Jim Annes on Driving Growth in a Platform Ecosystem with Agentic AI

Hey everyone. Welcome to Ingram Micro One. I'm Daniel Newman, and we are here on the ground at the event as it's getting kicked off.

Very excited to have a couple of great conversations here at the event. Starting off, we're gonna talk a little bit about AI and so much more. I've got Jim s Jim.

Dan, thank you. Thank you for being here with us. Yeah.

Well, you know, look, I love the opportunity to spend time with Ingram Micro. You are one of those companies, like, I call it like a bellwether company. Yeah.

You spend so much time with the implementers, with the integrators, you work with all of the vendors. It gives so much visibility. Sometimes, you know, when you're spending too much time at one part of the stack mm-hmm.

Too close to the customer, too close to the vendor, you don't see it. You guys really spend that time right there in the middle, all of it. And so much of that's on display here.

But is there anything, Jim, that we could talk about today that people would want to hear that's bigger than what's going on with ai? I, I think AI is the topic. Uh, not, not just here, but I think everywhere.

You can't escape it, whether it's in the news, in the general media, or even when we're talking about, uh, technology specific and specialization. It is the story, to your point. It absolutely is.

And, and by the way, just the morning and my flight here, between the time I left my house and the time I got here to Washington, DC there was like over $65 billion worth of new AI deals announced. Um, that is how fast and furious this is happening. The, it's, the investment is happening almost as fast as the rate of change it seems like at this Point.

Did you see that? Um, there was that graph out there that kinda talked about the internet versus ai, and it basically said that this AI pivot is seven times faster. I hadn't seen that, but it doesn't surprise me Yeah.

At all. Because a lot of people are trying to compare, well, is this another internet bubble? Mm-hmm.

You know, but the proliferation is happening so much quicker. Which brings me kind of a question I'd like you to dig in for me. Yeah.

Is AI is not like a monolith, it is not all one thing. Right. You've got, you know, we've been doing, by the way, AI algorithms four or five decades, easily, easily.

Um, you had generative AI come out three or four years ago in terms of at scale, right. Started to become made available in the last, uh, I don't know, 12 months. Eight gentech has been the trend line.

Kind of, you know, talk a little bit about kind of what all this means and why it's such a big game changer. Yeah. It, it's a, it's a great topic because these are all steps in the process.

The evolution of how we're interacting with AI tech, AI technology and, and the benefits we get from it. I think generative was a great stepping stone for a lot of people, because everyone could use it in their everyday lives, right. When you're at home sitting around, even something as simple as making me an image that looks like this and getting the result, and it really took hold.

And if you think about design or even coating, right? Using that to accelerate that, I think a gentech is this big pivot that everyone's trying to wrap their arms around. To your point where the model is shifting, where you have essentially an assistant that you're giving a set of objectives to, and it's gonna take autonomous actions to help you achieve those objectives.

And so that interaction model is the first big change I think people are gonna encounter is this back and forth conversational, um, you know, dynamic. That's new. The, the second if you think about it is the, you know, the architecture.

And now we're moving from a single agent trying to do one thing to an orchestrated experience where you have a, an agent that is in charge of achieving your objective. Yep. And then orchestrating purpose-driven agents to bring that together.

And then the need, especially in ag agentic, to have this fact checking or antagonistic check to make sure what's being brought back to you is actually gonna meet your objectives. So I think it, it's a big, big explosion in, in how the technology is built, but also how we interact with it. It is, and we're seeing the same thing.

And by the way, it's gone from like an agent to a platform. Mm-hmm. Which is something I know you at Ingram are focused on as well, is you have the X vantage platform.

Absolutely. Um, this is, you know, democratizing mm-hmm. For many of your partners.

I'd love to kind of hear a little bit about what your thought process is. Maybe start a little bit about what, what a X vantage is just for everyone out there, but then what are you building in terms of an agentic platform and how is that being, you know, consumed and how is that changing the user experience for all the Ingram, you know, ecosystem? Absolutely.

Uh, AI's been at the heart of the platform since the very beginning. When you think about advantage, it really how it drives value for our partners, whether it's vendor or customer Yeah. Is really in two parts.

One is, as you know, you've been in this industry a long time. We, despite all the great technological innovation and the advancements we've had to run, the business has been highly manual. Yep.

Ray's taken a lot of manual effort inefficiency. So the first thing is how do we, how do we take those inefficiencies out of doing business for all of our partners to free up time. Mm-hmm.

And then the second part of the platform is giving curated experiences to reinvest that time in that help us all grow. 'cause we're spending historically more time running the business than growing it. Yeah.

So if you think about AI and how that's been integrated since the beginning in the platform, it's to help take the manual work or friction out. So for example, uh, integrations. So having seamless integrations where you don't have to hire a team of 50 to try and plug your native applications into the platform, it's done using ai so you can come as you are.

