Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Emmy Hellgren & Brittan Trembley - How Pax8 and Microsoft Are Powering Partner-Led AI
Live from Pax8 Beyond in Denver - The Future of MSPs and AI
In this special live edition of Partnerships Unraveled, we’re joined by Emmy from Microsoft’s Copilot Studio Go-to-Market team and Britt from Pax8 to explore how AI is revolutionizing the channel. From agentic workflows to verticalized GTM strategies, this conversation is packed with actionable insight for MSPs and channel leaders.
In this episode, we cover:
- Microsoft’s vision for every user to have a Copilot and every business process to have an agent, and what that means for partners.
- How AI agents are driving new revenue streams, deeper customer stickiness, and vertical specialization for MSPs.
- Why Pax8’s Opportunity Explorer is a game-changer for identifying white space and accelerating partner growth.
- Real-world results from Microsoft’s internal AI deployments, including 9% revenue lifts and increased customer service capacity.
Tune in for a front-row seat to where the channel is headed and how you can lead the charge.
Connect with Brittan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brittanhere/
Connect with Emmy: https://x.com/hellgrenem
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Chanext and this week I'm very excited to welcome two special guests. How are you both doing? Good, how are you? Yeah, I'm excited to have you both on. We're live at PAX 8 and we're talking all things MSP, pax 8 and Microsoft and what AI is going to do to that whole world. Maybe, emi, you can kick us off with a bit of an introduction about who you are and what you do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. So. My name is Emi and I work with the Co-Pilot Studio Go-To-Market Strategy, so I've been working with partners for the past I would say 10 years say 10 years, awesome.
Speaker 1:And Britain? Yes, I'm the Global Director of Microsoft Modern Work and Microsoft Security here at Pexane, so I help partners find success all across the globe.
Speaker 2:So I sat in yesterday's keynote and it was amazing to sort of hear the vision in terms of where the market's headed. Unsurprisingly, sort of agentics and AI is becoming this sort of be all and end all for where one what end users will want to consume in in terms of the improvements, but also what the market is going to demand in terms of how we move forward. Um, we are speaking to the expert in terms of what the what microsoft's ai message and product stack looks like. Maybe talk us through what the vision is yeah, definitely.
Speaker 3:So we actually envision for every user to have a co-pilot and for every business process to have an agent. And then, if I'm to unpack what that actually means, if we sort of pause on the fact of every business process having an agent, that means that we're going to work with a wide range of agents. Like imagine a time where we might work with 100 agents on a database. So then the question is, like you know, feeling a little bit overwhelmed and like how are we going to do that, how are we going to access these agents? And that's essentially where Copilot will come in as the UI for AI, and Copilot will serve as that entry point. I mean, you can almost think about Copilot as your digital chief of staff that will help you to access these agents and you can simply like add, mention an agent, essentially in Copilot, and that's how you will collaborate and sort of work with them. And that's why it's so important.
Speaker 3:Like Copilot obviously brings other values as well as being that personal AI assistant and sort of reasoning over information within Microsoft 365. And then agents will serve as the entryway to reach data outside of Microsoft 365. So that's sort of how you will apply AI across your business, whether it is in M365, in your CRM system, in your business applications, in your ERP system. But that's sort of how the vision comes together. And then, from a partner standpoint, how? Because I get a lot of questions around like how do I monetize Copilot Chat? Because it's a free product essentially. You essentially monetize it through agents, because that's where you will drive consumption and that's where you will be able to build services.
Speaker 2:I think the bit that I think is most relevant to the MSP community. It's also where you drive stickiness right, because if you've built someone's agentic workflow and you own that workflow, you are I don't want to say impossible to churn, but basically impossible to churn, because if I have to press off, it would be like deleting your crm, right, it would just, it would pause all function within a company, especially once we have that level of adoption yeah, and the thing is that users won't want to actually interact with these systems in the future.
