We benchmark the channel as it's actually repricing, not as it used to look.
Benchmarking only helps if it measures the right things. We track partner economics across the Microsoft and Google ecosystems through the shift underway: where margin is compressing, where it is concentrating, and what the partners pulling ahead are doing differently. You get an objective read on your performance against your peers, the practices emerging across the channel, and a clear view of which moves are working while the model is still in motion, not a snapshot of a market that no longer exists.
Read the 2026 forecast
Partner Channel Economic Forecast 2026
Our flagship annual read on where partner economics is heading. It maps how AI is repricing the channel: where margin is compressing, where it is concentrating, and what the partners pulling ahead are doing differently. It is the full, authoritative version of the thesis the Insights series builds on.
Read the forecastThe forecast, worked through one post at a time
The forecast above sets out the whole argument in one piece. This series takes it apart and works through it a post at a time, in the order the shifts are arriving, with what each one asks of a partner serving the SMB-to-Corporate market. Eight posts are planned and they are written to be read in order.
See the whole series
The origin piece
The Alliance Shift: What It Means for Microsoft Partners
Anthropic's $200 billion commitment to Google Cloud reorganized the AI market into three infrastructure alliances. Microsoft partners are inside the one whose compute economics are weakening.
Post 1 of 8
The AI Value Chain Is Being Redrawn
OpenAI and Anthropic stood up services arms a day apart, and the hyperscalers are bundling AI into platforms customers already buy. Both moves are rational, and both shift where partners earn.
Post 2 of 8
Intelligence Is Commoditizing. Your Margin Is the Casualty.
Accenture and the largest IT-services firms repriced together in a day. The structural half of that story reaches down-market, into the SMB-to-Corporate accounts a channel partner serves.
Post 3 of 8
Don't Marry the Model
The pull toward standardizing on one AI ecosystem is real, and it is strongest where it looks most rational. Why a partner should keep silicon, model and workflow sovereign anyway.
Post 4 of 8
Your Agentic Workforce Has a Wage Bill. Almost No One Is Managing It.
The subsidy that made AI feel free is ending, and the bill now arrives priced by the unit consumed. Governing what a customer's agents spend is becoming a partner service line.
Post 5 of 8
The Project Ends. The Workflow Doesn't.
The people who understand the technology best are choosing to stay inside the customer rather than build and leave. The partner operating model is following: from build-and-exit to embedded operator.
