Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has revealed that the vast majority of customers are setting artificial intelligence (AI) goals but few are in a position to embrace the technology.
In its Architect an AI advantage report, the vendor shared research that found only a third of customers are set up to exploit AI.
The firm has been on a mission to get its channel to a position where it can support customers with artificial intelligence, and this research has underlined the task out there for its partner base.
“It’s unsurprising that our research reported that 94% of businesses are planning to increase their AI budgets this year,” said Matt Armstrong-Barnes, chief technologist for AI at HPE.
“However, what may be surprising is that businesses are investing in AI without first taking a holistic view of the technology and how to implement it. Diving in before considering whether they are set up to benefit from AI and who needs to be involved in its roll-out will lead to misalignment between departments and fragmentation that limits its potential,” he added.
There are plenty of areas where the channel can assist customers, with the HPE research revealing some of the challenges users are facing, including issues in running real-time data pushes and pulls, and the fact that not many have established data governance models to support advanced analytics.
With the promise of AI insights dependent on the ability to traverse data, the majority of those organisations quizzed by HPE were not capable of handling any of the key stages of data preparation for use in AI models – from accessing and storing, to analysing and processing.
“If businesses continue their current approach to AI, it will adversely impact their long-term success,” continued Armstrong-Barnes. “They must adopt a comprehensive end-to-end approach across the full AI lifecycle to streamline interoperability and better identify risks and opportunities. Considering AI – especially GenAI – is data-, power-, time- and resource-intensive to deploy and maintain, businesses need to take the necessary steps and lay the groundwork for their deployments so they don’t run before they can walk.”
Businesses are investing in AI without first taking a holistic view of the technology and how to implement it
Matt Armstrong-Barnes, HPE
Speaking to MicroScope last week, Charlie Tunley, UKIMEA channel and partner ecosystem director at HPE, said it was actively supporting partners with AI through enablement programmes.
“We announced at Discover in Las Vegas, at the end of June, a whole new suite of offerings around AI called Private Cloud for AI, which is an AI-customisable infrastructure stack that a customer can buy to start to deploy an AI within their enterprise,” he said.
“Part of what we’re doing with that is a huge enablement programme, or training programme, with our channel partners across the world, but across the UK and Ireland as well, where we are giving them the skills and capability to go and talk to their customers and understand the opportunity around artificial intelligence so that they can bring us in when they need support,” said Tunley.
