Building IP is Becoming more Important for Channels: CA Technologies

Tanuj Vohra, Senior Vice President and Head, India Technology Center, CA Technologies, spoke to Amit Singh on why AI is critical for IT channels and building their own IP has become crucial for them. He also highlighted that it is important for channels to prep the data, and make sure they understand the business needs rather than diving deep into data science

How is India progressing on the AI market landscape?

There has been significant progress with respect to AI adoption and maturity in the recent past as enterprises are moving from experimenting with AI technologies to implementations. There are several examples of enterprise deployments, significant investments driving real results and impacts in terms of customer experience and competitive advantage.

AI adoption in India is primarily driven by an organization’s size, digital maturity, industry vertical it belongs to, C-suite vision and risk appetite on AI investments. We are seeing a fairly strong response from BFSI, retail, and logistics. Level of commercial adoption varies but most of our customers are tinkering with various AI technologies like machine learning, conversational AI, and computer vision to drive differentiation in their markets.  Also, the focus is on growth over savings. These organizations have been overtly efficiency driven and are realizing the need to be learning- and knowledge-driven. So they are making intentional investments in these areas to extract ‘intelligence’ from the data explosion they are experiencing.

According to a recent BCG study, India has been ranked on the third spot after the USA and China in terms of artificial intelligence (AI) implementation. Several AI projects in the segments like healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, and infrastructure are underway. The private sector, as well as Government, is playing an important role in encouraging AI research and investment, yet the pace of innovation isn’t comparable with America or China. However, there is a great opportunity for India and industries have started working to re-skill their workforce to compete in this fourth industrial revolution or what many call the AI economy.

What is the synergy between the vendors and the solution providers in the AI space?

AI opportunity is expected to reach $55B by 2025. Providers are going to market and monetizing with (knowledge from) data, platform, compute, and algorithms. Most of the use cases involving a channel partner are using AI services from providers like AWS, Microsoft, and IBM but there is also a diversion from traditional channel habits: by developing their own intellectual property.

Building IP is becoming more important for channels as the big cloud players have begun to rely less on partners and more on direct sales for their own products. All the cloud providers want to engage directly with the consumer and for easy workloads they offer services for free or offer tools; hence, building IP helps channel partners create a repeatable pattern that they can apply to different industries and create a revenue stream for themselves.

Channel giants like Microsoft are offering partners guidance on how to launch and expand their AI practice leveraging Microsoft’s AI portfolio and market and sell service offerings.

AI startups and solution providers are enhancing their services with machine learning, computer vision, and natural language communication with chatbots or speech recognition. They are transforming core business processes with custom modeling and algorithms, eventually building packaged vertical solutions. In fact, AI is representing a huge opportunity to grow existing practices and launch new intelligent solutions.

Why is AI crucial for channel partners?

According to IDC, worldwide spending on cognitive and AI systems will reach $19.1 billion in 2018, an increase of more than 54 percent from 2017. By 2019, 40 percent of digital transformation initiatives are expected to use AI. This is the reason why system integrators and solution providers are reinventing themselves as AI experts and addressing the need of the new technology buyer — the LOB.

AI platforms have hundreds of prebuilt models that do the heavy lifting, essentially automating machine learning. The sales pitch to the LOB is about the business outcome, not the data science of machine learning. Hence, for channel partners, it is about prepping the data and making sure they understand the business needs rather than diving deep into data science. These tools open up AI to mid-tier companies that can’t afford high cost and scarcely available data scientists.