Driving Growth and Transformation in France with AI and Xvantage with Sophie Deleval

Hey everybody. Welcome back to Gram Micro one. We're talking with my new friend Sophie here about what's happening in the channel in France.

Sophie, welcome to show. Good to see you. The partners, I'm sure have lots of challenges.

There's a lot happening in France these days. Yeah. But when you talk to them, what's keeping them up at night?

So they have to face a lot of headwinds right now. So they think about the, the way they can be innovative in this market, which is slowing down because of the fact that the budget has not been voted yet. So all of the public sector, or most of the sector bj uh, project have been frozen.

Uh, enterprise tends to delay EBITDA investment. So in front of this, uh, tough market situation, it's important for them, first of all to streamline their opex, uh, see how they can be more efficient, and also to, to, to accelerate their performance. So they're looking at it with us.

So it's all about how can we standardize the processes, refocus our teams on the added value task so that we can create mature value. We've also seen that a lot of the end customers in France are probably navigating all kinds of economic issues themselves. Yes, indeed.

And they're probably looking at the partners for some help as to maybe how to streamline things and be more efficient. Exactly. And, uh, so then the purpose for the resellers is to see how we as distributor, we can help them, uh, meeting their partners expectations.

So it's important for them to be able to leverage our technical resources and our human resources. So it's all about what we are talking about right now. Mm-hmm.

One of the things that we're talking about here at the show a lot is there's a shift a little bit to focus more on business outcomes. It's not enough just to be a trusted technology advisor. I have to work with the end customer.

I have to know something about their business a little bit. Is that playing out in France as well? Yeah, of course.

So now we are all looking at the way we can, um, create better value for our partners, uh, for their own partners. And it's based on all of the artificial intelligence we are leveraging through our part platform. We have talked about it a lot right now with, uh, and Sanjeev on stage talked about it even more this morning.

So how can we accelerate the performance? How can we increase the breadth? How can we leverage the new tools?

We have, uh, Sanje talked about the digital assistance, intelligent digital assistance we can leverage to do that. We can use, uh, and finally what I think it's, we can talk about artificial intelligence, but first of all, it's about human intelligence. How can we have the right purpose, uh, in our discussions?

There will always be some human in the middle of that process somewhere. There will always be, fortunately, I hope so. Um, I guess the question I would have though is things tend to roll downhill in this world.

So are the partners leaning more on you for certain expertise and professional services because they can't always find that talent, or they might not wanna invest at something that they might once? Yeah. Yeah.

So the kind of service we are talking about, we were so far talking about professional services, for example, around the cloud, around cybersecurity. But I think that more and more we will talk about new services consultancy around how can we all leverage these new technologies? How can we leverage artificial intelligence, uh, in the way we can all increase our overall efficiency?

And they need also our experience to do that, right? So, uh, Tiffany yesterday talked about the fact that we need to use energy as a service. So I, I kept it in mind, uh, what is the narrative, uh, beyond artificial intelligence?

Because what we see is that we all are using artificial intelligence for our own purpose, but what are the, the true, uh, use cases in the enterprise, right? How can we really streamline the workflows? And I think that most of the partners, they are not very clear on that yet.

So they need us to be trusted advisor and accompany them in this motion. Understand occurs, occurs in every country that I talk to, there seems to be a skill shortage. And for the partners, it's almost doubly acute because I need technology people who are customer facing and friendly customers.

Yeah. So how does Ingram work with them to kind of find that kind of unique unicorn in the IT landscape To, to find what kind of unicorn, Uh, IT people who are have, uh, who can talk to customers and explain things to them and are very, uh, have a lot of empathy for the customer? Yeah.

So you mean how do we find this talent or it's not that easy to find this kind of talent? Yeah, that's my, that's my question. Yeah, Because it, so even in it, the, the, the job is really shifting a lot right now, and we are less relying on the skills than on the soft skills.

So it's about, so it's a combination of IT skills and, uh, the, the ability to create the right synergies with the salespeople so that we have a common language to the people and to be to the customers. And to be honest, in France, we didn't find the right profile yet. For, for fortunately we can rely on the global resources.

All of the people from SANJEEP team can really help us. Then we still have, uh, to deal with the language issues. So we, we are leveraging the local, the global resources from an IT perspective and leveraging our local resources for the sales purpose.

So it's a good combination. France, of course, is part of the eu. Is there more transactions spanning multiple borders or the partners working with each other in across Europe?

Or is they, are they still pretty much focused in their particular country or? No, it's still really focused at local level most of the time. So what we see is the complexity doesn't come so much from the fact that we have to interconnect different countries, even if it can occur.

But the complexity, complexity comes more from the, the, the fact that when we deal with project, we have to combine different technologies, different skill sets. So, and we need sometimes to connect different partners to each other. And for that, the platform advantage is made for that.

It's a, it's an ecosystem which is made to create mutual, uh, values between the vendors, the customers, and also to onboard some customers on the same project and be complementary in their skills. Are the partners becoming more open to that level of alliance with other solution providers? 'cause sometimes, at least historically, they always kind of view each other a little wally because they think they're competitors.

