Know Thyself, An Ancient Lesson for the AWS Era

Hello from beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona! This week, I am attending the AWS Partner Advisory Board. The PAB is a unique opportunity to collaborate, bringing together AWS' partner organization with a diverse group of Consulting, ISV, and MSP partners.

The AWS partner ecosystem is a bit of a paradox, as there are many partners, but it's also a small world, as we often collaborate and learn from one another. Ultimately, AWS and its partners share a common core value: customer obsession. As a result, partners must know their "superpowers" and those of other partners in the ecosystem. At Mission, we have found ourselves working with large consulting firms to support shared customers where our strengths are complementary. Similarly, we work with ISV partners like CrowdStrike and Vega Cloud as an MSP, ensuring that our shared customers are getting the most out of their enterprise SaaS investments.

As members of the AWS partner ecosystem, we also collaborate with other partners to share our experiences with AWS partner programs. As a unit, we share openly at events like the PAB, with an aim to make the ecosystem stronger and to create better outcomes for customers.

So, how does this actually work? In order to answer this question, let's take a little trip to ancient Greece.

It's All Greek to Us

Thousands of years ago, the sacred precinct of Delphi, located on the southwestern slope of Mount Parnassus, was considered by ancient Greeks to be the center of the world. Delphi was home to many architectural wonders, including the Stoa of the Athenians, a stadium and hippodrome, and the Temple of Apollo, which was dedicated to the god of archery, light, music, the arts, and healing.

There is an ancient Delphic maxim that was found engraved on the walls of the Temple of Apollo, which is simply translated to the phrase "Know Thyself." While we don't know precisely what the author of the maxim meant, experts have identified many of its applications in history. One such application implied the meaning to be best interpreted as "know your limits." The maxim has influenced major religions and schools of philosophy, so it's worth exploring more deeply.

Forgive me for applying an ancient Greek maxim to our current moment in time, but I think it is quite apt. All participants in the triad of AWS, partners, and customers would benefit from applying the maxim to themselves.

For AWS, "know thyself" means creating and nurturing a partner ecosystem that can enable customers to succeed on their platform. AWS' strength is creating an incredible platform for builders, but they need partners to accelerate successful adoption by customers.

When it comes to partners, "know thyself" means understanding our capabilities and target customers. Are we focused on specific verticals, categories, or practice areas? Equally important, what have we decided not to do. Many AWS partners are pure-play professional services companies, where others like Mission have both ProServe and managed services.

Finally, customers applying "know thyself" should acknowledge their core competencies. All businesses should be experts on their products and services, including their target markets, but it's possible that they have gaps when it comes to Cloud or AI capabilities. Businesses almost never manage every aspect of their operations exclusively in-house.

What About AI?

With the benefit of a few years of data, analysts and researchers have been releasing reports that paint a pretty bleak picture about AI adoption. One such survey found that only 36% of companies have successfully deployed AI to production. The most explosive was a recent report from MIT, which contained a wealth of insights, but also generated some pretty click-baity headlines, including "MIT Finds 95% of GenAI Pilots Fail." These headlines were picked up by every self-proclaimed expert, and in spite of clear evidence that they hadn't even read the report, their reactions stoked a fire of skepticism. So, what gives? And what can we do about it?

MIT's True Conclusions

If you take the time to read the MIT report, you'll discover the main obstacles to successful AI implementations. We've all used AI assistants, and it's not difficult to see the incredible potential, but applying that potential can be a challenge.

First, let's get the headline number out of the way. MIT didn't find that 95% of enterprise AI initiatives "failed." They discovered that 95% hadn't yet been able to demonstrate measurable ROI. On the surface, this may not seem like an important clarification, but it provides a lot of context for the findings from the rest of the report. Remember, only 36% of companies have been able to reach production.

Let's look at the other conclusions from the MIT study:

• 80% of organizations have piloted LLMs, but less than half of those are in production
• 67% of partner-enabled AI initiatives successfully demonstrated ROI, as compared to only 33% of those developed in-house
• Well over half of AI spend has been focused on GTM, but back-office automation has demonstrated significantly greater ROI

Ultimately, the study demonstrated that AI itself isn't the issue. As is often the case, the issue is execution. LLMs are incredibly capable, as any user of ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini can plainly see. Organizations made poor decisions about where to invest due to a lack of understanding, as internal teams have deep knowledge of their business, but have little to no experience with AI. They were also resistant to working with expert partners, in spite of data that shows that partners can double their success rate. Finally, organizations failed to understand the scope of internal disruption. Major technology shifts require cultural change – a new way of thinking and doing>. All of these stand in the way of success, and all of them point back to our ancient axiom.

Know Thyself

Let's put it all together. We are living in a pivotal moment in history, with the incredible potential created by AI. Yet success has been a challenge to achieve. It is clear to me that businesses that adopt a "know thyself" mentality will give themselves the best chance at success, leaning into their core competencies, collaborating with a partner that fills internal gaps with their deep experience and expertise, and fully utilizing the power of AWS.