Al's Future: What You Might Be Missing

This is a critical moment for vendors and partners striving to go to market with a unified AI strategy. According to research done by CRN’s parent company, nearly a quarter of partners are implementing AI solutions. But when it comes to something many are calling revolutionary – is that enough?

Andrea Medeiros, Sr. Director, Head of Global Content and Creative at The Channel Company speaks with Cyril Belikoff, Vice President of Azure & Industry at Microsoft, to find out:

• What’s new with Copilot
• Why it’s important to invest in AI now
• Insightful use cases that help paint the future for AI technology

Cyril, thank you for taking this time to speak with us. What we're hearing from partners is they are still unclear on how to successfully implement and monetize generative AI. What are some key customer trends you're seeing, and what industries are you seeing make the biggest advancements?

There are four areas where we see transformation happening with AI. Whether you pick industry A or industry B or size of customer, it really doesn't change.

• The first area is customer engagement, and that's about enhancing the self-service and personalization experiences for customers.
• The next is employee experiences. For instance, how do we help internal employees be more productive? How do we help them in their daily lives?
• The third is reinventing business processes. That's about reshaping things like supply chain and process automation.
• Finally, bending the curve on innovation in research and development in engineering teams is where we can offer deeper insights, faster analysis and turn over the business quicker.

We're seeing quite a lot of trends across all industries, but I'll pick two customers as an example that we've seen.

• The first on the retail side is Choice Market. Choice is a great retail customer that uses standard cameras to do anonymized analysis of where their customers were walking around its stores. Of course, with privacy, they anonymize that information. This is the story of the breakfast burrito. Choice Market noticed where its customers were walking, so they changed the location of their burrito and learned that customers bought burritos outside of breakfast. They ended up doubling their sales of burritos and now are applying that across all their line items in their store.
• The other one I use is Atrium Health, a healthcare company. It applied AI to its practitioners, doctors and nurses. It allowed its doctors to have much more engaging conversations with patients and not be caught up in taking notes. Nurses and doctors can then leverage those AI-generated notes to act on later.

CRN recently ran an article about all the investments Microsoft is making in AI. Why is AI also a crucial investment for partners, and how can they monetize it?

The first thing to acknowledge is that while we have these great investments in AI and AI is really driving the next wave of innovation, it is not in isolation from everything else in our customers' businesses. AI needs some sort of application or database or infrastructure to reason over and to connect and enhance and improve.

We must think about what else is in our customers' infrastructure. Do they need to migrate infrastructure or databases to the cloud, so they can reason over it? Do they need to create analytics experiences? Do they need to modernize some of their customers' experiences or applications? AI really sits at the center of everything in the cloud.

It's great for all of us and our partners to think about how AI is pulling everything else in the cloud and the money is there to be made. You know, the classic example that we use is Windows Server, SQL Server and Linux all have large on-premises states still with our customers. You can't reason over that data and infrastructure unless it's in the cloud. Helping our customers migrate and modernize that infrastructure and then apply AI to it is plenty of work for all of us but also presents plenty of opportunity.

It is so crucial to have AI tools that are optimized to integrate with other solutions in a customer's tech stack. With so much having changed over the past few months, can you speak to how products have evolved?

We're focused on ensuring that our partners come along with us and understand our evolving strategy and the products related to that. At Microsoft Build, we recently announced three areas of investment – Microsoft Copilot, Copilot and AI Stack and Copilot+ PCs. These three categories are really the breadth of the investments that we're making and that our partners can use with their customers.

• Microsoft Copilot is about the Microsoft 365 Copilot and how that helps individual productivity, and we announced how copilots will be available for Teams. Teams can invite a copilot to conversations and meetings that can help them in their daily work.

• The Copilot and AI stack is the stack we use to build our own copilots. We're making that available to customers and partners to go and build their own AI experiences using the same technology, development tools and experiences that we use ourselves.

We made a ton of announcements recently, particularly around things like OpenAI's 4.0 and 4.0 mini models. These are breakthrough multimodal models across voice, video, text inputs and outputs, our own models with Google Fi. Meta made announcements with their Llama models and all the experiences we provide around those models for deployment, decision making, management and optimization.

We made announcements around Fabric itself, which has real-time intelligence, so you can apply AI to real-time data coming off whatever data feeds you have in milliseconds. That is really a game-changing experience for our customers. Security is job number one for all of us, and so we're making huge investments there.

• The final area I mentioned was Copilot+ PCs. This is a new category of PCs where we embed an AI chip into the PC so it can handle the workloads for AI without taxing the core processing units or graphics units. AI will be natural with this new wave of PCs. With Windows 10 end of life in the next 18 months or so, it's a great opportunity for partners with PC refreshes to get these great new Copilot+ PCs.

Watch the full video above or head to our AI In Action Newsroom for the entire conversation with Cyril Belikoff.

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