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. We just went public in October of 2024, so 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 we sit right in the middle of that multi-trillion dollar global technology ecosystem that you guys are discussing each and every day. We do business in nearly 60 countries and we have over 160,000 customers. I'll call them solution providers. These customers are really solving the technology challenges and providing those outcomes for those millions of end businesses that they're serving each and every day. Through our customers, we're proud to say because of our reach, we can reach nearly 90% of the world's population. What we're excited about is we're transforming into a platform company through our AI-driven digital experience platform that we call Xvantage.

So there's a couple of things. Actually, maybe if I can give you just 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 and streamlining operations and driving operational efficiencies. The way I like to look at it is what's the cost to serve. In this first phase, we've done things where there's a lot of friction in this industry because on average we have six products or services, six different vendors that make up our average solution. We receive over a million emails a year with respect to placing orders—email validation. We've created technology where we actually take that email and make it touchless. It goes right into our system and confirms right back to a customer. Another one is what we call order status and tracking. Our industry has been very challenging because of the complexity of carriers and vendors and all the things that go along with that. We've created some technology where now you can get on our platform and you can see the order and when it's going to arrive. The reason why I bring that up is because we're making it more efficient and that cost to serve for our customers actually frees up time to spend more time with those end businesses every day. That's kind of the first phase. We look at that as how long are people coming onto the system. We've got some great success that I shared in our Q2 earnings results with regard to 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 really around demand generation, and for our customers, it's how do we shorten the sales cycle for them.

An example of this is we have what we call an integrations hub. There's so many different systems that are out there today—CRM systems, ERPs of how they're running their business, and other business applications that are running their operations. What we've done with our integrations hub is we ensure seamless connectivity into the Xvantage platform. Effectively, we're meeting partners where they are in their digital journey. We're trying to provide a very consumer-like ease of doing business. A lot of these integrations into CRM and ERP systems could take many, many months and technical resources. Now what used to take many months can actually happen in minutes. And then the last thing I'll touch on is the third phase. It's really unlocking value for our customers and our vendor partners. I always talk about the easy way of what a platform is for me: how do we take supply and demand and bring that together more intelligently, using this data to help them further grow and enhance their profitability ultimately with their end businesses. So I look at this as profitable organic growth, or say it another way: how do you use data and insights to drive the company and help our partners?