partners is keeping up with how quickly the market is changing.

Several people around the table felt that revenue alone is becoming too blunt a measure of what makes a valuable partner.

Of course, commercial performance matters.

But some leaders said they are increasingly looking at partners' ability to adapt to emerging technology. How quickly they can build capability around a new opportunity? And can they create credible customer case studies?

That last point came up more than once.

When the market is awash with new AI propositions, being able to point to a customer that has actually deployed something and seen a result carries weight.

And for vendors, partners capable of creating those proof points can be incredibly valuable even if they aren't necessarily the biggest revenue generators today.

It creates an interesting question about where vendors put their attention and investment.

Do you concentrate on partners already delivering the most revenue? Or should part of the focus be on identifying those moving quickly, building new skills and demonstrating that they can take emerging technology into real customer environments?

There wasn't one answer around the table. But there was a sense that the definition of a successful partner is getting broader.

Partners want to know what's coming next

Road map visibility was another issue several leaders were wrestling with.

If you're asking a partner to invest in skills, build services or create a proposition around your technology, there is an understandable expectation that they should have some idea of where that technology is going.

But providing that visibility isn't always straightforward.

Some marketing leaders talked about the increased pressure to give partners a clearer view of the road map and the tensions that can create internally between marketing, sales and product development teams.

Marketing teams can be the people having the conversations with partners and hearing what they need. But they don't necessarily own the product road map or control how much of it can be shared.

That leaves them trying to strike a difficult balance.

How do you give a partner enough visibility to earn their confidence and investment without making promises the wider business isn't ready to make?

It was also another reminder that partner marketing can't operate in isolation.

A partner experiences one vendor, not its individual internal departments. Whether marketing, sales and product are aligned behind the scenes matters enormously to the experience that partner eventually has.

What does partner marketing need to prove?

That brought us to the changing expectations of partner marketing itself.

Ahead of the evening, it was clear from CRN reporting that partner expectations around how their vendors communicate with them is evolving. There are changing preferences and requests from everything from MDF to legacy billing.

These were the common threads: a greater pressure for partner marketing to demonstrate pipeline and revenue; vendors trying to move partners from individual products towards wider platforms and outcomes; the difficulty of differentiation when almost everyone has an AI story; and questions over whether traditional MDF and co-marketing models still work in an AI-native market.

Those themes gave us plenty to discuss.

For all the excitement around AI, marketing leaders still have to show what's actually working.

Are partners engaging? Is activity creating demand? Is it contributing to pipeline? Can a partner take the proposition into a customer and turn it into a commercial opportunity?

AI isn't removing those questions.

If anything, it's making some of them more pressing.

The channel at its best

What stayed with me afterwards wasn't one particular prediction about AI.

It was the openness of the conversation, and how very different businesses were tackling similar challenges. What was incredibly valuable was leaders giving specific examples of what is working, while being prepared to talk about the things they are still figuring out.

One attendee summed up the experience like this: “The authenticity and openness of our discussion was so refreshing. And because of that, I’ve come away with plenty to take back to my team.”

The channel talks a lot about ecosystems, partnerships and communities. Sometimes it's easy for those words to become part of our industry’s vocabulary without stopping to think what they mean.

For me, our Partner Ignite dinner experience reminded me what community in the channel can look like.

It's getting a small group of people around a table in-person, sharing what we know, being honest about what we don't, and listening to how somebody else is approaching the same problem. And perhaps leaving with a different way of thinking about it.

That's the channel at its best.