Road trips require a few things. Ample supplies of salty snacks. Tunes you can sing along to. And, most importantly, a good co-pilot sitting in the passenger seat. But what about your digital transformation journey. Can artificial intelligence (AI) be the right co-pilot to help you deal with all the data?
You’d better believe it can. Just like how the right road trip companion can transform a seemingly ordinary trip into a memorable adventure, AI can be a fantastic co-pilot in your efforts to effectively manage all your data. After all, the core belief of AI is that machines can perform in a way that mirrors human intelligence, including learning over time based on data (i.e., machine learning).
Digital transformation is driving the appetite for data to huge proportions. Companies are starving for actionable insights. To try to get them, these companies are moving significant IT footprint to managed service providers (MSPs) and clouds while using modern technology like persistent memory, cloud storage, cloud analytics and business intelligence tools.
Effectively managing this complex hybrid IT architecture at scale requires strategies to dynamically tune the infrastructure to meet ever-changing business needs. But with the amount of data we’re talking about, that’s more than any IT team can be expected to handle on its own.
AI As Your Co-Pilot On The Journey To Digital Transformation
That’s where AI comes in. Use cases are increasing. According to IDC, AI spending will rise to $52.2 billion in 2021, reaching a 46.2% compound annual growth rate from 2016-2021.
But some executives remain leery of AI. In a 2018 article, fellow Forbes Technology Council member Terence Mills explored some of the reasons why AI is a "misunderstood technology." I agree that it’s unfortunate some executives are hesitant. There’s an incredible opportunity with AI to add value to any organization.
Think of the road trip companions you’ve had, and one probably emerges as your favorite co-pilot. Imagine what the AI version of such a co-pilot could mean in tackling your data challenges. The following are three reasons why AI may be the best co-pilot you’ve ever had.
1. AI Is Zen
The best road trip co-pilots believe in balance. They share everything: snacks, stories, driving duties.
AI believes in balance, too. An intelligent IT infrastructure is able to automatically optimize on demand to meet service-level agreements (SLAs) with load balancing and scaling across clouds and geographies. Load balancing ensures the health of the infrastructure. If one system is working too hard and one isn't working hard enough, AI can balance this and keep everything humming along.
Human IT takes time to figure out bottlenecks. AI monitors everything at once, from storage systems to network traffic. It sees the big picture and applies machine learning -- and the cost or performance priorities you’ve given it -- to make decisions.
2. AI Is A Navigation Whiz
Unspoken (but commonly known) Road Trip Law states that the co-pilot acts as the navigator. It’s difficult to read a map while your hands are on the wheel and your eyes are on the road. While the driver focuses on what’s directly ahead and on steering the car, the navigator plans a route to the destination and helps the driver figure out how to get there smoothly.
AI can navigate your company through the data complexity of digital transformation. Machine learning engines continuously monitor the health of the infrastructure, detecting the performance of applications and their shared data. Issues are fixed before they become problems and are resolved quickly. IT can stop being reactive as data management becomes proactive with AI’s help.
3. AI Gives You A Break
On a road trip, a good co-pilot understands that you’re sharing the driving duties. If you want a break to enjoy the views, study the map or rest your eyes, your co-pilot happily switches places with you and takes the wheel.
In a similar way, AI helps IT staff be more agile. It relieves IT staff from tedious and failure-prone activities, solving most issues at the source much faster than a human could and eliminating the time-to-root-cause analysis endemic in unexpected IT hiccups. An employee in the data center trying to keep everything running while juggling numerous requests and attempting to scale up simply can’t do it all.
AI gives IT the time and freedom to manage the infrastructure by business objective rather than by technical objective. What does that mean for IT? Projects and achievements that result in more long-term value to their organizations. With AI as co-pilot, IT gains the time for strategy (how to adopt tech applications or add clouds) and for accomplishing other high-value company objectives.
Bottom Line
According to consulting firm Capgemini, approximately 74% of companies surveyed in its 2017 report claimed AI is making their organizations more creative.
As George Sarmonikas, AI Lead at Ericsson, notes, "Artificial intelligence automates some of the repetitive tasks of the engineer. Now those engineers can dedicate more time to tasks that require more creativity." If you don’t find an effective way to manage all the data, you’ll be left in the dust by competitors who can. Don’t set off on this journey alone.
From an operational standpoint, AI enables IT to work on higher-value tasks, like analyzing how to adopt tech applications from different sources and how to add additional clouds. An IT manager’s job gets way more interesting and their work becomes more critical to their organization as a result.
And that makes AI one essential co-pilot, even without the snacks and tunes.
