John Siefert, Wayne Sadin, CIO, PriceSmart, and Cloud Wars’ Tom Smith got together at the recent Community Summit NA in San Antonio, TX, to discuss the AI Copilot Preconference, tech developments at the conference, practical AI use cases, and Wayne’s views on ServiceNow.
Highlights
Takeaways from AI Copilot Preconference (00:39)
Tom notes the high energy around copilots from all stakeholders — customers, partners, and Microsoft — as well as the focus on data quality and organizational change management as key drivers of success with Copilots and AI broadly. Managing change is significantly more challenging than using and capitalizing on the technology. Wayne notes that change management applies to both AI, CRM, ERP, and cloud migrations — as reflected by activity at Community Summit.
Emphasizing Business Problems (03:26)
Wayne notes the importance of factoring the business needs into technology strategy and planning. “I know this sounds like a crazy thought, but instead of IT saying, here’s a new piece of software, whether it’s AI or blockchain or ERP, you can say, let’s talk about your problems. Let’s talk about your opportunities.” He notes that agile software development places a big focus on understanding opportunities and risks, of user story and user story refinement. While Wayne’s company, PriceSmart, is investing in a lot of new technology and striving to retire technical debt, it’s important to tweak the technology but even more important to tweak the understanding of the people in the company about how the technology helps them.
Role of AI, LLMs (04:22)
Wayne notes that blue-collar work has been getting automated for 30-40 years (think robots driving forklifts) but now if you’re a buyer, or a forecaster, or an accountant, we can now take the drudgery out of your work too. That’s a fundamental shift most companies haven’t had to deal with. Asked to react to Microsoft’s value proposition — making AI available in existing tools and workflows — Wayne notes his company is putting in AI-enabled technology. For example: it’s using Copilot licenses but they’re mostly at the “play” stage. Embedding technology such as Microsoft Dynamics enables the accounts payable module to use expert systems and machine learning to forecast propensity to pay. It’s useful to have insight to consider whether a customer should receive early payment discounts, for example. That’s useful, real-world AI. PriceSmart has purchased technology called RELEX that provides insight into forecasting and replenishment for the $5 billion worth of goods his company buys. It has an ML algorithm that learsn from its forecast to forecast better in the future. That’s not trendy LLM technology but it’s focused on the outcome.
Tech Migration and Summit Benefits (07:20)
While Microsoft does many things well, it can’t imagine every industry, every size company, and every process and it can’t build all that into its core products. It’s critical for Wayne and other CIOs to engage with partners at an event like Summit because they are a tremendous resource in these areas, learning about problems that others have, why a market is thriving, and so on. Wayne is looking for financial management functionality and other applications to solve individual problems — rather than making a monolithic ERP selection, especially since massive projects tend to run over budget and miss timelines. He calls the rate of change in the Microsoft ecosystem “terrific.”
ServiceNow Adoption (11:04)
Discussing Microsoft-ServiceNow collaboration, Wayne says Service Now gives him the ability to modernize at different rates. Being able to break things up and integrate the data and process layers keeps him flexible to move both quickly and slowly as business needs change. “So the combination of Microsoft having an entire ecosystem and it plugged into a product like ServiceNow, gives me a tremendous amount of flexibility to scale up, down, and sideways. Optionality.”
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