Opening Session at Sage Future 2026 is in the books, and what a strong start it has been. I'm incredibly grateful to be here and already reconnecting with so many familiar faces across this community. There's something special about the energy that comes from bringing partners, leaders, innovators, and longtime relationships together in one place.
In the spirit of embracing innovation,
I used Anthropic's Claude to help capture notes and key moments from the day. Like any AI-generated summary, a few details may not be perfect-but the excitement, insights, and momentum certainly were.
Here's a recap of Opening Day:
**For the 90 Minds Community**
By Anne and Walter aka Claude
April 28, 2026 | Moscone Center, San Francisco*
The Opening Main Stage of Sage Future 2026 set the tone for the entire event with a clear, unified message: **partners are not a supporting channel - they are the growth engine.** From the first speaker to the last, every segment reinforced three interlocking themes: trust-led AI, partner-led outcomes, and a $58–59 billion market opportunity that Sage intends to capture - together with its ecosystem.
## Gretchen O'Hara - EVP Strategic Partnerships & Business Development
Gretchen O'Hara, Sage's Global Channel Chief, opened the session by acknowledging the pace of change head-on. Partner business models are evolving, the customer buying journey looks different - but one thing never changes: customer success.
She made clear that Sage has been listening, and the result is a renewed focus on four things partners said they needed: **predictability, transparency, accountability, and profitability** - with a clear path to monetization through expanded services, industry expertise, cross-sell/upsell, and AI-enabled solutions.
**The numbers:**
- $58 billion market opportunity by 2029
- $17 billion adjacent services opportunity for partners today
- Partners who co-sell with Sage generate 6x revenue for every Sage dollar
- ISV ecosystem growth has tripled in the last three years
Gretchen was direct on AI: **"AI does not replace you as a partner. It elevates you."** She pushed back on the noise from startups and big AI promises, reminding the audience that Sage operates mission-critical software. "We don't get to experiment at the edges. We have to deliver trust."
She closed by introducing Steve Hare, noting that the belief in partners is led from the very top of the organization.
## Steve Hare - CEO, Sage
Steve Hare joined Gretchen on stage for a conversation that zeroed in on what partners need to do right now. His message was clear: the market is noisy, but Sage's differentiation isn't generic AI - it's **trust-led AI**, built on 40 years of financial data.
Hare was unequivocal about pace: **"The future is all intelligence, built into every workflow."** He called on partners to match Sage's ambition, framing the real competitive advantage as combining AI agents with the platform so intelligence is embedded in real work - and customers feel the benefit directly.
He reframed the partner role: from implementor to **adviser**, from reseller to **innovator**. Partners who make that shift will capture the market earlier and build deeper customer relationships.
His direct commitment to the room: **"AI is not a feature. It's the foundation."** And on the partnership: **"We either win together or we don't win. Not winning is not an option."**
## Chris Grusz - Managing Director, Technology Partnerships, AWS
Gretchen O'Hara interviewed Chris Grusz on stage to announce a deepened Sage-AWS partnership with three specific components:
1. **Amazon Bedrock Agent Core integration** - a new platform for building AI agents without managing infrastructure, connected to Sage's developer tools
2. **AWS Marketplace as a route to market** - enabling partners and ISVs to monetize solutions directly through Marketplace, the number one selling AI category on AWS
3. **Joint SMB cloud migration focus** - a coordinated effort to migrate customers still on legacy on-premise financial software to the cloud
**What this means by partner type:**
- **ISV partners** get an instant route to monetize technology through AWS Marketplace, backed by both Sage and AWS
- **System integrators** get an immediate pipeline generation opportunity - millions of customers have not yet migrated to the cloud
Chris was emphatic: **"This is not a road map. This is ready today."** AWS is offering **up to $50,000 in credits** to registered ISVs to get started.
## Mark Hickman & Cinzia Bazzo - Managing Directors, North America & Canada
Mark Hickman and Cinzia Bazzo took the stage together. Mark introduced Cinzia as his successor in the Canada role, joking: "If you get a chance to replace yourself, hire somebody better than you. I did."
**Cinzia on what she's hearing:** For years, customers have been stitching together point solutions - one for finance, one for reporting, one for forecasting, one for operations. Now they're realizing it doesn't scale. What they want is **a platform that brings everything together**.
