As AI is making software abundant, distribution remains scarce.
Need → Discovery → Evaluation → Trust → Purchase → Deployment → Usage → Renewal/Expansion
This is the distribution path.
The closer a company gets to the way customers buy, the more closely its product, packaging, pricing and GTM align with what customers need. And the more adoption it can drive.
Companies should think as deliberately about distribution as they do about technology.
Hyperscaler marketplaces already cover much of its commercial lower half of this path.
At their strongest, they own the path from Trust through Renewal.
They benefit from established customer trust, existing cloud agreements, committed spend, consolidated billing, deployment infrastructure, usage metering, and renewal/expansion motions.
Now they are moving upstream
AWS and other marketplaces are adding agent-led discovery, comparison and purchasing support.
Evaluation is becoming agent-assisted. Discovery is moving into the AI products and workflows customers already use.
Marketplaces started as transaction infrastructure.
They are becoming part of the decision layer.
For AI, alliance and Marketplace leaders, this creates three practical actions:
Map your distribution path. Identify who controls each stage and where customers leave the flow.
Design for human and AI evaluation. Make use cases, pricing, deployment, compliance and technical compatibility structured and easy for agents to assess.
Track and improve conversion across the path. Measure how Marketplace purchases progress into deployment, usage, renewal and expansion. Use that data to find friction, iterate and increase adoption at every stage.
Cloud marketplaces are still somewhat early in this transition. But the direction is abundantly clear.
They are moving from processing transactions to influencing which AI products customers and agents discover, evaluate, trust and use.
If tokens are the unit of AI consumption, marketplaces are aiming to become the commercial infrastructure for AI distribution. They want to shape how AI consumption reaches customers and which products capture it. In a world of abundant software, that may be the most valuable position in the stack. Are you leveraging them?
For alliance and Cloud GTM leaders, the challenge is turning that shift into an operating model: choosing the right Marketplace strategy for your stage, aligning internal sellers and cloud teams, and moving customers from purchase into deployment, usage and expansion.
That execution gap is what we work through in the Cloud GTM Leader course.
The next five-week cohort starts September 29. It is designed for alliance and Cloud GTM leaders building repeatable growth across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud marketplaces.
Inside the course:
Marketplace strategy from listing to traction and scale
Co-sell, cloud relationships and differentiation
Internal buy-in, sales enablement, KPIs and scaling frameworks
If you want to turn Marketplace into a repeatable GTM engine, Cohort 16 is open.
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