I asked a channel partner recently what they’d been posting lately. The answer told me everything about where AI has actually landed in the channel. “Loads more,” they said, pleased with themselves. More of what, I asked. They scrolled. A photo from a trade show stand. Another from a different stand. A post shouting about their headline product. All of it written by AI, all of it posted within minutes, none of it anything a buyer would stop to read.
This is the quiet truth about AI in the channel right now. Adoption isn’t the problem. Most partners have already reached for it. The problem is what they’re using it for, and the answer, almost everywhere I look, is volume over relevance.
Partner content tends to come in two flavours. The flag-wave (look at us at this event, here we are at another stand) and the hard sell (buy our product, it’s the best, book a demo). Both have a place in small doses.
What’s missing is the middle of the funnel: the helpful explainer, the comparison table, the research, the report, the tool that helps a buyer frame their problem and look credible to their boss. That’s the content that builds interest and trust, and across most partner marketing, it simply isn’t there. Their use of AI has made it faster to produce the two things that were never the problem, and has done nothing for the thing that was.
The partners doing this aren’t lazy, and AI isn’t the villain. They’re using it raw, and by that I mean ‘off the shelf’. They haven’t spent time training it on their own voice, giving it grounding in the buyer’s pain points, or asking it to interrogate them to get all the right context before it writes. They type a request, take the first draft, and post it. Generic in, generic out.
If you’re a vendor, this is where I’d stop you. Your brand is getting represented across the market by content generated from a blank prompt.
The opportunity to fix this is enormous, and hardly anyone has taken it. The vendor that moves first does two things. It skills partners up on how to properly use AI to support content creation: how to brief it, train it on their voice, feed it real buyer pain, and make it ask the right questions. And it gives partners AI tools to use to help them do this. Tools that are pre-loaded with the brand, product, audience, messaging, competitive advantage and conversion assets, built in a way that allows partners to weave in their own messaging too. Rolled out across a partner base, this approach can turn a whole channel into a highly powerful, relevant, full-funnel content engine. This kind of partner enablement is exactly the work most vendors haven’t started.
The strange part is that no vendor seems to be doing this properly yet, largely because most vendors aren’t much further ahead with AI than their partners are. Which is precisely why the door is open. It doesn’t take a moonshot budget or a year of build. It takes someone with the foresight to see how this could benefit both the channel and the vendor.
If you want help developing a partner AI enablement programme, that’s the kind of thing we build at The Essential Agency.
