AWS Archives - Innovative Solutions

09/04/2025

DarcyIQ Launches Native Kaseya Autotask Integration to Streamline MSP Operations and Accelerate Deal Velocity

New MCP Server Integration Enables Direct AI-Powered Management of Tickets, Projects, and Client Accounts Through Conversational Interface

Rochester, NY, September 4, 2025 – DarcyIQ, the AI revenue acceleration platform developed by AWS Premier Tier Partner Innovative Solutions, today announced the availability of its native Kaseya Autotask integration through a new MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. This strategic integration enables Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and IT service companies to seamlessly connect their Autotask Professional Services Automation (PSA) platform with DarcyIQ’s AI-powered consulting capabilities, creating an unprecedented level of operational efficiency and client service delivery.

The new integration allows users to interact with their Autotask implementation through natural language conversations within DarcyIQ, enabling instant management of tickets, projects, client accounts, and service delivery workflows without switching between platforms.

“MSPs and IT service providers have been asking for deeper integration with their core operational systems,” said Travis Rehl, CTO of Innovative Solutions. “This Autotask integration transforms how service providers manage their day-to-day operations by bringing AI-powered automation directly into their existing PSA workflows. Now teams can update tickets, manage projects, and track client interactions through simple conversations with DarcyIQ.”

Key Capabilities of the DarcyIQ-Autotask Integration

Conversational Ticket Management: Create, update, assign, and close tickets through natural language commands, eliminating the need to navigate complex PSA interfaces during client calls or urgent situations.
Intelligent Project Coordination: Manage project timelines, resource allocation, and deliverables through AI-powered conversations that understand project context and automatically update Autotask records.
Client Account Intelligence: Access comprehensive client account information, service history, and contract details through conversational queries, enabling faster response times and more informed client interactions.
Automated Documentation: Generate detailed service reports, project summaries, and client communications directly from Autotask data, maintaining consistency across all client touchpoints.
Real-Time Status Updates: Receive instant updates on ticket status, project milestones, and client account changes through DarcyIQ’s notification system.

Transforming MSP Operations

The integration addresses critical operational challenges faced by MSPs and IT service providers, including time-consuming manual data entry, disconnected systems that slow response times, and the complexity of managing multiple client engagements simultaneously.

Early adopters of the integration report significant operational improvements:

60% reduction in time spent on administrative tasks
45% faster ticket resolution times
Improved client satisfaction scores through faster response times

Enhanced project delivery consistency

Advanced MCP Architecture

The DarcyIQ-Autotask integration leverages the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server architecture, providing secure, scalable connectivity that maintains data integrity while enabling sophisticated AI interactions. This enterprise-grade integration ensures that all Autotask data remains secure while providing DarcyIQ with the necessary context to deliver intelligent automation.

The MCP server supports:

Real-time bidirectional data synchronization
Secure authentication and access controls
Comprehensive audit trails for compliance
Scalable architecture supporting enterprise deployments

For more information about the DarcyIQ Kaseya Autotask integration, visit https://darcyiq.com/integrations.

Darcy IQ: Your AI-powered consulting platform

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About Innovative Solutions

DarcyIQ is the AI revenue acceleration platform that helps B2B services companies automate deal flow and accelerate win rates. Developed by Innovative Solutions, a Premier Tier AWS Partner with more than three decades of cloud expertise, DarcyIQ combines deep industry knowledge with cutting-edge AI technology. Innovative Solutions maintains a 99.7% customer retention rate and holds AWS Competencies in Generative AI, Migrations, DevOps, and Networking. The company specializes in cloud migrations, generative AI solutions, application modernization, managed cloud services, and strategic cloud consulting. Headquartered in Rochester, New York, with offices in Boca Raton, Florida, and Austin, Texas, Innovative Solutions helps businesses transform their IT investments into strategic growth enablers.

For more information about DarcyIQ, visit www.DarcyIQ.com. To learn more about Innovative Solutions, visit www.innovativesol.com.

About Kaseya

Kaseya is the leading global provider of AI-powered IT management and cybersecurity software. Its Kaseya 365 platform is purpose-built to meet the demands of multifunctional IT professionals, offering a unified solution to manage infrastructure, secure endpoints, back up critical data and streamline operations. Serving nearly 50,000 MSPs and IT departments across more than 170 countries, Kaseya’s portfolio includes trusted brands such as Datto, Unitrends, IT Glue, ConnectBooster, Spanning Cloud Apps, RapidFire Tools and more. Headquartered in Miami, Florida, Kaseya is privately held with operations in more than a dozen countries. To learn more, visit https://www.kaseya.com/.

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08/21/2025

Innovative Solutions Announces Successful Use of DarcyIQ in Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS Focused on Smaller Businesses

A Premier Tier AWS Partner with a specialized focus on SMBs, Innovative Solutions is distinctly positioned to help growing businesses leverage the power of AWS

Rochester, NY, August 21, 2025 – Innovative Solutions, a Premier Tier AWS Partner and global leader of Generative AI, Data, and Cloud services solutions for growing businesses, today announced that the company has achieved several important milestones in its Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) focused on helping small and medium businesses (SMBs) achieve meaningful growth. Innovative Solutions was a launch partner for the AWS SMB Competency in January 2024, and as such, is one of a small subset of AWS partners uniquely positioned to help emerging and growing companies on AWS.

Uniquely, Innovative utilized DarcyIQ, an agentic AI consulting platform that accelerates sales, to rapidly reach, inspire, and assist SMBs with growing on the AWS cloud. Using DarcyIQ, Innovative has tripled new customer acquisition in the SMB segment in the last 8 months.

“Innovative Solutions was born out of the SMB space and our mission is to help every SMB leverage the power of AWS,” added Justin Copie, CEO of Innovative Solutions. “Right now, SMB cloud spend is expected to reach $578B over the next two years, and at the same time, the overwhelming majority (91%) of small business technology transactions are facilitated or influenced by a partner. We aim to be the trusted partner that helps small and midsize businesses navigate the AWS ecosystem for their maximum benefit.”

