Google Cloud’s Channel Chief On AI Charge And ‘Revamped’ Partner Program

Google Cloud’s global partner leader, Kevin Ichhpurani, takes a deep dive with CRN on revamping Google’s partner program, the company’s agentic AI charge and why partners should pick Workspace with Gemini over Microsoft Copilot.

Google Cloud’s global channel leader, Kevin Ichhpurani, is placing his bet on AI agents as the next big wave in the artificial intelligence era that will elevate Google’s army of thousands of partners with billions on the table in new customer opportunities.

“The agentic AI opportunity is the biggest opportunity for partners,” said Ichhpurani, president of Google Cloud’s global partner ecosystem. “Partners can now take our Agentspace and Vertex AI platforms to create an agent to do literally anything.

“We have partners building agents in retail for returns. We have partners’ agents in medicine that are leveraging our AI to automate the entire process of taking notes and updating the [electronic medical record] systems. Agents that are looking at object defect detection and predictive maintenance on the shop floor,” he said. “These are powerful solutions.”

[Related: Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian On Agentic AI’s Starring Role]

In addition, the $48 billion cloud computing and AI company is revamping its channel programs to emphasize co-selling AI solutions with partners with Google Cloud’s massive end-to-end portfolio consisting of AI infrastructure and software to large language models (LLMs) and AI agent platforms.

“Our partner program was very much geared toward reselling or very resell-oriented. We are already co-selling on the ground every day with partners, but the program itself is being completely revamped in order to really enable a co-sell motion with simplicity for partners,” Ichhpurani said.

Ichhpurani takes a deep dive with CRN on Google Cloud’s revamped partner programs, the company’s agentic AI strategy, successful partner AI agent use cases and why he believes Google Workspace with Gemini bests Microsoft Copilot.

“Not only do we have the best product, but we have the best financial incentives for partners to take Workspace to market,” he said.

What is Google Cloud’s AI strategy for partners, and where is the biggest customer opportunity for the channel?

The agentic AI opportunity is the biggest opportunity for partners. When you look at most analyst reports, there will be billions of dollars of economic impact in terms of productivity from delivering agents within customers.

In 2025, we expect to see more agentic experiences where you’re leveraging AI to create an agent that understands the problem. Let’s say it’s a caller in a call center or it’s a customer coming in to do a return in a store—whatever scenario you can think of—the agent has to understand the problem, has to make a decision and then execute on that decision.

And we’re delivering the platform Agentspace in order to build that next generation of agents for customers. This is a huge opportunity for partners, not only to build agents, but also our platform enables the interoperability across agents.

We’re also distributing them through the Google Cloud Marketplace. Soon, there will be a dedicated section of the Google Cloud Marketplace where customers can come search and discover and procure these agents.

So we’re basically providing a route to market for these partners that are providing these agents.

Give me some examples of successful partner use cases for AI agents.

We’re working with HCLTech where we’re using our cameras on the manufacturing shop floor and pulling the image data and applying our AutoML and our AI to basically analyze the objects. So imagine if you’re a manufacturing facility. Rather than having QA people on the floor having to analyze everything, they’re now using cameras and AI to analyze which products are actually defective and taking corrective action on the assembly line, as opposed to having many faulty products out there that you need to later recall. We’ve already delivered that solution at HCLTech around the predictive maintenance to customers like Tata Steel, as an example, and a number of other customers.

We’ve built an agent with BCG [Boston Consulting Group] that we already delivered to a major insurance company. When there’s a claim made or a policy, insurance companies have to do a lot of search and discovery, and that’s very manually intensive. We were able to make significant improvements to many of their core departments—35 percent productivity improvements for the major insurance company that we jointly won. So we’re now taking that and rinse and repeat it from customer to customer because these same business problems—whether they take the manufacturing example with HCLTech, or they take the BCG insurance example—these same business pain points occur within every customer in that segment.

We have partners that are trying to tackle the problem in retail of returns. Returns can cost a company a lot of money because of all of the different systems of record that need to be touched—from warehouse management to accounts payable, to your financials, to your supply chain when the return takes place. Partners are solving how can you bring more productivity improvements to reduce that cost.

Partners can take our platform and create an agent to do anything.

Why do you think Workspace with Gemini is a better solution versus Microsoft Copilot? Why should channel partners pick Google Workspace over Microsoft?

We definitely feel that we have a superior offering.

From a partner lens, No. 1: We have superior AI capabilities built into the product.

No. 2: We have a much stronger economic value proposition for partners. So if you look at new business with Workspace, our economics are literally 60 percent of the first year’s revenue, 20 percent margins and a 40 percent rebate.

That’s pretty unheard of in the technology industry across almost any product with a mature company. That’s an incredibly attractive financial value proposition.

We’ve also increased our incentives in the AI side by 2X this past year and 4X for Workspace.

So we really have very strong economic incentives for our partners and have made it very financially attractive. So not only do we have the best product, but we have the best financial incentives for partners to take Workspace to market.

Talk about Google Cloud’s revamped partner program.

We’re revamping and delivering a completely new partner program: the Google Cloud Partner Network, a complete revamp of Partner Advantage. It’s really around driving a co-sell motion.

Our partner program was very much geared toward reselling or very resell-oriented. We are already co-selling on the ground every day with partners, but the program itself is being completely revamped in order to really enable a co-sell motion with simplicity for partners.

As a partner, you will now have a much easier process to register deals, to get attributed for the work you’re doing like, ‘Hey, I opened a door on this account. I did a POC [proof of concept] or an assessment on this account. I moved additional workloads in this account.’

So really being able to have value attribution by partner, by what activities they’re doing to help us co-sell.

What are some highlights of the new program partners should know about?

The ability for partners to really be able to get more points—think of the classic Silver, Gold or Platinum partner levels—to progress in the partner program based on how much co-selling you’re doing with us.

Another key to the revamped program is that incentives are tied to those co-sell activities.

So we’re super excited about this. We’ve done a phenomenal job of redoing the entire partner program so that it’s not just resell but resell and co-sell again.

It’s not that we haven’t been co-selling for years, but it’s one thing to do it on the ground. It’s another thing to have a real program and infrastructure to support all of this.

Is there anything specific on agentic AI in the new program?

AI will be one of the pillars in that program. So will data.

We’re finding that with AI, one of the biggest opportunities to deploy AI is you’ve got to get your data foundation in place. It’s like the foundation of the house. You’ve got to eliminate your data silos. You’ve got to deduplicate your data. You’ve got to ground your AI models and bring greater efficacy of the model.

Like if you’re an insurance company or a bank or a pharmaceutical company, you want to leverage your proprietary corpus data. So having your data estate order is critical. That’s a huge opportunity because we have the best data platform as that’s always been our strength.

In fact, I was recently listening to a Gartner [session] on health care. I think they said 80 percent or 90 percent of those customers don’t have their data state in order and they need help. They don’t have the skills internally.

So that’s a huge opportunity for partners—to help them with their data state in order to enable these generative AI and predictive AI experiences.