Teaching a sales team to trust an agent that works while they sleep.
Carmen is an AI partner-acquisition agent that sources, qualifies, and reaches out to partners on autopilot. The hard part was never the automation. It was getting a sceptical partnership manager to hand over the relationship.
Q3 Partnership Drive
+12.4%Partner sourcing is mostly unglamorous grunt work.
Partnership managers spend most of their week not on partnerships, but on the work around them: hunting for companies that fit, vetting whether they’re worth a conversation, finding the right person, writing the first message, and chasing the follow-up. By the time a single qualified conversation happens, weeks have gone.
Airstride’s bet was to give that entire pipeline to an autonomous agent, Carmen, who sources partners against your ideal profile, runs the outreach across LinkedIn and email, and books the meeting. My job wasn’t to design a dashboard for it. It was to design the moments where a person decides whether to let go of the wheel.
- P.01The leap of faith. Carmen sends messages in your name, to companies you might one day partner with. One tone-deaf outreach can burn a relationship before it starts.
- P.02The black-box problem. An agent working around the clock is invisible by default. If you cannot see what it is doing right now, you cannot trust it, or stop it.
- P.03The setup wall. Configuring an AI agent usually means a 40-field form. Most users abandon it before the agent ever runs.
Setup should feel like a conversation.
Instead of asking the user to describe their business, Carmen reads it first, then shows back what she understood and asks for a nod. The user’s only job is to react: confirm the market, then approve or reject five sample partners. Every yes and no quietly teaches the matching model what good looks like.
From there, configuration stays a conversation. Carmen reports what she found in a chat, and the user steers her in plain language: focus on EMEA, find more like these, rather than hunting through settings.
Pilot users kept describing the same surprise. They came in braced for another long form, and found Carmen had already done the homework. The first thing they did was agree, not fill in fields. Turning setup into a five-tap review and a short chat collapsed a multi-day configuration into minutes.
Your Business
Airstride is an AI-powered partnership platform that helps B2B SaaS companies discover, recruit, and manage channel partners at scale, replacing manual partner ops with an autonomous agent.
Your Market
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Make autonomous work legible.
The command center at the top of this page answers the question every partnership manager asks at 9am: what has Carmen done while I was away, and is it working? Three decisions did most of the heavy lifting.
None of them are flashy. The things that make someone trust an agent are mostly small: being able to see its work, read what it is doing, and stop it without hunting for the button.
The trust seam, made explicit.
Connecting LinkedIn is the moment a user hands Carmen the keys to their professional identity. So the flow does the opposite of what most OAuth screens do: it slows down and over-communicates. A plain-language ledger of what Carmen can and cannot do sits beside the form the whole way through. Credentials are encrypted and never stored. Disconnecting is always one click.
Naming the limits in plain words, cannot post, cannot touch your password, reassured people more than any security badge would have.
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What shipped, and what changed.
Carmen rolled out to design-partner workspaces through 2025. The model had been capable for months. What changed usage was making its work visible and its setup quick enough that partnership managers stopped checking over its shoulder.
What I’d let recede.
The legibility surfaces are the most polished part of the product, and the part heavy users touch least once they trust Carmen. I’d design them to recede on purpose. As a partnership manager approves their hundredth action in a category, the reasoning should quietly collapse into a glance.
Scaffolding like this is meant to come down. The next version should show less of its reasoning the longer you have worked with her, as checking becomes a habit you no longer need.