The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the Channel has increased exponentially over the last 12 months. Whether it’s the channel company providing the technology as a solution for its customers or using it to improve its own internal processes and practices, AI has already proved to be a gamechanger for many.
That level of interest and demand is evidenced by BT Wholesale research, which found 59 per cent of employees are actively asking for AI investment. It’s also reflected by customers, with a PSFK survey revealing that 74 per cent of Internet users prefer to interact with chatbots for straightforward queries.
As we enter 2025, AI uptake and the range of applications is only going to continue to increase. This is being driven by customers demanding ever-more and companies coming under greater pressure to drive efficiencies in a highly competitive market.
There is also expected to be a shift in the partner model towards highly collaborative ecosystems, with AI enabling seamless co-operation between vendors, partners and even competitors, thus delivering more innovative and comprehensive customer solutions.
“MSPs should be looking at adopting AI tools that are fast to deploy, cost-effective and deliver immediate benefits,” said Andy Venables, CTO and co-founder of POPX. “This lies in upskilling existing teams, leveraging ready-made AI solutions and automating routine operations to create space for strategic growth.”
He added, “With AI, MSPs can achieve more than just incremental improvements. It transforms the way services are delivered, making them faster, smarter and more responsive. As the technology becomes more advanced and accessible, the MSPs that embrace AI today will secure their position as industry leaders tomorrow.”
All of this will enable channel partners to uniquely position themselves as trusted advisors in helping customers to implement the best AI solution for them.
Contact centre adoption
Among AI’s widest use in the Channel right now is in the contact centre and unified communications space. The technology has been used to incrementally improve the video conferencing and virtual meeting experience, as well as to provide quicker and more accurate call recordings, transcriptions and content summaries.
“Traditionally, creating a single knowledge article might take an experienced team member 30 minutes,” said Venables. “With AI, that same article can be generated in three minutes, complete with clear, structured content. This shift empowers less experienced agents to deliver a higher quality service and enables them to self-solve simple issues – streamlining operations and improving the resolution time for customers.”
As well as being used during the call to analyse and provide prompts via virtual assistants in response to customer behaviours, AI can also be deployed to gauge customer satisfaction and identify gaps in operator training that need addressing. Equipped with that information, companies can then make the required changes.
“AI has the power to improve the customer experience on first contact around the way and how quickly calls are handled,” said John McKindland, head of partner channel UK, Sona Business. “AI bots can make collaboration much more personal, for example.
“In terms of employee engagement, there’s analytics for keywords and even emotive intelligence to better identify buying signals and handling of complaints. AI can significantly help with staff training. But I’d say improving customer satisfaction is the biggest area just now.”
Tony Martino, CEO of Tollring, added, “Examples of how AI powers business applications today are quality assurance and call evaluation. Instead of having to listen to customer conversations, summarise them and evaluate their effectiveness, AI can automate the entire process.
“Today, AI is being used to automatically spot keywords, topics and sentiment at scale, helping organisations to enhance efficiency, spot compliance failings and improve their understanding of the customer experience across every touchpoint. Tomorrow, this functionality will evolve further to include automated scoring and contextual analysis, and much more, powered by generative AI.”
For Adam Wilson, director of strategic partnerships, EMEA, Vonage, the key to improving the customer experience is to use AI to help employees to perform better.
He said, “AI is already being used to handle jobs like routine enquiries, data entry, and support ticket management, making agents’ lives easier and increasing engagement. AI can also help employees perform better, both by enhancing their work and by helping channel partners provide more in-depth, personalised training – like customer feedback and coaching suggestions based on transcripts.”
Claudio Soland, senior vice president, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, also pinpointed the significance of being able to provide personalised training. He said, “Through using AI in the form of powered chatbots and gen AI, our technical support teams have boosted response times, reduced the volume of tickets and increased partner autonomy by quickly providing relevant answers, recommendations and documentation.
“By analysing data, business results, plans and learning preferences, AI empowers us to deliver customised training content which responds to the needs of our partners – sometimes even before they themselves recognise the need.”
Bertrand Pourcelot, CEO, Enreach for Services Providers, added, “AI can add value across different times during the customer engagement lifecycle. Pre-call screening can save time for both the customer and the agent. Interaction during live contact with a customer – whether voice-chat or anything else – can help inform the agent by giving them real-time information, which, in turn, benefits the customer. Post-conversation, AI delivers insight that can be used to make further improvements.”
