Right now, it’s a time of incredible disruption in the tech and telecommunications channel. This was on full display when we recently sponsored and attended the 2026 edition of Channel Focus. From what we saw at the event, and our own observations this year, the message is loud and clear.
The entire channel model is being rebuilt.
In this new era, the way channel teams are built and operate, how vendors and partners work together, and how vendors incentivize and reward partners are all changing. And it’s the vendors and partners who adapt best who will come out on top.
AI is changing how channel teams are built and operate
AI has already changed a great deal about the channel, including where spend is going, and how relationships are structured. This disruption extends to how vendor channel teams are now operating. With more powerful tools at your disposal, your channel team can now achieve a lot more without having to vastly expand headcount.
What hasn’t changed are the primary objectives: your team is there to build better partnerships and drive more revenue. You still need to recruit and activate the right partners, and those partners need to close the right deals for you. It’s just easier now to do more with less.
You don’t need as much manpower
Using the right AI tools can make your team far more productive and efficient without needing to keep adding new members. Modern Partner Relationship Management (PRM) and Through-Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA) continues to evolve to make this possible. Unifyr, for example, employs the Unifyr IQ Suite across the platform, with agentic capabilities allowing vendors to truly orchestrate their ecosystem.
Ask IQ is at the forefront, which can step in as your own 24/7 digital Partner Account Manager (PAM). It reaches across your entire program, able to act on your channel data (rather than just read it). Then you have Onboarding IQ, Deal IQ, Campaign IQ, Social IQ, and more. Each of these agents automates more of the work you needed to do manually in the past.
And we have Agent Connect, which uses MCP to integrate Unifyr with your AI assistant of choice (like Claude, Copilot, or ChatGPT). This means your channel team can take actions from their own AI tool using plain language, rather than needing to access our platform directly.
Working from the tools your people are most comfortable with, that they use all the time, can significantly boost your team’s efficiency. Gone are the days where your PAM has to spend a morning pulling reports, wrestling with data filters to get things just how they want.
Now they can get what they need, sometimes just from a single question, then direct the action to address what they find. Maybe that’s a deal that’s gone cold… AI surfaces the details with plain language prompting, and your PAM can then put their time to working directly with the partner to get the deal back on track.
The skills your team needs are changing
These days, you don’t need more people to get more done. And your team doesn’t need to spend as much time on manual, repetitive tasks (like updating reports by hand). Better AI tools and more automation mean that team members can focus on the bigger picture, spending more time on things like broader channel strategy.
Discernment and iteration are important here, as skilled operators will work with the available tools to identify your business’s most pressing issues, and then work on resolving them. For instance, you can use AI to quickly get details about all the deals that are currently stalling… but your team still needs to know where to focus and what to do next to get the right deals back on track.
And no matter how good the tools, sometimes you need to go back-and-forth to get things right. Output isn’t always perfect the first time round. To handle this, you’ll need operators who know what good looks like, know when something isn’t quite right, and have the ability to work at it until it is. Of course, learning from experience strengthens this skill over time.
To steer a partner program in the right direction, your team must be able to map out the design of what you want to achieve, then build using available tools (including those powered by AI). When on stage during Channel Focus, our VP of Customer Solutions and Sales Acceleration, Josh Medeiros, highlighted this very principle when he related a story from a few weeks before.
He’d been at the Fryeburg Fair in Maine, and in between rides and food, took the opportunity to pull out his phone and tweak some deal registration workflows and dashboards in his demo environments (which mimic the live version of the Unifyr platform) using MCP through Agent Connect. Here, he had the vision of what he wanted to build, and then he used the tools at hand to create it.
Today, it’s easier than ever to connect and use these kinds of tools, but to get somewhere real, you need a build mentality, and then to match it with follow-through.
Data is everything
For all of this to work properly, data is everything. Organizations need to get theirs in order and store clean, accurate partner and customer data if they want AI to deliver real business value. AI tools can only do so much if the data they’re working with is poor quality (or non-existent). Having 6,000 partners isn’t much of a boast if 5,000 haven’t been active in years and you’ve never cleaned up your database.
Vendors also need to make sure more knowledge and business processes get moved out of people’s heads and into the systems of record that AI can access. If only one of your team members knows how a particular business process runs, and it’s not recorded anywhere else, you have a problem.
Partners are moving fast and vendors have to keep up
Partners are moving faster than ever, with an increasing number adopting AI into their own operations. Like everyone, they have preferred AI assistants they call on in their day-to-day work.
They also have less patience to deal with yet another portal. If a partner has 20 different vendors to choose from, the ones that are easiest to work with generally get their attention. To keep up, vendors need to give partners more and better options to work with them.
That means things like MCP integration (such as Unifyr’s Agent Connect), which allows partners to work and make changes directly from their own tools. For example, your partners could go to their connected Claude or ChatGPT and register a deal in seconds without having to enter anything directly to a portal. And this can extend to wider integration into the tech stack, by connecting other tools, including workspace apps like Slack and Teams.
Vendors can set the parameters of what AI can touch and what changes partners can make, while meeting partners where they work… bringing the portal to them, rather than relying on partners coming to it.
What we’re seeing: vendors that can deliver a more headless experience for partners will benefit the most in this environment.
Partner economics, incentives, and MDF are evolving
A major theme at Channel Focus this year was how partner economics are changing, especially thanks to AI. Traditional pricing models have been disrupted, with consumption- and outcome-based pricing options growing more popular.
This flows through to how you can incentivize and pay your partners. If revenue for the vendor is now coming at a different rate, perhaps over several months or quarters, how do you reward the partner that brought you the deal? Do you pay at booking, at activation, or on usage?
Josh Medeiros believes the vendors that have made the most progress employ more of a waterfall payout structure. Vendors pay only a portion of commission upfront, and then deliver more at additional stages when partners hit other milestones. That way, vendors and partners move away from sheer volume. Instead, vendors can reward adoption, attachment, and retention, and then track whether the customer is getting actual value.
For MDF, vendors should focus on funding the behaviors that make deals more likely to happen. That could be something like getting a solutions engineer involved earlier. And if you want to run a quick test to see how effective your MDF approval criteria is, see how many are about activity alone… if it’s most of them, then you might have an issue with your program design.
Tiering can suffer from similar issues, and focusing on revenue alone can get your program into further trouble.
Overall, modern partner ecosystems and sales cycles are far more complex now, and there need to be rewards and incentives that focus not just on total sales, but also on encouraging the leading indicators that you want to see more of from your partners.
One great way to incentivize and reward partners is to use time-bound contests, which can keep things fresh, and stop your partners from stagnating. Unifyr, for example, has a powerful gamification and contest engine that more of our customers are using to keep partners interested and motivated, and encourage the kind of action that helps drive their partner program ahead.
Reshape your own channel operations
If you’d like to find out more about how you can use Unifyr to revolutionize your own partner operations, book a demo and we’ll show you how.