As part of its SCA, AWS has co-invested with Innovative Solutions in go-to-market activities in the SMB space as well as initiatives to support SMB customers on AWS. With AWS’s support, Innovative has expanded its second headquarters in Boca Raton, FL in support of this strategic collaboration, brought additional products to market, and built new technology that allows growing businesses to buy AWS services instead of having to build from scratch.

“DarcyIQ helped us build upon Innovative’s AWS SMB and Generative AI competencies,” said Travis Rehl, CTO, Innovative Solutions. “We are clearly at the forefront of building the products and solutions that will continue to make genAI and genBI initiatives accessible to businesses of all sizes on AWS.”

Innovative Solutions has specialized expertise in working with companies in manufacturing, retail, financial services, life sciences/healthcare, and leverages DarcyIQ to perform discovery, analyze customer buying intent, and ultimately generate Statements of Work in minutes.

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About Innovative Solutions

Innovative Solutions is a leading provider of cloud services for growing businesses. With more than three decades of experience and a 99.7% customer retention rate, Innovative Solutions has deep expertise in Generative AI, Machine Learning, Data and Analytics, Cloud Modernization, Cloud Migrations, and Managed Cloud Services. As a Premier Tier AWS Partner with Generative AI competency, Innovative Solutions is at the forefront of helping businesses leverage the power of the cloud and AI to drive growth and innovation.

For more information about DarcyIQ, visit www.DarcyIQ.com. To learn more about Innovative Solutions, visit www.innovativesol.com.

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12/05/2024

Using AI to Save $80,000 per Year with Two Hours of Work

In today’s fast-paced business environment, efficiency is key. At Innovative Solutions, we recently faced a challenge that many growing companies encounter: processing hundreds of invoices monthly from various vendors, each with its unique format and structure. Our finance team was drowning in paperwork, and traditional OCR solutions seemed cumbersome and expensive. That’s when we turned to our own creation, Tailwinds, to help us rapidly develop a solution.

The Challenge:

400 Invoices and 33 Hours per Month of Manual Work

Our finance team was processing an average of 400 invoices per month, with each invoice taking approximately 5 minutes to handle manually. This translated to a staggering 33 hours of work each month dedicated solely to invoice processing. The challenges we faced included:

Delayed payments
Increased risk of human error
Reduced productivity
Mounting operational costs

We needed a solution that could handle diverse invoice formats, extract relevant data accurately, and integrate seamlessly with our existing systems. And we needed it fast.

Why Traditional OCR Fell Short

While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology has been a go-to solution for document processing, it presented significant limitations for our use case. Traditional OCR struggles with:

Varying document sizes and shapes
Inconsistent formatting across different vendors
Adapting to new invoice layouts without manual intervention

These limitations made traditional OCR solutions less suitable for our dynamic invoice processing needs. We needed a more flexible, intelligent solution that could effortlessly adapt to changing document formats.

Eating Our Own Dog Food

Using Tailwinds SaaS, our team of AI experts built a robust, AI-powered invoice processing system in less than two hours. Yes, you read that right – two hours! This solution can:

Extract data from any type of document
Provide structured output ready for parsing
Automatically insert the structured content into our company database

How It Works: 5-Step AI Magic

The entire process, from email receipt to database insertion, takes less than 10 seconds. It’s a dramatic improvement from our previous manual process, saving our finance team countless hours and thousands of dollars in labor costs each month.

Email Intake

When a new invoice arrives via email, it’s automatically forwarded to an AWS Lambda function via AWS SES. This function either extracts the text (if possible) or creates images of the document. It then calls the TailwindsAI API, passing in the new text or image.

Intelligent Document Analysis

Tailwinds reviews the file and queries a vector database (Weaviate) containing similar document types. Weaviate returns the specific entities (data points) we need to extract for that particular document type.

AI-Powered Data Extraction

Armed with the knowledge of what to look for, Tailwinds performs targeted data extraction using advanced AI techniques.

Structured Data Formatting

The extracted data is then formatted into a clean, structured JSON format, ready for further processing.

Database Integration

The JSON is passed back to the Lambda function, which handles the final insertion into our company database.

Retrieving Dynamic Document Meta-Data with Weaviate

A key component of our solution is the use of Weaviate, a vector database that stores example historical invoices and their associated metadata. When a new document comes in, we query Weaviate to retrieve the relevant entities for that specific document type. This approach allows our system to adapt dynamically to different invoice formats without the need for constant manual updates.

This flexibility is a significant advantage over traditional OCR solutions, which often require extensive configuration for each new document type. Our Tailwinds-powered solution, enhanced by Weaviate, can handle the ever-changing landscape of invoice formats with ease.

Tailwinds Empowers Rapid AI Innovation

This invoice processing solution is just one example of how Tailwinds is revolutionizing the way we approach business challenges at Innovative Solutions. Tailwinds SaaS enables us to rapidly build solutions like this in minutes, not months, allowing us to implement more AI-powered solutions in a fraction of the time. Key features that accelerated our development process include:

Drag-and-drop editor: Simplifies the creation of complex AI workflows.
Pre-made marketplace templates: Provides a starting point for common use cases, giving us a leg up in rapid development.
Seamless integration with AWS services: Allows for easy incorporation into our existing cloud infrastructure.

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The Surprise Factor: Speed to Implementation

One of the most unexpected aspects of this project was the sheer speed of implementation. In fact, we were initially concerned that we must have done something wrong because the solution came together so quickly. However, our thorough testing confirmed that we had indeed created a robust, accurate system in a fraction of the time we expected. This experience underscores the power of Tailwinds in democratizing AI development and allowing teams to iterate and innovate at unprecedented speeds.

Tailwinds vs. Off-the-Shelf Solutions

When compared to off-the-shelf invoice processing software, our Tailwinds-powered solution offers several advantages:

Customizability: We can easily adapt the solution to our specific needs and workflows.
Cost-effectiveness: No need for expensive software licenses or lengthy implementation processes.
Rapid deployment: The solution goes from concept to production in hours, not weeks or months.
Seamless integration: Built to work with our existing AWS infrastructure.

