CRN Answers Brings Channel News Into The AI Era

CRN readers now have access to a proprietary LLM that aims to help solution providers gain insight and make faster business decisions as they utilize the power of GenAI to access a trove of channel and technology news, market trends and analysis.

CRN is bringing its flagship website into the AI era with a new GenAI-based search tool that provides readers with the ability to get answers to their most pressing channel and technology questions.

The new CRN Answers feature, launched Monday on CRN.com, aims to help solution providers gain insight and make faster business decisions as they utilize the power of GenAI to access a trove of channel and technology news, market trends and analysis.

“CRN is by far the biggest media brand in the channel, but we're not resting on our laurels,” said Stuart Sumner, chief content officer at CRN parent The Channel Company. “We're innovating."

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Mining both the latest CRN stories as well as decades of historical content to provide results that are both timely and in depth, CRN Answers gives readers access to a proprietary large language model (LLM) that enables them to ask natural language questions about the channel innovation, technology breakthroughs and market-changing acquisitions that impact how they do business, Sumner said. CRN Answers also suggests additional questions based on a viewed article to help readers dig deeper into the topics they care about most, he said.

“We see it as a massive leap forward,” Sumner said of the move to bring AI-powered search capabilities to CRN.com. “It could become one of the main ways readers engage with our brand.”

The launch of CRN Answers marks the publication’s latest investment in new AI tools, said Sumner, noting that most articles on CRN.com include an AI-powered “listen to this article” feature that can read content aloud.

The AI Impact On Solution Providers

CRN’s strategy to incorporate AI capabilities into its website mirrors the moves solution providers themselves are making as they tap AI tools to increase productivity internally and improve business for clients, solution provider executives said.

Michael Goldstein, CEO of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based LAN Infotech, which has doubled its AI consulting business over the last year, said he sees the new CRN Answers feature opening the door for him and his employees to quickly get insight on the technology and channel programs that will ultimately help him deliver better solutions for his customers.

“Bringing a GenAI LLM to CRN is a huge breakthrough. It’s so cool to be able to go to CRN and ask questions that will help me run my business better,” said Goldstein. “This makes CRN a bigger channel and technology information source for me and my employees. It’s a very different experience than using an old-style search engine.”

Goldstein said he expects the CRN Answers capability to help him make technology solution choices and channel sales investments.

“This is just another example of how AI is dramatically improving how we get answers to the biggest challenges we are facing as solution providers,” said Goldstein. “This is the type of revolutionary use of technology that is going to make media much more compelling in the AI era.”

Goldstein said he is looking forward to taking full advantage of CRN Answers.

“AI is taking hold at both our customers and within our business at a breakneck pace,” said Goldstein. “It’s great to see CRN moving at warp AI speed to better serve partners.”

Travis Woods, CEO of San Francisco Bay Area-based solution provider Fort Point IT, said as a long-time reader of CRN, he is excited to try out the new tool, noting that CRN's focus on the channel has given it a strong position in a noisy media landscape.

"I rely on CRN for news that is really specific to the MSP channel," he said. "It helps me understand trends and directions, but it also is how I stay in touch with my community."

Dawn Sizer, CEO of Mechanicsburg, Pa.-based 3rd Element Consulting—an honoree on CRN’s 2025 MSP 500—said AI research and summary tools such as CRN Answers have the potential to “bring back more information than you would get with just a regular search.”

"[CRN is] a great repository of information," she said. “[It's where] I know I can always find the right news at the right time."

How CRN Answers Works

The proprietary LLM that powers the new search tool has been trained on over 25 years’ worth of CRN content. The one-click search tool returns a CRN Answers box with results that are to the point and in context, automatically including links to the CRN articles used to formulate the answer.

In addition, a “Related Questions” box incorporated into articles delivers the AI-generated follow-up queries site visitors are most likely to have based on the articles they read, while a “Highlighted Resources” module uncovers content related to the search topic from sponsoring technology vendors.

The Channel Company’s Sumner sees CRN Answers—expected to make its way to CRN sister publications such as CRN UK, CRN.de in Germany and MES Computing in the future—as the next evolution of search, saving readers time by quickly giving them a full answer to whatever is on their mind.

He called CRN Answers a step toward “the next phase” of website interaction in the AI era.

“It’s going to be a hit,” he said. “I’ve tried it, and I love it. I think it’s incredible.”

Even as CRN and The Channel Company continue to invest in AI across every department, Sumner stressed the continued importance of humans to the delivery of channel-focused news coverage, noting that CRN Answers won’t replace the CRN reporters who bring unparalleled intellectual property to bear from their years of experience reporting on the channel.

CRN Answers is “leveraging and finding new ways to surface the brilliant content that's written by our brilliant humans,” he said.

While some media outlets are turning to AI to replace human reporters, Sumner sees the human-to-human relationships CRN reporters have and human-to-human events held by The Channel Company, including the XChange brand of conferences, all the more important.

“This is a perfect use case for AI, but it is only valuable because of all the work done by humans,” Sumner said.

Steven Burke contributed to this story.