Show Notes
At Sage FUTURES in San Francisco, Gretchen O’Hara delivered a clear message to partners: the market is shifting fast - and the opportunity is massive. But despite the noise around AI, one thing hasn’t changed. Partners are still at the center of how businesses win. “The channel is one of the most important things because our partners are the ones that have the deepest industry expertise and are closest to customers that can really solve their unique, unique business challenges.” AI may accelerate execution, but it doesn’t replace the need for domain expertise, customer proximity, and trusted advisory. In fact, it amplifies it. Inside Partnering is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Cutting Through AI Noise with Real Value One of the biggest challenges partners face today is separating signal from noise. There’s hype everywhere - startups, tools, promises of automation. But Sage is pushing partners toward something more grounded: delivering real, measurable value to customers. “There’s a lot of hype on AI, there’s a lot of startups, there’s a lot of noise in the market. And so how do we help our partners sort of cut through that noise? Delivering real value with AI to our customers.” For SMB customers in particular, the bar is high. These are financial systems. Accuracy and trust are non-negotiable. “AI has to be right a hundred percent of the time in this space and SMBs shouldn’t expect anything less.” That requirement fundamentally shapes how partners need to approach AI - not as experimentation, but as production-grade capability tied directly to business outcomes. The AWS + Sage Strategy: Enabling the Ecosystem A major announcement at the event was Sage’s strategic collaboration with AWS. But this wasn’t framed as just a technology partnership - it’s an ecosystem play. The goal is to enable partners to build, extend, and monetize solutions on top of Sage’s platform using modern AI infrastructure. Three priorities stand out: * Enable ISVs and builders to create extensions via an agentic marketplace * Remove friction from customer migration to modern cloud environments * Deepen co-sell collaboration across Sage, AWS, and partners The intent is clear: reduce barriers, accelerate adoption, and create new revenue opportunities for partners. “We want to remove the complexity. We want to remove the financial risk… and help our partners make that move with our customers faster.” This is less about incremental improvement and more about unlocking a new phase of ecosystem-driven growth. A Defining Moment for Partners O’Hara was explicit about timing. This is not a “wait and see” moment. “The time is now. The time is to really focus on making sure that you’re bringing the best delivery, the best service, the best advisory to your customers.” The partners who commit early - especially in areas like agentic AI and modern finance workflows - will have a structural advantage. At the same time, Sage is signaling that it intends to bring the entire ecosystem along, not just a subset of leading partners. PwC and the Shift in the SI Business Model One of the most important signals came from Sage’s announcement with PwC. The core idea: use AI to dramatically reduce implementation timelines - from months down to a fraction of that - and shift value toward higher-level services. “Reduce implementation time… and shift the value of the dollars that customers are spending, not on the time it takes for the implementation, but the value we’re going to get on these integrated workflows.” This represents a fundamental shift in how system integrators operate. Historically, revenue was tied heavily to implementation effort. But in an AI-driven world, that model starts to break down. “Why am I paying these billable hours for something that should be easy to run and go and help me?” Instead, partners move up the stack: * Advisory services * Solution design * AI-driven inno
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At Sage FUTURE in San Francisco, I sat down with Dan Miller, EVP of Financials and ERP at Sage, to talk about how Sage is thinking about AI, ecosystem partnerships, and the future of ERP platforms. One of the clearest themes from the conversation was this: finance leaders are not resisting AI. They simply want transparency, accountability, and confidence in the outputs. For partner leaders, ISVs, and ecosystem builders, that creates a very different opportunity than the generic “AI transformation” messaging dominating the market right now. Dan framed it around trust. “What finance and operations professionals really want is confidence in the tools that they’re deploying are doing exactly what they are expected to do.” That requirement shapes how Sage is building both its AI capabilities and its broader partner ecosystem. Inside Partnering is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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