A symbiotic relationship
Cloud maturity has a direct impact on your ability to deploy AI technologies, both to solve short-term problems and achieve long-term business goals. AI needs an accessible cloud platform, such as Microsoft Azure, to leverage data and unlock the value of productivity, quality and process efficiency.
Without the right cloud strategy, businesses risk realizing the ultimate benefits of adopting AI — speed to act, agility to pivot and the productivity to enable growth while reducing costs across the business. It’s critical to adopt a holistic cloud strategy to enable your AI and generative AI initiatives.
Microsoft Azure offers best-of-suite cloud capabilities and enables customers to leverage existing technology and skills investments. By migrating to Azure, customers can avoid unnecessary integration costs and simplify solution complexity. A well-managed cloud platform like Microsoft Azure can effectively fuel your business transformation.
HCLTech and Microsoft are jointly focused on providing clients the best cloud experience to support their AI projects. Today, 33,000 Microsoft-certified engineers and an additional 80,000 professionals are trained in Microsoft technologies. Imagine the challenge facing UD Trucks, a manufacturer of heavy duty vehicles. They joined Isuzu Motors and quickly needed to migrate their entire IT infrastructure from on-premises data center to Azure HPC + AI — in less than a year! The goal was to move all systems to Azure for seamless and flexible scaling and to introduce AI capabilities to run more simulations and extract valuable results.
HCLTech offers a quick-read guide to ensure your cloud strategy will support your AI initiatives.
85% of senior executives recognize cloud’s role in enabling generative AI and agree it can only be deployed with the right cloud strategy.
Modernize applications and data landscape
An important component of any AI strategy is ensuring data gravity. Data on cloud eliminates data silos that can hamper AI initiatives. By modernizing applications and moving workloads to cloud, you can control technical debt while preparing for new AI initiatives. Modernizing applications on cloud ensures the availability of critical data required for AI solutions. Intelligent data management includes adhering to regulatory policies and processes that ensure data quality and data gravity. Modern businesses are investing in data management solutions that can help you transform your data architecture into a centralized, modern machine fit for AI scalability.
Technologies, such as HCLTech’s CloudSMART Industrialized Services for Microsoft Azure, can enable you to quickly modernize your data landscape by providing automation testing, database modernization and data consolidation. Enterprises also use Scale AI Foundry, Microsoft Fabric, Azure OpenAI and Purview Power BI to scale AI workloads.
Prioritize industrialized services
Industrialized services are a cost-effective way to modernize enterprise applications for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. These services accelerate workload and database migration. Industrialized services are repeatable and predictable and, coupled with factory execution, provide service assurance in less time and with lower costs. HCLTech designed these services to accelerate modernization and migration of workloads and data to Microsoft Azure. They exploit Microsoft One Click and the automated Azure Landing Zone, and rely on HCLTech IP — proprietary runbooks and models — for automation. Using automated services accelerates IT deployment and provides service assurance by eliminating error-prone manual processes. Predictable, accurate and cost-effective modernization and migration of workloads, data and applications uplevel your readiness for AI initiatives.
HCLTech Industrialized Services for Microsoft Azure equip IT to transition from working in silos and doing time-consuming, manual tasks to an organization-wide machine centered on agility and productivity. Imagine a large truck manufacturer, UD Trucks in Japan, being sold to Isuzu Motors and having to migrate and modernize 1,300 applications in two years. Industrialized services enabled automation to achieve the business objective.
Explore industry-specific capabilities
Industry-specific experience, especially in highly regulated and data-sensitive sectors such as healthcare and finance, can accelerate cloud-enabled transformation for AI projects. Successful adoption of AI technology requires a resilient cloud operating model that’s fit for purpose and meets requirements for industry-specific compliance with regulatory requirements, data handling protocols and ethical handling of data and use of AI. Adopting a cloud model tailored to your industry also facilitates rapid deployment and scalability, ensuring your business can quickly adapt to changing market demands and technological advancements, helping to position your enterprise for sustained future success.
To keep your business agile and compliant, explore industry-specific capabilities demonstrating a practiced understanding of your industry use cases while providing specific engineering expertise to scale solutions for on-time, on-budget delivery. HCLTech Industry Informed CloudSMART Services for Microsoft offer scalable solutions, ensuring your business remains at the forefront of innovation so that you can achieve goals for growth and profitability, while maintaining compliance and business productivity.
Today Microsoft and HCLTech continue to develop, test and document more than thirty industry-specific solutions. One example is a generative AI-based agent designed to respond to patient queries. The project, initiated by a large U.S.-based healthcare provider, involved identifying key pre-medical questions to build a conversational agent. The patient’s voice input is transcribed by the model into text, enabling machine comprehension. The text, processed by Microsoft ChatGPT, leverages conditional prompting to generate domain-specific responses. HCLTech refined the model to create highly specialized responses to achieve the business objective.
Create a cross-domain skill set
AI is more of a business motion than an IT motion. Successful adoption of AI technologies extends beyond the traditional IT skill set. Successes illustrate that AI projects benefit from a business-driven model with inclusive participation of multiple roles across the organization. It requires a cross-domain skill set that balances technical expertise, business acumen, change management, ethical and legal considerations, financial expertise and project management skills.
Before beginning an AI project, look at your business strategically and holistically to prioritize use cases that will benefit from AI. Consider where AI can add most value to your organization, determine skills gaps and how to fill them.
Identify which individuals will need to collaborate to initiate and complete an AI project. HCLTech offers multiple workshops and labs, providing an immersive experience for business and technology leaders. Your team interacts with subject matter experts on Microsoft Azure, containerization, industry use cases and data analytics to learn how these can be used and configured for your unique requirements.
Start with a single use case
To ensure your AI initiatives get past the proof-of-concept stage, identify a clear business objective first and focus your efforts there. Look for projects that may provide financial value to your business. Get clear on your vision and let your business goals be the guide to prioritize early projects. For example, if your overarching goal is to increase productivity, you may opt for AI initiatives that automate mundane tasks using AI-automated content and chat assistance.
Productivity applications typically don’t require PHI data and can deploy quickly. Applications that are internally focused are typically low-risk opportunities for innovation and efficiency. Choose a project that makes business sense and can be built and tested quickly and use it to share the success across your organization.
By relying on Microsoft Azure and CloudSMART, you can leverage your scalable, flexible and well-managed cloud to deploy the latest AI advancements to derive financial value.
Embrace continuous modernization
To remain competitive, foster a culture of continuous innovation and modernization with cloud.
- Cloud’s inherent agility means that your technology strategy can evolve to adapt to the rapidly advancing AI landscape. The ability to leverage the latest AI advancements depends on a scalable, flexible and well-managed cloud.
- Deriving the financial value of AI investments requires agile cloud and continuous modernization. Provide ongoing training for staff to ensure they’re up to date with techniques for application modernization, data management and advancements in AI technologies.
- Continuously monitor regulatory changes to make sure AI solutions stay compliant.
Fostering a culture of continuous modernization ensures you can harness the full potential of AI to remain competitive, efficient and secure.
Choose a SMART cloud to decode AI/ generative AI
By leveraging Microsoft Azure ARC, Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Security Suite, and combining Azure with HCLTech SMART Ways, you can optimize your cloud infrastructure to realize the tangible business benefits of AI. Working with Microsoft, HCLTech has delivered AI projects that have improved employee productivity, improved the customer experience, reduced errors that put patients or customers at risk, and optimized supply chains — reducing the cost of manufactured goods.
