How Ingram Micro Is Using AI to Transform the Global Channel

Good afternoon, Stephen.

Yeah, there's a couple of things we're focused on. One is how we're using AI. So, we call that AI assist. And the other is how we help our partners understand, sell, and service AI. So, let me talk about the first one. We've been on this three-year journey around AI. So, it's not just new for us.

No, we actually took our foundation when we hired Sanjie and he hired some experts. The first thing was about the journey, mapping out where we end up. That first one was all about the data. So being a 46-year-old company doing $50 billion and having many, many terabytes of data, that's great. The issue becomes what do you go do with all of that? So what we did is we got all of our data into a data mesh. And for the first year we didn't talk a whole lot about Xvantage and the platform and what we were doing. So that was the key element, number one is get the data right. Number two is the team started putting the AI models together. So we have more than 400 AI models, machine learning models that we brought together. And the good news is they've been training.

And the third step is kind of where we are now, is how do you journey map that to actually bring it to Agentic. And we just announced last week in our earnings call the partnership we got with Google Gemini to really empower...

A great opportunity for us is we kind of have a three-step journey. And the second one is what we call really demand generation for our partners. And so once we've got all of the internal streamlined systems together, we freed ourselves up to now focus on the partner. And so what we're able to do is bring all of the data that we have. And so we got a product that we talk about, a system that we talk about called IDA, Intelligent Digital Assistant. I think it's the best example of this first step into this. And what we're doing for partners is if Stephen brings us an open purchase order for a quote that's in the system, we can now take that data, we have more than 40 inputs on that data that says here's what your open order is. We know based off of what the end user's history is, based off of what you're selling, that we can proactively reach out and say that end business has the propensity to buy, may pick up in the next five days. And so now we're providing that data and we're saying in addition to that, here's a recommendation of what you should be adding on to that. So we're being proactive. This industry's been very point A to point B and reactive. And so we're really freeing up the internal time to really focus on our partners and provide them valuable insights and data to help them be more effective with their business.