AI is coming for Systems Integrators — Are you ready?

Just as end-users rapidly adapt to artificial intelligence so, too, systems integrators are reimagining how they deliver solutions. The traditional role of the systems integrator (SI) has shifted from writing discrete applications and bespoke platforms to crafting human-centred workflows, said Microsoft partner and Barhead Solutions' co-founder, John Orrock.

“Systems integrators are going to rethink how they service a client,” Orrock told CRN editors at our 2024 Pipeline conference on the Gold Coast.

“It's going to be a lot around business workflow; understanding the workflow. It's not going to be about building screens and views and the normal plumbing we do.”

Orrock said SIs must now focus on elements of project management such as customer change management, user adoption and, “rethinking how an end-user interacts with the technology”.

“Systems integrators … are going to need to adapt to that delivery model.”

Work shifts from apps to Teams on integrated Microsoft platforms

For Microsoft partner Barhead, the software titan’s Teams collaboration platform was now the portal through which all work took place, he said.

“We see convergence between Microsoft collaboration tools such as Modern Work, Teams and Microsoft business applications,” Orrock said.

“We see a world where a lot of the users will just work and coexist within Teams versus going into that siloed application.

“The opportunity with AI — Microsoft's platform, specifically — is to break down the silos of individual applications, where you can go … from CRM to finance to service, in a given workflow. So, AI in a business application context — or operating business application context — is more a natural language interface driven from Teams without going in and out of those systems.”

The opportunity for SIs was in drafting “repeatable workflows”, he said.

“If you can imagine an employee has to log a leave request, look at the travel policy, or interact with the company's information or knowledge, that is really going to change with AI, where you're asking about business questions instead of using an intranet or an application to do that.”

But to leverage the full promise of AI on the Microsoft platform, partners and their customers would have to go ‘all in’. This was aided by Microsoft converging parts of its business to smooth the transition from both sales and engineering standpoints, he said.

“To make the most use out of AI, you've got to start getting engaged with other products that Microsoft has, like [data platform] Microsoft Fabric.

“[Your] data … can't sit idle — it's got to be maintained; it's got to be controlled from a compliance standpoint; it's got to be accessed at the right point.

“And Microsoft Fabric is bringing that together … as a platform versus … custom work.

“So it brings together compliance, integration, and information.

And that's going to be the big transformation in business applications.”