In the AI era, channel value is being redefined

For as long as I have worked in the technology channel, one question has remained remarkably consistent: where does the partner add value?

It is an old question, but in 2026 it deserves a new answer.

For years, value was relatively easy to define. A partner brought technical expertise, product knowledge, implementation capability and ongoing support. Those things still matter, but customers today are dealing with technology environments that are vastly more complex, distributed and dynamic than they were even a few years ago.

AI is only accelerating that change.

The volume of data organisations need to manage is increasing dramatically, while the speed at which that data is being created, moved and acted upon is accelerating even faster. Gigamon research last year found one in three organisations had seen network data volumes more than double in just two years due to AI. From what we understand currently, that figure is now closer to four-times the volume of data.

That creates a simple problem: as the amount and velocity of data increases, so too does the potential for larger blind spots.

This is where I believe the definition of channel value is changing.

Customers don't necessarily need more technology

The technology industry has traditionally been very good at responding to a new problem with a new product. However, customers tend to have plenty of products already, and in many cases are looking to actively reduce their 'IT sprawl'.

Interestingly, the Gigamon 2026 Hybrid Cloud Security Survey found that 93 percent of organisations had invested in new detection and visibility tools, yet only 30 percent of organisations that suffered a breach believed their tools could effectively respond to threats.

That tells us something important about where partners can add value.

The opportunity is no longer simply to sell another security, networking, cloud or AI solution. It is to help customers make better use of what they already have.

That requires partners to move higher up the value chain; understanding how a customer's infrastructure fits together, identifying where visibility is being lost, and ensuring the tools they have invested in are receiving the right data and context to do their jobs properly. Remember, you only get out what you put in, and, in this day and age, clean and valuable data is absolutely critical.

AI makes that role even more important.

AI creates opportunity and complexity

Every organisation is looking at how AI can improve productivity, automate processes and create new services. At the same time, AI introduces more workloads, more machine-to-machine communication, more APIs and more data moving between applications, clouds and infrastructure.

Much of that activity doesn't necessarily travel through the traditional pathways that organisations have been accustomed to monitoring.

Today, an estimated 76 percent of data centre traffic is East-West traffic – moving internally between services, datasets and applications. Add encryption, cloud-native applications and autonomous AI agents to the equation, and it becomes increasingly difficult for customers to maintain a complete picture of what is happening inside their environment.

This is particularly important from a security perspective. The Gigamon Hybrid Cloud Security Survey found that 65 percent of organisations experienced a breach in the previous year, with AI involved in 83 percent of those incidents.

Customers therefore don't just need more alerts, they need greater confidence that they can see what actually matters.

Partners can become the visibility layer

For channel organisations, I see a significant opportunity.

The most valuable partners over the next few years won't necessarily be those with the biggest product catalogue. They will be those that can help customers simplify complexity.

That means asking different questions.

Where are the customer's blind spots? What data are their security and observability platforms actually receiving and monitoring? Can they see East-West traffic? What happens when traffic is encrypted? Are their AI workloads creating new connections or data flows that nobody is monitoring? Also, can their existing security investments distinguish between yet another alert and something that genuinely requires action?

This is where deep observability becomes relevant to the channel discussion.

By deriving intelligence from network traffic and combining that with traditional metrics, events, logs and traces, partners can help customers feed richer, higher-quality information into the tools they already own.

The result isn't simply better visibility, it can mean greater value from the customer's existing technology investments and indeed their service providers.

Value is ultimately about outcomes

So, perhaps we need to stop defining channel value by what a partner sells.

Customers don't really care how many vendor certifications a partner has or how many technologies appear on its line card unless those capabilities translate into an outcome.

Can you reduce complexity? Can you make my existing investments work harder? Can you identify risks I can't currently see? Can you help me adopt AI without creating an entirely new collection of blind spots?

Those are increasingly the questions that matter.

As data volumes continue to grow and AI pushes business and infrastructure to operate at machine speed, customers will need their trusted partners more, not less.

However, earning that position will require the channel to rethink the age-old question of where it adds value.

In my view, the answer is increasingly; clear value doesn't lie with adding more technology to an already complex environment, but in helping customers see, understand and get more out of what they already have. To put it another way, AI certainly won't kill the channel, but it will change what customers are willing to pay partners for.