IT leadership is steering the GenAI ship

Over many years, IT-business alignment has been a recurring challenge within organisations. This largely came out of a history of IT delivering new systems or capabilities designated for business usage, but without enough involvement of business users in the design and build phases. Without business users being ‘brought along on the journey’, there was often a lack of business user buy-in to the success or failure of the project, reflected in lower-than-anticipated adoption rates or a need for additional rework.

These days, alignment between IT and a business tends to be much more prominent, to the point that IT is a partner to the business and its needs. Generative AI is the latest test of the strength of that partnership.

Buoyed by its transformative potential to revolutionise how businesses operate and compete, business leaders and users alike are driving their organisations to adopt GenAI at a rapid pace. As a result, most organisations are already exploring its potential, with 97% viewing GenAI initiatives as a top-five priority, according to a report from Hitachi Vantara based on a survey by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

The first test of IT–business alignment and partnership was reflected in the ability of IT and business stakeholders to define an effective set of guardrails around early GenAI tool usage. During the first year of GenAI adoption, it was common across industries to see a set of ground rules being drawn up that balanced innovation and security, enabling business users to forge ahead down the GenAI path, with some guidance on how to proceed with use cases that may involve proprietary or sensitive data. This became a real test of the ability of IT to innovate at the speed of business, and not every organisation succeeded. Some felt the need to initiate temporary bans on certain GenAI tools to buy time to strategise an effective path forward.

Which brings us to an interesting juncture. Two years down the track, has the organisational dynamic on GenAI adoption changed much since those early days?

The ESG figures suggest that IT’s role in GenAI direction and delivery has not diminished. Perhaps due to the overt technical nature of GenAI services, and the requirement for skilled resources to engineer and package up these capabilities to the business in a user-friendly manner, there’s been limited ability to hand off responsibility to the business.

Put another way: while influence in GenAI decisions spans a wide variety of roles and departments, IT operations and technical executives are top stakeholders influencing purchase decisions, with 38% and 39% of respondents to the Hitachi Vantara-ESG survey, respectively. IT also serves as the primary budget holder for GenAI initiatives.

This shift in decision-making authority raises questions for business leaders who traditionally managed their own budgets for technology purchases. Unclear ownership and budgetary control can be roadblocks for GenAI adoption. Clearly, there are some interesting implications for the IT–business dynamic both now and into the future, underlining the need for both sides to stay aligned and in partnership with one another to ensure that GenAI’s trajectory can be maintained.

Infrastructure needs keep IT involved

Residual technical challenges around adopting GenAI at scale mean that technology teams are unlikely to be able to step back from leading GenAI initiatives anytime soon.

Many organisations are approaching a critical juncture in their adoption of GenAI. So far, most organisations have taken a generic and affordable approach utilising commercial or free off-the-shelf solutions to power their GenAI journeys. This strategy will remain effective for as long as the business sees appropriate value realisation and return-on-investment being generated by these tools and services.

However, there’s an emerging trend towards organisations developing their own proprietary large language models (LLMs) to achieve competitive differentiation. Organisations understand that the extent of their ability to tailor a GenAI model for their individual needs, and to use their own data to train and optimise the model, is how they can differentiate from the multitude of competitors using more generic or off-the-shelf GenAI solutions.

With an organisation’s own data powering its own internally developed LLM, this will naturally require a conducive IT infrastructure setup — another reason why IT will continue to lead GenAI work. A clear preference is emerging to build and deploy GenAI solutions on hybrid cloud infrastructure in a combination of on-premises and public cloud. This preference extends to data pipelines used for moving and managing data as well.

Such setups offer fast performance, low latency, reliability and availability to allow organisations to take the next step on their GenAI journeys. Given the processing-intensive nature of GenAI workloads, organisations should also factor in the energy efficiency of particularly the on-premises portion of the hybrid cloud setup, as this could make a real difference to enabling GenAI to progress in a sustainable way.

Clearly, IT will continue to have a leadership role in driving GenAI forward, in close partnership with the business. This approach will ensure GenAI continues to pay dividends and create value for organisations through the next wave of adoption. *George Dragatsis has more than 25 years’ experience in the IT industry and is currently ANZ Chief Technology Officer of Hitachi Vantara based in Sydney. He previously worked in solutions architecture roles for organisations including Nimble Storage, Dimension Data, VMware and Data#3.

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