Since Stacey Epstein is the CEO of Structured, the AI-native channel marketing platform, it only made sense to try her hand building an AI agent to help with her duties as prom chair at her daughter’s high school.
But she quickly discovered that security risks come with just about anything you do in the AI business playground.
“I woke up to an email saying, 'Warning: You’re disclosing the child’s name, the parents’ names, their insurance information’ — this is a big security risk,” she said.
Epstein averted disaster, but marketers in the channel are discovering all kinds of challenges before they even get to concerns around security and compliance. Most are just getting started with AI to streamline their operations, become more productive and save their companies money.
Reducing friction
Partner marketing can be messy. The many roadblocks include a diverse range of partner marketing skills, the seemingly never-ending approval workflow and the actual execution of a marketing program, to name a few. AI has the potential to help reduce friction and launch a marketing campaign with fewer pain points, according to the vendors relying on channel partners.
“AI makes partner marketing work better, and [experienced marketers] should be the ones guiding how it’s used,” said Epstein during a panel discussion last month. Epstein moderated a panel on AI and driving partner engagement at the Channel Marketing Association’s annual summit.
ServiceNow, the workflow management platform, set out two years ago to improve its partner experience with artificial intelligence, starting with content.
“We thought about content in a very different way to help our partners go to market faster,” said Maisa Fernandez, director of global partner marketing and demand strategy at ServiceNow. “We really wanted to help our partners personalize that content and give that flavor of a joint value proposition to the market.”
After some success, the strategy broadened.
“We asked ourselves, ‘How can we create better value in all of the marketing that we’re providing to our partners?’ We wanted to simplify and reduce the noise to give partners exactly what they’re looking for,” Fernandez told the CMA audience.
Go-to-market planning is where Microsoft’s channel marketing team is finding the best use cases for AI, according to Colleen Tyler, GM of global partner marketing and go-to-market for Microsoft.
Tyler noted that her team is constantly asking themselves how AI agents can help answer specific questions. By doing so, they’ve reduced the time it takes to create a unique plan tailored to an individual partner’s value proposition. Tyler said AI helped slash the time spent on internal back-and-forth and on communication with the partner.
The software giant’s partners are always asking the company how they can stand out among a sea of competitors. Using AI in marketing could be one such way.
“That’s a huge challenge and opportunity,” said Tyler. “But if you have something where you're able to combine your value proposition with the partner value prop, that's where AI can reduce the friction. What is our unique message to the customer that we can [present] together? Finding tools that allow you to do that at scale is a real [advantage].”
Vendor insights
Tyler says not even Microsoft has fully incorporated AI into the partner experience, but every vendor and partner should, at a minimum, be making those first steps. Fernandez agreed.
“ServiceNow has a lot of partners that don't even have marketing teams on staff, so they don't even know how to do marketing,” said Fernandez. “So you need to not only enable these folks, but also give them the tools to move through the process.”
She says the long-term goal is to use AI from beginning to end in the channel marketing process: planning, producing content, identifying targets and activating a campaign. The end result could be significant cost savings over traditional ways of working with partners to market their products, measurable productivity gains and an opportunity to demonstrate a return on investment.
Another benefit: an even stronger relationship with the partner.
“There is no replacement for that human conversation, that trust that you're building as you build out an alliance, Fernandez said. “People aren’t buying AI; they're buying the relationship they have with you and knowledge that they're in good hands if something goes wrong.”
