Citrix Parent, Microsoft Go Big — $1.65 Billion Big — on Generative AI

The tech sector is agog over the ever-increasing opportunities it’s creating around generative AI, but are end users as excited?

This week, two separate articles have published, challenging the value of generative AI, even as big-name companies roll out more partnership announcements around the technology.

“Increasingly, generative AI seems like a waste of our collective time and money,” wrote Kean Birch, director of the Institute for Technoscience & Society at York University in Canada, for The Globe and Mail.

To be sure, the question of generative AI’s value lingers throughout the indirect channel, too. Not all partners are convinced the super-hot technology is for them. For one thing, there’s not always a clear revenue outcome attached. For another, partners have to offer clear differentiators around their generative AI versus, say, a Google Gemini or Microsoft OpenAI.

Indeed, Inc. just issued an article positioned around that very idea.

One area where generative AI likely will prove most useful for partners lies in customer service, if the CEO of Dynatrace, interviewed for the piece, is on target. But those chatbots can be very hit-or-miss, as Rick McConnell points out to Inc., so the caution to partners is to develop those tools with extreme accuracy. Otherwise, end users will leave out of frustration. McConnell himself has done just that. One generative AI chatbot experience, he told Inc., “went so badly that I will never do business with the company again.”

We say all that as more announcements emerge this week touting new generative AI partnerships. Look for deals between Cloud Software Group, the parent company of Citrix, and Microsoft, as well as more between Accenture and Google, and McKinsey & Company and Google Cloud.

Again, though, while technology providers themselves are over the moon about generative AI, it’s incumbent upon channel partners to make sure their customers feel the same rather than forcing solutions upon them. Some organizations just aren’t ready to put the time, people and money into generative AI. Others need the technology now, recognize that and are willing to take the risks to implement it.

Channel Futures’ point simply is this: While generative AI holds much promise, it’s not for everyone and it’s the partner’s job to sift through the noise for clients and recommend the right approaches accordingly. Don’t let vendors pressure you or the customers who trust you into adopting something that might, as Birch wrote, waste time and money.

See our slideshow for AI-related cloud computing news from Cloud Software Group, Microsoft, Google Cloud, Accenture and more.