ALSO Holding AG, Europe's largest technology provider for the ICT industry, announced the upcoming launch of its AI Elite Partner Program, scheduled for summer 2026, to accelerate the adoption of agentic AI across the continent. The initiative comes as Europe's AI market enters a phase of rapid expansion, with IDC forecasting AI spending to reach USD 144 billion by 2028.
ALSO has positioned itself as a trusted AI marketplace for the European channel, offering a curated catalog of agentic AI building blocks from leading vendors. The offering combines proven AI tools, AI-ready infrastructure, AI PCs, cybersecurity, vertical AI applications, and partner enablement into a scalable recurring-revenue platform. It also includes AI solutions successfully deployed within ALSO's own operations, allowing partners and customers to benefit from proven real-world use cases.
The AI Elite Partner Program aims to equip more than 140,000 resellers across over 30 European countries with the capabilities to turn AI demand into practical customer solutions. Building on this foundation, ALSO has already delivered more than 1,000 training sessions and trained over 30,000 participants. Full platform functionality is scheduled to go live by August 2026.
As companies move from experimenting with AI to deploying AI agents that act within business processes, four critical questions emerge: execution quality (ensuring reliable outcomes and governance), cost control (managing usage and compute economics), data access (which data agents can access and under what policies), and deployment model (where AI workloads should run – locally or in the cloud).
ALSO's approach is designed to help partners answer these questions and enable tailored solutions for individual customer requirements. Sensitive and routine tasks can run locally on the customer's own device or infrastructure, while tasks requiring external AI can be routed to the cloud. This helps customers protect confidential data, manage cost, and deploy AI agents with the appropriate balance of performance, security, and control.
Jan Bogdanovich, Chief Technology Officer of ALSO Holding AG (SIX: ALSN), stated: "Major technology shifts need competent partners who enable adoption – that has always been the channel's job, and it is no different with agentic AI. The companies that will benefit most from AI won't be the ones with the most agents, but the ones who learn and adapt to new technology fastest without losing control. Our AI Elite Partner Program gives our resellers the expertise, tools, and ecosystem they need to turn AI opportunities into real customer outcomes."
ALSO is currently active in 31 European countries and in many countries worldwide via PaaS partners. The ALSO ecosystem comprises a total potential of more than 140,000 resellers, offering hardware, software, and IT services from more than 800 vendors in over 1,680 product categories. The company provides all services from provision to remanufacturing from a single source in the spirit of the circular economy. The main shareholder is the Droege Group, Dusseldorf, Germany. Further information can be found at https://also.com.
The Droege Group, founded in 1988, is an independent investment and consulting firm under full family ownership. The company acts as a specialist for tailor-made transformation programs aiming to enhance corporate value. Droege Group combines its corporate family-run structure and capital strength into a family-equity business model. Further information can be found at https://droege-group.com.
This announcement is significant for the European ICT channel as it provides a structured pathway for resellers to capitalize on the growing AI market. By offering training, curated AI solutions, and a scalable platform, ALSO is enabling partners to move beyond AI experimentation to practical deployment, addressing key concerns around governance, cost, data access, and deployment flexibility. The program's focus on proven use cases and local execution options helps customers maintain control over sensitive data while leveraging cloud capabilities for other tasks, potentially accelerating AI adoption across industries.
