AI in ecosystems has officially crossed a line — from experimentation to execution. In this issue of PartnerSpeak: Ecosystem x AI, we go straight to the builders shaping what comes next: autonomous agents replacing dashboards, data becoming the real competitive moat, and partner work finally moving at machine speed. From ServiceNow to Crossbeam to HPE, these leaders aren’t theorizing about the future — they're already running it.
If you want to understand where ecosystem automation is really heading, talk to the people building the future from the inside. In this edition, ServiceNow’s Divya Rajagopalan breaks down the shift from AI hype to AI horsepower — and why the next wave of partner advantage will be built on agents, not dashboards.
If Divya had to put a single oversized chip on the AI roulette wheel, she’s betting it all on Agentic AI — autonomous, multi-step, task-running agents that go way beyond today’s chatbots.
These aren’t cute little helpers. They’re orchestrators.
Agents that run customer support.
Agents that triage back-office operations.
Agents that manage sales forecasting, inventory sorting, and the endless operational “run work” that bloats every modern ecosystem.
And the companies leaning in hardest — the ones using agents past task automation and into real revenue-generating workflows — are already seeing material gains. Productivity jumps. Faster pipeline. Higher partner engagement. Better unit economics.
“AI is taking the busy work out of the system,” Divya says. Predictive analytics, smart sales assistants, automated marketing tools — partners who adopt these early are widening the gap.
Behind the scenes, the foundation is shifting too. Model builders like OpenAI and Anthropic, and the hyperscale infrastructure powering them, are accelerating at a pace that’s enabling a full industry transformation
ServiceNow isn’t experimenting — they’re operationalizing.
Internally, Divya’s team built custom agents that turned their content chaos into instant clarity. Instead of searching across SharePoint, OneDrive, scattered folders, outdated PDFs, and mystery locations, internal agents now pull the right content from everywhere and surface it instantly. It’s dramatically improved productivity and knowledge flow across teams.
Externally, they’ve built dedicated partner agents designed to eliminate the partner friction nobody has time for anymore:
The result? Partner Managers aren’t babysitting forms or chasing paperwork. They’re spending time where it matters: in strategic, high-value interactions with partners.
There’s a funnel — and it’s very intentional.
The result is a pipeline of AI capabilities driven by partner insights, business outcomes, and very grounded operational realities.
Divya was clear: the layer in ecosystems that’s about to undergo the most radical change is the middle layer — operations, support, channel management.
AI is going to streamline:
This isn’t about replacing marketers or partner managers — it’s about letting them focus on influence, not admin.
Divya’s vision is straightforward: The next-gen PRM will open with an AI bot — not a static portal page.
Partners (and internal sellers) will simply ask:
The bot does the work. The workflow engine executes the actions. Data powers the insights. And dashboards remain available for visual thinkers, but they’re no longer the starting point.
So, I asked…. In your example — could you have an agent proactively alerting a partner that they’re at risk of losing MDF and offering a campaign execution path — she lit up. That’s exactly where it’s going.
ServiceNow’s north star is “AI Ready.”
Put simply: AI should amplify human capability, not replace it.
ServiceNow’s CEO Bill McDermott’s positioning is consistent — AI in workflows drives productivity and world-class experiences. Human-centric, responsible, accountable. Their AI Control Tower ensures compliance and safe operations. Their goal: give humans superpowers.
And for partner managers? Less time in PowerPoints and spreadsheets. More time in conversations that move ecosystems
The bottom line? Ecosystem leaders who don’t embrace AI agents now will be playing catch-up for years. We’re moving into a world where the competitive edge won’t come from bigger portals or cleaner dashboards — it’ll come from intelligent workflows that anticipate, recommend, and execute before anyone even asks. The next wave of partner advantage belongs to the builders: the teams willing to automate the grind, rewire the middle layer, and put true agentic automation at the center of their ecosystem strategy
There are people in the ecosystem space who talk about AI… and then there’s Bob Moore. Crossbeam’s co-founder and CEO delivers insights at a velocity that borders on superhuman — and every sentence lands like a strategy memo from the future.
