At the Ecosystem Business Summit, Matt Yanchyshyn, VP - AWS Marketplace & Partner Services, AWS, shared valuable insights into the evolving cloud services landscape. He spoke about the growing role of AI in driving personalized recommendations, product-led growth combined with channel strategies, and scaling global sales through expert channel motions. He also spoke about how AI enhances customer trust, optimizes lead management, and consolidates software and consulting services within the marketplace. Following are the key insights from his address.

The rise of Gen AI and Artificial Intelligence in general has led to rapid iterations, with vendors emerging and disappearing, along with the ancillary and adjacent technologies. It’s important for customers to be able to experiment rapidly with software providers such as vector databases, core AI models, data stores, and data warehouses. The challenge is identifying quickly and discovering options through the vast selection. This is where Gen AI can assist customers directly and make customer recommendations. The focus has been on assisting customers to find their needs while simultaneously expanding the available options. This ensures customers can move quickly and also have access to vast options in this rapidly evolving IT, especially in the field of AI.

Enhancing Sales with AI-Driven Partner Recommendations

On the partner side, partners desire to have better-qualified leads, while customers desire to get stronger and more accurate recommendations. And that's really coming together in a lot of the features, like the partner matching engine, which provides recommendation features through marketing. The focus is on enabling speed and discovery through an expanding selection. In this dynamic space, particularly in cloud and especially in cloud AI, relying on a familiar list of options may no longer be sufficient. There is often a high concentration of reliance on trusted individuals within sales teams. However, it has been observed that most salespeople and customers tend to stick with familiar relationships and solutions. While this approach does not always align with what is best for customers, it is still widely used. It’s important to push and challenge old habits and use systems and tools to make more informed recommendations.

The partner matching engine, despite its name suggesting a large-scale service, plays a vital role in addressing this dynamic landscape. It's a feature of field tooling that makes automated machine learning or AI-driven recommendations to sales teams. It’s the same backend that generates recommendations for customers. This engine analyzes over 100 dimensions to provide more recommendations to both sales teams and customers. As a result, customers reach value faster. Partners get better-qualified leads because they’re getting recommended to the customers who have a high tendency to buy.

The more effort invested into good customer leads and opportunities, such as ACE opportunities, as well as strengthening overall partnerships, such as companies and things that give data and signals, the more valuable the outcome. This process feeds into the algorithm, which then surfaces more relevant customer opportunities. The algorithms take various dimensions and make informed recommendations. The investments put into lead and opportunity management through ACE, along with investments in AWS partner network programs, become valuable inputs to these algorithms.

Combining Product-Led Growth and Self-Service Strategies

The goal has always been to maintain balance since product-led growth and self-service are powerful strategies. Combined with private offer motions and a channel-first strategy in regions like Europe and parts of Asia, that makes a more comprehensive strategy. In regions such as South Korea or Japan, it’s hard to sell without working through an established reseller who holds customer trust and has the necessary contracts. The same applies in government sectors, including the US, where contracts are generally pre-existing. Even though product-led growth (PLG) and self-service are great for enterprise sales, one needs custom terms and custom pricing.

Similarly, the same flexibility is required when engaging in channel resale or working with distribution partners. There is an adjacent purchase wherein customers buy consulting offers or professional services through the marketplace. Then, in the same sales motion, customers make a separate purchase or private offer for the software. Software purchases, referred to as organic bundles or organic purchases are occurring at a significant scale. There is a strong underlying demand from customers to consolidate their IT purchasing across both software and consulting services within the marketplace. When this kind of organic usage occurs despite the lack of a formal feature, it is a clear signal of an area worth continued investment.

Enhancing Customer Trust with Artificial Intelligence

One of the major efforts is to scan all product listings in the marketplace to check for wrong descriptions and to verify whether a product performs as it claims. Using AI, this can be done at an unprecedented scale, and this enhances customer trust. By leveraging AI for enhancing trust, customers are likely to rely on the marketplace knowing that most listings can be trusted. Reducing procurement friction remains the top priority. Also, international expansion is a major focus, introducing more non-US currencies, supporting global tax compliance regulations, and enabling both customers and partners to operate seamlessly on a global scale. Business growth and profitability are also required. A balanced approach will be necessary to achieve this. The most successful partners combine a product-led growth strategy, self-service strategy, and a private offer strategy with custom pricing, custom terms, and an enterprise sales motion.

AI-Driven Strategies for Expanding Market Reach

Expanding market reach is also critical. Scaling effectively requires new leads beyond the network, and the marketplace plays a significant role in this. Product-led growth features such as free trials help qualify leads and bring in potential opportunities, even if they do not convert immediately. Over time, these smaller opportunities can evolve into high-value deals. Sustainable growth and profitability are driven through a balanced investment in both self-service and private offer strategies. Additionally, modern customers who have transitioned from app store users to CIOs increasingly expect immediate self-service features. Meeting these expectations through a strategic mix of approaches creates a mutually beneficial relationship between both partners and customers.

People coming out of the startup or cloud world often lack experience in scaling software or services sales globally. This requires strong channel motions and a sophisticated understanding of international sales—an expertise that seasoned channel professionals already possess. By combining that knowledge with cloud skills, professionals can create a highly valuable skill set. While looking at partner matching and co-sell programs, it is important to be selective and intentional about where investments are made. ACE hygiene matters even more than before.

Opportunities submitted and the data provided will make a difference among partners. With the maintenance of good lead and opportunity management hygiene on AWS, higher rankings could easily translate into better results and ultimately much more qualified leads. They significantly impact outcomes, so more attention should be given to them. With AI no longer optional but rather already achieved from POC to full production, a central role from a feature perspective continues to develop.