Generative AI is going to be a growing channel opportunity according to a survey of chief technology officers.
The Dynatrace survey found that customers see AI as positive and expect it to help them improve efficiencies, but there are concerns over technology management.
This means channel partners comfortable with AI can support customers who want the technology.
Dynatrace vice-president of worldwide partner sales Michael Allen said the channel has already seen that the hype cycle triggered by the release of ChatGPT late last year has generated significant interest in AI over the past 12 months.
“Customers need to drive down operational costs while also increasing the speed of digital transformation and are therefore looking to invest in technologies like AI and automation,” he added.
The survey found that customers were alert to the risks of moving too quickly and handing over control to an AI or an automated process before sufficient guardrails are in place.
“Channel partners have an unmistakable opportunity to add value and unlock new revenue by helping customers to establish these controls so they can adopt AI safely and securely,” Allen said.
Customer expectations around the potential of AI are high, with significant numbers expecting the technology will help improve cloud efficiencies and security and make more data analytics available across the business.
More than 61 per cent of CTOs are looking to increase their AI investments in the year ahead. Some worries exist around linking up tools to maximise those benefits.
“Organisations have significant concerns about the risks of using generative AI for critical IT use cases that enable them to accelerate innovation and drive operational efficiencies,” said Allen.
“The channel, therefore, needs to focus on showing customers how they can use other types of AI to enrich prompts with detailed context and precision about the current state of their IT environment and instantly validate the outputs produced by generative AI,” he added.
