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Crossbeam and Hyperscaler Marketplaces: Building the Future of Agentic GTM

If you follow Crossbeam, you've probably noticed that our recent releases have pulled us deeper into hyperscaler marketplaces. That's by design. 

We believe that the world of B2B go-to-market is about to see major changes as agentic buyers and sellers become mainstream, even for complex transactions. In this transition, marketplaces will be elevated from glorified shopping carts to the center of ecosystem collaboration. So it's only natural that Crossbeam's data network belongs right in the middle of it. 

This is just the beginning. Earlier this week, we announced an integration with AWS Partner Central Lead Enrichment, which brings AWS's own signals about your leads into Crossbeam. We're also about to drop some powerful playbooks on what's possible when you connect the Crossbeam MCP server and the AWS Partner Central MCP server to the same agent or session. And more announcements, with more partners and more ways to integrate, are in the works. 

As the transformative change of AI marches on, marketplaces will have a very important role to play in the AI economy, and we believe Crossbeam has a key role to play in making marketplaces rise to the occasion. We plan to innovate relentlessly in the places where those two things intersect, because that's where we see some of the biggest opportunities to create value for our customers and partners in the era ahead.

This post lays out that vision.

Agents will need trusted rails on which to transact

Consumer shopping agents are already here, even if it's messy. OpenAI put checkout inside ChatGPT in 2025. Amazon built its own shopping agents, then went to court this year to keep a rival's agent out of its store. But notice what those fights are about: who owns the checkout. Nobody is arguing that an agent can't be trusted to buy a Wi-Fi router with a credit card.

Now try that at work. Picture a Fortune 500 company that hands every agent in the building a corporate card and says, "go buy the software you need." Within a week you'd have contracts nobody reviewed, invoices with no purchase order behind them, sales tax questions nobody can answer, and a CFO looking for someone to fire. All hell would break loose.

Business buying doesn't run on credit cards. And we're not talking about paperclips. When a company buys software or technology services, it signs contracts with real obligations and legal protections. It takes on security risk. It commits to multi-year terms and structured payments through wire transfers and purchase orders. If agents are going to enter into commercial transactions like that on behalf of companies, and I believe they will, they need a place to transact that already respects all of it.

Here's the thing: that place already exists. It has been hiding in plain sight for more than a decade, and most of us in B2B software have treated it like the last box to check before a deal closes.

A decade-old channel that laid the groundwork for AI

If you're new to this topic, here's a primer using AWS Marketplace as an example. AWS launched its marketplace in 2012 based on a simple bit of logic: A lot of software had to be stood up and run on AWS servers anyway, so why shouldn't AWS resell that software on behalf of the companies that make it?

That idea grew up. Today you can buy almost any software product (and even services) through AWS Marketplace. Microsoft Marketplace and Google Cloud Marketplace followed suit, and Salesforce AgentExchange is also clearly laying the groundwork for its own marketplace play with support for private offers.

The pitch to the buyer is simple. Say you want to buy Crossbeam and you're already an AWS customer. You'd rather not onboard another vendor, pay another bill, and cut another PO. So you buy it through your existing AWS account. AWS keeps a small percentage, a bit like a credit card company would, and passes the rest to us.

Over time, the hyperscalers that own and run these marketplaces have made transacting even more compelling for buyers and sellers alike. Big AWS customers often sign annual spend commitments in exchange for a discount. Eligible marketplace purchases can count toward that commitment. So if you committed to $10 million with AWS and you're on pace for $9 million, buying software through the marketplace with that last million suddenly looks very attractive. You can basically consume your sunk costs, and the incremental purchases feel almost "free."

There's one more piece people overlook: AWS's own sales force. AWS has a huge, talented team of people around the world who are very good at selling, and sometimes they work for you. AWS refers leads out to marketplace sellers to build pipeline for them. Through programs like ISV Accelerate, AWS account managers earn incentives for co-selling partner products through the marketplace, even though those products aren't AWS's. It doesn't happen on every deal. When it does, AWS is co-selling with you and shortening your path to market.

Add it up, and buyers have four reasons to buy this way: security, legal, procurement, and economics. Sellers get a distribution channel with a sales force attached.

The rails were built before the train showed up

Remember that Fortune 500 company with a card for every agent? Enterprises need their agents to buy things without breaking every procurement policy on the books. Now look at what a marketplace already is: a pre-approved vendor relationship, a negotiated contract, a billing account that finance already reconciles, and a spending budget that has been committed in advance.

That is exactly the set of guardrails an agent needs. Letting your agent spend against your hyperscaler spend commitment through their Marketplace is a much easier proposition than handing it a corporate card and telling it to go buy licenses. The marketplaces solved this problem almost a decade early.

AWS, for one, isn't being shy about getting ready. It has been opening the marketplace and Partner Central to agents and automations, not just to people clicking through portals. Partners can submit and enrich leads through the Partner Central API instead of the console. And the Partner Central agents MCP Server lets partners' agents handle co-sell engagements, funding applications, and marketplace seller setup without anyone logging into Partner Central. That's a marketplace getting ready for work that happens headless.

So if you believe agent-to-agent commerce and agent-driven procurement are coming, these marketplaces are very likely the rails much of it will run on. They matter because they capture a big share of software spend today. They matter more because they're becoming the way transactions will happen tomorrow. There's market making going on here, and it has big implications for anyone who sells B2B software.

Marketplaces are moving up the funnel

There's a second shift happening that pushes marketplaces even more squarely into Crossbeam's traditional arena, and it matters even if you never let an agent near your purchasing process.