For companies facing similar challenges, the choice often comes down to buying expensive off-the-shelf software or building a custom solution from scratch – both time-consuming and costly options. Tailwinds offers a third path: rapid, customizable AI solution development that can be implemented in a fraction of the time and cost.

The Future of AI-Powered Operations

As we continue to explore the capabilities of Tailwinds, we’re excited about the potential for AI to transform other areas of our business. From customer service to product development, the possibilities are endless.

The invoice processing solution we’ve built is now available on the Tailwinds SaaS platform and is ready to be customized and implemented by other organizations facing similar challenges. And this is just one of many solutions that can be rapidly built and deployed using Tailwinds.

Our journey with AI-powered invoice processing is just the beginning. It’s a testament to the power of innovative thinking, the right tools, and the transformative potential of AI in solving real-world business challenges.

Are you facing similar operational challenges in your business? Let’s talk about how Tailwinds and the team at Innovative Solutions can help you harness the power of AI to revolutionize your processes. Contact us today to learn more about our Tailwinds platform and how we can accelerate your AI journey.

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12/03/2024

Innovative Solutions Announces the Availability of Amazon Nova Through Its Tailwinds Platform

Innovative is the first AWS Partner to provide its customers with access to Amazon’s new cutting-edge platform for building multimodal AI models

ROCHESTER, NY, December 3, 2024 – Innovative Solutions, a leading provider of cloud services solutions for growing businesses and a Premier Tier AWS Partner with Generative AI competency, today announced that companies can now offer access to Amazon Nova following its launch at AWS re:Invent this morning. Innovative Solutions will provide access to the new family of GenAI multimodal models through Tailwinds, the company’s new platform that accelerates the adoption and implementation of GenAI solutions for businesses of any size.

“Amazon Nova is going to be a game-changing offering for companies to enhance their GenAI capabilities, and we are excited to be the first AWS Partner that can offer access to this new technology to companies of any size,” said Justin Copie, CEO of Innovative Solutions. “In leveraging our industry-leading Tailwinds platform, our customers have already experienced the faster speed that GenAI solutions can bring to enhance their business. With the enhancements brought to market by Amazon Nova, companies will be able to further accelerate their AI initiatives and drive more impactful results.”

Amazon Nova represents a new generation of foundation models (FMs), capable of processing text, images, and video as prompts. Built on Amazon Bedrock, the new technology powers generative AI applications that can understand and generate multimedia content, including videos, charts, and documents, offering transformative capabilities for businesses leveraging multimodal AI.

Tailwinds will support Amazon Nova through its Amazon Bedrock integration, empowering businesses to:

Build enterprise-grade AI applications with enhanced performance

Leverage Amazon’s latest large language model (LLM) technologies within existing workflows

Maintain data privacy and security by using AWS infrastructure

Tailwinds is an advanced platform from Innovative Solutions that helps companies accelerate the adoption and implementation of GenAI solutions, allowing businesses to scale AI capabilities quickly and effectively to produce business results. To learn more about Tailwinds, visit www.tailwindsai.com.

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For more information about how to accelerate your AI initiatives with Tailwinds or to request a demo, visit www.tailwindsai.com

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12/02/2024

Innovative Solutions Announces the Launch of Tailwinds to Simplify and Accelerate GenAI Implementations

The New Platform Accelerates the Speed of Gen AI Implementations by 100 Percent for Businesses of Any Size

ROCHESTER, NY, December 2, 2024 – Today at AWS re:Invent 2024, Innovative Solutions, a leading provider of cloud services solutions for growing businesses and a Premier Tier AWS Partner with Generative AI competency, announced the launch of Tailwinds, a groundbreaking platform designed to accelerate the adoption and implementation of Generative AI (GenAI) solutions for businesses of any size. Tailwinds simplifies the process for creating Al-powered applications, Al agents, workflows, chatbots, and APls, and enables users to build GenAI Proofs of Concept (POCs) by up to 100 times faster than traditional methods, and at 1% of the price. This empowers leaders at any company to leverage new GenAI solutions that can advance their business goals without the inherent risk of investing substantial resources and costs.

“Tailwinds represents a pivotal moment in the democratization of AI technology,” said Justin Copie, CEO of Innovative Solutions. “By providing a user-friendly, visual interface for AI workflow creation, we’re making advanced AI capabilities accessible to businesses of all sizes. Companies can now go from concept to working prototype in days, not months, and at a fraction of the cost.” Prior to launching the general availability of Tailwinds, Innovative Solutions conducted a beta round of the product with 75 companies. The customers who participated in this beta phase leveraged the platform to easily build proof of concepts and quickly determine the impact of implementing new GenAI solutions on their business.

“Tailwinds has been an incredible tool for our organization, enabling our team to rapidly POC new ideas, validate concepts, and identify the business value of AI quickly”, said Bruce Sharpe, Chief Product Officer at Humach. “Our work with Innovative Solutions has led to an 18% increase in overall customer satisfaction and a 20% increase in call automation efficiency.” Read Humach’s Full Success Story

Tailwinds has been described as “The UI for AI” because of its intuitive visual workflow builder for creating complex AI processes without coding. The platform is built on scalable and secure architecture leveraging AWS services and IBM watsonx. It can be easily integrated with popular AI tools and cloud services, including AWS and Anthropic’s Claude, Weaviate, and others.

Tailwinds has been prebuilt with dozens of premade use case templates that enable companies to quickly implement AI solutions that are tailored to the needs of their specific industry. This allows for rapid deployment across many vertical industries, such as healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing, among others.

Tailwinds Licensing Options

Tailwinds is available immediately on the AWS Marketplace, with flexible pricing options to suit businesses of all sizes:

Take a Closer Look at Innovative Tailwinds

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For more information about how to accelerate your AI initiatives with Tailwinds or to request a demo, visit www.tailwindsai.com

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11/18/2024

Data Governance in the Age of AI: Ensuring Fair, Transparent, and Accountable Systems

AI drives the way most industries work today through automation, an upsurge in efficiency, and even opportunities that might not have been unlocked otherwise. AI systems are making important decisions—from loan approvals to patient diagnoses—in industries such as health care and financial services. Without strong data governance, these AI systems introduce risks in the form of bias, opacity, and non-compliance with different regulatory requirements.

