Solution Providers See GenAI Opportunities In 2024

NGEN, TanChes, iCorps and more share thoughts on GenAI and AI in 2024.

Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence to help employees and customers. Endpoint security boosted with generative AI. And readying customer data to make the most of GenAI.

This is how the most cutting-edge solution providers are approaching GenAI as the technology continues to capture customer attention heading into 2024. Bloomberg Intelligence puts the GenAI market at $1.3 trillion in 2032, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42 percent. And ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott believes GenAI could-boost global gross domestic product by nearly $7 trillion

CRN sampled solution providers in North America about the biggest opportunities for GenAI in 2024.

Solution Providers On AI

Among the solution providers who spoke with CRN are:

*NGEN

*TanChes

*AllCloud

*Converge Technology Solutions

Upcoming releases that could put GenAI in more hands include:

*Microsoft 365 Copilot and M365 Chat general availability (GA) on Nov. 1

*Salesforce Einstein Copilot Studio will enter the pilot phase in the fall

*IBM WatsonX.Governance enters GA in December

Here’s what the solution providers had to say.

Terry Speigner

NGEN

CEO, President

Lanham, Md.

At NGEN, we are using AI to improve our processes. We were early adopters in using AI. We were one of the first MSPs to roll out Cylance, which is AI endpoint protection.

We’ve implemented AI in quite a bit of our business processes to create efficiencies and eliminate obstacles to getting things done for our customers and our staff. … Customers want to know more about AI. They keep hearing about it.

They want to know what it can do for them. What we’re seeing most often is customers who have been interested in the RPA part of AI, the robotic processing automation, and customers who are also interested in machine learning.

And then on the AI side, we have customers who are interested in learning about how they can use it to enhance their internal processes and to be able to get things done quickly and more efficiently on the customer side.

There’s a lot of interest. … (The customer concerns around AI) we hear most about – cybersecurity is very important. Making sure that AI does not self-govern itself to the point where it is now doing things without human direction.

So you have got people who really are interested in implementing it. Some who are really concerned about the efficacy of whether or not it can go rogue. And then and whether or not other actors can access your AI and turn your AI against you.

So the cybersecurity aspect of AI is going to be critically important for anything that we do for our customers because what we don’t want to do is give them this most powerful tool that can be used for good but also to be used for bad.

Chesley Choudhury

TanChes Global Management

Chairman

Houston

The solutions we are providing, it’s all about business outcomes. And so if we can adapt AI to the client business and get them an outcome using that technology, definitely it will be a big push toward getting AI in their environments.

Microsoft is releasing (365) Copilot on Nov. 1. … That’s really going to change the landscape in terms of data that is siloed in different repositories. AI is actually going to collate that data and actually make sense of it. Very excited about that. … (Customers are) excited and curious at the same time.

The one thing that they are concerned about is security. Microsoft has kind of addressed that and they’re making Copilot exist within the tenant for the tenant. … (As for the cost, first) they want to see what it does first. And if it does what they think it can do, then $30 is not a problem. … I wish Microsoft did a basic version (as an option). And then as they want to expand the capabilities, they should offer a premium version.

Michael Hadley

iCorps Technology

CEO, President

Woburn, Mass.

One is to be more responsive when events happen – incident response and to mitigate more quickly, from hours to minutes. That’s what the focus is.

The second thing is to better understand threats every single day in no way we could do it before.

And as an MSP, model our client via keywords. Based on those keywords, be proactive about our clients’ response. So that’s really what we’re going to focus on how to use the technology to accomplish those outcomes.

We also have an internal (AI-powered chatbot) – the iCorps Wizard. That’s to educate our consultants, (new and) existing ones. That’s live. It uses Microsoft’s ChatGPT. The iCorps Wizard is pretty cool.

Shannon Hulbert

CEO

Opus Interactive

Hillsboro, Ore.

AI has a really huge opportunity for us being able to automate — but then also really be able to make sure that we’re empowering our people to do as much as possible with as little as possible.

