As Senior Director of Channel Marketing Solutions at Impartner, I help organizations across the globe scale partner programs using automation and intelligence. One of the most disruptive and promising forces shaping the future of our space is Artificial Intelligence (AI). And when applied strategically, AI isn’t just helpful but transformational. 

Impartner is the leading provider for Partner Relationship Management (PRM) and Partner Marketing Automation (PMA) solutions, built from the ground up to deliver scalable growth through automation and a partner-first approach. But more than that, these platforms are now home to world-champion AI that solves the two biggest obstacles in channel marketing: content bottlenecks and low partner adoption. 

In this article, I’ll explore how AI is redefining what’s possible in PMA, why predictive and generative AI are game changers, and why the time to adopt is now. For a deeper dive, watch my full presentation from the AI in the Channel event:

What Is Partner Marketing Automation (PMA) and Why Is It Foundational?

Before diving into AI, let’s align on what PMA is. When vendors go-to-market through partners, they need to tap into both:

1. Know audiences (partner’s existing customers and prospects)
2. Unknown audiences (net-new demand)

PMA platforms centralize marketing content like emails, landing pages, social posts, ads, and microsites, and automatically co-brand and distribute it to partners, enabling them to launch scalable, localized campaigns.

Impartner’s PMA solutions help:

• Engage known contacts via partner-branded emails and social media
• Capture unknown audiences using paid media like Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Meta ads.

The result allows partners to run campaigns autonomously while retaining full visibility and control. But even the best PMA platform faces two lingering challenges.

Challenge #1: The Content Bottleneck

No campaigns = no results. Yet many channel marketing teams struggle to produce the volume and diversity of content needed to fuel the engine. Why? Teams are often too small, they rely on corporate content that often isn’t partner ready, and content must be adapted for different verticals, regions and partner voices. 

How Generative AI Solves This:

Generative AI radically accelerates content creation:

• Creates campaign-ready content in minutes
• Localizes and personalizes for language, vertical, region
• Expands content formats form emails, ads and blogs, to podcasts and videos

AI becomes your full-time content studio scaling partner readiness without scaling headcount.

Challenge #2: Partner Adoption & Execution

Even with great content, most partners don’t launch campaigns. Why? Because they lack: 

• Time
• Resources
• Marketing expertise

It’s not that they’re unwilling, it’s that you’re asking them to be marketers when their job is to sell.

The Navigation Analogy: From Paper Maps to Predictive AI

Years ago, driving to a partner meeting meant mapping your route manually, with a street atlas, paper, pens and a lot of guesswork. Today, you enter the destination, follow GPS directions, and arrive with confidence. 

Partners need the marketing equivalent of GPS a system that guides them to campaign success, not one that requires them to navigate complexity alone. 

This is where predictive AI and automation step in.

This Is Where Predictive AI & Automation Shine

Predictive AI can optimize campaign performance across hundreds of partners, analyzing:

• Click-through and conversion data
• Audience engagement
• Best-performing assets, timing and bidding

Combine that with automation and the system can:

• Automatically do thousands of bidding changes per day per partner
• Select the right audiences to target
• Mine for new high-impact keywords 

Predictive AI enables partners to deliver standout marketing results, without needing deep marketing expertise.

Challenge Priority: Navigate Before You Accelerate

Step 1: Solve the Partner adoption and execution Gap (Challenge #2)
Before creating more fuel, make sure the engine can run. Start by enabling partners to launch campaigns with the navigation guidance, automation, and support they need. Even with limited content, you’ll start seeing results and building momentum.

Step 2: Scale the Content Engine (Challenge #1)
Once partners are in motion, it’s time to accelerate and fuel the engine. Generative AI can become your full-time content studio, creating campaign-ready assets in minutes, localizing for language and vertical, and expanding into new formats like video and podcasts — all without increasing headcount.

The Outcome
First, get partners driving confidently. Then, open the throttle with more content. The result is a channel ecosystem that moves from stalled to scaled — quickly, efficiently, and sustainably.

AI as Opportunity, Not Threat

While concerns about AI replacing jobs are common, in channel marketing, it serves as an enabler.  It empowers small teams to achieve big results and enables partners to execute campaigns that they never could have managed manually.

Where AI Brings the Most Value: 

Area	AI Type	Benefit
Content Creation	Generative AI	More partner-ready content, faster.
Campaign Execution	Predictive AI & Automation	Campaigns launched and optimized automatically.
Advertising Optimization	Predictive AI	Lower CPL, higher conversion rates.

AI in Action: The Results Speak for Themselves

From real-world deployments of Impartner’s AI-driven PMA tools, here are some standout results:

• 6300% increase in email volume via automation
• 25% reduction in advertising cost per lead
• 300% increase in ROI

These numbers aren't projections, they’re results from clients already using AI and automation today.

Case Study: Xerox Scales Lead Generation with Predictive AI

Xerox’s global partner team turned to Impartner’s Google Ads for the Channel solution to scale their paid media campaigns and improve local lead generation. Their initial approach using agencies was time-consuming, costly, and failed to scale. Worse yet, individual partner campaigns were cannibalizing Xerox’s own corporate ads.

By centralizing campaign creation and layering in AI-powered optimization, Xerox achieved:

• 75% decrease in cost per lead
• Zero-effort partner adoption (co-branded Google Ads were launched automatically)
• 27% of leads converted to sales opportunities
• Full visibility into campaign performance and lead quality

Impartner’s automation also enabled follow-up email nurtures and tracking through its integrated Lead Management solution giving Xerox a competitive edge and making Google Ads their top-performing lead source globally.

Building on the Lessons of Traditional TCMA

This shift to intelligent automation is especially crucial given the well-known limitations of traditional Through-Channel Marketing Automation (TCMA).

In a previous post, I outlined why many TCMA programs fall short:

1. Manual execution that overwhelms partners
2. Overreliance on organic content that doesn’t generate net-new demand

With Impartner’s platform, that’s changed. Paid media capabilities like Google Ads for the Channel add reach, while predictive AI and automation solve the execution gap.

As seen with Xerox and Stanley Black & Decker, who achieved a 163% increase in partner leads and a 49% decrease in cost per lead, advanced PMA turns traditional TCMA into a true growth engine

The Future of Channel Marketing Is Already Here

AI isn’t here to replace your channel, it’s here to unleash its full potential. With generative AI, you can solve the content bottleneck.

With predictive AI and automation, you remove complexity, drive adoption and deliver consistent results at scale.

This isn’t about turning partners into marketers.  It’s about giving them tools that do the heavy lifting, so they can focus on what they do best: building relationships and closing deals.

The future of channel marketing isn’t manual. It’s intelligent, automated, and partner-first. Best of all? It’s already here.