Cisco’s Andrew Sage: Agentic AI is transforming the role of IT distribution

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing you news and information for the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

We’re continuing our coverage of Cisco Partner Summit 2026 in Vancouver, where one of the recurring themes has been the evolution of the partner ecosystem, and particularly the growing role of artificial intelligence in changing how partners, distributors, and Cisco itself work together.

And when it comes to distribution, Cisco isn’t just talking about what’s possible. It’s already putting agentic AI to work.

This week, we heard about an integration between Cisco and Ingram Micro that can reduce a process involving network configuration, deal registration, pricing, and ordering from as much as a day to just five minutes. And there’s similar work underway with TD SYNNEX, where AI agents are helping automate the presales configuration and quoting process.

But the bigger opportunity may be what these technologies allow distributors and their partners to do next.

Cisco is increasingly looking to distributors to provide services and expertise on behalf of partners, helping smaller VARs and MSPs offer more sophisticated solutions, develop new capabilities, and compete for opportunities that might previously have been out of reach.

To explore what this means for the future of distribution, I sat down with Andrew Sage, Cisco’s vice president of global partners and distribution sales, here at Partner Summit.

We discussed how agentic integration is changing the relationship between Cisco and its distributors, where the next wave of automation is heading, and why Sage believes these changes could significantly expand Cisco’s reach into the SMB market.

We also get into the upcoming integration of distributors into the Cisco 360 Partner Program and what Sage sees as an unusually strong set of growth opportunities for the distribution channel.

Let’s get right into it. My chat with Andrew Sage.

Robert Dutt: Andrew, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Andrew Sage: Of course, Robert. Always great to see a fellow Canadian here in Vancouver.

Robert Dutt: Speaking of that, you’ve spent so much of your career with global roles at Cisco. What’s it like having Partner Summit in Vancouver this year? And from your perspective, what is bringing Cisco’s global partner community back to Canada for the third time, may I add?

Andrew Sage: For the third time, yeah.

Well, you know, we move Partner Summit around North America, and I was patiently waiting to come back to the home country.

I think it’s a perfect time to get partners together because there is so much going on right now in our business.

We sat through a keynote today where Jeetu Patel, our president and chief product officer, walked through the innovation that Cisco is bringing to this moment we’re having with AI.

And our CEO, Chuck, was comparing it to the Internet and how that changed how people thought about technology. The impact was underestimated at the beginning and ultimately became quite profound.

I really feel like it’s exactly the same now, probably on steroids, if I can add that.

So, yeah, we’ve got a lot to talk about, and we’re lucky enough to be in this beautiful convention centre. This place is just off the charts.

Robert Dutt: And distribution has been such a hot topic.

It always gets attention because it’s Partner Summit, and obviously distributors are a big part of that. But it feels like the subject of distribution is getting the love from the top executives on down at this week’s event. There’s a lot going on.

We’ve heard a lot this week about the vision of an agile, increasingly AI-enabled partner ecosystem. And distribution has obviously been central to the channel strategy for obvious reasons.

But how do you see the role of the distributor changing, both as a result of that vision becoming reality and as a result of the decisions the distributors are making about what they want to be going forward?

Andrew Sage: Yeah, great question.

Distribution remains hugely important to Cisco. About a third of our business goes through our distribution channels. More than two-thirds of our transactions go through our distributors.

So they are very, very busy partners of ours in every corner of the world, and they continue to gain share in Cisco’s route-to-market mix. They become more and more relevant over time.

And their business is changing.

I have an AI agent that every morning gives me a summary of what’s been announced from our distributors, usually earnings announcements and things like that.

Their businesses are growing really well, and they’re profitable. They’re in a good spot.

But they’re being asked to do more and more by companies like ours who partner with them.

Obviously, they still need to deliver that core value of scaling our business into every corner of the world, providing us with capillarity, enabling our partners, helping our partners do demand generation, and even the most basic things they provide, almost taken for granted: inventory, credit, those sorts of things.

But now, more than ever, we’re really focusing on getting our distributors to help partners move fast, because this is all moving very fast.

We have this concept we call “on behalf of,” where our distributors are building capabilities to do things on behalf of partners.

In a community of partners that is pretty diverse, not every partner is going to be able to drive adoption, for example, and lifecycle services for their customers.

Not every partner will be able to do a sort of post-[unclear] security assessment for their customers, where there’s massive demand right now.

