Vendor CEOs On The Biggest AI, Agent Trends: CEO Outlook 2026

‘As customer environments become more complex and AI becomes more embedded in day-to-day operations, partners play an increasingly important role in how security is delivered, operated and scaled,’ says Darktrace’s Jill Popelka.

Evolving business models for solution providers in the artificial intelligence era. Booms in storage and networking thanks to AI workloads. And growth in physical AI and AI at the edge.

These are among the trends some of the biggest technology CEOs have said to expect from AI in 2026 and how they are enabling channel partners to meet the moment.

Leaders from Microsoft, Dell Technologies, Lumen Technologies and AMD are among the participants in this year’s CRN CEO Outlook.

Darktrace’s Jill Popelka said one of the security vendor’s most important areas of investment in 2026 is continuing to expand and strengthen its partner ecosystem.

“As customer environments become more complex and AI becomes more embedded in day-to-day operations, partners play an increasingly important role in how security is delivered, operated, and scaled,” she said.

[RELATED: CEO Outlook 2026]

CRN CEO Outlook 2026

For more on AI in 2026, check out CRN’s top 10 AI predictions for the channel in 2026, featuring more insight into the the companies investing in channel partner programs, outcome-based pricing and the mergers and acquisitions that await the channel and the IT industry.

Read on for 10 of the biggest insight around AI and AI agents by the vendor CEOs who participated in CRN’s 2026 CEO Outlook.

Industry-Focused AI

Multiple vendor CEOs pointed to a growing emphasis on industry-specific AI tools and use cases as a way to differentiate their companies in a crowded marketplace and more quickly communicate the benefits of this cutting-edge technology to customers.

Organizations across the retail, manufacturing, and transportation and logistics industries are seeing about a 20 percent increase in productivity by digitizing and automating their workflows, Zebra Technologies CEO Bill Burns said.

“AI and automation are critical for addressing workforce challenges across all major industries,” he said. “Together with our partners, we are augmenting frontline workers with technology to make their lives better every day.”

In health care, meanwhile, Acer uses AI-driven medical imaging analysis to enable early detection of macular degeneration, glaucoma and other conditions, CEO Jason Chen said.

“In response to an aging society, Acer also leverages AI image recognition to identify early signs of dementia, showcasing a meaningful real-world implementation of the technology,” Chen said. “In addition to AI Medical, Acer is expanding its application scope to include AI Agents, Cybersecurity, and various other products and services.”

Storage Bonanza

The adjoining infrastructure bonanza that goes with AI proliferation was a common topic among the vendor CEOs.

Dell Technologies founder, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell said the company is helping partners modernize customer infrastructure with the compute and storage capacity and performance reliability needed for the AI workloads of today and tomorrow.

“My top priority is enabling our partners and customers to win in the AI era,” he said. “My focus is on ensuring they have access to the world’s broadest AI portfolio, from client to cloud, so they can build their AI Factories and turn data into intelligence.”

Hitachi Vantara CEO Sheila Rohra called data center efficiency the biggest market opportunity the company will tackle with channel partners in 2026, with storage and data infrastructure efficiency becoming a business-critical requirement, not just an operational goal.

“Customers need infrastructure that can deliver performance, resilience and scale while operating within real-world constraints related to power availability, cost and sustainability,” she said. “This creates a significant opportunity for partners to help customers design and operate efficient, resilient data centers by optimizing storage and server utilization, improving power efficiency, strengthening cyber resilience and ensuring data quality and governance so AI and analytics initiatives can scale responsibly.”

Enterprises want storage that is fast, simple and predictable without surprise bills and massive egress fees, Backblaze co-founder and CEO Gleb Budman said.

“With our partners, we connect huge datasets to compute and AI in a way that dramatically lowers costs and delivers real business value,” he said.

His top priority for 2026 is “helping our customers overcome the trade-off between massive data growth and escalating cloud costs, enabling them to solve their toughest data storage challenges.”

Networking Modernization

The new demands of AI tools not only put a spotlight on storage needs but a greater emphasis on networking refresh and even the convergence of the industry with other parts of the technology stack.

Lumen Technologies President and CEO Kate Johnson positions the company’s digital network as a way to reduce complexity, accelerate time-to-value and deliver the performance and security AI demands with the simplicity of a service.

