If you’ve been anywhere near the ecosystem world lately, you know the vibe: everyone’s talking AI, but only a handful are actually doing anything worth paying attention to.
That’s why this next volume of Ecosystem x AI hits differently. Four leaders. Four very different vantage points. One shared truth: the old partner playbook isn’t just bending — it’s breaking.
These are the operators who aren’t waiting for “industry maturity.” They’re already rewiring co-sell, reshaping partner experience, and calling out the empty hype in the AI conversation.
Let’s get into it.
In this latest edition, Barracuda’s, SVP, Global Partners & Alliances Michelle Hodges brings her trademark clarity and candor to one of the biggest questions facing partner leaders today: how to connect more meaningfully with partners in an AI-driven world. Known for her focus on connection, culture, and performance, Michelle shares a grounded take on how AI can make every relationship—vendor to partner, partner to customer—more authentic, productive, and human.
For Hodges, AI isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about connection.
“When I think about AI, I think about how it helps us connect more and be more productive within that connection,” she says. “That obviously leads you to engagement, activation, and co-sell. That’s where I’m placing my bet.”
That mindset is shaping how Barracuda engages partners. What used to be a traditional “co-selling day,” for example, has evolved into something far more powerful.
“We’re re-imagining that to engage and accelerate the relationship,” she explains. “We use digital sales rooms that contain everything the partner needs—target accounts, data, sales plays, scripts, campaigns—and we can measure engagement and refine as we go.”
The impact has been dramatic. With automation and AI overlaying these efforts, Barracuda has tripled the productivity of its co-sell engagements—scaling from one day a quarter to an entire week each month.
“It allows us to sit where partners want us to be,” she adds. “They want you to be present, but they also want to be productive.”
AI noise is everywhere—and partners are inundated. Hodges’ advice? Look for authenticity.
“Focus on vendors where AI is an authentic and integral part of their solution, not just a new talking point,” she says. “For Barracuda, AI has been core to how we deliver email and application protection for years. That foundation gives us credibility.”
She believes the same principle applies to partner engagement:
“Find vendors who are using AI to grow your business—not just to talk about it. Is this going to help me build my relationships? Serve my customers better? That’s what partners should be asking.”
When asked how AI has most surprised her team internally, Hodges doesn’t hesitate.
Instead of restrictive councils and approvals, the company encourages every employee to experiment through hackathons and recognition programs.
“We’re all challenged to come up with ideas that make us better,” she says. “Sometimes they’re not sexy—like automating rebate reconciliation—but they free up time to focus on strategy, collaboration and building stronger human connections.”
Her team is already deploying AI agents internally, with a “pretty robust sales agent” live today and plans underway for AI-enabled customer success and partner agents integrated into a new PRM.
“We’ve been asked to identify AI gurus across the organization and invest in their enablement,” she adds. “The pace they’re moving at is phenomenal.”
Looking ahead two years, Hodges believes AI will strengthen—not replace—the human side of partner engagement.
“It’s going to make for better relationships,” she says. “If we deploy it accurately, it’ll bring us closer together—up and down the partner tiers. That’s what drives growth.”
That relationship focus carries through to Barracuda’s partner advisory boards and surveys, where AI’s role in enablement and collaboration has become a key agenda item.
“Anything we do is in service of the value of the relationship,” she emphasizes. “What’s going to help us grow and be stronger?”
Despite the hype, Hodges remains pragmatic about where vendors should lead—and where partners will chart their own paths.
“I can be very clear about what we’re doing and why,” she says. “But I can’t assume partners will do it the same way. They’re running their own businesses.”
Her advice to other partner leaders: communicate your intention clearly, focus on growth, and let AI amplify—not replace—the human element.
“It’s basic communication and intention,” she says. “Be clear about your desired outcomes. For us, it always comes back to connection and growth.”
“AI is going to be huge for co-selling—on every layer.”
That’s how Kelly Sarabyn, HubSpot’s Director of Technology Partnerships, opens our conversation. She’s known for cutting through buzzwords to explain how real-world partnering works, so when she talks about AI’s role in changing how partners prospect, sell, and enable each other—it’s worth listening.
“On the enablement side, we’ve all relied on slide decks, one-sheets, and LMS systems to train and equip partners,” Kelly says. “With AI, that’s going to look completely different. Imagine templates already pre-loaded with brand assets that AI helps shape into winning joint value propositions on the fly and enablement delivered in real time when it is needed. That’s where we’re headed.”
Beyond content creation, she sees operational transformation coming fast. “Prospecting agents and AI-powered partner BDRs are already real. Intent signals that AI can detect and flag to the right partner—those will be game-changers. And AI will do a much better job identifying target accounts than humans can.”
HubSpot already partners with Crossbeam, and Kelly sees a natural AI layer on top of that shared data. “There are a lot of AI use cases for partner data when combined with other data sources and context. The biggest challenge for large ecosystems is often: how do you find the best partner for a specific deal? It’s overwhelming. AI can use partner data combined with other data, read the context, and recommend which partner should engage on a particular account—and when.”
