Red Hat CEO: Channel Partners Are Critical to Enterprise AI Adoption
Red Hat's biggest opportunity lies not in selling directly to enterprises, but in equipping solution providers to guide customers through AI and virtualization decisions, CEO Matt Hicks said during Red Hat Summit 2026 in Atlanta this week.
"If you're a CEO, it's the biggest bet and choice you're going to make," Hicks said in an interview. "And if you don't know these things yourself, you have to have someone you can trust that can help put you on that journey."
Partners Address the Trust Gap
Enterprises face two overlapping obstacles: the technical complexity of AI and the organizational risk of making the wrong platform choice. Red Hat can demonstrate that its products work. Partners provide something different-deep knowledge of a customer's existing environment and the credibility to guide them through change.
Bo Gebbie, president of Evolving Solutions, a Red Hat and IBM partner, said customers are increasingly interested in Red Hat's virtualization portfolio as an alternative to VMware, particularly after VMware's pricing changes. Customers also want automation tools to reduce costs and human error.
"As you think about people cost increasing, you think about AI workloads-the automation side is needed for all of that," Gebbie said.
Three Layers of Partner Opportunity
Hicks outlined distinct ways partners can create value for customers moving to Red Hat infrastructure.
Virtualization as an entry point: Customers frustrated with rising virtualization costs see a chance to consolidate platforms and reduce expenses. That transition becomes more valuable when partners help customers modernize workloads at the same time, rather than simply lifting and shifting existing systems.
AI integration: Once customers move to Red Hat's OpenShift platform, they gain proximity to AI capabilities. Partners can help customers determine whether to run their own GPU resources, rent them, or use a hybrid approach. This requires skills most enterprises don't yet have internally.
Use-case development: Partners can help customers identify where to start with AI-check scanning in banking, research agents in software companies-and then guide them toward both frontier models (like those from Anthropic or OpenAI) and open-weight alternatives that cost less at scale.
Avoiding Vendor Lock-In
Hicks emphasized that customers should not become dependent on any single AI model provider. A frontier model might excel at one task but fail at another. Open-weight models from IBM Granite or Nvidia Nemotron might handle volume workloads more cost-effectively.
"You will have to use frontier models," Hicks said. "But you won't want to be beholden to anyone."
Partners who understand this playbook can start customers with a frontier model to demonstrate capability, then systematically test open-weight alternatives to reduce costs without sacrificing performance.
The Developer Experience Problem
Red Hat sees an underdeveloped market in developer tools for AI workload creation. Building agents requires infrastructure knowledge most developers lack. Red Hat Desktop with Podman Desktop aims to let developers build and test AI applications locally in ways that mirror production environments.
Partners who help developers adopt these tools early can prevent costly rework later in the development cycle.
What Developers Should Know About AI
Hicks, who started his career as a developer, acknowledged that AI now outperforms most humans at algorithm writing and puzzle-solving-tasks developers traditionally enjoyed.
The field is shifting. Developers who move from writing code to evaluating code quality, designing testing frameworks, and managing continuous integration at scale will remain valuable. Those who resist the shift face disruption.
"That mindset shift-I'm not writing code, but I am writing evaluations," Hicks said. "That is a very valid application of an engineering mindset that is critical."
The same shift is happening across executive roles. CFOs, CEOs, and general counsels all face pressure to rethink their responsibilities in an AI-driven organization.
Red Hat's Broader IBM Integration
Red Hat's parent company IBM has acquired infrastructure vendors HashiCorp and Confluent in recent years. Hicks said these fit naturally into Red Hat's portfolio. HashiCorp's Terraform and Vault complement Red Hat's Ansible automation. Confluent's Kafka data streaming platform provides the infrastructure to move data between edge environments and AI systems.
IBM's Concert operations platform and Sovereign Core foundation also integrate with Red Hat's security and compliance tools, allowing enterprises to manage their full infrastructure stack through a single lens.
The Partner Expansion Opportunity
Red Hat is investing in partner programs throughout 2026, adding sales training, technical certification, and sales tools focused on AI. The vendor is also releasing AI Agents & Automation capabilities through Ansible Automation Platform 2.7 and closer integrations with Nvidia GPUs.
For executives evaluating AI strategy, the message is clear: internal teams may lack the breadth to navigate virtualization modernization, AI platform selection, and organizational change simultaneously. Partners who combine technical depth with industry knowledge can compress timelines and reduce risk.
For those leading this transformation, understanding how to evaluate partner capabilities-and what questions to ask-becomes as important as the technology choices themselves.
Your membership also unlocks:
