Microsoft Partner Chief Nicole Dezen Details E7, Agent 365 Push

‘When I look at the channel, our channel partners are masterful at thinking end to end holistically about what customers need,’ says Nicole Dezen, Microsoft’s chief partner officer.

Microsoft’s platform approach giving solution providers the ability to deliver technology with their own intellectual property, services and products built on top continues to serve as “a very powerful formula” for customers as the marketplace for business-grade artificial intelligence gets noisier by the day, Nicole Dezen, Microsoft’s chief partner officer and corporate vice president of global channel partner sales, told CRN in an interview.

And not only does a comprehensive portfolio help Microsoft maintain its channel juggernaut reputation with around 500,000 partners in its ecosystem—but it also prepares solution providers for navigating difficult questions around improving customer security postures, moving customers concerned about growing prices to the cloud and readying their data for AI transformation, Dezen said.

“This is a partner superpower,” Dezen said. “When I look at the channel, our channel partners are masterful at thinking end to end holistically about what customers need. This is the promise of CSP,” which is Microsoft’s Cloud Solution Provider program.

[RELATED: Microsoft Unveils E7 Suite, Copilot Cowork In Enterprise AI Push]

Microsoft Rolls Out New AI Enablement, Discounts, E7 Incentives

As the calendar turns to May and the Redmond, Wash.-based technology giant enters the final weeks of its 2026 fiscal year, Microsoft is unveiling and rolling out changes to training and discounts designed to help solution providers with the AI opportunity ahead. Microsoft’s new 2027 fiscal year starts July 1. Microsoft discloses its next quarterly earnings report on Wednesday.

Dezen spoke with CRN ahead of Microsoft’s new E7 license plan becoming generally available Friday alongside the Agent 365 (A365) agent control plane. Promotions Microsoft has planned to help with E7 sales include:

All of those promotions have a license cap of 9,999, according to Microsoft. The vendor will make E7 CSP promotions available through Dec. 31.

For partners selling Microsoft’s Windows 365 Business cloud PC offer, the vendor plans to reduce list prices by 20 percent starting Friday to better appeal to small and midsize businesses. On Friday, Microsoft also plans to reduce Dragon Copilot per-user license pricing in the U.S. and other geographies, according to the vendor.

Microsoft’s top channel goals for this year include increasing the amount of net-new accounts coming through partners and encouraging partners to sell a broader part of its portfolio, according to CRN’s 2026 Channel Chiefs.

Corey Kirkendoll, CEO of Allen, Texas-based Microsoft solution provider 5K Technical Services—a member of CRN’s 2026 MSP 500—told CRN in an interview about Microsoft’s reworked deal with ChatGPT maker OpenAI that Microsoft offers a premier platform for accessing a variety of AI models, with the new OpenAI deal helping with user flexibility.

“The real value will not be in which model wins,” Kirkendoll said. “It will be in helping organizations choose the right tools, govern them properly [and] turn AI into actual business outcomes.”

On Friday, Microsoft plans to add Agent 365 trials to its envisioning and proof-of-concept engagement solution providers can leverage for selling AI to customers, according to Microsoft. At the start of April, Microsoft added partner performance measurements for the ”Copilot + Power Envisioning & POC and Deployment Accelerator.” The vendor also made M365 E7 and A365 eligible products that retire the Copilot Revenue requirement for performance measurement, according to Microsoft.

On Thursday, Microsoft will add targeting and usage insight to identify high‑propensity Microsoft 365 E7 and Agent 365 opportunities to its AI Business Solutions & Security Partner Experience (ASPX) in Partner Center, according to the vendor. ASPX aims to help marketing, sales and customer success teams identify growth opportunities, track Microsoft Commercial Incentives (MCI) performance, and manage FastTrack referrals.

