Automation can handle many things people can but deciding what is a tricky business for the channel, says Billy MacInnes
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Mike DePalma, OpenText
There was an interesting story on CRN concerning remarks by OpenText vice president of business development, Mike DePalma (pictured), on the significance of the human touch to the channel’s relationships with customers and vendors.
Speaking to an audience of MSPs, he stressed that although the was a long-standing notion that technology would overtake the importance of the relationship aspect in the IT channel, there were no signs that it will. “We need that relationship,” he said.
Pointing to analysts who predicted online marketplaces would displace the need for channel relationships, he argued their remarks had proved they “don’t understand the channel”. DePalma argued that things were unlikely to be any different with the arrival of GenAI and agentic technologies. “The one commodity that we have that AI will never replace is that relationship aspect,” he stated.
To illustrate his point, DePalma spoke to two CEOs of MSPs who provided anecdotal evidence of how their human interactions with others had helped to develop business and provide opportunities.
The article quoted Raymond Ribble, founder and CEO of SPHER, based in Torrance, California, who said: “While AI is really important as an overall theme – you pick that up everywhere we’re going – it still comes down to the people. Different tasks are being moved to AI. But that last mile is still going to be individuals who are going in there and working with the clients.”
There’s no doubt that this is a reassuring message but it does presuppose that there will still be room for human interaction between vendors, partners and customers. That isn’t guaranteed, it is entirely dependent on partners making sure that the human aspect is still vitally important in that chain. Which brings us to the classic tug-of-war between longstanding initiatives to automate as much of the process between the participants in that chain as possible and the continual efforts by partners to preserve the value and importance of the human element.
Clearly, for ‘people’ to be the most important element of the vendor, partner, customer model, the value of the human relationships needs to be evident to all. So what does that entail, exactly?
Most of the ordering, purchasing, shipment and delivery processes have been or can be automated quite simply, so this seems an easy place to implement AI.
But what about the consultation, the recommendation and the support? That’s perhaps not quite so simple, although it’s not impossible to achieve over time. Whatever the solution might be, the choices and variables aren’t infinite. Most are easily replicable, with some small customisation, across a wide number of customers. Indeed, you could argue that this is what the business models of many MSPs are predicated on.
In the context of Ribble’s comments, perhaps it’s down to just how many tasks are moved to AI. It’s difficult to define just how far that might extend but it could be too far as far as some are concerned because there’s an economic case for automating as many tasks as possible for the partner, vendor and customer.
Which makes the human element even harder to quantify. For Ribble, it’s the last mile of individuals going in and working with clients. But isn’t it also entirely possible that the last mile (or kilometre for us in Ireland) will gradually shrink over time? If that’s the case, will the value of the partner diminish too?