The most important and interesting part of being a digital Workplace consultant is interacting with the customers with empathy, listening to them, understanding their objectives and guiding them through a stable and realistic journey to realize their vision. The customer’s vision becomes our goal. This is our core KRA. In my current role, I do a lot of interactions with customer’s to understand their objective and my core responsibility is to understand their current IT maturity and provide them with a realistic solution on how to realize their objectives from their current state.
In the last 1 year, I have interacted with the IT directors and CIOs of some of the world’s largest and top automotive firms globally and one objective across is common. The message I hear verbatim is “We feel left behind in the AI race and we want to adopt Agentic AI in our Digital Workplace ecosystem and lets start with GenAI”. My answer has been consistent, Yes, You can adopt Agentic AI in the ecosystem but it cannot be a leap directly to AIOps and it is not an overnight journey. Help me understand your current IT maturity and let me understand where you are in the overall IT maturity curve (Use the gartner definitions of the different stages if needed). But I keep it simple, The customer should be in either of the 4 buckets – Traditional -> Modern -> Zero Ops and then AIOps and to my surprise 8 out of 10 customers I have interacted are in between traditional and modern.
This is a reality that most customers have not even become modern with complete adoption of Intelligent Automation and end to end analytics based workplace. Their user’s behaviour and their adoption pattern is not studied and has not been nudged yet to adopt to modern ways. We still see more than 90% customers with user to SD contact around 0.6 to 1. Understanding the device performance and monitoring the DEX scores using the standard market tools is not XLA. Those scores only show how the device is performing and assuming them as XLA score is misleading.
These concepts have been in the industry for more than 8 years now and I have observed that either the customer doesn’t have the budget to implement these modern tools or their ecosystem is not ready like network bandwidth issue doesn’t allow Autopilot to function efficiently or even if implemented , The OOB use cases have not made any difference and have not delivered the right ROI. These situations does not accommodate introduction of Agentic AI into the environment. It becomes our responsibility to explain to customers that Agentic AI brings in considerable cost and if it doesn’t deliver value, Then any modern technology will become obsolete.
Customers have to navigate through the journey and reach each stages, realize value. Once they have reached the zero ops. We need to stop, regroup and assess the readiness to move to towards AIOps as more than the IT, The organization, users, data and security posture has to be ready and accommodative of the huge change AIOps will introduce.
Do workshops with the customers, understand their objectives, the current IT maturity, draft the journey and in the process, use the agile boards to identify the EPICs and user journeys and this is where our experience and excellence comes in.