Industry cloud platforms are essential tools for CIOs, offering solutions tailored to the specific applications, processes and workflows of their businesses. These platforms unlock new levels of intelligence and automation since being infused with embedded AI.
However, the potential business benefits of cloud platforms are often outweighed by the cost, complexity and risk associated with them due to the siloed nature of existing cloud services. Industry cloud platforms utilizing AI offer CIOs a way to address these challenges. CIOs can lead the adoption of AI‑infused industry cloud solutions by utilizing the following steps.
1. Bring together IaaS, PaaS and SaaS
CIOs must drive collaboration and integration of the different cloud services, such as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS).
For over a decade, cloud computing has been a technology disruptor rather than a business enabler. This has led to an acceleration of infrastructure costs without perceived user value. By linking IaaS and PaaS, CIOs can enable automation and synergies between technology platforms and underlying infrastructure resources. AI for IT operations (AIOps) plays a crucial role in enhancing cloud cost management and financial operations by providing predictive insights, automating recommendations, enabling scenario planning, and facilitating continuous optimization.
Compliance burdens also continue to grow. The current volume and velocity of security and compliance threats cannot be met with manual human efforts. Adopting everything-as-code throughout the IT environment will bring speed and consistency to security and compliance tasks. It can also be applied to infrastructure, application development, and business applications.
CIOs can use AI to bolster compliance by generating policy, documentation, audit reports and controls from compliance documentation, and performing audit governance checks, providing improvements and remediation suggestions.
Cloud services continue to outpace the enterprise’s ability to use them; thus, leveraging the full suite of cloud services by leveraging AI agents can provide the enterprise with agility, scale, and innovation. For CIOs, AI can accelerate decision-making, automate routine tasks, provide predictive analysis and adaptive learning.
Unsurprisingly, IT staff are facing increasing technical complexity. Luckily, CIOs who effectively use cloud services can offload much of the technical toil from IT staff, effectively elevating the organization to higher levels of the cloud stack. They can do this by combining and abstracting IaaS and PaaS, and offloading mundane tasks to AI.
Many enterprises are also facing a skills shortage. CIOs can enable the entire IT organization to move up the value chain by leveraging application-level (SaaS) packaged business capabilities as functional building blocks. This will help directly address vertical, industry-specific use cases and bottlenecks, and provide a wide range of cloud industry-targeted functionalities.
Linking SaaS and PaaS brings the developers and business units closer, while collaborating; IaaS and PaaS bring infrastructure and operations and developers closer together and force a platform orientation. Combining these will also accelerate the activity of fusion teams and business technologists.
Supporting emerging business technology and AI fusion teams throughout their entire life cycle is crucial for success. These teams ensure that AI solutions align with industry objectives and address specific pain points.
Lastly, three key enabling technologies must be adopted and matured to enable industry cloud platforms: marketplace, data fabric and composable technology.
Marketplaces contain packaged business capabilities (PBCs), which are a key enabler of industry solutions’ value proposition. PBCs are the building blocks created, curated, maintained and made available via marketplaces by the participants in the ICP ecosystem.
An integrated data fabric includes industry connectors, the ability to manage active metadata, and the ability to perform governance on the data. The data fabric also includes a data catalog that allows users to navigate the data using industry-specific reference models.
Composable business orchestration and automation technologies (BOAT) enable the processing and automation of the different composable components. Composability is key to enabling industry solutions and integration with existing applications. Composable technology will also be key to enabling the AI agents that will transform industry platforms.
CIOs must mandate collaboration and enforce a unified, synergistic approach among their infrastructure, operations, digital workplace, data and analytics and application developer teams to ensure that the above three elements are deployed and matured.
CIOs will also need to gauge vendor selection of their cloud service provider based on the characteristics of their specific enterprise and how their team will leverage the ecosystem.
2. Anticipate and weigh the Impact of AI on possible industry solutions
The interaction of industry cloud platforms and AI will be transformational. It is predicted that vendors will recoup their massive AI investments through AI-infused industry solutions. With AI and AI agents, it is possible to create dedicated (small, less complex and tailored) solutions for each industry, instead of a monolithic solution that tries to cater to many industries.
The true power of AI agents lies in their ability to be instantly customized, composed and deployed to address highly specialized business challenges, democratizing access to sophisticated automation for both technical and nontechnical users.
This potential is magnified within the context of industry cloud platforms, which provide a rich ecosystem of capabilities for AI agents to leverage. At the core, these platforms offer hybrid infrastructure spanning public cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. This ensures that AI agents can operate where data resides, optimizing for compliance, latency and performance.
A key enabler is the industry cloud marketplace, which offers a catalog of API-enabled business capability components and services, including packaged AI agents. Additionally, AI data fabrics further enhance agent capabilities by providing seamless integration and orchestration across disparate data and AI resources.
Again, AI agents allow CIOs to unlock a new paradigm of business agility and innovation when empowered to leverage the composability, integration and marketplace capabilities of industry cloud platforms.
AI-infused industry cloud solutions allow CIOs to rapidly create, adapt and optimize workflows for specific industry scenarios, enabling users to drive transformation through simple, intuitive interactions and positioning themselves at the forefront of digital competitiveness.
Gregor Petri is a distinguished VP analyst in the Business and Technology Insights team of Gartner covering industry cloud strategy and go-to-market in addition to sovereign cloud strategies.
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