“If you don’t master GenAI in your field in the next 12-18 months you will not exist”
Commenter: Chris Gabriel, Chief Strategy Officer, Sapphire Systems
Focus: A £54m-revenue UK SAP, ServiceNow, Automation Anywhere, AWS partner
How are you deploying generative AI at Sapphire internally?
Like most channel partners we are leveraging multiple GenAI tools in marketing from market analysis, content refinement, and in areas such as outbound email sequence creation. We started producing AI-personalised collateral at the start of the year, and we are refining it on a constant basis.
Our consulting teams are also leveraging AI tools in a controlled way to optimise certain tasks and while this is limited at the moment we are seeing some genuinely exciting returns in terms of efficiency. We have been using RPA/Automation in Project Management [project starts] that has delivered quantifiable outcomes in terms of time savings but also workload management for our teams.
Of course, for anybody who responds and says ‘we aren’t using GenAI in our business yet’ it simply means they don’t know they are using GenAI in their business yet. Every single engineer is probably testing code, testing firewall rules, asking for complex configs to be created, you name it.
Do you also see generative AI as a customer opportunity?
Unlike most of the partners who you may talk to, we are at the eye of the storm in terms of GenAI for customers, probably alongside Microsoft365 partners. Working with SAP, ServiceNow, Automation Anywhere, AWS, we are seeing huge acceleration in GenAI applications that are nascent right now, but we expect to see this being mainstream by year end.
The wave of GenAI is going to flow over businesses in finance, supply chain, sales, marketing. But forget ChatGPT as the interface this will be embedded into the core software platform as a co-pilot. Microsoft/Google are now charging $30 a month for Co-pilots. Now think about the opportunity to unlock those for service desk engineers, networking engineers, telesales, finance folks, the list goes on. Let me predict one thing. By 2030 more people will have a co-pilot alongside them than don’t. The channel opportunity is simply HUGE. And if you don’t master GenAI in your field in the next 12-18 months you will not exist.
Should marketing pros in the channel be worried that generative AI will take their jobs?
Automation has always created more jobs; just different ones. A marketeer’s job is to create highly impactful campaigns and engagement that elicits a response or reaction and their audience. Why would marketing NOT want to use GenAi to achieve this?
We are encouraging everybody in marketing to use GenAI tools; from talking heads video creation, animations, content, email sequences, you name it. I want my marketing team to be the masters of AI. If I master it and my competition don’t [they sit and say it’s fluff] there will be fewer jobs in marketing, but just in their marketing teams and not mine. And of course it’s coming in their core tools like CRM, ABM and content platforms, so the more we embrace it, the more formidable we will be.
Where is Wanstor CEO Francesca Lukes placing her genAI bets? See following page for more…
