Partnerships is behind on AI. It never made its own work legible to a model.

I spent two days at a partnerships summit recently. AI came up in almost every conversation yet the most common question was what is a valuable use case?

That is not a criticism of the people in the room. It really shows the state of our function.

Salesforce’s 2026 sales research puts AI use at 87% of sales organisations, with 54% of sellers having already used an agent. The Content Marketing Institute has 95% of B2B marketers using AI somewhere in their workflow. In partnerships, the most widely adopted use case is partner content personalisation, at 38% piloting and 11% in production. Partner scoring sits at 14% piloting and 3% in production.

Sales and marketing are not ahead of us because they are smarter. They are ahead because they made their work “AI legible”. A pipeline has stages. A funnel has conversion points. Both are a defined, repeated decision you can point a model at. How many of us are guilty of describing our job as relationships? A relationship is not a process, so when AI arrives there is nothing obvious to point it at.

There is a structural gap underneath this. Crossbeam found 40% of B2B SaaS teams have no dedicated partner operations headcount at all. Sales has sales ops. Marketing has marketing ops. Most partner orgs have partner managers, spreadsheets and rev ops function we outsource to. The function that would own an AI rollout does not exist, so individuals scramble to make it happen.

So here is something we can all try as individuals this week, using the LLM your company has made available to you.

Export 90 days of partner activity. It could be deal registrations, certification completions, last contact date. Use the data you have and compile it on one sheet. Ask one question. Which five partners changed their behaviour most in the last 90 days, and what changed? Ask for reasoning, ask for proof.

The first time I compared this to the list of the five I would have named, I was quite surprised. No content, no QBR deck written faster. An actionable insight that helped me to notice sooner.