“In the AI economy, networking leaders will bundle connectivity into repeatable solutions—secure AI-ready architectures, validated designs and life-cycle management—so customers can deploy quickly, scale confidently and operate simply,” she said.

In 2026, AI workloads will drive demand for higher-performance, lower-latency networking while redefining how organizations build and operate teams, Cornelis Networks CEO Lisa Spelman said.

“We are already seeing AI act as a powerful equalizer, enabling smaller, highly focused companies to scale their impact in ways that were previously only possible for much larger organizations,” she said. “AI allows developers to work faster, iterate more effectively, and deliver more with fewer resources, creating a more level playing field across the industry. That same shift will apply to how partners deliver value, focusing more on integration, optimization, and outcomes rather than raw headcount.”

Fortinet founder, Chairman and CEO Ken Xie called momentum acceleration in the convergence of networking and security one of his top priorities for 2026, with a continued focus on secure networking, unified secure access service edge (SASE) and security operations.

“Innovation is foundational to Fortinet, and staying ahead of emerging threats and technology shifts requires sustained investment in R&D across AI, quantum-safe security, edge computing, and OT security,” he said. “These investments ensure we continue to deliver differentiated value and meet the evolving needs of both our partners and customers.”

AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su said she expects global compute demand to increase by roughly 100 times over the next five years. So although AMD is investing across its CPU, GPU and NPU road maps, its networking strategy is also key for higher performance and better efficiency, she said.

“We are expanding our capabilities with our first rack-scale solution powered by next-generation Instinct MI455X GPUs, EPYC ‘Venice’ CPUs and Pensando ‘Vulcano’ networking,” Su said. “With workloads growing more demanding and complex, we are also investing in packaging and interconnect technologies, including silicon photonics. Equally important is our continued investment in open software, platform capabilities and developer enablement to make AMD AI solutions easier to deploy and optimize at scale.”

The Evolution Of Distribution

The AI era is not only transforming solution providers and the creators of the technology they sell to customers, but also the distributors providing a connection point from the channel to the technology makers and better enabling a channel breadth motion so that the AI evolution hits Main Street and the midmarket as much as it does the Fortune 500.

Through its ArrowSphere platform, Arrow is serving up multi-vendor ecosystems, harmonizing cloud marketplaces with traditional routes and monetizing the full customer life cycle through quote, order and renewal, the distributor’s interim CEO Bill Austen said.

“By bundling infrastructure, AI platforms, security and life-cycle services, we and our channel partners can simplify complexity, accelerate adoption and drive recurring revenue growth while attaching high-value services like FinOps, SecOps and AIOps for long-term profitability,” he said.

Through its Destination AI and broader ecosystem of programs, TD Synnex wants to help partners move from experimentation to outcomes through use case prioritization, adoption acceleration, and delivery of specialized, AI-enabled solutions that differentiate them in a crowded market, CEO Patrick Zammit said.

“In a year where success will hinge on anticipating change and activating new capabilities at speed, we’re already equipping our partners to seize the opportunities ahead,” he said.

Ingram Micro CEO Paul Bay pledged a continued focus in technology investments on creating and capturing value through its Xvantage platform, making it easier for Ingram Micro’s team and customers to conduct business in real-time using real insight.

“We will use Xvantage intentionally as a way for our customers to get three things: 1) speed at a lower cost 2) scale to generate more demand and more services-led revenues and 3) service to improve margins and the ultimate experience provided to the end customers,” Bay said. “And we will lean into our AI Factory for continued innovations including what you've seen to date with IDA (Intelligent Digital Assistant), our integrations hub, and our Sales Briefing Agent.”

Pax8 CEO Scott Chasin said to look at the company’s marketplace as a full-stack platform for agentic workloads.

“That includes multi-tenant orchestration, life-cycle management for AI agents, embedded assessment and telemetry, and monetization models that support usage- and outcome-based services,” he said. “We’re also investing heavily in integration with hyperscaler ecosystems so partners can deploy, manage and govern intelligence across dozens or hundreds of customer environments with the same operational leverage they expect from cloud today.”

