by Alex Zagury, CVP, Global Channel Sales
For many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the AI conversation has moved beyond whether the investment can deliver value. Customers are increasingly focused on what comes next: how to embed AI into everyday work, extend it across business processes, and manage it securely as adoption grows.
That shift creates an even bigger opportunity for partners. By building the services, managed offerings, and intellectual property (IP) that turn adoption into measurable outcomes and recurring revenue, partners can create a durable path for growth, particularly in the SMB segment, where customers often rely on them for both technology and ongoing expertise.
In a recent Morning Brew interview, Allison West Hughes, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Global Small Medium Business, noted that SMBs adopt AI tools about 10 percentage points faster than enterprises. She also highlighted the role partners play across geographies, industries, customer sizes, and service models as SMB customers build agents and secure their data.
Microsoft Ignite 2026, taking place November 17–20 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and online, is an opportunity to build on that momentum. For partners serving SMB customers, the focus is on turning growing AI demand into a repeatable growth motion that connects adoption, security, managed services, and ongoing customer value.
Registration for the in-person and online experiences is open. Secure your spot, then use the Partner Business view of the schedule builder to create an agenda around the capabilities and offers you want to build next.
Turn AI adoption into a repeatable SMB growth motion
Frontier Transformation describes the shift toward AI and agents becoming repeatable, governed capabilities embedded in how organizations work, serve customers, and run business processes.
For SMB customers, making that shift practical matters. They need a path that brings intelligence and trust together without adding unnecessary complexity. That creates a natural role for partners to connect licensing, deployment, security, adoption, agents, measurement, and ongoing management across the customer journey.
It also changes the economics of an AI practice. Instead of treating deployment as the end of an engagement, partners can use it as the beginning of a longer-term services relationship: identify high-value scenarios, establish the security and governance foundation, drive adoption, extend into agents and business processes, measure value, and continue optimizing over time.
That is the opportunity we will explore at Microsoft Ignite in Frontier Transformation: The Next Trillion-Dollar Partner Opportunity, where I am joining David Lochridge, General Manager, Commercial Partner. The session is designed for channel leaders, AI-native partners evaluating platforms, and partners serving SMB and corporate customers.
We will focus on four practical questions:
- Where are the strongest AI growth opportunities emerging for partners?
- How can industry solutions, AI-powered services, managed offerings, and IP create more repeatable revenue?
- What capabilities are needed to operationalize AI securely, including governance, adoption, change management, and Frontier Transformation engineering?
- How can an initial customer engagement develop into a longer-term services relationship?
The goal is to leave with a clearer view of the business model behind Frontier Transformation and the capabilities required to turn customer AI adoption into recurring services revenue.
Go deeper on monetization
For partners ready to get specific about packaging, pricing, and scaling offers, the partner theater session From Experimentation to Monetizing AI goes deeper into the operating model behind an AI practice. Explore the Partner Business theater sessions in the Microsoft Ignite catalog.
The session focuses on moving from customer curiosity to measurable outcomes through repeatable offerings, AI-powered IP, and agentic solutions. The important question is not simply what you can build. It is how you package that capability so your sales and delivery teams can take it to market consistently, and customers can understand the value they are buying.
Partners serving SMB customers should also add two sessions to their agenda.
The Frontier Transformation Partner keynote on Wednesday, November 18, from 9:00 to 10:00 AM Pacific Time will explore how organizations are redesigning work and scaling AI adoption, along with what those shifts mean for partner capability and customer opportunity.
The SMB Partner Path: Turning AI Ambition into Customer Growth will focus more directly on making AI practical for SMB customers through a unified conversation and repeatable path from ambition to business value.
Together, these sessions can inform a simple question to bring back to your business: What is the next AI offer we can package, sell, deliver, and manage repeatedly for our SMB customers?
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