AI is changing how quickly products evolve, how customers evaluate technology, and how partners deliver value.
Software vendors can now bring new solutions to market in the time it once took to develop a beta product. Entire companies are emerging with capabilities that, until recently, would have required significantly more time, capital, and people to build.
The AI SOC market is a great recent example. According to KuppingerCole, more than 100 vendors have emerged in the space over the past two years. In an interview with Judy Shaw, Lior Div, CEO and co-founder of 7AI, described the acceleration firsthand – the kind of product development that took almost three years at his previous company was achieved in less than a year at 7AI.
That pace of innovation makes partners more important than ever. Customers increasingly rely on analysts, channel partners, system integrators, and other trusted advisors to cut through the noise and determine which technologies are worth adopting.
What AI changes about the partner’s role
AI can accelerate an investigation, but it cannot manufacture context it doesn’t have. Imagine an AI-powered security operations center investigating a suspicious domain. The AI-powered platform correlates alerts, automates triage, but the investigation still ends inconclusively because it lacks visibility into the infrastructure behind the domain or its connections to broader threat activity.Â
This is where partners make a tangible difference. By connecting technologies and expertise, partners can help customers get more from the tools they already have. They can advise about the strengths of different solutions, build integrations that make disparate systems work together, and create services that address problems no single product solves on its own.
Partners are no longer simply a route to market or distribution. Partners are one of the most important sources of innovation, customer insight, and product adoption we have. Their role will only continue to grow, as long as vendors make it practical for them to experiment, collaborate, and contribute.
From managing partners to accelerating them
Consider the challenge in the AI-era from the partner manager lens – how do you effectively enable a partner that works with hundreds of vendors, each releasing new capabilities and evolving their offerings at record speed?
Traditional channel programs were designed for a more predictable product cycle. Partner tiers established expectations, certifications validated product knowledge, and account-mapping meetings identified opportunities. A partner sales representative who attended training once a quarter – or even twice a year – for key vendors can stay informed enough to guide customers until the next update.
Today, a product update can arrive before the previous training has made its way through the partner organization. Simply adding more training sessions isn’t a realistic answer when partners have to navigate an entire ecosystem of technologies. The opportunity is to make enablement less of an event and more of part of how partners work.
For our team this has meant things like using gamified learning like capture-the-flag (CTF) exercises to build skills. Shared Slack and Teams channels put product updates into our partner’s existing internal communications workflows. And our deal rooms are evolving beyond static document repositories into active workspaces that bring together the right resources and stakeholders as the opportunity develops. The aim isn’t to flood partners with more information. It’s to help them find the right information without waiting for the next generic training session.
At Censys, this is shaping how we think about our channel program. We’re interested not just in whether partners have completed training, but in how quickly they can turn what they’ve learned into a customer conversation that addresses a real need.
Three shifts partner leaders can make
1. Make technical access part of the partner experience.
Partners can’t build solutions around capabilities they can’t touch. Access to technical experts, sandbox environments, and input into the roadmap can help them test ideas before taking them to customers. At Censys, we provide our partners with access to enterprise sandboxes, and it’s become one of our fastest paths to delivering new integrations.Â
2. Make it easier to experiment.
AI is changing how quickly a partner can explore a new use case or endpoint. At Censys, for example, our API documentation includes machine-readable markdown files that AI coding assistants can interpret. This gives partners a way to explore documented capabilities and develop initial integration concepts quickly. It doesn’t replace engineering expertise or reviews, but it does allow our technical partners the ability to experiment and learn quickly.
3. Measure more than what they sell.
Activity, pipeline, and revenue are some of the core measures of a channel program. But they don’t tell the whole story. It’s also worth measuring whether partners can independently identify use cases and innovate upon ideas for their own geo, market, or customer base. Those capabilities may take time to show up in revenue, but they can help explain where investment can make a difference.
Ultimately, giving partners the resources to explore independently, with the right guardrails, helps them turn promising ideas into reliable solutions.
The next era of partner strategy
For partner leaders, the challenge isn’t to make every partner an expert in every new development. It’s to make your partner ecosystem better at experimenting and working together as the landscape changes.
In the AI era, the advantage won’t come simply from having more partners or more technology. It will come from helping partners connect the dots, and making it easier for them to turn those connections into customer value.
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About Celestine JahrenÂ
Celestine Jahren is the Vice President of Strategic Alliances and Channel at Censys, the authoritative Internet Intelligence Platform. She works with global enterprises, critical infrastructure organizations, security partners, and ISACs to help organizations operationalize Internet intelligence and reduce cyber risk through strategic partnerships.
With expertise spanning Internet intelligence, exposure management, and security operations, Celestine focuses on how external visibility, adversary infrastructure, and emerging threat trends enable organizations to modernize their security operations and improve operational resilience.
A frequent speaker at Black Hat, RSA Conference, Infosecurity Europe, Dark Reading, FS-ISAC, H-ISAC, E-ISAC, MS-ISAC, Auto-ISAC, and other industry events, Celestine regularly shares insights on cybersecurity strategy, threat intelligence, and the role of partnerships in strengthening cyber defense. Her work has also been featured in publications including CIS Cyber Quarterly, ChannelE2E Perspectives, and Medium.
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