SMBs drive AI demand for Think Solutions

AI adoption will be faster than cloud adoption, and the fear of missing out and being disrupted is driving the interest in its applications, particularly from small- to medium-sized businesses (SMB), according to managed service provider (MSP) Think Solutions.

A June report from Nutanix found that the ability to support AI had a considerably higher impact on Australian organisations’ infrastructure choices.

In the sixth annual Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index report, the AI desire led to 99 per cent of Australian respondents following a ‘cloud-smart’ infrastructure strategy – leveraging the best environment, such as a private data centre, public cloud, or edge, for the unique requirements of each workload – compared with 90 per cent worldwide.

This surge underscores the region’s pivotal role in driving the next wave of AI innovation and technological advancement.

While Nutanix’s report sees the AI drive mainly occurring in the enterprise space, Think Solutions believes that it’s seeing this trend tricking down to their SMB and lower-end enterprise customers across various industries.

“A lot of these customers are unsure of the impacts of AI on their specific industry but are coming to us asking questions about what we are seeing,” said Think Solutions sales director Pedro Duarte. “I’ve got a customer that’s very mature around AI now; they’re leveraging GPT-style AI to improve their organisation’s document building and process building to drive some efficiencies around information workers.”

In addition, Think Solutions is looking at include the impacts of AI around security and “how they can leverage that to smarten their cyber security practices”.

While the use cases for AI are varied, it is the one topic every one of Think Solutions’ clients is having.

“I liken this to when cloud was a terminology that was new to people. Everyone was talking about it, but no one knew quite what it meant to their organisation,” said Duarte. “While people are willing to have a conversation and they’re willing to explore — that’s where it stops for most customers.

“A lot of this is driven from the top down, which we saw with cloud as well when the explosion came about. It was driven from the top down, not the bottom up.”

He said that conversations and exploration around AI were plentiful because customers’ fear of missing out was present.

For most customers, conversations around AI are exploratory – looking at what’s out there in the market and how it could potentially fit.

“People know that if they don’t react quickly in their industry, they’re going to be disrupted,” he said. “I think many people are keen on doing something, but they almost like they’re waiting for a solution in the box for their specific industry.”

Out-of-the-box solutions

However, there are some customers who are waiting for that golden nugget for someone to come up with a solution that is very specific to their industry, said Duarte.

“There’s no or very limited AI in a box solution now that’s purpose-built for a particular industry. It’s more open at this stage,” he said.

This has led to customers looking at various AI solutions to implement private GPTs. Duarte said this means customers need to set permissions around GPT tightly.

“What happens if someone requests data that they shouldn’t have access to? If the rules aren’t set correctly in the AI engine, it can give the wrong people privileges to access data that they typically shouldn’t see,” he said.

Duarte also said Think Solutions’ customers are early adopters of cloud and software-as-a-service- (SaaS) based products and don’t have a large on-premises footprint, so they’re used to agile work processes.

 “When an AI-driven product pops up, they like to copilot what’s available. They are agile, so they can adopt it, trial it and turn it off if they don’t like it,” he added.

Thinking about AI

One of the main concerns Think Solutions’ customers have about using AI is the question of having to let staff go, although some see it as an opportunity to redeploy staff to do other tasks.

This also applies to Think Solutions’ own journey with AI, as Duarte said the MSP was also looking for ways to become more efficient.

“As an MSP, you try to drive as many efficiencies as possible so that you can increase your capacity, which in turn makes you more profitable,” he said. “We’ve already started looking at how paid-for GPT can help us with writing knowledge-based articles while driving consistency between different staff in writing templates and so forth. We also want to automate tasks and menial tasks that are repetitive via AI.”

Duarte said that as an MSP, it’s about making sure that staff understand the risks associated with using tools like GPT and only using the paid-for version.

“We are advising staff that we’re looking to leverage these in a more corporate professional manner so that we still see the productivity gains associated with [AI],” he said. “Sometimes that raises questions from the internal staff, concerned about their jobs and what that will mean for them.

“Internal communication is critical because, like any project, it needs staff buy-in to be successful. You must ensure they’re on the journey with you.”

Meeting industry disruptions

While Think Solutions’ main focus has been on supporting customers through their AI and other managed services journeys, the MSP also ensures it can handle the disruption and movement around infrastructure refreshes and changes.

“When Broadcom bought VMware, there were a lot of changes, and that’s caused a bit of disruption in the industry,” he said. “Our focus has been lately assisting customers in that journey, navigating from migrating from a public cloud back to a private cloud or from Broadcom by VMware to an alternative hypervisor.”

This has meant that Think Solutions must also look at upskilling itself internally.

“Our ethos has always been to promote from within,” said Duarte. “Our service desk is constantly hiring and evolving and hiring staff, and then we try and skill stuff up within our service desk to eventually make it into our projects team.”

In the past couple of years, the MSP has grown its service desk alone by 50 per cent, while its projects team has grown close to 50 per cent. Duarte said Think Solutions has established a senior leadership team as part of its restructuring.

“As part of that, we made sure that in that senior leadership team, we had people for each area of the business, from our service desk to projects team, sales team, finance administration and then the CEO,” he said.

This meant that instead of decisions being made with a subset of people, they were made across the business and based on a majority.

“We changed our business to become technically focused these days,” he said. “Our management is light, and we try to run lean. We want to have more technicians than middle and upper management and that’s what we will focus on for the next 12 months.”