In my last post I mentioned almost in passing that AWS launched a conversational AI interface at re:Invent that lets customers discover and evaluate solutions using natural language. I want to come back to that, because I think it is one of the most significant signals of where enterprise technology procurement is heading and most people in the channel are not treating it as the structural shift it actually is.
Let me start with a question I have been sitting with. If you can already buy Salesforce, CrowdStrike or Snowflake through a hyperscaler marketplace, and ServiceNow just crossed $1 billion in AWS Marketplace transactions, with an AI governance platform at the centre of that milestone, why would buying AI agents be any different in two years?
The SaaS procurement motion took the best part of a decade to go from interesting experiment to default enterprise channel. AI agents are moving faster than that, and the infrastructure is already in place. What I think people are missing is this: the AWS conversational interface is not just a better search box. It is the beginning of the marketplace becoming an active participant in the buying journey rather than a passive checkout. You can now find, compare and evaluate AI solutions through a chat interface, generate procurement proposals, ask follow-up questions, all without leaving the marketplace. Jay McBain predicted the marketplace would evolve from its current focus on configuring, pricing and transacting into the orchestration layer for the entire customer buying journey. That re:Invent launch is the first visible step in exactly that direction.
Microsoft is approaching the same destination differently. In September last year they launched a unified Microsoft Marketplace with over 3,000 AI apps and agents available across Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft 365 Copilot, and critically, 100% of those purchases count toward Azure Consumption Commitments. Copilot Studio sits alongside it as the build-your-own-agent layer, integrated into the M365 and Azure ecosystem most UK enterprises already run on. The budget is already there. The catalogue is live. The governance tools are being built out. AWS and Microsoft are taking different routes to the same place and for most enterprise customers the answer will involve both.
From what I can see, the conversation in most enterprises right now is still about selecting and piloting AI tools. That is understandable. But the procurement and governance question is arriving faster than most buying committees realise. Who decides which AI agents are approved for enterprise use? How do you manage AI consumption costs against committed cloud spend and who owns that problem when the bill arrives? How do you make sure the implementation, integration and ongoing management of an agentic deployment are captured in the same commercial motion as the software itself?
These are not theoretical questions. They are the conversations SCC is already having with customers. And they point to why marketplace, done properly, with services wrapped around it, becomes the answer rather than just the channel. Customers are not going to manage a patchwork of direct vendor relationships for every AI agent they deploy. They are going to want a governed, consolidated procurement path through infrastructure they already trust and have already committed budget to.
The numbers support the direction of travel. Omdia projects hyperscaler marketplace sales to grow from $30 billion in 2024 to $163 billion by 2030. Critically, they predict partners will facilitate nearly 60% of all transactions by then. That matters because the narrative that marketplace disintermediates the channel is wrong. What it actually does is change what the channel needs to be good at. Less order processing. More helping customers buy, govern, deploy and get value from complex technology through a commercial layer they already operate in.
The partners who will win the AI services opportunity are not necessarily the ones with the most impressive demo. They are the ones who can show up in the customer’s buying journey at the moment the complexity starts, and help them navigate it through the marketplace motion rather than around it.
As organisations continue to scale their Al initiatives, bridging the gap between deployment speed and cost governance will be critical to achieving sustainable, long-term value.
Want to learn more? Connect with one of our specialists:
Fabienne Porquet, Marketplace Sales Specialist – SCC UK Sales Software
Author: Andy Dunbar, Managing Director, Software & Security (UK)
We also recommend reading The Real Challenge Behind ServiceNow’s New Licensing Model