D&H Distributing Co-President Dan Schwab called on partners to take complete advantage of the extensive opportunities for training and knowledge-sharing that the distributor provides.

“They will be expected to meet increasing customer expectations and shift to services-led models,” Schwab said. “We anticipate that many of our partners will need our support moving from transactional sales to outcome-based solutions. Our proven resources, like our Go Big AI initiative, will support them through expert-led training, strategic guidance and curated resources.”

For Sherweb, equipping MSPs with the tools, training and personalized support that help them define their value is one of the ways the company continues to differentiate itself in 2026, Co-CEO Matthew Cassar said.

“Partners must remain agile, continuously evolving their offerings as customer expectations and technologies change,” he said. “At Sherweb, we believe success comes from collaboration.”

Navigating An AI Hardware Refresh Cycle

AI PCs pushing a major hardware refresh cycle opportunity for solution providers and their customers was a dominant theme in the CEO Outlook 2026 among some of the biggest hardware CEOs on the planet.

“With the global AI PC transition reshaping new demand, Acer is broadening our portfolio spanning AI PCs, thin-and-light laptops, gaming systems, stereoscopic 3-D solutions, and enterprise-grade AI platforms and solutions through our subsidiaries,” Acer’s Chen said.

Lenovo Chairman and Yuanqing Yang expects AI PCs to represent 80 percent of the market within the next three years, with the number of AI smartphones to reach nearly 1 billion units.

“Together, we will also explore new opportunities in AI-native wearables—an emerging category we believe holds massive potential, with the opportunity to scale to billions of units over time,” he said. “I expect our channel partners to add their expertise to our end-to-end products, solutions and services portfolio to deliver measurable business value for end customers.”

AI at the edge is no longer theoretical, HP Inc. President and CEO Enrique Lores said. Customers are seeing value created there, and HP has invested in a broad end-to-end portfolio to help customers improve productivity, manage costs, and create more secure, engaging work experiences.

“The biggest market opportunity for HP and our partners in 2026 is helping customers redesign work for an AI-driven world—moving beyond devices to deliver measurable business and workforce outcomes that advance the future of work,” Lores said. “Despite industry headwinds, this is a moment of optimism.”

Growth In Data Observability, Governance

AI tools might finally deliver on the massive amounts of data that solution providers’ customers have been amassing in the era of connected devices and the Internet of Things.

That means a greater opportunity for solution providers that supply the observability and governance tools to safeguard sensitive data and keep AI insight relevant and on track.

Gigamon President and CEO Shane Buckley sees AI-driven applications driving an exponential increase in network traffic volume, the majority of it encrypted and moving laterally across hybrid cloud infrastructure, increasing the importance of visibility.

“As traffic volumes grow, visibility into all data in motion, including encrypted and lateral traffic, becomes essential for security and IT teams to detect threats, validate compliance and manage performance,” he said. “Through the Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline, partners help customers establish the visibility foundation needed to operate AI responsibly by efficiently delivering network-derived telemetry into existing security and observability tools.”

Parallels CEO Christa Quarles said that organizations adopting more AI-powered applications and agents means IT teams need more cohesive ways to securely deliver, govern and control them across hybrid environments. Her company is embedding AI tooling across development, support and operational workflows to accelerate execution and enable faster innovation across the organization.

“This shift is accelerating demand for AI-aware delivery and secure workspaces that reduce operational complexity by applying intelligence across automation, management and analytics,” Quarles said. “Enterprises need clear visibility, consistent control and a secure environment where AI applications, autonomous agents and existing applications can operate side by side.”

True end-to-end visibility across cloud, on-premises, hybrid and the internet itself unlocks self-healing IT and real business impact, LogicMonitor CEO Christina Kosmowski said.

“Partners who lean in will lead this shift as trusted advisers,” she said. “They’ll help customers cut through tool sprawl, trust their data, and put AI to work preventing problems instead of babysitting dashboards. This is a transformation every customer knows they need but cannot do alone. That’s our opportunity to lead.”

Governance, discovery, intelligence and orchestration of unstructured data is key to avoiding AI initiative failure, Nasuni CEO Sam King said.

“By embedding these capabilities directly into the platform, we help customers transform unstructured data into clean, compliant, business-ready fuel for AI,” she said. “We’re also investing heavily in resiliency and security, which are foundational to AI readiness.”

