Exclusive: Anthropic Channel Exec Sees Channel Buildout As ‘Blueprint For The Future’

‘What we want to build here isn’t the same–nothing we do is the same,’ says Steve Corfield, Anthropic’s head of business development and partnerships.

Anthropic’s $100 million investment in its Claude Partner Network, new certification program and emerging partner organization of powerhouse channel executives from enterprise software vendors are part of what the artificial intelligence startup’s head of business development and partnerships deems a “blueprint for the future” of partnering in the AI era.

“We’re not just looking at straight, partner account management types–we’re going to bring people with very diverse muscle,” Steve Corfield told CRN in an exclusive interview ahead of this week’s debut Anthropic Partner Summit, held Wednesday and Thursday in Carlsbad, Calif.

“What we want to build here isn’t the same–nothing we do is the same. Everything we are building now is the blueprint for the future. So we need a different set of muscles and a much more multifaceted set of personnel to deliver that,” he said.

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Anthropic Builds Channel Muscle

The San Francisco-based company–founded in 2021 by former members of ChatGPT maker OpenAI–is full speed ahead on plans to build a channel ecosystem that can help cement its reputation as the preeminent artificial intelligence upstart for enterprises, even as the Claude maker battles with the Pentagon over its recent supply chain risk designation and investors in more-traditional enterprise software-as-a-service vendors fear an existential risk to SaaS by Anthropic and fellow AI upstarts.

Corfield joined the vendor in November after a nearly 11-year run at enterprise applications giant Salesforce. He spent about three years as Salesforce’s executive vice president and general manager for global alliances, channels and emerging products. His resume includes about three years with Microsoft, leaving in 2015 as director of U.K. services sales for Microsoft Consulting and Premier Support, according to Corfield’s LinkedIn account.

Although the technology brought to market by Anthropic and its rivals is revolutionary, the deep relationships solution providers have built with their customers and their prowess in integrating new technology with existing infrastructure makes them an essential part of mass enterprise AI adoption, Corfield said.

And although Anthropic has publicly announced partnerships with some of the biggest services providers in the world–CRN Solution Provider 500 members Infosys, Accenture, Cognizant, Slalom and Leidos–Corfield sees a massive opportunity for smaller partners and smaller businesses looking to add Claude to their technology stacks.

“This is a partner-first situation,” he said. “When I sit in front of the partners (and say) where we’re headed and what we’re doing, we really want to demonstrate that Anthropic is the most committed AI company in the world to the partner ecosystem.”

Here’s more of what Corfield had to say on Anthropic’s enterprise technology moves and channel investment, lightly edited for space and clarity.

Why should solution providers partner with Anthropic?

We’re on a tear growth-wise. When Paul Smith (Anthropic’s chief commercial officer, recruited in 2025 after working at ServiceNow as president of global customer and field operations) approached me about doing this, it was–how do we set up a world class AI ecosystem?

How do we create a truly partner-first company that scales through, all levels, all channels, all markets, all segments, with our partner economy? How do we take that experience from other roles and what we’ve seen work and really make that land–particularly as we think about the diversity of our partners, our cloud partnerships, our GSIs.

I had a fabulous 11 years at Salesforce, no doubt. (But this is) a business that’s doing things at an unprecedented time. It was just too good an opportunity to miss.

This is a partner-first situation. So when I sit in front of the partners (and say) where we’re headed and what we’re doing, we really want to demonstrate that Anthropic is the most committed AI company in the world to the partner ecosystem.

How are you seeing the channel and solution providers change for the AI era?

SIs are looking at completely changing their model. How are they using this technology to move away from human capital, time-and-materials, day-rate-based projects to–how do you drive a more outcome-based solution?

And how do we help them, then, with the (data) that says, when they enter into those contracts, that there is an element of reassurance that they can deliver those things?

When you think about code modernization or something that Claude is amazing at, things that used to take months can now potentially take weeks. And we want our GSIs to go in and do that with the security of being able to use our products.

When you think about some of the processes that have probably been running for 50 years that now can be very much streamlined using these models, they take things down from maybe 10 days to two hours.

We don’t want to make (projects) shorter. The opportunity now is to change the process. Some of these processes have been here for too long. So there is a real opportunity around business engineering, business process design.

How do these organizations then interact with these agents? And how do they work with AI?

Over $2 trillion is going to be spent in 2026 on AI. So this isn’t a niche or a trend. This is possibly the biggest market that’s ever been created.

Where is the Anthropic partner program today, and where is it going?