Internally, HubSpot’s adoption of AI goes well beyond product features. “We have a ton of AI training and tools at HubSpot that cover a wide variety of use cases across the company. My team uses Claude and ChatGPT AI to help generate content, analyze our partner ecosystem, research industry benchmarks, map whitespace, and understand total addressable markets across different partner products categories.”
“We’ve also trained Breeze (HubSpot AI) to respond to our long-tail partner emails, which saves tons of human time and provides partners with instant answers. A human will always follow up if the partner needs further assistance, and they are able to do so more quickly since AI answers so many of the questions.”
Kelly shared that their technology partners are heavily investing in AI. “The vast majority of our technology partners are already using AI within their products. They’re thinking about how they can better meet their customer needs with AI and developing those features. Every SaaS company knows it has to form a point of view on how AI fits into its core mission and delivers real value.”
Kelly lights up when we shift to discussing how she sees AI impacting the broader market. “The biggest disruption won’t just be in how we sell—it’ll be in what we sell. AI transformation consulting, technical implementations that optimize the use of AI, and digital and process change management are all becoming critical needs for businesses.
Her take: “The companies that move first and most effectively into AI-powered services will lead the next wave. And vendors will seek those partners because their products can plug directly into a new AI operating system.”
Kelly doesn’t buy the doomsday scenarios that AI will make software obsolete. “Point solutions exist for a reason. If you’ve built deep product, data, and domain expertise around a specific function—say, outbound sales videos—you’ll still be able to do that one thing better than anyone else.”
“The product and integration landscape will look different but there will continue to be an abundance of software that serves one customer objective incredibly well. Businesses will keep buying point solutions because they will help them outperform their competition. There is not going to be one giant chatbot or agent that everyone uses for everything.”
The takeaway? AI isn’t ending ecosystems—it’s re-wiring them.
“The partners who evolve into AI-powered service providers, and the vendors who help them do it, are going to define this next chapter,” Kelly says. “The cycle to evolve is faster now—but the opportunity is bigger than ever.”
If there’s one universal truth across the partner ecosystem right now, it’s this: everyone’s experimenting with AI, but few have cracked the code on how to make it meaningful. Meg Brennan, Head of Global Channel Strategy, Programs & Experience at HP, isn’t afraid to say it—most AI initiatives fail for the same reasons partner programs always have: lack of clarity, lack of structure, and a rush to “do something AI” without defining the why.
But what HP is doing differently—and what Brennan’s team is learning along the way—offers a glimpse into how AI is fundamentally rewriting the rules of partner engagement.
“When we started this journey with our partners,” says Brennan, “we had to get out of being clueless.”
The first step wasn’t deploying AI. It was understanding it. HP partnered with NVIDIA to launch an AI Masterclass—a foundational education series that’s now been completed by more than 20,000 partner employees. The curriculum covered everything from large language models to how AI chips power smarter devices.
“It was high level, but necessary,” Brennan says. “Before we could talk about AI use cases, we needed to get our partners fluent in the basics. And honestly, so did we.”
From there, HP shifted gears—from teaching what AI is to exploring what it can do. “We had to start building real use cases,” Brennan explains. “I have an AI laptop, and even I didn’t always know what made it AI. But then you start noticing: the battery lasts forever, the camera follows you in meetings, the processing happens locally. Those are tangible examples of how AI changes the experience.”
Understanding was only half the battle. The next challenge was figuring out where AI should show up across HP’s partner ecosystem.
“We were creating agents everywhere,” Brennan laughs. “Copilot agents for this, copilot agents for that. Suddenly, there were 5,000 of them across the company. It was chaos.”
That chaos led to a pivotal realization: HP needed structure. Brennan’s team created dedicated AI leads—focused internally and across the partner journey—to strategically identify where AI could deliver the most impact.
“We had to stop duplicating efforts and start being intentional,” she explains. “Now we’re asking: where can AI improve the partner experience? Where can it speed up what’s slow? And how do we make sure it doesn’t just create more noise?”
Noise, as Brennan puts it, is the silent killer of partner engagement. Partners are drowning in content, campaigns, and communications that often miss the mark.
AI is the antidote.
“Hyper-personalization is where it gets exciting,” she says. “We can now build partner experiences that know who you are, where you work, and what you need—without you having to go look for it.”
In HP’s vision, a partner seller at CDW might log in to find a personalized feed of campaigns, co-sell opportunities, and content relevant to their role. Over time, the system learns from feedback—what’s useful, what’s not—and adapts in real time.
“It starts as a chatbot,” Brennan says, “but over time it becomes more like a personal assistant. I use Copilot as my assistant—I want our partners to have the same thing. Something that’s proactive, anticipatory, and helps them be faster and smarter.”
Or, as Brennan puts it with a grin: “Imagine your partner opens their laptop, and it says, ‘Hey, I saw you talked to this customer last week. Want me to register the deal for you?’ That’s where we’re headed.”
If that sounds futuristic, Brennan insists it’s actually inevitable. “We call it the Gen Z experience,” she says. “My kids don’t want to call anyone or email anyone—they want instant, virtual, personalized help. That’s the expectation. By 2030, over half of IT decision-makers will be Gen Z or millennial. We have to design for that now.”