Physical AI, Edge AI

In 2026, vendor CEOs expect AI to expand even further beyond software applications and create a new world of connected devices, physical AI and AI at the edge.

New use cases emerging with physical AI are already ramping in multiple industries, Versa CEO Kelly Ahuja said.

“The need for sovereign AI will emerge as business adoption ramps,” he said. “This cost-effective, secure deployment of AI will dramatically expand the demand for new architectures. Versa's ‘AI at the Edge’ strategy reflects this reality—providing a platform that can host AI workloads, small or large language models and inference deeper in the network cost-effectively will enable use cases that may not be otherwise possible.”

As enterprises push compute, data and AI workloads closer to the edge, Zenarmor is investing in architectures that securely connect and protect these distributed environments, CEO Murat Balaban said.

“Enabling low-latency, secure connectivity and inspection across on-prem, cloud and edge infrastructure will be critical as AI workloads become more decentralized,” he said.

The channel is the beneficiary of organizations training large models, running inference at the edge and supporting intelligent systems in the physical world, Alkira founder, president and CEO Amir Khan.

“These workloads place new demands on the network for performance, reliability and scale,” he said. “That creates strong demand for AI-ready networking delivered through the channel. At the same time, AI is changing how networks are operated. Using intelligence to automate tasks, improve visibility and resolve issues faster allows partners to deliver better outcomes with fewer manual steps. The opportunity is to make AI practical by turning it into faster deployments, smoother operations and more predictable results for customers.”

Greater Automation For Operational Efficiency

AI tools shouldn’t just drive greater revenue opportunities for solution providers. The proliferation of AI should lead to lower operating costs in running an efficient partner business.

“For MSPs and MSSPs, AI companions and agents reduce alert fatigue, speed investigations, surface the right context at the right time, and automate routine response through integrated workflows,” Sophos CEO Joe Levy said. “That allows human analysts to focus on judgment, customer context and outcomes.”

PagerDuty Chairman and CEO Jennifer Tejada pointed to her company’s AI agents as a way to autonomously resolve known issues and accelerate response during partially known incidents, saving time and improving focus.

“Our agents work in concert with other agents and third-party systems to generate insights, make decisions and drive actions,” she said. “We'’e extending value and use cases across our ecosystem through MCP [the Model Context Protocol standard to allow AI model connection to external applications and data]-driven integrations that enable AI-powered operations across developer and operational life cycles. This empowers partners to become solution accelerators across different industries and sectors.”

The biggest opportunity in 2026 for ControlUp is helping enterprises move from reactive endpoint management to truly autonomous operations, CEO Jed Ayres said.

“IT teams are drowning in tools, alerts and manual workflows at the same time endpoints are becoming more distributed, more diverse and more business-critical,” he said. “The traditional model simply does not scale anymore. ControlUp has the technology, accelerated by some of our latest innovations and acquisitions, to proactively identify and fix endpoint issues before users ever notice them and to do it with far less human intervention. The outcome is fewer tools, fewer tickets, and dramatically less time spent troubleshooting, allowing IT teams to focus on higher-value work.”

HaloPSA aims to ensure MSPs have the tools to automate the mundane, integrate with the software used to secure customer environments and ensure they can keep the focus on the customers and not the tooling, CEO Tim Bowers said.

“As SMBs increasingly shift to hybrid and cloud-native environments, MSPs are under pressure to do more with less,” he said. “Our partners will be tackling that head-on with our platform, eliminating repetitive workflows, reducing ticket resolution times, and proactively managing IT infrastructure through automation.”

Evolving Solution Provider Business Models

The possibility of AI automating many manual tasks and moving the payment model for some technology providers and solution providers to an outcome-based pricing approach is high on vendors’ minds in 2026.

Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said that AI fundamentally changes the value equation of partner services, automating large amounts of undifferentiated work and freeing partners to focus on higher-value problems.

“We already see customers replacing work equivalent to multiple full-time roles using agents built on Snowflake Cortex AI,” he said. “Those patterns are repeatable, and our technology partners are best positioned to package and scale them across industries.”

