From Strategy to Scale: How IT Services Fuel AI ROI

AI Services

Generative AI is rapidly maturing from initial proofs of concept to scaling across the enterprise. It’s transforming business operations, improving customer experiences and pushing the boundaries of innovation. At the heart of this transformation are technology services from trusted partners who specialize in maximizing ROI.

We commissioned Forrester Consulting to survey more than 500 global IT decision-makers about their top needs from IT service providers. The feedback shows an increased reliance on IT services to deliver business value with AI.

Below are three insights based on the study:

1-Transform processes to effectively leverage and scale AI

This hit home for me. I cannot stress this enough – applying AI to bad processes will greatly hinder ROI and scale.

About eight years ago, Dell’s Services organization began digitizing more than 4,000 business processes and refining our workflows. We then automated those processes leveraging advanced process engineering and machine learning tools, which allowed us to see what I call “the happy path”. Meaning, we had visibility when things worked well for customers, and what happened when they didn’t. In the years that followed, more advanced AI and machine learning was applied across consulting, deployment, support, service parts and Dell’s professional services.

Those early years automating the processes allowed us to quickly generate significant business value and scale our automation when generative AI began booming in 2023. It helped us stay nimble and take advantage of AI’s continued evolution, including agentic AI. Today, we’re continuing to greatly improve AI-driven outcomes inside the company, and that’s helping us accelerate tangible outcomes for our customers.

2- End-to-end service capabilities are key to generating business outcomes with AI

AI implementation is a complex process that requires more than advanced hardware or tools: 72% of IT decision-makers prioritize IT services providers with end-to-end AI capabilities.

To drive consistent ROI, businesses need end-to-end AI support across strategy, use cases, data prep, deployment, integration, optimization and scaling AI implementations. Piece parts from a fragmented set of solution providers are slower to implement, more costly and harder to scale.

Services are a key part of deriving business value from AI technology.

According to the study, “Leaders are increasingly relying on IT services providers to drive innovation, strengthen competitive differentiation, and identify cross-organizational impact beyond the IT department.” Additionally, 81% said they are seeking demonstrated experience and success aligning business and IT for maximum agility.

3-IT Services accelerate ROI with AI

More than half of respondents (53%) said services help accelerate AI implementation, 63% cited the value of pre-deployment readiness and guidance, and 64% said they need help with data for AI use cases.

All these elements are critical, with data often posing the greatest challenge, as 91% of organizations face challenges when identifying, preparing or using data for AI use cases.

Many of the use cases we deploy at Dell present similar ROI opportunities for our customers, and technology services are a great example. For example, we’re leveraging GenAI to tell our support agents the “next best action” to take to resolve an issue, which reduces the time and effort it takes to resolve tech support cases for customers.

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