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More than a buzzword or plug-and-play technology, AI is a paradigm shifting movement that pervades the business and IT community and is even touching the political realm. People are seeking information on the good, bad and ugly side of these advanced solutions and exploring how these embedded algorithms and systems will impact their future. With scores of experts - some more in the know that others - making disparate predictions about the impact of artificial intelligence on our personal and work lives, uncertainty remains a potential growth inhibitor.

One thing most authorities do agree on today is that AI adoption is ramping up rapidly and the IT industry will play an essential role in securing and developing meaningful uses for these promising yet daunting new technologies. These real-world examples are the key to overcoming uncertainty and opening the door to event greater investment in the business community.

IT distributors are already essential players in that mass adoption movement and will continue to fill a vital role moving forward. Like the managed services and cloud revolutions, these orchestrators are providing the types of services and programs that vendors and solution providers need to scale their AI practices. Attaining sales, implementation and client satisfaction objectives for these advanced technologies requires more specialized and costly resources that relatively few IT companies possess today.

Hiring and training people who understand the intricacies of selling, integrating, implementing and supporting AI-enabled solutions is a tremendous undertaking. The investments needed to market, deliver, and promote advanced new technologies - especially in the relatively undefined area of artificial intelligence - are incalculable. IT distributors have a long, successful track record of helping vendors and solution providers overcome these obstacles and successfully deliver new innovations like AI to their collective end-customers.
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Capitalize Quickly on AI Opportunities

Innovation creates lucrative and long-lasting prospects for the channel. The adage “there’s margin in the mystery” absolutely applies to AI-enabled solutions, creating a variety of new opportunities and recurring revenue streams for vendors, IT services providers and other technology companies. Complex yet high value technologies typically hold the promise of higher profit options - if suppliers can deliver those solutions cost-effectively and rapidly gain marketshare.

Whether rolling out a new company or offering, significant investments are typically needed to fund development, testing, sales, implementation and support programs. There may be other requirements for those targeting customers in certain communities, including certifications and the ability to meet specific regulations or standards. Few emerging vendors have the capacity to address all of the obligations that come with introducing revolutionary solutions and capturing new customers without specialized assistance.

Now add time factor of innovation to that equation. A critical element for maximizing returns on new technologies like AI is getting those solutions to market as fast as possible. While demand often favors innovators in the early stages of the new product/service lifecycle, the timeframe for capitalizing on recent discoveries or improvements continues to shrink as competitors quickly counter or match those advances. The window for maximizing profits is limited by the speed with which vendors can scale revenue and adoption of their latest wares.

The earliest AI innovators are likely to struggle in all of those crucial areas without effective go-to-market strategies. IT distributors simplify and strengthen the process of introducing new technologies, allowing even the smallest vendors with few internal resource to expand their reach and support to the farthest parts of the globe. Those are just a few of the many things that make up distribution’s value proposition for AI technology innovators.

Over the next few months, GTDC will highlight those efforts in a series of short (2-4 page) reports. From the latest research and interviews with renowned industry subject matter experts to new business use cases and ideas for driving additional revenue, each piece will provide insight on how AI can drive more opportunities across the channel. These briefs will be posted and available to download in the GTDC Knowledge Hub once published.

With so many questions and areas of opportunity around artificial intelligence, narrowing down the topics of importance for channel professionals is no easy task. So why not start with a survey of how IT vendors are currently utilizing these technologies and where they expect them to go in the future?
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Driving AI Adoption from the Inside Out

The technology industry is often its best test market. In addition to producing and delivering innovative new products and solutions, channel vendors, as well as distributors and solution providers, typically “eat their own dog food” or utilize and optimize their offerings internally before rolling them out to end customers.

AI is no different. While the number of these technologies hitting the market appears large thanks to a strong hype cycle, adoption and business use cases are still in the early stages - yet the IT industry looks to be moving quite quickly. A recent GTDC poll of channel vendor executives offers a glimpse into the internal value and portfolio opportunities for these innovations.

One surprise finding from that survey is the already high level of AI usage within sales departments (82.9%). Use among marketing and support teams also reached an impressive point as of mid 2024 as well, at 53.7% and 46.3%. Just 12.2% are leveraging AI in the logistics function and 7.3% are employing these technologies to assist with a variety of other tasks. One of the most interesting responses was from an executive of a vendor that employs artificial intelligence to grade devices they refurbish.

The other significant AI opportunity for vendors is on the revenue side of the business. According to the survey, more than half (58.5%) of respondents are already offering the technologies as part of their portfolio of offerings. Considering the variety of vendors engaged in the study and the diversity of their solutions, from cloud to hardware, that level of AI pervasion highlights its potential for the IT industry.

While the vendor community continues to boost internal adoption of these technologies, industry executives recognize the value distributors can and already are providing on the channel-enablement side. A majority of respondents say distributors’ sales support (58.5%) is important to their revenue growth strategies, with technical and marketing services adding to that value proposition. Those numbers should continue to rise as more manufacturers and software/cloud developers enhance the AI capabilities of their solutions.

When will artificial intelligence reach that adoption level? According to about 40% of the tech executives in GTDC’s survey, that point may come in the next two years, while the remainder suggest it could be three to five years - not one respondent selected a longer time frame.

That leave little time for the IT community to construct and implement effective AI-enablement strategies and support programs. For channel companies, that process may involve solution development and beta testing, partner marketing and education, sales development and advanced support capabilities. From vendors and distributors to the solution provider companies that manage end-user environments, the IT community must come together to ensure AI success.

Responses to the final survey question show that their partners, while making solid progress, still have a long way to go in the adoption process. 50% of vendor executives say less than one in four of their partners are currently integrating artificial intelligence in their portfolios. On the other end of the spectrum, 8% of the respondents reported that more than 75% of their partners have achieved that advanced technology milestone.
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Constructing a Strong AI Roadmap

These strides in vendor and partner adoption show the promise of AI technologies and how channel businesses are increasing their own familiarity and capabilities with these invaluable new solutions. Distributors’ sales, marketing and engineering teams are working hand-in-hand with vendor partners to develop and promote the various use-cases for artificial intelligence.

This first-hand knowledge is critical to the success of innovations that hold the promise of reshaping the way entire industries operate and how people will work. Distributors are working diligently behind the scenes to advancing AI adoption.

Watch for the next installment of Distribution: The AI Force-Multiplier, which will highlight the related industry trends and some newly available and highly valuable resources for the IT community.