Data governance ensures that AI systems work ethically, transparently, and according to regulations. In this blog, we’ll discuss how organizations can institute comprehensive governance practices across industries, using the banking industry to illustrate common challenges and possible solutions.

What is Data Governance in the Age of AI

Data governance is the practice of managing availability, usability, integrity, and security applied to data. In this classic view, data governance extends to how the data are used to train, test, and operate AI systems to ensure any decision made by AI is fair, explainable, and regulatory-compliant. In cases when organizations use AI for automated decision-making, data governance must deal with the following key aspects:

Data Quality: Guaranteeing that data is clean, correct, and updated as it enters into AI systems.
Bias Mitigation: Actively identifying and addressing any biases in training data or model outputs.
Explanation: Providing explanations that are clear enough to understand the basis on which the decisions of AI systems are made is especially important for industries with stringent regulations.
Accountability: Ownership and responsibility for AI-driven decision-making, holding an entity liable or answerable; this implies that the decisions of the AI system are auditable and traceable. For example, the use of AI for loan approvals, fraud detection, and risk assessment creates several governance principles that become very important in banking.
Data Security and Privacy: Ensuring that sensitive information, such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), is properly protected and compliant with privacy regulations like GDPR. This protection is essential for maintaining data privacy and preventing security breaches in AI systems that process large volumes of data.

Five Key Principles of Data Governance for AI Systems

Organizations should adhere to the principles to effectively govern AI in any industry:

Data Quality + Integrity

Issue:
In AI, data quality defines decision quality. For instance, if the historical loan data in banking is incomplete or biased, then an AI model would learn from that to make decisions that could lead to discriminatory outcomes.

Solution:
Services like AWS Glue DataBrew offer automated data preparation, profiling, and cleaning to ensure quality data. These types of services can help perform anomaly detection, fill up missing values, and standardize data before feeding it into any AI model. The assurance of data consistency and integrity at this stage reduces the chances of model performance being bad downstream.

Bias Detection + Fairness

Issue:
AI systems that rely on biased historical data tend to propagate systemic inequalities. For example, the credit-scoring model developed by a bank could inherit biases from historical loan approvals that tend to favor higher-income or non-minority applicants.

Solution:
IBM’s Watson Knowledge Catalog hosts integrated bias detection and remediation tools. In addition, its real-time bias monitoring in IBM watsonx.governance allows organizations to detect skewed predictions throughout the AI life cycle. The platform continuously audits all AI deployments to ensure their fairness and regulatory compliance across the operations of the model.

Make Transparent + Explainable

Issue:
Most AI models are very complex—for example, deep learning based-algorithms—and their performance can be so cryptic that it makes it hard to figure out how and why humans make decisions. This lack of explainability can lead to non-compliant scenarios in domains like healthcare or banking, where regulatory scrutiny is high.

Solution:
AWS Amazon SageMaker Clarify is an explainability feature that allows organizations to get into the details of their models when making predictions. Clarify would provide feature importance reports, making it clear to a business stakeholder what variable determines a decision in a model. The same is ensured by IBM watsonx.governance for ensuring the process by which AI models reach their conclusions. Both of these platforms ensure AI models stay transparent and remain compliant with industry standards.

The Human Element

Issue:
This is when, after some time, the model starts to degrade because of data drift or the changes in an external environment. For instance, the model that predicts credit risk under economic conditions from a year ago wouldn’t be relevant with new financial data flowing into the system.

Solution:
Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker offer continuous monitoring and fine-tuning of AI models. Both orchestrate with the larger Amazon AI services to provide real-time insights into how the models perform so data or model retraining can be adapted in time. IBM Watson AI Governance platform entails continuous monitoring, auditing, and logging of the model for its performance. It ensures that AI models have coverage in terms of performance monitoring and in governance observance policies on data security, privacy, and ethics.

Data Security + Privacy

Issue:
In AI, handling sensitive data such as PII introduces privacy and security risks. Organizations must ensure that this data is protected from unauthorized access and malicious activity and complies with data privacy regulations such as GDPR.

Solution:
IBM Guardium offers comprehensive Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), scanning databases, S3 buckets, and other data sources to monitor access patterns, detect vulnerabilities, and flag malicious content. Guardium ensures that sensitive data such as PII is properly handled and protected, preventing data breaches and enabling organizations to meet stringent regulatory requirements.

Customer Use Case

AI in Banking for Loan Approvals

Let’s illustrate the above by using one of the most common scenarios in banking: lending automation through AI. Lenders apply their AI models for credit evaluation to decide whether to approve or reject a customer’s loan application. More often than not, these AI systems have historical training data and, at times, also have data from present customers with income, credit history, and employment status.

Problem Discovery

A good example is the deployment of a credit scoring model by an AI-based major bank, which the bank had based on the use of automation in approving loans. In the beginning, the model did fine; the speed at which loans are processed improved, and with better accuracy. After using this model for a few months, the bank realized that some minority applicants are getting rejected disproportionally compared to other groups. The investigation showed that the data science team found the trained model to be biased against high-income, non-minority applicants.

Governance Solution with AWS and IBM

Data Auditing and Quality Control: The team applies an extensive auditing procedure to the training data using AWS Glue DataBrew. It helps detect groups that are not proportionally represented in the dataset and points with anomalies, and it even flags incomplete or anomalous data points. Such tools are used so that future model iterations see augmented and balanced datasets toward high-quality, more representative data. To further enhance data security, IBM Guardium is used to continuously scan data sources, such as S3 buckets and databases, monitoring for abnormal access patterns and protecting sensitive data like Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from exposure or malicious activity.

Bias Detection and Mitigation: IBM watsonx.governance is used to assess model bias in production at runtime. It raises an alert on the data science team for some applicant groups with a high rejection rate. This further allows the team to apply bias mitigation techniques, such as resampling and reweighting, in order to obtain a model that provides fair outcomes and doesn’t lead to disproportionate harm or benefit for any selected group.

