Channel partners to fuel AI ambition for midmarket businesses

Channel partners play a pivotal role in bridging the gap for midmarket businesses in their AI journey, comments Utkarsh Maheswari, Chief Partner Officer and Head of Midmarket for SAP Asia Pacific Japan.

Midmarket businesses are ramping up their AI initiatives as they understand the need to embrace the technology or fall behind their competitors. Unlike large enterprises, midmarket businesses are more likely to be challenged with having sufficient funds and talents to achieve their AI goals.

Research from SAP has shown that the intent to adapt AI remains strong in the industry. While midmarket businesses are often defined by the size of their employees and revenue, the reality is, their desire to enable AI in their workforce is no different to large enterprises or even SMBs.

But will this momentum continue in 2025? Despite some organizations planning to consolidate vendors and such, IDC predicts AI spending in the Asia Pacific region to reach US$110 billion by 2028. A huge chunk of this spending will undoubtedly be on improving the AI infrastructure to build, support and scale AI use cases.

Interestingly, Utkarsh Maheswari, Chief Partner Officer and Head of Midmarket for SAP Asia Pacific Japan believes that AI will go beyond flashy buzzwords in 2025. According to Utkarsh, business leaders are beginning to experience fatigue over the AI hype. But he predicts that business leaders will begin to realise the true power and value it brings as AI technology gains more widespread familiarity across business functions and at the executive level in 2025.

“As perspectives on GenAI matures, we will see more practical applications of the technology that solves actual business problems. This increased adoption will further break through traditional narrow AI capabilities to drive true automation within business processes. We can also expect a rise in novel use cases previously unimagined, particularly as agentic AI capabilities – that is, AI-powered systems that act as intelligent agents with a certain degree of autonomy – take shape,” said Utkarsh.

To harness the full potential of AI, it has to be built in the cloud. Given the increased investments in cloud infrastructure, hyperscalers are pouring billions into expanding their data centre footprint, especially across emerging digital markets such as Indonesia and Vietnam.

Utkarsh pointed out that in the APAC region, SMEs make up a significant majority of businesses, and 92% of midsized businesses already consider GenAI a priority. In the coming year, he believes as companies in the region increasingly recognize AI as the springboard for innovation, the cloud boom will continue, with companies doubling down on cloud transformation.

“Companies that have already invested early in building a resilient, scalable cloud infrastructure will see the biggest return from their AI investments, while those that haven’t will need to leapfrog with a cloud-first approach to remain competitive,” explained Utkarsh.

Ecosystem partners rise the ranks in fuelling AI adoption

With limited resources, inadequate data governance frameworks, and a lack of in-house expertise among common barriers that companies face in implementing AI for their business, Utkarsh highlighted that channel partners play a pivotal role in bridging the gap.

According to Urkarsh, the channel ecosystem is essential is for midmarket organizations. Not only can channel partners provide pre-built frameworks, industry expertise, and solution add-ons, but they are also capable of delivering end-to-end support to augment and integrate AI capabilities into essential business processes.

“SAP is already witnessing the growth of partner-led territories in markets like Australia and New Zealand, India, Indonesia, as well as many parts of Southeast Asia, where partners combine their local business expertise with unique intellectual property (IP), on top of the complete suite of SAP solutions, to offer customers tailored AI solutions that drive meaningful business outcomes,” said Utkarsh.

As such, he predicts that 2025 will see increased AI collaboration and technology alliances in the partner ecosystem. He also predicts a significant expansion and evolution in the role that channel partners play in helping businesses of all sizes make the promise of Business AI a reality.