More so than any other company in the world, we’re really going to put some muscle behind what we’re saying, both financially and with our people and process.

We’re investing $100 million in the partner ecosystem. And that isn’t $100 million over the next 10 years. That’s this year.

We’re going to 5x our partner facing (team). We’re going to build a serious internal organization with dedicated partner success, dedicated partner accounting.

How do you address your top GSIs? How do you make sure that you can manage the midmarket? How do you make sure you can build a billion-dollar reseller business with the best opportunity to expand globally with these partners in market, in culture.

The team is being built. (We) will have to be all the block and tackling that you’re used to. Have you got a portal? Have you got a world class program? Do you have tiers?

Do partners have somewhere to go so that they can have the collateral and the ability to have those co-sell and go-to-market resources that they require? That is the standard platform piece, which is being built. And we’re actually (launching) it this week. We’re calling it a Claude Partner Network.

This is the glue that holds it all together. We talk about the big investments, the big spends. But having that partner experience layer is going to be absolutely critical. (And) then if we move on to things like certification–there’s just an insatiable desire right now for training.

We’re going to launch our very first certification on Claude. That GAs (becomes generally available) on Thursday (today). There’s going to be a rich set of certifications that we have.

We need to train a million people. And we know that from previous roles that that’s a real thing. And we need to do it fast. We need to do it with quality. (And) the challenge of that is obviously the products move (and advance fast). So we just have to stay ahead of that.

We’re going to be working with world-class third parties to make sure that we can drive this through the appropriate platform.

Is the opportunity with Anthropic available for smaller solution providers, or just the biggest GSIs?

(Our smaller partners) have the most unbelievable skills. They develop fiercely on the platform. So right now these digitally native partners are doing some of the best work. Our challenge there is that we just need to scale them hard.

That midmarket and the SMB (small and midsize business) and commercial space is just absolutely enormous. So that ability to move fast and do those things–we need hundreds of those partners. (The) door is just wide open to that.

We know we can get good enterprise (value) with the biggest partners. (But) how do we create a really frictionless entry point for all of these other partners so they can onboard, get going, and then join our partner success ecosystem. And then we can facilitate every part of the market.

(What some call) solution engineers, we call it applied AI. We will have an applied AI team sitting inside our partner org. That will only scale so far. So we have to make sure that we can get that (credentialed) population right the way down to those small RSIs (regional system integrators)

I can see us quickly scaling to a number of thousands of partners globally. Because obviously our international market is still growing. Chris Ciauri’s just joined (in September, as Anthropic’s managing director of international business).

I’ve got a leader in DACH (the central European countries of Germany (D), Austria (A), and Switzerland (CH)). I’ve got a leader in France. Just about to hire in India. We’ve got one in Japan.

So we’re starting to build out that international muscle as well. What we’ll also be looking at is which are the right markets to enter with partners and which are the right markets to enter with critical mass and have our own resources on the ground as well.

It strikes me that Anthropic might invest more in research than its sales arm–how should partners think about Anthropic’s distribution muscle, especially with you coming from Salesforce and its mighty GTM arm?

We don’t share the size of our go-to-market organization, but we’re hiring pretty fast. We are gearing ourselves to the Global 2000.

When we get opportunity, we almost need to be able to, from an SDR (sales development representative) perspective, give it straight to trusted partners, so there’s that low entry point for them to get going.

Second piece is–how do we sales-enable them well enough such that they can get an opportunity to maybe sell (certain offers) without us having to be involved.

When you think about organizationally and you think about how we market, certainly in North America, we now have industry leaders. We have industry verticals, as you would see as a standard play.

And then we’ve got this new group. It’s just called commercial, which is basically everything that sits in that big tail, that big addressable tail, where you’ve got thousands of customers. SMB and commercial. That will be 100 percent delivered by partners.

What should partners think about this conflict between Anthropic and the Pentagon?

We believe the SCR (supply chain risk designation by the Pentagon) is fairly narrow scope. We think the majority of customers around the world are unaffected.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon all reviewed and said Claude remains available for non-DoW (Department of War, the Trump administration’s preferred name for the Department of Defense) work, which is great for us.

We filed a lawsuit on Monday, So we do that active litigation. We can’t really comment (on that).

We are committed to national security–that is unchanged. (And) our partners are still showing up as they were before. For us, outside of the DoD stuff, it’s very much business as usual.

What else do you want solution providers to know about the new partner investment fund?

