Microsoft Has Stopped Paying Partners to Exist 

AI: genuine upside, but only if you're actually selling it 

The new Growth Margin on strategic AI workloads is a proper incentive. It pays on new-to-offer, seat expansion and adoption growth and it stacks on top of what you already earn. 

The bit nobody much likes saying, though: if you're not landing Copilot, Agent 365 or AI-led workloads, this incentive doesn't exist for you. Microsoft isn't paying partners for turning up at renewal time; it's paying the ones who create new demand. 



And a gentle reminder while we're here: buyers have grown more sceptical. AI in your messaging is now an expectation rather than a differentiator. We're seeing very clear daylight between partners who are actually doing it and partners who've simply put it on the website. The Growth Margin rewards the first group, and the ones really winning are still those who can demonstrate their own journey. “Customer zero” is not a phrase that’s going away any time soon, so if you can’t answer “how is AI affecting your target operating model?” when your customers or indeed Microsoft ask, you need to get started, and quickly. 

Promotions: cash on the table, wasted without messaging 

Windows 365 at up to 25% off, extended E3 and E5 promos, a new E7 promo, Copilot bundles now permanent in SMB. 

All of it is useful, but promotions don't create pipeline, effective to-customer messaging does. If your sales team can't articulate a business outcome, a 25% discount is just a number on a slide – and as we all know customers don't buy discounts, they buy reasons, therefore the promo basket is fuel for a conversation you have to be capable of starting in the first place. 

Change of channel partner: less punitive than the noise suggests 

The new rules aren't the disaster LinkedIn would have you believe. Incoming partners keep the Growth Accelerator even in displacement scenarios. 

But again, this only matters if you're winning customers, not inheriting them or waiting for them. If your growth plan is "hopefully someone else's customers get fed up", FY27 incentives aren’t going to fix that for you. 

Modern Work and Dynamics: yes, it's worse. That's not the real problem 

The flat rebate is gone. Core rate is gone for indirect resellers. Another 5% margin cut hits legacy SKUs in October. 

That's a genuine hit and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. But the real issue isn't the cuts. It's that too many partners, were (and to some extent still are) built on rebate gravity rather than customer outcomes, with renewals quietly doing the heavy lifting for years. FY27 won’t break those businesses so much as expose them. 

The MCI shift that's had far less airtime than it really deserves 

The CSP rebate changes have attracted most of the attention, but this is the structural shift that actually matters. It's not something you'll spot by comparing rebate percentages. 

Microsoft have folded all of their activity-based incentives under a single umbrella called Frontier Accelerate, so these MCI incentives no longer sit as separate line items but as one connected programme. And the positioning has shifted with it, AI isn't one of three strands sitting alongside Azure and Security anymore, it's the strategy the whole thing is built around. They’re also splitting the Copilot deployment incentives in two, one for M365 and one for agents, which tells you exactly where Microsoft thinks the next wave of value sits: agentic workloads aren't a feature of Copilot any more, they're being funded as their own category. 

In FY26 the funding pot was broad, predictable and product/SKU-driven. You could earn across Azure, Security and AI Business Solutions without deep alignment. Pipeline was optional and renewals carried you through. 

In FY27 you get three targeted investment programmes: AI, Azure and Security. Each comes with its own gates and proof requirements, and each is designed to reward partners creating new demand rather than maintaining old estates. MCI engagements now need demonstrable outcomes, and co-sell maturity is increasingly the price of entry. 

The upshot is that Microsoft has stopped funding presence and started funding impact. Partner Centre has quietly become a pivotal line on the P&L, and the partners doing well are the ones who've got that engine singing. 

And while everyone's busy complaining about the rate card, many are missing the change that actually matters most for the SMB segment. The customer eligibility threshold has dropped from the historic 300 to 500 user range down to just 50 in some instances. That's not a rounding error, it's Microsoft putting real money behind proof that SMB transformation matters to them, not just enterprise. And then there's the conversion bonus, which is Microsoft doing the thing we've been telling partners to do for years: being deliberately narrow. Rather than a generic top-up, it specifically rewards partners for displacing the likes of Google Workspace and CrowdStrike. That's not spray-and-pray funding, it's a targeted opportunity to displace named competitors. 

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