The traditional consulting partner model – defining the scope of technical work, delivering against that statement of work and billing by milestone or hour – has long been under the pressure of a changing market landscape. It’s no secret how customers are looking for partners to be strategic collaborators rather than transactional sellers. Businesses want outcomes, not just implementations.
Even so, the transactional model still describes how a large chunk of tech advisors and MSPs engage with prospects and customers. But surveys and executive interviews performed by AWS show a decisive shift in what enterprises are asking from partner consultants and how they engage with those channel partners. And it seems the pressure to move from transactional models has only been compounded by the emergence of AI.
The study, conducted by AWS’s Business Value Realization (BVR) Motion team in early 2026, found that 80% of customers interviewed reported moving toward value-based, outcome-tied commercial models and away from time-and-materials and milestone-based contracts. “Some are doing so in response to internal cost pressure. Others are funding ambitious AI agendas and need to ensure those investments translate into business results,” said AWS researchers,
In short, customers increasingly expect their partners to share accountability for business outcomes rather than focusing on just the completion of a defined technical scope. They want partners “who think like owners of their business.” They want partners that proactively identify ways to optimize the impact of technologies, that suggest pathways to innovative and digital transformation, and that contribute to success long after implementation is complete.
“We are looking for more outcome-based models, so the provider has skin in the game,” said one director of IT strategy for a major automotive company, who was interviewed for the study. “We no longer rely on models where a PO is sent out, and the supplier gets invoices paid irrespective of success or failure.”
The AWS study identified two ways in which AI is accelerating the shift from transactional selling to transformational partners. For starters, enterprise customers are making substantial AI investments as part of their broader transformation agenda. In turn, they face significant pressure to demonstrate returns, and that pressure flows all the way down and through to their consulting partners. “Customers want partners who can convert AI investments into measurable business impact, not partners who simply deploy AI tools into production,” said AWS researchers.
At the same time, AI compresses the technical effort required for many implementation tasks, reducing the share of engagement value tied to pure technical execution.
“From customer interviews, we learned customers want partners who can deliver a comprehensive set of capabilities to help them achieve value realization and ROI,” said the study. “They want partners who connect value targets mapped to use cases to the people and process changes needed to deliver on them, driven by continuous tracking and optimization across the entire customer success engagement and beyond.”
The “customer success engagement,” they continued, rests on three core capabilities, which collectively distinguish partners that deliver implementations from partners that drive business impact.
These include “value mapping” to help customers envision the use cases that will accelerate their AI transformation vision and identify specific outcomes; “adoption and change management” to ensure the people, process, and organizational readiness needed to optimize enterprise usage and impact from the new capabilities are in place; and “monitoring and business value determination,” which continuously tracks outcomes after go-live, adjusting as needed for further optimization, and demonstrates ROI.
According to AWS researchers, several customers described screening partners out of consideration or not advancing to pricing discussion if these types of customer success initiatives were absent from a proposal. On the flip side, when customer success capabilities such as the above are provided and credibly presented, enterprises are willing to pay a premium for consulting services, ranging from 10‑20% above the baseline price for an implementation-only engagement of similar scope.
“The driver is risk reduction: a partner that contractually and operationally commits to value realization absorbs uncertainty that would otherwise sit with the customer,” said the study.
The AWS study combined a quantitative survey of 292 consulting partner decisionmakers globally with 35 in-depth executive interviews with partner and customer leadership.
