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Will AI buy your software next?
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In this discussion, Vinod Nair and Michael Levy explore how product-led growth (PLG) and agentic AI are fundamentally reshaping the AWS Marketplace. They detail why relying on traditional sales-led motions is becoming obsolete as AI agents increasingly take over software discovery and procurement. The conversation provides actionable insights on auditing API strategies, adopting outcome-based commercial models, and removing setup friction to capture the growing wave of machine-driven B2B buying.
Key Takeaways
- Product-led growth (PLG) allows users to discover, try, and buy solutions without relying on direct sales interactions.
- A successful free trial must deliver immediate value rather than forcing customers to spend time on complex setup processes.
- AI agents prioritize technical availability, structured metadata, and API access over traditional brand identity during procurement.
- The Marketplace MCP server acts as an official connector for Claude, driving a significant increase in AI-based search and evaluation traffic.
- Sellers looking to monetize agentic AI should transition their commercial models toward usage and outcome-based billing.
- Over 90% of surveyed global sellers are expected to transition to product-led growth within the next three years.
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Key Tags
product-led growth, AWS marketplace, agentic AI, software procurement, Claude connector, API strategy, outcome-based billing, SaaS transformation, technical availability, structured metadata, AWS seller prime, agent core payments
Transcript
Vinod Nair and Michael Levy AUDIO Podcast
[00:00:00] Michael Levy: Humans, for the most part, care about brand and brand identity and all of that. Agents don’t care about that, right? It’s about the technical availability. It’s about the structured metadata. It’s about evaluating whether it’s the right tool to accomplish that task.
[00:00:15] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026.
[00:00:26] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi. Own your host. And each week I sit down with leaders at the
[00:00:33] Vince Menzione: intersection of technology, partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy.
[00:00:48] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. Let’s start.
[00:00:57] Vince Menzione: All right. Thank you. All right,
[00:01:01] Vince Menzione: so we talked about product led earlier today with that, um. Agent powered. And then marketplace growth is, uh, is part, part of your, your mandate. You’ve got a lot of mandates though, from what I remember. Um, why don’t we just go through like introductions and tell, take us through your mandate, your individual mandates and roles at AWS.
[00:01:20] Vinod Nair: Okay, thank you. Uh, my name’s Vinod Nier. I’ve been with AWS marketplace close to eight years now. Uh, I started off as a category lead and worked with. Elastic, uh, MongoDB Databricks. Uh, and that’s where I kind of learned that one of the big missed opportunities in marketplace is helping ISVs grow through product led growth.
[00:01:43] Vinod Nair: So, literally wrote a paper, got it approved, and this launched AWS marketplace Sell a Prime about three and a half years ago.
[00:01:51] Vince Menzione: Nice.
[00:01:52] Vinod Nair: Elastic was one of our founding partners. Grateful for their support and it’s. It’s grown, and that’s kind of my charter. How do I help ISVs activate product-led growth in marketplace?
[00:02:03] Vince Menzione: I love it. I wanna dive in.
[00:02:04] Vince Menzione: Vinod is the godfather of product led growth. I love it on marketplace.
[00:02:08] Michael Levy: Um, I’m, uh, Mike Levy. Uh, I’m from our marketplace business development team. So my team focuses on feature launch and go to market. So for across the features, uh, in Matt Wise org. For partners and for customers.
[00:02:21] Michael Levy: And I’m also, I’ve also been the BD lead for our AI agents and tools category within Marketplace. So we formally launched that as a category last year and we’ve seen tremendous growth. And along with the category, we’ve also launched like new deployment mechanisms that many of our partners and customers are taking advantage of.
[00:02:37] Michael Levy: Basically to make it easier for partners to go to market with ag agentic solutions specifically, uh, and for customers to procure those solutions on marketplace.
[00:02:46] Michael Levy: Unbelievable. So I think a lot of people get PLG wrong and we’ll start there. And you, you’ve had, you mentioned some market leaders
[00:02:53] Vinod Nair: Yeah.
[00:02:54] Vince Menzione: Like outstanding organizations.
