Demystifying Artificial Intelligence and Its Role in the Technology Industry

Published in

TD SYNNEX

7 min readAug 22, 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) has influenced or directly impacted almost every aspect of our lives, most of the time without us even knowing it. According to a Pew Research Center survey about AI technology in everyday life, 27% of Americans say they “interact with artificial intelligence almost constantly or several times a day,” while 28% say they “interact with AI about once a day or several times a week.”

The reality is likely much higher, considering the prevalence of smart phones, streaming services, and other AI-powered solutions and services that most of us rely on without being aware of it.

AI is one of those things that, because of how much it has infiltrated our daily lives, most of us want to know more about. But with how quickly AI is evolving, it can be tough to keep up or even understand what this technology is, and what it means to our lives and our businesses.

Today we’re demystifying AI and boiling it down to understandable terms.

The Origin of Artificial Intelligence

AI has been around a lot longer than people realize. Going back to the early 1950s, the concept and application of AI has been featured in everything from pop culture to the business marketplace.

A paper was written back then about the power of computers and the ability for a computer to act like a brain. That’s really what AI is — a computer acting like the brain of a human. Fast forward to the late 1990s and we have computers beating chess grand masters or Ken Jennings, the all-time Jeopardy winner. This is all thanks to advancements in AI.

Today we have AI-powered tools, like ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, available to anyone with access to the internet.

The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence

AI has been around for such a long time, and it’s just now getting to the point where it’s user friendly. If you think about when computers first came around, you had to have a whole room dedicated to all the all the machinery that was required.

The same was true with AI during its infancy. You had to have huge teams dedicated to trying to create AI models to take advantage of the technology. These people are extremely smart, but extremely expensive.

And now you have a computer in your hand that’s four inches by two inches and with amazing capabilities, including AI-powered solutions. AI is now becoming more user friendly and much more cost effective.

AI Is Becoming More Efficient and Accessible

For most of the last 70 years AI was extremely resource dependent, and those resources were in two buckets — resources around the actual computing needs and people resources.

During that time, people like data scientists who understand the problem, could organize the data could, and then figure out how to create the AI model were the only way to leverage this technology. To make this happen required a lot of resources and was extremely expensive.

With the advancement in computing power, as well as AI technology, you don’t necessarily need a team of data scientists to do that type of work anymore, which lowers the cost and makes AI more efficient and accessible to businesses, especially small and medium businesses.

AI’s Role in the Business Marketplace

AI’s role has changed since it was just an idea 70 years ago. Around the mid 2000s there started to be a more buzz around AI and actual use cases leveraging this technology. Unfortunately, it was expensive to do anything with it, so there weren’t many useful applications for most businesses.

Over the last couple of decades, what we’ve seen are a lot of people testing and trying things, and as technology has advanced, so have the use cases for AI. We’re now seeing the ability to run these extremely heavy AI workloads in a way that is cost effective for businesses to start leveraging. We’re seeing this mostly with repetitive tasks that are data focused, but soon we’ll see the adoption of AI solutions in other areas of business and operations.

AI Adoption in the Technology Industry

AI is not necessarily new to the technology industry, but there certainly is a level of comfort in this industry with AI with its capabilities, which removes some barriers to adoption that other industries may face. In fact, AI has been a main driver and topic and technology conferences for most of the last decade.

With that level of comfort there is a little bit more likelihood that a tech company would be willing to invest in its AI solutions by testing AI workloads and technologies a bit sooner than other industries. We’ve certainly seen that with companies like IBM, Google and Microsoft, who not only produce AI solutions, but are also trying to leverage it internally to drive more efficiencies and lower costs.

Leveraging The Power of AI in Technology

With AI solutions being more readily accessible for organizations, we’re starting to see different types of organizations and industries start to leverage this technology. If you think about resources within your organization and how AI can augment those, you can start to understand the potential of AI-powered solutions.

We’re already seeing this today. Think about the last time you opened and email and started to type, and how text recommendations were being made in real time. This is AI at work in our daily professional lives, helping us to be more efficient.

For most roles in an organization, and I think you’ll start to see AI augment these positions and free people up to focus on other priorities, especially as businesses become more comfortable with AI solutions. Whether that’s writing emails, correspondence with customers. creating videos, marketing, or other tasks, these will be completed more efficiently and at a lower cost.

Powering AI Solutions Across the IT Ecosystem

TD SYNNEX has been preparing for this inflection point for a while, including investing not only in our Cloud and Security practice, but also our Data, AI and IoT practice. AI is something that will play a significant role in each of these areas and across the technology industry, and our role in the ecosystem is to drive as many positive business outcomes for both vendors and customers.

What we’ve done over the last three years is bring our partners through a data journey to better understand how to collect, understand, and apply their data, and AI-powered solutions are a huge part of that. AI allows organizations to become data-driven organizations, and TD SYNNEX is at the heart of supporting the entire IT ecosystem to leverage these solutions.

AI Is Important, But It’s Not “The Cure”

There’s no denying that AI is impacting our daily personal and professional lives. There are amazing AI applications that are changing the way we do business, how we engage with stakeholders, and so much more. But it’s important to remember that AI is not the cure for everything.

Even as a technology industry leader that paves the way for new and innovative technologies, we must remember that they all have their place, regardless of how sophisticated they are. This is a journey that we are all on together, and I’m sure we’ll see the AI use cases expand drastically, but we need to be strategic about how and where we use these applications. With the pace that AI is evolving, let’s talk again in 12 months!

Organizational Priorities as AI Becomes Mainstream and Accessible

As a technology leader, we are concerned with critical elements like data bias or ethical use of data through technology like AI. But for businesses wanting to harness this power, priorities are far different. Understanding these priorities is why we’ve put together this AI and data journey here at TD SYNNEX.

At the most basic level, to be ready to leverage AI-powered solutions, organizations need to make sure they are properly collecting, storing, and organizing data. As advanced as AI is, it is still only as good as the data it can analyze. As organizations be more comfortable with this technology, it’ll be important to think through how and where AI solutions will be implemented in a way that aligns with organizational, industry, and societal values. Thinking through those things now will be critical to leveraging this technology as it matures.

Looking Ahead at an AI-Powered Marketplace

We are fast approaching an AI-powered marketplace, and the latest TD SYNNEX Global Technology Ecosystem Benchmark Report highlights two key priorities for businesses operating in this ecosystem.

The first is that the “largest categories of reseller business investments are directly linked to acquiring skills, certification and expertise.” While AI solutions and tools are more accessible today, those businesses who are investing in these technologies, and the personnel to implement and activate those solutions, will be the biggest winners.

The second insight was that “cloud solutions (cloud deployment, cloud integration, multi-cloud management) dwarf all other technology solutions resellers say they plan to offer in the next 24 months.” As AI technology starts to become more widely adopted, it’s impact on other areas of the ecosystem, like cloud and cybersecurity platforms, will be significant.

We can’t predict how fast AI solutions will evolve, but we know for certain it’s happening fast. It’s up to us to align organizational needs with the power of this technology.