Speaker 3:Like I was talking with a friend that changed from sales to marketing and I asked him like, oh, how do you like marketing? And he was like, well, the best thing is, now I don't have to be in a crm ever again. So it's like people spend so much time in these business systems and, yes, you know, we have nice user interfaces, but we still, like you know, we input information, we extract information. It takes a lot of time. So having the ability to work through ai and do that work is just so beneficial and time-saving maybe britain coming to you.
Speaker 2:How do you help articulate the outcomes towards the MSPs? I think you know we're talking about revenue increase but also reduction of cost. We're talking about improved stickiness retention rates. How do you sort of evangelize and take partners through that vision?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. That's a great question. One of the things that you mentioned is about that agentic stickiness and it's really that by leading with use cases and business outcomes in agents, you're really allowed to embed yourself as a part of the business structure of your customers. So it creates this incredible ongoing relationship that really feeds the MSP channel. I think that really, we would typically recommend that the M365 co-pilot is one of that the more personal assistant offer and it can be targeted towards your high potential M365 users as, like your key place to get the most value out of that version of co-pilot, whereas chat is available to be something that can be turned on for an entire organization with very specific agents driving outcomes for the entirety of the organization, and then you have your maturity flow right in front of you as they grow deeper into their relevancy with Copilot. Then they can do things like add M365 Copilot, copilot for sales and really augment that data in the right way from your organization.
Speaker 2:One of the sort of perennial debates when it comes to MSP go-to-market is do I verticalize my outreach or do I geographically target my outreach? And I think one of the things I'm super fascinated when it comes to agentics, verticalization becomes super important, right, If I build my entire practice on how do I optimize legal firms, I can take the learnings from the implementation and structure and stickiness and start to copy and paste that infrastructure to other partners. Is that something that you sort of actively encourage and advise partners to to go after?
Speaker 1:that is absolutely something we see in the partners that are moving quickly today. They're creating that use case. They're they're getting that first customer experience so that they can recreate that and iterate with that. Yeah, just like you mentioned that, they're moving into a specific industry, targeting law firms, targeting financial institutions, and then allowing those agentic builds that they've already created to serve them in growing a brand new market.
Speaker 2:Awesome, maybe Emi coming to you. I think it sounds sort of bizarre, slightly scary, slightly overwhelming 100 agents per person. I think people sort of bizarre, slightly scary, slightly overwhelming a hundred agents per person. I think people sort of understand it but struggle to articulate what the outcomes are. I know Microsoft has some really interesting use cases in terms of the productivity advantage or competitive advantage that Microsoft has in its own internal organization has been able to deliver.
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 3:We have started to transform our business processes internally using agents and we have actually seen some amazing results, like, if I'm to highlight a couple like we saw that we deployed this within a sales organization and those sellers had an average of 9% increase in revenue.
Speaker 3:So that's absolutely amazing. And then we also deployed an agent on Azurecom and we had more than 20% conversion increase. Azurecom and we had more than 20% conversion increase. And then we have also deployed it across our customer service organization and they have been able to take on more customer service cases per day. We have also deployed it internally to sort of manage our HR questions and we have seen that employees are more likely now to find and answer to the question than before. So we have seen some absolutely amazing results internally. But then sort of how partners can actually, let's say, make sense of it or go to market with this is to really think about like from a customer standpoint. Many customers will look to their partner to help them actually build these kind of services, like they will look to their partner to build agents for them to manage the agent and deploy the agent and and I think that's the big opportunity for them to provide those services.
Speaker 2:It's funny because you're talking about like very niche individual AI deployments, right? Sometimes I think we think of AI as like this magical hammer that just cracks any nut, which is sort of true, but actually it's like oh, we have a customer churn issue and it's because of response timelines's. Like, oh, we have a customer churn issue and it's because of response timelines. Okay, well, we can actually do a really specific use case and I think partners who approach those outcomes and that strategic problem solve and then bring the right hammer to crack the right nut. That's sort of what we're aiming for.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and one thing that we have seen working really well when we talk to customers is also to bring examples. Like if you're talking to a customer, for example, to bring an example from another manufacturing customer and say like, hey, these are the kinds of results that we've seen with a previous customer that is similar to your organization, because then you can also start to help the customer envision what they can actually do, because with agents you can deploy it anywhere. So you need to give a few examples to get the customers to really understand the opportunities.
