Datacom doubles down on AI and agentic AI

For IT service providers like Datacom, artificial intelligence (AI) has really kicked into gear in the last 12 months, with tangible use cases showing value derived from the AI starting to come to fruition in the last six months.

It’s become more of an enterprise-grade technology, rather than an innovative technology that only some people had access to, said Datacom director of cloud A/NZ Mike Walls.

“With the fast pace of AI evolution, like agentic AI, that’s doubled down on the ability to derive value much faster than what AI was typically used for before,” he said. “[Previously] machine learning and computer vision could deliver certain use cases.

“[However], agent technology effectively changes the whole picture around AI and what it can do from an end-to-end perspective.”

Datacom’s 5,000 employees in Australia and New Zealand are currently leveraging artificial intelligence for modernisation, digital engineering, and customer service, Walls told ARN in an interview.

Tools like Amazon Q and AWS Transform accelerate app modernisation and process adoption. He also touched on the need for security, data policy, and ethical considerations in AI implementation.

“As an organisation, we’ve started to really double down on investment around capability and business enablement,” he said. “[This includes] business change, training enablement, but also operating model [and] ways of working.”

“When you look at agentic [AI], you’re starting to look at digital workforces, or digital employees effectively, and those types of concepts.”

This makes an organisation, like Datacom, reimagine how they work and operate as a business in terms of delivering efficiency or better experiences and offloading some of those tasks into a digital worker.

The key part of this technology was ensuring that the people, process elements, along with technology adoption aren’t forgotten, otherwise the world becomes “littered with big, chunky transformation digital projects”, explained Walls.

Datacom, through its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), was using generative AI like Amazon Q and AWS Transform to fast-track cloud migrations across Australia and New Zealand.

Organisations are being driven to digitise, which means they need to modernise their infrastructure and platforms. This will give them the foundations to access and make the most of the digital technologies that are now becoming ubiquitous in everyday life, said Walls.

For Datacom, this means looking at what technology means for their customers’ business and adapting how those customers work and service their own clientss. This also requires the service provider to train, enable and re-engineer teams.

“[AI] it’s not just the technology, [this] is actually reasonably easy these days,” he said. “It’s just adopted out of the view of the partner.

“AWS is on tap effectively, so it’s all about how you take that technology and apply it in relevance to the customer context.”

That’s the “actual superpower” of Datacom’s genAI offering wrapped to the AWS technology stack.

“The other cool, interesting part of this partnership are some of the tool sets that AWS have now got,” pointed out Walls. “They’re enabling the ability to fast-track a bunch of the technology adoption processes that would typically take lots of resources and time to get through, from a modernisation perspective.

“Previously [these were] often where large transformations blew out.”

According to Walls often the challenge of modernising an application, for example, was that the app was so old and no one had any knowledge left in the organisation of how to use it because it may not have been “well documented”.

However, tools like Amazon Q and AWS Transform now enable IT service providers like Datacom to address those challenges a lot faster, and de-risk those types of projects effectively, Walls explained.

“Often it took an army of BAs [business analysts] to work for nine to twelve months to try and unpick this application, re-document its use cases and architectures for the internet, plan out in terms of modernising,” he explained. “As we all know, the longer the project goes, the more risk and failure there is.

“Leveraging AI power [would] effectively use digital workers to fast-track the documentation and understanding process in the use case development, and in the re-architecture piece, as well as the re-platforming piece.”

Humanistic communication

Before implementing Amazon Q and AWS Transform, Datacom used the tool sets and technology internally first.

 “We’re big advocates…increasingly big advocates of drinking your own champagne,” Walls said. “We’ve got 1700 developers, and they’ve been using Amazon Q internally for the practices and processes for our own software development.

“We build our own SaaS products as well [and] we test a bunch of the stuff for ourselves.”

Walls explained that its teams can see that these products work. Importantly the IT service provider understands the safeguards and guardrails that need to go around it.

The business side want to understand the processes and enablement piece was initiated properly and they want peace that go with it, he said.

“Then we can then pass that back into customer engagement land, after we’ve had a crack at it,” Walls shared. “We [discussed] the reduction in time and cost leverage in [its use of Amazon Q and AWS Transform] was significant there.

“[How] we found that out was doing it for ourselves.”

This was exciting for IT service providers like Datacom.

AI is the “biggest shift since the Internet was born”, Walls said. It has generated excitement for the possibilities in terms of what problems these tools could solve.

“When we started playing with it, there was initial surprise about how smart, efficient and effective it was actually,” he said. “The fast pace of evolution [of the agentic AI was] probably a daily thing; and the other surprise was just how quickly you’re able to learn and develop things.

“It’s exponentially [faster than] anything we’ve seen before, certainly [during] my time from a tech perspective.”

According to Walls the other exciting part was just seeing its ability to be “human” and more humanistic for agentic agents.

“They effectively start behaving like people [for example] they communicate back and forth,” he said. “They congratulate each other on a job well done [and] they’re pleasant to each other.

“It’s quite interesting seeing communications between agents at their level, which is very different from a traditional technology…that is usually input output.”

Walls explained with agentic AI is the fact there can be multiple agents all collaborating to deliver an outcome, rather than be interfered with.

Keep the guardrails up

The evolution of AI is compelling Datacom customers across enterprise, government, corporate, down too small to medium companies.

“They’ve all come to the realisation that they’ve got to modernise faster than they thought they probably had to,” Walls said. “And AI is driving a bunch of that.

That excitement about agentic AI must be tempered with the understanding that Datacom is providing access to tools that have been leveraged, tested and played with in a safe environment.

This, according to Walls, was to make sure the Datacom team were “comfortable” in understanding how it works before taking it to customers.

Walls said it was important that organisations know they are working with a local partner that understands the local context of how to apply this technology.

It also has the breadth of capability to “leverage infrastructure and cloud” for AI, but also modernisation and digital engineering.

“The key thing with AI, is that last word ‘intelligence’,” said Walls. “Once you’ve got [intelligence that can] reason and learn… [the] learning expedites the pace of change, ability and capability within it.

“The balance is [putting] enough safeguards and guardrails in to be comfortable that you’re protected, while not stifling innovation.”

Walls said it was the age where organisations increasingly needed to have the “agility” to innovate fast. They also need to “solve things quickly, while making sure they’re safeguarded and protected”.