[00:02:55] Vince Menzione: So take, take us through, I mean, I’m not expecting you to go through all six pages Sure. Of the document you wrote, but we know it’s a six pager usually. Right. Uh, but with the pen. But take us through the thesis of what, what you had to solve. Why, why partners need to get this right.
[00:03:09] Vinod Nair: Yeah. Yeah. So I’ll start with just kind of defining product led growth because it’s.
[00:03:13] Vinod Nair: It’s, it’s, it’s still ambiguous to a lot. Yeah. And so have a product that basically a user can discover, try and buy without talking to a salesperson. So that’s kind of the key element that it looks, sounds simple, but it is incredibly complex behind the scenes. So there’s a, like the duck swimming very fast.
[00:03:36] Vinod Nair: You think everything is fine. So. It incorporates free trial. That same, because that’s how a customer actually sees the value, but the free trial needs to have some value. It’s delivering. Otherwise, if the customer is just spending most of their time trying to start your product, then free trial’s a waste.
[00:03:56] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:03:57] Vinod Nair: Then, then it is kind of monitoring them through their journey. And so this includes support from marketing. It includes support from sales because sales needs to, sales can now become more of a customer success because they can, they have a very qualified lead. Here’s a customer that’s actually using my product.
[00:04:16] Vinod Nair: They’ve seen the value. So I, when I have that conversation with the CTO, it’s like I’ve already won the technical battle. I need to do now is show you the commercials for a, for a bigger deal.
[00:04:28] Vince Menzione: What are you doing to help them? Are you helping them embed any technology into their solutions so that you can get the real time feedback you need to on their usage?
[00:04:38] Vince Menzione: And
[00:04:38] Vinod Nair: so
[00:04:39] Vince Menzione: where they’re
[00:04:39] Vinod Nair: seeing what, what AWS marketplace has done is a few things. One, we have, uh. Like currently we have, IM delegation and quick, uh, it used to be called moonwalk. What that does is it removes the friction of setting things up. That’s a complex task. So that’s, that’s where we are trying to bring that down to as close to one click as possible.
[00:05:02] Vinod Nair: Databricks is a great example where we started off and that hockey stick analogy, they saw a tremendous growth in conversion. Once they did that,
[00:05:11] Vince Menzione: yeah.
[00:05:11] Vinod Nair: Another one is buy with AWS. So free trial has ended. Don’t let them disappear. Hey, you can continue and buy with AWS so they stay within your product.
[00:05:24] Vinod Nair: Complete the free trial and start going down the paid journey.
[00:05:30] Vince Menzione: So Mike, 2,700 agent.
[00:05:33] Michael Levy: Uh,
[00:05:33] Michael Levy: no, I think that’s when we spoke in, uh
[00:05:35] Vince Menzione: oh, it’s, oh, okay.
[00:05:36] Vince Menzione: I think it’s over 4,000.
[00:05:37] Vince Menzione: Wow. It’s over four. Okay.
[00:05:38] Michael Levy: And let, let’s be clear, I think Matt cleared this up a little bit, but it’s AG agentic solutions, right? Right. So a lot of that is professional services, uh, which have you tuned in recently.
[00:05:47] Michael Levy: There there’s, uh, much more economic incentives to transacting professional services, including agentic professional services, um, and SaaS solutions that have agents embedded within it. So there’s a couple different models with ISVs that we’ve seen on. How they’re going to market with agentic solutions.
[00:06:04] Michael Levy: Um, and it’s kind of a, a, a spectrum that I can get into detail, if that’s helpful.
[00:06:07] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Well, um, I’m, I’m interested in how your two, uh, wheelhouses your remits, uh, kind of, they, they converge and they diverge, right? In many respects.
[00:06:18] Vince Menzione: Definitely.
[00:06:18] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:06:18] Michael Levy: Um, I think product-led growth has been a story of how humans can procure something, a product without friction and without talking to another human.
[00:06:28] Michael Levy: I think agent led growth maybe is the the next evolution of that, where
[00:06:31] Michael Levy: sounds like it
[00:06:32] Michael Levy: today. If a human can’t come to your product page or come to your product page on marketplace and seamlessly execute the entire funnel from discovery to procurement. I’m sure as hell that an agent can’t, an agent can’t either.