The ($)100 million–that was infrastructure. When we talk about 100 million, we’re talking about tens of millions of dollars of marketing development fund.

We’re talking about launch events and how we market and how we go with a partner into an industry with a use case, with a solution. Then we’re talking about tens of millions of dollars of sales development funding (to help take) a customer from zero to an MVP (minimum viable product) to a proof of concept and beyond.

And then we’re also putting tens of millions of dollars into what we’re calling our customer investment fund, (which is) how we are ensuring activation and adoption.

The biggest challenge has always been, how do we get people to adopt? How do we get from proof of concept to adoption? So we’re putting an awful lot of time, resource and money around that customer investment.

If they’re successful, they’ll drive lifetime value for that customer. They’ll drive lifetime value for us. And much more of that stickability and durability that all these companies like ourselves are looking for.

What’s your take on this ongoing conversation around whether new AI tools will destroy traditional enterprise software-as-a-service?

You think about things like the (Claude) Cowork plugins and integrations that we announced (recently)–Salesforce was up (about 5 percent in stock price after Anthropic revealed a partnership with the vendor for enterprise agents). DocuSign was up (by more than 2 percent off the same news).

We think AI can amplify great software if it’s integrated thoughtfully. This is where these great companies meet our great company and we do great things.

That’s the model we want to build. This is why we’re hiring some of the leaders that we have and have these relationships and that credibility that can deliver through the channel and bring these organizations together rather than be it like we’re at loggerheads with each other. That’s not what we want to do.

I think everybody’s surprised (by the market’s reaction to Claude innovations and plugins). Hopefully over this year we’ll see these things solidified more. You’ll hopefully see us much more embedded with a lot of these companies who have been challenged over the last few weeks with share prices.

The power of us together will hopefully steady it down a little bit.

What will help Anthropic continue its growth in the enterprise space?

This is where the partners play a massive role. (And) when you think about the depth of relationships (built) over the years, I don’t think there’s anybody better than GSIs to help shape that future.

From a product perspective, Claude Code has been a fantastic wedge for us in all enterprises and all organizations. It’s been an easier thing to adopt from how businesses use it.

Where we need partners is as we move up the stack into the agentic enterprise, we think about–how do we really do that process re-engineering? And how do we really redefine how businesses are run?

Imagine you’re a customer (and) you’ve got your business as usual. You’ve got a standard rate of business change. And you’ve got this rocket ship coming up the side saying, ‘transform service, governance and the things that need to happen around that.’ It is just crying out for partners who really understand how to manage that change environment.

We have a super high dependency on that. And we will continue to create these great models, these great technologies and (get that to) our partners such that they can go and drive that rate of business change.

Does Anthropic offer a nice value add for solution providers with deep partnerships with other vendors?

Our startup business is huge. People using the API (application programming interface) to use Claude as the model to power those solutions–that will continue.

We launched Marketplace (this month). Really good opportunity for some of these partners.

Customers with multiple transactional volumes (are) able to burn down in a single marketplace where we offer incentives and things like that.

For some of these ISVs, that’s a great opportunity as well for us to accelerate their brand. And some of these smaller companies, how do they get velocity by being part of our partner network?

Any other members of the Anthropic partner team you want partners to know about?

We have got just the biggest focus that you could ever imagine on making sure that every partner is credible and (credentialed) as they go into their customers.

We hired Michelle Tan (in November as head of partner success) from Asana. (She has) deep partner experience. She’s actually owning the program.

(Paul Smith is) a fantastic commercial officer. Had a great run at Salesforce. An unbelievable run at ServiceNow. And he’s anchoring our commercial strategy. We’re in lockstep with him and that go-to-market organization.

Phil (Samenuk, hired in February as Anthropic head of partnerships, has more than) 14 years at Salesforce. (And) the great thing about Phil is he was in sell, too. He wasn’t just partners.

That’s the other piece about this team. We’re not just looking at straight, partner account management types–we’re going to bring people with very diverse muscle.

What we want to build here isn’t the same–nothing we do is the same. Everything we are building now is the blueprint for the future. So we need a different set of muscles and a much more multifaceted set of personnel to deliver that.

How has Claude transformed your work, personally?

Cowork and vibe coding is unbelievable. (And) the everyday use of this–the fact that it sits on your desktop. The fact that I can drag in a document (and) it can review, it can summarize. Just the productivity game at a personal level.

When you’re a small company and you’re growing as fast as we are, you need the tools and resources. And I think Claude is just the best tool ever to drive that productivity and efficiency.