At a recent Ultimate Partner LIVE at Microsoft’s Conference Center in Redmond, leaders from Nvidia and Microsoft – two players at the forefront of AI – had advice for partners: when it comes to agentic AI, don’t wait.

“First, I would say, don't stay back from AI,” Microsoft VP Sandy Gupta said. “Just really skill yourself. I mean, just build an agent tonight. It’s not that hard. Don't let the geeks frighten you. It's actually easier than you think. Second, the time has come for the ISVs and the channel partners to come together. if you look at the mid-market and SMBs, they are not going to consume AI by building it themselves. The time has come now for the for these partnerships to come together in B2B. Third, we’re going to have a massive focus on migration next year, and, and I want to make sure that everyone here is part of that sort of opportunity, because it involves. every type of partner in that.”

Pat Lee, Nvidia VP of strategic partnerships, agreed the tools are available to get started: “This is not there's not a time to wait, and there's all sorts of ways to get started. Every business that you work with and support has a mound of business-critical data that they need to maximize, and if we're not helping them get there, they are going to lose business. Other people are going to come in and take that business. If you can't maximize the value in these applications, they'll be replaced. So if we don't make AI the prominent, most important feature of these applications, they won't be able to keep up. We're providing the platform. You don't have to build all this. There's a lot of foundation you can build on top of.

Ultimate Partner CEO Vince Menzione, who moderated the discussion, had the last word: “I hope everybody else hears this loud and clear, is it is important. I think there was a sense of hesitancy in the beginning. There was this feedback that was coming from CFOs saying, ‘we're not seeing the value yet in AI.] And I think organizations need to hit the gas pretty hard right now.”

You can watch the full session here.