[00:06:45] Michael Levy: Mm-hmm. Um, and so Arif touched on this briefly, but it’s really about making your product discoverable to agents. So if you’re not doing that either through marketplace or directly, it means you’re not gonna be showing up in the places where a lot of our buyers, more than half of our buyers now are doing the research.
[00:07:01] Michael Levy: Um, and so my call to action, I’ve spoken to ISVs a lot about this is. Look at your product, like audit your API strategy. Like if you look at your product, if an agent comes to your product today, are they gonna hit a login screen or are they gonna hit an API or an MCP server? Mm-hmm. And I think the delta between the two, that should be your product roadmap over the next six to 12 months.
[00:07:22] Michael Levy: Makes
[00:07:22] Michael Levy: sense. It makes sense.
[00:07:23] Vinod Nair: Yeah. And I’d I’d add to that, that one of the. One of, on my LinkedIn feed, there was a developer who said they wanted to try MongoDB and it was human gated because they told their agent, go try MongoDB for me. So keeping that in mind, it’s like you’re gonna see more of that agent, uh, discovery agent, trial agent buy.
[00:07:43] Vinod Nair: So all of that is going to happen. Discovery has already happened. One of the. G two studies said that 52% of buyers are now starting somewhere in G two in in the chat GPT or something else. So that’s like a B2B buyer, and about 33% of them bought from a vendor they never even considered to begin with just because the research showed them something new.
[00:08:09] Vince Menzione: That’s the testament right there.
[00:08:10] Vince Menzione: Yeah. I think agent to that point, you know, humans for the most part, care about brand. Brand identity and all of that. Agents don’t care about that, right? It’s about the technical availability. It’s about the structured metadata. It’s about evaluating whether it’s the right tool to accomplish that task.
[00:08:26] Vince Menzione: And the agents are gonna make a very quick analysis, right? Millisecond analysis, and they’re gonna go through that whole catalog and they’re gonna pick. Either good goods are good or bad and they’re gonna make some decision points.
[00:08:38] Vinod Nair: Exactly,
[00:08:39] Vince Menzione: yeah. We’re seeing that already, like we’re seeing a lot of traction.
[00:08:41] Vince Menzione: So we talk about agent mode, which is if a human comes to marketplace and wants to upload an RFP or describe a use case that they want to get a solution for. I think the other aspect is agent mode is powered by the marketplace. MCP. The marketplace, MCP server is also an official connector in Claude, so we’re seeing an increasing amount of marketplace search and evaluation traffic that’s coming from Claude, not just from the Marketplace website.
[00:09:05] Vince Menzione: Yes.
[00:09:06] Vince Menzione: Let’s talk about where partners stall, where they, where they misstep. ’cause I think it’s important we, we learn the most from our, our mistakes.
[00:09:14] Vinod Nair: Yeah. I, I’d say for product led growth, it, it’s very similar to what Stalls sales led growth that Arif mentioned. It’s looking at marketplace as an afterthought saying, I am, yeah, I’m doing pro, I’m doing product led growth on my direct.
[00:09:32] Vinod Nair: Site, I’m just gonna use marketplace for enterprise sales.
[00:09:37] Vince Menzione: Yeah.
[00:09:37] Vinod Nair: And I’m gonna put a a hundred thousand dollars product in marketplace. Like, okay, you’re losing a lot of money. Uh, one of the recent, we are gonna come out with this study, it said that in the next three years, uh, we’ve surveyed a whole bunch of sellers across the globe.
[00:09:54] Vinod Nair: 2.8% of the correspond, or the respondents said they’re gonna stick with a sales led motion in three years. Yeah, the remaining 90, my math is always bad, but 90 plus percent are going to adopt product led growth. So if you are not adopting that product LED growth and the other kind of, sorry, don’t want to throw a lot of data, but Marketplace is the second highest cell service route to market after the ISVs own website.
[00:10:23] Vince Menzione: Interesting.
[00:10:23] Vinod Nair: So if you are not coming there, you’re not thinking about it holistically. You don’t have your executives buy-in. It’s not gonna succeed.
[00:10:33] Vince Menzione: That makes sense. What about from your side?
