Channel supporting dual-speed AI adoption trend

The channel must navigate a two-speed generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) market and ensure they are in a position to support early adopters as well as more cautious customers.

The buzz around AI has been deafening in the past year, but the emergence of use cases has meant some verticals – financial services being one example – have moved quicker than others, such as the public sector.

Speaking at an IBM event that focused on the technology and the opportunity for the systems integrator (SI) channel, Neil Ward-Dutton, vice president of automation, analytics and AI at IDC Europe, said the market for GenAI had developed rapidly, but at various speeds as customers grappled with the technology.

“We’ve gone from a situation 18 months ago where nobody really knew about this stuff, to a situation now where nine in 10 UK organisations actively engage with the technology in some capacity – they’re either experimenting, creating proofs of concepts, or they’re going further and implementing,” he said.

“At one level, we’ve got this very fast adoption curve of generic productivity types of implementation, where you might be using Copilot to summarise meeting notes or transcribe something ... or in a software development context [to] automatically create some test scripts or ... document your code. But there’s another branch of development, which is occurring more slowly, [with] organisations wanting to think about use cases that are tied to a more concrete business value,” he added.

Ward-Dutton said the channel was in the challenging position of ensuring they can support these varying customer positions.

“The challenge for the channel is doing both those things at the same time. It’s like trying to stand on two trains that are moving at different speeds,” he said.

“The channel partners that are successful have to be able to help customers where they are, so they have to be able to help those customers who are on that fast path, and maybe they want to go very, very broad and get productivity improvements across a very broad population. And they also have to be ready to help those people who want to go to that deeper level,” he said.

Claudia Brind-Woody, vice-president for the UK and Ireland at IBM’s global systems integrator practice, said it had seen its SI community build skills to make sure they were in a position to support customers with AI.

“On the IBM journey, many of them are in the process of getting skills and certifications and badges in our Watson X space – so the Watson X, AI, governance and data,” she said.

“There’s a whole movement to get skills in place. We are running, across Europe as well as in the UK, many centres of excellence, very much enablement types of things, as we’re looking at developing practices with partners so that they’ll have practices around, in our case, the Watson X suite,” she added.

“It’s a journey, but we are now working with multiple partners on various RFP responses in the AI space,” she said.