Frontier Badge Becomes Frontier Partner Specialization

In the coming months, Microsoft plans to evolve its “frontier badge” into a “frontier partner specialization,” update its “frontier distributor designation” to better signify distributors that can help solution providers scale agentic AI and improve benefits in the App Accelerate program for software companies building AI applications and agents. Dezen revealed the updates in her annual “State of the Partner Ecosystem” blog post, published last week.

The frontier partner specialization should help differentiate services partners, channel partners and other partner business models that demonstrate they can build or deliver agents across the Microsoft product stack, according to the vendor. Customers and Microsoft field sales teams will use the specialization to identify solution providers validated for agentic AI scenarios.

A “frontier engineer badge” learning path through Microsoft’s Titan Academy is meant to prepare solution providers’ solution engineers and architects for designing, building and operating production-ready agentic AI products across Microsoft Copilot, Copilot Studio and other offerings, according to Microsoft.

The badge is for partners that earn the required certifications, demonstrate delivery capability through the project-ready materials and show the ability to operate at scale with governance and industry focus, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft Marketplace should reach $300 billion in partner services opportunity by 2030, Dezen revealed in her blog post. The marketplace now has more than 5,000 AI products and services available and allows for multi-party software and services. About 75 percent of partners report faster close rates selling through the marketplace, and 69 percent report larger deals through it.

Solution providers can leverage the Partner Marketing Center Pro AI-powered campaign creation tool, introduced in February, for accelerating demand generation, co-branding, intelligent localization, intelligent translation, automated publishing and built-in reporting, according to Microsoft. An AI assistant can coach users through the process.

Partner Marketing Center Pro is available to Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program members with at least one partner benefits package, members with a “solutions partner” designation or members enrolled in the ISV Success program, according to Microsoft.

Frontier Distributor Updates

Among the changes coming in the months ahead, Microsoft will update its “frontier distributor designation” so that solution providers can better identify distributors that can deliver repeatable training, enablement for building and managing agents, Microsoft Marketplace-backed motions for transacting and growing agent sales and other capabilities for scaling agentic AI in the channel.

Distribution giants including TD Synnex and Ingram Micro have the designation.

Microsoft is investing in more partner skill attainment that connects certifications with project-ready execution. Its project-ready workshops, delivered through Partner Skilling Hub, aim to give solution providers role-based training for repeatable delivery practices, according to the vendor.

Organizations successfully scaling AI put the tools where people already work, Dezen said in her annual “State of the Partner Ecosystem” blog post last week. They put innovation close to the business challenge with observability at every layer for measuring quality, governing risk and managing AI like a production system.

The world could see 1.3 billion agents in circulation by 2028, Dezen said in her post. More than 90 percent of the Fortune 500 use the Microsoft 365 Copilot AI assistant and 80 percent of those companies use Microsoft agents.

Partners can also leverage Microsoft’s Agent Factory Pre-Purchase Plan (P3) for more flexible licensing across Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, Fabric and GitHub, according to Microsoft. Customers can also receive tiered discounts to support broader adoption and avoid isolated pilots, according to the “State of the Partner Ecosystem.” The plan also has role-based training included at no additional cost.

The blog post also argued for solution providers to consider an outcome-first approach to customers instead of transaction-first, with licensing usually the entry point to broader, services-led engagements.

For solution providers looking to sell Copilot and Microsoft AI agents, they should focus on an outcome, layer in a security baseline and establish an optimization cadence with customers, according to Microsoft. The easiest time to introduce change for customers is when discussing renewals. Partners can look to pair change with business cases and time-bound offers, the company said.

Solution providers can leverage tooling like Microsoft CloudAscent and the AI Business Solutions & Security Insights dashboard to target high-propensity accounts, deepen adoption and standardize responsible prompting, according to the vendor.

Microsoft solution providers “add tremendous value in that they understand the customer's business goals, thinking about how they want to approach changing the way that they engage their own employees, the way that they engage customers, reimagining business processes,” Dezen told CRN in her interview.

“AI is an enhancement and capability accelerator for all of that,” she said.