The $80 trillion reason to rethink your partnerships

There is a persistent belief in enterprise leadership that the path to competitive advantage runs through ownership. Own the technology, own the customer relationship, own the data, own the outcome. It is a belief that made sense when markets moved slowly enough for a single organization to build and maintain every capability it needed, but that era is over.

The shift away from ownership-as-strategy has been underway for years, but it has accelerated dramatically in the past eighteen months. AI has compressed product development cycles and expanded the volume of content that enterprises need to deliver across markets, while simultaneously raising baseline expectations among customers everywhere. The organizations responding well to these pressures tend to share a common trait. They are building stronger partnerships externally rather than trying to do more internally.

The math has changed

The economic case for ecosystem-led growth is no longer theoretical. McKinsey projects that partner ecosystems will drive $80 trillion in annual revenue by 2030, a figure that would represent roughly one-third of total global revenue. Forrester’s 2025 State of B2B Partner Ecosystems report found that 67% of ecosystem leaders expect their indirect revenue to grow more than 30% above the previous year’s levels. These are not aspirational forecasts. They reflect a structural change in how value is created and captured.

The driver behind this shift is a recognition that the capabilities required to compete globally have outpaced what any single organization can build and maintain on its own. The technology stack alone has become too broad and too fast-moving for any one company to master every layer.

Scott Kinka, Chief Strategy Officer at  Bridgepointe Technologies, has spent three decades advising enterprises on technology decisions. His firm manages a portfolio of more than 300 technology suppliers and works with organizations up to the Fortune 25. On Phrase’s In Other Words podcast, he put the ecosystem argument in blunt terms. “You just can’t get that kind of engagement without an ecosystem,” he said, reflecting on how roughly 70% of his previous company’s revenue came through indirect distribution by the time it sold to private equity.

The coordination problem nobody talks about

If the strategic case for partnerships is compelling, the operational reality is harder. A Forrester Consulting study found that 61% of B2B leaders say their partner ecosystems are already too complex for effective orchestration and collaboration at scale. The gap between strategy and execution is wide, and it tends to widen as organizations add more partners without investing in the coordination infrastructure to make those partnerships productive.

This is where most ecosystem strategies fail. The mistake is treating partnerships as a procurement exercise, a list of vendors to be managed rather than a network of capabilities to be orchestrated. Scott draws a useful distinction between two operating modes for technology leaders. The plumber keeps the lights on and manages infrastructure. The general contractor decides how the business will use its technology assets to grow. 

“Post-COVID, IT has been brought forward to have the opportunity to be the general contractor. And I think that decision makers need to decide which one they want to be.”

The general contractor model requires a fundamentally different relationship with partners. It means selecting for strategic fit rather than lowest cost, and investing in integration rather than just procurement. Above all, it means accepting that the quality of the ecosystem increasingly determines the quality of the customer experience.

Phrase CEO Georg Ell has argued that this coordination challenge is inseparable from the AI opportunity. “AI alone is not enough,” he wrote for AI Business. “To scale effectively, businesses need an integrated approach, one that connects AI with the right tools, services and partners.” His point is that the value of any single technology investment depends on the ecosystem surrounding it. A powerful AI capability embedded in an isolated workflow produces a fraction of the value it would produce inside a well-orchestrated partner network.

What partnership looks like when it is working

The difference between a vendor list and a functioning ecosystem becomes visible when multiple partners need to operate as a single system. At SlatorCon London 2025, four companies described what Georg calls a “quadratic relationship” that has developed between Phrase, language solutions integrator Acclaro, headless CMS provider Sanity, and customer engagement platform Braze.

Braze had established its localization team just three years earlier and was expanding rapidly into new markets with many different content types. Rather than attempting to build a unified solution internally, the company assembled an ecosystem. Acclaro connected Braze with Phrase and built a bridge between short-term translation needs and a longer-term operational solution. Phrase integrated with Sanity, the API-first CMS that Braze was already using. Sanity, as Senior Solutions Architect Rich Higgins put it, positioned itself as a “satellite member” of the team, running monthly calls and aligning with the quarterly objectives of the business.

“We win together with that ecosystem,” Georg said. The two companies went further, co-investing in a joint solutions architect who splits time between Phrase and Acclaro, giving both organizations shared visibility into how the partnership is performing.

The results illustrate what ecosystem coordination produces when it is working well. Braze has localized into five languages, generating 3,000 course completions in languages other than English and 70,000 hours of engagement from just 46 hours of localized content. In Japan, more users now access Braze’s certification content in Japanese than in the original English. “We’re always ready now,” said Iara Altkorn, Localization Operations Lead at Braze.

What makes this example instructive is that no single vendor could have delivered the outcome alone. The value emerged from how the partners connected, not from what any one of them sold.

The question that matters now

Rob Giglio, Canva’s Chief Customer Officer, made a similar argument on Phrase’s In Other Words podcast when describing how the company scales across 120+ countries.

“Maybe the translation of simplification in a go-to-market context is orchestration. Lots of different parts, and if any one played alone it might not sound very good. You need a conductor putting pieces together at the right tempo and pace.” 

Canva’s own global expansion relies heavily on local resellers and integration partners, an acknowledgment that even a platform with 230 million monthly active users cannot serve every market alone.

The $80 trillion McKinsey figure is a prediction about the future of competition itself. The organizations that will capture a disproportionate share of that value are the ones treating their ecosystems as strategic assets rather than line items on a procurement spreadsheet.

Scott’s advice for leaders navigating this shift is characteristically direct. When asked whether the winning strategy is to build, buy, or partner, he did not hesitate.

Every enterprise has partnerships. The question worth asking this is whether those partnerships are structured to create competitive advantage or merely to fill gaps. As AI reshapes how content is created, localized, and delivered across markets, the organizations that treat their ecosystems as strategic architecture will outperform those still managing them as vendor lists. The window to make that shift is narrowing, and the cost of waiting grows steeper with every quarter that passes, measured in lost speed and market position that becomes increasingly expensive to recover.