Why Partners Should Prioritize AI in 2021

Bob Friday

Customer experience was the top priority for vendors and partners alike in 2020. With all of the curve balls the year threw at us, it’s been crucial for businesses to find ways to ease partner and customer pain points and simplify processes wherever possible. As we head into a new year of uncertainty, and as the industry becomes even more crowded with similar solutions, it’s all about investing in the right differentiated technologies to bring value and overall simplicity to customers.

As such, in the new year and beyond, artificial intelligence will be more important than ever in providing proper support to remote workers, securing data and differentiated visibility to the end-to-end customer mobile experience.

New Year, Same Home Office

COVID-19 has changed everything, from the way we communicate and socialize to the way we learn and work. You’ve probably heard by now that our homes have become enterprise microbranches. This means that for IT teams, instead of having to manage one big hub, they are managing hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of remote work environments. It’s a very real possibility that in a post-COVID world, we will have to adjust to the new normal of more people working at home by choice and improved business productivity, in turn fundamentally shifting how businesses will provide IT services.

As we’ve learned, artificial intelligence plays a huge role in working at home when it comes to enabling IT teams to have the end-to-end visibility needed to support remote employees. Gone are the days when an employee could simply walk over to the IT department when a tech issue arose on connectivity in the office or branch. As you can imagine, this puts tremendous strain on remote IT teams as they face issues of scale and frequency like they never have before. Enter artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps).

AIOps is changing the paradigm of customer support for business to customer/employee and for business to vendor. Specifically, in the networking industry, it is helping enterprises manage the end-to-end user connectivity experience. AIOps is the convergence of data science and customer support, and it is being used to address the growing complexity of IT operations. On the business-to-vendor side, cloud AIOps is turning the customer support model upside down. IT teams need no longer to argue with vendors over return material authorization (RMA) – with AIOps, vendors now know when there is a hardware/software problem and can proactively inform customers when RMA fixes in the network are needed. In short, AIOps can help IT departments anticipate and solve their problems, before they impact end users, in a cost-efficient way.

Rather than manually searching through data to find the root cause of hundreds of connectivity problems from all different microbranches, AIOps does this automatically and learns along the way. As many of us will continue working remotely into the new year, it will become increasingly appealing for enterprises to provide their partners with vendor agnostic AIOps strategies that can ingest data from multiple sources to allow IT to quickly isolate a poor user experience.

The time and cost-savings of AIOps benefit not only the IT team, but the enterprise as a whole. This represents a major value-add partners can provide to their customers.

The Customer Comes First

In the enterprise space, customers putting business-critical services on increasingly complex networks is driving the need for AIOps. As society becomes more mobile through these remote microbranches, the wireless user experience is more complex. And as wireless networks become more critical to the daily lives of employees, AIOps is enabling the next era of search and chat bots. The goal is …