By testing and innovating AI solutions in-house first before taking them to market, cloud solution providers are finding a customer-winning formula. Here’s how.
Cloud solution providers are finding massive success selling a range of AI solutions and services to customers if they launch and test out their AI innovation in-house first to make sure that the AI truly does its magic.
From “drinking our own champagne” to creating “AI Jedi,” solution providers say proofing out AI solutions in-house first is winning them customer mindshare.
“We are customer zero for our own AI services that we offer,” said Sanjay Singh, CEO of AI cloud solution provider Onix. “Everybody has to learn and certify themselves on the AI stack. So it’s a mindset and it’s a hard-core discipline that we design that helps us win more [AI] customers.”
After successfully testing its new agentic AI platform Wingspan internally first, Princeton, N.J.-based Onix was able to prove successful use cases in-house, which Singh said helped drive Wingspan sales to clients.
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“When we create platforms with agentic AI and we create AI delivery solutions, we try to be customer zero for everything across them,” he said. “It helps customers see that we’ve done it ourselves, trust it and the outcomes work.”
Cloud AI Jedi
For Ontario-based cloud solution provider Pythian, it was important for employees to embrace Google Gemini internally first before creating and launching AI solutions to the market.
“We needed to embrace Gemini, in our case internally, for all our employees to really push them to adopt Gemini to innovate themselves first on how they can build their own agents, look at how they can change the way they do their work,” said Pythian CEO Brooks Borcherding. “Customers like to see that you’re using it too and you’re betting on it,” he said, likening it to “drinking our own champagne.”
“We really look at our own internal hygiene to AI-enable us first to be a better company before providing all of it to our customers,” he added.
What sprouted from this strategy is what Pythian dubs its “AI Jedi” practice—an AI business unit of highly skilled AI field technologists who are laser-focused on helping cloud customers adopt AI services and solutions.
“They focus on how we can help companies adopt AI to improve their own IT operations internally like we did,” Borcherding said. “It taught us, ‘How are we truly leaning in to embrace AI for our managed services? How do we improve ticket responses? How do we automate common responses?’ And we use that to improve our own customers’ infrastructure.”
Big Increase In Businesses Using AI Services ‘Extensively’
As solution providers are kicking the tires of AI innovation and use cases internally first, customer usage of agentic and generative AI public cloud services continues to increase year after year.
In a 2026 Flexera market report that surveyed over 750 tech executives, 45 percent of respondents said they are using public cloud AI services “extensively,” a big increase from 25 percent in 2024.
In addition, 36 percent of respondents are using public cloud services “sparingly” in 2026, up from 22 percent in 2024.
Interestingly, 100 percent of executives in the report said they are using cloud GenAI services in 2026, an increase from 85 percent in 2024.
This bodes well for solution providers selling their own AI solutions and services on top of public cloud providers’ products.
‘We’re Able To Serve More Of The AI Demand’ For Customers, Innovative CEO Says
Cloud solution provider Innovative Solutions was able to launch its agentic AI consulting platform DarcyIQ last year after testing and co-innovating alongside AWS’ AI technology.
This month, Innovative launched its AI-powered Agentic Delivery offering—powered by DarcyIQ—that enables AI agents to work alongside data architects and engineers across the full delivery life cycle. Innovative initially built its new agentic delivery services in-house, CEO Justin Copie said.
“I was walking through the halls of Innovative in Rochester, New York, and I look over the shoulder of one of our engineers. This engineer had five screens all running simultaneously. And I could tell that it was AI actually doing coding. I asked the engineer, ‘Hey, you were just on a call with a customer. What were you guys doing on those five screens?’ He goes, ‘Oh, those five screens aren’t the customer I was just talking to; those are five other customers that I’m working on right now simultaneously,’” said Copie. “We could see customers’ own use cases for this is huge.”
By using DarcyIQ internally first, Innovative was able to find successful use cases and build an outcome-based offering that is winning over clients at a rapid pace.
“What used to be four or five people that we would have to put on a project we now can streamline to maybe two or three people because we’re using AI to do more,” said Copie. “We’re able to serve more of the AI demand that’s out there for our customers.”
