Agentic AI to shift partners towards collaboration: Gartner

Success in the future will belong to partners that collaborate, not specialise.

As agentic AI takes hold, the role of partners could become more important as a network of partnerships and alliances is critical to growth, according to Gartner predictions.

The research firm recommends an indirect channel model to scale market reach that includes domain-specific partners and technology providers to target specific markets and specialties such as AI engineering and data services.

Srinivas Gutta, technical practice lead at Adactin, agrees it will accelerate the shift from traditional, single-provider models towards decentralised ecosystems. “Different partners will bring specialised capabilities to the overall solution,” Gutta said.

In practice, this could be one partner bringing the domain-specific expertise and business processes, while another provides the technology, integration, orchestration and implementation for those services.

“Rather than one organisation trying to deliver everything, partners will collaborate around their respective strengths to deliver a complete business outcome,” he told CRN.

Domain expertise becomes particularly important in industries where AI agents are operating within complex, highly regulated or specialised business processes, he noted, citing financial services, insurance and healthcare.

“Domain-specific partners bring the specialist knowledge, models, data and business context required to ensure that agents are not just technically capable, but are relevant, accurate and aligned with industry requirements,” he said.

“As agentic AI moves from assisting users to taking actions within critical business processes, the combination of technology expertise and deep industry knowledge will become increasingly important,” he added.

Will a single partner deliver the full agentic AI stack?

Gartner notes that organisations are still exploring agentic AI, with many in the discovery or pilot stage, and now is the time for building the partnerships with resellers, systems integrators and managed services providers.

This creates much broader opportunities for partners, according to Gutta as organisations look beyond simply technology to building in governance, security, standardisation, architecture and operating frameworks.

“The opportunity is shifting from simply proving that AI works to helping organisations industrialise, govern and scale it responsibly,” he said.

Collaboration and orchestration in the agentic future

Partners will need to be much more open to collaboration, according to Gutta, because by their design, agents interact with a range of tools, platforms, systems and specialised services rather than operating within a single technology ecosystem.

“This means partners will need to focus on interoperability and integration, while being clear about their respective roles and responsibilities,” he said.

In fact, it’s likely that no single partner will own the entire technology stack, meaning that the ability to interact across organisational and technology boundaries will become increasingly important.

“Ultimately, successful partnerships will be built around shared outcomes and collaboration, rather than ownership of a particular platform or technology,” he said.

Gutta believes that the agentic future is less about one provider delivering everything and more about bringing together the technology, implementation and domain expertise.

For partners, they’ll need a thorough understanding of how capabilities such as AI engineering, data, integration, security, governance and domain expertise come together.

“Just as importantly, they will need the ability to orchestrate these capabilities across different technologies and partners to deliver a cohesive solution,” he said.