Air IT offers SMEs a way through AI confusion

If customers are struggling to adopt artificial intelligence (AI), there are several approaches the channel can take to support, advise and deploy technology alongside users. For some, this can look like launching advisory services, while others have looked to establishing use cases – plus there is always the option of developing your own technology to solve user challenges. At Air IT, the decision was made to deliver all three as a suite of services and move to close the “decision gap” that was holding back small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from their wider adoption of the technology. The channel player adopted AI across its own business and has invested in its own development team that can generate the resources on its agentic marketplace, where customers are able to adopt tools that would meet their specific use cases. Air IT has a group of 13 within its data automation and AI teams, staff in its intelligent data offering, and had invested in senior leadership to guide the strategy “If you look over the past three or four years, we’ve been investing heavily from a data automation and AI perspective to put it into our own business, into our own service operations, to both make us more efficient and to make us more productive, but – most importantly – to improve the customer experience,” said Lee Johnson, group CTO and CISO at Air IT . The firm has seen improvements in terms of speed and consistency, and has been able to provide customers with more self-service options. But it has also provided insights into how to embark on an AI journey, which Air IT is sharing with customers. “From a managed services provider [MSP] perspective, there’s a unique opportunity for us to provide more value outside of what a traditional IT service provider would offer in terms of providing IT support, cloud services and cyber security,” said Johnson. “Those things have always been important, and they will continue to be. But there’s now an opportunity when you talk about being a strategic partner – a real opportunity to make a difference to our customers’ businesses, [which] they [also] feel,” he said. Johnson said SME customers were coming under pressure to adopt AI through both board interest and a fear that their competitors would get ahead through using technology they were slow to adopt: “Often at board meetings and executive roundtables, talking with investors, corporate finance houses, and business owners and people who are on the board … there’s often a lot of outward pressure to go, ‘You need to get AI in your business’. “A lot of the time, the owner managers or the directors of the business are leaving [those meetings], going, ‘Where do I start?’. It’s a heavily technical area that is growing a huge amount, innovating at a pace that we haven’t seen before, and we wanted to fix that for the SME industry. What we’ve set out to do is take away that decision gap,” said Johnson. Air IT works on closing that gap by meeting with SME customers and spending a day working out where they are, what the goal is and the barriers that need to be overcome to make that happen. The three-stage process starts with assessment, before accelerating deployment and then supporting use cases with specific AI agents. Johnson is convinced that working closely with SMEs to overcome the decision gap and making it clear where the steps to AI start and the direction they head in would get more of that sizeable customer base adopting the technology. “I would encourage customers to try the assessment and the accelerator,” he added. “You do need to think about things like security and data governance, making sure that you can measure the impact, so you don’t have failed pilots and wasted investment. But there’s also things you can do to mitigate those risks.”