Dive Brief:
- Anthropic launched a partner program at its inaugural Partner Summit on Thursday. The Claude Partner Network was seeded with an initial $100 million to provide training and other resources to channel firms helping enterprises adopt Anthropic’s Claude model, the AI company said in an announcement.
- Partners gain immediate access to a certification program and will be eligible for direct marketing and co-marketing funding as the effort scales. Anthropic will also add solutions engineers and technical architects to work with partner teams aiming to expand its partner-facing operations fivefold, per the announcement.
- “The certification, the co-investment, the dedicated team — this infrastructure is built so that any firm, at any scale, can build a Claude practice,” Steve Corfield, head of global business development and partnerships at Anthropic, said in the announcement. “Our partners are instrumental in getting enterprises from proof of concept to production with Claude, and we're making sure they have everything they need to do it.”
Dive Insight:
The formalized partner program builds on an array of alliances Anthropic has already forged among large IT service and consulting firms.
Accenture and Anthropic teamed up in December to form a joint business group, train 30,000 Accenture professionals on Claude and build AI tools for regulated industries. In February, Anthropic and Infosys integrated Claude and Claude Codemodels into Infosys’ agentic AI platform. Anthropic also forged strategic partnerships with Cognizant and Deloitte last year.
The channel has emerged as a key player in the evolving drama around AI adoption, as enterprises grapple with data disorder, infrastructure inadequacies and governance gaps. The problems have multiplied as AI use spreads throughout organizations, escaping IT oversight, according to a Nutanix study published this week.
Model builders, cloud providers and software vendors are all banking on the channel to clear a path for enterprises to scale AI, deploy agentic solutions and deliver as yet elusive ROI.
A partner playbook is coalescing around testing, piloting and deploying AI tools internally to iron out the kinks and demonstrate value before foisting the technology on customers.
Nearly half of partners and two-thirds of the largest channel firms were piloting agentic AI capabilities last year, according to research by Omdia, a Channel Dive sister company.
“The internal-first approach positions partners as credible advisors, enabling them to address customer challenges effectively and drive successful deployments,” Omdia Principal Analyst Devan Adams said in an October report that pegged the partner opportunity for AI services to reach $267 billion by 2030.
Cognizant has given roughly 350,000 of its associates access, Sandra Notardonato, head of global partnership development and influencer relations at Cognizant, said in the Anthropic announcement. Now the company is using Claude for customer modernization projects.
Anthropic partners will receive a Claude Code modernization starter kit, as well as access to a certification, training and a partner portal. The program is accepting partner applications immediately.