As you can imagine, customers are extremely nervous about the state of their infrastructure.

Do they need patches? Do they need upgrades? Do they need to put compensating controls in place?

A lot of our partners can’t deliver that service yet, but our distributors can.

And so we’re asking them to do some of these things on behalf of partners.

That last one is a really important example: doing customer assessments using some of the tools Cisco has, like Cisco IQ, to look into the customer’s network on behalf of that partner.

Give that customer a sense of what their priority actions are in order to secure their network in this crazy AI world, and then build a plan to help them go out and do it.

The distributors can also support that partner with professional services.

What this does is allow us to move quickly to get the new solutions into the hands of our customers.

It also creates a great profitability opportunity for our distributors. They’re really leaning into it, and we’re excited about this new phase we’re in.

Robert Dutt: Well, and it maps nicely with one of the things distributors have wanted to do for a while, which has obviously been the “sure, we’ll be your bench” kind of approach.

And that sounds like it’s taking it even a step beyond, as in, “Don’t just tag me in on a specific opportunity. I’ll be able to surface more of what your customers need,” because of telemetry and automation and all those good things.

Andrew Sage: Yeah, exactly.

And the earlier that partner has the conversation with the customer and then brings the resources from the distributor into that opportunity, the better.

Because once you’re early in that phase, you can consult with that customer. You can give them a path.

Customers’ budgets aren’t instantly doubling to upgrade everything in their network.

They need to know: Where do I go first? Where are my most vulnerable devices? What’s facing the Internet? What do I need to patch immediately? What could potentially wait until down the line? Where do I put a control in place?

And ultimately, how do I modernize that infrastructure?

It’s a long journey for some customers, and the distributors are helping a lot there.

Robert Dutt: One of the really interesting themes here has been Cisco’s work to make its own partner operations more agentic and to bring more of that automation into the mix, intelligent automation beyond just the rote rules.

Now, we’ve seen the announcement with Ingram Micro around SMB Quick Buy, which connects Cisco’s intelligence to Ingram’s Xvantage platform to automate more of the buying process.

Walk me through what that represents for you.

How fundamentally does it change the relationship between Cisco, the distributor, and the partners who you are jointly, ultimately serving?

Andrew Sage: What it does, in a nutshell, is that over time, I think we’re going to see a blurring between the distributor, the vendor, the partner, and the customer in terms of who does what in a typical workflow, whether it’s a commerce workflow, a design workflow, or an adoption workflow.

And I’m really thrilled by the opportunity to use AI in our business because it’s the most operationally complex business Cisco has.

As I mentioned, most of our transactions go through the distributors. Millions of transactions, some very small, some larger.

Where we think AI will really apply is in embedding it into workflows that face the partner and maybe ultimately even face the customer, taking manual, lower-value tasks away from the distributors’ teams so they can focus on the things I talked about before, like doing these post-[unclear] assessments.

So they move to value and use agents connecting back to our agents to conduct some of these more routine tasks.

And over time, those routine tasks will become even more sophisticated.

With Ingram Micro, what we’ve done is launch a service on their Xvantage platform that really walks a partner through designing a network, registering that opportunity with Cisco, getting the best pricing, and then ultimately placing the order, all assisted by Cisco’s AI agents on the back end.

It’s going to really simplify the process of working with Cisco for these partners.

And frankly, some of the smaller partners serving the SMB market, who we really value, find us a little difficult to work with sometimes.

This is going to really help that, I think.

Robert Dutt: What does it do, or what do you think it has the potential to do, for the velocity of the deal, especially once it’s been configured and set up on the partner end and handed off to Cisco?

I’m curious how much faster things can go when it’s a couple or three agents dealing with it, as opposed to going through the formal processes of getting a deal approved.

Andrew Sage: Of course, yeah.

And I have to stress that in all of these workflows, there are humans in the loop, for sure.

Because you want somebody to ensure at the end, “Yes, this is what I’m looking for. Yes, I’ve had a chance to tune it,” or whatever.

But in the case of Quick Buy, the process of designing the network, applying for a deal registration to get the best available pricing, and then placing that order, because of the back and forth between the partner, Ingram Micro, and Cisco, could potentially take a day to get all the approvals done and everything else.

In this agentic workflow that we built with Ingram Micro, it can be five minutes.

And that partner never has to leave Xvantage to get the value and intelligence of the agents we have on the Cisco platform, because they’re connected directly into that Xvantage workflow.

