• How are $370Bn in cloud commitments reshaping the tech ecosystem?

• How is AI creating billions in new service revenue?

• What are the challenges and opportunities in AI implementations?

• How will this change the role of alliance leaders? And more

In our new episode on “How AI is changing Cloud GTM and partnership playbooks?” I had the pleasure to host:

Avanish Sahai, board member, top executive, and early employee of many iconic software companies. He has served as CVP at Google Cloud, Global VP at ServiceNow, Global VP at Salesforce.

Bader Hamdan, the Ecosystem Chief at Vectara, who previously was VP at Twilio, and Global Head, Strategic Technology Partnerships at Google Cloud.

Here are the top insights from our discussion that may reshape your partnership strategy:

AI is challenging the single-stack approach

Avanish explained that AI is changing the technology game as “you start moving away from a completely fully verticalized single stack to really bringing different sets of data, different set of workflows.”

For this to work together seamlessly, companies need to figure out how to unify and leverage their internal data and data that sits in their partners, customers, and suppliers.

AI will enable precise GTM targeting

AI is not just changing how tech works, it has potential to unlock precision targeting and new go-to-market strategies. Avanish highlights,

"The second implication is more on the go-to-market side... how can AI help partnership teams work with their own sales teams, work with their partners and ecosystems to build better, you know, better targeting, better alignment? So using data and …better models to bring insights into, hey, here's the type of accounts or customers or prospects or opportunities that we need to go pursue."

85% of enterprise AI data is on-prem, making it the new battleground.

As AI drives cloud commitments to nearly $370Bn, hyperscalers have a distinct advantage as the access point for these large commits and consumption patterns.

However, most of enterprise data is still not on the cloud. Bader emphasizes,

"85% of the enterprise data that really matters for Gen AI is sitting on-prem, right? So on-prem is going to be sexy again in this Gen AI era."

Services companies are seeing an AI gold rush

Avanish highlighted:

"If you look at some recent announcements from BCG or McKinsey, etc., they're saying 30 to 40% of their projects now are about AI. Those numbers are staggering. BCG, I think annual revenues are about 12 billion, and if it is 30 percent, they're doing three to four billion dollars kind of from scratch."

Customers expect tech stack integration in the ecosystem

Bader notes that customers expect the AI stack that they use to integrate seamlessly, which requires partnerships “to come together and connect the dots in the right way.”

While hyperscalers are emerging as the key orchestrators of the AI ecosystem, alliance leaders must become orchestrators in their own right to thrive in this new era.

Bader advised alliance leaders:

"it's about the ecosystem in this market, in this specific tech stack. It's about connecting the dots. You have to be the orchestrator to unleash the art of possible engine AI via that ecosystem. Honestly, this is a role that we have to play”

However, building an ecosystem doesn’t mean losing focus on the customer and key solutions. Avanish underscored the need to pick winners who will build them:

“…picking winners, and there was always hesitation to do that. Hey, if I'm a platform, I want an open ecosystem, and I want everybody to come, and may a thousand flowers bloom and all that.

The reality is, again, customers are looking for solutions. And I think one of the changes that's going to happen is going to be some selection of a smaller number of partners who kind of come together and build either industry solutions or some more specific horizontal solutions, where the orchestrator has, in fact, identified one or two or three key players. …Some hyperscalers, I think, are starting to do that. They're doing that with some of the key technology partnerships and some of the application partnerships and so on."

AI is fundamentally rewiring partnership strategies.

Alliance leaders who master these new playbooks will get ahead in the age of AI. Are you changing how you operate?