Microsoft Marketplace Promises Simpler AI Agent Purchasing Experience

‘Channel partners are building agents, and this is a fantastic place for them to showcase those skills,’ Microsoft Chief Partner Officer Nicole Dezen says.

Microsoft has released in the U.S. a new marketplace that aims to simplify artificial intelligence application and agent discovery, purchasing and deployment while also unifying its Azure Marketplace and AppSource marketplaces, with plans to introduce Microsoft Marketplace worldwide.

A resale-enabled offers capability in private preview for the Microsoft Marketplace allows software companies to authorize channel partners to sell private offers on the vendor’s behalf. And the marketplace has an “AI apps and agents” category users can select for 3,000-plus AI offerings from Microsoft itself and other vendors, according to the Redmond, Wash.-based AI and cloud vendor.

Nicole Dezen, Microsoft’s chief partner officer and corporate vice president of global channel partner sales, told CRN in an interview that for channel partners, the marketplace will enable further customer reach and faster time-to-value delivery. Just three months into the fiscal year, Microsoft has seen customer purchases of AI products through the marketplace double.

“Channel partners are building agents, and this is a fantastic place for them to showcase those skills,” Dezen said.

Microsoft Marketplace

As an example of how Microsoft partners are transforming their business to meet customer needs in the AI era, Nyasha Tunduwani, founder of Seattle-based Microsoft solution provider Real Impact, told CRN in a recent interview that he and his team have been building greater capabilities around Microsoft’s Fabric analytics platform.

Fabric is one of Microsoft’s tools that is making data accessible and usable beyond back-end analysts, representing the promise of new AI tools democratizing data insight for a larger share of the workforce, Tunduwani said. His company does a workshop on becoming a Fabric analyst in a day that has proven popular.

“I don’t want to call us ‘plumbers,’ but we’re essentially putting [in] that back-end infrastructure, knitting those pieces together,” he said.

Making AI apps and agents available through the marketplace should cut down on configuration time and lower operating costs, according to Microsoft. Distributors that are integrating the Microsoft Marketplace catalog into their own marketplaces include Arrow, Crayon, Ingram Micro, Pax8 and TD Synnex.

Microsoft Marketplace launch partners include CRN 2025 Solution Provider 500 members Infosys, Avanade, Kyndryl, Cognizant and Capgemini.

Resale-enabled offers allow other vendors to expand their reach through authorizing channel partners to resell products by geography. Vendors can adjust or remove authorization at any time. Microsoft expects to expand access to resale-enabled offers later in the year.

Customers with Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitments (MACCs) can leverage that for buying thousands of “Azure benefit eligible” offers. IT teams can integrate products from the marketplace into Microsoft Cloud with management and control tools to ensure security and governance standards.

MACCs provide competitive Azure infrastructure pricing and help facilitate larger long-term deals that can reach up to five years, according to the vendor.

The marketplace’s other categories range from data and analytics to productivity and collaboration and include industry-focused offerings, according to the vendor.

Users can also continue to procure third-party and Microsoft-made AI products within Microsoft products. Microsoft’s Agent Store in Microsoft 365 Copilot, for example, has Copilot agents from the Marketplace catalog. Microsoft is also working on future experiences with thousands of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, according to the vendor.

In the coming weeks and months, visitors to Azure Marketplace and AppSource pages will get redirected to Microsoft Marketplace, according to the vendor.