Robert Dutt: What do you see as the biggest difference between what you’re doing, and can do in the future, with agents versus the sort of e-commerce and automation work that distributors have been doing for a long time?

What’s possible now that wasn’t possible before?

Is it just a matter of that velocity, or is there more to it than that?

Andrew Sage: It’s a different kind of exchange of information, Robert.

Our interactions with our distributors are the most automated at Cisco, and we’re oftentimes the most automated vendor that these distributors work with.

But it’s done with APIs.

We’ve built out an extensive set of API connections, but APIs just exchange bits of information back and forth when asked. Ask, answer. Ask, answer.

Now that we’ve got these agentic communications, we’re exchanging intelligence. We’re exchanging insights.

It’s a very different exchange of information.

And using MCP servers, the connection between our agents and theirs is really simple to do.

Robert Dutt: Is what we’re seeing with Ingram a model for what the relationship with distributors is going to look like more broadly in the future?

Are we headed toward a world where these kinds of connections become the standard across the distribution ecosystem?

Andrew Sage: Sure hope so.

Robert Dutt: You’re betting on it?

Andrew Sage: Yeah, we’re betting on it.

I’ll give you another example, just to show you how quickly things are moving.

In fact, the work that we’re doing with the distributors is the first external agentic connections that Cisco has done.

So we’re going to see this broadly across our channel, our entire customer base, over time.

And we’ve got another example with another large global distributor, TD SYNNEX, where they’ve got a presales agent.

That presales agent takes a quote request from a customer, automatically passes it to our configuration agent, and our configuration agent reviews the request, recommends the right equipment, potentially recommends expansion opportunities, and passes that back to TD SYNNEX’s agent.

A quote is created in the TD SYNNEX ERP system that then gets reviewed by that presales engineer at TD SYNNEX.

They get involved in more value-added work of customizing it, potentially expanding it.

But they save a ton of time in all those initial phases because the first two or three phases of that entire interaction were done purely agent to agent.

And that is also live now in TD SYNNEX U.S.’s presales team.

Robert Dutt: So how do you see this changing how distributors differentiate themselves?

As the transactional side becomes increasingly automated, how does that change how they create value, how they justify themselves and what they do to both you and to their customer, the partner?

Because obviously, in distribution, you have to please a multitude of masters.

Andrew Sage: You do, yeah.

And you have to differentiate, for sure.

I will stress that the core values that distributors bring for vendors like ours — that capillarity, the ability to hold inventory, because we are very much a company that has hardware tethered to software to create that unique value for customers — remain important.

So inventory, subscription management, enablement: that continues to be really important.

But what this does is enable the distributor to move away from what would be considered busywork, potentially, and start to focus on some of those things we talked about at the beginning of the conversation.

Helping partners deliver AI security customer assessments for their customers, for example.

Another area where our distributors are really leaning in is software activation and adoption.

We want every customer of ours to love the subscription they have with us, but they won’t love it if they don’t activate it. They won’t love it if they don’t make sure everybody’s using it.

And once again, a lot of partners don’t have the teams or the skills to do that activation and adoption.

So the distributors are now staffing those teams to drive adoption with customers.

And there’s actually a really great incentive program at Cisco that they’re driving some super profitability out of as well.

So that’s the trend we see, moving toward that kind of work.

Robert Dutt: What are you hearing from partners, especially that smaller or midsize VAR or MSP who buys through distribution, in terms of where they see the most value in this sort of thing?

I’m curious how much is the ability to expand what they do versus the ability to take time out of the sales process.

Andrew Sage: I think that over time, it’s that “expand what they do” part that’s going to be the most valuable.

We have a lot of partners out there that are smaller, but whose customers, for example, want to use some of our more sophisticated buying programs, like enterprise agreements.

And so the distributors can basically represent the enterprise agreement capabilities for that customer and for that partner, and allow them to do an enterprise agreement when they could not have done one before.

The partners see huge value in that because all of a sudden, they can punch above their weight.

They can show up in an account with the distributor behind them, supplementing their capabilities to make them go head to head with a partner that might already have made those investments.

That’s pretty exciting for small partners.

I think we’re going to broaden our partner base by doing so.

Robert Dutt: You’ve spent a good part of your career focused on making Cisco’s technology more accessible to small and midsize businesses.

