Dive Brief:
- TD Synnex expanded its AI-focused Destination AI partner program Oct. 27, providing partners with assets tailored to midmarket organizations. The added features include a small and midsize business AI adoption workshop, an AI skills marketplace in the StreamOne platform and a foundations course for partners.
- The technology distributor wants partners selling AI to SMBs to lead with revenue and cost results rather than productivity tools, Sergio Farache, the distributor's chief strategy and technology officer, told Channel Dive. Productivity tools “on their own don't change how a small business runs or grows," he said in an email.
- The company did not say how many partners have advanced through Destination AI's three maturity tiers. Farache said thousands of partners globally are at the entry-level Aware stage and that a "steady flow" is moving to Ready, with Europe showing strong momentum. Destination AI assets are free and create revenue through AI license adoption, consumption and demand for services.
Dive Insight:
TD Synnex wants to take down objections partners hear most from small businesses: AI costs extra and the payoff is hard to show.
"To justify the added cost of AI, SMBs need tangible results”, Farache said, pointing to growing quote volume, faster responses, more calls handled and better reports. Those gains, he said, have to cut costs or grow revenue.
For partners, sales workflows are changing. While a seat license sale ends as a transaction, a skill tied to a quoting or support workflow is ongoing, billable work that needs discovery, proof of value and someone to deploy and maintain it. TD Synnex built its SMB tools around that sequence. AI Game Plan finds the use case, Cloud Labs proves it, and the marketplace supplies a prebuilt AI skill to deploy.
Revenue comes through the licenses and consumption they pull through. The SMB announcement doesn't say which vendors' platforms the skills run on or what partners can earn beyond their own services work. Partners evaluating the marketplace will likely ask.
The SMB push comes a couple of weeks after TD Synnex added 53 AI agent tools to its PartnerFirst platform. When TD Synnex introduced AI Game Plan in December 2025, it focused on enterprise customers and said it was best suited for partners in the Ready or Expert tiers. The program launched in North America in August 2023.
TD Synnex isn't alone in taking on AI hesitancy among SMBs. Microsoft has addressed AI cost objections by extending promotional pricing on Copilot Business for organizations with up to 300 users. In June, it offered a 15% discount, bringing the standalone license to $18 per user per month through Dec. 31, and added a 25% discount bundled with Microsoft 365 Business Basic. The extensions could mean the discounts are working or they could mean that small businesses still need convincing to pay. Farache didn't mention Microsoft or Copilot.
TD Synnex's AI numbers are tough to pin down. Farache said nearly all of the distributor's partners have done AI business in some form, a count that includes partners selling AI-enabled devices alongside those with full AI practices. He noted that many partners serve customers of every size, so labeling a share of them as SMB-focused is difficult.
"The goal is to move AI from a nice-to-have productivity tool to a must-have business outcome," Farache said.