Speaker 2:And MSPs live on referrals right. So my view is, actually it'd be great we can take the use case from one manufacturer to another, but actually you can just get the manufacturer to walk you in because they're in their own ecosystems, they're in their own bubbles and if you are the, I keep using the legal practice one. But hey, contract creation is a very language model, heavy function, so it's where AI is super simple to deploy. Legal firms talk to each other all day, every day, share best practices and if you are seen to be that value added partner, that managed intelligence partner which we're hearing a lot of information, maybe Britain coming to you, how can you see that old world style of referral and this new agentics intelligence partner thing coming together?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I love that we're talking about managed intelligence providers. It truly is the wave of what we would have formerly called the MSP, and so, as we're mentioning, when we go towards the agentic future and really target some of these best use cases and bring the right hammer to crack the nut, you can absolutely go towards the thought leadership of that and create a real brand differentiation for your partnerships with your customers. And then your reputation precedes you. So that's absolutely what we want is for partners to dive in quick, fast and get their hands in it through becoming their own first customer, doing what they need to do to improve their own processes, and then taking that out towards their customers and showing them what they want.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that I think I'm sort of really bullish on how marketplaces and AI comes together, because at some level, ai is just management of data. Now, if you're an individual end user, you have your data. Now, if you are a marketplace and you understand partner data at scale, you can take learnings from one partner and apply them to another. One of the amazing things that we're seeing in terms of Pax8 eating its own dog food Opportunity Explorer. Talk to us about what that is, how it's going to drive the business forward.
Speaker 1:Yes. So if you are here at Beyond and you got to see the innovation keynote, of course we get to dive into what we're doing there. Opportunity Explorer is absolutely AI driven and it helps to uncover the white space in your existing customers by allowing you to take not only the trends all up that the marketplace is seeing, but the individual trends of what your customers are transacting transacting, and so that can do something like recommending a security framework, aligned SKU like Business Premium or M365E5, or supplementing by noticing that you have high propensity M365 users, and then Copilot would absolutely be at the top of those type of recommendations.
Speaker 2:I so often hear people talk about AI as a cost reducer, which I understand. If we're doing legal contracts, it takes me five hours and with a language model, I can do it in an hour. There is a cost reduction. I actually think the true upside is going to be in the revenue increase. Opportunity Explorer is a perfect example of how AI can affect channel practices. But to chase more growth, not reduction of cost. How?
Speaker 1:AI can affect channel practices, but to chase more growth, not reduction of cost, absolutely. I consider it a value builder, not a cost reducer, because at the end of the day, it is able to help businesses go further faster.
Speaker 2:That's exactly the point across the globe with everybody that's using it, and we obviously are all sat here today because we've been working on a partnership between Pax8, Chanix and Microsoft. Britton, maybe coming to you first, how have you seen Chanix leveraging AI to help drive performance and how we can embed AI?
Speaker 1:again as a revenue generator, absolutely, so. You do have some great things going on that I love with AI, and so our partnership with Chanix allows our partners to be able to automate social media that speaks directly to their customers about what's important to them, and what I love is that you have an AI capability to really speak in the partner's voice and allow that to come to their customers in a way that feels identifiable and doesn't feel as if it may be going through a platform that's providing it. It really takes that personal touch and allows them to be in the market as themselves, but without having to have that hand on touch well.
Speaker 2:We always appreciate the personal touch at partnerships unraveled, which is why we ask our current guest to recommend our next guest. Who did you have in mind?
Speaker 3:so from my end, I would love to recommend a woman called lisa from microsoft, and she works with the partner development, and I think it could be really interesting to have her on, because she will be able to give the perspective of working with partners every day.
Speaker 2:Awesome. I'm excited to have Lisa on. Thank you both so much for coming on. It's been awesome.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having us.