COVER STORY
In a June blog post, Microsoft suggested that people interested in staying updated on Copilot developments use Message center in the Microsoft 365 admin center and the online Microsoft 365 road map. Interlink’sWilson said Microsoft needs to give partners concrete release dates for when Copilots and other generative AI offerings go generally available. The vendor also needs to release more information on how much generative AI will cost customers and better address “hallucinations”—the term for when AI models produce false information. Although the hallucination issue is improving and solution pro- viders have techniques they can use when interacting with models to minimize the concern, “sometimes the model just has to be able to say, ‘I don’t know,’ versus making stuff up,” Wilson said. Providing solution providers with “solid training” on leveraging generativeAI and interpreting output will help with user adoption, he said. EY’s Little said solution providers can put guardrails in place for customers and investigate the causes of hallucinations. Sometimes, a hallucination reveals an issue with the customer’s data used to power the AI, Little said. “We were demoing [the payroll chatbot] to a client,” he said. “And the client just asked a question, came back, and the cli- ent said, ‘Well, that’s wrong.’ We were like, ‘OK, well, let’s click.’ So we clicked to the data source. And actually, what we found was the data had wrong information. So actually, we found a secondary effect in cir- cumstances where it ends up helping us from a data cleansing perspective and continuously making it better.” Microsoft making governance tools and prompt engineering tool sets more available will help customers, Little said. Core BTS’ Thompson said Microsoft has done a good job of talking about responsible AI broadly, but he wants to hear more about industry-specific responsibility and how to factor for cus- tomer interpretations. “If you know anything about the governance and risk and com- pliance, it’s really how to take those regulatory controls, and each company has their own interpretation of their definition of what it means,” he said. “What is that prescriptive guidance that needs to come into play? And how do we actually take those controls that they have in the platform to conform it to meet that?” He also wants to see all vendors put interoperability forward. “It shouldn’t matter whether it is a third-party vendor, whether it’s Microsoft, or whoever it is,” he said. “We’re playing into the ecosystem of what our enterprise needs and also from our consumer perspective. We need to be able to play together in that same pool.” Network Solutions Provider’sWalker said details on how generative
AI uses customer data will help build trust in the technology. “They need to give us and the community—the Microsoft com- munity—best practices,” he said. “It’s having an honest, detailed conversation about what AI is doing and how it uses data … so people can make a decision willingly on giving their data and what they are feeding into it.” Walker said more education around using generative AI to avoid headline-grabbing debacles such as Samsung employees feeding proprietary data to ChatGPT and a New York lawyer filing a legal brief with made-up legal opinions generated by ChatGPT. He related this to when early internet users needed education on when not to put in credit card information and Social Security numbers when asked online. “There just needs to be rules or ideas of, ‘Hey, this is what we should or should not do with AI,’” he said. Aligning With Microsoft When Arora and WinWire CEO Ashu Goel both left Microsoft in 2007—Arora worked at the vendor for about seven years and Goel about six—to start their solution provider business, they decided that one of their competitive advantages would be always aligning closely with Microsoft’s direction. “From the very early days of Azure and every- thing else, we have made sure that we are always part of the best and the latest and greatest that Microsoft is investing their time on,” Arora said. “When mobility came into the picture. When IoT came into the picture.When cloud, of course. … as data and AI itself came into the picture.” For Arora, investing time and money this early into generative AI means WinWire stays ahead of the competition to win new customers and deliver innovative solutions to existing customers. “We are theAI expert for you for a long time—data andAI,” he said. “And we are also generative AI experts. … Our commitment to Microsoft as a platform, Microsoft as a partnership and to our existing customers, it is creating a lot of buzz out there for us as a company.” Although WinWire is strictly a Microsoft partner, Arora is still watching how competing services from Google Cloud and AWS compare. For now, he feels secure with his bet on Microsoft. “Microsoft, the way it has increased its presence in everything in the last five, 10 years, and in the last five or six months on this technology, I think our bet has been paying off,” he said. “They need partners like us, the team that I’m bringing in, to go deeper into technology to scale and to speak to the customers. And we are able to provide that.”
‘[Microsoft needs] partners like us, the team that I’m bringing in, to go deeper into technology to scale and to speak to the customers. And we are able to provide that.’ — Vineet Arora, CTO, WinWire Technologies
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AUGUST 2023
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