[00:10:35] Michael Levy: Yeah, I think it, from a product-led growth pers perspective and an intech AI in general, it’s, it’s the same sort of analysis that you would do.
[00:10:41] Michael Levy: It’s like, where is the funnel leaking, right?
[00:10:43] Michael Levy: Yeah.
[00:10:43] Michael Levy: Is it top of funnel that you need to get your marketing teams involved and, and channeling ’em towards marketplace? Is it sort of trial conversion or is it even post-purchase deployment? Like there’s, there’s a lot of SaaS out there that gets procured in some capacity.
[00:10:58] Michael Levy: A lot of it’s pay as you go. Some of it’s product led. And it doesn’t get used. And so Marketplace has some incredible features to help on post-purchase deployment as well. Um, I think where folks are, where partners are getting maybe stalled with it when it comes to agentic ai, um, I think is maybe not jumping in far enough.
[00:11:19] Michael Levy: So I talked about that audit of like making your software agent accessible. I think that’s the, the big piece that’s like the table stakes now. Um, I think where we see. Partners succeeding is where they’ve done that audit. They’re making their software agent accessible, but then they’re also shifting their go-to-market model, uh, and maybe their commercial model, and they’re pivoting a little bit more towards usage and outcome-based.
[00:11:42] Michael Levy: Zendesk was a good example. Workday was a good example. There’s some other partners that are leaning into this more. Um, and so if you’re able to make that pivot, if you’re able to do that audit internally, internally to say, what is the actual business outcome? What’s the unit of value that I drive for my customers?
[00:11:59] Michael Levy: And then you’re able to do the right metering internally. Marketplace is there to meet you, right? We have the product like growth mechanism. We have the flexibility to essentially make an outcome-based product and bill for it on your AWS bill for via marketplace.
[00:12:13] Vinod Nair: Yeah. And now just to go back to your earlier question about divergence and convergence of PLG and agent tech, I see this as a convergence story with just sort of humans.
[00:12:24] Vinod Nair: You have agents, the same principles that are, that went to driving product led growth will also drive agent growth. Agent led growth.
[00:12:32] Vince Menzione: Agreed.
[00:12:33] Vince Menzione: So, I am gonna open up for the, a couple questions while, while we still have everyone here in the room, but I, I was thinking maybe the one thing that we could talk about, like in the next 30 days.
[00:12:43] Vince Menzione: What should we, the people, the leaders in this room, should be thinking about doing better or differently?
[00:12:48] Vinod Nair: So for product-led growth, I’d say what is the va? And I’m, I’m assuming I’m gonna be stealing a little bit of what Michael’s gonna say. What is the, if you’re considering product led growth, what is the value you’re going to deliver to your customer?
[00:13:02] Vinod Nair: If you don’t have a good articulation of that, then it’s hard to deliver. And who’s your ICP? Focus on those two and then build the story around that.
[00:13:12] Vince Menzione: Yeah, go ahead.
[00:13:15] Vince Menzione: Same takeaway I was talking about, which is like, do that audit, like make that assessment of your own software of is it dis discoverable, is it digestible, is it pro curable by agents?
[00:13:24] Michael Levy: Um, because I think we’re piloting some stuff in marketplace. Um, agent core payments is something that launched that. Not only can you, you know, find things, but you can actually pay for them autonomously. So things are moving quickly. So I think catching up and doing that audit is, is the most immediate next step.
[00:13:43] Vince Menzione: We’re gonna open up to questions. We’re a small, intimate group now, so we can keep it in the room.
[00:13:49] Vince Menzione: One happy family.
[00:13:50] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Alright. Yeah. We Okay this, oh, we got, here’s some mics. Some, there’s some mics coming. Okay.
[00:13:59] Guest: I was just gonna ask stealing Allison’s, uh, organ analogy. Um,
[00:14:04] Vince Menzione: we’re all laid out on the table here, Allison.
[00:14:09] Guest: We’ve been talking a lot about enablement across organizations, and I’m just curious what that looks like for the technical and engineering teams to loop them in with the, the sales and marketing and co-sell, and how and when do you loop them in and, and get them enabled?