AI is also being used to enhance sound and video quality. This ranges from features such as echo cancellation in microphones and speakers, and ambient noise reduction to camera and voice tracking, and auto framing.
“The next phase of the journey includes how AI can create more efficiency, productivity and operational benefits,” said Frederik Hornkvist, co-founder, Boom Collaboration. “This is mainly through software enhancements to automatically create meeting notes, summarise meetings if a participant is unavailable or needs to answer the door. Also, live transcription is another valuable tool.”
Customer service role
Another key area where AI has proven to be effective is in customer service. The technology has enabled smaller firms to make significant in-roads into the market, without having to spend big, and it also gives them a quick and profitable return.
“Across all industries and businesses, AI is an unavoidable topic that is having a profound impact,” said Clare Rafferty, head of channel partnerships, netcall. “Focusing on customer experience though, especially within the contact centre space, it has been traditionally quite hard for new companies to break into the market with the barriers of entry high in gaining ground on the traditional big players.
“However, with the advent of AI putting a focus on the front end of businesses as well as being accessible to all, it has opened up the market substantially, which is great for the Channel.”
AI is also being used to improve customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. Marco Faassen, partner director EMEA and APAC at Neat, said, “One of the most important areas that we see our channel partners harnessing AI is in CRM, specifically analysing customer data and predicting buyer behaviours. Many in the Channel are also using it for sales forecasting, understanding how customer demand fluctuates and analysing historical sales data.”
Richard Thompson, CEO of ANS, added, “Improving customer satisfaction is one of the many ways that AI is an enabler. Using product data, AI can create personalised recommendations for channel customers, turning the sales process into a smooth and enjoyable experience.”
But companies also need to strike the right balance between AI’s adoption and human interaction. To this end, it should be used as a tool to augment humans, rather than to replace them.
“With customers expecting quicker and quicker customer service times, contact centres need to ensure that they are still maintaining a personal connection with customers, especially when response times are slower,” said Emily Masterton, EMEA head of channel at 8x8.
“When services fall short, customer dissatisfaction escalates quicker and this trickles down to the employees who bear the brunt of frustrated customers.”
Cloud growth
Cloud is another growth area for AI. As businesses increasingly adopt hybrid and multi-cloud environments, AI-powered cloud networking solutions will become essential for managing complexity.
“Automation will enhance interoperability across diverse platforms, ensuring seamless connectivity, reducing latency and enabling more efficient resource allocation,” said Dale Smith, channel director for EMEA at Juniper Networks. “These innovations will support scalable, high-performance architectures critical for global operation and distributed workforces.”
AI has a critical role to play in cybersecurity too. A recent Gigamon survey found that 54 per cent of security and IT teams believe the technology is vital to their defence efforts, while a further 41 per cent have reported an increase in AI-driven cyber attacks.
“Therefore, deep observability – network-derived intelligence delivered to cloud, security and observability tools - will be crucial to counteract this increase in threat actors using AI,” said Jon Kane, senior director of partners and alliances, EMEA, Gigamon. “Without real-time visibility and insights into security blind spots, weaknesses and footholds, organisations will continue to leave a back door open for attackers to exploit.
“Channel partners will play a pivotal role in empowering end-user security teams with the ability to identify any suspicious movement and ensure that potential threats are flagged, analysed and remediated before bad actors can do any more damage. This requires deep observability into all network traffic wherever it flows – private/public cloud and on-prem, encrypted or unencrypted, north/south and east-west.”
William Rubio, CallTower’s CRO, added, “The rise in cyberattacks has made AI critical for identifying threats and responding proactively. AI systems can detect anomalies, track potential breaches and mitigate risks much faster than humans.”
On the hardware side, AI can be used for inventory management. By analysing customer demands and buying behaviour, it can be deployed within the supply chain to optimise procurement, storage and transportation.
By department, AI can be used by IT teams to group related incidents and provide summarised insights, enabling members to prioritise and resolve issues faster.
Additionally, AI-powered chat and email reply generation can automate responses to common IT queries, freeing up teams to focus on more complex problems.
For HR, it can be used in sensitivity detection to flag potentially problematic language in employee communications. Chat summarisation tools can quickly distil the essence of employee queries or concerns.
