Exclusive: Avanade CTO says AI conversations are now more cultural than technical
Aaron Reich also explains why he sees more of a challenge around AI adoption pace, rather than AI understanding.
At Avanade, their discussions around AI focus more on the behaviour and cultural angle, rather than technological.
During the Avanade World Tour in Sydney, Aaron Reich, global chief technology and innovation officer, at the global solution provider told CRN Australia he is having more people, behaviour, culture, and change discussions than what was 18 months ago was all technology.
“Our blocker is people and behaviour and what we want to do [with AI] and within Avanade,” he said.
Together with Avanade’s chief people officer Nisha Verma, they are co-sponsor's in the company’s entire reskilling program for their staff.
“That is so critical to our own transformation of what we are doing, because it's not ‘here's a training program’. It’s how do we build the right foundational skills that everybody should have,” he explained.
He noted how they think about the different roles within the organisation.
“If you're in an engineering role, which is different than a sales role, which is different than an operations role, then how do you use the tools in the right way within your part of the business of what you are running so that you're up to speed.
“How do we then help you do part of that transformation, versus us having to do it at a central level.”
Reich highlighted a recent Accenture study that showed only 25 percent of organisations feel equipped to do everything they need around AI skilling staff. Notably, 55 percent of organisations know they need to do something but haven’t decided yet.
“In the typical fashion, we've leaned into the technology, and now we are chasing adoption,” he explained.
“But not in the way that we used to think of, ‘we should measure that for productivity’. It is, ‘how critical are these areas of our business, and we're not going to be able to get there unless we can get everybody on board for what they need to be able to do’.”
AI understanding
Looking at the knowledge of AI with his customers, Reich noted that there isn’t a lack of AI understanding, but a challenge of organisations keeping up with the pace of new tools that are coming.
He said that the solution provider’s customers know what they want to do in terms of AI adoption but are being “choosy” of the pace.
“We have several clients that are starting on ‘we're going to change the way that we are going to have our people work’,” he said.
“The first way we're going to do that is with Microsoft Copilot and we are at scale and scaling that for lots of different customers.”
He used the example of one of their customers, Australian bank Colonial First State.
"They are looking at driving AI, as a full transformation across the business,” he explained.
Reich noted that Colonial First State are viewing AI from multiple dimensions.
“There are business processes we're going to change but we also are going to change things around governance and risk.
“We are going to change things that we need to know around from a talent perspective, we are going to change and put in place what we need to run, data and data governance that maybe we didn't have in place before.
He ended, “It is much more holistic from that approach.”