COLUMN: How Solution Providers Can Take AI Agents From ‘Buzzword’ To ‘Blockbuster’

CRN Executive Editor Jennifer Follett says channel partners who can help organizations deal with the security challenges around agentic AI will find no shortage of opportunities.

The AI gold rush is in full swing, and IT vendors are racing to market with promises of digital transformation that will impact every aspect of how companies do business, from how they develop software code to how they use data to anticipate customer needs to how they shore up their cybersecurity operations.

But there’s a critical gap between what these AI offerings can do in theory and what they deliver in practice, a gap that AI-savvy solution providers are uniquely positioned to fill.

A key piece of the AI story—one that rode a high wave of hype coming into 2025—is the advent of AI agents, software programs empowered to complete tasks on a user’s behalf.

AI agents grabbed more than their fair share of headlines last month as OpenAI released ChatGPT Agent, which enables ChatGPT to use its own virtual computer to carry out tasks; ServiceNow reported over 20 percent revenue growth for its second quarter, driven largely by its work with AI agents and agentic AI; and retail giant Walmart said it has a brand-new AI “super agent” strategy that will bring AI tools to its customers, employees, partners and developers.

But while all of that was going on, the concept of AI agents took a reputational hit as word spread about an entrepreneur who was experimenting with an AI coding agent when it admitted it had violated a directive and deleted a production database.

The CEO of software development company Replit, maker of the AI agent, apologized for the episode on X.

This all goes to show that there is a seismic opportunity for solution providers to help customers take AI agents from “buzzword” to “blockbuster.”

There are two areas in particular where the role of solution providers in bringing AI agents to life is critical, both of which we explore in the August issue of CRN: securing them and building the data infrastructure that supports them.

On the cybersecurity front, a key issue is managing and securing the access that AI agents have to critical data and systems.

“The entire purpose of agents is to connect to many different systems and data sources to autonomously accomplish tasks.

But if such access is not actually supposed to be authorized, a data breach is the probable result,” wrote CRN Senior Editor Kyle Alspach in his story about securing AI agents, part of our AI Special Section. “Exacerbating the issue is that fact that because agents are charged with executing tasks without constant human oversight, breaches could go entirely unnoticed for a period of time,” he added.

Solution providers that can help organizations deal with the security challenges around agentic AI will find no shortage of opportunity going forward as they help customers grapple with issues most aren’t equipped to face on their own, executives told CRN.

“[With AI agents], the need for the access to data is going to typically be greater,” said Matt Shufeldt, chief solutions officer at San Diego-based systems integrator Evotek, No. 92 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500. “And because of that, you need to solve for those data management issues more quickly.”

Elsewhere in the AI Special Section, CRN Features Editor Rick Whiting chronicles the key technologies—including ETL (extract, transform and load) tools for collecting, preparing and forming data for AI tasks; data pipeline management tools; data governance and data quality tools; and vector databases—solution providers can bring to bear as they help customers bring AI projects to life.

“Most companies understand that they can’t really do the more advanced AI use cases or applications they want because their data platforms are not ready,” Daniel Avancini, chief data officer at Indicium, a New York-based AI and data service and consulting firm, told CRN. “They don’t have the framework, the [data] governance, the security or the technology that will provide that AI-ready data for these applications. We believe that most companies are not 100 percent ready for large-scale AI applications.”

These foundational challenges aren’t going away anytime soon. If anything, they will become both more critical and more complex as AI agents proliferate, consuming more data and accessing more sensitive systems. Solution providers that position themselves as the essential experts in the underpinnings of successful AI agent deployments will strike it rich.