Another major application for AI is in sustainability. Companies can now use AI-driven tools to monitor and optimise their energy consumption, thus enabling them to reduce their carbon footprint and contribute to the circular economy through smarter resource management, recycling and the adoption of energy-efficient hardware.
“Channel partners should seize opportunities across all markets, including vertical industries, to fully leverage AI’s potential,” said Jason Uslan, SVP of global sales at Wildix. “As AI becomes the standard for modern business, success hinges on offering the right tools to solve the right problems. Whether it’s streamlining operations in retail, enhancing patient care or driving insights-based decisions in sales, partners must align solutions to their clients’ specific challenges.”
Key challenges
Despite the clear benefits that AI brings, it also presents a host of challenges. Chief among them is the skills gap and educating the customer on how to best use the technology, given that one quarter of IT decision makers don’t feel they fully understand it, according to BT Wholesale research; as well as having the right guard rails, processes, infrastructure and resources to support the technology.
“One of the most significant barriers to AI adoption in the Channel is the lack of understanding and expertise,” said Bill Hopkinson, chief revenue officer at Intercity. “Businesses often lack the internal resources to implement AI effectively, which can result in slow adoption and misapplication.”
Another key challenge is the complexity and cost of integrating AI into existing systems and protocols. Even if the technology is successfully implemented, then there is the issue of achieving scalability if the resources aren’t there to support it, as well as maintaining the integrity of the data.
“One significant issue is the quality and accessibility of data,” said Richard Hanscott, CEO of Esendex. “Given AI systems rely on large volumes of high-quality data for training and operation, any inconsistent, incomplete or biased data can lead to inaccurate results.
“Organisations also often face difficulties with data silos, which hinder access to the diverse datasets required for effective AI deployment.”
Added to that is employee resistance. That’s evidenced by 8x8’s Future of Work report, which found 68 per cent of leaders believe AI will take more jobs than it creates, while only 20 per cent think it will be a net job creator.
“The best way to counter understandable hesitation in the market is through a detailed case study,” said Jeff Green, managing director of Elisha Telecom. “One that speaks to the wider challenges of a particular industry, making it easy for potential customers to imagine the benefits in their operations.”
Then there is the matter of ensuring data privacy and security. As well as being used to protect against breaches, AI is also being deployed by hackers to automate and scale their attacks. Companies also need to comply with the latest relevant data security and privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.
“Security of the data is vital,” said Martin Saunders, COO at Highlight. “Highlight has always delivered a robust multi-tenancy capability and we will ensure that when using machine learning it will only access and provide results on a customer’s own private data.”
Companies also need to have a robust and reliable network in place to support AI. That includes having sufficient capacity to cope with the data-hungry technology.
“Whatever customers use AI for, they need their network to be a rock-solid foundation,” explained Gavin Jones, director of wholesale partner channel at BT Wholesale. “AI already places a heavy burden on network traffic, and this will only increase as use cases and technology advances. Additionally, real-time AI applications require an uninterrupted connection and ultra-low latency to operate.”
Future applications
Moving forward, AI will undoubtedly be used to solve more complex and technological problems. Rather than merely being applied to speed up and make processes more accurate and efficient, it will now be used to provide a greater depth of analysis and business intelligence for key decision-makers, such as spotting new market trends and opportunities.
“Channel partners should focus on using AI for enhanced insights and trend analysis, enabling better network monitoring and preventative maintenance,” said Jonathan Wright, director of products and operations at GCX. “Basic AI-driven tools can be cost-effectively developed in-house, bypassing the need for expensive solutions.
“Partners working with large-scale operations, such as telecom providers, can leverage AI for traffic predictability, dynamic routing and planning next-generation infrastructure. By targeting these areas, partners can offer tailored solutions that align with specific customer needs.”
2025 will be the year where ambitions must be supported by action. Ralf Jordan, vice president channel EMEA at Lenovo, said, “Channel partners are already keen to ride the wave of AI, but turning ambition into fruition is what will really matter in 2025. IT vendors need to access state of the art AI solutions, allowing customers to deploy AI faster, safely and more efficiently.
“Key to this is providing access to a partner ecosystem, including AI independent software vendors, across various applications and services. Partnerships will be crucial here.”
This feature was included in our February 2025 print issue. You can read the magazine in full here.