I know that’s not necessarily directly in your bailiwick at this exact moment, but is the next generation of distribution capabilities potentially a breakthrough for that market?

Could AI-driven automation make it easier for smaller partners to bring some of the higher-end stuff to market, especially, as you say, with partners who don’t necessarily have that capability today?

Andrew Sage: That is definitely the plan. Absolutely right.

We want to increase the breadth of our partner community.

We think that potentially complexity has limited us a little bit from reaching the number of partners that we want to reach.

And I think this kind of work we’re doing with the distributors is going to absolutely impact that.

Robert Dutt: What are the biggest SMB opportunities to add some of the technologies that may not have been as SMB-friendly in the past as they potentially could be?

Andrew Sage: One of the biggest benefits of the Cisco portfolio is that we have this platform approach, where under a single agentic management console, you can meet the needs of a customer from a networking standpoint, from a security standpoint, and from a collaboration standpoint.

And the platform on top of that allows it to be really easily managed under one interface, very agentic, so that it’s quite simple and doesn’t require quite as much manual work.

What I would love to see, frankly, Robert, is the partners we’re working with sell across the breadth of the portfolio and realize that platform advantage, which is going to really help out their customers as well.

They can do more with fewer people.

And I think that’s an exciting proposition for most SMBs that I talk to.

Robert Dutt: And that’s been, I know, an area of focus. Obviously, engaging distributors and getting cross-sell going has been an ongoing focus for God knows how long.

Andrew Sage: Forever, yes.

Robert Dutt: And it remains so.

Andrew Sage: One hundred percent.

Robert Dutt: But it seems like this is a real opportunity to potentially accelerate that as things get more automated and as distributors can add more of that ability and support.

Andrew Sage: One hundred percent.

Robert Dutt: Cisco’s asking partners to develop new capabilities in a bunch of new areas: AI, security, lifecycle services, customer experience.

How do you see distributors being able to help partners make that transition and build those skills themselves, as well as being the augmenter?

Andrew Sage: I think ultimately, over time, most of the SMB-focused partners that I talk to want to develop those skills themselves.

They want to be able to monetize those capabilities with their customers and maintain relevance with the customer.

But it’s rare that they’re going to have all of the people they need at the time they need them to do assessments or adoption.

And it’s also rare that, at the very moment the customer needs it, they may have the breadth of skills.

They may have the networking capabilities. Most of our partners are awesome at networking.

But some of them may just be starting to build some security capabilities, particularly around agentic AI and AI defense and some of these new technologies.

So I think that’s where the role of the distributor is most important.

It may be transient over time as they build out the capabilities of the partners, and then the partner moves on and does it on their own.

But it’s going to be hugely valuable for the channel.

Robert Dutt: Obviously, we’re in relatively early innings of agentic distribution, but I’m curious what you see now, especially now that we’ve got those first use cases in action with both Ingram and TD SYNNEX, and then probably others in the works, I don’t know, but I have to imagine.

What do you see as the next steps?

Where do you see this going in the short to medium term, in terms of the relationship and how that evolves?

Andrew Sage: Well, if you listen to Cisco, you’ll know for sure that we’re aggressively deploying AI in our own business to cover sales use cases, adoption, CX, et cetera.

And we see our relationship with our distributors moving in the same direction.

The examples I gave you are really focused on commerce simplification, configuration, and commerce.

The next wave of agents that we’re going to start deploying for the distributors are around installed-base analysis and recommendations, and identifying threats in a customer’s network.

Because we know what the customers have in the network through our systems and the distributor systems, we can apply agent technology to that to help that partner go out and articulate the challenges, the risks, and the opportunities there.

So, last day of support, identifying renewals, for example, is another great area where we can apply agentic workflows.

We can take a look at a customer’s renewal base, or a partner’s entire renewal base, and start to drive potentially agentic outbound to those customers to make sure that they know they’ve got a renewal coming.

Sometimes partners remember to do that, sometimes they don’t.

And the last thing you want is to get, “Oh my gosh, your renewal’s up, and I need you to do something for me in a day or two.”

Another area where distribution has been adding value for a long time, but the ability to do so at a different scale and a different velocity, certainly, as it gets agentic.

Robert Dutt: That makes sense.

Andrew Sage: One hundred percent.

Robert Dutt: A little bit of a sidebar, a little bit off the line of what we’ve been talking about, but we’re almost at the point of distributors getting represented under Cisco 360 and getting that PVI in place.

