AI's Impact On the Channel: CRN In Depth

CRN’s Jennifer Follett and Stuart Sumner discussed where solution providers are in their journey toward commercializing AI, the partners using AI internally, and what they need to know about capturing opportunities around the AI trend.

AI has moved out of the realm of buzzword and into primetime as vendors bake more AI features and capabilities into their products and services, and solution providers are starting to get in on the action by helping their clients build and deploy new and innovative use cases that are powered by AI. All around, there's a lot of positivity and a high level of optimizing on what AI will mean for the channel.

At CRN parent The Channel Company's Xchange March 2025 event, CRN’s Jennifer Follett and Stuart Sumner discussed Sumner's keynote panel in which he shared new research on AI investment trends. The two editors spoke about where solution providers are in their journey toward commercializing AI, the partners using AI internally, and what they need to know about capturing emerging opportunities around the AI trend.

A transcipt follows below:

Jennifer Follett: I'm Jennifer Follett and this is CRN In Depth, where we talk about a big story with a reporter who covered the news. In this case, we're actually talking with our Chief Content Officer, Stuart Sumner, who helped make the news here at XChange in Orlando, where Stuart, you moderated a panel about AI and you presented some research from the channel company about how solution providers are thinking about AI. What was sort of a high-level take away in terms of a statistic that you felt really was surprising, impressive -- Something of the partners really need to know.

Stuart Sumner: Yeah, thanks, Jen. So, I think one of the things that really stood out to me is the levels of optimism that the channel has around AI and its potential impacts. Obviously, AI is not a new technology, but you look at Gen AI and the way it's being deployed now, it is quite a new trend. And even though it's new, there's huge levels of optimism in the channel around the impact it's going to have. And 2024 was already quite an optimistic year, but this year it's a third higher. We measured it around like whether people are slightly optimistic, very optimistic, whatever, whatever they are. Broken that down into sectors of the audience and found that, yeah, this year they're a third higher. So yeah, huge amounts of positivity out there.

JF: One of the concepts that you talked about on stage that I thought was really interesting was this idea of the halo effect. Can you explain what that is and how that's important to partners?

SS: Yeah, sure. So, this is something I often liken AI to cloud from 15 years ago. Fifteen years ago, you remember, Jen, as journalists, we're kind of privileged in that we get a very early look at new technologies, new trends and we speak to lots of interesting people find out, you know, how the industry is reacting. And with cloud 15 years ago, it was very much like AI now everyone was recognizing this is a big thing, but there's a there was a lot of caution out there. People were talking about cloud as someone else's computer. They were dipping their toes in and I'm hearing a lot of that now around AI as well. And one of the things we had about cloud was this halo effect, which again we're seeing now with AI. And that's the idea that you'll speak to your partners, you speak to your customers and they'll come in and they'll say to you, I want to talk about AI, I want to understand AI, I want to see how it could impact my business, but then you often end up running a completely different projects or selling something completely different. It could be often it's you'll end up with a project around data because you'll realize that in order to exploit AI effectively, you need to change your data structure, change the way it's secured, change perhaps the way it's stored in your systems. Or, maybe you'll end up buying some more cloud. And that's the halo effect. People will come to you, ask about AI. And you'll end up selling something else.

JF: What about the way solution providers are using AI themselves internally? What did the partners have to say about that?

SS: Yeah, that's a really interesting one. And what we're seeing is that partners are using AI internally and then having success with it and iterating on that and then productizing it and offering it to markets. There was one really good story I heard from the CEO of I think the company is called General Informatics and they developed a chat bot which, so far, so sort of, I guess 2021, but what was interesting here is, it wasn't just an ordinary chat bot. They infused it with a personality, gave it a name, gave her a background, gave her an accent. She would talk about her family, just really humanized this chat bot and the staff loved it. So, she was handling all the HR calls, HR help desk calls, which meant the calls to the to the humans in HR dramatically dropped, which raised productivity. And they thought this is so good, let's offer it as a service for our clients. And again, it's flying off the shelves and been one of the most successful things. And we're seeing that a lot. People are trialing AI internally, getting good with it and then recognizing actually if this is good for us, this will be good for others. So that's a really interesting thing for partners to try.

JF: Yeah. What do you think is important for the partners, when they walk out of the room or they turn off this video, what's the thing that they should take heart and really give focus to as they go forward?

SS: I think that the thing is that we're seeing is there's a lot of pioneers, there's that sort of classic thing, you've got the early adopters and you've got the laggards. I think the main take away for me would be don't be a laggard because there are people that are really trailblazing. I've talked about General Informatics and the way they've tried it internally and offering it externally. There's a lot of companies that are really getting au fait with AI, getting their heads around it, offering consultancy around it and understanding it themselves. So that when the when end user budgets are unlocked around AI, which is likely to be within the next 6 to 12 months according to our research. That's when the money's really going to start flooding in. You need to be ready to exploit that immediately and not then start thinking, OK, what should we do? Because that's too late. The horse has bolted and everyone else is eating your lunch. So, understand the market now and understand the opportunity now. That's the best advice.

JF: Stuart, we're so glad that you're able to fly all the way across the pond and join us here for CRN In Depth. I'm Jennifer Follett. Thank you for joining us.