Top 10 AI Predictions For The Channel In 2026
Rising investments in AI channel programs and initiatives, edge AI and physical AI momentum and “born in the AI era” cyberattacks are among the possibilities.
Rising investments in AI channel programs and initiatives. Physical AI and AI at the edge growth. And the industry getting tested by “born in the AI era” cyberattacks and lawsuits.
These are just some of what CRN has predicted for how AI and the channel will evolve to meet the demands of this new era in computing and business.
To compile this list, CRN has scoured a variety of 2026 AI prediction reports from the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Snowflake, Morgan Stanley and KeyBanc to predict how AI will impact the channel in 2026. CRN has also ranked these predictions from least important to the channel to most.
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AI In The Channel In 2026
Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, new concerns over technology component supply shortages are emerging that could affect a variety of prices in the IT world.
About 20 percent of IT budgets are now influenced by and focused on AI, Wedbush said in a report in December. The investment firm said that it does not see companies splitting IT budgets for AI and cybersecurity spending, with many proof-of-concept calls discussing a separate budget for AI spend going into 2026.
Organizations’ desire to consolidate IT vendor spend, AI projects getting budget from the likes of hardware and communications budget, AI projects receiving funding from outside the IT department are resulting in expected 2026 IT budgets to moderate in growth to 3.4 percent year on year from the 3.5 percent growth of 2025, Morgan Stanley said in a recent report. Solution providers in AI and software look best positioned to benefit from 2026 IT budget increases.
Read on for more of what CRN has forecasted for what the channel will experience from AI in 2026.
Channel Investment From AI Giants, Neoclouds
The past three years of this GenAI era have shown self-service of AI adoption is a quick path to AI failure, and signs are already emerging of AI vendors and upstarts interested in growing a channel presence in the name of expanding sales motions, customer support and growing success rates.
For example, Anthropic has a job opening for a head of North America partnerships who “will lead a multi-functional team working across Global Systems Integrators (GSIs), Management Consulting firms, Regional Systems Integrators, and Agencies,” according to the listing on the Claude AI bot maker’s website.
In December, OpenAI and Accenture announced a partnership to equip tens of thousands of the solution provider’s professionals with ChatGPT Enterprise and launch a flagship AI client program to help organizations bring AI into every part of their business.
With the high need for compute not only by AI vendors but anyone far along their AI journey, a new batch of cloud and graphics processing unit as-a-service vendors dubbed “neoclouds” have emerged.
Neoclouds such as Vultr, Armada, Fireworks AI and Lambda have partner programs for resellers, service providers and other solution provider business models.
Neoclouds could nab $20 billion in revenue and erode hyperscaler dominance in GenAI as they prioritize GPU workloads over x86 and Arm ones to better suit AI needs, Forrester predicted in a recent report on 2026 expectations. Neoclouds in 2026 will likely invest more in orchestration, open-source model support and sovereign AI to further create commercial viability. Enterprise neocloud deployments should triple in growth.
Deeper, Next Level Industry Use Cases
With generative AI entering year four since ChatGPT dazzled technical and non-technical users alike in November 2022, AI vendors and their solution providers will need to arm themselves with more cutting-edge customer stories that illustrate AI as a revenue driver and an operating costs reducer.
A common mantra already in 2026 by AI vendors and solution providers is less experimenting, more returns on AI investments. Solution providers will be uniquely positioned to showcase where AI has worked and where it hasn’t, with AI vendors wise to pick up on stories of repeatable AI success alongside the most mind-blowing of AI use cases.
In 2026, organizations have a better idea of what good agentic AI looks like and know the financial, operational and workforce benchmarks those systems need to hit to show value, according to a PwC report from December. To impress a more AI-sophisticated crowd, expect vendors and the channel to take an industry-specific and persona-specific lens to what AI can do.
Leveraging natural language to diagnose manufacturing equipment issues, speeding up the discovery of new drugs and materials and engaging patients in symptom triaging and treatment planning, and applying multi-document reasoning to synthesizing facts and mapping arguments for lawyers are some of standout use cases vendors hope to disseminate stories for in 2026, as predicted in recent reports by IBM, Snowflake and Stanford University.
Physical AI Makes Gains
Physical AI, edge AI and advancements in computer vision, internet of things (IoT) and connected devices will push AI adoption further not only with developers and keyboard jockeys but also people working with physical objects, opening up new and more opportunities for solution providers working with clients handling goods.
More stories of humanoid robots handling item picking and movement will emerge this year, culminating in a $38 billion market by 2035, according to a Wedbush report.
