If a sales manager or other executive in your company isn’t talking about artificial intelligence (AI) these days, it’s time to ask them why and get them involved. Excuses are increasingly rare when it comes to switching to advanced processing technologies. Solutions such as artificial intelligence are now readily available, and businesses no longer need to make heavy investments to stay ahead of today’s digital economy. Furthermore, it becomes impossible to do business without transformative digital technologies. It is only a question of will, education and evangelization of the new horizons that these technologies open up to companies.
Automation gets us there. John Roese, global chief technology officer at Dell Technologies, says transformative digital technologies are now a necessity, but there simply aren’t enough experts on these topics to enable a company to stay competitive in the 2020s. “It’s a problem of scale,” he explained in a recent interview published by MIT Technology Review. “Without autonomous operations, it becomes impossible to keep up with the growing opportunity to become a more digital business using only human effort. »
The choice is clear, he adds: to meet the demands for more computing capacity, “we could either try to hire exponentially more people or do it in a different way, which is to distribute the work between people and machines in a more creative and efficient way”. The good news, continues John Roese, is that “you don’t have to be at the forefront of digital for all your capabilities. You don’t need a giant team of data scientists. You don’t need to develop your own software. You don’t need to build your own infrastructure. You can consume it from any number of supply sources which actually provide you with very advanced and almost turnkey results for many situations”.
AI and machine learning have entered the business vocabulary
This also applies to the size of IT teams, he continues. “From an infrastructure perspective, a business that today has a small IT organization but is embracing autonomous operations can deliver a much larger and more scalable infrastructure. Additionally, today’s IT teams “can extend more capabilities to the edge, can have a multi-cloud strategy, and can probably do it faster and better than a giant organization of experts two years ago.” “.
Over the past two years, there has been a “gradual shift towards smarter, more autonomous systems, different consumption models”, explains John Roese. This paves the way for the democratization of technology. “Several years ago, to successfully complete a digital transformation, you had to do the bulk of the work. There were no turnkey products. Companies weren’t necessarily set up to do it for you in an easy-to-consume way without huge amounts of expertise inside your company. »
As a result, everyone participates in the decisions and implementation of the technologies. For example, it’s actually common to hear the head of sales talk about AI these days, he says. “If this isn’t happening in your business, you should probably ask yourself why. Because selling is a relationship between you and your customer, but there is a third party that can help you, and that third party is data and artificial intelligence that can give you better insights and more contextual awareness. and more responsive to your customer. »
John Roese adds that “it is fascinating to see how these technical terms like AI and machine learning and autonomous operations are now part of the business dialogue. I think most business leaders understand that there is this third party in the relationship. It’s not just them and their customer, it’s the technology they use that can ultimately change the economics and performance of their part of the business, whether it’s sales or services or engineering. or computer science.
Tighter teams
Until a few years ago, advanced technologies such as AI were the preserve of companies with deep resources and talented internal collaborators. “They had to be able to tap into the talent pool to really develop their own technology or to really be in the slums,” says John Roese. It was a “have it or not have it” scenario. Today, it is clear that we still need smart people. But now companies with much smaller software development teams using low-code applications and containerization and automation tools can develop really interesting software assets with a much smaller footprint.
So, “instead of having a giant data science team to develop your entire tool chain, a much smaller data science team and analytics team can actually use the platforms and capabilities that exist,” explains John Roese. In addition, these platforms allow small teams “to do almost better work than companies could do two years ago.”
With the democratization of advanced technologies, successful digital adoption must be linked to a human-machine partnership. “The scale of digital transformation tasks exceeds the human capacity of your IT organizations and the budget you have to use pure human effort,” he points out. “That inevitably leads you to look for ways to shift work to autonomous systems, to infrastructure, to technology, so that that scarce resource of human capacity can still keep up with high-level goals. »
Source: ZDNet.com