Artificial intelligence, following a few years of hype in which it was treated as a new concept set to immediately transform our existence, is now firmly in Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment. User organisations have realised that costs will be significant and experimental projects have been challenged to scale up effectively but it’s not all doom and gloom. Much of current AI landscape is typical of the developmental path taken by most transformative technologies, it’s just that we’re in a learning phase and more work needs to be completed to unlock the technology’s full potential.

“As an organisation, we’ve supported AI for a long time,” confirms Steve Daly, the Senior Vice President of Solutions in the Global Digital Transformation Group at New Era Technology.

“AI has been around for 70 years but the recent hype has seen a peak of inflated solutions. The reality is that, at $30 per user/per seat Copilot for Microsoft365, is attractive for an organisations doing proof of concepts but once those stop, companies haven’t found the value proposition or return on investment to multiply that $30 by 12 months by the number of users.”

It’s not only the cost of AI that is holding back uptake. Many organisations have justifiable concerns about sharing data and keeping AI secure. “New Era has a very strong data and security practice that we have pivoted to provide Copilot Studio which allows organisations to build genAI solutions with a much tighter blast radius,” adds Daly. “With Copilot Studio, you can tighten down to a single file or Sharepoint library or website. You can have much tighter control.”

No More Overpromise, Under-deliver

Reinforcing confidence in AI is multi-layered. Addressing security and data control concerns is a fundamental foundation which goes alongside determining the business model to make sense of AI investments. Then, organisations need to exercise patience and ensure they keep projects on track to their fruition – or termination.

“We’re seeing lots of projects get stuck,” adds Daly. “We estimate about half of projects lose momentum because of poor security and sub-optimal data management and projects need to be able to show progress. This is partly because of the nature of innovation – it’s new, so you don’t know what you don’t know.”

Introducing Intelligent Adoption

This is where Copilot Studio comes in because it can enable IT to show that progress is being made and that investment in solutions is delivering a valuable output. Copilot Studio help users to focus on the jobs that really need to be done and follow the steps needed to gain results. New Era has augmented this with its Copilot for Microsoft 365 Intelligent Adoption Framework which focuses on three key areas: technical redesign, organisational readiness and user readiness.

Within the Framework, New Era brings together its experience to help users understand where they are in the developmental journey, how to develop their corporate persona and how to identify which jobs AI can contribute to. “It’s not just about consumption of the licence,” concludes Daly.

“We’re working to develop packaged offers so we can train a trainer on day one, for example, and then demonstrate proofs of concept using Copilot Studio. We try to help customers answer the ‘When are we going to build a genAI chatbot?’ question accurately and help them navigate the challenges of AI adoption while handling the time and priority pressure placed on CIOs by stakeholders.

Importantly, the solution is available on the Azure Marketplace and can be accessed remotely.”



from UC Today https://ift.tt/mdUNV3H