Eight Solution Providers Dish On Their Most Exciting AI Projects

Executives with 3rd Element Consulting, ABM Technology Group, eCreek IT Solutions and others share how they are working with AI.

Meeting transcriptions, meeting summarizations and creating better data-informed forms are among the more exciting, consequential projects some solution providers are working on in the emerging artificial intelligence space.

That’s according to eight solution provider executives surveyed by CRN reporters at CRN parent The Channel Company’s XChange NexGen 2024.

CRN reporters asked NexGen attendees, "What is the most exciting AI project you are working on with a customer?"

AI In The Channel

In October, Gartner said in a report that worldwide IT spending is expected to total $5.74 trillion in 2025, up 9.3 percent year over year. The research firm said that in 2025, it expects CIOs will spend on GenAI beyond proofs of concept.

Read on for what IT executives had to say about the most important AI projects they are working on lately.

Ashley Chavez

Operations Manager

Dega Systems

New York

A lot of our clients are nonprofits that work with children and the elderly, so we’re starting from square one.

It’s building that foundation of what is AI, what kind of tools that you can utilize and where in their existing environments do they have the capability of implementing it.

So, for example, [Microsoft] Copilot has been something that we've been educating them on. It’s teaching them how they can utilize that internally when they’re having meetings, summarizing what’s happening at the end and creating notes.

Kristi Goold

Services Director

eCreek IT Solutions

Denver

ChatGPT [by Microsoft-backed OpenAI] is our top AI project. We’ve used a few applications that come with AI, and none of them have that intuitiveness that ChatGPT has.

We can have an actual conversation, send a screenshot back after an error, say, ‘Hey, that didn’t work.’ Then ask, ‘What’s next?’

And the AI is like, ‘Oh, sorry, here, try this,’ and it finds the little things that you missed. And it’s like a real conversation with someone.

ChatGPT has been a big help in a lot of things we use daily, like all our techs do. I’ve used it to find things like an extra space in the code. I've used it to help me build out a [Microsoft] SharePoint program that I wasn't familiar with. I’ve asked it all kinds of questions whenever I can.

Luis Armendaris

CEO

Gordon Lewis Group

Doral, Fla.

[With Microsoft Copilot] I can see my own prior chats or meeting chats and garner notes [and insight]. Same thing regarding clients.

So I sometimes can gauge client temperature just by asking, ‘Has anything been happening in the system operations chat? Or in the projects chat?’

And they [Copilot] are like, ‘Yes, looks like there was an outage last week.’

So before I engage with the client to go try to upsell them, I get a little reminder that they had an outage last week, and make sure I clean that up. … Client obsession is a big thing for us and being able to know quickly know if there’s anything going on before I pick up that phone [is important].

Dawn Sizer

Co-Founder, CEO

3rd Element Consulting

Mechanicsburg, Pa.

Understanding usage, rails and security [are some of the more recent exciting and consequential AI projects we’re working on].

Decision-makers aren't understanding that employees are using it whether they want them to or think they are. Decisions on how it can be used within and outside the organization need to be made.

Zac Paulson

Director, Product, Strategy

ABM Technology Group

Fargo, N.D.

For us, we’re definitely using the [Microsoft] Teams transcribe and sentiment [analysis] and all of that. That’s been the most valuable [feature] we’ve been seeing [internally and with customers].

There’s a lot of other cool features–job descriptions, etc. … We’ve [even] launched a [new AI-focused business] unit [called ABM AI].

We’ve hired up to 15 people in a company of 125, so we’re talking a major amount of growth, not a small amount [of investment]. And then all focusing on [Microsoft’s] ‘modern work’ [products] and AI with Microsoft.

Chris Wilson

Co-Founder, EVP, CTO
Rudick Innovation & Technology (RIT)

Dallas

We'’e a Microsoft shop, so everything we do is Microsoft-related. So when Microsoft announced Copilot being available, we started pushing some of our customers to try it out.

We’re bringing that to them as a productivity enhancement. We’re basically positioning it like an executive assistant that every employee could have access to. And with that, we’re educating them on how to use Copilot, and also what the risks are with it.

[The NexGen conference] touched on the risks of enabling Copilot without really thinking about it. So we’re getting ahead of that with our customers by talking about things like, ‘What does Copilot have access to?’

Well, it has access to anything that that particular user account in Microsoft has access to. What does that mean? Well, that means SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, any documents that have been shared internally within the organization to everybody. All of those things are fair game.

So what could that potentially mean? Well, that could mean there’s salary information in one of those documents. And if an employee has access, they could simply ask Copilot, ‘What is so-and-so’s salary? Or they can look for other kinds of potentially sensitive information out of that.

Dustin Vaughn

CEO, CTO

Network Performance

Albuquerque, N.M.

The biggest AI project we're working on now is probably a form creation project for somebody who wants to use it to work their way through some of their processes.

So as the questions get answered, they get the data. But we need the end users to be able to get the data out easier.

Honestly, the biggest project we're looking at now is how can we do form creation without having to develop a form each time that they need one? So we have a form that intakes the data and dumps it in a SQL database. And we somehow need that to come back out into viewable forms. … Our other work with AI isn’t so much customer-driven. It’s more for ourselves.

It’s where a platform like Halo[PSA] does a little more AI and starts looking into our tickets and starts doing resolution that way. And that’s big.

Bob Coppedge

Owner, CEO

Simplex-IT

Stow, Ohio

Microsoft is betting the farm on Copilot, just like they bet the farm on Internet Explorer. They’re realigning their entire partner program to revolve around Copilot.

[The most exciting AI projects are] both what we do internally with it, understanding the licensing and understanding what we can deliver to our clients in terms of Copilot as it relates to their internal and external data.