The Rise of AI Agents in Partner Experience Management

In this episode, Sugata Sanyal, Founder & CEO of ZINFI, welcomes Naomi Dreifuss, Founder & CEO of Zugit, for an in-depth discussion about her journey from enterprise SaaS sales to launching a transformative AI-powered partner experience platform. Naomi reflects on her decade-long career in B2B sales, with notable stints at data-centric companies like Sisense, where she first encountered the systemic challenges of working with channel partners.

At Sisense, Naomi struggled with the inefficiencies of indirect sales—complex processes, lack of alignment between sales and partnership teams, and minimal trust between vendors and partners. The pivotal moment came when the company announced it would cut parts of its direct sales force to expand its channel partner program. Realizing the future lay in mastering this flawed system, Naomi sought to understand and ultimately redesign it.

She discovered her frustrations were widely shared among peers in similar roles, revealing a broader industry problem: channel partnerships were broken, weighed down by poor data sharing, misaligned incentives, and outdated processes. This insight fueled her decision to found Zugit, named after the Hebrew word Zug (partner). Naomi’s vision is to build an agile, modern framework for partner relationship management akin to how Salesforce revolutionized software delivery.

Naomi Dreifuss identifies a major transformation underway in the channel landscape: the era of efficiency has arrived. She explains that the pressure to generate faster return on investment (ROI) is no longer coming just from sales leaders, but from company boards and investors. Organizations are demanding smarter, leaner go-to-market (GTM) strategies—whether direct or indirect—that can scale quickly without consuming disproportionate resources. Naomi stresses that this requires a complete mindset shift: partnerships must adopt the same agile, iterative approaches already embraced in software development and marketing. Legacy models can't keep up with the pace of today’s ecosystem economy.

Sugata adds that while software development has moved from long, waterfall cycles to continuous releases in the cloud, partner development hasn’t followed suit. Companies still rely on rigid, once-a-year partner kickoffs, which creates an "information density" problem—partners can’t absorb or act on new initiatives fast enough. Naomi calls this outdated structure “painful” and a “waste of money.” She notes the lack of modern resources and execution playbooks for partner experience management, highlighting a critical gap in the industry.

Naomi addressed this with over 300 partnership leaders and partners for two years. She uncovered universal friction: partners often juggle multiple vendors with different systems, making the experience inefficient and risky. Zugit pivoted from building another partner portal to developing a data-driven platform for vendors, giving them real-time insights, sentiment analysis, and a unified source of truth to manage partnerships more strategically.

Naomi Dreifuss explains how Zugit delivers value through a hybrid model that blends strategic service with intelligent software. The process begins with Zugit providing a high-level “Bloomberg report” for C-suite executives, offering a clear snapshot of the company’s partner ecosystem. This visibility helps CEOs and CFOs understand the state of their channel programs and secure their buy-in—crucial for executing meaningful change. With executive alignment, Zugit then deploys its AI-powered agents to work alongside channel teams, transforming strategy into action by identifying performance gaps, data blind spots, and emerging partnership opportunities.

One of Zugit’s most powerful tools is its sentiment analysis agent, which continuously collects partner feedback and generates health scores. This feature helps channel managers prioritize their attention and resources, particularly in managing the long tail of underperforming partners. Naomi shares a striking example where a client had over 12,000 signed partners, yet only 800 were driving value. Instead of focusing on partner acquisition, Zugit helped them uncover “golden nuggets” already in their ecosystem.

Looking ahead, Naomi envisions Zugit as a central intelligence platform for executive teams seeking to optimize inefficient partnership programs. She stresses the importance of embracing AI in partnerships, predicting that resistant mindsets will naturally phase out as data-driven leaders take over.