INSIGHTS
Altman Solon is the largest global telecommunications, media, and technology consulting firm. In the following insight, we examine new opportunities the generative AI development boom creates for systems integrators to drive value and fuel investment in the tech sector as enterprises seek strategic partnerships to support their AI transformation.
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is driving a seismic shift in enterprise needs, elevating the role of systems integrators to MVP status. System integrators have the scale, capital, and historic expertise providing outsourced services to major corporations. As model training costs go down and as AI agents, which are designed to automate complex decision-making and process workflows without human intervention, gain traction, enterprises have a pressing need to adopt and develop strategic AI models. These tools promise major gains in productivity and cost savings; however, they will only be as effective as the data that trained models can access.
The biggest barrier to achieving this goal is that most enterprises lack AI expertise. Collaborating with systems integrators for data foundry and model fine-tuning helps them accelerate time to value while enhancing their value to investors and the customers they serve.
A new service model has emerged for AI data and model training that may effectively replace traditional IT services and time and materials (ITS T&M), offering a more streamlined and efficient solution for businesses. Telstra’s recent joint venture with Accenture is a perfect example of the result being greater than the sum of its parts. Leveraging Accenture’s $3 billion investment in AI assets, talent, and ecosystem partnerships, Telstra is successfully accelerating innovation while gaining a strategic partner as they scale.
Challenges and solutions for AI adopters
Advanced AI models require more structured data sets for training and fine-tuning. However, most enterprises still struggle with data and processes that are fragmented, siloed, unstandardized, and poorly stewarded. Since generative AI learns from uniform, standardized datasets, organizations face an uphill battle to clean and organize data to train the model on.
- According to our research, approximately 85% of major tech firms are turning to specialist providers for data curation and tagging to expedite time-to-market and fine-tune the AI model.
- This critical reliance on experts underscores the importance of specialized services in the AI ecosystem, underscoring the vital role systems integrators play on an enterprise scale.
Opportunities for systems integrators
With several major AI infrastructure projects already in progress, most in partnership with Nvidia, systems integrators (SIs) are in a prime position to lead global AI transformation in the enterprise context.
- SI's historic expertise in collaborating with large complex enterprises, implementing digital transformation and data management tech stacks make SIs key players to offer model building, training, and deployment capabilities. This should be of particular interest to investors keen to enter the AI market.
- Executives and other stakeholders see this unique outsourcing partnership as a clear path to value creation supported by the emerging business model.
An adapted service model
A new service model is emerging to address enterprise needs for AI data and model training. In this model, SIs charge an upfront fee for access to a platform that hosts the enterprise data and LLM/SLM for annotation and training, respectively. This would typically include access to data scientists and industry experts. From there, every inference query (measured as tokens) is chargeable based on the type of token (e.g., text, video, audio, etc).
This structure allows for more predictable budgeting and cost management, making it an attractive option for enterprises looking to scale with AI.
We are at a pivotal moment in enterprise transformation driven by AI adoption and systems integrators have much to gain.
The urgency to develop and implement scalable bespoke solutions is more pressing than ever. The emergence of this new service model opens significant opportunities for enterprises and AI investors alike as we step into a new era of machine intelligence.
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