Yeah, it's interesting to see during this event, for example, we are here with 10 French partners, and during lunchtime, even during the dinner, they start talking about their, their skills, their experience, and to see how they could, uh, be complimentary and work together to compete with some big players. Right? And it's true in the mid market, mid-market area, in the SMB area, Of course, we're here in a show, and I don't think we can go very far without running into somebody talking about ai.

And we talked about it earlier, but what's the level of enthusiasm in the, among the partners for ai? I mean, are they kind of studying it or are they, are they all in? No, they are not all in yet.

So it's, it's, uh, they're wondering exactly what it means, con correctly, right? Because while most of the people, they know what they do with GPT, for example, for their personal life. Uh, coming back to the enterprise, uh, beyond ai, there are a lot of questions around what, as I mentioned before, what are the concrete use cases, but also from a security perspective, how can we make sure that we have the best user usage of it without compromising our data?

So for that, we need really to explain them through our own AI factory that we can secure their data and that can, we can provide the right added value and, uh, and contribute to their business development without, of course compromising their own security. Mm-hmm. Um, one of the themes of the keynotes here has been this whole notion of using AI to make it easier to do business, not just with the partner in Ingram, but from the partner to the end customer.

Yeah. Do you think that we're gonna see like a significant reduction in the amount of friction that has historically been in those processes over the years? Yeah.

Yeah, I think so. If you take the, what makes the job of a distributor right now, there are still a lot of, let's say, low added value task around the quotation management, for example. And it creates a lot of workload, a lot of burden, uh, even from a financial perspective.

So if we can remove it, remove this kind of friction, if we can, um, accelerate the, the time to market of the quotation, if we can have a really, really, uh, a full digital process from the catalog ingestion to the, to the, to the invoicing, imagine how, how qualitative can be the discussion afterwards. Because now we still have to talk a lot about, do, did you get my quotation? What is the price?

When will it be available to me? Uh, did, uh, do you know when I will be delivered? For example, if all of the information is available on the platform, then we can really start talking about strategic initiative.

How can we build the future together? So I don't think that artificial intelligence will make us less close to the partners. It's exactly the opposite.

The more we'll develop it, the more time we'll have to, to, to develop qualitative discussion and, uh, to, to really, um, build the future together. We might have time for a drink and dinner to discuss something rather than In France. It's very important, you know, to have a very good glass of wine and talk about the business, of course.

Is there something you wish the partners would be focusing more on? And as you kinda look at them and you talk to them, I know they're all different, so it's difficult to generalize, but as you kinda have those discussions, is there something that you kind of, you know, would wish the partners or some piece of advice that you would give them and say, folks, you need to spend a little more time on this. I don't think I'm the right person to give advice to my partners, because we are all on the same boat, all facing the same, of the same kind of difficulties.

You know, the problem with this deep transformation we are going through right now is to deal with the day-to-day operational issues. We have the, with the business pressure we have as well. So we need to deliver short term outcome while transforming in the longer term.

So the advice I would give is to try to combine, combine both, sorry, and spend enough time, even one, two hours a day to keep thinking about how the future will look like and how can we, uh, foster the right dynamic internally to have the right talent, thinking about the way they can streamline workflows, the way they can create more values for their own partners. And it's easy to say, it's not easy to do because it's about the purpose. We need to reassure all of the people about how the future will look like.

Each time we're talking about artificial intelligence, you know, that there is a fear behind it. We will lose our job. We will be less, uh, intelligent in the future because we'll fully rely on artificial intelligence.

What will be our added value? What about the, the enablement? So we really need to all think about it and see how we can, first of all, I think really first of all, drive the right purpose.

What is the storyline behind it? What do we want to get out of this artificial intelligence capacity? So we started the conversation with what's happening in France today.

We're kind of at the end of the year. As you look into 2026, you know, what do you think will happen? What is your crystal ball telling you?

So in 26, so, you know, for me, AI is like the, the way we were talking about cloud 10 years ago. You know, we have talked a lot about cloud. And finally, between the time we have started to talk about cloud and the time we have seen concrete, uh, outcome from a business perspective, it took a while.

I think that in 26, we will start, first of all to see two motions. First of all, our partners customers, and even ourself being very much more concrete in the way we can leverage this ai, uh, technologies. And on the other end, start seeing some real business opportunities around it.

Uh, while so far we have seen some very big deals, uh, around ai, uh, some solutions, uh, embedding Nvidia, for example, but we didn't see in the SMB in the mid-market area. We didn't see really the integration of this AI opportunities from a business perspective. And I hope that in 26 we'll start seeing it concretely.

Of course, another big part of this channel equation are the vendors themselves. There's many of them here. They have boots.

Um, is there something that you wish they would understand about the channel in France and the partners in France a little bit more than they do today? What they need to understand is that it's important for them as well to standardize their processes. Because if they really want to keep benefit of all of this new, um, platform or digital platform opportunities, they need to accompany us as well by providing us the right access to their data, by standardizing their own processes, breaking some silos so that we can really all together make it much more fluid and the added value for them will come out of it as well.

All right. Hey folks, you heard it here. France.

It's a funny thing. They have a different word for everything, but they have the same issues. We do.

Hey, thanks for being in.