Mission Cloud, a CDW company, is seeing enterprise AI conversations shift from experimental proof-of-concept work to production-ready deployments tied to business outcomes, according to President Ted Stuart.
Stuart said Mission Cloud, now operating as CDW’s dedicated AWS practice for private-sector customers, has completed more than 400 AI projects and is increasingly working with customers who already believe the technology can deliver. The challenge now is helping them decide where to start.
“We don’t have to do as much of ‘Let’s try this use case and prove that it works,’” Stuart said. “A lot of the work that we’re doing now is to help get alignment around a roadmap, help them prioritize the roadmap, and then, obviously, help them understand ROI.”
AI buying shifts toward business leaders
Stuart said AI decisions are increasingly led by line-of-business executives rather than solely by CIOs, CTOs, or IT teams. Customers are also arriving with longer lists of potential use cases, often 30 or 40 at a time.
That shift has changed Mission Cloud’s role. Instead of simply proving the technology, Stuart said the AWS-focused provider is helping customers evaluate impact, complexity, cost, and potential return before committing resources.
The company is also seeing customers move beyond proofs of concept, which Stuart said are often “built to succeed” because they avoid difficult production concerns such as governance, security, and data integration.
Mission Cloud pushes MVPs over AI proofs of concept
To address that gap, Mission Cloud is emphasizing minimum viable products that begin in production environments with a limited scope but room to expand.
One offering, called “5x5x5,” uses Amazon Q to connect five line-of-business leaders with five data sources in five days. Stuart said the goal is to give customers a governed, production-ready starting point rather than a throwaway pilot.
Mission Cloud is also offering fixed-fee AI engagements, including chatbot deployments and an intelligent document processing fast-track program that begins with two document types and can expand if the customer sees value.
READ MORE: Learn about Mission Cloud’s recent AI-focused offerings.
AWS focus supports faster AI delivery
Stuart said Mission Cloud’s AWS specialization helps the company move quickly as AI services and customer needs evolve. Mission Cloud has also built its own platform, Mission Control, to give customers a digital experience purpose-built for AWS environments.
Because the company is deeply focused on one hyperscaler, Stuart said Mission Cloud can iterate faster than providers that attempt to build offerings across multiple platforms.
AI becomes the new enterprise operating layer
Looking ahead, Stuart said customers are beginning to think of AI less as a collection of discrete use cases and more as a connective layer across the business.
He described AI as “the brains and the nervous system of the company,” connecting financial, HR, sales, inventory, and operational data so employees can build workflows across systems that historically operated in silos.
For channel partners and cloud service providers, that evolution could create more demand for advisory work, data strategy, governance, and implementation support.
Stuart said customers will need help aligning business leaders, ranking use cases, calculating ROI, and securing sponsorship before AI becomes embedded in how companies operate.
“It really is more around alignment, prioritization, analysis, and helping companies to get started and do it in an effective, thoughtful way,” he said.