Is there a killer use case for AI, when will AI growth take off in the channel, and can the UK really become an AI world leader?
These were some of the killer questions a panel of top reseller, MSP and GSI leaders faced at the AvePoint OnPoint event last week.
Moderated by IT Channel Oxygen, the panel – entitled Seizing the AI Opportunity – featured:
Flannery Devine Gibbons, Microsoft Alliance Lead at CDW
Richard Flanders, Commercial Director at Aura Technology
Russell Lack, Solution Director at Capgemini
Held at voco Manchester, the event was introduced by AvePoint UK Director, Elements, Chris Shaw, who set the tone by proclaiming that AI growth is “just at the start”.
“We haven’t really got into it,” Shaw told the room of partners.
“Nine out of ten times, customers are giving [Copilot] to a test user or a small subset of their executive leadership team. They’re not generating the economies of scale to get the best returns. The opportunities for them to drive efficiencies, and for us as partners and vendors to make money out of it, is huge.”
Killer question 1: Has AI found a killer app?
Recent headlines suggest even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes AI is yet to find its killer app. Did the panellists agree?
Gibbons got things rolling by saying CDW is already building up a range of AI case studies which have delivered demonstrable ROI.
This includes a Copilot for Microsoft 365 use case, which she said could regularly save a client in the creative industries thousands of pounds in legal costs.
“They came to us and said, ‘every time we’re engaging a legal third-party firm to deal with copyright claims, we’re spending thousands of pounds just to review their documents against ours’,” Gibbons explained.
“We took a quick look and leveraged Copilot for Microsoft 365 and compared the documentation. Believe it or not, it captured the same work the legal firm did every single time. It reached the point where they could run a single query that saved them thousands of pounds a pop every time they ran it.
“It can be hard to measure the ROI, and I think that’s where many organisations get stuck [with AI].
“That’s real ROI you can put your hands on. It’s maybe not a killer app, but it’s certainly a killer use case.”
Lack identified diagnostics in healthcare, as well as threat protection, as among the killer AI use cases Capgemini has uncovered.
Flanders at Aura felt AI’s potential is being hindered by its inability to tell fact from fiction, meanwhile.
“The one thing AI doesn’t do at the moment very well is truth and facts,” he said.
“We had to write some case studies for a proposal recently, so we used Copilot. The AI actually managed to create a case study for a customer we hadn’t signed. It looked at all the good proposal documentation we’d put together and made the assumption they were onboarded and had a good service. The danger is that the information it’s looking at is based on your content, not fact or reality.”
Killer question 2: What AI investments have the panellists made back into their own businesses?
Lack pointed out that Capgemini has pledged to invest €2bn in AI over the next three years.
“That €2bn investment is really around upskilling the organisation. As part of last year’s objectives around AI, everyone in the business had to attain a certain level of training, regardless of roles,” he said.
Flanders said Aura’s focus has been on training customers to make use of AvePoint’s offering, including its Policy & Insights tool.
“A second thing we’ve done is invest in an AI platform. It’s not released to our customers yet, but it gives us the ability to private cloud large language models, as well as create applications. The struggle we’re finding now is that AI is moving faster than you can physically develop those applications,” he said.
For CDW, it is partly about being its own “customer zero” on AI, Gibbons said, meanwhile.
“If we want to take an organisation on a journey of adoption and learn some of the pitfalls, we need to experience it ourselves,” she said.
“We’ve adopted Copilot for Microsoft 365 across all of our customer-facing users, as well as some back-end departments.”
Killer question 3: Can the UK become an AI world leader?
Sir Keir Starmer in January pledged to “mainline AI into the veins” of the UK in an effort to make the country a world leader on the AI stage.
Lack at Capgemini was optimistic the Prime Minister’s goal is achievable if the government sticks to the 50-point plan set out by Matt Clifford. Key initiatives include forging new AI Growth Zones and increasing public compute capacity by twentyfold.
“There’s a lot of things happening to make sure we’ve got the capacity to support AI. If we can manage those key items, we’re in a good position to sit in third place behind China and the US,” he said.
Gibbons at CDW agreed, saying she’d drawn hope from the publication of Microsoft’s recent AI report.
“Historically, we have been at the forefront of innovation for technology and industrialisation, so why not? If you look at that report, it gives me a lot of optimism,” she said.
Killer question 4: How are partners using AvePoint to help customers on their AI journeys?
The three leaders were quick to share their experiences of how AvePoint has helped them build AI momentum.
“If you look at the way we run an adoption journey for our customers to adopt and deploy AI tools, we’ve built a lot of AvePoint’s offerings into that,” Gibbons at CDW said.
“We leverage the data ROT analysis they offer. It allows you to look at all the redundant, obsolete and trivial data and just remove it. If you’ve got obsolete data, or it’s from 10 or more years ago, that information is not going to be relevant and Copilot might surface that in a query.
“We’ve also leveraged their risk assessment to help our customers look at what information they have out there, who has access to it and whether they have properly classified the data they have available to users. This might sound basic, but you’d be surprised by the number of organisations that don’t classify their information at all.”
Killer question 5: When will the UK channel benefit from mainstream AI growth?
On this final question, Gibbons said the market is only at the “early crest” of adoption.
“If we think about overall maturity in the GenAI space, a lot of time it starts with personal productivity, and that’s great because as an individual you can use these tools to take notes, to project manage or to help you prep for a meeting,” she said.
“But as you go up the maturity stack, you’ll start to get into functional and organisational use cases, and that’s where you really see true automation, true leveraging of GenAI. There’s a long way to go.”
“Most of our clients are really at the beginning of the process,” Capgemini’s Lack agreed.
Flanders characterised adoption among Aura’s customers as “slow”, but predicted the rise of AI could eventually spawn a new breed of MSP.
“I don’t think there’s anything tangible we can go out and offer customers as a business solution in a box,” he said.
“It’s important to consider that we’ve spent so much time selling security over the last few years, and so it’s a fundamental shift for organisations like us to focus on the end-user experience and business productivity.
“We definitely see the third generation of an MSP will be consultancy, application integration and AI, and that’s really about end user experience and journey. But we’re definitely not there yet.”
This article was produced in association with AvePoint and is classified as partner content. What is partner content? See more here.