This year could see autonomous trucks and robots emerge as a new value creation frontier, according to a Morgan Stanley report. Although driverless vehicles have been a vision for about a decade, the investment firm sees 2026 as the year for their commercial viability, with 2025 showing leaps in proving technology viability by the likes of Kodiak, Aurora, Waymo and Tesla.
Computer vision in manufacturing should improve to the point where it predicts maintenance needs and product defects with increased precision, growth in use in retail should prevent theft and automate customer checkout, Snowflake and Morgan Stanley point out in recent reports.
Edge AI And AI PC Growth
Demand for AI at the edge of a network shouldn’t only come from IoT devices and industrial spaces in 2026, with the year offering a possible inflection point for the AI PC market.
Last year, PC makers and the channel received a push toward AI PC adoption thanks to end of support for Microsoft’s Windows 10 in October and the age-out of PCs purchased during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and rush to remote work.
The higher average selling price (ASP) could be a boon for solution providers–or it could keep some customers away. Some factors in favor of solution providers in 2026 include enrollment in Microsoft’s extended security updates (ESU) program that allows continued Win10 usage with some malware and cybersecurity protection ending on Oct. 13, 2026, which could mean another wave of Windows 11 upgrades is on the horizon for device solution providers.
ESUs resulted in an immaterial refresh cycle in 2025, according to a Morgan Stanley report from earlier this month. X-ray machines using Windows and other applications also didn’t get upgrades to avoid a software redesign.
PC makers are also starting to “de-spec” entry-level devices to maintain profits amid rising memory storage costs and lowered memory storage supply, according to the firm. Many 512-gigabyte storage options are being replaced by 256-GB ones, for example. This could potentially push users to higher-end models for the specifications they are used to.
And as multiple solution providers told CRN in 2025, the Win11 upgrade conversation with customers could include opting for AI PCs and Copilot+ Windows PCs better made for AI use cases.
The enterprise buying cycle focus on future-proofing could push companies to buy AI-capable PCs now, plus AI PCs have proven better than traditional PCs for avoiding cloud reliance for common AI workloads, improving latency, privacy, security, personalization and cost, according to a Bank of America report earlier this month. Copilot+ PCs could win over users with the promise of better efficiency per watt with their neural processing units (NPUs) compared to central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs), resulting in potentially better battery life.
Storage, Networking Needs Grow
The growth in the edge and agentic AI markets should prove a boon to storage-focused partners and partners selling networking and data center equipment. Sandisk, as an example, has industrial memory storage products for high bit-rate video streams in surveillance, with vision workloads next year set to drive removable media and embedded flash, Bank of America said in a 2026 predictions report. Edge AI growth should mean more video, more sensor logs, more on-device datasets and other opportunities for storage partners.
Large enterprises opting for on-premises data center investments to assist with AI inferencing’s data gravity–the idea that bringing compute to the data rather than moving massive datasets to the cloud is cheaper and more secure–spells good news for the likes of Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM. The growth in data center interconnect (DCI) and scale-across networks with data moving between various data centers bodes well for HPE’s Juniper division and Cisco.
The amount of data leaving a data center is growing from around 5 percent to around 20 percent, aiding the scale-across opportunity, Morgan Stanley said in a report. But the firm put the scale-up networking opportunity in data centers at $17 billion in size, almost half the entire data center market and setting up Cisco and its partners for a wild 2026.
Agentic and physical AI will also increase networking content and change traffic patterns to create demand for speed and spending increases in application delivery controllers (ADCs). This activity shows promise in 2026 for Cisco, F5 and other competing vendors.
Component Shortages Wreck Supply Chains, Increase Prices
Although many vendors and solution providers navigated the supply chain hurdles in 2025 caused by tariff negotiations, shortages of hard disk drives (HDDs) and other components could prove an interference in product procurement and pricing.
The HDD supply shortage is getting more severe, with Morgan Stanley increasing its shortage estimate to 200 exabytes (EB) in the next 12 months compared to its 150 EB estimate three months ago. The investment firm also predicted Dell, HP and other original equipment manufacturers to cut headcounts to protect operating margins.
Morgan Stanley called the NAND and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) markets in the middle of a pricing supercycle thanks to heightened hyperscaler demand and shift to high bandwidth memory. Hyperscalers went from about 20 percent of DRAM demand in 2016 to 2018 to now upwards of 60 percent of DRAM demand.
