COLUMN: The Very Real Challenge Of Artificial Intelligence
CRN’s Jennifer Follett says one of the biggest obstacles solution providers face when selling and deploying AI is overcoming the fear of the impact that AI will have because it represents such a huge change to the status quo.
Will AI take my job? Will AI make me irrelevant? Is my company’s reputation at risk? Is it worth the hassle? Is it safer to wait?
These are the types of customer concerns, whether spoken out loud or not, that solution providers are up against as they seek new ways to help businesses innovate with GenAI solutions.
People, by and large, don’t like change. It can be uncomfortable, stressful. Sometimes it’s even painful.
It’s a natural factor of the human condition to dislike change. Futurist and author Crystal Washington shared some insight into the challenges of grappling with change when she spoke about GenAI at CRN parent The Channel Company’s Women of the Channel Leadership Summit West earlier this year.
She talked about how the human brain is wired to respond to change as if it’s harmful.
“Understand that the only reason that any of us are here today is because our ancestors’ brains evolved to recognize change as danger. It kept them alive,” Washington said during a keynote address at the event. “Understand that our brains still operate the exact same way. They’re not caught up to the world of fast-paced change that we’re living in right now. Currently, when most of us see change—unless we have trained ourselves to be otherwise—our amygdala fires off the exact same way it would if a bear was chasing us.”
That kind of visceral reaction creates a particular challenge for people today, Washington noted, because we are currently living in a time of unprecedented transformation.
“Right now, we are living in a renaissance. History is going to write about this period for thousands of years,” she said, noting, “There have never been humans that have been required to adjust to [as] much constant change as you.”
To ease those qualms, it is vitally important for all parties in the channel ecosystem to get trained on GenAI now and start to adopt it internally in order to get comfortable with the technology, uncover real-world use cases and get familiar enough with GenAI to help customers through the transition.
It’s encouraging to hear that some companies are already taking this approach to heart. HP Inc., for example, a few months ago rolled out Copilot for Microsoft 365 to its full team of sales reps—thousands of people, said Kobi Elbaz, senior vice president and general manager of global channel, sales innovation and operations, in an interview when CRN recently sat down with him at the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.
“This is the kind of technology that you need to touch, you need to feel, you need to play with it,” Elbaz said.
At the same time, HP Inc. has rolled out its Future Ready AI MasterClass, a role-based partner training program that aims to educate solution providers on AI use cases, both for AI at the edge and in the cloud, Elbaz said.
“My call to action is to get trained, start to use AI, and for everybody asking [themselves], ‘When is the right time?’ The time is now,” Elbaz said.
That’s the same message given by Rachel Narel, employee engagement and productivity practice lead at Interlink Cloud Advisors, a Mason, Ohio-based Microsoft partner. She told CRN Senior Associate Editor Wade Millward in this month’s CRN Magazine cover story that her own experiences using Copilot are invaluable during workshops Interlink is conducting with its customers.
“I can show them a day in my life and how it is saving me time,” she said, pointing to her use of Copilot to catch up on email, summarize video calls and generate PowerPoint slides. “That’s a game-changer for us also working with customers—being able to show the real-world use cases, but a lived-out use case and not just, ‘Here is stuff we heard from other customers.’”
And make no mistake, the pace of change is blinding. Copilot is updated so frequently that Interlink holds webinars every three weeks to showcase new features and how to use them, Narel said.
No doubt about it, the transformation being driven right now by AI is daunting, but the best step forward is just that, to move forward. Welcome to the AI renaissance.