AI Is Rewriting the Systems Integrator Business Model | Tinder on Customers

**Bob Evans** (0:09)
Hello, everybody, welcome back to Cloud Wars. We are gonna have another interesting discussion about the way in which AI is really roiling, disrupting, and transforming the way work is done. In this case, about how systems integrators work on software projects for customers, and who better to talk about that than our good friend Bonnie Tinder, founder and CEO of Raven Intelligence. Bonnie, welcome.

**Bonnie Tinder** (0:34)
Thank you, Bob. Yes, it is definitely a time of disruption and excited to get into it.

**Bob Evans** (0:40)
Yeah, Bonnie, you know, I think it was at the SAP event several weeks ago, SAFIRE, but again, I heard a lot of discussion there where they said, you know, whatever mid-size and big companies pay for software, it's eight or nine times more that they pay for the systems integrators to get involved. Now, in some ways that seems like that's an idea from, you know, the Middle Ages, but it wasn't that long ago that was the prevailing thing. And now, Cloud changed some of that. But it seems like AI is going to come in and totally sort of blow up that idea. So is that premise at all right? And let's just jump into it from there, Bonnie, because I knew you have a lot of good thoughts about this.

**Bonnie Tinder** (1:28)
Absolutely. And yes, that estimate is true. I've heard up to 11 times the cost of the actual software. So if you are paying a million dollars for your software licenses, you can potentially pay $10 million to have it implemented.
So the real cost and the real decision really should lie in the partner that you select to implement, or we call them systems integrators, the class I's, because they're the ones that are really doing the heavy lifting and helping you to plan, configure, roll out your software, the data migration, the integrations, change management. They are the ones that are responsible to get your software up and running and be accountable if the project goes wrong. And so absolutely, Bob, the cost and weight of the decision of the SI is a huge one. And that's changing now in the dawn of AI, because all of these SIs are using AI to help them be lean, mean and deliver services in a different way.

**Bob Evans** (2:47)
Yeah.
Bonnie, one of the things that I was hearing at the SAP event, SAP itself is coming up with these migration agents. I think at one of the meetings, you were asking some very good questions about that. What are these migration agents going to do? How much will that compress the time, the cost, the efficacy of the migration? So it seems like that route or that market, that category that SIs lived on for so long, we got very complex new software coming in to what is already a very complex environment. We're going to need lots of people here for a long time redoing a lot of things. What's the new model going to look like, Bonnie? How will the entry of AI into here change what the SI does or doesn't have to do?

**Bonnie Tinder** (3:41)
Yeah. So the agents that, or these assistants for let's say a migration, or in the world of Workday, they call them deployment agents, are really designed to compress the data migration effort that goes into either a migration, so taking someone's on-premise ECC system and moving to the Cloud, or they're taking an existing HCM, let's say, and moving it into Workday. These agents are designed to compress the effort around the data migration, to move that data over, and to take any like customizations or I'm going to throw out a word ontology. I mean, I hate people, the semantics of the data, that piece of it and help more easily move that over. So the estimated, let's say, compression of time and resources is anywhere, as we're told, between 30 and 50 percent less effort.
That potentially then reduces an SI having 50 junior agents in there doing that work. Now, that no longer needs to be the case. And so the projects can be staffed a lot more lean. And because the effort is more condensed and the time is less, it really should cost less. I haven't seen that actual downstream impact yet on the actual cost of an implementation, but it's coming. And so this idea is that there is a real pressure, and this is really started from the vendor side to the SIs doing the work to compress the time and cost that it takes to do one of these implementations. And they can be years. Some of these implementations have gone on for years, and the customers are still not live.