Video: AI Dominates Conversations at Channel Partners Conference and Expo 2024

Hi, I'm Katie Bavoso with Channel Insider. Channel Partners Conference and Expo kicked off on Monday here in Las Vegas with a panel of experts from some leading tech companies who weighed in on whether or not A.I. will live up to the hype or fizzle out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all panelists agreed that AI is here to stay and that the next wave of the eye will be a highly personalized experience for customers, all grounded in data. So imagine a consumer goes on an e-commerce website and they want to upload a picture of an outfit that they really like, and then they say: located in this location, I’d like it here by this weekend, I'd like to spend under $200.

Here's my size. You can do that in a natural language kind of way and create a much more personalized, crafted experience to get the kind of content back that you want. From the other side of it, Jay, you talked about internal experiences. We're starting to see a large increase in our customers utilizing AI to improve their internal operations, the efficacy through which they drive experiences. For example, a major local consulting firm uses MongoDB to improve and accelerate its discovery process.

So previously relying on analysts, thousands of hours reviewing complex documents. Now a consultant can go say, Hey, help me understand best practices for implementing customer success at global telecom market. And Generative AI can actually create based on the data and experiences that that firm has through all the conversations they’ve had, the engagements done, they can develop an initial pitch of these are the three best practices. These are the pitfalls to look out for.

This is the way to implement it. So we really believe that data will be core to this experience. At Lenovo, we’re looking at AI in a very holistic manner. We're looking at it in three phases right, there is the public, the private and the personal. And we see this as a hybrid. So when you start thinking about AI, iIt's all about choice. Where do you use it? Who uses it? When do they use it? Why do they use it? All of this is really key. Greg Maxson of MongoDB also says channel partners play a major role in ensuring secure large scale A.I. deployments globally by providing guidance to their customers.

I asked them solution providers at the event what they're doing to make AI accessible and more useful for their clients. Hi, I’m Matt Wren. I work for Moser Consulting as the Vice President of Growth. Our product Honeycomb is a data lake in a box that we have stood up in an environment within 7 minutes, and then we manage the environment for the customer. With honeycomb we're starting to, like everybody else, add AI and Generative AI into it with chat features and automating certain functionalities of it.

It's allowing our customers to have, I think, faster interactions with different things they need to ask it and with as well as a chat feature on our website to ask experts the question that either is a real person or is a bot, one of the two. It just depends on the time of day. I'm Chris Corbett. I'm a channel technology consultant with NexusTek. We're really excited. We’ve worked a little bit with Microsoft and Microsoft Copilot. So we put together an initiative there to help folks for AI readiness and we have a program around AI readiness for folks. because many customers out there aren't really sure how to address AI, how to handle the compliance portion, how to handle the policy portion internally.

End users are getting ahead of the company, right? They're already using it and companies don't know. So they have to modify their policies internally to make sure that employees understand here's when we can use it, how we can use it, and why. And then help them identify the proper tools that they can bring into their business to help take advantage of the power of AI. Hi, I'm Zac King, vice president at GreenBean IT. So we are investing in the AI at GreenBean through customer service.

There are AI solutions that will monitor tickets and conversations that happen to better coach our technicians on how to overcome, you know, challenges or issues that may rise, they may face. And also looking at trends and tickets. So that way we can see is there something that a human missed that we might be able to catch and prevent our customers from having a bigger problem down the road? For our customers, it means that we've got an extra eye watching things right when when the humans are sleeping.

But it also means for us that it's leverage. as costs are rising, employee costs are rising. We need to be able to grow, but we don't always have the funds to be able to add staff. And so adding in a solution like AI helps us to be able to leverage those things and continue to provide top level service, even if we're not adding more bodies to the team. Stay tuned to Channel Insider for more from Channel Partners Conference and Expo.