COVER STORY
“Do I bill an hour? Do I bill five? Do I bill one hour at five times the rate? We’re going to have to navigate through that stuff—both for me as a professional services firm and I think for a lot of orga- nizations,” he said. “If all of the sudden your employees are more productive, do they work less? Do they work the same? Do they demand more money? How much does the organization give credit for provid- ing the AI tools versus what the employee gets for being more productive and using them? We’re going to have to navigate those conversations because there is going to be a lot of change as peo- ple’s job roles adapt. ... I don’t see it replacing a lot of jobs, but I do think it ultimately changes many of them.” PhillipWalker, CEO of Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based Micro- soft partner Network Solutions Provider—a member of CRN ’s 2023 MSP 500—said that the generative AI fervor has had a ripple effect on customers seeking Microsoft Power BI AI capabilities. His company has worked with customers on data lake cleanup to prepare for generative AI. “The golden nugget is going to be Power BI,” Walker said. “It’s going to be analyzing data. It’s going to be real-time information. It’s going to be recommendations. Because before, you had to have SAP HANA installed.You had to have NetSuite installed.You had to have some enterprise Oracle ERP to get that type of insight for your business. And you had to have a team of analysts from Harvard sitting in a room looking at the data to make sense of it. Those days are now going away.” Gordon McKenna, global vice president of alliances at Downers Grove, Ill.-based Microsoft partner Ensono—No. 103 on CRN ’s 2023 Solution Provider 500—told CRN that an example of his company’s early generative AI work has been demonstrating an OpenAI application that takes in a vast number of anonymized Statements of Work to create recommendations. “You can literally query the tool and say, ‘I’ve got this type of customer, and they’ve got this type of requirement. What do I need to put in the SoW?’” McKenna said. “And it literally scours through those Statements ofWork and comes up with a response.” A member of the Microsoft PartnerAdvisory Council, McKenna said that Microsoft’s investment in AI is for the long haul and that it has prompted AWS, Google Cloud and other rivals to publicly announce how they are tackling this technology. “I would say the pivot that Microsoft made aroundAGI [artificial general intelligence] is a sharper pivot than they made going all in on the cloud,” McKenna said. “And it’s absolutely the right pivot to make. They bet the house on it. … I applaud Microsoft. It’s the right move. It is very exciting.” Microsoft taking generative AI seriously is why the vendor’s partners need to as well, he said. Interested partners will probably see opportunities for on-premises work, private offerings with more security, and hybrid cloud. “Any partners that aren’t leaning into this now are going to be dead, same way as cloud,” McKenna said. “But I think it’s
a quicker pivot. … The time is now. In a year’s time, two years’ time, the market will be saturated. Not only by partners that have transformed, but new partners coming into the market.There are a lot of startups that are like, ‘I want a piece of this,’ and are leaning into the market and are going to become very quick contenders for the crown.” What Partners Need From Microsoft Although some enterprising solution providers have already plunged into generative AI, all the partners who spoke with CRN had suggestions for how Microsoft can make Copilots ready for the channel once they become generally available. WinWire’sArora said he knows Microsoft understands that even businesses won over by generative AI may not have budgeted for its adoption. AI-specific incentive programs for solution providers go a long way, he said. When asked about bringing generative AI to capital-conscious customers, Microsoft’s Dezen said that solving for particular busi- ness problems and communicating that this isn’t technology for technology’s sake is key. “This isn’t a science project,” she said. “This is about how you help customers solve their real business problems, and then you can get to the crux of what do you need to do and what are the resources, investments you need in order to solve this problem.” The productivity benefits—and employee morale boost from no longer working on mundane automated tasks in favor of more complex problem-solving—can help offset the price of adopting generative AI, she said. Productivity “is a pretty obvious place to get a direct cost savings,” Dezen said. “This is where you realize savings through time savings. I love the way that we talk about Microsoft 365 Copilot and how you can eliminate those mundane tasks.With the elimination of those mundane tasks is the elimination of hours of work. There’s real cost savings there.” WinWire has preview versions of certain technology from the vendor, Arora said. More previews will help WinWire and other solution providers evangelize the technology to customers con- cerned about content safety and accuracy. WinWire’s Guidi said that Microsoft-funded assessment programs and ways to help customers with building costs will help move the technology forward. When asked about incentives, more specializations, more train- ing and more resources for partners, Dezen said this is only the beginning. “There’s a lot more in the road map,” she said. “We’re not slow- ing down at all.” PwC’s Greenstein said he looks forward to more ways to scale vector databases, provide access control and synchronize data—not to mention integration to prevent employees from having to work with dozens of different AI systems. “Those are going to be critical as this becomes an enterprise capability,” he said.
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