IT intellects share their AI predictions for 2025

Experts from Netcall, Datadobi, Lenovo, Distology, and Claroty discuss the growing impact of AI on the channel

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From left to right and top to bottom: Clare Rafferty, Ralf Jordan, Tim Mackie, Lance Williams, and Steve Leeper

In 2024, artificial intelligence has been gathering more attention than ever, impacting every level of the channel.

But the ever-evolving technology is just getting started, as AI is projected to bring $17tn (£13.4tn) to the global economy by 2030, according to Pax8’s president and CCO Nick Heddy.

As 2025 rears its head with its share of challenges and uncertainties, five vendor and distribution leaders share their AI predictions for the coming year.

Clare Rafferty, head of channel partnerships, Netcall

“Across all industries and businesses, AI is an unavoidable topic that is having a profound impact.

“Focusing on customer experience though, especially within the contact centre space, it has been traditionally quite hard for new companies to break into the market with the barriers of entry high in gaining ground on the traditional big players.

“However, with the advent of AI putting a focus on the front end of businesses as well as being accessible to all, it has opened up the market substantially which is great for the channel.

“The adoption of AI isn’t without its challenges, though. Channel partners are regularly asked by their end customers what impacts AI can have, and this is causing confusion, which has caused a scramble for channel partners to formulate strategies and fully understand how they will incorporate AI.

“So for vendors, it is vital that they stay ahead of the curve when it comes to AI capabilities and the functionalities they are adopting, so that partners are kept abreast of the latest innovations and how the innovations they are seeking to implement through adoption of AI.

“2025 is sure to the tides changing again for the channel, with customer expectations increasing and AI adoption showing no signs of slowing down, but also many channel partners and vendors will turn to consolidation where one platform can provide a multitude of solutions, rather than several vendors providing different solutions.”

Read on for the predictions of experts from Lenovo, Distology, Claroty and more...

Steve Leeper, VP of product marketing, Datadobi

“With the acceleration in the growth of unstructured data, the need for insights is greater than ever. Insights are key for managing the lifecycle of data from creation to archiving. Insights are also key for ensuring the most appropriate data is included in data lakes and data lakehouses that support new workloads in the AI/ML space.

“It’s not good enough to blindly copy data into a repository that will be used to train or augment a model. Only businesses that can confidently say their data is GENAI-ready will succeed.

“The amount of unstructured data stored in both public cloud and private cloud environments will continue to grow. The impact of unstructured data management solutions that give partners and their customers the ability to manage data no matter where it is located will increase as the data in multiple environments accumulates.

“It’s no longer realistic to ignore the fact that, in most organisations, data lives in a hybrid environment and global data management is required.

“The adoption of unstructured data management solutions will continue to increase in 2025 as partners and their customers wrestle with cost increases due to endless storage expansion, higher consumption of cloud storage, new workload adoption, increasing regulations, and ever-growing data protection requirements.”

Ralf Jordan, VP channel EMEA, Lenovo

“The channel landscape is undergoing significant change and in 2025 both hybrid and multi-cloud will open up unprecedented opportunities for resellers, offering everything from platform to infrastructure and end-user services.

“They are reshaping IT modernisation and disrupting traditional reseller roles.

“As cloud services expand, resellers are shifting from product sales to managing cloud infrastructure and digital transformation projects.

“The multi-cloud trend, originating in large enterprises, is now penetrating SMEs, offering opportunities across platforms, infrastructure, and services. This evolution positions multi-cloud as a dominant strategy for businesses of all sizes.”

An AI future

“Channel partners are already keen to ride the wave of AI, but turning ambition into fruition is what will really matter in 2025. IT vendors need to access state of the art AI solutions, allowing customers to deploy AI faster, safely, and more efficiently. Key to this is providing access to a partner ecosystem, including AI independent software vendors (ISVs), across various applications and services. Partnerships will be crucial here.

“One of the major roadblocks to wider AI adoption is the fact that even if companies buy the best software or hardware, there can still be issues harnessing the technology and ensuring employees have the right skills to maximise their AI investments. It is crucial that IT vendors have initiatives in place to combat these challenges.

“The channel in 2025 is set to undergo a significant transformation, driven by the rapid evolution of AI and the growing adoption of flexible and multi-cloud environments. AI will act as an enabler, helping partners anticipate customer needs, streamline operations, and deliver personalised, intelligent solutions at scale. At the same time, businesses will demand seamless integrations across increasingly complex ecosystems, pushing the channel to prioritise not just interoperability and agility but also robust security measures.

“Security will be pivotal in this evolution. As businesses grapple with the demands of protecting their increasingly distributed operations, the channel will need to develop solutions that ensure speed, flexibility and data protection are no longer mutually exclusive.

“AI-driven tools that integrate seamlessly with existing platforms will allow businesses to expand their teams, enhance performance, and operate securely without compromising control over their data.

“Partners who thrive in this era will be those who balance cutting-edge innovation with a customer-centric mindset.

“Strategic partnerships will become increasingly important, with distributors and vendors stepping up as educators to guide customers on their AI journey. By deepening their expertise in AI, they can identify where it can have the greatest impact, navigate critical areas like trust and privacy, and help businesses to harness AI's transformative power responsibly.

“In 2025, we’ll also see the lines between traditional channel roles blur. Vendors, distributors, and partners alike must embrace new business models and evolve from transactional relationships to value-driven ecosystems. As these shifts unfold, the channel will not just adapt but redefine itself, creating an era where technology becomes a collaborative force that drives growth, resilience, and innovation across the board, with AI as the enabler."

Lance Williams, CTO, Distology

“The AI-arms race still persists to be the most anticipated and highly spoken about topic. What is really clear is that generative AI models have been proliferated into businesses, technologies and services without a huge amount of thought and attention.

“These tools are still largely free because the industry and the tech hasn't yet reached a point of maturity that garners a fee. However, the fee models are coming!! Companies who have been using these free tools should be starting to feel nervous about where the data is going.

“Key considerations for cybersecurity are four-fold:

“DLP applied to the GenAI models is a good guardrail and insight tool for orgs.

“If you're into building/developing LLM you'll need a purpose-built tool for this.

“Focus towards AI runtime via more robust chipset security and software-based runtime security solutions.

“Finally, information governance will become more and more important, both data discovery leading to data security posture management and data encryption.”

Tim Mackie, VP of worldwide channels and alliances, Claroty

“AI advancements in 2025 will introduce both challenges and opportunities to the cybersecurity industry. Just as technology providers are finding more ways to incorporate generative AI into their product offerings, threat actors are also using GenAI to make their attack techniques more sophisticated and effective.

“This will make it more challenging for targeted organisations to detect suspicious activity and create more false positive alerts.

“On the flip side, AI will improve the cyber and operational resilience of cyber-physical systems. It will be necessary to deal with the increasing speed, sophistication, and scale of AI-powered attacks.

“With the acceleration of digital transformation initiatives, organisations will adopt an ever-growing number of connected devices into their mission-critical infrastructure.

“With billions of IoT connections globally, the volume of data that organisations will collect from these devices will become unimaginably large.

“By leveraging GenAI to unlock the massive amount of valuable insights within this data, organisations can gain a highly granular view of their asset inventory and attack surface area.

“This can enable organisations to stay ahead of attackers and increase the resilience of their mission-critical assets and systems.”

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