The attribution problem in co-sell is not new. What is new is that deals now run through many partners and AI agents at once, and that breaks the old way of tracking who did what.
Picture one deal. An AI agent finds the account. A technology partner adds the integration context. A services partner builds the business case. The direct rep closes it. Now try to label that deal "sourced" or "influenced." The old model was never built for credit spread this thin.
The first instinct is to fix it with better tools: more tracking, automatic logging, cleaner PRM data. That improves your data quality, but it does not touch the real problem, which is governance. Most companies have no clear, leadership-backed way to settle a contested deal. They rely on informal habits, quiet deals between managers, and the odd escalation.
AI-led selling will create more contested deals, and faster. The companies that agree on clear attribution rules now, with sales leadership behind them, will spend less time arguing and more time selling.