Build on the Strength of Sales Channels

Build on the Strength of Sales Channels Draw on three kinds of partners. First: cloud providers and large platforms. AWS, Azure, and GCP are themselves important gateways for enterprise AI procurement. Joining their co-selling programs gives you a pass onto enterprise purchasing lists. Their marketplaces also address a practical pain point: “Customers can use existing committed cloud spend to purchase your service, bypassing the procurement process for adding a new supplier.” (Robin: In most cases, cloud marketplaces already offer similar products from many startups around the world. Merely listing a product will usually not get sales moving—just as people today seldom download apps from their phones’ app stores.) Second: consultancies and systems integrators. The industry ecosystem entered a new phase in 2026. Bain & Company and McKinsey appeared among the founding partners of OpenAI’s new delivery entity, The Deployment Company. They moved from potential competitors to business allies. The logic is clear: “Model providers have the technology; consultancies have customer relationships and industry knowledge; systems integrators have the people to implement solutions. Only by working together can all three address the vast AI-transformation market.” For technology startups—model providers in this discussion—the lesson cuts both ways: “Watch out for consulting giants absorbing your delivery business in the name of ecosystem collaboration, but recognize the real benefits of alliances with regional and industry-specific systems integrators. They hold customer relationships you could not build in three years.” FDE teams should “place engineers with both technical and industry backgrounds at the customer site from the outset, deeply involving them throughout implementation.” Consultancies possess relationships; model platforms lack industry depth. Joint FDE teams become the bridge. (Robin: In Taiwan, potential consulting partners include the Big Four accounting firms, telecom operators such as Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan Mobile (精誠), and Far EasTone, along with systems integrators. ERP companies such as 鼎新 are also possibilities. Explore industry alliances with them to develop business.) Third: customers’ customers and supply chains. The strongest ecosystem integration embeds you in the customer’s own value chain. Palantir brought its technology and products into Airbus, and the two launched Skywise, a data platform serving more than 100 airlines worldwide and Airbus’s vast supply chain. As customers and suppliers adopt Skywise, Palantir can expand through Airbus’s network, sharply reducing customer acquisition costs. Build this ability to deliver onward into your solution from the start: can the customer use it to serve its own customers? If so, you are embedded in the customer’s business model. #ForwardDeployedEngineeringFDE