Infinity Group CEO shares AI experiences
Microsoft partner has embraced Copilot, and has some lessons to share to encourage others to do the same
Customers are starting to understand the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and how the technology can be harnessed.
A lot of effort has gone into promoting AI tools such as Copilot, but it’s taken time for use cases to emerge that users can line up behind.
The experience of Rob Young, CEO at Infinity Group, also underlined the need for users to engage with AI and roll it out across their organisations to truly identify where it can make a difference. “A lot of customers are very inquisitive about AI and Copilot, and there’s different levels of that, and we’re seeing people consume the licenses now,” he said. “But I think – and this is us as an organisation as well – we’re starting to align to what a world of AI and Copilot looks like.”
The channel has been urging customers to start their AI journeys by looking at the data and ensuring it’s available and of high quality, and Young agreed it was important to start there to make sure any deployed tools produced the results customers were expecting. “If you think about Copilot effectively, it’s a large language model that that looks at data,” he said. “So, what’s really important right now ... data is actually the basics.”
After having got a grip on data, Young said the next step was to move to the cloud, and many customers were doing that because of the promised access to current hardware, security and total cost of ownership arguments. But there were AI drivers that also meant the cloud conversation was needed.
“Clients need to move to the cloud because, if I’ve got my finance system in the cloud with something like Business Central, I need to ask Copilot questions about the finance it needs to have context,” he said.
“If I looked at numbers on their own, it doesn’t paint a picture,” said Young. “That needs to be able to look at documents as well within the organisation, they need to be configured in a way that’s got some governance and security around it, and give context to those those queries that Copilot is going to be running. That’s the same with a sales team, that’s the same with the marketing team, that’s the same with the finance team and the service teams. So, there’s a whole load of work that needs to be done, and that is moving customers to the cloud, making sure that they’ve been transformed.”
Staff buy-in
The advice from Young is to roll out AI with buy-in from staff across the organisation to make sure it’s seen as a positive.
“What you’re seeing a lot of the time is IT teams driving this and trying to push it to the rest of the business, and the rest of the business are going, ‘Oh, it’s just some other IT distraction, it’s going to create more work for me and be a nuisance’, whereas what they should be doing is forming advocacy groups.
“When we’ve done this internally, where we’ve got a group of people that are interested, initially in AI, but from all facets of the business and different levels of roles and everything else, we almost drive it from the bottom up,” he said. “Create some interest, educate them and get them together to regularly educate them on the different things we can do.”
Infinity is close to Microsoft, and is part of the vendor’s Inner Circle partner group, providing the channel player with a chance to get insights into the approach to AI, cloud and security the vendor is taking.
“We feel that we’re in a position now to take customers on that journey, to move them to the cloud, to transform their front and back office, and then to apply that security in one Microsoft solution and cut down those multi-vendor relationships that lots of customers have,” said Young.
“There’s only a few in the UK that are Inner Circle partners,” he said. “What it means to us, from a practical point of view, is we meet regularly, virtually discuss various incentives, initiatives and challenges that we may be facing ... but it also crosses over into other elements now – Copilot AI and the products are becoming more intertwined with each other.”
