Where Does the Channel Make Money in an Agentic Economy? | Barcelona, 6-8 October

AppXite is an Ecosystem Partner at Canalys Forum EMEA 2026, returning to W Barcelona on 6-8 October. We’ll be there for all three days - let’s meet in Barcelona and talk about what’s next for the channel.

A few questions we'll be taking to Barcelona:

• • What does a frontier distributor actually look like - and where should distribution participate in the AI services lifecycle?

  • If partner-led AI services are heading toward $347 billion, where will you be on the AI-services growth curve?”

  • When agents automate routine managed services, what becomes the new billable unit for MSPs?

  • How do you sell AI when neither the salesperson nor the customer knows exactly what AI they need?

  • And can today's channel platforms actually transact what comes next — consumption, tokens, agents, services and outcomes?

Where will you be on the AI-services growth curve?

The opportunity is significant.

Omdia expects partner-led AI services to grow from $85 billion in 2026 to $347 billion in 2031 - a 32.5% CAGR.

But the more interesting part is not only how quickly the market grows. It is where the growth moves.

In 2026, partner-led AI services are still heavily weighted toward foundations, advisory, design and build. By 2031, the mix shifts toward a more mature operational services economy.

Security and governance grow from 12% to 18% of the opportunity. Adoption and integration rises from 8% to 13%. Management and optimization moves from 10% to 15%. Meanwhile, advisory and design become a smaller proportion of a much larger overall market.

In other words, value does not stop when an AI solution is sold or deployed. It extends across the lifecycle - from identifying the opportunity and building the solution to deploying, governing, managing and continuously improving it.

The question for every channel company is therefore not whether AI services will grow. It is: where will you be on that $347 billion growth curve?

When agents do the work, what does the MSP sell?

For MSPs, the pressure is already visible. Omdia’s MSP Trends and Predictions 2026 puts managed services market growth at around 10% for the year -  below historical rates, with only the most focused and differentiated providers expected to outperform it. Traditional helpdesk and per-user services are increasingly commoditised, while 43% of MSPs in Omdia’s partner polling are already evaluating alternatives to user-based pricing.

On the security side, agentic tooling creates another challenge: repetitive Tier 1 SOC activities are exactly the kind of work increasingly suited to automation.

Taken together, this is less a story about AI adoption than about a pricing model losing part of its foundation.

For much of the last decade, managed services have monetised human attention repeatedly. AI agents can increasingly provide that attention without adding another person.

But that does not eliminate the MSP opportunity. It moves the value.

Architecture, integration, governance, security, optimization, and accountability for business outcomes become more important. And the commercial models around them need to evolve too - from predominantly per-user and fixed subscription models toward a mix of subscription, consumption, platform, and outcome-based pricing.

The billable unit is changing.

And that raises another question: who gives thousands of partners the capabilities to make that transition?

What does a frontier distributor actually look like?

This may be one of the bigger strategic questions for distribution over the next few years. Distribution has always been built around scale: aggregate once, operationalise once, and make it available to many partners.

Product aggregation, licensing, financing, fulfilment and supply-chain efficiency remain essential. But increasingly, they are the baseline rather than the differentiation.

Frontier distribution takes those same one-to-many economics and applies them to services and revenue generation.

Instead of entering the process only when a partner has something ready to transact, the distributor becomes an active participant in helping partners create and capture the opportunity.

That can put distribution across much more of the AI services lifecycle:

Envision → Generate demand → Assess → Advise → Build → Deploy → Drive adoption → Manage → Optimize

A frontier distributor can help generate a funnel. Provide assessment and advisory capabilities. Enable workshops. Bring together vendors and specialist service providers. Support implementation and deployment. Help drive customer adoption. Provide ongoing management, governance and optimization. And underneath it all, provide the commercial infrastructure required to transact the solution.

That does not mean the distributor has to deliver every service itself.

The more interesting role may be orchestration: giving an ISV, MSP, SI and specialist AI provider the tools and commercial infrastructure to co-sell and co-deliver around one customer outcome - and making those capabilities available to the partner ecosystem at scale.

That is the fundamental advantage distribution already has: one-to-many economics.

Our view is that the frontier distributor applies that advantage not only to products, but to capabilities. That means helping a partner sell more effectively, access expertise it cannot economically build itself, assemble solutions from a growing ecosystem and participate in services opportunities that might otherwise be out of reach.

