The World Economic Forum ‘s Growth in the New Economy: Towards a Blueprint (April 2026) is, on the surface, a macroeconomic policy document for governments. Read it as a B2B tech channel leader, however, and it has plenty to say on the game of partner ecosystems in the next 5 years.
The headline finding is striking. Of the twenty-two industries scored by the Forum’s panel of more than 11,000 executives, IT services scored 11.5 as a driver of global growth to 2030. The next-ranked sector, advanced manufacturing, scored 7.7. Healthcare followed at 7.1.
The economic growth vector for the next five years (and beyond) is technology-shaped and in B2B technology, that value increasingly reaches the customer through partners.
So what are the key takeaways from the WEF report?
1: The geographic centre of gravity has moved
The WEF projects that Asia will contribute more than 50% of global GDP growth between 2025 and 2030, with Southern Asia alone delivering 17.9% – more than the whole of Europe (15.5%) or North America (11.9%). Middle-income economies will account for 65% of cumulative global growth.
Most UK, European and North American partner programmes were architected for a different distribution. They prioritise established VAR, MSP and SI partners in saturated markets, with enablement, margin mechanics and sales motions tuned to mature buying behaviour. The growth, increasingly, is elsewhere, and so is the partner type that can capture it.
This isn’t an argument for abandoning your existing base. It is an argument for assessing what proportion of your partner investment is currently flowing toward the geographies that will produce the next wave of demand. For most vendors I work with, the answer is: nowhere near enough.
2: Investment-led growth changes the sales motion
The WEF found that business investment and foreign demand are the two most-cited sources of expected growth across regions and income levels, while consumer spending and public expenditure are notably weak.
For tech vendors and their partners, this matters because investment-led growth requires a fundamentally different sales motion than consumption-led growth. Investment buyers expect business cases, longer cycles, executive sponsorship, multi-year value modelling and outcomes-based contracting. Most channel programmes still reward transactional licensing and product-attached margin.
If you want partners to capture investment-led demand, the economic model you’ve built around them, the rebates, the deal registration mechanics, the marketing development funds, and the certification structure need to reflect the work it actually takes to win those deals.
3: The AI dilemma cuts straight through the channel
The WEF frames the technology question as a no-regret move (productivity growth, human capital investment) coupled with a dilemma: competition versus coordination. Translate that into channel terms, and the same tension appears.
AI is simultaneously the largest single contributor to IT services growth and the largest single threat to traditional partner economics. Partners that can productise AI advisory, deployment and managed services will compound growth. Partners that remain implementation arbitrageurs of a labour cost they no longer enjoy will compress. Vendors face the parallel choice: race partners to the frontier, or coordinate the diffusion of AI capabilities across the base.
4: Fragmentation rewires what partners are for
The WEF identifies geoeconomic fragmentation as a net negative for two-thirds of countries but a positive in pockets of South-East Asia. Supply chains are reorganising. Critical technologies are being weaponised. Trade barriers and reshoring are reshaping comparative advantage.
For partner ecosystems, this is a structural opportunity. Partners are increasingly the answer to a problem vendors cannot solve unilaterally: localised data residency, sovereign cloud requirements, regional compliance, in-country presence, language and cultural fit. The vendors that lean into this by treating partners as geopolitical infrastructure rather than distribution overhead will find their ecosystems acquire strategic weight that direct sales cannot replicate.
5: The barriers map tells you where to invest
The two intersecting barriers identified by executives globally are high energy costs (a top-three barrier in 62% of countries) and lack of policy stability (53%). Beyond that, barriers diverge sharply by income level: skills shortages and rigid regulation in high-income markets, access to finance and infrastructure in lower-income markets.
For vendors building global partner programmes, that divergence is significant. A single global enablement programme design will under-serve both ends. High-income markets need partner skills development, regulatory navigation and AI fluency. Lower-income markets need finance access, deal-stage support and infrastructure readiness. Many vendors are still running one programme everywhere.
A warning from the past
The WEF puts it sharply:
Old growth strategies in the new economy are unlikely to yield returns and may even erode past gains.
The same is true of channel programmes. The structures, incentives and partner archetypes that produced the last decade of indirect revenue will not produce the next. Left unrenewed, they will actively destroy value because they hold investment in declining practices while competitors fund the rising ones.
Take a look at a different ecosystem
Tech is an instinctively introspective and focused world where we obsess about solution capabilities, competitors and partner relationships, but channel leaders looking for precedent should take a look over the fence. The most instructive lessons come from sectors that have already navigated structural channel resets.
Automotive franchising
The franchise dealer model that defined US and European car retail for nearly a century has been disrupted by direct-to-consumer entrants. Tesla is the obvious case, but legacy OEMs are now re-entering direct sales through e-commerce platforms. The lesson for tech: when the manufacturer can establish a cleaner, more profitable, data-rich relationship with the end customer through a marketplace, the franchise model has to justify its existence on something more than incumbency. Cloud marketplaces are doing to the technology channel what Tesla did to dealerships.
Travel agencies
The collapse of the high-street travel agent is a cautionary tale. A whole layer of intermediation that added genuine value via curation, advice, and complexity management was destroyed not because the value disappeared, but because the cost structure couldn’t survive disintermediation by online aggregators offering “good enough” at a fraction of the price. AI buying agents and self-service procurement are the same threat to transactional resellers. The travel partners that survived were those that moved up-stack into experience design and complex itinerary work. The MSP and reseller equivalent is moving into AI advisory, vertical specialisation and outcome-based managed services.
Pharmaceutical distribution
US pharmaceutical distribution consolidated to three majors in Cardinal, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen over the past thirty years. Specialist distributors didn’t disappear; they bifurcated. One tier became massive-scale logistics machines, the other became high-margin specialists in oncology, biologics and rare disease. Technology distribution is partway through the same bifurcation, with hyperscaler-aligned scale players on one side and capability-led specialists on the other. The middle tier, neither at scale nor specialist, is where disintermediation pressure is most acute, and it’s where a lot of vendor channel investment is currently parked.
Financial services platformisation
Open banking, embedded finance and the rise of API-first infrastructure providers (Stripe, Plaid, Adyen) restructured how financial products reach end customers. Banks are increasingly the regulated layer behind a platform that owns the customer experience. The cloud marketplace stack in the form of Pax8 , Giacom and Sherweb hyperscaler marketplaces, is the same pattern playing out in technology. Vendors who treat it as another route-to-market risk being commoditised by those who treat it as the route-to-market.
The pattern across all four is this. Channels don’t die – they restructure.
No regrets
The WEF report frames its core argument as a contest between no-regret moves and dilemmas. The same framing applies to partner ecosystems.
- The no-regret moves for B2B technology vendors with partner ecosystems are reasonably clear.
- Concentrate investment on the geographies where GDP growth actually is, not where your historical revenue mix says it should be.
- Re-engineer partner economics for investment-led, outcomes-based selling rather than transactional product attachment.
- Build AI advisory, deployment and managed services capability into the partner base, both as a customer offer and as a defence against intermediation.
- Treat partners as expert, connected, geopolitical and regulatory infrastructure, not as distribution overhead.
- Differentiate enablement design by market maturity rather than running one global programme.
The dilemma is how fast to disrupt your own incumbent channel to capture the new space before someone else does. Move too slowly, and the marketplace layer eats your margin. Move too fast, and you destroy the partner trust that took twenty years to build.
The hand you were dealt for the old economy is not likely to be the hand you need for the new one.
