Quantifying the AI opportunity for vendors and partners: Insights from XChange EMEA day 1
On the first day of the Europe-wide conference, attendees heard about the distinct areas of the AI channel opportunity
The channel sees huge opportunities in the adoption of AI but is still about a year away from meaningfully adopting the technology.
This was the key takeaway from the first session of XChange EMEA 2024, taking place in The Hague on 20-21 June.
According to the latest round of AI research from IPED Consulting, the research and consulting arm of The Channel company, 72 per cent of solution providers globally are currently investing in AI exploration, with 22 per cent stating they are investing aggressively, and 50 per cent taking a cautious approach (see graph below).
A lot of this early exploration centres around marketing automation, attendees at the conference heard.
"A lot of interest around revolves around marketing automation and is coming from the MSP space. But it's important to manage the risks. Similar to other technologies in their early stages, such as cloud and blockchain, the risks are top of mind," Stuart Sumner, chief content officer at TCC told the audience on Day 1.
"One survey respondent to our survey was a healthcare company and was considering using AI, but is working with critical data," he said.
"Obviously, that's hugely valuable, hugely important, but also usually risky when it comes to personally identifiable information and heavily heavily regulated data."
Attendees then heard that a plurality of channel partners (33 per cent) expect to see the largest positive impact from genAI in software and analytics services, at least across a 12-month horizon.
Cybersecurity came in at a close second, with 32 per cent, followed by platform and data management (22 per cent), industry-based solutions (17 per cent) and infrastructure and optimisation (16 per cent).
"So that's where we see some big partners selling lots of services to big customers, Sumner said. "But that's still a fairly small part of the overall for now, then you get into things like AI PCs, which have just started entering the market. We've all read stories about AI PCs, but that's very much forward looking."
The survey results suggest that market opportunity for vendors can be split across four key areas:
- The core AI opportunity, which includes general partner education, defining the offering, outlining the present and future and learning from partners
- Partner segmentation, e.g. differentiating partners based on maturity, partnerships with distribution and positioning themselves as ‘strategic' AI vendors
- AI practice development, including developing AI practice guides, focusing on outcomes and use cases and anticipating the M&A landscape
- Vendor channel engagement, meaning using AI as a change catalyst and applying it to the partner experience
"And I think one of the closing thoughts I want to end with is that this is developing rapidly. So the opportunities are there, but no one quite knows how the chips are going fall yet," Sumner concluded.
"The future in a few years time, will turn out to be different from how we think now, so everyone's just trying to figure it out. But all the solution partners we spoke to are extremely bullish."