**Three areas where the ecosystem wins:**
- **Platform advantage** - partners integrate, configure, and extend to solve real customer problems
- **Trusted AI** - AI only creates value when connected to real workflows, which partners understand better than anyone
- **Partner-led outcomes** - this ecosystem is not just a network or a channel, it is a community with shared values
**The North American market opportunity: $59 billion.**
Real-world example: **Operation HOPE**, a nonprofit focused on financial literacy that has reached more than 4 million people in underserved communities. After moving to Sage Intacct, they doubled revenue without adding headcount, reduced invoice processing time by 99% through AI-powered automation, and gained real-time visibility across 300 locations - all made possible by a partner bringing the solution to life.
## Nancy Sperry - VP US Partner Sales, Sage
Nancy Sperry focused on two major areas of momentum: **Sage Intacct Advisory (SIA)** and **Sage HCM**.
**SIA** is reinventing how Sage goes to market with partners - an advisory-focused offering designed to help partners deliver higher-value services. More details to follow later in the week.
**HCM** was the centerpiece. The core problem: HR, payroll, and finance don't line up, making workforce cost management messy. Sage HCM connects people data directly into Sage Intacct so customers can see and manage payroll and labor costs with confidence.
Nancy interviewed **Andy Raschek, CRO of Alliance Solutions Group**, an early adopter in construction:
- Finance, HR, and payroll were telling different stories, causing slow or wrong decisions in an industry where workforce costs move fast
- Customers experience a "finally moment" - HR, payroll, and finance designed to work together, not stitched together after the fact
- Business impact for Alliance: **effectively doubled their average selling price** by bundling Sage HCM with Intacct in the same deal
- Andy's advice: **go all in** - invest in solution engineers, get certified, treat this as a real growth lane, not a test
## Rahul Bakshi - Sage AI, with Julie Shales (Whitley Penn)
Rahul Bakshi presented Sage's AI philosophy, followed by a conversation with Julie Shales from Whitley Penn.
**Sage's three requirements for AI customers can trust:**
- **Confidence** - outcomes are explainable, verifiable, and can be interrogated
- **Control** - humans remain in charge; critical decisions require human approval
- **Accountability** - every AI action is traceable: who initiated it, which agents were involved, what changed
**Julie on real-world adoption:** When Whitley Penn started polling clients on AI readiness in early 2025, sentiment was skeptical. A year later, responses from finance leaders saying they're ready for AI have more than doubled. The barrier isn't a technology gap - it's a **confidence and adoption gap**.
Two specific examples of Sage AI delivering value:
- **Close Workspace** - instead of status meetings and chasing updates, the close process now carries ownership. Teams see where things stand and communicate in context.
- **Subledger Reconciliation Assistant** - what used to require custom reports, Excel exports, and long checklists now goes straight to the transactions driving the mismatch. One of the most dreaded exercises turned into a faster path to clarity.
Julie's bigger picture: partners are becoming **AI-enabled advisers** - spending less time on manual work and more time helping clients interpret and act on AI output.
## Sinead O'Connor- Sr. Director, Strategic Alliances, Sage
Sinead's segment focused on the opportunity for partners to move from reselling Sage to building their own IP on the platform - and the deal momentum that follows.
She interviewed **Dan Mitchell from Baker Tilly**, who shared how building vertical-specific IP changed the way they win deals in the nonprofit and faith-based sector:
- Deals frequently stalled because customers were trying to figure out expenses or how to integrate church management software
- By building purpose-built solutions including **Ministry Intelligence**, Baker Tilly transformed from a vendor figuring it out on the fly to a **trusted adviser arriving with proven best practices**
- The customer mindset shift: from "Is this the right solution?" to "This might actually solve our problem" - and that's when deals pick up momentum
- Key to repeatability: identify industries with recurring challenges, build IP around those patterns, stop starting from scratch
Dan's warning: **"If you're not bringing a complete solution to your deals, your competition is - or worse, your customer delays the decision while they try to figure it all out on their own. Time kills all deals."
## Aaron Harris - Global CTO, Sage
Aaron delivered one of the most technically rich and entertaining segments of the morning, anchored by a major acquisition announcement.
