“Struggling to get out of the POC stage”: Slalom head of solutions on helping customers on their AI journey

Stefan Buchman at the systems integrator discusses how they’re helping their customers implement an AI strategy.

As artificial intelligence continues to be top of mind to implement for business leaders, many of them are still in the proof of concept stage, according to Stefan Buchman, head of solutions at Slalom.

Buchman spoke to CRN Australia at AWS Partner Summit in Sydney about the issues the systems integrator’s customers are currently facing.

Buchman explained many of his customers have focused their shift to AI and are trying to figure out where to get started.

“Many of our customers are already in the proof-of-concept stage, but we're finding that a lot are struggling to get out of that proof-of-concept stage,” he said.

Where Slalom comes in, Buchman said is helping their customers strategically around AI implementation.

“Some of the trends that we're seeing is where we need to help customers strategically around how they think about AI.

“How they're able to measure the value at the end of the day, and how they're able to reorganise themselves and reorganise their workforce to focus on the right parts of AI,” he added.

As more businesses implement AI and AI strategies, Buchman noted that there is anxiety amongst organisational leaders to be the first to have the technology embedded in their companies.

Buchman said he wants to ensure his customers use the right tools to get to meet their business goals.

“There's competitive advantage in getting there quickly, but it's also, how do you identify the right thing to get there quickly with?” He explained.

"That is where we want to make sure that we're helping customers identify what are the things they can move quickly on, and what are the things that are going to take a little bit longer, that they need to maybe take a little bit slower?”

Buchman highlighted the importance of having good, clean data to bolster those AI tools.

“If their data is a mess and bad quality, that's some of the first things that is going to put brakes on their ability to move at speed,” he explained.

“Oftentimes, it's identifying the use cases that allow them to move quickly.”

While some organisations want to implement AI because it is the new shiny toy, Buchman says it doesn’t matter if the leaders want to jump on the trend because at the end of the day, the technology performs.

However, he does warn that they need to be wise of where to implement AI, “You have to identify the right use cases to actually leverage as part of that.”

Buchman uses an example of an airline Slalom worked with to figure out what AI tools would be most useful to them.

“Part of what we did was run an innovation day with them, to help them ideate and come up with what use cases we think are going to be valuable,” he said.

“As much as it's a shiny technology, it's moving quickly. There is a lot of conversation out there in terms of what it's capable of and what it will be capable of.”

Regardless, of the capabilities, Buchman said it still comes back to what problems can AI solve for their customers.

“We have a library of use cases that we can bring into those things, but oftentimes you're still sitting down with a customer and figuring out, what do you want to do, what's going to be valuable for you?

"Then it comes back to the beginning of the conversation around when you identify those, are the other mechanisms already in place. Is the data in place? Are the policies in place? Is your governance in place that allow you to then to run at that use case quickly? Versus one that you potentially need to take your time off,” he ended.