Yep. And then when you talk about reinvestment, insights, recommendations, you know, customize to our partners business that are based upon the objectives they're trying to achieve. So it could be something as simple as an add-on or identifying brand new opportunities on an upcoming tech refresh that tie into specific software opportunities.

So really harnessing the power of AI to help our, our customers go faster and achieve new levels of growth. And a big part of your world right, is you are moving the equipment. You mean that's the scale.

Of course, you've also been sort of the pacesetter in many ways to how those companies you provide, uh, hardware and technology to build services. Mm-hmm. Okay.

So you've got kind of the transactional part of the business. It's always been something you've been great at, and people understand that very well, but part of the growth story has been adding more. Yep.

Right? Absolutely. So how are you sort of thinking about that from the standpoint of how the Advantage platform, what it is, how it grows?

Because I can see a ton of ways like age genically, the transactions platform has value, like mm-hmm. Everything from how it tracks to how it helps you understand what to consume. A lot of the automations we talked about in the RPA era, like starting to really come to life with age agent.

Absolutely. But then you've got, it's, it's gotta be more than that though, right? You've built this thing to be so much, you know, I'd love to hear a little more about how you're thinking about that.

Absolutely. If you think about challenges for our partners, it's where are you going to invest for growth? And it's a, it's a tough question because you're investing ahead of the return.

Yeah. Could be a quarter, two quarters, three quarters a whole year. And we're, we're really leveraging a agentic and AI to work with our partners is to how do you quickly and simply identify the areas of opportunity that convert to return fastest.

So you think about the questions a, a, uh, partner may have of, if you think about the upcoming AI enabled refresh of laptops that people keep talking about, okay, we all talk about it, but we're partner. How can they quickly understand where their top 10 opportunities in that space with which customers, what's the best approach, what are they upsell, cross-sell opportunities associated with that, and turn those insights into actually opportunities to go pursue with a pitch that's, that's generated by a framework by ai. That's the same as having in two, three years ago, having to hire five, six business development resources to go go through manual data to come up with those ideas.

Yeah. And then now you can match those to programs and go to market in real time. So I think it's, it's really transforming growth Yeah.

In the Industry. It's really interesting. I I was thinking about that.

So if I'm breaking this down for everybody out there, right? It's, you have a lot of data, right? And of course your customers, the ones that are buying from you, the MSPs, the channel partners, the implementers, integrators, they have mountains of sort of, of data.

And by the way, some of it's probably really well organized. Mm-hmm. Some of it's probably not.

Yeah. Very True. Uh, structured, unstructured, some of it sits in emails and slack messages, and some of it sits in, you know, tables.

Things that we've been great at doing analytics on Absolutely. For a long time. This is part of what you're doing, right?

It's building that exchange that you're giving that infrastructure and exchange of data mm-hmm. To be able to do, um, integrations mm-hmm. To say, Hey, this is your customer profile.

This is all the work they've been doing over whatever period of time. This is all the equipment that they have deployed. And where here is a series of, and what you're saying, right, let me make sure, is that here are five different recommendations mm-hmm.

Based on this customer of upsell, cross-sell, refresh. Is that, is that kind of what this is building towards? Absolutely.

And it, and it goes beyond that a little bit to bringing in the, the wider industry and market data, right? So what are the overall macro trends? What are the opportunities with those?

Then to your point, how do you match that up with a personalized data and experience of a partner? So it's applicable to them. Insights are great, but unless they're actionable for the partner, it's just information at the end of the day.

And that's not what we're driving. We're trying to work with them to drive outcomes. Yep.

You know, faster and at a larger scale. And the other part of this that's great with agen is you may start off with a dataset to your point, but then you experience interacting with the agents points out where you need to bring more data in from different sources that you may not have had access to before to have a more robust view of where the opportunities are and how to action them. So it's constantly evolving.

So this is not new, but it's new, right. These, these next level X vantage AI and agentic capabilities, are you able to share at all sort of anecdotally or maybe, you know, some specific, like how it's changing customer? Because I'd kinda love to hear some practical stories and probably for this audience just to kind of hear what, what does success look like?

You know, and, And it's, it's a great topic. You know, we've already have our partners already interacting with AI and agentic AI right now with us. And I could give a few examples.

One, one easy one would be integrations, is we were talking about before, simplifying, taking the friction out. Where as a partner of ours, you can send us your information, your quote request, your order request in any format you can send us to it. Even an email unstructured, you don't have to conform to sending in a specific format to us to have it processed.

And we're using AI to pick that up, process your order in seconds, right? So getting you that speed to market, helping speed up the quote to cash cycle. So efficiency improvement, taking down the burden on our partners when it comes to interacting with us.

If you think about the growth story or opportunities, we're, we're using ida, intelligent digital assistant right now to go find and help prioritize opportunities that our partners are working on with their end users. 52 different dimensions of data that it's analyzing and actually enables our associates to reach out to partners and say, these four thing items that you're working on, these four opportunities for these three customers have the highest propensity to close based upon all this data that we're looking at in the next 30 days. You should focus your effort there.

