In the final part of our feature on AI and the channel, we asked that the channel opportunities are.
Werner Herbst, MD of First Distribution
AI represents a significant opportunity for the channel, but it requires a shift in approach.
The focus is moving from selling products to delivering measurable outcomes. Customers need support in identifying use cases, integrating solutions, and managing increasingly complex AI environments.
This creates opportunities in advisory, implementation, and managed services — particularly around AI and agent-based solutions.
For First Distribution, the role is to enable partners with the platforms, skills, and support needed to deliver these outcomes successfully.
Ryan Martyn, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Syntech Distribution
This is where I see the biggest opportunity: localised infrastructure. Over time it will make sense for businesses to invest in on-premises workstations and servers that host secure information locally, feeding a local RAG setup that interacts with market-leading LLMs and handles query processing. This gives employees access to AI that’s actually relevant to the business, removes the risk of confidential information leaking out, and saves on token and processing costs. As more businesses invest in this kind of infrastructure, it will also create new employment opportunities in the channel to build, secure and maintain it.
Ravi Bhat, commercial solutions and AI officer at Microsoft South Africa
The partner opportunity is significant and moving up the stack. Partners will continue to support cloud migration, data modernisation, security and governance, but the bigger growth is in Copilot adoption, change management, workflow redesign, custom copilots, AI agents and managed services.
Customers want both growth and trust. The partners that win will connect AI innovation with security, compliance, and measurable outcomes. In short, AI is not shrinking the channel role; it is making it more strategic, with the AI partner opportunity moving up the stack, from implementing tools to helping customers transform how they operate, compete and grow.
Othelo Vieira, technical product manager lead at Cloud On Demand
The channel is positioned better than at almost any point in recent memory — if it moves fast enough. The opportunity set is broad: AI readiness assessments (most organisations genuinely don’t know where they stand), data infrastructure modernisation, cloud migration and hybrid architecture design, and AI solution implementation. Managed services around AI operations — model monitoring, data pipeline management, governance frameworks — are an emerging category with strong recurring revenue potential. The resellers and integrators who will win are those who develop genuine AI competency rather than just reselling vendor AI add-ons. That means building teams that understand the business problems, not just the technology stack. There’s also a real opportunity in the mid-market, which is underserved: these companies need AI capability but lack the internal resources to get there without a trusted partner. The channel is that partner — or it should be.
Andre Hogewoning, chief operating officer at Business AI
The channel has more to gain from AI than almost any other sector.
The opportunity is twofold — and most partners are only thinking about half of it. The first opportunity is to transform their own business with AI. The second is to build entirely new revenue lines by helping their customers do the same. The partners who do both, in that order, will define the next decade of the South African channel.
We advise channel partners to become an AI-native business first. You cannot credibly sell a transformation you have not been through yourself. The channel partners we respect most are the ones using AI internally to do more with the team they already have — scaling capacity and response times while protecting their margins. That experience becomes their single most powerful sales asset.
This internal adoption does more than improve efficiency. It builds the genuine, lived expertise that customers are increasingly demanding — and that separates a true implementation partner from a reseller forwarding a brochure.
The second opportunity is to move decisively up the value chain — from reselling product to designing, implementing and governing AI solutions. Critically, this can be done while supporting and strengthening local supply channels rather than defaulting to foreign platforms. Every locally implemented, rand-denominated solution keeps value, skills and capability on the continent — and contributes to the African AI ecosystem the market urgently needs.
Finally, there is significant opportunity in roductizing and on-selling repeatable, locally-built AI services — secure domain assistants, knowledge-management deployments, tender and inventory intelligence tools and similar use cases — as packaged, governed offerings.
Ziaad Suleman, senior vice-president and CEO at Cassava Technologies, SA and Botswana
The channel has an unprecedented opportunity to evolve from transactional IT resellers into strategic systems integrators and AI deployment partners.
For example, through centres such as our Liquid C2 Partner Experience, powered by Google Cloud in Johannesburg, South Africa, partners can now leverage the Gemini Playspace to prototype AI solutions, earn technical certifications, and confidently guide enterprise clients through complex data readiness roadmaps.