The VienerX Newsletter

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After a successful week at Channel Partners, the VienerX team is excited to launch it’s first-ever channel sales campaign!

If you are interesting in participating or would like to learn more, please contact a VienerX team member.

The Celebree GrowBig 2026 conference at The Vinoy Resort & Golf Club delivered exactly what a maturing franchise system should: strong community, real celebration of operator success, and clear, practical guidance on how to run better schools. 

The tone was forward-looking but grounded, with franchise owners sharing wins, challenges, and lessons in a way that felt both authentic and actionable.

We’ve been part of the Celebree School franchise system from the beginning. Over 10 years ago, when the model was being built, we were there helping to design and support how the system would operate.

Our focus has been straightforward. Provide better visibility, stronger security, and more streamlined systems so that franchisees can focus on running their schools.

Investments were made in delivering more data and dashboards to improve your visibility. Better information leads to better decisions and a clearer understanding of where your business stands.

We have tightened security across the entire network to protect the brand, the data, and each individual location.

We have streamlined systems so that operations are consistent, reliable, and require less manual effort to maintain.

We are also focused on giving you better tools to help yourself. That means more self-service capability, faster response when issues arise, and more accurate, accessible data. This is a learning system. As you learn, we learn, and the entire network benefits from that shared experience.

The next phase is about leveraging growth with confidence. The most successful franchisees stay engaged, keep us in the loop, and work through challenges with us. They use our experience and perspective as part of how they make decisions and operate their business.

That is where the real advantage comes from.

We are here to Make Your Company Work.

As you win, we win.

And we appreciate that you are at the center of what we do best at Vx.

WV

After a week of meeting with vendors, industry leaders, and partners old and new, the VienerX team is back from Channel Partners, energized and carrying a notebook full of conversations, opportunities, and ideas already moving into execution. From vendor panels to the showroom floor to our own hosted event atop the largest Ferris wheel in North America, this year’s conference gave us a chance to connect directly with the people shaping the technology channel in 2026. To everyone who took the time to meet with us, thank you, we look forward to continuing the conversation soon.

If you couldn’t make it or want to revisit the highlights, check out our recap videos below.

Channel Partners offers attendees a front‑row seat to what’s coming next in the Enterprise Technology and Telecom space. This year, one topic flat‑out dominated every corner of the conference: AI. Stop us if you’ve heard this before, AI ruled the show. There were so many AI products that at one point Jordan, our Chief of Brand, looked around the showroom floor and asked, “Can we just find a booth that isn’t talking about AI?”

Even for those of us in the field, it can be hard to tell how much of this is genuine innovation and how much is vendors simply hopping on the wave. As we said in our Super Bowl column, two things can be true at once: AI is absolutely part of the future, and those without an AI play right now feel like they’re falling behind.

Agentic, Agentic, Agentic

We did see some impressive demonstrations. XBert by Nextiva stood out for its quick setup and realism (and shoutout to Nextiva for having the only costumed mascot we spotted). Microsoft’s AI business analytics tools remain second to none, a reminder that solutions don’t have to be flashy to be useful. Several smaller vendors also showed promise, and we’ll be speaking with them in the coming weeks.

So what is Agentic AI?  - Agentic AI refers to autonomous systems that act independently to achieve specific, complex goals, moving beyond mere content generation to reasoning, taking action, and using tools without constant human supervision. Unlike generative AI, which requires continuous prompting, Agentic AI acts as a digital agent, making decisions, collaborating with other agents, and navigating software environments to execute multistep workflows.

AI was everywhere, but Agentic AI was by far the largest subset. Every phone provider, and their mother, now claims to have an Agentic AI solution that can replace a receptionist, scheduler, or other entry‑level employee.

The technology is undeniably impressive, but we’re not convinced it can fully replace a human today. One question we kept coming back to: how many of the sales agents who are pushing Agentic AI to their customers actually enjoy interacting with the bots that every major company is rolling out?  (hint, the answer is few to none)

Right now, this feels like the play of the moment in the telecom channel. The value is there, but most people still strongly prefer talking to a real person. Whether this category truly breaks into the mainstream the way some hope remains to be seen.

By: Jordan Viener

As a young professional, this was my first Channel Partners conference, and only my second corporate conference of any kind. By the start of day two, as I began to grasp the sheer scale of not only this event but the many happening up and down the Las Vegas Strip, a simple question formed: why do any of this?

Seriously. In an age of constant connectivity, the very foundation of the industry we work in, why do more than six million people attend conferences in Las Vegas alone each year? Couldn’t all of this be achieved through webinars and video calls? The answer, put simply, is no.

Despite the rise of powerful communication tools, the value of gathering in one place was on full display last week. The bars, restaurants, concourses, and exhibition halls around the Venetian were packed with people from every corner of the industry. Online meetings require intent, they must be scheduled, justified, and slotted into someone’s calendar. Conferences create space for chance encounters, spontaneous conversations, and ideas that don’t need a pre defined value to be worth having.

And then there’s the human element. I had met several of our partners online, in some cases many times, but seeing them in person was different. More meaningful. More real. There are no screens to hide behind. Being able to say, “Oh yeah, I’ve met you,” changes the entire dynamic.

Not every part of a convention needs to be in person. But speaking as a digital native and a second time conference goer, I can tell you this: it’s a hell of a lot more impactful than scheduling a meeting on Teams.