Partners are helping customers decide which use cases to pursue, whether the required data and APIs are available, and how to measure the business outcome.
Genesys is seeing its India partners take on a broader role in AI deployments, with customers looking to them for help deciding where AI should be applied, how it should connect with existing systems and how the resulting business value should be measured.
Speaking to CRN India, Gwilym Funnell, head of strategic growth, Genesys, and Raveender Singh, senior manager, partner sales – Asia & India, Genesys, said the shift is expanding the services opportunity for partners beyond traditional CX implementation.
Funnell said customers [expect partners] to deliver business outcomes rather than simply deploy technology, while Singh said partners are using their industry knowledge, integration capabilities and local market understanding to help customers structure AI use cases and address gaps around data, skills and regulatory requirements.
At the centre of that shift is a question that Genesys believes partners are helping customers answer before an AI project begins: what is the right use case to pursue?
Funnell said identifying the right use case can have a significant impact on how quickly a customer can move from an AI project to value.
He said customers can often identify a use case because it appears simple and high volume, but the underlying technology environment may not support it.
The problem can emerge when the APIs required to deliver that use case are not exposed.
“If we can’t expose the data, we can’t do that use case,” he said.
For partners, Funnell said, being able to identify such limitations early can prevent customers from spending significant time pursuing an approach that cannot be implemented effectively.
That makes use-case selection an important part of the partner value proposition, particularly as customers move from AI experimentation toward broader deployments.
Funnell also said partners need to help customers take a staged approach rather than attempting to solve every possible scenario at once.
“It’s better to deliver smaller value rapidly, over and over again, than to try and bite off something too big to chew,” he said.
Partners move upstream into advisory and integration
The change in use-case selection is part of a broader shift in what customers expect from Genesys partners. “Customers now don’t expect partners to deliver technology; they expect them to deliver business outcomes,” Funnell said.
According to him, customers are asking partners to help them understand how to build better customer experiences and then create technology roadmaps that align with those business objectives.
That is creating a broader services opportunity around business advisory, roadmap development, change management, AI solution development and integration.
Funnell said one Genesys partner described the services opportunity as the biggest it had seen, partly because the Genesys platform creates opportunities across the end-to-end customer experience.
The opportunity, he said, extends beyond traditional CX services into helping customers determine where to start and how to move through the deployment journey.
The partner’s role also becomes more important where Genesys needs to connect into systems outside its own platform.
“Where the role of Genesys ends is that we’re obviously not an expert on the customer’s other systems,” Funnell said.
Partners, he added, need to fill that gap by helping customers understand how those systems connect and how the overall environment can be aligned to the intended business outcome.
For partners, this means their value increasingly sits around the customer’s broader technology environment rather than only around the Genesys platform itself.
Data, integration and regulation become partner skills
Singh said the capability gap facing partners is also becoming broader than traditional technical integration.
“It’s not just technical integration,” he said.
Partners are expected to unify fragmented data, different systems and workflows into a single governed orchestration layer, connecting business context, data, workflows and enterprise systems into a cohesive experience strategy.
Singh said partners in India are investing in capabilities that combine integration expertise with data governance and regulatory awareness.
The combination is becoming important as customers navigate complex environments while also dealing with regulatory requirements around the use of AI and data.
Singh said partners have been elevating their capabilities by investing in people who can “participate in deeper customer conversations” rather than focusing only on implementation.
Genesys is supporting that work through an open, API-first platform and pre-built integrations with systems such as Salesforce and ServiceNow.
Singh said the company’s AppFoundry ecosystem, open APIs and platform flexibility allow partners to tailor solutions without having to recreate integrations from scratch.
The objective, he said, is to support partners who bring industry knowledge and integration capabilities while reducing the time they need to spend building the underlying technology.
Measuring the outcome becomes part of the job
Funnell identified measurement as another area where partners can add value.
According to him, customers often begin AI projects without establishing clearly what they are trying to change or how they will determine whether the project has delivered the intended result.
“You need to be really clear about what it is you want to change and can you measure that today, and can you measure it again in the future,” he said.
That is becoming a growing opportunity in services because customers can complete projects without necessarily knowing what business results they achieved.
For partners, understanding the metrics attached to an AI deployment therefore becomes part of the engagement rather than something addressed after implementation.
The emphasis on measurement also reinforces the broader shift Genesys sees in the partner role. The partner is expected to connect the technology deployment with the business problem it is intended to solve.
Partners are becoming value consultants
Singh said the broader transition is changing how Genesys partners position themselves with customers.
“They’re no longer implementers. They are innovators. They are value consultants that are upping their game,” he said.
He said India does not need convincing about AI adoption. Instead, the focus is increasingly shifting toward trust, skills and organisational readiness.
Partners, he said, can use their existing customer relationships and industry experience to help organisations structure AI use cases, select the appropriate technologies and demonstrate tangible business outcomes.
Singh said this is allowing partners to move from being known primarily as implementers to becoming business consultants within the industries they serve.
The shift is also changing the nature of the services opportunity.
Funnell said customers may now engage multiple Genesys partners within the same programme, with one partner providing business advisory and roadmap services, another handling implementation, and a specialist partner contributing capabilities such as workforce engagement.
That is creating a more distributed ecosystem around experience orchestration, rather than a model where one partner necessarily owns every part of the engagement.
