How Are People Actually Using AI in Their Partner Programs?

Everyone says they’re “using AI,” but what does that actually mean when it comes to their partner program?

What are they using AI for? What AI tools do they use? Have their AI experiments moved the needle in a significant way?

We decided to find out.

Below, we unpack seven crowd-sourced use cases for AI in partner programs, with real-life anecdotes — straight from teams testing, iterating, and learning what works.

7 Ways to Use AI in Your Partner Program

1. Speed Up Recruiting

Source New Great-Fit Channel, Affiliate, and Referral Partners

Finding excellent partners to add to your roster is not easy, even if you’ve built out an ideal partner profile and know exactly what you want.

Building a partner recruiting list can involve anything from spending hours researching the partner programs of your current partners, talking to customers about their preferred solution providers — even scraping public data.

Outsourcing this time-consuming task to AI can make your partner team more efficient. Raviraj Hegde’s team at Donorbox created an internal AI workflow to assist with partner recruitment using a combination of GPT-4 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

“We ask the AI to rate profiles for industry fit, historical SaaS partnerships, and overlapping customers. It eliminates noise and ranks partners on IPP fit and preparedness. This took days off of our outreach process.”

The outcome? A 40%+ increase in response rates.

Another option? Use a prebuilt tool like Clay to find accounts and contacts based on highly specific criteria, like company size, region, tech stack, role, and former workplace.

Surface Integration Partners

Pieter Wellens at Apicbase uses AI to automatically surface integration partners that would be most useful to their customers.

“We realized our customers were often requesting the same integrations over and over again, and our dev team was spending a lot of time evaluating feasibility. We work with POS systems, inventory tools, and delivery platforms, and instead of manually deciding which ones to partner with next, we use AI to analyze usage patterns and identify gaps where a new integration would bring the most impact.”

Running usage data and customer feature requests through an AI model gives Pieter’s team clearer signals about what integrations will bring real value. And it’s working.

“We’ve launched integrations 30% faster because we’re no longer guessing what to build; we have data to back every decision. Our partner satisfaction score improved by 18% over the last two quarters.”

2. Use AI to Organize and Keep Track of Your Partner Program

No matter whether you’re more junior or senior in your partnerships career, it can be tough to keep track of the partners on your roster.

Who should I check in with first? What conferences did they go to recently, and have they logged any deal registrations yet? What new partners still need to be vetted?

These questions take up a lot of mindspace. What if you could outsource them to AI?

Turns out, you can. Raegan Wilson, VP of Ecosystem Solutions & Innovation at Spur Reply, is doing exactly that, training tools like Microsoft Copilot on her client’s Portal data, and building AI agents that surface the most relevant data to each partner manager.

“There are just so many things a partner manager needs to think about every day.‘What deal registrations haven’t been updated in a month?’‘Which partners haven’t logged into the portal in 60 days?’‘What partner-led deals are coming up for renewal?’‘Which of my smaller partners should I pay attention to now because they could have huge potential?’

AI can not only find this information, but help partner managers prioritize it, turning it into more of a checklist than an overwhelming amount of work in their heads.”

Weaving AI into partner manager and other internal workflows first has helped her team work out any kinks before deploying AI in partner-facing parts of the portal.

“Using AI to streamline internal workflows is better because there’s not as much risk attached to it — you’re not going to show partners something they shouldn’t see. And users can help you refine it over time.”

3. As a Thought Partner

Mackenzie Wiley, former Channel Program Manager at Telestream, uses ChatGPT as a sounding board for new projects and campaigns she’s cooking up. 

She explains,“I like to ask ChatGPT about the type of content I want to create or ask it for ideas. I may not use its exact answers, but it saves me time and adds a different perspective.”

Having a second brain can be especially useful if you’re on a smaller team and your boss and colleagues don’t always have time for a brainstorming session.

Ask ChatGPT or Claude to role-play as your boss, sharing innovative ideas, pointing out potential obstacles, and challenging you to think about different angles for approaching a problem. You can even ask it to provide a plan for accomplishing your goal that you can tweak to your unique use case. 

4. To Find New Ways to Upsell (Or Cross-Sell)

Knowing what and how to upsell is an art and science. And, depending on how your partner program is set up, partners may not realize that an end customer would benefit from new features that were recently released or want certain add-ons because of their specific use case.

A recent GTM Partners newsletter (Who Owns AI in GTM?) highlighted that their clients use AI to guide upsell and cross-sell efforts.

