AI, Cloud, and the Channel: A Conversation with Ingram Micro’s CEO

Thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.

So yeah, a lot of times people say we're one of the largest companies that people haven't heard of. We're a 45-year-old company that just went public in October 2024. Now we're back on the Fortune list—we're a Fortune 100 company, and as you mentioned, we're doing billions of dollars. We do nearly $50 billion in revenue and sit right in the middle of that multi-trillion-dollar global technology ecosystem you discuss every day. We do business in nearly 60 countries and have over 160,000 customers. I'll call them solution providers, as you know there are many names for them. These customers are solving technology challenges and providing outcomes for millions of end businesses they serve daily. Through our customers, we're proud to say that because of our reach, we can reach nearly 90% of the world's population. And what we're excited about is transforming into a platform company through our AI-driven digital experience platform called Xvantage.

So there's a couple of things. Maybe if I can give you a little bit of background on the journey we're going on with our customers. This transformation of our company with our customers comes in three phases. The first one is really about removing friction, streamlining operations, and driving operational efficiencies. The way I like to look at it is what's the cost to serve. To answer your question, in this first phase, we've done things where a lot of times there's inbound distribution, and the relevancy and value of distribution for many years has been about the tactical, and there's a lot of friction in this industry because on average we have six products or services, six different vendors made up of our average solution. We receive over a million emails a year regarding placing orders, putting them into our system, and this is email validation. We've created technology where we take that email and make it touchless—it goes right into our system and confirms back to the customer. Another one is what we call order status and tracking. Like we know in our personal lives when stuff is going to arrive, order status and tracking in our industry has been very challenging because of the complexity of carriers and vendors. We've created technology where you can now get on our platform and see the order and when it's going to arrive. The reason I bring that up is because we're making it more efficient and that cost to serve for our customers to free up time to spend more time with end businesses every day. So that's the first phase, and we look at that as how long are people on the system. We've had great success that I shared in our Q2 earnings results regarding how long people are on there, how many self-service orders are up, considerably quarter over quarter and year over year. The second phase is around demand generation, and for our customers, it's how do we shorten the sales cycle for them.