Most large enterprises now have an AI assistant in the hands of most of their employees. Very few can point to a number in their profit and loss that moved because of it. Closing that gap is what Zinnov calls Enterprise AI diffusion, the job of getting AI out of pilots and into how a company actually runs. The constraint is rarely the model. It is what a company will change around it: who owns the result, what gets checked before an answer is acted on, and what the systems underneath are allowed to do.
Most enterprises added AI to the work instead of rebuilding the work around it. Zinnov’s AI maturity framework sets out four stages: Manual, AI-Augmented, Agentic and AI-Native. The majority of large companies sit at AI-augmented, where assistants run on existing systems and a person reviews every output. Value starts at Agentic, where roles are redesigned, agents act inside defined limits, and business heads answer for what those agents produce. One move separates the two, and almost every large enterprise is stuck on it, because it asks ownership, checking and systems to change at once.
Enterprises do not make that move alone. The Zinnov Partner Survey 2026 found that when a partner leads a pilot, two to three times as many reach production. The work that carries a company from AI-augmented to Agentic belongs to specialists most enterprises have never contracted: context engineering firms that build the map of the business every agent reads, evaluation and assurance firms that test whether its answers hold, and security firms that give each agent an identity and a boundary. One partner in five leads that work today, and four in five say it is their focus for the next 12 to 18 months.
The programs they sell through have not caught up. Partner investment sits in the middle of a deal, where the billing is familiar, while AI deals die at the two ends. Among partners surveyed, 46% rate unpaid pre-sales work a severe problem, and 45% say no liability terms cover what happens when an agent gets something wrong.
That leaves four questions in front of every partner program this year. Which specialist partner types to recruit, and how to get each one to a first joint deal. Where to move the funding and the incentives. How to serve large enterprises and the mid-market when different partners win each. And how to pay for all of it on a team that is not growing.
The keynote answers each one, with the frameworks behind the argument and the partner stack an agentic deployment actually needs. Download the keynote here.
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