“AI can suggest personalized upsell/cross-sell paths based on similar customer behavior, identify support trends that lead to expansion, and recommend new services or educational content proactively.”

Their clients use it for both:

• Personalized end customer journey mapping, boosting adoption, and revealing where partners can add value — if new use cases arise, goals have changed, the market is shifting, etc.
• Proactive success outreach triggers. AI can detect patterns in customer purchases, service tickets, and product usage, surfacing accounts that are ready for more, whether it’s an add-on product or service package.

5. Use AI to Accelerate Onboarding in Your Partner Program

In theory, the partner enablement journey you’ve developed works perfectly. If partners read and follow your directions, they know exactly what steps they need to take to understand your product, get certified, and start submitting Deal Registrations.

But ask yourself how often that really happens. If your program is like most, partners rarely follow your process 100% of the time.

That’s why Raegan’s team has used AI agents to build always-on, in-portal assistants to nudge partners in the right direction.

“It gives partners quick-start suggestions based on where the partner is(region) and their type when they log in. It can even proactively reach out and say,‘Hey, have you done this yet?’”

She’s seen that this kind of interactive guidance ends up leading to more partner engagement — a key metric for showing the value of the channel.

6. Offload Some Partner Support

Think about how many times partners reach out to your PMs and CAMs about: 

• Their program status
• The certifications they need to get
• The SPIFFs they qualify for
• Their marketing development fund max for the year

Now think about how much time you could save them by implementing an AI-powered chatbot that answers those questions in a few seconds. That’s a lot of time saved on unnecessary emails!

Even though all that information is probably already available in your Portal, partner users don’t always have the patience or know-how to find and comb through your business plans or figure out how to use your Portal reporting features. And, let’s face it, they probably deleted your emails about new promos coming down the pike.

Raegan’s team at Spur Reply is also using AI agents to build an ‘Ask a CAM’ assistant for one of her clients to alleviate this pain.

“That assistant lives in the Portal and knows who the partner is, where they’re located, and where they are in the program, then gives tailored answers to partner questions based on their profile.”

If you don’t have the resources to build a tool of this scope, you can start small.

For example, one of our Channeltivity customers is embedding a prebuilt chatbot into the Library, periodically feeding the bot File Name, Description, URL, CreatedDate, and ModifiedDate data so that partners can ask it to find a particular whitepaper, pricing sheet, or case study.

7. Draft Personalized Channel Marketing Campaigns

In our recent guide to channel marketing, Ana Beatriz Santos at Axur shared that she uses AI for personalization and marketing automation, adding in small touches to help outbound channel marketing campaigns better resonate with the audience they’re trying to target.

“All of our solutions at Axur are based on AI models, so we’re encouraged to lean on the AI solutions that are already integrated into our CRM and the rest of our tech stack. The suggestions it gives us save us a lot of time in campaign creation and execution.”

Raviraj uses AI for partner marketing efforts at Donorbox, too. “We use AI to craft customized webinar invitations, landing page descriptions, and other co-branded campaigns for individual partner verticals.”

The real value, he says, is that “AI learns to adjust tone and language in accordance with previous campaign performance,” ultimately leading to better webinar attendance, website engagement, and open and click-through rates.

A note here — that may be fairly obvious, but is good to keep in mind — is that the personalization power of your AI engine is completely dependent on:

1. The data you give it (more on that later),
2. The way you prompt it.

If you want it to emphasize specific features for a specific audience, let’s say, you have to tell it that upfront — otherwise, the model is just guessing (and we’ve all seen how wild hallucinations can get).

For AI to Work in Your Partner Program, You Need Partner Data

At Channeltivity, we’ve designed our Partner Portal to collect and manage all the data you need to feed, train, and deploy AI agents that drive true ROI for your program.

We collect:

• Partner enablement data, tracking everything from Training and Certification progress to how many times partners log into the Portal.
• Deal Registration submissions and approvals, plus supplemental data from syncing to your CRM (like Salesforce or HubSpot).
• Lead Distribution data, to see which partners accepted and closed the Leads you sent them (and when).
• MDF data, to show which partners participate and what marketing activities reel in new deals.

Plus, we have our own analytics and reporting tools to help you monitor and clean data on the backend — before feeding it into your models.

Ready to transform your partner program with AI?

Schedule a demo with Channeltivity to see how our PRM can empower your channel strategy.