on the client’s needs and preferences. “Partners can rely on Charlie to suggest the best telecom solution for their clients, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty,” said the company. Utilizing an intuitive user-friendly interface and intuitive design, Charlie was created to make it easy for even the least tech-savvy professionals to navigate the system effortlessly. And it can integrate with existing platforms and systems so Clarus partners can continue to use their preferred tools while benefiting from Charlie’s quoteretrieval capabilities. TSD and SaaS marketplace AppDirect, meanwhile, is busy working to develop its AI Marketplace solution, which allows partners to easily create no-code, personalized AI bots that operate off data from AppDirect’s supplier marketplace and internal sales enablement data, as well as a partner’s own chosen proprietary data. In cases where partners do input data, that data would reside on a “vector database” that AppDirect hosts and manages, as opposed to the trusted advisor sending its data directly to OpenAI, explained Peush Patel, AppDirect’s vice president of product management, in a blog post surrounding the solution’s introduction. “AppDirect’s AI Marketplace is designed to empower users to easily transform AI bot ideas into reality without needing any coding skills, while also offering a secure platform for sharing and effectively monetizing bots in various marketplaces,” said the company. Partners can build AI bots based on their choice of popular large language models, such as ChatGPT, Llama, Bard or Cohere. By providing specific training data, including files, websites and drives, users can program AI bots to focus on the work they need to accomplish. Technology advisors even could train their AI bot to deliver new business insights for upsell opportunities, said AppDirect. The resultant bots can be private, available to an organization or eventually shared and monetized on the Marketplace. According to Patel, the idea for AI Marketplace started as a proprietary application AppDirect was building as a customer service and sales bot. This “painfully excruciating” experience left his team thinking about the issues AppDirect channel partners would face building their own internal chatbots, Patel said. “We realized that if this was so painful for us, it’s going to be so painful for everybody else in the market. We have a 250-person engineering team today,” he continued. “So, what about small companies with 15, 20, 100 employees? They don’t have the technical skills. They don’t have all the resources at their disposal. So, they need a no-code solution.” The bots eventually will pull information on actual orders and payments, which would be of particular interest to technology advisors that frequently express the desire for increased visibility and automation from their distributor’s digital platforms when it comes to the status of their orders, said Patel. Initially, a select number of technology advisor firms are testing out the chatbots. After collecting feedback in Q1, AppDirect will make its AI Marketplace available to more partners, said Patel. Those partners’ end user customers who possess an AppDirect account will eventually get access, as well. Elsewhere in the channel, PRM and through-channel marketing automation platform provider Zift Solutions recently unveiled its ZiftONE AI Assistant, what the company calls the industry’s first generative AI solution designed to assist partners with content discovery and guidance for an enhanced and more efficient partner portal experience. The ZiftONE AI Assistant addresses the industry-wide struggle of resource constraints, said the company. By leveraging AI to create a virtual channel account manager, it assists partners in discovering the right content for their needs and guides them on the next best action for the task they are undertaking. Through intelligent task automation, constructive conversation and content automation, the platform enables Zift customers to accomplish more in less time with fewer resources. ZiftONE AI Assistant will become available in March, as a new feature on the ZiftONE platform, an all-in-one solution for managing partner marketing activities, onboarding, training and performance tracking all in one place. There’s no doubt, effective channel management can be a time and laborintensive process, particularly for solution providers and distributors that must simultaneously support hundreds, if not thousands, of partners and sub-agents with marketing, onboarding, training, lead generation and dealclosing support. Too often this is done through highly manual, home-grown or resource-intensive tools and processes. So it’s no surprise partner management and enablement are among the early software categories to leverage the power and efficiency provided by AI capabilities. Indeed, the above examples are likely just the beginning of a much bigger shift in PRM and channel management. It appears inflationary pressures are going to continue to press through 2024, and buyers – after two years of seemingly absorbing higher prices – are increasingly pushing back on higher input costs being pushed their way. In turn, vendors and distributors are being forced to do more with less, and AI can suddenly turn what was once impossible or highly impractical – across a vast array of customers, partners and products – into an almost ordinary, if not mundane, task. o AppDirect AI Marketplace demo sign-in screen 21 THE CHANNEL MANAGER’S PLAYBOOK
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