Advania shares AI lessons

One of the key areas of focus for Advania is artificial intelligence (AI), with its experiences with the technology highlighting the challenges faced by the channel.

Speed is one of the fundamental issues around AI as the technology evolves at break-neck speed, as well as the pressure on partners to outline strong use cases and take customers forward with adoption and deployment.

“AI is changing a lot, every six weeks there’s a new kind of company, and there’s a new model,” said Chris O’Brien, CTO at Advania UK. “We’re still seeing quite a few organisations that are stuck in POC mode. Sometimes it’s challenges in finding where the measured benefit is and pinning it back to a real business outcome. Sometimes it’s like we all push ahead and want the benefits of AI, but we’re starting to get concerned about our data and compliance.”

In addition, the channel is being asked questions around security and data sovereignty, and it needs to be able to provide answers to users.

O’Brien added that the channel not only needed to be able to talk about the implementation and benefits of AI, but also had to be able to navigate culture and broader customer concerns.

“There’s a big push for AI, pretty much in all of our clients, but sometimes the employees are pushing back because the mandate is to use more AI, and it’s really blunt, simplistic and doesn’t help that much,” he said.

“Organisations that do it right are getting real benefits now, and it comes from two places: it’s raising the productivity bar for everybody, but making it stick takes the right kind of adoption programme led by experts that know the tools that go into each different sort of business unit and function, understand their reality and help them get the most out of the tools,” he said.

Neil Sawyer, senior vice-president and managing director EMEA at HP, agreed that the channel could play a crucial role in delivering support for customers keen to adopt AI and to answer how the tech can improve life for users.

“There’s a great opportunity for the channel community to own that question, because there is no doubt that – in every single end user organisation – AI use is rife throughout the workforce, but it’s not managed,” he said.

“That presents security concerns, it presents issues around compliance and it presents issues around cost as well. When you take the proposition that Advania can deliver to a large organizstion, a government entity, and particularly a mid-sized business that doesn’t get all this consultative input from many different organisations.

“What a great opportunity for the channel to take ownership of that and introduce it as a management framework, so companies then know what it’s being used for, how it’s being used, and is it protecting the interests of the company and their client base,” he added.

Advania recently moved to add more AI expertise with an acquisition of Icelandic player Evolv, with the intention of sharing the gained knowledge across the business.