‘The chatbot is a learning tool to gain experience with [GenAI], but building it into the other applications is where the value is going to really start showing,’ WWT’s Jon Duren tells CRN.
GenAI is quickly moving beyond the exploration phase and is on track to find much deeper integration into business applications in 2025, according to a leader in World Wide Technology’s AI business.
During the next 12 to 18 months, the industry is poised to see a dramatic expansion of GenAI “baked in” to existing applications that can offer much more than a typical chatbot, said Jon Duren, sales practice manager for AI and data solutions at St. Louis-based WWT, No. 7 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2024.
[Related: WWT CEO Jim Kavanaugh: ‘We Are An AI-First Company’]
“Over the coming year, and especially the next 18 months or so, we’ll see these companies taking what they’ve learned from chatbots and beginning to build that as a back end into the other tools that they already have,” Duren told CRN. “The chatbot is a learning tool to gain experience with [GenAI], but building it into the other applications is where the value is going to really start showing.”
For example, while countless software vendors now offer chatbots as part of their products, “I can’t ask [the chatbot] questions about all the information that’s behind my firewall,” he said.
Once that functionality becomes available, however, a user might be able to gain far greater ability to use GenAI as a true assistant, according to Duren.
And it won’t be long before that happens—assuming that organizations can get a handle on key data and security challenges, he said.
“If they really want to get to the AI outcomes that they’re after, there’s going to have to be a lot of effort spent preparing in the data space,” Duren said. “And that includes security—all of the protection, all of the permissions, all of the tagging and labeling is necessary.”
Aside from data and security concerns, another potential hurdle for some organizations is that individuals are not actually spending enough time acquainting themselves with the technology in their daily lives, he said.
There is, in fact, a greater need for “getting people to just play with the technology in order to get comfortable with the technology,” Duren said.
“So many of the customers we meet with are using their chatbot like a search engine, and that’s not really how you get maximum value out of it,” he said.
Duren recommends that individuals spend more time trying out some of the GenAI tools in their own lives, which will “make it easier to see how it could affect you at work.”
Ultimately, “you’ve got to be able to learn and understand how to develop more complex prompts and how to interact with it,” he said. “When people start using their chatbots that way, they start getting so much more value. They start beginning to realize how it can be used across bigger parts of the organization. And they start seeing what I see—which is the power to transform.”
