Where Do 1.3 Billion AI Agents Get Sold?

The Numbers Are Hard to Ignore

IDC predicts 1.3 billion AI agents in circulation by 2028.¹ More than 230,000 organisations already use Microsoft’s Copilot Studio to create and customise agents, with over one million custom agents built in a single quarter, representing 130% growth quarter-over-quarter.² Eighty per cent of the Fortune 500 are already deploying Microsoft agents in production, led by manufacturing, financial services, and retail.³

These aren’t pilot programmes. This is enterprise adoption at scale.

But every agent that gets built needs a way to get sold. As the number of agents in production grows from thousands to millions to over a billion, the question of distribution becomes the central commercial challenge of the next three years. How do enterprises discover, procure, and pay for AI agents?

The answer is increasingly clear: cloud marketplaces.

Every Hyperscaler Is Betting on Agents as a Marketplace Category

In the last eighteen months, every major cloud provider has promoted AI agents to a first-class marketplace category.

Microsoft launched the Microsoft 365 Copilot Agent Store, an in-product storefront where enterprise users can discover and install AI agents directly within Teams, Outlook, and Word. The broader Microsoft Marketplace, which Omdia projects as a nearly $300 billion partner services opportunity by 2030,⁴ now features over 5,000 AI solutions.⁵ Microsoft’s Agent 365 control plane, generally available since May 2026, provides the governance layer for identity, security, and compliance management of agents at enterprise scale.⁶

AWS launched a dedicated AI Agents & Tools category within AWS Marketplace. Enterprises can deploy pre-built agents or submit their own, with monetisation handled through AWS billing and tight integration with IAM, audit logging, and compliance frameworks. Agents built on Amazon Bedrock can be listed and sold alongside the broader AWS partner ecosystem.⁷

Google Cloud introduced AI agent listings on Google Cloud Marketplace with validation for A2A (Agent-to-Agent) protocol and Gemini Enterprise integration. Their marketplace supports multiple monetisation models, including subscription-based, usage-based, private offers, and outcome-based pricing. A Futurum Research study commissioned by Google Cloud found that vendors selling through their marketplace see 112% larger deal sizes and faster sales cycles.⁸

The pattern is unmistakable: cloud marketplaces are becoming the app store for enterprise AI agents.

Why Marketplaces Win the Agent Distribution Problem

For traditional SaaS, marketplace distribution was a nice-to-have. An additional channel alongside direct sales, partner referrals, and self-service. For AI agents, marketplace distribution is closer to a requirement. Three dynamics make this the case.

Enterprise procurement runs through cloud commitments. Large organisations increasingly purchase software through their existing cloud spending commitments. On Azure, that’s MACC (Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment). On AWS, it’s EDP (Enterprise Discount Programme). GCP has equivalent committed spend arrangements. If your AI agent isn’t transactable on the marketplace, you’re invisible to buyers who are specifically looking to deploy their committed cloud spend on AI solutions. This isn’t a marginal channel. For many enterprise buyers, it’s the primary procurement path.

AI agents need consumption-based billing. Traditional SaaS typically sells on per-seat, per-month pricing. AI agents are different. They often need to bill on consumption: tokens processed, workflows executed, outcomes delivered, or API calls made. Cloud marketplaces have built-in metered billing infrastructure designed for exactly this pattern. Building equivalent billing infrastructure independently is a significant engineering investment that most agent developers shouldn’t be making.

Governance and security are non-negotiable. Enterprise buyers won’t deploy AI agents that can’t be observed, managed, and secured within their existing infrastructure. Marketplace-listed agents inherit the cloud provider’s identity, compliance, and governance frameworks. On Microsoft, that’s Entra and Defender. On AWS, it’s IAM. On GCP, it’s Gemini Enterprise governance. This dramatically reduces the trust barrier for enterprise adoption.

From Theory to Practice: Legal Interact

The clearest proof that this model works is already in production.

Legal Interact, a legal technology company, needed to bring a suite of AI-powered legal solutions to enterprise buyers. The portfolio includes My AI Lawyer, Contract Understanding, Contract Manager, and Matter Manager. These are sophisticated applications that leverage AI to transform how legal teams manage contracts, matters, and compliance.

The challenge was distribution. Legal Interact is a software company, not a marketplace integration specialist. Building the technical integration to make each solution transactable on Azure Marketplace would have required landing pages, fulfilment APIs, operations APIs, webhooks, SSO orchestration, subscription lifecycle management, and metered billing. That’s months of engineering time better spent on product development.

Stactize handled the entire marketplace layer. Legal Interact’s solutions are now live and transactable on Azure Marketplace, discoverable by enterprise buyers who are spending their MACC commitments on AI-powered legal tools.

The introduction came through SoftwareOne, our global channel partner. The economics illustrate the flywheel: Legal Interact grows its sales through the marketplace channel. Stactize earns its monthly platform fee for providing the integration and lifecycle management infrastructure. SoftwareOne benefits as Legal Interact’s cloud services provider.

