Welcome to the June edition of Partner Center Technical Corner. This month, we’re spotlighting new AI assistant capabilities for enhanced partner support, tools to optimize small and medium enterprises, and a summary of recent releases. As always, at the end of the blog you can find the most up-to-date essential Partner Center resources.
Empowering partners: The evolution of the Partner Center AI assistant
Partner Center AI assistant (preview) is built to enhance your Partner Center experience with generative AI, offering tailored insights and intelligent suggestions to transform everyday tasks in Partner Center into opportunities for growth and innovation. As we continue to equip the AI assistant to offer better, more tailored results, we have steadily expanded its capabilities to help make your daily operations more efficient and insight-driven.
Currently available in preview to partners using the English version of Partner Center, the AI assistant can be accessed via the sparkle icon in the upper-right corner of the page. We will expand this offering to other languages soon. As needed, partners can initiate the support ticket creation process through the AI assistant panel.
AI assistant now provides comprehensive support for the partner incentives co-op questions in the Earnings and Incentives workspaces. Partners can now quickly access vital information about co-op policies, deadlines, qualifying activities, and proof of execution requirements—information that previously required referencing lengthy documentation. You can ask the AI assistant questions like: "What is the claim deadline for FY25H1 co-op?" or "What are the qualifying activities for partner skilling?" and get quick answers.
In January, we introduced the AI assistant Anywhere scenarios in the Earnings workspace, empowering partners to view their detailed earnings trends (by program, engagement, or lever); analyze payment details for their specific customers; and gain deeper insights into revenue streams. Partners can access these capabilities by choosing a specific record in the Payments summary tab or Earnings summary tab and choosing the option from the sparkle icon on the page. The AI assistant quickly generates the right prompt and provides a customized response in the AI assistant chat.
Spotlight: Accelerating small and medium enterprises
Continuing our focus on the addressable market opportunity for small and medium enterprise customer segments, Partner Center has four new options to optimize and accelerate revenue growth and help you compete in the evolving cloud market. These features provide Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners with essential tools and automation to more efficiently manage cloud services, reduce operational overhead, and enhance the overall customer experience.
First, channel transfers are now available at renewal—facilitating Enterprise Agreement (EA) to CSP change and the transition of customers’ subscriptions. This migration process is crucial for partners who manage large-scale cloud services and need a streamlined method to transfer their customers' subscriptions without causing downtime or financial disruptions. Additionally, the EA to CSP channel transfers interface helps CSP partners ensure customers with EA subscriptions for Microsoft 365 Enterprise suites with Teams can retain their Teams entitlement when they renew into CSP.
Second, partners can also take advantage of the new streamlined support experience to automate the cancellation and credit process for duplicate subscriptions resulting from many-to-one upgrades. This automation builds on our investment in the AI assistant in Partner Center, allowing partners to cancel duplicate subscriptions more efficiently after an upgrade to a higher-level SKU. This enhancement reduces the friction partners face during the upgrade process and shortens the time required to execute upgrades by more than 90%!
Third, partners now have the ability to change terms when upgrading to end of sale (EOS) SKUs that support conversion. This means partners can upgrade EOS SKUs to higher SKUs and can also change the term of the new subscription at the same time. This is a key functionality requested by partners managing subscriptions for EOS SKUs such as Microsoft 365 Enterprise suites with Teams. For example, a customer with a Microsoft 365 E3 with Teams one-year subscription can upgrade to a Microsoft 365 E5 with Teams three-year subscription mid-term or at renewal.
And finally, many small and medium enterprise customers want to opt in to longer commitment terms to preserve pricing throughout the duration of the subscription. Partners can now access three-year terms for select enterprise SKUs, including Microsoft 365 E3, Microsoft 365 E5, and Teams Enterprise. Important to note: the three-year SKUs also support upgrades from lower SKUs with Teams that are now in EOS status.
Securing the channel
We’re introducing two significant changes to increase security.
Bulk update for fraud event status: The bulk update capability empowers partners to update fraud event status alerts via API on a given set of alert IDs, providing better control, efficiency, and scalability.
Upcoming changes for Partner Center portal and API access: To enhance security across Partner Center, multifactor authentication (MFA) will soon be enforced for all pages in the Partner Center portal and also for API access. MFA will become mandatory on the portal starting August 30, 2025, and for APIs on April 1, 2026.
These changes are essential to protecting partner data and require timely system updates to ensure compliance with Partner Center’s new security standards.
Just released
Claiming partner of record experience: The claiming partner of record (CPOR) Business Applications revenue recognition experience now includes Business Applications (BA) CSP subscriptions. BA partners can now receive credit for impact that contributes to Solutions Partner designations. This model provides dual partner recognition, with Modern Work partners earning transactional recognition and incentives, while BA partners receive revenue recognition.
Referral confidence score: You can now use the machine learning-powered referral confidence score to create high-potential inbound referrals in real time. The system provides partners with inline recommendations based on data patterns, helping you strengthen your co-sell referral submissions by suggesting additions and improvements.
Flexible billing schedules: Tailor customer private offers and multiparty private offers to better meet customers’ business requirements, streamline sales, and accelerate deal velocity with new flexible billing schedules available on Microsoft marketplace. Supported scenarios include quarterly, semiannual, and bimonthly billing. Flexible billing is offered globally for all marketplace-supported currencies, SaaS flat rate offers, VM software reservations, and professional services. Take time to learn how to build a flexible billing schedule as well as use the Insights dashboard reporting on Partner Center using the new filter “Billing Plan.”
Partner Center Technical Roadmap and resources
Stay tuned to our blog for more updates and tips to make the most out of partnership with Microsoft!