And it's a new way of helping our partners align their resources with outcomes. And we're seeing tremendous, tremendous benefit for our partners. Hundreds of millions of dollars of opportunities.

We're helping them close a quarter using that model. So when, when I say integrations, you're saying ERP systems, you're saying, uh, it's connecting to their CRMs, it's connected. Cq, But I'm saying it's, you know, for those mm-hmm.

Integrators, channel partners, uh, MSPs that work with Ingram, you've built the integrations across a, a wide swath of well understood, well known. Absolutely. And it sounds like also you've built some integrations for things like unstructured data that come, that comes from, you know, people's, uh, uh, word documents.

Yeah, Absolutely. Absolutely. Spreadsheets and chicken scratch.

And they've now, you know, scanned into their system so that they, because again, what a real org looks like, you know, we all know, and you, you, you lead a big org, right? We all know how much salespeople love putting stuff into Sierra. Yeah.

It's gonna be challenge. It's, it's, But so half the battle's been there, but if all of a sudden now, hey, there was a Slack interaction that took place yesterday that had a bunch of really juicy, good, valuable details mm-hmm. That stuff can be constantly being mined.

Absolutely. It, it's the that multidimensional perspective Yeah, right. That you're talking about, which is what's the holistic view of the partner, the interaction, the opportunity, because really we don't live in a world where one individual is gonna have all the interactions with one partner opportunity.

Yeah. It's bringing those together and identifying not only the best, the best action to take, but then often who's the best person to take that action. Yeah.

I, it's funny, I, I talk about a lot of the tools we're building now, we're gonna start building for AI to talk to ai. It's, it's, we're getting a little ahead of ourselves. Yeah.

Like, we're not that far away though, from the fact that what, who's gonna actually might, who may be reading your best idea that you came up with for an upgrade, maybe an AI that's gonna then filter that system down to, it's, it's going that way. And If you, if you think about it, the amount of time it's freeing up for the people in the business, it's this, it's non-linear. It's an exponential level of growth.

Because now think if you have your own assistant to go mine and do that research and come back with the answers for you, now your focus is on doing something with that data. Yeah. It, it's a huge transformational shift for the industry.

For sure. Yeah. It's very exciting.

And by the way, every business, every industry has a place for it. There's so much more productivity to be gained. There's so many efficiencies to be found.

And, you know, I keep saying that this industry picking your right partners, and, you know, we started this conversation talking a little bit about like, some of the, the deals that were announced today. You know, you look at a company like OpenAI and it picks its partners, it's a MD, it's Nvidia, it's Microsoft, it's Amazon, it's Right. They're like, who are the companies I wanna be around?

If you're a implementer, an integrator, and you want access to hardware, software services, consulting, gram, I mean, it seems like that's what you guys have built your, your, your lifeblood on being able to support all those needs. Yeah, absolutely. And it, it ties in AI as well as, if you think about the investments we were just going through a few that we've continue to make, right?

We're an AI centric platform with advantage, the benefit to the partner bases. You don't have to go make your own massive investments in technology or you the structuring data, creating data lakes and event driven architectures. You can leverage what we've built as being part of our partner.

And the more interactions you have with us, the richer the data, the richer the opportunities that are presented. So it's, you have your own AI factory, which is us to leverage and then turn those into actions and outcomes for your business. Well, if you build the event driven architecture, correct.

We've done this on our own company, built our own platform for research, and it can be very flexible. And that's probably for a lot of people lot that might say, well, if I am using the same thing everyone else is using, then how do I be different? Because you can use it around your data, around your processes, and it'll look completely different in your organization than someone else's.

That's just something that Yeah. I thought everybody should know. So on the way out mm-hmm.

Um, you know, one message to the viewer, one message, one prediction about the future of ai, you get a choice. Yeah. What, what would you, what would you share with them?

I, you know, what I, what I would say is AI eventually is gonna become, likely gonna become the primary UI for our interactions, right? So we're gonna, you know, you still have to have very strongly developed applications that are underneath all that. But I think we're gonna go more and more to a conversational user experience where that agentic, you know, your personal agent is gonna be helping you accomplish your objectives, might take you away in a, around, in a curated experience to do it.

But I think that's gonna be a big shift. And how do we get comfortable with that conversational business transactional flow that today has been more embedded within a workflow, becomes a, a conversation tomorrow. That's a, that's AI is the new ui.

I've heard it a few times. Uh, a few different sources. Totally agree.

More semantic, more contextual, more natural. Um, even these devices may or may not be the thing that we'll be using forever. Uh, we hear a lot about that.

Jim. S thank you so much for joining me here. Aate, fun to chat To you.

Pleasure. Thank you everybody for tuning in here at Ingram Micro One. We are on the ground.

That was a great conversation. Stay with us for more.