AI adoption is not simply a technology upgrade: it is simultaneously an engineering challenge and a business transformation journey – and organisations that treat it as anything less are setting themselves up to fail.
This is according to Sasha Slankamenac, architect in the office of the CTO and practice lead: AI at Dariel, who adds: “The organisations most likely to succeed will be those that move beyond excitement about AI’s potential and instead focus on combining clear, well-defined use cases with pragmatic technology choices that produce measurable outcomes.”
The pressure many businesses currently feel to “do something with AI” is real but it is also a risk. Without clarity on where AI is genuinely useful, where simpler automation is sufficient, and where the risks outweigh the benefits, organisations can easily end up investing in technology that does not solve a real business problem.
This is precisely where IT resellers have an opportunity to differentiate themselves. According to Slankamenac, relevance in the AI era will not come from product fulfilment alone. “Resellers need to evolve into a more advisory role, one that helps customers identify specific use cases where AI can meaningfully reduce cost, improve service quality, or eliminate repetitive work,” he explains.
Equally important, he adds, is helping customers understand the less visible requirements of successful AI adoption: data quality, acceptable use governance, and the organisational readiness to operationalise these tools.
Slankamenac’s view is that resellers should help customers frame the right problems first. Business process and data readiness should lead the conversation, not the technology. “When the problem is properly understood, the choice of tools, licences, and platforms follows naturally, rather than driving decisions that may not fit the customer’s actual needs,” he says.
He is clear that resellers do not need to become full-blown consultancies overnight. “But they do need to build sufficient AI literacy to identify credible use cases, recognise adoption risks early, and steer customers away from technology-led decisions that lack business grounding.”
By combining product knowledge with the right integration, governance, and managed-service partners, resellers can remain central to the customer relationship, not as vendors, but as trusted advisors helping their customers choose responsibly.
“The resellers that will remain highly relevant are those that make this shift,” he concludes. “The ones that don’t risk being bypassed by customers who need more than a product catalogue.”