Explainability for Compliance: The bank leverages Amazon SageMaker Clarify to produce detailed explanation reports on model decisions and passes them through to make the model available to compliance teams that audit the model for explanations of why specific applicants are accepted or rejected. Similarly, IBM watsonx.governance generates explainability reports that meet this bank’s regulatory requirements, ensuring full compliance with financial industry standards.

Continuous Monitoring and Retraining: Finally, the bank will leverage Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor to monitor, on a continuous basis, any form of performance degradation and to track changing trends of loan applications and customer profiles and give an alert the moment the model predictions start to drift away from the expected outcomes. Equipped with IBM watsonx.governance, the bank establishes automated pipelines for retraining the models to ensure they remain current with changing market conditions and customer behavior. IBM Guardium continues to monitor the data flow, ensuring that sensitive data is handled securely throughout the model’s lifecycle.

Building Resilient AI Governance Across Sectors

As AI continues to transform industries, the need for robust data governance frameworks has never been more critical. Ensuring that AI systems are fair, transparent, and accountable is not just about compliance—it’s about protecting your organization’s reputation and earning the trust of your customers. With tools like Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, and IBM watsonx.governance, along with IBM Guardium, your organization can harness the power of AI while safeguarding privacy and ensuring regulatory compliance.

Now is the time to invest in resilient AI governance that goes beyond risk mitigation and enables innovation with confidence. Equip your teams with the right platforms and processes to build AI systems that not only perform at a high level but also reflect your organization’s commitment to ethics, accountability, and customer trust.

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10/28/2024

How to Seamlessly Integrate Generative AI into Your Existing Business Processes

If there’s one surefire prediction we’d make for the future, it’s this: AI technology is here to stay — and it will only become more advanced. At this point, most small- to medium-sized business owners know why they should be implementing GenAI, but the question we get most often is how to implement it in the least disruptive way.

Five best practices to guide your organization through implementing GenAI

Below, we’ve laid out a list of five best practices to guide your organization through implementing GenAI so you can capitalize on its benefits without derailing your day-to-day operations.

Establish Clear Objectives

To get the most value from integrating GenAI into your business, you need to start with the following question: What problems are you trying to solve with AI? Understanding your challenges and critical needs will make it easier to identify where GenAI can be of use and provide you with the most value. It’s the foundation that allows you to build out a road map that aligns with your business’s larger strategic goals.

Having specific objectives in place will also help you establish measurable outcomes from the outset, and allocate your resources (time, money, and people) more efficiently for minimal business disruption.

Choose the Right AI Tools to Fit Your Business Objectives

According to a 2024 survey conducted by McKinsey & Company, 67% of businesses surveyed plan to invest more in AI over the next three years. The supply of AI tools and capabilities continues to increase to meet the demand of more businesses adopting GenAI at an increasingly rapid pace. With more tools on the market, it’s more important than ever to do your research to choose tools that align with your needs once you’ve established your objectives.

When choosing which tools to use, you’ll also want to consider existing integrations to ensure they’ll play well with your tech stack and current platforms. If you’re overwhelmed with all the options, working with a trusted partner with deep expertise in Generative AI, like Innovative Solutions, can simplify the process. At Innovative, we offer helpful services and products like Tailwinds SaaS, a platform specifically designed to help product teams, technical teams, and business leaders streamline their approach to GenAI implementations. Tailwinds offers out-of-the-box integration with leading GenAI partners like Amazon Bedrock and industry-leading chat interfaces, including IBM’s watson.x assistant.

According to a 2024 survey conducted by McKinsey & Company, 67% of businesses surveyed plan to invest more in AI over the next three years

Prepare and Refine Your Data

Whether you’re working with a partner on a GenAI solution, or striking out into the world of AI on your own, you’ll want to gather and refine the business data you have that is relevant to the tasks you want to automate. Depending on your industry vertical and GenAI use case, this could include: historical sales data, operational data like supply chain information, product and services data like descriptions or customer feedback, or employee performance reviews and team productivity data.

Having your data prepared in advance has several advantages, including:

Improved AI model accuracy: The output you get from your AI tools will match the input of data. In other words, poor data quality will lead to poor results.
Aligning AI with your business objectives: This is another reason why it’s crucial to understand your goals from the outset, so you can pull together the data that matches your objectives, and train your AI tool with the correct data to get outputs that help you meet your goals.
Reduced bias and ethical AI practices: By preparing your data in advance, you’ll be able to minimize any potential bias that may exist. For businesses in industries like healthcare, for example, that may deal with sensitive patient information, eliminating bias and ensuring your AI model is producing accurate information is non-negotiable.

Test Your GenAI Solution on a Small Scale With a POC

As with most new processes and tools, testing your GenAI solution on a small scale first with a Proof of Concept (POC) allows you to work out any hiccups and minimize risk in advance. A POC also makes it possible to collect valuable feedback early on to understand your solution’s impact and ROI value — a must if you’re also in a position where you need to convince internal stakeholders and get the support you need for integration. Starting small is key to minimizing unnecessary disruptions and helps ensure a smooth transition once you scale.

Humach, a privately held CX solutions provider for companies seeking exceptional customer experiences, is a prime example of the benefits of starting with a POC. With our Tailwinds SaaS platform, Humach was able to rapidly POC their ideas, and quickly identify the value AI would have for their business. As a result, they’ve already seen an 18% increase in customer satisfaction and a 20% increase in call automation efficiency.

Train, Scale, and Optimize

Once you have validated your POC, and you’re ready to scale, you’ll need to train any internal team members using your new GenAI solution, so they know how to collaborate with it effectively. If your team understands its functionality, you’ll be enabling them to leverage all features and capabilities right out of the gate, maximizing efficiency and productivity and mitigating any unnecessary errors or misuse. Training also supports the improvement of your solution. A trained team can provide valuable feedback on performance and identify where changes need to be made.

