Dive Brief:
- Global technology distributor TD Synnex rolled out 53 pre-built agentic AI tools and an AI business coach at its annual Inspire event in South Carolina last week, the company said in an announcement. Partners can access the features on the TD Synnex PartnerFirst platform, which was also outfitted with an MCP bridge that connects third-party applications to PartnerFirst data.
- TD Synnex launched PartnerFirst in September 2025, aiming to unify product discovery, skill building and loyalty programs for its reseller community. The agentic additions broaden the platform’s customer lifecycle management capabilities by automating pricing, discovery, shipping, invoicing and subscription workflows, the company said in the announcement.
- “It's using AI to do what a solution architect or what a presales person would do,” Nate Herz, regional CIO North America at TD Synnex, told Channel Dive. “At the reseller level, folks are needing to manage quotes, orders, subscriptions and other specific workflows that PartnerFirst can now automate.”
Dive Insight:
TD Synnex CEO Patrick Zammit vowed to use AI to simplify partner processes last year. The PartnerFirst platform has become the nexus of that initiative.
“You can develop very rapidly, very interesting use cases — automating workflows, automating some tasks, you name it — thanks to agentic AI,” Zammit told Channel Dive in October 2025. “Where, probably for companies, LLMs were a little bit abstract, agentic AI makes it very, very concrete.”
The distributor expanded the platform’s reach in August, adding data from Cisco, Microsoft and several other larger vendors to its product dataset. The plan is to continue integrating vendor data into the PartnerFirst database so TD Synnex resellers don’t have to, Herz said at the time.
To fine tune its agentic capabilities, the company ran two separate pilots with partners, one with the 65 individuals testing the automation and the other with 20 reseller firms testing the MCP connector, according to Herz.
“People are doing things that you would expect — checking on order status using the AI, creating quotes and orders,” Herz said, speaking at Inspire last week. “The interesting thing is the depth that people are going to.”
AI-assisted product search is one reseller function PartnerFirst agents can tackle as ongoing chip shortages bog down hardware supply chains.
“They're looking up one type of product, seeing that it's out of stock due to shortages and finding shippable alternatives,” Herz said.
Relieving paperwork headaches remains a core use case.
Marco Technologies, a managed services provider and technology consulting firm in the TD Synnex network, was one of the partners piloting PartnerFirst agents. Previously, the company spent hours paging through invoices AI was able to process in minutes, according to the company’s President of SaaS and Technology Clay Ostlund.
“We’d have to manually look at that invoice and the purchase order, and then we’d have to look to see if there were credits that are going to be applied to this invoice,” Ostlund said in a prerecorded Inspire presentation. “It can be hours of work manually.”
