COVER STORY
in October—as the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, in a reflection of how important AI technology is for Microsoft and its partners’ futures. The vendor also tripled its investment in Azure Migrate and Modernize—a renamed Azure Migration and Modernization Pro- gram—which provides assessments, more partner incentives and support for additional workloads. Separately, Microsoft said it has invested $100 million in a new Azure Innovate offering that aims to help partners and customers infuse AI into applications, experiences, advanced analytics and custom cloud-native app building, And Microsoft unveiled new “Era ofAI” marketing campaigns in a box and anAI transformation playbook with guidance on skilling, innovating, marketing and selling. While generativeAI is in its earliest days, some Microsoft solution providers are already delivering generative AI solutions. That work ranges from WinWire AI journey maps to EY’s payroll chatbot and from PricewaterhouseCoopers saving employees 80 percent of work time to Core BTS launching an AI readiness assessment. WinWire’s Journey Maps AtWinWire,Arora works with customers—health care, manufactur- ing and retail are some of its biggest verticals—onAI journey maps, maps that Arora considers to be WinWire’s intellectual property. “You’re not going to jump into building full-fledged production- ready solutions off the bat,” he said.“There is a step-by-step approach that you need to take.” He asks customer CIOs and CTOs what their vision is and their familiarity with generative AI. He’ll take about 30 minutes to “demystify” generative AI and then identifies one to three use cases for a proof of concept or pilot. WinWire then works with customers on budgeting for the work. “We are able to supercharge the adoption of that technology into their areas,” he said. “They are Microsoft’s biggest customers, some of them. And as Microsoft starts bringing those technologies [to market], we are there to help them adopt them in the right manner. And that’s a promise that I provide to them.” Tony Guidi, WinWire’s senior vice president of alliances, told CRN that the solution provider’s years of experience in modern- izing customer data estates “allowed us to leapfrog a lot of other Microsoft partners.” “For years, we’ve been doing modern data, app innovation, all the things that this technology is going to help even further acceler- ate,” Guidi said. “So we were in a unique position where we could take our 16 years of experience and very quickly pivot to focus in this space and … build out the significant team with some of our best people to just begin to develop use cases by industry, [custom] Copilots, proofs of concept, accelerator approaches in order for customers to make this technology real.”
CRN ’s 2023 Solution Provider 500, has a responsible AI readiness assessment available through theAzure Marketplace for customers to identify high-value, low-risk opportunities to use generative AI on business functions within the organization. Finding a document within a business group, generating relevant data content from the document and using generative AI to model the data for company stakeholders to access is one example, Perry Thompson, managing director of technology strategy at Core BTS, told CRN . The solution provider’s 400-plus Microsoft certified professionals are also working onAI at the networking layer to help find anoma- lies and behavior patterns that run afoul of policies. Core BTS employees have looked at customers’ internal data, the value that data provides business functions and the data’s classification and taxonomy. The solution provider is also working on guardrails to protect sensitive information—keeping health- care customers compliant with federal privacy laws, for example, Thompson said. “We’re starting right off the bat because we recognize that this is something that is really exploding in the market,” he said.“But when you start to get into the actual processing of information and trying to give controls and automation, that’s the piece that you have to be very sensitive about.And you have to work with your leaders in your organization to set that vision first and then be able to define strategic goals that actually align to their business and their values.” Customers seeking generative AI are really seeking more con- nections across business units to share data quickly, make decisions faster and get closer to end customers, he said. “This is why we have to take a step back and be able to try to set that strategy, identify those key areas, to define some mitigation aspects of the actual highlighted area—if it exists—go into the pilot mode for them to be able to look at it at a small scale.And then we turn back around and plan for the scaling up of the entire solution and make sure that we have a continuous feedback process that actually continuously improves,” he said. EY’s Payroll Chatbot Global systems integrator and Microsoft solution provider EY— whose accolades include winning multiple 2023 Partner of theYear awards—is in the piloting phase for an Intelligent Payroll Chatbot for a handful of customers, not to mention conducting proofs of concept in other areas of generative AI for EY and with clients. Jim Little, a partner principal and global Microsoft alliance lead and Americas technology strategy lead at EY, told CRN that the company is piloting the chatbot with several customers before going industrial scale with the chatbot. For now, the chatbot knows 27 languages and takes about 15 seconds to answer payroll questions compared with the baseline of 2.2 days for client contact centers. The accuracy rate for proofs of concept and client pilots has increased to 94 percent from a baseline of 67 percent for human agents.The chatbot also nearly doubled first-resolution percentages
Core BTS’ Readiness Assessments Indianapolis-based Core BTS, a Microsoft partner and No. 168 on
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