CHICAGO – Channel partners have not shared in the AI-driven market capitalization increases that S&P 500 companies have enjoyed, Canalys founder Steve Brazier said Wednesday at the Canalys Forum Americas.
Analysts attribute much this year's growth in the U.S. economy's to the so-called AI boom. Harvard economist Jason Furman calculated that investments and “information-processing equipment and software” drove 92% of U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025, despite representing only 4% of the overall U.S. GDP. Brazier said capital expenditure commitments by hyperscalers and neoclouds total $616 billion in 2025.
However, that capex “hardly touches” downstream channel partners, he said.
Brazier said publicly traded channel partners, on average, have not seen their stocks rise since the launch of ChatGPT. The market capitalization of those partners, which include value-added resellers, managed service providers and system integrators, sits between 90% and 100%, a LSEG and Canapii study found. The S&P 500, on the other hand, has soared more than 160% since November 2022.
“So far — I'm afraid to tell you — since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, the valuation of the partners in the room, at least the publicly quoted, large channel partners, has not grown,” Brazier said. “You would have lost money had you invested in this community compared with the S&P 500, which has been up something like 165% in the same period.”
Distributors were an exception, having slightly increased in market capitalization since November 2022. Brazier said distributors have enjoyed an indirect benefit from the AI boom as “some of this AI spending is falling through into their business.”
Many publicly held channel partners saw their share prices peak in 2024 and early 2025 and decline below their November 2022 levels. Accenture's stock price has gone down from about $300 to $250, despite climbing to $388 at the beginning of 2025. CDW has declined from about $188 in November 2022 to $156 today, after reaching $255 in 2024. Others are up over the three-year period, including Insight Enterprises and ePlus.
AI growth outside the market cap
Stock prices may not accurately reflect AI-related channel partner revenue gains.
Privately held SHI International announced last week that its annualized gross sales had surpassed $16 billion.
The value-added reseller is working to prove Brazier wrong, said Kapil Bansal, SVP at SHI.
“I think we've learned to be patient in certain areas and in some other areas we're definitely seeing some growth,” Bansal said in a keynote panel on Wednesday.
Bansal said SHI has seen momentum on end user devices related to AI and AI PCs.
“If anything, there's still some surprise as to how many customers are still running Windows 10 after the sunset. I think the latest stats show around 30%, but that's definitely showing double-digit growth for many of us in the partner community,” Bansal said.
Andrew Pryfogle, head of AI/CX at tech services distributor Avant Communications, said AI use cases have grown “more attainable” for medium enterprises. Avant and its technology advisor partners have found many use cases in customer experience software that contains AI. The company recently closed a $15,000 per month deal to automate a dental group’s customer interactions.
“That's a very real use case that we're starting to see more rapid adoption, where six to 12 months ago, there might have been a lot of tire kickers,” Pryfogle told Channel Dive.
Disclosure: Informa, which owns a controlling stake in Informa TechTarget, the publisher behind Channel Dive, is also invested in Canalys. Informa has no influence over CIO Dive’s coverage.
