New TD Synnex Resources For Microsoft 365 Copilot Aimed At Readying Solution Providers

‘You can have the best product in the world, but if the partner is not capable of absorbing that … then you don’t go anywhere,’ says TD Synnex Chief Strategy Officer Sergio Farache.

As generative artificial intelligence grows in popularity and prompts an innovation race among vendors, it also may start that same race among distributors to win over solution provider customers.

TD Synnex Monday launched what it calls an “Enablement Journey” for the Microsoft 365 Copilot generative artificial intelligence offering, including sales and technical enablement, training, readiness tools, peer-to-peer collaboration and sharing to help solution providers bring emerging GenAI technology to small and midsize businesses.

The distributor—with headquarters in Clearwater, Fla., and Fremont, Calif.—has included in the Enablement Journey for M365 Copilot a Copilot practice builder and lab experiences for testing concepts and use cases.

Sergio Farache, TD Synnex chief strategy officer, told CRN that GenAI needs solution providers for successful end user adoption, and his hope is Enablement Journey and future offerings help solution provider customers cut down on the cost of building AI practices.

“You can have the best product in the world, but if the partner is not capable of absorbing that understanding and then really transforming the user in the delivery, then you don't go anywhere,” Farache said.

TD Synnex Microsoft Copilot Offering

Phil Walker, CEO of Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based Microsoft partner and TD Synnex partner Network Solutions Provider—a memberof CRN’s 2023 MSP 500—told CRN that he agrees AI will need channel partners for end-user adoption.

Walker sees some of the biggest opportunities in professional services, data management, setting up business prompts and managing integration and workflows.

“The channel is going to have to change to empower that motion,” he said. “For years, we were at the application [layer] and below. We're now going to have to get into the application.”

The Copilot offering is part of TD Synnex’s vendor-agnostic Destination AI program, which aggregates various AI services, products and resources. Destination AI customers can access applications and services that run on M365 and Microsoft Azure, including data analytics, natural language processing and computer vision.

Farache puts the AI services opportunity for solution providers at two or three times that of simply reselling the technology.

Some early use cases solution providers can try out with TD Synnex’s help include human resources adopting AI to improve recruitment and quickly summarizing information from a meeting a user didn’t attend, he said.

The first wave—potentially a “more transformative” wave than individual GenAI products—is newly embedded AI capabilities in existing applications, which Microsoft has also started doing with popular apps including Word and Teams.

“We see AI as a transformative technology in terms of how businesses operate,” he said. “What we realize is that this is a significant need for change management.”

Solution providers will still have “a significant role” in introducing embedded GenAI features to end users through change management, deployment and implementation, Farache said.

“It's a significant service component and needs that partner enabling the user,” Farache said. “Many of the users are not familiar with the technology and, at the same time, do not necessarily know how to implement the processes or modify their processes around those technologies.

The next wave of AI adoption—personalizing and teaching GenAI models for particular end users—will also need a solution provider motion, especially if an end user has a heterogenous IT environment with data stored with various vendors. Solution providers will also face demand for compliance and security services related to new AI technology that end users adopt.

TD Synnex will help solution providers with data preparation, filtering and model training, he said. Solution providers can also receive certifications to show others their AI prowess.

Daan Koppelmans, who became vice president and global lead for the Microsoft practice in July, told CRN that resources such as Enablement Journey should help GenAI and other cutting-edge technologies avoid just “being hype” and instead develop a sustainable business model.

“This is one of the largest opportunities that we've seen over the past few years in the cloud space,” he said. “As an indirect provider, we have the vision that we empower our partners and customers to thrive in the evolving landscape of modern workplaces.”

Koppelmans said that the TD Synnex offering should bridge the gap solution providers may face between GenAI’s capabilities and practical use for businesses. He predicts that AI adoption will be faster than cloud adoption.

“So that is something that we need to capitalize on now,” he said. “There's a really high urgency and interest.”

TD Synnex itself is experimenting with Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service and other GenAI products for applicable use cases that the distributor can then help solution providers adopt, he said.

“We make sure that whatever we do internally, that our centers of excellence are fully aware and can present it as a use case… for partners to then be able to deliver that message toward the end customer,” he said.