AI elevates partners into true strategic advisers, with AI literacy becoming table stakes, much like basic computing skills did years ago, Ramaswamy said.

“Partners who build practices around upskilling, adoption and AI-enabled workflow redesign will see enormous demand,” he said. “Customers need help with governance, evaluation, feedback loops and measuring outcomes—not just deploying tools. They’re looking for partners who can take them from experimentation to production with confidence.”

Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, describes the new “frontier firm” solution provider as one devoting 10 percent to 20 percent of their time to skilling, unlocking more incentives, co-selling benefits and higher revenue through the new designations and badging that verifies those attained skills.

“With 145 AI courses and millions of individuals at partner organizations trained, we are building capability and capacity to lead the AI era,” Althoff said.

Copilots and agents automate tasks that once took weeks and will free partners to focus on higher-value services for customers.

“AI-powered insights will accelerate co-sell motions, increase win rates and expand deal sizes,” he said. “Partners who adopt AI internally will gain credibility and speed, enabling them to deliver transformative outcomes for customers grounded in experience.”

Xerox CEO Steve Bandrowczak sees organizations seeking partners who can deliver measurable business outcomes through workflow automation, intelligent document processing, analytics and secure hybrid work support.

“For Xerox and our partners, this represents a major growth pathway: combining software, services and emerging technologies to help clients streamline operations, enhance compliance and improve productivity,” he said. “Partners who embrace these areas will transition from transactional print providers to trusted automation and digital-workflow advisers.”

Every business now demands outcome-based engagement from their partners and vendors, PagerDuty’s Tejada said. They want to see a measurable impact on revenue, uptime guarantees and operational cost savings.

“AI is enabling businesses to accelerate while simultaneously raising expectations for impact and measurability,” she said. “We anticipate customers will deploy agents this year for operational workflows at scale, driving new business models as usage and adoption increase.”

Among cybersecurity solution providers, greater AI automation unlocks the ability to deliver continuous threat exposure management to customers at enterprise scale in ways that weren't previously feasible, HackerOne CEO Kara Sprague said.

“By combining a coordinated set of AI agents with human researchers, all operating on an integrated platform, partners can expand their offensive security practices without having to scale teams linearly,” she said. “This creates new opportunities across AI red teaming, safety validation and continuous security testing. The partners who succeed will be those who can pair AI-driven scale with human accountability.”

The AI era means mere product reselling won’t be enough for solution providers, who will need to deliver ongoing security outcomes and long-term value, Trend Micro co-founder and CEO Eva Chen said.

“AI will enable faster decision-making, proactive protection and expansion-led growth,” Chen said. “This will strengthen subscription adoption and create more predictable, durable ARR [annual recurring revenue] for Trend and our partners.”

The Channel Is Essential To AI In 2026

For any technology executives hoping the AI era would be one of customer self-service, the complexity of enabling AI and customer desire to modernize existing investments for the new business computing era mean the channel is essential to unlocking AI power with their current customers and future ones.

Multiple CEOs participating in the CEO Outlook 2026 project voiced an understanding of the importance of the channel and vowed additional resources to help partners meet growing AI demand.

“Our partners are essential to our mission, and their success is the ultimate measure of our own,” Dell’s Michael Dell said.

Microsoft’s Althoff called partners “critical to delivering end-to-end outcomes.”

“Through the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, we are enabling partners to lead with AI— deploying Copilots, building autonomous agents, and integrating AI into every workflow,” he said. “Partners who embrace this market opportunity will capture new revenue streams in cloud, security and data while accelerating meaningful innovation for customers.”

And Vertiv CEO Giordano Albertazzi said channel partners will play a key role in helping customers deploy reliable, scalable and efficient digital infrastructure to support high-density compute environments as AI moves from pilot projects to full-scale production.

“Vertiv is uniquely well positioned to support this shift by leveraging its expertise in power and cooling to help customers operationalize AI at scale and drive sustained business growth,” he said. “Just as our customers are deploying AI to improve productivity, Vertiv and our channel partners are leveraging AI to drive greater efficiency across the business, from predictive service and equipment performance to inventory optimization and planning. We expect this adoption to create new opportunities for Vertiv and our partners to help customers scale accelerated computing and high-density infrastructure more effectively.”