GenAI isn’t a “set it and forget it” type of technology. As GenAI evolves, and you continue scaling your solution’s capabilities, you’ll want to be measuring and optimizing performance along the way. Doing so ensures that your solution remains a tool that adds value to your business as it grows. Regularly monitoring your solution’s performance will also help you catch any errors before they become more significant issues that could hinder operations. A GenAI solution optimized to grow and evolve with your business will continue providing the ROI you set out to secure in the first place.

Engage a Partner to Bring Your Ideal GenAI Tool to Life

As a business owner, we know your time is valuable (and limited). As a small to medium-sized business or start-up, we also understand that your internal resources can be limited. If all of the steps above make sense, but you know you don’t have the time or resources to spend on walking through the process alone, an experienced partner can help. Engaging with a team of dedicated experts will make your GenAI vision a reality — and give you the competitive edge you need in a world where AI capabilities are evolving at a breathtaking pace.

At Innovative Solutions, we’ve evolved along with the companies we’ve helped for over three decades, gaining deep expertise in Generative AI, Machine Learning, Data and Analytics, Cloud Modernization, Cloud Migrations, and Managed Cloud Services. We’ve mastered the science of meeting people where they are with the tech-driven solutions they need.

With Tailwinds, we’re giving businesses like yours the confidence to grow in the cloud with Generative AI. Learn how we can help you take the next step on your GenAI journey.

Learn More about Innovative Tailwinds SaaS

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08/07/2024

How to Leverage Managed Cloud Services to Future-Proof Your Business

As the leader of a small to medium-sized business (SMBs), future-proofing your company is non-negotiable for remaining competitive through inevitable economic fluctuations and technological advancements.

It starts with assessing the health of your IT infrastructure. Think of this Infrastructure as the vehicle driving your business — it supports your operations, enabling you to enhance efficiency and grow. But if you’re not changing the oil by effectively leveraging cloud technology and managing your systems, that engine will blow, and you’ll be left watching your competition pass you by.

No one wants to get left behind, but you can only wear so many hats as a leader. The good news is you don’t need to future-proof your business alone. We understand that in-house resources are limited, and the cloud expertise you need may be in short supply. Whether you’re already utilizing cloud technology or want to migrate your business to the cloud, a managed service provider (MSP) can help you seamlessly bridge the gap and get back on the road.

Cloud Computing vs. Cloud Managed Services

Cloud computing has become a mainstream option for businesses due to its convenience and ability to support rapidly evolving tools like Generative AI (GenAI), requiring highly scalable computing capabilities. Cloud providers, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), provide IT resources on demand via the Internet, eliminating the need for businesses to own and maintain physical data centers and servers.

While it’s a far more sustainable and flexible option than owning a physical data center, cloud technology does come with its complexities. As the use of cloud technology increases, so does the demand for managed cloud services, especially for SMB leaders seeking ways to utilize cloud technology to scale their businesses cost-effectively.

This demand is projected to increase as more businesses utilize the power of the cloud. By 2026, it’s predicted that 75% of organizations will have undergone digital transformations, using the cloud as their foundational platform. According to TechAisle’s 2024 Top Ten SMB and Midmarket Predictions, more SMBs than ever will be “mastering the cloud with managed services,” and IT managers will build strategies that fully integrate these ongoing partnerships.

By 2026, it’s predicted that 75% of organizations will have undergone digital transformations, using the cloud as their foundational platform.

Why Partner with a Cloud Managed Services Provider?

With managed cloud services, you get the power of the cloud and a team of experts to manage your cloud-based systems. In other words, all the benefits and none of the headaches. These experts — cloud managed service providers (MSPs) — do the heavy lifting and provide the data management, maintenance, and security measures needed so you can wear one less hat and turn your attention back to other strategic initiatives within your business. If you haven’t yet made the leap to the cloud, now is the time. Luckily, you don’t need to navigate the migration on your own. MSPs can help with that process, too.

Learn more about our Cloud Migration Services

Solving Your IT Challenges with Managed Cloud Services

Are you using cloud technology but struggling with high costs, worried about security issues, or lacking the in-house expertise to feel confident you’re leveraging all the benefits the cloud offers? You’re far from alone if the answer is yes to any or all of the above. Below, we’ve broken down the most common challenges SMBs like yours face and how you can utilize managed cloud services to empower your business with solutions that will position it for success — both now and in the future.

Scaling IT Infrastructure to Meet Growing Business Needs

With cloud technology, you aren’t tied to a specific infrastructure or on the line for costly physical hardware when you need to scale. Instead, you can scale only as required with pay-as-you-go models designed to meet your business needs as they evolve and prevent you from over-investing in resources you may not need yet so you can scale sustainably.

Managed cloud services keep your business nimble, as new services and applications can quickly be deployed. This allows you to go to market with new offerings for your customers and maintain a competitive advantage.

Ensuring Continuous Operations and Minimized Downtime

When you invest in managed cloud services, you gain access to experts who can not only fix problems quickly but also prevent issues from happening in the first place to minimize downtime. At Innovative, we have a dedicated team of AWS-certified cloud engineers who provide technical support and guidance on demand.

Disaster recovery and data backup solutions are also included with managed cloud services. In the event of hardware failure, a cyberattack, or a natural disaster, you’ll have peace of mind that your data is safe and that you’ll be able to resume your business operations with minimal disruption.

Maintaining High Security Standards

Speaking of cyberattacks, managed cloud services provide continuous monitoring and extensive security solutions, including encryption and firewalls, to keep your data secure. If an issue does arise, you’ll have access to expert technical support to resolve it quickly. An ideal MSP will offer 24/7 Service Level Agreements (SLAs), so you can rest assured you’ll get timely data monitoring and support.

When cloud computing first started rising in popularity, skeptics voiced concerns over how secure it really was. However, it has become abundantly clear over time that the concern shouldn’t be about the cloud itself, but whether businesses are using the cloud securely. According to Gartner, through 2025, 99% of cloud security failures will happen as a result of business misuse — not the technology.