For most of their history, marketplaces have mattered primarily at the very bottom of the funnel, in the moment of a customer being fully ready to transact. I can't tell you how many deals we've closed through a Marketplace where the week the deal closed was the first time anyone mentioned a marketplace. Yes, sometimes the marketplaces send you leads or get involved, but for most marketplace sellers it’s the edge case rather than the norm. 

Meanwhile, Crossbeam has often delivered its best value at the top and middle of the funnel: Identifying net new pipeline, qualifying leads, positioning sales pitches, aligning with co-selling partners, packaging for the largest lands and expands, and the like. Then in the home stretch, maybe the deal also transacts on a marketplace. 

The recent moves from AWS take these two distinct domains and make them into a beautiful Venn Diagram (which happens to be my love language). Through Partner Central, AWS now enriches partners' leads with signals that used to require a conversation with someone at Amazon: which funding programs an account qualifies for, what it's likely to buy, and how likely it is to buy through the marketplace. It does this at scale, without bothering the buyer and without breaking anyone's trust. 

Crossbeam now offers a direct integration to this AWS lead enrichment. It pulls AWS lead enrichment data and signals directly into the Crossbeam data network, UI, MCP, and integrations — making the marketplace context front-and-center in the up-funnel touchpoints where we already impact deals.

The result is that the marketplace part of the conversation moves toward the first meetings instead of the final ones. Whether you bring a hyperscaler rep into a deal or simply position a marketplace closing path early, the deal can close faster, close bigger, or get scoped more favorably. That's a breakthrough for partnerships and an even bigger one for sales.

In aggregate, this pushes us even closer to a world where Crossbeam serves as a unified data layer that holds all partner context in one place, aggregated from disparate systems in real time. It’s what sellers need and what agents need, all coming together just in time for the future of GTM. 

Let the LLM be the platform

Look closer at what these hyperscaler marketplaces are doing in the early AI era, and you'll see a pattern we're betting on. They are opening up data that used to require a phone call, and it made that data available programmatically, to your agents as well as your people.

Our CPO Lindsey DeFalco made a point on a recent episode of our podcast The AI Ecosystem that stuck with me. Exchanging data between companies doesn't replace the human interactions, especially not in the near term. What it does do immediately is make them better. When you finally get on the phone with a hyperscaler’s sales rep about an account (if you even need to), you show up knowing far more than you used to. Meanwhile, the rep spends their time on stronger deals. Data exchange made both humans better at their jobs.

Now put agents in the picture. Open an AI session, or have a webhook kick off an unsupervised agent. Give it access to two separate but compatible sources of data, like a hyperscaler’s view of an account via their MCP and your partner ecosystem through the Crossbeam MCP. Then let it rip. What the agent can do on its own, by reasoning across those two datasets, is more powerful than any product UI could provide.

I want eyeballs on our screens as much as any software CEO. But I'm happy to throw in the towel on this one. Give agents the data and the context around it, and you'll get the best outcome. Companies that only wrap surfaces around that are probably not going to be around forever.

The Crossbeam approach

So, why marketplaces, and why Crossbeam?

Two things have to exist for agents to sell together across company lines. They need a way to transact, and they need a way to collaborate. The marketplaces are building the first. Crossbeam powers the second: giving agents the information they're supposed to have from the partners they work with, so they can make smarter decisions and take better actions. At the intersection of these capabilities, we find the future of agentic GTM.

In this world, Crossbeam is a networked context provider. It is the one place you can access proprietary context from your ecosystem partners, your channel, your marketplaces, and your own internal data. This context is the lifeblood of your own agents running in your own infrastructure. It gives them the precise data and connectivity needed to act and win in a differentiated way.

The best part is that none of this has to wait for the agent-to-agent future. The buyers and sellers using marketplaces today, for all the traditional reasons, benefit from exactly the same data. Better account intelligence earlier in the deal helps a human rep this quarter just as much as it will help an agent. We get to build for where this is going and deliver value in the very human world we live in right now.

That's why you'll see us go deeper with the hyperscaler marketplaces. The AWS lead enrichment integration is just the first step. We'll have more to share at AWS re:Invent and at the Crossbeam AI Summit in December.

Stay tuned.

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FAQ section

What is agentic GTM?

‍Agentic GTM is a go-to-market model where AI agents act on behalf of buyers and sellers, including in complex B2B transactions. Crossbeam expects agentic buying and selling to become mainstream, with hyperscaler marketplaces and shared partner data at the center of it.

What is a hyperscaler marketplace?

‍A hyperscaler marketplace is a cloud provider’s storefront where companies buy third-party software and services through their existing cloud account. AWS launched AWS Marketplace in 2012, followed by Microsoft Marketplace and Google Cloud Marketplace. Salesforce AgentExchange is also adding support for private offers.

Why do B2B buyers purchase software through cloud marketplaces?

‍Buyers get four main benefits: security, legal, procurement, and economics. They avoid onboarding a new vendor or cutting another PO, and eligible purchases can count toward an existing cloud spend commitment.

How do marketplaces help software sellers?

‍Marketplaces give sellers a distribution channel with a sales force attached. AWS refers leads to marketplace sellers, and through programs like ISV Accelerate, AWS account managers earn incentives for co-selling partner products through the marketplace.

Why are hyperscaler marketplaces a good fit for AI agents that buy software?

‍Enterprises need agents to buy without breaking procurement policy. A marketplace already provides a pre-approved vendor relationship, a negotiated contract, a billing account finance already reconciles, and a budget committed in advance. Those are the guardrails an agent needs to transact safely.

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