[00:14:26] Vinod Nair: So I, I’ll, I’ll say here, uh, one is having leaders like Matt who can kind of talk at, at, at events like this, at other events that says, Hey, what are we building and why you should care.
[00:14:40] Vinod Nair: That’s definitely a big, uh, kind of microphone. Uh, we also rely on partners like. WellSpan, tackle laba. These are the people who have the conversations upfront with these, with the ISV to say, what are we building? Why, how, what’s our go to market? Who needs for product led growth? You do need that engineering team in the conversation, and you do need the marketing team.
[00:15:06] Vinod Nair: So how do you get them early on? We also work with partners to say, let’s enable our partners. Uh, today there’s also, of course, agents coming in, so they will also be there in the. In the future.
[00:15:17] Michael Levy: Yeah. Just to add to that, I think getting in touch with the product and engineer engineering leaders, especially when it comes to age agentic AI is super important.
[00:15:24] Michael Levy: We had an event with product leaders a couple weeks ago in San Francisco about like exactly this topic. How does your product need to change for age agentic ai? How does your commercial model need to change how you actually monetizing ai? Those are all product and engineering decisions ultimately, so.
[00:15:39] Michael Levy: Bring them to us, bring them to our admins. We’re happy to do that. Have that conversation. There’s resources at AWS too to help think through what we’re calling like a SaaS transformation, so to speak. Um, so that’s one, one aspect of it.
[00:15:53] Michael Levy: Nice question. Allison’s got a question I love. Oh
[00:15:56] Guest: shit. I have a question.
[00:15:57] Guest: Um, so Accenture, we package and offer professional services offerings on marketplace. Do you have any insights or tips to how that differs from a traditional product, you know, in the, in the traditional sense of the word, or any tips for us as services providers to how we capture more demand through marketplace?
[00:16:21] Vinod Nair: So one thing I will, uh, start off with saying is whether you’re a professional services, uh, provider or any, you want to know who’s visiting your site or how do you drive more traffic? One of the things that we have enabled through this Seller Prime program that I mentioned is enable you to get that granular data.
[00:16:42] Vinod Nair: I ran this marketing campaign. I got these many visitors, so many of them clicked, whatever is the call to action. That gives you sense to say what marketing activities are driving the most conversion. We’ve enabled that. We’ve also made all our go-to-market material, which is PLG, but it’s the same principles who, how do you talk to AWS customers?
[00:17:05] Vinod Nair: How do you drive demand? We’ve made that all available to any, any, uh, any seller, including professional services.
[00:17:12] Michael Levy: I’ll add to that. I think there’s a lot of room for us to experiment there with you and with others. Like I think the most recent change in the listing fee is just one aspect of how we’re trying to evolve the business to help.
[00:17:23] Michael Levy: Reduce friction in transacting professional services. Not just reduce friction, but also help from a discovery, uh, and, and, you know, demand gen capability. So I think candidly, it hasn’t been that much of an engine for professional services now that we’re making all these changes with variable billing and the, the ability to actually transact it.
[00:17:41] Michael Levy: Um, we’re leaning into, figure out from a discovery perspective how we, how we can help, I don’t know, public offers for professional services, seller prime, maybe for professional services. I think these are all things that we should be experimenting with.
[00:17:53] Vince Menzione: Nice. Yeah. Good stuff. Any other questions?
[00:18:02] Vince Menzione: Have we have, we,
[00:18:03] Vince Menzione: we stumped him.
[00:18:04] Vince Menzione: We stumped him. Well, I am just thrilled to have you both here today. Um, I’m so glad you could make it and I’m hoping to see you again. This is awesome to meet today and have you as well. Thank you for the opportunity. It’s been terrific. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jeff.
[00:18:20] Vince Menzione: Good to see you. Great to meet you as well. Thank you. Thanks for listening to The Ultimate Partner Podcast. If today’s conversation resonated, share it with a partner leader in your network, subscribe where you listen, and head over to the ultimate partner.com for show notes related content and the resources for this episode.
[00:18:41] Vince Menzione: And if you haven’t already, now’s the time to register for the Ultimate Partner Live event in Reston, Virginia, October 26th through October 28th. Until next time, keep showing up in the rooms that matter because being in the room changes everything.