This is why implementing a cloud strategy that incorporates putting risk management practices in place for your business is crucial. However, many businesses lack the in-house expertise or resources to implement this strategy effectively. The good news? MSPs can also provide cloud consulting services to help you develop a cloud strategy that meets your business’s unique needs.

According to Gartner, through 2025, 99% of cloud security failures will happen as a result of business misuse — NOT the technology.

Managing IT Costs Efficiently

Flexibility and adaptability are vital to maintaining sustainable business growth. Not having a handle on your IT costs makes it far more challenging to pivot operationally. By utilizing the cloud, you’re already saving exponentially by not owning and maintaining physical servers. The savings continue with cloud MSPs taking on the responsibility of maintenance and system upgrades, so you don’t need to invest in additional IT staff or pay for expensive hardware upgrades.

An experienced managed cloud services provider will include advanced tools for automation and management to help you streamline business operations and lower the costs associated with time-consuming IT tasks. As noted above, managed cloud services also provide extensive disaster recovery and backup solutions, which reduces the chances of IT failures and system downtime — both of which are incredibly costly in terms of lost productivity and the resulting decrease in revenue.

Keeping Up with Technological Advancements

Managed cloud services provide SMBs with access to the latest technology, including AI and advanced performance monitoring, to analyze trends and increase efficiency. The result is a cost-effective option for having an up-to-date IT infrastructure that provides a foundation for continued innovation and growth and gives your business a competitive advantage.

At Innovative, our managed cloud services provide our customers with AI-driven cloud management with integrated GenAI chat functionality to streamline support and management processes as you scale your business. We also utilize IBM Instana to provide in-depth cloud performance monitoring to ensure our customers are leveraging the full potential of the cloud.

Set Your Business Up for Long-Term Success in the Cloud

Managed cloud services play a critical role in ensuring that your business will not only survive but thrive as technology evolves at a break-neck pace and the economy continues to fluctuate. By partnering with a cloud managed service provider, you gain access to expertise that enables you to adapt quickly to changes and leverage the cloud in a way that makes the most sense for your business. It’s a partnership that allows you to remove the complexities of IT management from your plate of duties and focus on core strategies and innovation so your business will be prepared to handle whatever the future holds.

As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with over 30 years of technology experience, Innovative Solutions has mastered the science of meeting people where they are with the tech-driven solutions they need. Our AWS Small and Medium Business Services Competency and extensive cloud expertise position us to help businesses like yours successfully migrate and manage their IT infrastructure in the cloud. Take the next step to leveraging the cloud for your business, and learn more about our Managed Cloud Services.

Learn more about our Managed Cloud Services

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08/07/2024

How Generative AI Positions Your SMB for Sustainable Growth

Generative AI (GenAI) is a powerful tool for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and startups.

It has the power to provide businesses with increased revenue, cost reduction, cycle time improvement via automation, and better-quality products and services to create a competitive advantage. However, as a leader with your business’s success on the line, it’s understandable if you’re wondering where to start with this new technology and how to harness its power to grow your business.

Whether you’re an AI enthusiast seeking to better understand the positive impact of implementing GenAI on your business or a skeptic still trying to decide whether it’s a worthwhile investment, let us ease your mind. We’ll explore the benefits of this technology and uncover how real-world businesses like yours have already adopted it and found success.

Why Now Is the Time for Your Business to Implement GenAI

As the saying goes, there’s no time like the present — and that couldn’t be more true when it comes to adopting GenAI. Since ChatGPT came onto the scene in 2022, AI has grabbed attention on a global scale, and it hasn’t given up the spotlight since.

According to an October 2023 poll of over 1,400 executives conducted by Gartner, Inc., 45% confirmed that they are testing out GenAI solutions, and 10% had already put GenAI into production. These results marked a rapid increase from an earlier poll conducted in March of 2023, when only 15% reported testing GenAI in their businesses. An increase in positive sentiment accompanies the increased implementation of GenAI: 78% of those respondents believe that the benefits of investing in GenAI outweigh the risks.

The economic impact of GenAI isn’t slowing down anytime soon, either. In its 2023 report, McKinsey projected 6.1 to 7.9 trillion dollars being added annually to the global economy. In addition, one-third of the organizations they polled reported already using GenAI in at least one business function with plans to expand further. The overarching message? Get on board or risk being left behind by your competition.

How Does Generative AI Benefit SMBs and Startups?

Before you invest in GenAI, you may wonder, “How can I utilize GenAI to have the most significant impact on my business?” The short answer is, “however you need or want to.” As AI technology evolves, so do its capabilities and its flexibility. But we realize that’s an overarching statement to make. Let’s get more specific.

Optimize Your Business’s Productivity and Efficiency

Automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, reducing errors and increasing efficiency. Another bonus? By relieving your employees of these often mind-numbing tasks, you’re allowing them to focus on more rewarding and creative work, boosting both morale and productivity.

Decrease Costs and Increase Profitability

Increasing efficiency by automating routine tasks and processes reduces both labor costs and operating costs. A reduction in costs allows you to reallocate your resources into more strategic investments, leading to increased profitability.

Make Critical Business Decisions Based on Data-Backed Insights

Optimize resource allocation by using GenAI’s ability to analyze large amounts of data quickly. More accurately identify trends and opportunities to invest in and forecast demand for your products and services. Gain a competitive advantage in your market by using the insights you gain to uncover opportunities for innovation and improvement that set you apart from your competition.

Gain Customer Trust and Boost Brand Loyalty

Create personalized customer interactions through tailored recommendations based on historical data. Provide more comprehensive customer support with GenAI-powered chatbots that eliminate wait times and quickly give your customers the information they’re looking for —increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Provide Your Business With Flexible Solutions

For SMBs and start-ups that typically have more limited in-house resources, the complexity of GenAI technology and the rate at which it’s evolving may feel overwhelming. However, its evolution has brought more intuitive ways to integrate it into your business operations. Adopting GenAI has become easier than ever thanks to fully managed, cloud-based GenAI services, like those offered through Amazon Web Services (AWS). This includes our Innovative Tailwinds offering, an AI acceleration solution that runs on Amazon Bedrock and integrates watsonx, IBM’s AI and data platform, and large learning language models (LLMs) Anthropic and Cohere.

