Dive Brief:
- Microsoft fine-tuned its vast partner ecosystem in the run up to the May 1 release of the Microsoft 365 E7 and Microsoft Agent 365 AI-powered office productivity bundles, the company’s Chief Partner Officer and CVP of Channel Partner Sales Nicole Dezen said in a Tuesday blog post.
- The software giant added service and channel partner specializations to the Frontier Badge designation introduced as part of a broader program overhaul in November. The company also updated its Frontier Distributor designation to make it easier to identify partners with agentic AI capabilities.
- “Distributors are so crucial to the work that we do to serve SMB customers, and so the frontier distributor designation will better reflect what it really takes for partners serving SMBs to scale agentic AI across the channel,” Dezen told Channel Dive. “This is all about helping resellers identify those distributors that can enable … so that they can transact and grow their agent selling through the Microsoft marketplace.”
Dive Insight:
Microsoft’s AI-centered program tweaks align with similar moves made by its hyperscaler peers.
Earlier this week, Google Cloud created a $750 million partner fund to provide AI training and resources to its partners. The company retooled its partner program in December, adding AI features to the Google Cloud partner portal and creating incentives to drive co-selling efforts, post-sales service delivery and collaborative software development.
AWS, the largest of the big three cloud providers, took a similar route starting last year. In November, the company announced that it would restructure incentives, simplify third-party provider benefits and roll out third-party provider discounts, effective Jan. 1.
Generative and agentic AI have been central to the AWS strategy. The company introduced three agent-specific AI Competency Partner categories for software and service providers in November and deployed agents to assist partners last month.
Microsoft made changes to its cloud marketplace in an effort to get partners to use more AI, prior to unveiling Frontier partner badging last year. Those efforts continue, according to Dezen.
“We know that in order to have credibility and deep expertise on AI, partners have to use it themselves,” Dezen said. “This is not something that you can just sell just automatically. Having that real-world, hands-on experience with the product makes partner sellers better sellers.”