Reported memory fulfillment rates could fall below 40 percent in the next two quarters. Every 10 percent increase in memory cost could eat about 30 basis points year on year in gross margin from equipment makers, according to the firm.
The firm expects product gross margins to start contracting year on year during the first quarter of 2026 for the likes of Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP, NetApp and Pure Storage. It expects the trend to go on until the second quarter of 2027. Gross margins could fall an average of 75 basis point year on year.
PC makers could raise prices by around 20 percent in 2026, per Morgan Stanley. PC vendors could also push back on batteries to try to share the cost burden.
AI Industry Tested By Cyberattacks, Lawsuits, High-Profile Vendor Failure
This year could see a lot of avenues to stress test the durability of the AI era, with potential headline-grabbing disasters around “born in the AI era” cyberattacks and lawsuits to determine liability levels for solution providers and vendors and end users plus a high-profile AI business failure.
Solution provider customers will not only want to talk about the good news surrounding AI and its achievements in bringing in new revenue and operating costs–they’ll turn to their trusted IT advisers to be on top of negative headlines and factoring in the new risks from the AI era.
AI era cyberattacks will be a major proving point of the AI-powered reaction time of new security tools and the AI-powered preventative measures these new tools can take for the customers who avoid a costly “born in the AI era” breach. Just as the 2024 CrowdStrike-Windows outage served as a reminder of the importance of backup tools, any major AI cyberattack reduced to a nothing burger by adept solution providers will create a winning customer story.
While the threats of leaking proprietary information to the internet and other such GenAI years one to three risks are still there, in year four, organizations may contend with a rogue AI agent that escalates privileges and executes unwanted trades or deletes backups, for example, as Palo Alto Networks laid out in a report on 2026 AI cyberattack scenarios.
A threat actor might craft the perfect AI-generated replica of a C-level leader to receive passwords and access to sensitive information, successfully exploit a back door added to an AI program’s training data or breach a support bot and find customer data. Terms like “prompt injection” and “data poisoning” will go mainstream.
But of course, the ability for AI and AI agents to take triaging alerts, preventative measures and remediation to another level poses an incredible opportunity for managed security service providers (MSSPs) to continue their journey as essential parts of doing business in 2026.
Amid a hodgepodge of contradictory AI regulations from U.S. states and the federal government and even overseas, the early decision-making around who carries liability around AI projects among solution providers, vendors and end users might be settled first in the courts after a cyberattack or based on bad customer experiences with AI.
Expect lawsuits in 2026 reaching the level of 2024’s court decision for Air Canada to abide by a policy hallucinated by an AI chatbot. This year could see the first major lawsuits holding executives personally liable for rogue AI agent actions, as an example, according to Palo Alto Networks’ look-forward report.
Representing an extreme worst-case scenario of AI tools without sufficient guardrails, Gartner predicted that by the end of 2026, “death by AI” legal claims will exceed 2,000 due to failures in health care, public safety and other sectors, the firm said in a report in November. Explainability, ethical design and clean data will become non-negotiable.
More IT Work Cedes To AI
Solution providers will see more lower-level IT work automated away by AI and AI agents in 2026. Support chatbots will answer simple questions from clients, AI capabilities built within MSP tools will remedy issues automatically and AI-powered triaging will find the most important security alerts.
Solution providers will redefine the work expected out of junior-level employees and senior-level ones. As a result, solution provider employers might start to demand junior engineers come in with less coding skills and better higher-level understanding around design and architecture, Snowflake predicted in a recent 2026 predictions report. Senior engineers, in turn, will derive value from understanding the company’s specific architecture and codebase.
Solution providers, like their clients, will start to list more cross-functional roles. They can expect engineers to have product manager skills, product managers to code, marketers to do analytical work and analysts to conduct data science, according to Snowflake. Data engineers will no longer need to create pipelines, instead orchestrating them and thinking more about higher-level abstraction, talking to colleagues about the outcomes they want and how to achieve them through data, in another example.
Entry-level software engineer jobs for workers 22 to 25 years old have fallen 13 percent since 2022 even controlling for firm-level shocks while entry-level employment in other fields has stayed stable or continued to grow, William Blair said in a January report. AI can increase senior engineer productivity from tenfold to even 100 times. AI is automating away basic coding and other tasks. Still, the investment firm believes that developer jobs will ultimately grow along with total software output. And some entry-level workers might come with AI skills.
Fluency in programming languages and the software building cycle from architecture to troubleshooting provides essential context for AI agents to do their jobs, according to the firm. To borrow some historical examples, calculators and spreadsheet software didn’t replace financial analysts. They made financial analysis more accessible to a wider pool of workers.