In our latest PartnerSpeak: Ecosystem x AI interview, Bob takes on the myths, the hype, and the very real opportunity sitting inside the data flows of your ecosystem. If you’ve ever wondered why 95% of AI initiatives miss the mark — or what the 5% are doing differently — this one’s a must-read.
Bob doesn’t mince words: most AI projects fail because they start with the shiny stuff.
“People rush to build an agent that scans a knowledge base or queries a system,” he says, “but if your context is thin, your AI will be thin.”
The winners — the real 5% — are doing the opposite. They’re starting from the data out:
When your agents understand the 360° reality of your business — customers, partners, products, market signals — they behave less like chatbots and more like your most high-performing employee.
And that’s exactly the point: AI cannot outperform the data layer underneath it.
Everyone’s buzzing about “AI for co-sell,” but Bob brings the clarity most people miss.
"If you have ten partners, each with several thousand of accounts in their CRM systems, you may need process hundreds of thousands of account mapping events per year in search of the needles in the haystack worth acting on. Then imagine if you have hundreds of partners, or thousands.".
Humans cannot scale that. Territories cannot scale that. Spreadsheets absolutely cannot scale that.
But agents can.
“They’re situationally aware across every one of those scenarios,” Bob explains. “When a new overlap appears or a prospect becomes a customer of your partner, the agent can detect it, surround it with context, and take the right action — instantly.”
This is the new era of co-selling:
Propensity, personalization, timing, orchestration — all of it moves from “campaign logic” to real-time intelligence.
If Bob had to place one big bet on AI in ecosystems? He cheats (in the best way).
AI solves the extremes:
1. The “Head of the Curve” Partners
Huge global partners with massive data sets become far more manageable when AI can prioritize the noise, surface the signal, and guide sellers into the right joint motions.
2. The Long Tail
Countless smaller partners, agencies, boutiques, SI’s — the partners who often get lost in the noise — suddenly become discoverable, trackable, and actionable.
AI can spot the moment when a small-but-mighty partner deserves attention, engagement, or opportunity. At scale. Without extra headcount.
Bob’s big bet: Invest in the foundational data layer that lets you go both wide and deep.
For vendors trying to stand out in a crowded partner ecosystem, Bob is clear: AI finally kills the blunt instruments of the past.
Instead of:
AI enables near-limitless, real-time, hyper-accurate personalization across:
By combining first-party data, third-party enrichment, and second-party ecosystem data, AI lets vendors speak to partners with precision that cuts directly through market noise.
“You’ll break through because everyone else is still using blunt tools,” Bob says. “AI lets you speak specifically and directly to them.”
One of Bob’s biggest surprises? AI-generated video.
As a hobbyist, he’s now producing fully AI-driven speaker videos for Crossbeam’s Enterprise Leadership Group Summit — and they’ve exploded in engagement.
Views, shares, buzz, attention — all from AI-video content created with zero traditional production.
It’s a glimpse of where partner marketing is headed: high-quality media at near-zero cost, produced at the speed of creativity.
If Bob gets his wish, this is what AI will rewrite in ecosystems:
For years, ecosystem pros have been forced to convert nonlinear collaboration into rigid forms, fields, and steps — because that’s how old SaaS tools were built.
AI changes that.
Agents can:
When that happens, ecosystem teams stop being “interfaces for forms” and return to high-leverage, creative, revenue-driving work.
Bob reminds us that ecosystems don’t scale through more forms, more workflows, or more noise — they scale through intelligence. The next chapter belongs to leaders who invest in data foundations, embrace agentic automation, and elevate humans back into high-leverage work.
In this installment of Ecosystem x AI, Nick Buckner, VP of Networking Channel Operations at HPE, cuts through the noise with one of the clearest “crawl, walk, run” blueprints for partner-facing AI we’ve seen yet. His philosophy is simple: start with AI that gets adopted, then scale to the game-changers.