Successful, Real-World Use Cases of GenAI in Action

At Innovative Solutions, we’ve helped numerous organizations seamlessly integrate GenAI into their workflows using Innovative Tailwinds to create customized solutions. GenAI’s industry applications are virtually limitless: Our customers span multiple industries, including health tech, fintech, manufacturing, SaaS, and more.

Preverity is an established leader in malpractice risk analytics. The organization wanted to improve its risk management and patient safety products further to provide unparalleled risk insights to its hospital and insurance partners. Implementing GenAI has allowed Preverity to take its risk measurement and development process to the next level, increasing speed, providing deeper insights, and driving more client efficiency.

By deploying Tailwinds, Preverity has achieved:

90% faster risk measurement development via automation
Projected $100k in annual savings

Read their full success story

Avannis is committed to enhancing the banking experience via customer engagement surveys. The company manually reviewed over 20,000 surveys each month, and needed a way to automate the process that would help it scale more efficiently. Innovative worked with Avannis to leverage a GenAI solution for automation, built on Innovative Tailwinds and Amazon Bedrock. This solution enabled a faster and more accurate survey analysis.

Thanks to this solution, Avannis has:

Projected an annual savings of $54,000 through reduced manual labor
Experienced improved staff morale with employees able to turn their attention to more engaging and valuable tasks
Increased scalability now that it can scale its operations without increasing staff and costs

Read their full success story

MacStadium, partnered with Innovative to streamline the implementation of their Orka platform and enhance customer satisfaction. The resulting solution, powered by IBM watsonx assistant and Amazon Bedrock, was dubbed “Mac.” Mac is a highly sophisticated AI assistant platform specialized in Orka that integrates with MacStadium’s existing system and knowledge base to facilitate improved customer service.

The implementation of Mac has resulted in:

A 30% increase in staff efficiency with its enablement of quicker and more effective customer interactions
A 25% reduction in customer support queries with more first-contact resolutions
Enhanced service implementation speed, contributing to increased customer loyalty and overall business growth

Read their full success story

AI Is Now Table Stakes — Don’t Risk Getting Left Behind

Generative AI is no longer just a technological innovation — it has now become a strategic necessity for SMBs and startups aiming to achieve sustainable growth. Businesses that are implementing AI solutions are gaining a distinct advantage over those that aren’t. The real-world evidence paints a clear picture: from boosting productivity and efficiency to enhancing customer service and enabling cost-effective scalability, GenAI offers a multitude of benefits that business leaders can’t ignore.

As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with over 30 years of technology experience, and a launch partner for the AWS Generative AI Competency, Innovative Solutions has mastered the science of meeting people where they are with the tech-driven solutions they need. Take the next step on your GenAI journey, and learn more about our GenAI offerings.

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03/06/2024

Innovative Solutions Achieves the New AWS Generative AI Competency

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (March 6, 2024) – Innovative Solutions, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Services Partner, announced that it has achieved the AWS Generative AI (GenAI) Competency. This specialization recognizes Innovative as an AWS Partner that helps customers and the AWS Partner Network (APN) drive the advancement of services, tools, and infrastructure pivotal for implementing generative AI technologies.

Acquiring the AWS Generative AI Competency differentiates Innovative Solutions as an AWS Partner that has achieved technical proficiency and proven customer success, as demonstrated by their 10+ case studies. Innovative Solutions possesses the experience and expertise demonstrated through successful projects addressing customer challenges using generative AI solutions, predominantly in the healthcare and financial services industries. These solutions enable digital transformation strategies for augmenting the customer experience, delivering hyper-personalized and engaging content, streamlining workflows, and delivering actionable results powered by generative AI technology from AWS.

Travis Rehl, SVP of Product and Services at Innovative Solutions, says, “We are so excited to achieve the AWS Generative AI Competency as proof of our excellence in the generative AI space. It’s a testament to the maturity and agility of our organization and how it has strategically aligned with industry and market demand.”

The AWS Competency Program aims to assist customers in connecting with AWS Partners who possess extensive knowledge and technical expertise in using AWS technologies and best practices to adopt generative AI. These AWS Partners facilitate the seamless integration and deployment of AWS-based solutions to meet the unique needs of all customers, from startups to global enterprises.

AWS’s recognition of Innovative’s expertise has resulted in new ways to address customer challenges. This includes a customer growth initiative with IBM to provide service offerings that combine software from IBM with cloud infrastructure from AWS.

Tailwinds, Innovative Solutions’ packaged offering launched on AWS Marketplace, is just one example. Tailwinds is built on the IBM watsonx AI and Data platform, powered by Amazon Bedrock, using the large language models (LLMs) – Anthropic and Cohere. It enables small businesses and startups to rapidly and cost-efficiently adopt generative AI technologies, allowing them to be technology leaders in their space by saving money through staff efficiency gains while providing new products and services to their end customers.

“We can offer a packaged solution to our customers on AWS Marketplace and already have dozens of production customers and systems in place. Achieving the AWS Generative AI Competency makes it clear that our customers can trust Innovative as a vetted and experienced AWS Partner for generative AI — and move quickly with us to find a solution,” says Justin Copie, CEO of Innovative Solutions.

Innovative Tailwinds

About Innovative Solutions

Innovative believes that every company will become a technology company, and we’re here to help. Recognized as an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner. With an army of cloud experts and the Innovative Cloud Runbook utilizing leading cloud technologies, Innovative gives businesses of every size the confidence to grow in the cloud with generative AI, application modernization, cloud migrations, AWS cloud hosting and resale, managed cloud services, cloud cost optimization, cloud security monitoring, and IT consulting.

Want to learn more? Contact us today.

Learn more about Tailwinds

Tailwinds Assessment helps organizations develop a comprehensive strategy to successfully adopt and implement Generative AI technologies.

Create a best-practice Generative AI solution with all the tools you need and quickly integrate it into your business

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