As enterprises take a measured approach to AI adoption, channel partners are being pushed up the tech stack. Caylent CEO Lori Williams says that shift is redefining how services firms create long-term value.
In an interview with Channel Insider, Williams outlined how Caylent is evolving its managed services and advisory offerings as AI demand matures.
Rather than chasing hype cycles, she says partners that focus on expertise, change management, and outcomes-driven services will be best positioned to capture repeatable revenue as customers move AI projects into production.
AI demand is pushing channel partners further up the stack
It won’t surprise anyone in the channel to hear someone say AI is changing the industry. To Williams, though, the impacts aren’t just based on customer demand.
On the contrary, she still thinks the enterprise market has a long way to go before it embraces the AI solutions.
What she sees happening now is an evolution of the technical expertise needed to manage the tech stack at large organizations as the tooling itself changes over time.
That, she says, will require many providers to think further up the stack.
“If you started as an engineering-focused provider, what’s happening now is that that work is moving up the tech stack,” said Williams.
That work will also include advising clients on how they should adopt various AI tools with their entire environments in mind.
“As AI gets more sophisticated, it’s more important than ever, I think, to be able to guide businesses through it and how it all works.” she continued.
How Caylent turned cloud expertise into AI-driven services
Caylent has a long history of supporting customers with their cloud migration planning as well as related work across data, application development, and other services and one-time projects.
Williams said the team began to focus on AI in late 2024 and spent the early part of 2025 bringing AI-related ideas to customers.
While it didn’t always result in expanded deals immediately, Williams said she has seen many of those customers come around to the initial plans months or even a year after the first conversation.
“With that, we learned that there is a long tail with this work that pays off over time,” Williams said. “It took our customers a while to absorb the information we gave them and what the potential impacts would be. A lot of those early ideas are now, at this point, in production.”
To Williams, the journey to AI-related and AI-enabled services shows that channel partners can, and often do, evolve alongside end-user businesses in times of fast-paced innovation.
“We’ve grown with our clients in a lot of ways,” said Williams. “It has changed the nature of some of our work. We’ve added new change management offerings along with product management and engineering transformation because our clients need all of those things around their AI work.”
Why adaptability will define the next generation of services firms
Williams also feels strongly that while AI itself hasn’t lived up to its hype in every way, the promise of what AI could eventually do to the nature of work has fundamentally changed the conversations occurring across the industry.
As that trend continues, Williams says, providers are going to have determine the best course of action for evolving their offerings to match customer demand.
“We have an organization that likes to learn, and we’re very lucky to have that. And resulting from that, I think the people who join an organization like ours tend to see that and also be people who are willing to learn and experiment,” Williams said. “I do have a fair amount of empathy for leaders who maybe don’t have that built internally in the same way.”
The benefit to this, Williams says, is that the opportunity ahead for providers who can adapt is focused on building deeper relationships and repeatable revenue with customers.
“There will be an opportunity moving forward to offer much more strategic advising to customers than we maybe did before,” she added.
How Caylent’s approach has changed, and where it stays the same
Williams told Channel Insider that Caylent is constantly examining how it can get better. To do that, the teams are constantly thinking about the processes and workflows that can be automated, improved, or otherwise changed.
“We’re rethinking how we reinvent the how, especially within our delivery teams and with our migration offerings,” Williams said. “We’re also rethinking how we package our solutions. It’s more important now to be outcomes-driven for our customers and their needs.”
Even with all of the things that can change, Williams says the fundamental desire to work with people has not changed.
“The level of human expertise still required in these projects, even alongside AI agents, is still quite high, and I think it will be for some time,” she said.
Williams also says the general needs of a customer, from pre-sales support through implementation and then a pass-off to ongoing support, haven’t changed either. With AI and other automation capabilities, though, the gaps in between plan and execution are shrinking.
“The lifecycle of a customer isn’t going to change, but it used to feel like very discrete steps and phases. I think those are starting to blend together quite a bit,” Williams added.