AWS is leaning further into managed services, partner enablement, and business value tracking as enterprises move from AI experimentation toward more complex agentic AI deployments.
Julia Chen, vice president of Partner Core at AWS, said the AI market is advancing at a pace unlike anything she has seen, but enterprise maturity remains uneven as new models, tools, and use cases continue to shift expectations.
“I’ve never seen it grow so fast like this,” Chen said. “What is considered mature? That timeline also keeps changing.”
Data modernization remains a key AI blocker
Chen said many enterprises are still struggling to prepare their data and infrastructure for AI adoption, even as urgency around AI outcomes accelerates. AWS is positioning programs such as its Migration Acceleration Program and AWS Transform as ways for partners to help customers modernize faster.
“You can’t actually harness the full benefit of them if your data is in terrible shape,” Chen said. “There’s this urgency to get to the AI outcomes, right? But you can’t get to the AI outcomes unless your data and your infrastructure are in order.”
Chen said AWS Transform is designed to help partners move modernization projects forward more automatically and at scale, including mainframe modernization and migrations of complex infrastructure workloads.
Managed services take on new importance
As AI environments become more complicated, Chen said customers increasingly want partners to implement AI and continue running it.
“Customers are actually asking for partners to not only help them set up the AI but to actually run it for them,” Chen said.
To address this demand, AWS is expanding support for managed service partners, including a three-month extended trial for Amazon Q, a six-month trial for AWS Transform’s custom agent, security agent, and DevOps agent, and preview access to the FinOps agent for partners.
Chen told Channel Insider she sees enablement as a top priority for the giant’s massive ecosystem of partners.
“My role supporting partners is about helping them get enabled and also that they have the right investments to be able to learn and pick them up and integrate them into their practices and really be able to help customers with the latest of the latest launches,” said Chen.
AWS wants partners focused on outcomes
Chen also said AWS is pushing partners beyond sales motions and toward customer success-focused metrics, including adoption, usage, renewal, and measurable business impact.
“I’m not measuring you on Amazon revenue,” Chen said. “I’m actually measuring you on the customer’s achievement of the thing that they were trying to achieve.”
That shift, she said, requires partners to think about workflow transformation, not just technology deployment.
“You actually have to completely rethink the way you were doing it yesterday,” Chen said. “A fuller service partner needs to think end to end about not just the tech, but the workflow around the tech.”
Chen told Channel Insider she views the shift towards managed services as one all partner types now need to consider to stay relevant in an AI-driven environment.
To her, and therefore to AWS, partners will need to wrap services around infrastructure, data, and AI technology in order to see lasting adoption at the enterprise level.
Partner opportunity moves toward recurring value
For partners, Chen said the managed services model offers deeper customer relationships, recurring revenue, and stronger margins.
“Partners prefer not to do one SOW and then hope they get the next SOW,” Chen said.
The long-term opportunity, she added, is for partners to become proactive advisors that continually monitor, improve, and secure customer environments as AI capabilities evolve.
In moving its ecosystem towards managed services, AWS is joining the ranks of vendors rethinking how their partners can best bring technology to the market.