As artificial intelligence (AI) moves from experimentation to enterprise-wide deployment, the IT channel is undergoing one of its most significant transformations in decades.
In conversation with iTnews Asia, Sundaresan K, Vice President & Country GM - India & ANZ, Tech Data, highlighted how AI is transforming the IT channel into an outcome driven, intelligence led ecosystem, where success is defined by skills, orchestration, managed services, and long-term value creation rather than pure technology resale.
According to him, the greatest untapped opportunity for channel partners today lies not in selling AI technologies themselves, but in delivering managed AI services that help customers navigate complexity, talent shortages, and trust barriers.
“Traditionally, value was measured by product distribution and volume moving hardware, software, and cloud services. Today, new value lies in embedding intelligence into workflows, enabling outcomes, and delivering insights to plan better, reduce risk, and drive growth,” Sundaresan said.
From technology resale to outcomes
AI is fundamentally changing how value is created and measured in the channel. Rather than selling discrete technologies, partners are increasingly expected to take ownership of outcomes.
This outcome driven approach is also reshaping ecosystem collaboration. The traditional linear model of distribution is giving way to a matrix of partnerships involving system integrators, MSPs, ISVs, data specialists, and governance experts.
“AI is already outcome centric,” he noted. “Businesses are integrating scalable use cases into their processes, and that has reshaped how the ecosystem collaborates, not around products, but around results.”
It is here that managed AI services are emerging as a critical growth lever.
Why managed AI services matter
While AI adoption is gaining momentum across Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ), many organisations remain stuck at the proof-of-concept stage. Sundaresan believes managed AI services are best positioned towards the next phase of growth.
“The biggest untapped opportunity lies in managed AI services,” he explained. “They address the widest gap between market demand and partner capability.”
Talent shortages remain the single largest barrier to AI adoption in APJ, with more than half of partners citing lack of skilled professionals as their primary challenge. Customer skepticism around AI outcomes further complicates adoption, slowing decision-making and investment.
Managed AI services help bridge these gaps by allowing partners to provide ongoing expertise, governance, optimisation, and support, without requiring customers or partners to build deep AI capabilities from scratch.
- Sundaresan K, Vice President & Country GM - India & ANZ, Tech Data
Instead of one-time deployments, partners can deliver continuous value, improving confidence and accelerating AI adoption across enterprises.
The orchestration advantage
AI solutions are rarely plug-and-play. They require tight integration across hardware, cloud platforms, data pipelines, software, and security frameworks. Sundaresan said that distributors play a unique role in orchestrating this complexity, one that hyperscalers or single vendors cannot easily replicate.
Beyond aggregation, he added that distributors are now guiding partners through the full AI lifecycle, from use case discovery and enablement to implementation and post sale support, while also providing financial enablement to accelerate go-to-market.
Skills over scale
A recurring theme in the AI-driven channel transformation is the primacy of skills over scale.
Sundaresan emphasised that partners who invest in AI expertise will be best positioned to move beyond product reselling toward value selling and solutions led engagements. This includes building capabilities around AI training, enablement, governance, and managed services, as well as staying closely aligned with evolving technologies such as GenAI and agentic AI.
While horizontal AI tools are becoming increasingly commoditised, differentiation is emerging through managed services and, over time, vertical-specific solutions tailored to industry needs.
Long-term value
While future revenue streams such as data monetisation and co-developed intellectual property hold promise, Sundaresan cautioned that they will take time to mature.
“Until foundational gaps such as skills, trust, data governance, and cloud maturity are bridged, partners may find it difficult to move beyond experimentation and unlock scalable, revenue-driven AI offerings,” he said.
In the near term, managed AI services and AI-as-a-service models are likely to see the fastest adoption, as they directly respond to these barriers.
Ultimately, AI is pushing the IT channel toward a long-term value creation model, where incentives, partner programs, and leadership mindsets must evolve beyond short-term, volume-based metrics, he added.
As AI adoption deepens, the channel’s relevance will depend on its ability to evolve culturally as well as technologically.
Sundaresan said success will belong to partners who see themselves as trusted AI implementation and outcomes partners capable of orchestrating ecosystems, delivering managed services, and continuously building skills to keep pace with a rapidly shifting technology landscape.
In this new model, intelligence, not inventory has become the channel’s most valuable currency.