This is the shift we have been discussing internally at AppXite: from distribution as a supply and transaction layer toward distribution as an active participant in the service chain - from funnel generation and consultancy through implementation, deployment, adoption, maintenance, and continuous improvement.

How do you sell AI when the customer doesn’t know what they need?

Before any of those services can be sold, however, the channel has another problem to solve.

Ask a customer today:

“What are your AI needs?”

And you may get roughly the same response salespeople got when they asked customers about their “cloud needs” fifteen years ago.

The customer often doesn’t know. And frequently, neither does the salesperson.

Customers understand their businesses. They know where processes are slow, where costs are high, where employees spend too much time, and where customers are frustrated.

But they do not necessarily know which AI agent, model, application or combination of technologies could solve those problems.

At the same time, a salesperson presented with a rapidly expanding catalogue of AI products cannot realistically be expected to translate every product into a specific, quantified business outcome for every type of customer.

That creates a gap between AI capability and sellable AI opportunity. It is a challenge we have been discussing directly: the salesperson struggles to articulate exactly what should be sold, while the customer cannot necessarily envision what AI could do for the business.

And that gap is itself a distribution opportunity.

Instead of waiting for a partner to find a customer who already knows what AI solution they want, what if distribution could help partners create that demand?

That is one of the problems we are working on at AppXite.

Our AI Business Assessment approach starts with the customer’s business rather than the technology catalogue. It analyses how the company operates, identifies potential AI use cases, evaluates where those use cases can create value and turns them into a quantified starting point for a partner conversation.

The result is not simply “here are some AI products you could buy.”

It is closer to:

Here is the problem. Here is the potential outcome. Here is what that outcome could be worth. And here is where we can start solving it.

For the partner, that creates something equally valuable: a qualified sales opportunity with a much clearer understanding of what the customer needs and why. The concept is designed to make that assessment scalable - potentially turning it into funnel generation across a distributor’s partner and customer ecosystem.

That is what selling AI based on outcomes rather than features starts to look like.

Can today’s channel platforms transact what comes next?

Creating the opportunity is only half of the problem. You still have to transact it.

Most of the channel’s digital infrastructure assumes a human at a screen. Catalogues built to be browsed. Quotes built to be read. Approvals built around someone clicking. Marketplaces optimised for a person with a budget and a shortlist.

Agents do not necessarily buy that way. An agent transacting on a customer’s behalf needs something different: machine-readable catalogues carrying real, current commercial terms; entitlements that can be granted and revoked programmatically; metered billing capable of reconciling dynamic consumption; and an audit trail that survives procurement and compliance review.

And the commercial models themselves are becoming more complex. Seats and subscriptions are not disappearing. But they are increasingly sitting alongside consumption, compute, tokens, services and potentially outcome-based pricing.

For a frontier distributor orchestrating multiple vendors and partner types, that creates a fundamental infrastructure question:

Can your platform transact whatever your ecosystem decides to sell next?

The service model can only evolve as fast as the commercial infrastructure underneath it.

That is where AppXite spends much of its time: bringing catalogue, CPQ, provisioning, subscription and consumption billing, integrations, and channel management together so that distributors and their partners can introduce new vendors, offerings, and commercial models without rebuilding the operating model underneath them.

So where does the margin move?

The $347 billion partner-led AI services opportunity suggests the answer is not simply “into AI.”

It moves across the lifecycle.

For MSPs, value moves from repeatable human effort toward architecture, integration, governance, optimization, and measurable outcomes.

For distributors, it moves beyond aggregation and fulfilment toward demand generation, service enablement, and ecosystem orchestration at scale.

For vendors, the opportunity is increasingly tied to partners capable of translating technology into complete customer outcomes.

And underneath all three sits a new commercial requirement: the ability to transact subscriptions, consumption, agents, services, and eventually outcomes without rebuilding the channel infrastructure every time the business model changes.

That is how we are thinking about frontier distribution at AppXite.

Don’t just move the product through the channel. Help the channel create, sell, deliver, and monetize the outcome.

Meet us in Barcelona

If you’re an MSP thinking about what agentic automation does to your services and pricing, a distributor considering how far your role should extend into the AI services lifecycle, or a vendor trying to reach an increasingly diverse partner ecosystem, let’s compare notes in Barcelona.

Book a meeting with the AppXite team in Barcelona →