We had invested in a DevOps (development operations) group about two years ago. And their whole role was to go through everything that we have, all the repetitive things, and just build automation into those areas, just from what we currently have.

And so as we’re moving forward, it will be — how do you do those things in a way that is learning from the bigger collective amount of data that we have available?

Vinod Paul

Chief Operating Officer

Align

New York

This is truly greenfield. I think in 2024, the biggest opportunity for our clients to leverage it is to look at — how do you improve process?

How do you improve analytics? How do you get the most efficiency possible? And I think that the tools that are out there are going to enable our client base to be much more productive and leverage AI to make better analysis of situational investments that they’re making.

It will allow them to look at risk from a more-holistic standpoint.

John Douglass

President, CEO

Pileus Technologies

Wichita, Kan.

The big opportunity I see is for us, as an organization, to [use GenAI] internally probably first — and help our techs better communicate with our customers.

That’s from a PSA (professional services automation) standpoint — integrating into ChatGPT — to where it can go through and it can pull context from things that our techs are saying, and to hopefully open the barrier of communication with our customers.

It could probably read the context of an [interaction] and spit out, ‘Have you tried this and this as options?’ — to help them perform better.”

Manak Ahluwalia

CEO, President

Aqueduct Technologies

Canton, Mass.

From a customer perspective, the fact that they have such a vast amount of data available to them, if they could find a more natural way for their consumers to tap into that data, they’d be in a better position. That’s a lot of where they’re leveraging GenAI technology today.

They’re trying to figure out, ‘If we get a natural learning model in place, and consumers could just ask us the questions they actually want to ask us, versus us having to interpret what they want to see and get access to data a lot quicker.’

There’s a lot of areas where we see productivity and customer experience improvements on the generative AI side of the house.

From a technology perspective, we’re finding it is being embedded in pretty much every tool. You’re looking at things that may have taken significant manpower, or things that could have been correlated in data, and now being able to leverage the technology to effectively do that on your behalf.

We’re getting smarter about identifying potential performance issues and identifying security issues.

From our specific perspective, we are actively looking at different ways to use that technology to reduce our mean time to repair from an MSP perspective.

So a lot of these technologies are really just improving the human experience, not really replacing the human experience at this point in time. We’re excited to increase that level of productivity and responsiveness to our customers.

Gabriel Romero

Chief Marketing Officer, Global Head of Alliances

AllCloud

Denver

So our approach is, we have our GenAI assessment that we run our clients through—it is quite popular.

What we’re learning is that everybody says, ‘Okay, I need GenAI. I need GenAI because it’s going to solve these business challenges that I have.’ We look in and say, ‘Okay, we need to actually start with the basic infrastructure of your data and analytics. What are you doing today in analytics? Your data has to be on the cloud. You have to have all your data sources on the cloud in a way that you can access the data and use the data.’

So before we ever run off and say, ‘You need GenAI to solve this problem.’ We need to make sure customers have their data in place that they can even access it and use it. Then we’ll look at it and say, ‘Okay, maybe GenAI can solve this business challenge for you.’

So when you look at GenAI, that’s really what we’re learning. It’s not completely redoing your infrastructure, it’s just making sure that your data is in the right place and that it’s in a way that’s usable. So that you know how to interpret it to then we can say, ‘OK, now we can look at solving these business challenges.’

John Teltsch Jr.

Chief Revenue Officer

Converge Technology Solutions

Gatineau, Quebec

We’re making a massive investment around AI. It’s our largest global practice. We have several hundred practitioners in that space today.

We’re working with Nvidia and the partnership we built with them. We did some deals in the second quarter with some very large automakers around AI. So we’re in some very deep projects right now doing consulting work in use cases around: financial services, around the automotive industry, and around healthcare that we’re now working with clients on them developing their own AI set of practices.

A lot of it’s going to be driven by how the customer wants to see their data and how the data is presented to it.