I looked at the latest partner program updates from the big cloud providers. Microsoft is throwing cash at Copilot Deployments. Salesforce is pushing Agentforce Activations.
This is 2010 thinking applied to 2026 technology.
They are paying us to turn it on. They measure success by seats deployed or active tenants. AI is a garden. It needs weeding, watering, and pruning.
When you incentivize deployment, you get what you pay for. A thousand half-baked bots that get turned on, annoy a few customers, and get quietly turned off three months later.
The ecosystem is flooding with POCs that never scale and deployments that technically went live but have zero adoption because the answers they give are mediocre.
Nobody is paid to make them good.
The partner program pays to deploy the solution. The partner takes the check, sets up the tenant, runs a training session, and leaves. The customer is left with a stochastic parrot that hallucinates twenty percent of the time.
The metric for success must be adoption and resolution. Pay when the bot successfully resolves its thousandth ticket. Pay when the sales team uses it to book fifty meetings.
If the major vendors want their AI transformations to stick, they need to stop bribing partners to shovel shelfware. They need to start rewarding the hard, unglamorous work of tuning, testing, and refining.
Until then, Deployment is just a vanity metric with a bonus attached.