Paul Bay, CEO of Ingram Micro, addressed a global audience of 2,200 in-person and nearly 1,000 virtual at the tech distributor's ONE Innovation Summit, emphasizing the company's commitment to innovation and collaboration.
On the heels of the company's IPO in early October, Bay highlighted key industry trends, including consolidation, the importance of AI, cloud services, and the need for scalable, global solutions. He also discussed the challenges channel partners, resellers, and MSPs face, including resource constraints, cybersecurity, and regulatory demands, and the role Ingram Micro can play to help partners -- and their customers -- meet those challenges.
Partners would do well, Bay said, to leverage AI, but to avoid AI-washing and focus instead on real, proven use cases where it can add value and deliver tangible outcomes. Bay repeatedly cited Ingram's AI-powered, self-learning platform Xvantage, which uses automation intelligence and machine learning to personalize data insights that are tailored to Ingram Micro’s partners. Xvantage also includes real-time transactional benefits such as up-to-the-minute order status, tracking, renewals, subscription billing, and real-time customer service capabilities. Xvantage first launched in late 2022 with a mobile app available in 2023.
"There's a lot of conversations around AI. If you focus on AI and promise the growth and the outcomes, then you have to focus on the AI solutions that are delivering growth," Bay said. "And, as all of you know, in business-to-business, they are not buying products, they're not buying point solutions, they're buying outcomes from all of you, and we've got to continue to focus on that."
Of course, one of the biggest challenges channel partners face involves all the administrative work involved in developing, coordinating, selling, and closing deals, Bay said. That's the toil Xvantage was created to address for Ingram Micro partners, he said.
"It takes multiple people from your company and from the vendor partners to actually deploy these solutions. On average, six products make up our average solution, and a lot of times, now, your end customers are included. So, that one deal, when you look at it, can take hours, it can take days, sometimes weeks. Phone calls, emails all the way from quote to close -- how do you get accurate pricing? How do you make sure the negotiations are done properly, all the way to that final order? And guess what? That's before any work is even started," he said.
To that end, Bay said, Ingram has committed to leveraging AI in its platforms in a way that will deliver the desired outcomes for partners: Removing the tedious administrative work to free up humans to collaborate more closely with each other.
"At the end of the day, technology is important, and we know technology and services are the center of your business. But, really, humanity is the thing that sits squarely in front of your relationships and our relationship with you, too," Bay said. "So by bringing the technology and the people together, we're going to be able to create opportunities to take out those tedious tasks we're doing every single day. Let's free up time to have more meaningful conversations about what we're doing. In my opinion, that's really what value creation is all about. What all this means is we're moving from a transactional business -- the phone calls and emails -- to an interacting business to really enrich those relationships," he said.