What follows is part pragmatic roadmap, part preview of how partner experience will look in a world where content consumption, co-selling, and joint business planning all happen in real time.
Nick’s first principle: don’t chase the biggest AI bet — chase the earliest win.
HPE is starting with AI for content consumption, tackling a universal problem for partners and sellers: too many PDFs, decks, sales plays, program rules, and updates spread across too many places. His team is using AI to turn all of that into simple, conversational answers.
“Instead of searching through five places for how to position two networking solutions, a seller or partner can just ask the agent and get a clean, accurate table in seconds,” he explains.
From there, the roadmap moves into AI-generated, in-brand content — enabling sellers to instantly create polished, presentation-ready material without building every slide “pixel by pixel.” Early pilots show massive time savings, and the team expects “hours and hours of sales productivity” to be unlocked as they refine in-brand generation.
A smart twist in the HPE strategy is recognizing that partners are adopting their own AI tools — many building on Microsoft Copilot or similar platforms.
Rather than forcing partners into a new UI, HPE is creating AI-ready fact packs: well-structured, tagged content that drops directly into partner-owned chat interfaces.
“Some partners download our content and push it into their own engine,” Nick says. “So, we’re giving them fit-for-purpose packs that help their AI succeed.”
It’s a subtle shift — but one that aligns perfectly with the next generation of decentralized ecosystem enablement, where vendors enrich partner-owned models rather than competing with them.
Next on the roadmap is a knowledge agent designed for partner account managers and channel sellers — part of the “walk” phase of the AI journey.
The agent will give sellers on-demand guidance — how to position products, how solutions compare, which use case fits which customer scenario — in real time. No hunting for decks. No outdated materials. No delay before a partner meeting.
It’s classic “enablement at the speed of conversation.”
Over time, deeper capabilities will follow: technical refreshers, certification-based answers, and intelligence that reinforces learning. The outcome: reduced search, increased confidence, and elevated partner conversations.
Nick’s most forward-looking concept — and perhaps the most ecosystem-shaping — is his idea of moving from static joint business plans to joint business agents.
Instead of an annual artifact that gets filed away and forgotten, an AI agent would:
“Don’t set it and forget it,” Nick says. “Bring it to life.”
This keeps partners aligned, gives PDMs more time for relationship-building, and allows AI to do the heavy lifting of data analysis, pipeline monitoring, and prompt generation.
It’s one of the clearest examples of where ecosystem-led AI is heading: dynamic, persistent, insight-driven collaboration.
If Nick had to place one big bet on ecosystem AI, it’s on embedded AI — the kind partners and sellers don’t even know they’re using.
He gives a perfect example: choosing the right partner inside Salesforce.
Instead of scrolling through thousands of partner options, embedded AI could instantly shortlist the three partners with the right certifications, territories, success patterns, and capabilities for that specific opportunity.
It increases seller success, rewards partners who invest in capability, and eliminates the adoption barrier because it’s baked directly into the tools people rely on every day.
Perhaps the most surprising insight from Nick’s team isn’t about speed or efficiency — it’s about inclusion.
Across HPE’s global organization, AI is helping level the playing field for team members whose first language isn’t English. Colleagues are using AI to interpret dense content more easily, draft emails and presentations in their own voice, and ensure clarity, accuracy, and appropriate tone before sharing with partners or executives.
“It’s making people feel more confident participating,” Nick explains. “They’re not second-guessing their grammar or phrasing — they’re focused on the substance.”
The result is a quieter but powerful shift: stronger participation, clearer communication, and more voices actively contributing across regions. In a moment when AI is often framed as disruptive, this is a reminder that — when applied thoughtfully — it can be profoundly empowering.
Real-time enablement. Partner-owned agents are fed by AI-ready vendor content. Joint business plans that run themselves. Embedded partner-matching. Co-selling that happens in hours instead of days.
Nick’s roadmap isn’t hypothetical — it’s underway.
And as HPE advances these capabilities, it signals the next wave of ecosystem innovation: AI that is practical, adopted, and transformative.