AI creating storage opportunities

The need to keep data for compliance reasons and to underpin the promised insights from artificial intelligence (AI) should make this a good year for storage specialists.

Structured data is seen as the fundamental starting point for AI roll-outs, which has driven increased interest in storage. But there are also regulations coming that will require more information to be stored.

Next month will see the introduction of the EU AI Act, which requires customers to demonstrate that their staff have AI literacy and that data can be shown to underpin the decisions made using artificial intelligence. Although EU-wide, the pressure will be on British firms to follow the same standards to trade with continental partners.

Andy Palmer, Seagate’s UK channel lead for enterprise data and cloud solutions, views the compliance regulations as one of the areas where its channel can pitch storage to customers.

“We’re training AI models and we’re getting the inferences from it. You need to store the data, and in February, we’ve got the EU AI law kicking in,” he said.

“Part of that says that if you store, if you make a decision based on AI, you’d better keep that data available for future examination and compliance reasons, and that therefore becomes a storage opportunity,” added Palmer.

He expects the impact of the legislation and the continued growth in AI adoption to take time, but it is an area that should be on the channel radar this year.

“We’re seeing the socialisation of AI apps, we’re seeing increased usage, and I think what’s going to happen is that businesses will be making decisions in the standard way and then testing it against AI to see what AI would have done. It will take some time to build that confidence in AI,” he said.

He added that when such confidence does emerge, “we’ll see a dramatic increase in the storage market”.

“I think the opportunity for the channel in the next 12 months is we’ve got all these companies who feel that they should get into AI, because everyone else is using some of the apps,” he said.

Palmer said the emergence of agentic AI was also an opportunity for the storage channel because it would increase the capability and data used by customer-facing systems.

“We’re seeing the emergence of agentic AI, which is where the AI has agency to take actions on your behalf. As they start to build apps and capability around that, I think that’s the opportunity for the channel,” he said.

“Think about all this data being kept,” he added. “It’s about helping the end user orchestrate the data, make sure that they remove the biases, remove the duplications, get it ready to make good decisions.”

His advice for the channel was to identify the needs of customers and get into a position where they had the capabilities to solve those issues.

“For the channel, it’s getting expertise in the legislation. Get an expertise in consulting opportunity and trading opportunity, helping the end user organise. But it’s a big wave coming through,” said Palmer.