More Consolidation Among Vendors, Solution Providers
Like the big-money deals seen in 2025, 2026 should see vendors and solution providers alike make purchases to quickly expand capabilities into certain technology practices suited to unlock AI or to even get access to a platform or product in an area outside their traditional expertise.
The AI era promises to speed up innovation through turbocharged automation and scaling performed by AI chatbots and agents, but not every vendor and solution provider has the time needed to reach that innovation organically.
The channel has seen business models consolidating over the years, with partners not only growing beyond Microsoft practices, for example, and adding an Amazon Web Services practice through M&A. Solution providers have even built their own intellectual property (IP) and developed software, whether they are bespoke, white-label products for customers or a repeatable framework applied to a variety of clients.
Either way, a consulting-focused solution provider buying a software development shop, a PC fleet manager expanding cybersecurity capabilities through a manager security services provider (MSSP) purchase, a Microsoft partner buying an Amazon partner and the reverse of all of those scenarios should play out in 2026 as the need to grow fast and the demand by customers for one-stop shopping and vendor consolidation forces an M&A spree in the channel.
The same principle goes for vendors. Customers want to consolidate the number of vendors they work with and spend budget on. They will seek a networking provider to meet their cybersecurity needs, cloud providers to come with advanced financial operations (FinOps) and cost calculator capabilities, AI vendors that already have robust orchestration and governance controls plus integration tools to allow AI insights from legacy IT assets, and so on.
And with data the new oil of the AI era, we could see solution providers and vendors alike become valuable acquisition targets based on the data they hold, the industry expertise they carry, the book of business won over the years and the trusted relationships developed over time. Salesforce buying Informatica and IBM buying Confluent are just the early examples of this.
The field of startups in AI and adjacent spaces will shrink, although enterprises may still invest in a series of hyperscaler-neutral “Switzerland” companies to prevent lock-in and overdependency on any one company to avoid future price increases and to even create redundancy should a tech giant stumble in 2026.
Evolving Solution Provider Business Models
Vendors and solution providers will continue to explore what business models make sense in an AI world where charging based on consumption of goods might make more sense than licensing and where pure reselling provides less value than setting strategy, monthly and quarterly check-ins and managed services.
Many software vendors have already included some consumption-based pricing through tokens, agents and application programming interface (API) calls for AI offers while many core products remain seat-based, William Blair said in a recent report. The investment firm expects revenue models to gradually shift over time as AI product growth outpaces core revenue.
In the AI era, software output will increase even if headcount doesn’t, calling seat-based pricing into question. Outcome-based pricing instead of just billing clients by hours worked and charging monthly or annual subscriptions could grow as a possible model for solution providers.
The growth in outcome-based pricing could come from a mixture of fewer humans needed to get the job done in the AI era, the way users consume AI products lending itself better to this kind of usage pricing model or demand by customers wanting to ensure value-add by their trusted IT partners, with AI tools making outcome measuring more possible.
Solution providers can use outcome-based pricing to get paid per support ticket resolved, per hour of equipment uptime delivered, with sensors and logs capturing the data needed to charge the client, as described by Stripe in a September article.
The payments platform recommends fees based on the dollar savings from an automated resolution, volume discounts, monthly maximums and minimum commitments to prevent invoice surprises and add some predictability. Outcome-based pricing also encourages over-performance for a larger share of upside and perhaps an easier path to a sale for clients who balk at large up-front dollar amounts for subscriptions. The approach, should it grow in importance for channel customers, will disrupt partners that rely on revenue from a lot of downtime and unused capacity.
IT services demand should stabilize in 2026 and maintain a steady trajectory after a couple of years of uncertainty, William Blair argued in a report looking at the year ahead. Cloud modernization efforts and AI advancements are supporting the field.
The investment firm expects resellers to evolve from traditional models into comprehensive technology integrators with attached services.
Systems integration and consulting poll as the top IT services spending category over the next 12 months, a sign of increasing interest in GenAI proof-of-concept engagements, according to a Morgan Stanley report Wednesday. Business process outsourcing (BPO) and hardware and software support saw the worst performance for spending over the next year.
AI, security and cloud computing are the top spending initiatives of 2026 by chief information officers. Almost 70 percent of CIOs surveyed by the investment firm said they expect to engage an IT services provider to help with AI and almost 60 percent said they plan to engage a service provider for cybersecurity. About half said they’d look to a service provider for cloud computing.