COLUMN: Big ROI Savings Driving AI Customer Adoption
CRN’s Steve Burke says AI is rewriting the rules of business at blinding speed.
Michael Hadley, co-founder, president and CEO of iCorps Technologies, a Woburn, Mass.-based MSP, has helped his customers drive big savings and competitive advantage from every treacherous technology twist and turn over the last 31 years.
Hadley, however, has never seen anything like the out-of-the-gate ROI that his customers are seeing with AI. “It is all about automation and saving customers money,” he said.
In one case, a construction company has saved $200,000 annually with a customized Microsoft Copilot iCorps AI solution aimed at speeding up the contract proposal process and project management.
ICorps, No. 486 on the 2024 CRN Solution Provider 500, is also implementing AI solutions for law firms that are adopting them for document analysis and for banks to flag abnormal responses and applications for risk management.
Hadley said the proven ROI that iCorps is bringing to the table with AI solutions as a trusted adviser is far different than the heavy lifting his company experienced to try to get companies to shift from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. “We had to spend so much time and energy in the early days to get people to adopt the cloud,” he said. “You really had to talk people into moving their IT to the cloud. Adoption of cloud was very difficult when it first came out, unlike AI.”
A big difference between the early days of the AI revolution and the cloud computing paradigm shift is how quickly customers are getting “up to speed” on the benefits of AI, said Hadley.
“They are seeing that the investment they are making is resulting in true cost savings,” he said. “We’re just at the beginning of this. This is the tip of the iceberg. It is only going to get bigger and bigger in terms of the cost savings and use cases from AI and automation.”
Hadley said in his three-plus decades in business he has never seen as much interest in a new technology. “It’s everywhere,” he said. “It’s in newspapers, TV, radio, politics. The conversation on AI is happening in boardrooms and management meetings with top executives asking, ‘How can we save money with AI? How can we be a better company with AI?’ We’re having those conversations with our customers every day and implementing AI solutions for them that are driving big ROI.”
Hadley is not alone. MSPs serving small businesses to midmarket-focused super regional providers to global systems integrators are also seeing AI take hold at a much faster clip than prior massive technology transformations.
Customers are anxious to have strategic conversations with solution providers aimed at rewriting the old rules of business to compete in the AI era. If their trusted advisers are not ready to have those conversations, they will look elsewhere.
“You have to be all in with AI,” said Hadley. “If you’re not having a conversation with your client, someone else is going to.”
The bottom line: Those not stepping up and making the big AI investments necessary to provide business use cases with proven ROI for customers are becoming more irrelevant with every passing day.
