How did you find yourself working in the tech space?
I actually stumbled upon a job working for a start-up MSP over 12 years ago. I had never really considered a job in the tech space previously and, at the time, I had no real knowledge or understanding of IT and technical services generally.
However, after being there for only a few months, I realised I really enjoyed learning what went on behind the scenes in our clients' organisations. The more I discovered how technology worked, and what difference it could make, the more I loved sharing this knowledge with customers.
There is always something new to learn, due to technology evolving so fast. But I haven't looked back!
What caught your attention about Cloudwize?
I'd had prior dealings with Cloudwize while working for an MSP and was really impressed with the team's knowledge in the AI space. In the channel, AI is still a huge unknown, and many consultants who profess to be experts, sadly are not. CloudWize therefore really stood out, especially because they come from my world. The experience in this team is like nothing I've ever seen before!
When I was looking for a new role, I knew I wanted to move into this space. AI adoption is advancing at a rapid pace, but CloudWize is not simply jumping on a bandwagon. I know I've really futureproofed my career by coming here, and the role fulfils my love for learning too.
Describe your role here:
I work as an AI and cloud account manager. Primarily, it's my job to support companies as they advance their cloud, automation and AI strategies. This involves gaining a deep understanding of each customer's business on an individual level – their processes, people and their existing tech stack, but importantly, what they want to achieve as an organisation. Then I work with my colleagues to establish areas where automation and AI can be leveraged to improve efficiency, productivity, employee satisfaction, customer service and ROI.
How would you hope clients describe you in 3 words?
Dependable. Polite. Listener.
The world of AI is rich with potential. Where do you think the biggest opportunities lie?
With custom applications. Before AI, if you wanted to build a custom application that was bespoke to the exact needs of your business, the cost of this would be astronomical due to the amount of professional service dev work involved, and the length of time a project would take (often multiple years).
AI has completely revolutionised this because developers can work 10x faster – and more. The financial barrier to formerly complex tech transformations has therefore been removed, providing you select the right partner.
The days of off-the-shelf SaaS products which demand businesses to fit themselves into restrictive boxes to try and make the technology work for them, have long gone.
Where are companies coming unstuck?
By starting with tech first, rather than process and people. If you understand the business process and the people impacted, there may be early opportunities to refine and improve, before you rush into an unnecessary product.
What’s your advice for an organisation in the early stages of AI maturity?
Don't start with the biggest, most complicated process you can think of, however tempting it is to overhaul it. Yes, we talk about the endless art of the possible. But too many organisations rush into a huge AI project before they have the basics covered, and the risk of failure is not for the faint-hearted.
Instead, I would recommend starting small and picking a time-consuming, repetitive task – even a micro-process – and improving that using automation or AI. Such a mini project will be quick to implement, lower cost, and will provide immediate value to staff. This unsurprisingly helps with cultural AI acceptance and adoption too, which builds confidence to start looking at more complex AI projects.
What’s the most exciting AI project you’ve heard about recently?
There are so many incredible AI projects going on at the moment, it's really hard to pick one.
From a personal interest point of view, I think it's really cool seeing the work that's happening in the linguistics space, with AI being used to help decipher ancient text that we have previously not been able to understand. There's lots going on to try to understand animal languages too, which is crazy to think that one day you might be able to have a conversation with your cat!
I've also seen something really exciting happening in the channel. It's perhaps unsurprising that I'm so passionate about this project, given my background, but honestly, I don't think MSPs will have ever seen anything like it, when it's launched.
But things don’t always have to be game-changing do they? Why are intelligent chatbots a big topic of conversation at CloudWize right now?
The utilisation of AI in our personal lives – with a growing reliance on the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini – means AI is not just a topic of conversation within the tech department.
People know that LLMs increase their productivity and many are looking for ways to bring that efficiency into their workplace roles too. The problem is that often this goes against company policy. But just because a policy exists, doesn't mean employees adhere to it – shadow AI is significantly on the rise.
So, we're encouraging organisations to think of an intelligent chatbot as the equivalent of a private ChatGPT purely for their business. Somewhere employees can talk to company data, or seek assistance with procedural tasks, in a secure, controlled environment that ensures commercially sensitive information remains safe. We wrote a blog about it recently to showcase some examples of how intelligent chatbots could be used. They're quick and easy to deploy, affordable, and they drive immediate value.
Without giving anything away, what do you feel the next 12 months have in store for CloudWize?
I think there are going to be big waves made in the MSP space, enabling MSPs to become more efficient, more profitable, and more value-adding to their customers. Watch this space...
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