COLUMN: The Ultimate Channel AI Use Case

CRN Executive Editor Jennifer Follett says that solution providers need to take notice of major vendors like Dell Technologies that are using GenAI to accelerate their sales cycles.

The conversation around GenAI inevitably turns toward one question: What are the real-world use cases?

It’s an issue savvy solution providers are tackling not only for their customers but also for their own businesses as they explore ways to tap into the power of AI to fuel both efficiency and growth.

So it behooves solution providers—and many others across the channel—to sit up and take notice when one of the biggest IT companies in the world, namely, Dell Technologies, determines that its top-priority GenAI use case is accelerating its sales cycle.

Take it as an early sign of the far-reaching disruption AI is going to bring to the process of selling IT products and services across all facets of the channel ecosystem.

As told by CRN Senior Editor O’Ryan Johnson in our June cover story, after running a “massive diagnostic of 20,000 sellers,” Dell determined it could gain the biggest bang for its AI buck by using the technology to tap into the intellectual property it has acquired from conducting years-worth of client meetings and mining that to help speed up the time it takes its team to prep for sales calls.

“We looked at the day in the life of our seller, realized [how much] of their time in aggregate was spent preparing to engage with the customer, and we said, ‘Wow, if we could fix that and free up the time a seller has in the week to go be in front of customers, that would probably move the needle in a pretty significant way,’” Global CTO and Chief AI Officer John Roese told CRN.

The result has been a reinvigorated Dell sales team that is using AI innovatively to get more sales at-bats in front of customers, Roese said.

“Today, every time I run into a salesperson they tell me all these creative things that they’re doing with it, which all correlate to they’re moving faster,” he said.

The lesson for solution providers is that you are already sitting on a treasure trove of sales data you can unlock with an AI key to bring more speed and agility to your sellers in the field. Dell stands ready to help on that front as well. The company is working feverishly to bring the power of AI, specifically agentic AI, to its channel partnerships, foreseeing a future where AI agents are built directly into the sales process.

“When you envision the partnership of the future, it’s not just going to be about human-to-human interaction. It’s going to be about how our sellers and our partners’ sellers are managing all of those touch points and interactions through [AI] agents,” Dell Chief Partner Officer Denise Millard told CRN. “Whether that’s selling agents or marketing agents or operation agents, it is really going to streamline the operations between our organizations and then put us on a whole new trajectory in terms of how we go and win and deliver great outcomes for customers.”

The role of AI in sales is expected to increase rapidly as companies seek to “enhance automation, personalization and customer satisfaction,” according to Gartner, projecting that 95 percent of seller research workflows will begin with AI by 2027, up from less than 20 percent in 2024.

Incorporating GenAI into the channel sales cycle has the potential to enhance the process in many ways, whether that’s improved pipeline visibility and forecasting, boosted conversion rates or better efficiency.

Successful solution providers will be the ones that move quickly to organize and prepare their own data for the AI era.

After that, they will be in prime position to leverage GenAI, agentic AI and whatever the next wave of AI advances will bring as tools to complement, supplement and enhance the sales skills they already excel at: building trusted relationships.

That’s a use case tailor-made for the channel.