GTDC Panel: Distributors key to building a successful AI strategy

At the recent GDTC APJ Summit in Singapore, CRN Asia moderated a panel discussion on building a successful AI strategy.

Building a successful AI strategy is critical for organizations in their AI journey. In Southeast Asia, there continues to be an increasing number of AI innovation centers that have been developed by vendors and partners to help organizations understand more about how they can deploy AI use cases in their organizations.

In Singapore, there are currently more than 60 AI innovation centers with more expected to be unveiled in the future. While these innovation centers are imperative to understanding AI, building a successful AI strategy requires guidance from both partners and vendors as well.

Over the past two years, vendors have continued to invest in their partners in the region, preparing them to not just be subject matter experts in AI but also deploy some use cases to see how AI can make a difference to their operations.

Some distributors and resellers in the region have already implemented AI in their business processes while others are working with vendors to design specific AI use cases to support customer needs.

At the recent GDTC APJ Summit in Singapore, CRN Asia moderated a panel discussion on building a successful AI strategy. Moderated by Aaron Raj, CRN Asia Editor, the group addressed key elements of these programs, including setting expectations, overcoming challenges and collaborating on new opportunities.

The panelists included Corrie Briscoe, Director of Partner Core, APJ at Amazon Web Services, Joseph Turner, Global Director, Research and Business Development, CONTEXT, SS Lim, Managing Director of PTC System (S) Pte Ltd and Debdut Maiti, Head of Sales, Solutions Services Group from Lenovo.  All four panelists shared the importance of the partner ecosystem to understand how they can best use AI to help them enhance their opportunities but also serve customers better.

According to Briscoe, AWS continues to work with its partners in ensuring they are capable of supporting customer needs. She also believes that partners have been showing more intent in trying to understand how they can also use AI in their business processes.

For Maiti, Lenovo relies heavily on its partner ecosystem as it looks to support customers in their AI journey. This includes working with partners not just in the software side of AI but also on the hardware side. Given Lenovo’s capabilities in AI PCs, servers and other AI infrastructure, Maiti also called on partners to work together with Lenovo to co-innovate more solutions for customers.

Meanwhile, Lim, who represented the role of system integrators in AI, also strongly voiced the importance for distributors to be bold in adopting new technologies so they can showcase it firsthand to customers. Lim also pointed out that partners that leverage AI tend to have a better opportunity in working with customers.

Looking at managed service providers (MSPs) and managed security service providers (MSSPs), Turner explained that there are two components to an AI strategy based on a study conducted by Context. First, there is how MSPs and MSSPs can use AI to help them better manage cybersecurity for customers. Second, it was about using cybersecurity to manage AI that customers are deploying.

Both of these highlight the importance AI has for MSPs and MSSps and why they need to also have a strategy on how they can best adopt the technology to serve customers better.