That means eliminating friction, predicting needs, and delivering the “Amazon experience” inside the partner portal. “They want the right information, instantly, without having to hunt for it,” Brennan says. “And they expect it to be easy.”
So, what gets rewritten in this new world? Brennan doesn’t hesitate: “The CAM role. And partner operations, too.”
It’s a provocative take—but she stands by it. “I don’t have a relationship with Amazon, and I spend thousands there every year,” she says. “If I get what I need, the relationship becomes less critical. The same thing is coming to IT sales and partner management. What doesn’t change is the desire to do business with companies you trust.”
Brennan believes AI will evolve from a reactive tool into a strategic partner—one that identifies opportunities, builds business plans, and even manages co-sell motions automatically.
“Once the tech is mature,” she says, “you won’t need a CAM to check boxes or fill out QBRs. AI will do it faster, smarter, and more accurately. What’s left is strategy, creativity, and trust. Everything else gets automated.”
Brennan pauses, then smiles. “I know that sounds controversial, but it’s true. The nature of our relationships with partners will be completely transformed. AI will change not just how we engage—but why.”
In the AI era, trust won’t come from quarterly calls or joint business plans. It will come from experience—from partners feeling that the vendor already knows what they need, when they need it.
And as Brennan says with a slight wink, “That’s not science fiction anymore. It’s just good partnering.”
In this installment of Ecosystem x AI, Cassandra Gholston — CEO and co-founder of PartnerTap — breaks down why co-selling has always been messy, how AI is finally fixing it, and why data is quietly shifting the power dynamic across ecosystems. Her take? The hype phase is over. It’s time to automate the chaos.
“Hype dominated the last three years. But the technology is catching up. Models are improving daily, enterprises can now mix, match, and orchestrate multiple models. The speed of innovation is so fast — the hype is now reality.”
AI has officially moved from the lab to the field. Enterprises aren’t just experimenting with predictive models for customer behavior anymore — they’re using them to see where the next co-sell win will happen. Cassandra says the real magic is in the shift from theory to traction: companies are operationalizing AI to spot the right customers, the right partners, the combined products to sell and who at in these complex account teams should be collaborating with a closed won opportunity — before anyone else.
“What everyone’s missing is: who are the best partners we should be working with, what combined product mix we should be recommending and who is the account team we need to connect with our sellers?”
Every enterprise has mountains of historical partner data — but most lack visibility into what’s happening right now and who at the partner is actually assigned to these accounts today. Cassandra’s team is helping major vendors feed live partner data directly into their propensity and prediction models. The result? Real-time visibility into who’s actually selling into your customers this quarter, not last year. It’s not just about knowing who your partners were — it’s about knowing who they are right now.
“We’ve solved the problem of where to focus and who to focus with. Now it’s all about solving the messy middle.”
For years, co-selling has lived in the gray zone — endless calls, chats, and spreadsheets trying to keep everyone aligned. AI is finally closing that gap. By pulling insights from unstructured conversations, updating CRMs automatically, and syncing systems across teams, AI is turning collaboration chaos into clean, connected motion.
“Account teams won’t have to update multiple systems anymore — it’ll just be done for them.”
The “messy middle” isn’t where deals go to die anymore — it’s where automation quietly makes them happen.
“There are jobs that will be rewritten by AI — but new opportunities will emerge for people who know how to connect data to business outcomes and apply a strategic lens to what agents produce.”
AI isn’t replacing people — it’s amplifying them. Cassandra sees the biggest transformations happening in partner operations and long-tail management.
Those regions and segments that once required large, distributed teams will soon be supported by intelligent agents that manage routine coordination, surface insights instantly, and highlight new opportunities before anyone has to go searching for them.
This doesn’t shrink the role of humans, it elevates it. People will shift from repetitive tasks to higher-impact work: training these agents, interpreting their recommendations, and guiding the strategy behind them – not filling out spreadsheets.
“That long tail of partnerships will be completely automated — but we’ll also see new, smaller partners being elevated because of predictive modeling.”
AI won’t just trim costs — it’ll reshuffle the ecosystem hierarchy. Cassandra predicts vendors will use predictive models to uncover emerging niche players who outperform expectations and bring them into the spotlight. These once “invisible” partners will suddenly find themselves getting funding, attention, and support traditionally reserved for the top tier.
In other words, the long tail is finally having its moment.
“The power is going to go to the companies that have the most data to mine.”
For years, partners held more control — now, vendors are quietly taking it back. Those with rich, connected data models can identify the most effective partners, predict outcomes, and move resources in real time.
“You’ll see vendors finding small partners doing something innovative and giving them the funding and visibility they deserve.”
The winners will cultivate the best relationships — because they’ll have the smartest models.
Cassandra’s perspective makes one thing clear: AI isn’t just streamlining co-selling — it’s redefining who wins.
Predictive models will surface tomorrow’s breakout partners. Automation will eliminate the grunt work. And data will become the new gravity holding ecosystems together.
The messy middle? It’s finally getting cleaned up — and this time, it’s permanent.