Here’s where nine solution provider top executives see as the biggest generative AI opportunities in the channel in 2025.

Channel partners are bullish about the generative AI opportunities next year as customers still need more guidance around their artificial intelligence strategy and future.

From AI advisory services to developing new GenAI offerings for customers, channel partners are the tip of the spear when it comes to strategizing and implementing AI solutions for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

“We’ve woven AI and intelligent automation in all its forms—like RPA [rapid process automation] and bots, etc.—into everything we do,” said Jonathan Lener, president and CEO of InterVision. “So we often think of ourselves as much as a product development or really an orchestration of offerings company. It’s not about reselling other people’s things. It’s about weaving them into logical bundles of services and solutions.”

[Related: GenAI Market Report: 10 Huge ROI, Top Use Case, AI Costs And Benefits Results]

Many partners next year are hoping for customer traction in specific industry verticals that are clamoring for AI solutions that provide a business outcome.

“We’ve developed, and Fulcrum Labs has developed, a couple of vertical solutions around healthcare, around retail, and around insurance or financial services,” said Tom Colleary, president of F3 Technology Partners. “So in 2025 for GenAI, I would say manufacturing, retail, financial services and healthcare are big opportunities.”

CRN spoke to the top executives of solution providers during The Channel Company’s XChange Best of Breed conference this week to find out what are some big GenAI opportunities next year.

Each of these solution providers were asked the question: What do you see as the biggest GenAI opportunities for your company in 2025? Click through to read their responses.

Tom Colleary

President

F3 Technology Partners

Hartford, Conn.

We’ve developed, and Fulcrum Labs has developed, a couple of vertical solutions around healthcare, around retail, and around insurance or financial services.

We define healthcare as everything from provider to payer, so it kind of bridges that gap between financial services and think the big insurance companies. But there’s some great solutions around that.

Also manufacturing, now that some of those people are getting into the pharmaceutical business and things like that—how do they use AI to rapidly and effectively fill prescriptions and get them out the door and predict them.

These are, I would say, 80 percent blueprint and 20 percent customization. So once you have that framework built, then it’s pretty easy and cost effective to the end user, instead of starting from scratch. It’s to be able to go off the blueprint then customize it, just like if you’re building a house.

So in 2025 for GenAI, I would say manufacturing, retail, financial services and healthcare are big opportunities.

Jonathan Lerner

President and CEO

InterVision

Chesterfield, Mo.

We’ve woven AI and intelligent automation in all its forms—like RPA [rapid process automation] and bots, etc.—into everything we do. So we often think of ourselves as much as a product development or really an orchestration of offerings company. It’s not about reselling other people’s things. It’s about weaving them into logical bundles of services and solutions.

We even do it under our own brand, our InterVision as a service offerings. For example, we have Ransomware Protection as-a-Service. And we bring market leading technologies in MDR and XDR and GRC with our managed and professional services. Then we serve those back as outcomes that are fully managed services to the mid-market and enterprise. We wrap it all with AI and intelligent automation.

Our view is that our customers continue to absorb innovation, otherwise they sort of become stagnant. So we help them with innovation around every one of those in 2025.

We’re approaching it from two angels: automate or augment. It can be just GenAI and can extend beyond the four walls and developing LLMs (large language models) and taking advantage of third-party platforms for how you introduce AI to customers. But it may be as simple as leveraging RPA, and how do we bring automation into more repetitive, transformational journeys.

How do we use technology to augment, for instance in the contact center: How do we make agents more happier? How do we provide the data for them to be able to serve their customers, their patients, the citizens of the states they live in, by predictively providing that information to know them better. To know their journey, their history, why they’re calling likely, likely what’s happening, etc.

To date, a lot of the investments has been on, ‘Help me develop a use case and help me quantify and qualify what the benefits are to automation?’ Our advisory services begin before then, it’s around: data readiness and where does the data live? How do we actually prepare the data. We believe that those discussions on the advisory side are really, really important now.

Asif Hasan

CEO

Quantiphi

Marlborough, Mass.

I see two broad themes: one on the demand side and one on the supply side of the business.

On the demand side, I read a Goldman Sachs report recently which indicated that most enterprises are currently spending minimal amount of their technology budget on Gen AI, somewhere in the 2 percent to 3 percent range and this number is expected to grow to over 15 percent in the next three years.

So the opportunity landscape is likely to expand by a factor of 5X to 8X. What this implies is that we have a far bigger opportunity to help our customers build solutions like search assistants, agentic workflows to power their back, middle and front office workflows like customer service as well as some game-changing industry solutions like pharmacovigilance in life sciences with our Baioniq or low touch underwriting in insurance with our Dociphi.