Beyond everyone liking to feel like they belong to the club and are under the same umbrella, what does it mean to your organization and to the distributors to be fully integrated into Cisco 360?

Andrew Sage: We’re thrilled.

We announced it to our distributors in some detail on Monday, and we got really great feedback.

So, like the Cisco 360 Partner Program, we’re about to enter the prequalification phase for our distributors, which is going to start in January.

That’s where they build up the capabilities they need in order to meet the requirements of the program.

But the feedback we’ve been getting is, number one, they love the fact that it’s very consistent in how the partner program is designed.

Number two is that the work Cisco has been doing to make the program super manageable in PXP is now available.

In fact, it’s available first for the distributors, and they love that.

And so we’re excited.

We’ve strived to get a program that was more predictable and simpler and ultimately more profitable.

And we got the thumbs-up this week from the distributors.

It goes live on the first day of our fiscal year 2028, which is August 1, 2027.

Robert Dutt: All right.

And I know with Cisco 360, obviously, you did a lot of premodelling to help make sure that partners were fitting into the program where they fit into, or better than, under the previous program.

I assume the same process is going on with the distributors.

Andrew Sage: Yeah, we’ve been co-designing this with them for about 18 months.

Ironically, we came to them with a really simple design.

Actually, they gave us ideas about a really simple design.

We went away and came back with a really complicated one, and then spent 12 months going back and forth, and we’re back to a very simple one now.

And that co-design process was super critical.

They gave us tons of great feedback along the way.

So it wasn’t really a surprise to many of them because most of them spent a lot of time telling us what they really needed from us.

Robert Dutt: Right on.

Wrapping up, when you look at this two or three years down the road, how different do you expect the Cisco distribution ecosystem to look, both in terms of what it does and how it does it?

And what’s the biggest change that you think partners should be preparing for in their own relationship with distributors?

Andrew Sage: I think partners should always ask a distributor for more than they’re getting from the distributor.

And I think they’re going to be surprised to find that that distributor will be able to meet those requirements.

Because we’re going to be really pushing them from our side, both enabling and encouraging the distributors to build out some of these value-added capabilities.

Ultimately, what it’s going to result in is a broader channel for Cisco and a more prepared channel for Cisco.

And I think that one of the biggest benefits of using distributors in this way is that we need to be agile.

It’s going to change quickly.

And I think our distributors can help us execute on the constant new opportunities and changes that we’re going to see in the market.

So that agility and breadth is something that I’m looking forward to.

And we have really big growth ambitions for the distribution channel over the next three years.

We have more tailwinds at the moment in this business than we’ve ever had.

We used to be happy with one solid tailwind, a growth cycle or something like that.

And we think we’ve got really four legitimate tailwinds.

We’ve got a cyclical growth cycle.

We’ve got the fact that agentic AI is driving up network traffic and requiring some redesigns and enhancements.

We’ve got a third one in the sort of post-[unclear] world of “I need to be secure.”

And then we’ve got the fourth one we just spent a lot of time talking about, which is AI is driving down the cost for us to scale and making room for the distributors and the small partners to drive more value.

Robert Dutt: Sounds like fun times for us distribution nerds.

Andrew Sage: Darn right it is.

Robert Dutt: Andrew, I appreciate your taking the time.

Andrew Sage: Great to talk to you, Robert.

Robert Dutt: There you have it, Andrew Sage, Cisco’s vice president of global partners and distribution sales, speaking to me at Cisco Partner Summit 2026 in Vancouver.

I think one of the most interesting takeaways from that conversation is that agentic AI could change distribution in two important ways.

The first is efficiency, taking processes that previously involved multiple systems, organizations, and manual steps and dramatically reducing the time required to complete them.

But the second may be even more important: giving distributors the ability to provide more sophisticated services and capabilities on behalf of partners, potentially allowing smaller solution providers to compete for opportunities that would otherwise be beyond their reach.

As Andrew points out, the next wave of agentic integration could take this even further, helping partners proactively identify customer needs around security, modernization, and lifecycle management.

My thanks to Andrew for taking the time to join us, and to Cisco for hosting us at Partner Summit.

And of course, as always, thank you for listening.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, please do subscribe to or follow the podcast, whatever podcast app you use. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, all the usual suspects.

And of course, if you’re in the mood, ratings and reviews are always appreciated.

Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

[Music]