As I’ve written before, the arrival of the AI PC is a revolutionary moment for the industry, and this includes the channel. The emergence of AI PCs and the opportunities they create revolutionises the role of the channel because it changes the channels core value proposition to end users and vendors.
How the AI PC enables end users to run powerful AI applications at the edge transforms the PC as a tool for productivity and creativity.
Of course, in many ways an AI PC is a super-fast PC, and the market may get fixated on trillion of operations per second speeds. This misses the point of how the AI PC transforms edge computing.
The value for a business deploying AI PCs for end users in field as diverse as finance, software development, health and media is how it enables powerful business solutions. So how the potential of AI is realised in an enterprise requires a channel business to apply a much more thorough consultative mindset and use the hardware conversation to expand into other fields and help a customer onboard the technology correctly. Therefore, the channel needs to develop the right skills to be educated about AI PCs and AI technologies to be able to bring their customers up to speed and ensure their success. Indeed, we expect an AI skills race like we saw with the hunt for cybersecurity skills and knowledge a few years ago.
There are other positive impacts of the AI PC on the channel including an increase in margins. As such, there will be an acceptance of higher prices for the technology that delivers a significance jump in productivity and creativity. There will be a halo effect from this technology as customers look to their channel partner for help and more willing to pay more for services that advance an AI solution they need in place.
The need for the channel to deliver AI solutions opens new bundling and cross selling opportunities. There will be the AI development tools, productivity suites, and industry-specific applications that are available and in the development. The AI PC itself triggers an array of potential peripherals sales for complementary devices such as high-resolution monitors, external GPUs, and advanced input devices. And returning to services, in addition to managed services, AI consulting, training, and support, there is also potential for bundling cloud services to support AI workloads and data storage solutions alongside new fleets of AI PCs.
As the first AI PCs go into an array of organisations, there will be ripple effect on future technology churn that the channel can gain advantage from. What will be striking is how equipment replacement is going to be driven by different factors. In the past, it was how a new processor triggered a refresh of machines or the impact of a major operating system upgrade. The new determining factor for switching out older technology will be from new use cases and applications that rely on even more AI processing at the edge. Today we are seeing first generation AI PCs with ratings of more than forty trillion operating processes per second, but it is not hard to see 100 TOPS machines soon and how that will drive more churn.
The channel is starting its journey on embracing the AI PC and will need support to exploit this opportunity. This is why we built our Destination AI programme to educate our partners about the whole AI technology opportunity; give them the tools to enable success; specialist support during a sale; and finally, the resources to support their customers with the AI investment that they’ve made and how they can evolve their AI over time.
