John Brown at Ingram Micro Australia on monetising AI and tokenisation

The senior general manager at strategy, AI and emerging technologies breaks down opportunities for partners.

As the AI uptake continues from partners, the age-old question remains: how can partners make money from this technology?

John Brown, senior general manager, strategy, AI and emerging technology at Ingram Micro Australia told CRN Australia that the distributor’s partners are looking to monetise AI in different ways.

Firstly, is it through business process automation, which Brown calls an “obvious” stream for monetisation.

“Taking monotonous processes and turning them into automated workflows,” he added.

Brown noted that some partners are using agentic AI to their advantage.

“Others are building bespoke agentic solutions and packaging them as subscription products,” he explained.

In AI professional services specifically, Brown said he sees quite a few areas emerging.

Some of these include, adoption and change management, priced as project-based engagements; AI governance and agent management; AI engineering as a service; inferencing; and strategic AI reimagination.

For Brown, he said strategic AI reimagination is not about workflows or models in his view.

“It starts from the question: given AI agents can now operate at a different scale, speed and cost to humans, how should we think about and potentially redesign our business processes and organisational roles to create competitive advantage?”

According to Brown, the implementations that work have two traits.

“Leadership treats AI as a strategic imperative rather than a side project,” he said.

“They work to build a culture where people can safely experiment on real business problems.

He added, “Underneath both sits enablement, teaching people how to use AI responsibly and encouraging and authorising its use.”

Tokenisation

Tokenisation is becoming more of a concern for partners, and according to Brown the main concern he is seeing is the consumption of tokens.

He said the use of tokens is climbing faster than measurable value.

"Practically speaking, consumption continues to climb because agentic workflows use significantly more tokens per task than a single chat exchange, and because people still spend time feeding context, checking outputs and re-running prompts,” he said.

“Both are solvable with the right focus and discipline.”

Brown noted that there’s an opportunity for partners to architect the right mix based on the needs and requirements of their customers.

“Sovereignty plays a role in this too - data residency, infrastructure ownership, access to the keys and the legal frameworks that apply. Governing it and controlling it aids to build the basis of a genuine service business,” he said.

“This means the technology conversation should preferably follow the commercial one: partners need to select and standardise on the right operating model before the stack can create repeatable value.”

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