OpenAI reportedly spent $5.73B on sales and marketing last year - 44% of revenue. Why OpenAI is spending Salesforce-like money to sell AI and still invest $150M in partners?

100 alliance and cloud GTM leaders joined us last Wednesday morning in New York to discuss one major shift: AWS Marketplace is becoming commercial infrastructure for AI and enterprise software GTM, not just a procurement path.

AWS cut Marketplace fees for professional services from 2.5% to 0.5% last week. It also made AWS Marketplace easier to enter and faster to transact through. Will it be harder to stand out?

40% of supply chains will create new ecosystem relationship roles by 2029 as AI changes how supply chains work.

Anthropic shipped its most capable model last week, and while it’s been temporarily suspended, it was priced 2X Opus 4.8 on a per-token basis. CFOs are now asking a different question: what will this Agentic AI shift cost us — and how do we control the spend?

OpenAI just launched its partner program - $150M behind it, with a heavier co-sell emphasis. Anthropic moved first in March with $100M, and already 10K consultants have Claude certification. AI labs are now building partner ecosystems that look a lot like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Palo Alto Networks posted a record quarter last week: $3B revenue (+31% YoY), RPO $18.4B (+36%). It’s striking how closely they now work with AI labs that many expected would disrupt them just months ago.

Cloud marketplace interest broke out in 2025 - across all 3 hyperscalers at once. AWS has the deepest transaction proof, but Microsoft and Google are closing the mindshare gap faster than many realize.

39% of LucidLink’s revenue now runs through channel partners. That’s a number you would expect from an infrastructure or security vendor, not a media collaboration company. For LucidLink, that is exactly the point.