As enterprises accelerate AI adoption, fragmented tools, inconsistent governance, and disconnected workflows are creating new operational challenges—and expanding the role of channel partners.
Sandro Guedes, global director of partnerships at Pipefy, said partners are increasingly being called on not just to sell AI technologies, but to help customers integrate them, establish governance, and drive adoption across the business.
In an interview with Channel Insider, Guedes discussed the risks of disconnected AI deployments, the growing importance of orchestration and traceability, and why partners may be best positioned to help enterprises turn AI investments into broader business transformation.
AI adoption creates integration and governance challenges
Many organizations are accelerating their AI adoption. From your perspective, what operational challenges are becoming more apparent as businesses integrate AI into their workflows?
AI adoption right now looks a lot like the early cloud era: every business unit is building its own AI to solve its own piece of the process — and moving fast is the right instinct.
But each new tool creates its own island of context, and the operational challenge that’s becoming impossible to ignore is integration: to actually turn AI into ROI, you can’t have Marketing’s AI, Finance’s AI, and Support’s AI running on their own version of the truth.
That’s the problem we built Pipefy to solve — one place where all of that reconciles, one single source of truth that gives AI the full operational picture instead of a fragment of it. Without that, companies end up with a dozen fast processes and no coherent operation.
Organizations often deploy multiple automation and AI tools across different departments. What are some of the hidden costs or challenges that can emerge from disconnected workflows?
The disconnected-workflow problem isn’t just technical — a lot of it is human. Companies are moving fast to bring AI into every workflow, and that speed is the right instinct.
But speed without literacy is dangerous: professionals need to actually understand how to use these tools well, or you get shadow AI, inconsistent guardrails, and no real productivity gain — just new risk with better marketing.
Building that literacy — security, traceability, genuine productivity — is exactly where the partner earns their seat, and it’s exactly the gap Pipefy’s orchestration layer is built to close: giving every tool and every team shared context and shared rules instead of five islands that only talk to each other through spreadsheets and guesswork.
Building a secure and scalable foundation for AI automation
As enterprises automate more business processes, what governance practices should IT leaders prioritize to ensure those initiatives remain secure, compliant, and scalable?
Three things, in order. First, traceability — every AI-driven decision needs a visible trail: what triggered it, what data it used, who’s accountable.
Second, control by design, not by policy — governance embedded in the workflow itself, not a PDF nobody reads.
Third, a single source of process truth — this is the principle behind how Pipefy runs process orchestration, with every AI action logged and auditable by default.
I’d add one thing that’s changed in just the last year: security used to be a checkbox on this list. It isn’t anymore. As agentic AI starts taking real actions inside enterprise systems — not just suggesting, but executing — security stops being negotiable. It’s mandatory, full stop.
Looking ahead two to three years, what should IT leaders be prioritizing today to build a strong foundation for AI-driven automation?
Here’s the uncomfortable part: the window to build this foundation is now, not in two or three years.
Companies waiting for AI-driven infrastructure to feel ‘mature enough’ to invest in are making a bet they don’t realize they’re making — and it’s a bad one. The cost of building orchestration and governance is dropping every quarter; the cost of retrofitting it onto years of disconnected automation is climbing every quarter.
That’s the bet Pipefy is making with our own AI and MCP integrations — building this layer now, while it’s still cheap to build. Companies that wait to build that foundation aren’t just going to fall behind. Some of them won’t exist in a few years. That’s not hyperbole — it’s math, and the gap compounds fast.
Channel partners move from resale to implementation and adoption
You’ve held leadership roles across Microsoft, Google, and now Pipefy. How has the role of channel partners evolved as AI becomes a core part of enterprise IT strategies?
I’ve watched this evolution from both sides. At Microsoft, I saw a company built entirely on traditional licensing transform in real time once cloud arrived — the lesson was blunt: value-added selling and driving real adoption stopped being a nice-to-have and became mandatory to compete.
Google Cloud was born the opposite way — adoption was baked into the philosophy from day one. Different starting points, same conclusion: the way you sell has changed, and the partner sits in the critical seat — either architecting the value-added sale or driving correct implementation and adoption.
Those are the two things that actually earn a customer’s loyalty to one technology over another. That’s exactly the shift we’re driving with Pipefy’s partner ecosystem, and AI is forcing every other vendor to relearn the same lesson, faster than cloud ever did.
Where do you see the biggest opportunities for partners to help customers move beyond AI adoption and toward meaningful business transformation?
This is where I think the industry conversation gets it wrong — it frames ‘adoption’ and ‘transformation’ as sequential steps. They’re not. For partners, this is a service and loyalty story: building an ongoing relationship, a journey, not a one-time deployment.
The Forward Deployed Engineer model — putting real engineers embedded with the client, co-building inside the customer’s actual operation instead of handing over a tool and walking away — is instructive here, even outside the category it came from.
That’s the shape partners need to take, and it’s exactly what we see inside the Pipefy ecosystem: our strongest partners aren’t reselling licenses, they’re using our orchestration infrastructure to redesign entire operating models for their clients, becoming the real trusted advisor for that next journey. The partners who build that kind of trust are the ones still standing — and growing — in three years.
Pax8 is backing GTIA’s new Managed Intelligence Alliance to establish shared standards, accreditation programs, and responsible AI guidance for MSPs. Read more about the initiative and how it could shape the delivery of AI services across the channel.