‘If the last 20 years were about building the foundation—the infrastructure, the programs, the trust—the next chapter is about what [partners] build on top of it,’ says Brian Bohan, AWS’ director of consulting.
Amazon Web Services partners who will lead the future are solution providers who understand AI isn’t just a product, but critical to how businesses operate and are managed, explains AWS director Brian Bohan.
“The partners who will define the next 20 years are the ones who understand that AI isn’t a product line—it’s a new way of running a business,” Bohan, director and global lead for AWS’ consulting center of excellence, tells CRN.
“If the last 20 years were about building the foundation—the infrastructure, the programs, the trust—the next chapter is about what [partners] build on top of it,” he added.
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The AWS partners who are winning in 2026 are not waiting for customers to ask for AI transformation.
“The window between a customer’s first AI conversation and their expectation of production-scale results has compressed dramatically. Partners who are winning right now are the ones who didn’t wait for customers to ask—they went and rebuilt their own delivery models first, so they could show up with real answers instead of roadmaps,” said Bohan.
82 Percent Of AWS Partners Are ‘Activity Delivering AI Transformation’
Bohan is a 13-year AWS veteran with more than three decades of channel and sales experience.
He talked to CRN as AWS celebrates 20 years since the launch of its first product, Simple Storage Service (S3), in March 2006.
Today, S3 stores more than 500 trillion objects and serves more than 200 million requests per second globally across hundreds of exabytes of data in 39 AWS Regions for millions of customers. The maximum object size has grown from 5 GB to 50 TB—a 10,000-fold increase.
“When I look back at 20 years of AWS, what stands out isn’t just the technology—it’s the partner network that grew up alongside it,” said Bohan.
“What’s changed is the scale. Today, partners generate $7.13 for every $1 of AWS sold, and 82 percent are actively delivering AI transformation to their customers,” he said.
Bohan takes a deep dive with CRN about what the AWS partner of the future looks like, the typical AI migration cycle, and the new generation of AI-native partners.
Looking ahead, what does the future look like for AWS partners?
If the last 20 years were about building the foundation—the infrastructure, the programs, the trust—the next chapter is about what [partners] build on top of it.
We’re already seeing the early signals: AI agents moving from novelty to core business infrastructure, physical AI making its way into manufacturing floors and energy operations, and quantum computing beginning to move from research labs toward real-world applications.
But what I’m most focused on is the partner network that will power all of it.
We’re seeing a new generation of partners emerge—AI-native firms that don’t look like traditional consulting companies, that are built from the ground up around agentic workflows and machine-speed delivery.
At the same time, our most established partners—the Accentures, the Capgeminis, the DXCs — are reinventing themselves in real time, embedding AI into how they operate, not just what they sell.
The partners who will define the next 20 years are the ones who understand that AI isn’t a product line—it’s a new way of running a business.
AWS’ job is to make sure they have every advantage we can give them to get there.
How has AI changed the typical IT migration and sales cycle?
We’ve been through big transformation cycles before — cloud migration, application modernization, digital transformation.
Each one required partners to reinvent how they delivered value.
AI is no different in that sense, but the pace is unlike anything we’ve seen.
The window between a customer’s first AI conversation and their expectation of production-scale results has compressed dramatically.
Partners who are winning right now are the ones who didn’t wait for customers to ask—they went and rebuilt their own delivery models first, so they could show up with real answers instead of roadmaps.
What are customers asking for from AI today compared to a year ago?
The question customers are asking has fundamentally shifted from a year ago. It was: “Where do we start with AI?’
Today it’s: “Why aren’t we further along?”
AWS AI Competency partners are helping close that gap—getting AI projects into production 25 percent faster by bringing codified best practices and proven blueprints rather than starting from scratch every time.
Collectively, partners have launched more than 20,000 generative AI opportunities with win rates above 70 percent.
That’s not a market that’s still figuring itself out — that’s a market that’s executing.
The AWS Partner Network was created in 2012 with you joining AWS right after with a focus on partners. Talk about AWS’ partner history and any similarities in 2026?
When I joined AWS in 2013, we were one year into the formal AWS Partner Network, and the truth is that we were inventing as we went—together with partners.
The conversations back then weren’t about AI strategy or marketplace listings. They were about convincing a CFO or CIO that it was okay to put workloads in the cloud, or helping a regional systems integrator understand whether they needed to rebuild their entire delivery model from scratch. A lot of partners were genuinely uncertain.
But the ones who leaned in anyway—who helped us build the migration methodologies, the training programs, the go-to-market frameworks that didn’t exist yet—those are the firms that became the backbone of what we have today.
You can’t shortcut that kind of trust.
It gets built in the hard years, when the outcome isn’t obvious and both sides are taking a real bet on each other.
In 2015, we stood on stage at re:Invent with Accenture to announce the Accenture AWS Business Group. And what that moment represented wasn’t just a new business arrangement. It was a signal to the entire enterprise industry that cloud had arrived.
Before that, a lot of large organizations were still treating AWS as something their developers used, not something their CIOs needed to have a strategy around. That announcement changed the conversation.
What I find remarkable is that we’re at a similar inflection point today with AI—where the question has shifted from ‘Should we be doing this?’ to ‘How fast can we move?’
The partners who helped us cross that threshold in 2015 are the same ones helping customers cross it again now. That continuity matters more than people realize.
