For an entire IT channel navigating what it means to be a relevant partner in today’s AI-driven world, one truth stands out: data is the new currency of competitive advantage. For channel partners, data-driven workflows can enhance everything from managing sales pipelines to service efficiency to vendor alignment.
If being data-driven is the new competitive advantage, then partners should look beyond data that’s a commodity in favour of the data that’s truly unique to their business. Third-party datasets, offered by the likes of market intelligence providers, are commoditised in this sense. First-party data, on the other hand, remains underutilised and provides a strong route to a competitive edge.
When harnessed effectively, the fragmented first-party data that all channel partners sit on can be brought together to establish a holistic view of customer requirements and commercial opportunities. In practice, analytics automation solutions and their capability to collect data from both on-premise and cloud environments make this possible. But success rests on more than point solutions.
Equipping Teams with Required Knowledge
Data points related to customers and competitors are powerful examples of first-party data for channel partners. Customer interactions, feedback, support history, user patterns and digital engagement rates can all be pieced together to generate valuable insights. For channel partners to actually gauge those insights, however, individual team members need to know how to harness data-driven workflows in their day-to-day.
That’s why channel businesses need to place a priority on fostering an internal culture of data literacy in 2026. When organisations prioritise upskilling, employees benefit – they’re empowered to understand and use data effectively to make better decisions. Providing teams with intuitive, low-code analytics tools is the key to demystifying data for all employees, no matter their technical experience, and enabling every employee to work with data with confidence.
To meaningfully drive upskilling, giving teams the tools to work with data should be paired with upskilling efforts that reflect each team’s capabilities through tailored learning paths. No employee is the same, but a foundational understanding of working with data, paired with the ‘how-to’ basics of using an analytics automation tool, drives up internal data literacy across the board. It’s important to note that these efforts aren’t ever ‘one and done’. A culture of continuous learning and ‘always‑on’ training improves organisation-wide comfort when working with data, paving the way to more sophisticated applications of first-party data over the medium-to-long term.
There are common factors that make or break the overall success of initiatives to drive data literacy in channel businesses. Leadership buy-in is the first. Executives must be engaged with efforts to build a culture of data literacy. The move toward data-driven initiatives and increased insight‑sharing across business segments can only thrive if it’s supported and prioritised by senior decision makers. The second is governance. Effective guardrails must be in place to ensure data is used appropriately and in a manner that aligns with organisational goals. This is the most effective way to avert the integration of inaccurate or otherwise unusable data into workflows, which can quickly cause problems and set efforts to be more data-driven back.
Laying the Groundwork for AI
Like all businesses, channel partners are weighing up the best way to capitalise on recent AI breakthroughs in their own operations. The truth is that any efforts will be a non-starter without internal data literacy. Employees who understand how to manage data effectively are best placed to input high-quality data into AI systems and understand their best use cases.
When channel partners integrate AI agents and advanced analytics into internal processes, they can move more quickly while delivering more personalised and effective customer-facing solutions. The other side of the coin is that customers recognise channel partners who are savvy in their use of AI as ideal partners to support their own AI rollout journey.
Generative AI also holds transformative potential in the commercial operations of channel businesses. Teams that can interface with first-party data with natural language prompting are better placed to spot trends, new commercial opportunities and base sales outreach on data-driven insights. But, to stress again, none of that is possible without a base layer of data literacy.
The New Differentiator
First-party data provides channel partners with the clarity and confidence to make smarter decisions, faster. A data-literate culture combined with accessible solutions to automate analytics acts as a strong foundation for channel partners to become data-driven in a more sophisticated manner than their peers. They’ll also be better positioned to both leverage AI approaches and support customers on their own AI adoption journey.