As we noted in SoftwareOne’s recently published case study on the partnership: “A win-win-win, and one that the emergence of AI agents will amplify tremendously.”⁹

The SoftwareOne Partnership: Proof at Global Scale

The Legal Interact win isn’t an isolated case. It’s the product of a global channel partnership that has been building since 2022.

When 1Nebula formalised its partnership with SoftwareOne, the focus was on helping ISVs get transactable on the Azure Marketplace. Three years later, the partnership has evolved into a multi-cloud, multi-region channel operation.

APAC now accounts for 15 to 20% of Stactize’s new business pipeline, all from SoftwareOne introductions.⁹ The pattern is repeatable: SoftwareOne’s regional teams identify ISVs and AI agent developers who want to launch on cloud marketplaces or who are struggling with existing listings. They introduce them to Stactize. We handle the technical integration and ongoing marketplace operations. SoftwareOne benefits from the resulting cloud consumption.

Joint go-to-market initiatives are actively educating the market on how to navigate this landscape. These include webinars on AI agent monetisation and regional enablement sessions across Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Singapore. These aren’t customer-facing events alone. They align SoftwareOne’s internal sales teams with Stactize’s expanding multi-cloud capabilities, ensuring that when an ISV in Melbourne or Manila needs marketplace enablement, the local team knows exactly where to send them.

The partnership has also evolved beyond Microsoft. Stactize launched AWS Marketplace capabilities approximately a year ago, with GCP support following. This multi-cloud expansion reflects a market reality: in regions like the Middle East and APAC, cloud preferences are more diverse, and organisations increasingly operate in multi-cloud environments.

What This Means for AI Agent Developers

If you’re building AI agents, the distribution question is no longer theoretical. Enterprise buyers are centralising procurement through cloud marketplaces. The hyperscalers are investing heavily in agent-specific marketplace infrastructure. And the window to establish marketplace presence before the category becomes crowded is closing.

Here’s what Stactize handles so you don’t have to:

Zero code changes required. Our platform creates marketplace-compatible wrappers around your existing Azure AI Foundry or AWS Bedrock endpoints. Authentication, usage tracking, and billing are handled automatically.

Launch in under 24 hours. Manual marketplace setup typically takes 6 to 12 weeks. Stactize’s automated workflows handle the technical requirements across all three major cloud marketplaces, including documentation, compliance certifications, and approval processes.

Purpose-built for AI workloads. Intelligent token batching, usage optimisation, and enterprise billing patterns. Support for complex pricing models including volume discounts, enterprise tiers, and consumption-based billing. These are the billing patterns that AI agents actually need.

Multi-cloud from a single subscription. One Stactize plan gets you transactable on Azure, AWS, and GCP. No separate integrations, no separate maintenance, no separate billing infrastructure.

Global channel reach through SoftwareOne. When you list through Stactize, you’re not just getting marketplace integration. You’re entering an ecosystem where SoftwareOne’s global sales teams are actively introducing ISVs to enterprise buyers across APAC, Europe, the Middle East, and beyond.

Plans start at $299/month with zero transaction fees from Stactize.

The Agent Economy Needs a Distribution Layer

IDC’s 1.3 billion agent prediction may prove conservative or optimistic. The exact number matters less than the direction: AI agents are becoming a mainstream enterprise software category, and the volume of agents in production is growing exponentially.

What’s certain is that every one of those agents needs a way to reach enterprise buyers. Direct sales alone won’t scale. Self-service alone won’t meet enterprise procurement requirements. The cloud marketplace is the distribution layer that solves both problems, and the hyperscalers are investing billions to make it work.

Stactize exists to ensure that the marketplace plumbing doesn’t become your engineering problem. You build the agent. We make it sellable. SoftwareOne helps it reach the world.

The goal has always been simple: make it easy for software companies to sell where their customers are buying.

In the agent economy, that means cloud marketplaces. And the time to get listed is now.

Sources

1. IDC Info Snapshot, “1.3 Billion AI Agents by 2028,” #US53361825, May 2025. Sponsored by Microsoft. Referenced in Microsoft Official Blog, April 2026.
2. Microsoft Build 2025 keynote, Jared Spataro, Chief Marketing Officer of Microsoft AI at Work, May 2025. Referenced in IT Pro, May 2025.
3. Microsoft first-party telemetry measuring agents built with Microsoft Copilot Studio or Microsoft Agent Builder in use during the last 28 days of November 2025. Microsoft Official Blog, April 2026.
4. Omdia, “Partner Ecosystem Multiplier: The Microsoft Marketplace Opportunity,” commissioned research sponsored by Microsoft, December 2025. Microsoft Official Blog, April 2026.
5. Microsoft Official Blog, “Accelerating Frontier Transformation with Microsoft Partners,” April 2026. Source.
6. Microsoft Official Blog, “Introducing the First Frontier Suite built on Intelligence + Trust,” March 2026. Source.
7. AWS Marketplace, AI Agent Products documentation. Source.
8. Futurum Research, commissioned by Google Cloud. Published via Google Cloud Blog, “Google Cloud AI Agent Marketplace.” Source.
9. SoftwareOne Partner Story, “1Nebula and SoftwareOne: Scaling marketplace success in a multi-cloud world.” Source.