On the supply side, we are excited about using GenAI to power developer productivity. We have built our own version of a software engineering agent called codeaira and this has helped increase our developer productivity by over 30 percent. What this means is that the combination of our human expertise and codeaira working together can help increase time to value for our customers by 25 percent to 30 percent and do it far more cost effectively.

Felise Katz

CEO and President

PKA Technologies

Montvale, N.J.

The GenAI push started in 2024, so we’ve already been down this path, and it is incredible the opportunity that awaits us. We are taking a very specific, vertical approach. We’re not looking to go all over the place. We’re looking at our strengths, our core competencies. We’re already developing a portfolio of strategies to help those industries that we are you know that we have strength in today, including regulated industries, so SLED (state, local, and education), healthcare, legal, retail, those areas where we are already experts, and marrying that with AI to assist those clients. Same thing that did with security. And we’re moving along at a very rapid clip.

In 2025, this is gonna move very quickly. It has been moving very quickly, and will continue to move in that direction. As long as we’ve been in business, our clients that we started out with are still our customers, which is a very interesting thing. But we’re not the same as we were. We keep on going through this metamorphosis, and adjusting and adapting in order to stay relevant in the industry. So when you think about it, it’s a pretty incredible journey all the solution providers in the industry have been on. If we’re not changing, we’re not growing. There’s huge potential out there. And it’s not just an infrastructure refresh. It is a complete change of how you think and how you’re helping the lines of business grow. The bottom line: It’s all about the customer. It’s all about what the customer needs and what the customer wants in order for us to be effective at what we do.

Terry Mirza

President

Compugen Systems

Houston

There are different AI segments, with enterprise being the slowest to. I think right now there’s a balance of what Microsoft’s doing with Copilot around the workers and modern work and productivity, and how that aligns with Windows 11 and M365. I think that’s going to really unlock a lot of work and use cases for us. And on the other side is work we’re doing around building an AI appliance and things like an HR (human resources) department that wants a small language model, minimal viable product to help AI to look at benefits programs. So if you wanted to understand very quickly, am I eligible for glasses? Am I eligible for dental care this year? To be able to do that through, you know, AI algorithms with your HR data, I think that’d be a great use case. So for 2025, we’re very much focused on the data and AI. I think customers are gonna need to really get their data estate ready. So I think that’s going to be a lot of our work.

Mark Galyardt

President

Xiossx

Naples, Fla.

Generative AI will be able to handle high volumes of data with large language models. For example, talk to the dean of a good university law school who might think this would be awesome, because they can create additional space in their law school by compressing all these volumes of old documents and books and stuff and move them out of the way to create new space that can be reimagined for more collaborative learning and more classroom type of stuff.

Generative AI can take existing information and pull it together way quicker than a lot of other things that mostly have been done by humans. And then it can also be triaged for accuracy, which is highly important. So once you get the readouts, and you can trust them and they can be accurate, that’s the real value. Generative AI can be also applied to a bunch of point solutions in a data center. They can’t talk to each other, and it’s been that way for years, but with a generative AI cloud overlay there, they can.

We are looking at a number of cool things we can do with generative AI, including leveraging new AI partners to bring GenAI to woman-owned businesses, SMBs, and other areas that haven’t really had access to them. How many small businesses can afford to experiment with AI? We want to leverage AI for these businesses.

Gary McConnell

CEO

VirtuIT Systems

Nanuet, N.Y.

I think there’s a ton of opportunities. One is the storage and compute that’s needed to support it. That creates sales opportunities for the partner community, which is huge. Regardless of whether it’s a Dell server or an HPE, the commodity is not as important. But it’s the ability to get those solutions in front of your customers and then build the solution around them. Is the partner community ready to sell AI? Absolutely not. We haven’t gotten into the enterprise use case [for AI] yet, where we’re overhauling organizations’ businesses and the way they operate. But I do think the partner community is going to play a huge role there.

Keelin Conant

Managed Services Consultant

Alvaka Networks

Irvine, Calif.

Because we’re so security-focused, we’re very, very specific about any AI that we actually allow in our environment. It goes through extremely rigorous testing. And a lot of it right now is locked down because we don’t know what we don’t know. As far as Alvaka goes, the biggest asset we have are our people. I think that there’s a lot of opportunity for them to use [GenAI], if it becomes tried and true. It could empower our people to be able to use AI to maybe quicken things, but I don’t think we’ll be able to replace them any time soon.

Ahmed Mahmood

CEO

Ocean Solutions

Ashburn, Va.

What I would suggest to all small businesses is build your solutions around your needs. AI is vast. So just focus your energy on the pieces that really solve a problem for you. Start with, “I have this manual process, I have this challenge” — and then work your way backward from there to try to reduce the cost, the time, the investment — and get it down to the level where it’s running optimally using AI.