**On the "SaaS apocalypse" narrative:** Aaron pushed back hard. Coding agents make developers 10x more productive - that doesn't mean 90% fewer coders, it means 10x more software. The Sage Intacct API has been the number one user of the platform for more than a decade. The third-party integration ecosystem isn't threatened by AI - it's about to explode.
**Sage AI by the numbers:**
- Custom AI models training and deploying for more than 17,000 customers
- Proprietary entity recognition model processing more than $5 billion in vendor bills per month, growing ~300% per year
- AI model instances grew from ~40 million to over 400 million per month in the last year
- Developers have generated more than 25 million lines of AI-assisted code in the last six months
**The big announcement - Sage acquires Doyen:**
Data migrations have been one of the hardest problems in ERP implementation for decades. Doyen cracked it by using AI not to read and move data, but to **write code on the fly for each migration** that handles the unique nuances of each source system - translating natural language instructions into deterministic, verifiable code with human verification at the end.
Results from the design partner program:
- **CLA** saved over 250 hours on a complex migration
- **Fortis** reduced migration time per source file from 9–10 hours down to 2–3 hours - a **60–80% savings**
**Sage officially acquired Doyen as of last Friday.** The tool will continue with design partners for ~6 months, then roll out to the broader SIP ecosystem, followed by the full partner ecosystem.
**Sage AI Developer Solutions - three components:**
1. **Sage Intacct AI Gateway** - REST API endpoints and MCP server for agent interaction
2. **Sage Agent Builder** - developer tooling built with AWS Bedrock Agent Core; agents embed inside the Sage Copilot experience
3. **Sage Intacct Data Cloud** - real-time data sync with Snowflake for performant partner access to customer data
Aaron's challenge: **"Don't just build faster. Solve the customer problems you've never been able to solve before. Automate more. Integrate more. Build 10 times more."**
Closing
## Derk Bleeker - Chief Commercial Officer, Sage
Derk closed the Opening Main Stage with a commercial leader's view on why Sage is positioned to win.
**On market disruption fears:** After a US investor road show, every single investor Derk spoke with had the same prediction - the market's reaction to SaaS as a risk asset is a massive overreaction. AI agents need software; they don't replace it.
**Sage's four-layer moat:**
1. Over 25 years of compliance, workflow, data, and industry expertise built into the products
2. An R&D budget exceeding the total funding raised by all AI startups in the space last year
3. Millions of customers who trust Sage, advocate for it, and build their businesses on it
4. **The partner ecosystem itself** - the most passionate, committed, customer-obsessed community in the industry
**His four asks to partners:**
1. **Embrace AI** - as an opportunity to create value for customers and transform how you run your own business
2. **Innovate together** - over 100 applications for the AI developer program signals the power of the ecosystem
3. **Go all in** - invest in customer acquisition, demand generation, customer success, and new verticals; "your future cannot be your past"
4. **Make this week count** - don't just attend, engage; go to the AI Copilot sessions, platform sessions, and high performance finance sessions; start conversations
He closed with a relay race metaphor: **"In a relay, it's not just about who moves fastest. It's about trust. Timing. Execution. Teamwork. I can't think of a better team to run this race with"
## Key Takeaways for 90 Minds Members
**AI is the foundation, not a feature.** Every speaker reinforced this. The question for partners is not whether to engage with AI, but how fast to move.
**The Doyen acquisition is significant.** A 60–80% reduction in migration time is a game-changer for SIP partners. Get on the design partner list now.
**HCM is a real growth lane.** Partners like Alliance Solutions Group are doubling their ASP by bundling Sage HCM with Intacct. The early adopter window is open.
**AWS Marketplace is a new monetization channel.** ISV partners can now build, deploy, and sell AI agents through Marketplace with up to $50,000 in AWS credits available.
**The partner shift from implementor to adviser is accelerating.** Multiple speakers framed this as the defining move for partners who want to lead in this market.
**$59 billion.** That's the North American market opportunity Sage and its ecosystem are going after together.
*Recap prepared for the 90 Minds community. Notes captured live from the Sage Future 2026 Opening Main Stage, Moscone Center, San Francisco, April 28, 2026.*
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Anne Sawyer
90 Minds Inc.
Executive Director
anne.sawyer@90minds.comCA
https://90minds.com------------------------------