01732 759725 48 The second part is customer experience and operational efficiency – think workflow, automation and productivity. These now go hand in hand with where AI is heading, especially with agentic AI. But again, there’s still a lot of groundwork required before organisations can get to that point. It’s a similar journey. Q: How have you changed/are you changing business operations to exploit new opportunities? A: We’re constantly changing. For example, right now we are bringing in a new system to replace four or five others so we can be leaner and more efficient. We’re always evaluating job roles, product lines, and what’s adding value. The same goes for which vendors we work with and what clients are telling us through surveys and our yearly NPS. We ask clients if there’s something they want that we don’t offer, and we’ll check if that’s worth exploring and whether it fits our strategy. Q: If you could change one aspect of your job, what would it be and why? A: I’d love to get back to more in-person meetings, less Teams. I miss the human interaction, I think we are losing some of that community, that spirit in business, and I think it’s a sad situation. Q: How do you spend your week – time on phone, face to face meetings with customers etc.? A: I try and mix it up a bit as much as I can. There’s a mix of client meetings and client entertainment, that could be anything from having a coffee to going to a football match. I also like to spend time with the internal teams in the office, then the rest of the time is Teams meetings. Q: What would make your job easier? A: If people had a more open mind to change, life would be easier. One of our biggest challenges is getting clients to see us as something different than they perceive us to be. Clients still see us as just print, not document management or AI. and the capability sitting behind it. If I compare that for instance to HP, it’s not as joined up globally. It’s much more disparate. In the MPS area, we’ve got a lot of enterprise clients and we do a lot of global service delivery. We have the flexibility that they don’t have to make their tools work really well across every region. In my opinion, Xerox’s toolset is the broadest and widest, it is ahead of the game and has been for many years. Q: What are your customers most interested in currently? A: AI presents a massive opportunity for diversification, but the realities are starting to settle in. It’s not as simple as ChatGPT makes it seem when you’re asking questions! The technology is brilliant, but organisations have a lot of work to do before they can truly take advantage of it, primarily around compliance guardrails, data security, document classification, and understanding what information should and shouldn’t be exposed. The last thing you want is to open up access to sensitive information. If you have AI running and you get hacked, it becomes easy for bad actors to ask the same AI for the same information an internal user could access. We’re helping clients to navigate the AI journey, we’re working with them through an AI assessment maturity model: for example, if your documents aren’t machine readable, AI is a non‑starter because it can’t interpret what it can’t read. If you don’t have strong classification, capture, extraction processes, and robust metadata, you’re not going to trust what the AI delivers. From there, it becomes a question of guardrails, and how you work with your classification software to ensure the wrong people don’t gain access to information. Right now, everyone is chasing efficiencies, but we’re seeing instances of AI adoption without a full understanding of the complications behind it. It often isn’t until someone searches for something they shouldn’t be able to find, that everything gets shut down. We’ve already seen this happen with clients. Q: What do you see as the biggest challenges facing channel businesses today? A: Trying to diversify in a challenging market is probably one of the biggest issues. There are very few market spaces that have deteriorated as quickly as print in the post-COVID era, which makes diversification, trying to find the right resourcing, funding, etc. a challenge. The second challenge is waiting for the vendors to catch up and change as well. OEMs are behemoths, so they often move a lot slower than we and our clients expect. There are pros and cons to that - it gives us some flexibility to think outside of the box and look at other partnerships and relationships, which is something we have done. But anything new takes time, effort and energy, and that can be challenging in itself. Q: Which OEMs do you partner with and why? A: Xerox, but we also have a separate organisation, UT3, that partner with HP. Why Xerox? It’s really their toolset Marc Ueckermann, Chief Technology Officer, Xenith View from the channel Q&A Marc Ueckermann
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