“What is not selling?”: How partners can take advantage of the AI boom

During Ingram Micro Experience 2026, a panel of executives told MSPs how they can monetise AI.

AI has become more prolific within the channel, the challenge now is for MSPs to take advantage of the technology.

During a panel at Ingram Micro Experience in Sydney last week, several executives from technology vendors discussed how partners can take advantage of the current AI boom.

Karla de Oliveira, APAC GTM leader, enterprise solutions and operations, Nvidia was optimistic about the opportunities that AI presented itself.

“The question is what is not selling,” she stated.

“We're pretty sold out everywhere in the world, and there is so much opportunity in this world of AI across multiple industries.

“There is not one industry that we have seen around the world that haven't adopted this technology.

“AI has driven this great transformation that we have experienced from being a gaming organisation to now becoming one of the largest organisations in the world when it comes to AI capability.”

De Oliveria noted that the opportunity for their partners is about helping customers moving from the productivity conversation to getting value from AI.

“That's where the opportunity is. It's helping our customers build,” she said.

“There is a huge opportunity, not only with the frontier models, but also with the open weights model.”

AI agents

When MSPs are onboarding an AI agent, Shivam Bansal, VP, global field technology at H20.ai believes that the biggest opportunity for partners is within the operations and run part of the AI agent lifecycle.

"In agentic software they are non-deterministic. They are probabilistic. They are driven by the large language model behind it, they are driven by the prompts, and that is the reason why one needs to focus on the behaviour, the operations, and the run part,” he said.

“This is where the biggest opportunity of recuring revenue lies.”

Data layer

Making money of the data layer is a new revenue stream for MSPs. Joe Hassell, VP sales, APJC at Weka highlighted two opportunities for partners in harnessing the data layer.

“One is providing the data infrastructure layer, gigabytes per month, dollars per gigabyte per month, and that piece comes down to optimisation play,” he said.

“Either optimising for GPU utilisation and improvements, or optimising for inference, so that you can effectively get more tokens per watt out of your GPU infrastructure.

“There's an optimisation play there that revolves around the recurring revenue of hosting an enterprise's data and managing that data on an ongoing basis.”

The other side is really around the data operations, Hassell explained.

“One huge opportunity I see for service providers, for SIs, for integrators, and resellers is around providing data engineering for AI,” he said.

“Engineering data pipelines to prepare data for the AI workflows that are coming that are going to drive the value of producing this intelligence for us in the future.

“Thinking about how we transform from our legacy data platforms into a modern data and memory platforms such as Weka.”

Tokenomics

As more companies use AI, the question of tokenomics comes into play for channel leaders. Albert Saunig, account architecture executive at Cisco explained why token costs need to be control from day one of an MSPs AI plan.

“My view is that you've got to have a platform that takes into account not just a factory that produces tokens and your token per watt is perfect,” he said.

“If you look at token per watt and find out everything that's in between, you've got to work out what the revenue and the cost is.”

Saunig explained that partners need to compare a token cost to a hybrid cloud cost.

“For example, if you're in Microsoft or Amazon, you can then compare,” he said.

“The beauty about having that comparison is that then you can put the correct workload in the correct place. You can put it on a finely tuned instrument on-prem with Cisco, Nvidia and our security solutions and our storage partners, or you can have it with all the bells and whistles on Microsoft apps.

He added, “There's no one answer here; it's a hybrid answer. Baking in those from the beginning is very important.”

Fast moving

John Brown, senior general manager, strategy, AI and emerging technology, at Ingram Micro Australia told CRN Australia that AI is moving so fast that nobody can master every layer.

“The strongest results come from deliberate ecosystems: knowing where you' are strong and partnering for the rest,” he said.

“That is also what we are seeing through programs such as Ingram Micro’s Xvantage Enable AI. The partners making the most progress are not trying to build every capability themselves.

“They are combining enablement, specialist expertise, financing and ecosystem support to move AI projects from proof of concept into production more quickly and at a scale they could not achieve alone.”

Access to models is no longer the differentiator; Australia already has high usage, Brown noted.

“The opportunity now is systematically transforming usage into measurable business outcomes through governance, cost control, engineering discipline and genuine process redesign,” he said.

“It’s also useful to step back from the technology and look at reimagining AI in symbiosis with organisational roles and the organisation at large. All of that is demanding work, and it is exactly the kind of work this channel has always done well.”

CRN Australia is the exclusive media partner of Ingram Micro Experience 2026.