Olga Lykova, Head of Partnerships, North America at monday.com.
It seems that it was just yesterday when people opened ChatGPT to write content, ask for travel advice and find recipes. Now, McDonald’s is building AI solutions for customer care with IBM Watson AI; Apple is using AI in its products, including the iPhone, iPad and Mac, and FOX Sports is using Google’s Vertex AI Vision to quickly input live videos and images to analyze millions of hours of custom footage for broadcast, social media and marketing assets. The AI revolution is here.
The global AI infrastructure market is set to surpass $200 billion in spending by 2028, reflecting the growing commitment of businesses to AI technologies. McKinsey reports show that "generative AI’s impact on productivity could add trillions of dollars in value to the global economy." McKinsey explored four key areas where 75% of the value that generative AI could deliver is in: customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering and R&D.
The fastest way to scale, monetize and dominate AI is not by doing it alone but by building the right partnerships. Companies that are not leaning into AI will be left behind. Since the early 2000s, 52% of Fortune 500 companies have disappeared from the list, including Nokia, Blockbuster, Yahoo and Kodak, because they couldn't keep up with innovation and failed to adapt. We are in the middle of the next innovation. It's time to stop fearing it and lean into it.
Forward-thinking CEOs should be asking: What business problem am I trying to solve with AI? How can AI improve customer experience, revenue growth and efficiency? How can AI help me stay competitive in my industry? Which AI partners can help accelerate product or service development? How can AI partnerships drive faster go-to-market execution?
For years, partnerships have been the most underutilized growth lever in SaaS—not because they don’t work, but because many CEOs fundamentally misunderstand them. The biggest mistake? Thinking of partners as an afterthought rather than a core growth and a sufficient revenue engine. Too many CEOs view partnerships as a cost center rather than a growth engine. The best partnerships do not just support AI innovation—they accelerate it.
At Salesforce, Marc Benioff and his team didn’t just build a customer relationship manager (CRM), they built an ecosystem. In 2021, IDC predicted that Salesforce and its partner ecosystem would create 9.3 million new jobs and $1.6 trillion in revenue between 2020 and 2026. The Salesforce economy, powered by AI, will create up to 11.6 million jobs and $2.02 trillion in revenue between 2022 and 2028. Salesforce is not simply adding AI; it is making AI a partner-led strategy.
At Microsoft, partnerships are not just a channel; they are the backbone of growth. Microsoft’s success traces back to its partner ecosystem of over 450,000 resellers, integrators, ISVs, advisers and more. This channel powers over 90% of Microsoft’s revenue. Satya Nadella’s decision to partner with OpenAI rather than compete with it was a pivotal moment in AI strategy. Instead of spending years developing a ChatGPT competitor, Microsoft invested, integrated and co-sold, positioning Azure as the dominant cloud platform for AI workloads.
Accenture’s collaboration with NVIDIA underscores the critical role of AI partnerships in enterprise transformation. Accenture is currently training 30,000 employees on NVIDIA’s AI software platform and developing a new business division focused on custom AI solutions. This move positions Accenture at the forefront of AI adoption, demonstrating how partnerships can serve as a force multiplier in scaling AI capabilities. When AI knowledge and implementation become scalable through partnerships, growth accelerates exponentially.
At monday.com, we have leaned into AI through our customer lens by automating existing workflows and tasks they already perform. With 245,000 customers all over the world, AI has become key in processing unstructured information and making it actionable within minutes. Our AI capabilities include CV screening (with some of our customers processing 100,000 resumes monthly), analyzing invoices, RFPs and PDFs and more, transforming time-consuming processes into quicker automated workflows.
Your customers will likely be looking for guidance, thought leadership and best practices, which means more service opportunities for partners. Successful AI-driven SaaS companies will need to ask: Are we leveraging AI partners to build faster? Are we enabling our partner ecosystem to drive AI adoption? Are we co-selling AI solutions with partners who have already established customer relationships?
To build an AI-driven partnership strategy, companies must leverage AI partners to accelerate product development and innovation, build AI training and enablement programs for their partner ecosystem and invest in co-selling strategies to ensure partners can successfully take AI solutions to market.
Having built SaaS partnership programs that have generated millions in revenue, I can confidently say that the AI revolution will be won through partnerships. Companies that treat AI partnerships as a core business strategy will outpace those attempting to navigate AI alone or ignoring AI altogether. It's time to lean in.
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