Oxygen 250 leaders swapped their killer AI uses cases and mulled the future of the industry in the first episode of this special podcast.
Sponsored by Nebula Global Services, the Oxygen 250 profiles the UK’s top 250 channel partners by revenue.
It is free to download here.
This month, we welcomed two Oxygen 250 leaders into the studio to discuss some of the key themes that emerged from the report or have since bubbled up (see highlights above, and full video, bottom).
Our guests:
Candice Arnold – CRO, Wanstor
Alastair Rudman – CEO, Natilik
Ross Teague – CEO, Nebula Global Services
2025 has already seen some big channel partners – including Advania – restyle themselves as AI services and solutions companies.
Asked how 207th-ranked Oxygen 250 outfit Wanstor characterises itself, Arnold said was emphatic.
“I’ll tell you what I’m not: I’m not a trusted advisor. Because I think these days, with AI-powered smartphones, everybody has an AI-trusted advisor in their back pocket,” she said.
“We want to be known as the doer, somebody who helps you execute your strategy and really helps create those business outcomes for customers.”
Rudman characterised 52nd-ranked Oxygen 250 outfit Natilik as a “global technology solutions and services company” that works with midmarket enterprise clients to deliver their outcomes, meanwhile.
“Loads and loads of AI us cases”
Asked about killer AI case studies, Arnold said Wanstor has shifted its focus to AI incubators that are pre-priced out of the box.
They give customers “the guardrails for them to actually take to market something that is pre-defined, without them having to do too much work”, she said.
“The whole notion of agentic AI is giving organisations the ability to not just experiment with artificial intelligence, but to really try and be bold,” she said.
Rudman picked out service desk as an “obvious example” of where channel partners themselves have benefited from AI.
“The way in which we can predictively answer enquiries, the way in which we can speed up our mean time to resolution, self-service for our clients… the list goes on,” he said.
Rudman said Natilik’s use of the likes of Cursor to migrate and check code is also “giving loads of time back to engineers”, while the bots it has created for its staff to interrogate knowledge bases are “speeding up RFPs inordinately”.
“There are loads and loads of cases just within a business like our own,” he said.
Nebula is predominantly using AI around business process automation, Teague said.
“We’re probably doing 5% of what we could be doing with AI, and I might be being generous there,” he said.
In this first episode, our panellists discuss:
- What they like to be known as in 2025
- How their role is evolving
- Their killer AI case studies
- What extra precautions they are taking around cyber amid a surge in cyber attacks
