Jack and the BeanstAIk: Why the AI opportunity isn’t just for the giants

AI offers new ways for many MSPs, VARs and SI businesses to add value and support customers. However, to many, it might seem like an enormous giant: easy to spot from afar, but up close, much more intimidating.

But before you grab your axe and scramble for the nearest beanstalk, it’s important to survey the scene and make sure that you’re heading for a cash cow rather than being left holding a handful of dry beans.

And before we stretch our metaphors any further, let’s take a closer look at the opportunities this presents for the channel.

Who is adopting AI today?

Healthcare is one industry where we’re seeing huge growth, largely because of AI’s potential to help people live longer, take better care of them and reduce administrative burdens. A lot of AI in healthcare doesn’t depend on GenAI, and we see a lot of startups in this sector based on the machine learning industry.

We also see significant AI uptake in manufacturing, mostly in the optimisation of production processes. With its heritage in Kaizen and Six Sigma, manufacturing has always seen a strong appetite in this area. The sector is also starting to embrace predictive maintenance, using both digital twin and machine learning technology.

Thirdly, the retail industry has embraced a mix of GenAI and machine learning to improve customer interactions using chatbots, sales optimisation and hyper-personalisation. AI is allowing every brand to offer the kind of personalised experience that was previously restricted to luxury brands; it has the power to absorb a lot of data points about customers and provide a far more customised experience across the areas of both sales and customer support.

Finally, we see a great amount of AI adoption in the financial sector, particularly in fraud detection and personalised engagement. The financial sector has historically been enthusiastic about machine learning for improving KYC (Know Your Customer) processes, and AI can really accelerate this.

You can see a number of common trends emerging here: AI has great potential to improve efficiency and personalisation, drawing together data from different customer journeys. AI enables everyone to give customers a highly integrated approach when it comes to their relationship with brands.

Implementation Challenges

However, we also hear a lot of questions from customers about data handling, from ethical principles to cloud audits and hands-on management.

First and foremost, data quality is absolutely a challenge. Most legacy systems weren’t designed to work with AI, and most organisations have legacy systems, so there’s a real need for modernisation. IDC’s latest findings predict an unprecedented YoY growth of 97% in AI compute and storage hardware infrastructure to support this adoption. This is a vast area of investment, currently valued at $47.4b. There are a lot of projects going around today to update and extract data from old systems, and partners who can support with this may be in a position to significantly drive their customers forward in terms of AI maturity.

We are also seeing a big talent gap. AI is a new industry, so organisations are still developing their skills. The upshot of this is that many projects don’t go beyond a POC – we see a lot of exploratory initiatives, but then they don’t scale!

There are two main ways that partners can help to address this: you can either help a customer to address the gap directly and deliver workshops and training, or you can provide the end customer with people to do the work on a temporary basis.

All of this requires a transformation plan and can be daunting, but it does represent a major opportunity to add value. Furthermore, these projects will usually start with data literacy, making sure people understand the potential of AI and getting buy-in. The good news is that these starter projects usually have quite a significant ‘wow factor’, and once the penny drops, stakeholders tend to be very bought in about the impact on productivity that AI can have.

Future Opportunities

AI absolutely offers prospects of gargantuan proportions and, like many new rapid-growth market cycles, once you’ve separated the wheat from the chaff (or beans from the stalks), climbing up to the giant’s AI tech lair is a significant opportunity for partners.

As always, it’s important to listen to what customers are doing and understand their broader strategic and technical landscape, but in the long term, embracing the AI opportunity can uncover new business treasures you never knew existed!