Ingram Micro Unplugged: Practical tales from the AI infrastructure front lines

Ingram Micro partners, also known as VARs, MSPs and IT business advisors, sit at an interesting AI intersection. These front-line technology leaders are adopting AI, as well as developing, deploying and managing it for customers. These partners are also looking to AI for help solving for multiple challenges ranging from supply chain disruptions to evolving cybersecurity threats to operational efficiency, compliance, and increasingly complex customer environments.

Speaking at Ingram Micro’s Trust X Alliance (TXA) Unplugged event, a gathering of small businesses and partners in Buffalo, NY, Victor Baez, senior vice president, U.S. Sales, highlighted the big picture of AI adoption in small businesses and the non-negotiables for growth.

• The core multi-contact relationship with partners and their customers must be preserved and expanded.
• AI's entry pointfor partners and the SMBs they serve is boosting sales productivity and offloading manual work. More strategically, the goal is to use AI as an operational layer with their organizations and their customers.
• There's a strategic balancing act between cloud and on-premises deployments. Partners are building out on-premises data center practices because AI workloads will be hybrid.
• AI adoption is multi-tool and is a horizontal growth lever, not human replacement. "AI doesn't necessarily replace the human relationship," said Baez. "There's this belief that we're going to have a bunch of robots coding and running our business. We're still going to need a very strong community."

The power of community was a recurring theme throughout the event. The idea behind Ingram Micro Unplugged was to ditch the speeds, feeds and portals to focus on “where possible meets people,” even as SMBs were talking AI.

Continuous transformation is the new job requirement

Bill Brandel, EVP & President of North American Sales, walked through Ingram Micro's transformation into a B2B platform company — removing friction, using AI to discover greater opportunities and efficiencies and expanding value by distributing data intelligence and services, not merely products. .

"Transformation is not new. Transformation is something we've all been going through for a very long time. Cloud was extremely disruptive. We had to transform. Then the next buzzword was digital transformation," said Brandel.

Brandel said AI will require transformation from Ingram Micro, as well as its ecosystem of SMBs and partners. "AI is transforming everything, and it scares the crap out of a lot of our people," said Brandel. "AI will change every job in this world. It will evolve every job, but it should make us better. It should allow us to do things we never knew how to do before."

Transformation in businesses will require multiple course corrections, a heavy dose of co-innovation and changes that make partners indispensable to customers, said Brandel.

He emphasized that companies would need to move from "AI Dreams" to execution and scale. "How do we help our partners to help stop the dream of AI and actually start executing? How many of you are sitting in a place where you're going, 'I want to do AI. What do I do?'

Cheryl Rang, VP, Technology Solutions at Ingram Micro, said transformation will be required to manage through the demand shocks and supply constraints caused by AI. Partners and smaller customers feel the brunt of constrained inventory and volatile pricing because they lack the buying power of cloud hyperscalers.

"We know that inventory is going to continue to be constrained. We know that there’s going to be more and more pricing pressure put on every single one of you, and we know that the impact to the partners and to the customers that sit in this room is going to be the absolute highest because you don’t have infinite budgets," said Rang. “You don’t have the same buying power…but you do have Ingram Micro.”

Community and resilience

Ingram Micro executives referred to community and its ecosystem repeatedly during the one-day event. For Ingram Micro, community means collective buying power, shared experiences and the human element of navigating an ever-changing business and developing resiliency.

"The power of this community coming together to talk about what you need and give you visibility will allow [Ingram Micro] to help make the inventory at the right place at the right time for our partners," said Rang.

Bob Bell, Director of Operations at Integrated Data Technologies, Inc. explained a community of inner circles and broader circles that grow stronger. "Technology is going to change. Our businesses are going to change. We're going to move on to different phases in life and different phases in business. But if we have a circle and an inner circle, those two things will last a lifetime," said Bell.

One session featured an inspiring discussion with Caleb McDonald, son of longtime TXA community member Alan McDonald, CEO of AllConnected. Caleb, a rock climber and web developer at AllConnected, fell 80 feet during a climb last year and sustained a life-changing spinal injury that forced him rethink life in a new body. He had to learn everything again in a slow recovery.

“If there is anything I have learned across the past decade is that progress isn’t linear,” said McDonald. “You have months where you feel like you’re not making progress, not going forward. But then you break through. See, in climbing, the holds you see at a gym, in my own garage, in a wall in Europe, they are all the same holds," he explained. "The same problems. The same sequences. Everyone grows up in climbing trying these same problems. But when I got home from the hospital, I realized, all of these holds were comfortable. I knew them. My body can turn and lift. I remembered all of them but now they were harder. I found a way to use all that had happened and realize for myself that there was a different way."

For McDonald, resilience has led to winning gold at the 2026 Para Climbing National Championships. He credits community.

"When I landed in the hospital, I realized that strength did not mean independence. It can lay in people in my life. I let my family and my friends in my life in a way that I have never allowed myself to do before," said McDonald.

Growth in an AI World

At the Buffalo event, Constellation Research analysts Liz Miller and Martin Schneider fielded a series of questions from local partners about getting started with AI, how small businesses can punch above their weight and picking use cases.

The team shared that the real opportunity for small businesses and partners is the ability to become 10 times more productive and efficient without the headcount. Small businesses can do more with the same team and find ways to add greater customer value and counter margin pressure from tariffs, inflation and supply chain issues.

Here's a look at the takeaways:

Sales, marketing and lead management. Use AI to create a business development team that's always on and can touch all leads, re-engage nurture pools to find needles in the sales stack and shorten cycle times, said Schneider. Other tools for aggregating meeting summaries and account data can support the lifetime value of customers.

Start with your biggest pain point, not everything. Don't ask what AI can do for sales, but focus on the most painful part of the process whether it's reporting, lead follow-up or forecasting. Apply AI there and expand. Avoid "a million little AI experiments," said Miller.

Business outcomes not AI features. The partners at Ingram Micro Unplugged were notable because they not only purchase AI, but they also sell it. For both ends of the AI spectrum, it's worth noting that customers don't buy AI as much as they buy efficiency, monetization and margin improvement. The focus needs to be on outcomes, not tokens, model names and feature lists. The foundation for AI sales and procurement is on clear outcomes and the data foundation needed to achieve them. The metric to watch is revenue per employee.

Be education partners. AI is being used for strategic planning and scenario analysis and partners can add value as information and strategy guides beyond just suppliers. Education as an industry is facing tension between public perception and the real need to leverage AI and can use a few good advisors.

AI is your best intern, not your CEO. Treat AI as an intern that is capable but needs training, guidance and guardrails. Teach your processes, language and business rules to AI, but don't hand the business to it. Your experience and judgment remain the secret sauce.

Basic economics. Focus on business outcomes, not just task completion. Customers are buying outcomes, not utilization. For partners, there's a role to grow your business with applying operational rigor around AI and tracking spending and outcomes. Use multiple models, deployed in the cloud, on-premises, and at the edge, to manage costs.

Skills Count. Hire young professionals who are comfortable with AI tools and systems and have curiosity, communication skills and critical thinking ability. You'll need people with experience that can operate and improve AI-enabled processes.