Ep 2 Pt 2 - The Agentic Buyer

The hard part of ecosystem strategy was never proving that partners matter. It's translating that belief into infrastructure, data, and outcomes that senior leaders can measure, especially now that AI is rewriting how buying decisions get made.

In this episode of Spur Conversations, host Kate Caday returns with Jay McBain, Chief Analyst at Omdia, and Bob Moore, co-founder and CEO of Crossbeam, to turn the ecosystem conversation into a playbook. If agent-to-agent selling is coming, what should leaders actually do now? The answer is less about chasing the next shiny thing and more about doing the fundamentals better than everyone else.

Key takeaways:

• There's no switch to flip. An ecosystem can't be conjured overnight, which is exactly why incumbents with established partnerships hold an advantage they can put to work immediately.

• Build the glue layer early. The data infrastructure that connects your ecosystem to other systems isn't expensive or difficult to start, and it creates a virtuous cycle: outcomes justify investment, which drives more outcomes.

• You only have to be 10% better than your competitors. The odds are sobering (most companies won't survive the next decade), but no one is doing this well yet. Crawl, walk, run beats trying to figure it all out first.

• Win on place, not product. In 50 years the best product, price, or promotion has never won. Distribution and ecosystem do, and AI has put an exclamation mark on it.

• Get granular about names, faces, and places. Roughly 80% of the $7 trillion AI buildout runs through about a thousand partners. Knowing exactly who they are, and where they gather, is the new level of executive-ready detail.