CEOs MUST select Right AI-Cloud Partners
As critical as partners in life!
The AI-powered CEOs of every business that is an AI business now, must choose the right-fit AI and Cloud integrated Service Providers as Strategic Value/ Impact Partners. Doing it Right First Time is absolutely critical for the businesses first to survive and then thrive, in the hyper-AI-competitive industries especially like BFSI, retail, healthcare industries.
How to choose the Right AI-Cloud SPs First Time?
1. Focus on SP's Proven Capabilities on AI-Cloud related Soft Change Management with peer references by Verticals: For example in smart manufacturing- This is a critical strategic capability that most of the strategic cloud consulting partners should be evaluated on, by end-user CEOs in relatively more cloud-mature regions like US.
In these regions, cloud adoption has matured and moved beyond vanilla lift-and-shift, to more business-first, vertical-aligned strategic capabilities for enterprises even in traditional sectors like manufacturing that have high legacy tech debts. Change management becomes an even more crucial lever for cloud success in such enterprise contexts. CEOs in these relatively AI-mature regions must leverage proven SP capabilities to elevate their AI-Data-Cloud value storyboards to strategic, board-level conversations beyond tactical, operational ones.
2. Ask for Integrated Battlecards from Short-listed SPs: For CEOs of enterprises where cloud adoption strategies have so far tended to be seen as POCs in siloes, the strategic end-to-end benefits are hard to articulate and translate in terms of business impact. Same challenge exists in IT service provider capabilities and subsequently in their evaluations too, where the cloud impacts have limited and immediate technical and operational visibility but with no direct or indirect roll-up possible to larger business strategic objectives of the client enterprise. Therefore, integrated cloud battlecards stitched well across infra-apps-dev-sec-ops stacks and adjacent areas, can ensure that the customer voices are at the core of it. That's why CEOs evaluating AI-Cloud vendors must ask for and evaluate Integrated Battlecards from industry and cross-industry peer references, so that cross-vertical best practices as well as the Real Value Realization data points can be cross-checked.
3. Evaluate SP's proven capabilities on new areas on carbon footprint e.g. Benchmarkable Green Cloud and AI: This is of high relevance for EU and best practices to be transported to the US market. Many advanced end-user CXOs are already pushing their SP partners to deliver on these aspects that are also becoming regulatorily critical for their businesses.
4. Look for a More Imaginative Refreshing vision of Integrated cloud, beyond what's already done now: For example, demand to see at least 50% of revenue of short-listed SPs coming from innovations and transformation-driven strategic cloud-AI-data integrative implementation and value realization projects. Also look for Skin-in-The-Game Providers that are ready to own up value delivery and take at least 30% outcomes-realized pricing.
The integrative layers must exist between:
o Infra –high in maturity curve, big in size;
o app modernization 2.0- infra as code to CAD; finops for apps moved to cloud already;
o Data, AI and security;
o packaged ERPs on SAP, salesforce;
o Vertical cloudstacks- Cloud in a Box e.g. factory of the future
5. Demand to see and critically evaluate Interesting, disruptive, strategic industry usecases and problems: For example- media & entertainment usecases like fan community engagement, integrated metaverse and blockchain in gaming. These can be extended to new revenue streams for clients such as in fan-gaming, or even in different sectors like Patient Healthcare experience sharing or pharma co-vigilance, with Google Gemini and DALL-E 3 plus GPT4 kind of multi-modal generative AI usecases.
