Workspan AI Looks to Solve Channel Ecosystem Complexity

As companies increasingly look to the channel as an opportunity for long-term growth and scalability, they often require complex work processes to keep programmatic elements of their relationships running efficiently.

Workspan, with a new AI-enabled offering, is on a mission to help those organizations take their partnership approach to a new level. We spoke with SVP of Marketing, Sam Gong, to learn more.

New AI offering aims to bring new opportunity to partnership integrations and GTM

Workpan recently announced its latest offering, which it claims addresses the current market needs and is designed to bring new capabilities to often short-staffed partnership teams, providing more scale and support as they grow.

The company describes its new Partner Ops AI Teammate as a suite of intelligent tools trained on an organization’s specific partner ecosystem and embedded directly into its CRM. The goal is to enable sales and other client-facing teams to quickly access the relevant information they need to close deals and provide value faster than ever before.

“Where I think AI is so exciting for partnerships is in managing integrations and the ‘plumbing work,’ so to speak, that makes these programs run,” Gong said. “This isn’t about replacing humans at all, this is about augmenting those humans and offering small teams capabilities they couldn’t have hired enough people to solve.”

“Workspan has always helped companies with their programs, but AI really unlocked a new level of scale,” he continued.

The solutions Workspan offers address the needs of top-tier customers whose name channel partners would easily recognize, and likely work with today in some capacity. These customers are coming to Workspan, Gong says, because they need to further scale their business with channel partners more than ever.

“Partner tech is such an interesting market because partnerships have been really bespoke in the past,” Gong said. “Now, more and more companies are seeing the benefit of digitizing their partner programs as maturity in business operations has driven these programs to software as they scale.”

Workspan AI is a closed model trained on each individual customer’s channel GTM content. Webinars, training materials, and other branded content can be fed into the system and then used to build a knowledge base for the agentic model. Then, sales teams, for example, can utilize the agent as a tool to surface relevant resources as they close deals with partners more efficiently.

“Even if you have a large partner sales team, they could never cover and close every deal in every region on their own,” said Gong. “The agent helps worldwide field teams scale instantly, as they more quickly utilize existing resources to prove value in deals.”

“You don’t have to be a $10 billion company to think about your channel ecosystem, especially not now,” Gong added.

Ten years in, Workspan embraces a shifting market and new partner demands

Workspan is not a new player in the partner game, but Gong says AI is shifting the entire market and what it can provide to customers. He says Workspan is quickly becoming a key partner in the journey to strong, efficient partnerships.

“We have teams using our new offerings and already going, ‘okay this is great for now, but what else can we do now that we have this,’ and we know we’re going to see use cases and outcomes we didn’t initially plan for,” Gong said.

Gong anticipates a significant increase in market demand for partnership-related technologies over the next few years, as more companies adopt collaborative go-to-market (GTM) models through the channel. For Workspan, that represents a significant opportunity to lead innovation in the market.

“We’re here for organizations who already see the value in partnerships and have programs in place, but we’re also here to help all the companies just starting to see the value in channel and partner models, who can now scale their programs much sooner in their journeys,” said Gong.

Gong also notes that the industry, including partner tech, is still in the early stages of understanding what AI adoption will mean for how businesses operate. To him, Workspan’s focus on bringing the power of AI as an augmentation tool rather than a replacement for human talent is an exciting journey to join.

“I feel really good about being at a company that isn’t looking to replace people,” Gong said. “We’re really focused on helping organizations think about the net new things they can do with our offering as a bonus to their teams, and being at the forefront of a fresh way of looking at this work.”

Partner programs continue to be a crucial way for tech vendors to reach a broader customer base worldwide. Catch up on the latest news from Scale Computing’s channel chiefs in this interview with Katie Bavoso.