Ingram Micro CEO Paul Bay On Customer Focus, The Impact Of AI And Advice For Would-Be CEOs

The Ingram Micro CEO talks about how the distributor’s intelligent digital assistant is helping it connect with partners, keeping up with the pace of industry transformation and why being a ‘good listener’ is so critical to building strategies.

Ingram Micro CEO Paul Bay spoke with The Channel Company Chief Content Officer Stuart Sumner at the 2025 XChange Best of Breed conference in Atlanta on a number of topics, touching on when he thinks end users will go from AI experimentation to rolling out commercial projects and offering some advice for senior professionals looking to make the step up to becoming a CEO.

What’s top of your agenda right now?

How do we continue to focus on our customers? AI is obviously the big topic so we’re having more conversations around how do we help them understand, how do we help them sell and how do we help them deploy. It’s a great opportunity. You hear some of the stats that are out there—I think they say 70 percent of business is going through the channel from a vendor standpoint. It’s upward of 90 percent when you talk about security. More and more vendors see the value and what the channel can do, and I think it’s because of the complexity of technology right now. We have six different products and services on an average [purchase order] for us, with six different vendors and six different certifications required to bring all of that together and focus on a business outcome.

How does AI change in that conversation?

How do we take a very fragmented business-to-business ecosystem and make it business-to-consumer-friendly? We get two and a half million order status requests a year in the U.S. Phone calls, emails—‘Where’s my order of those six different products? When’s it going to arrive?’ So someone has to pick up the phone and answer emails all day. We’ve used AI to help bring that together and make that a single pane of glass. Now you can see your hardware, software, cloud orders, all together. It’s on your desktop, your notebook, your phone, your tablet—it’s the same experience in real time.

And we have our intelligent digital assistant to help connect with our partners and be more proactive than reactive. We talk about how to go from order takers to order makers; we’re trying to free up time that used to be inbound to go outbound.

This article originally appeared on our sister site CRN.

When do you see end users going from experimenting with AI to rolling out commercial projects?

Everybody’s making an investment in everybody else right now. It’s big tech investing with big tech. Some of them used to be competitors, right? I think everybody’s so hung up on thinking they need AI, but they really don’t know what that means. So let’s start with the problem that we have, that we can discuss how we solve for that. It’s starting to resonate more. We’re seeing certain use cases pop up, where we’ve seen efficiencies coming from customers, efficiencies coming from vendors, but I think it’s still early days.

Do you think there’s an AI bubble?

I think there is a lot of opportunity for businesses to operate much more effectively. Is there going to be an AI bubble? It is interesting how everybody is investing in everybody [and everybody] is investing in everybody else. Now, everybody’s placed some bets and there’s going to be winners and losers. It’s different than anything that’s ever happened in my career. I mean, we sit in a $5 trillion ecosystem because we have 161,000 customers globally, with 1,500 vendors. And many of those are the ones placing these bets. We often benefit from the winners because there’s a high likelihood that we’re doing business with them somewhere along the way.

What keeps you up at night?

One is the transformation in our industry and the pace that it’s moving. How do I keep up with what’s going on because what’s great today is going to be different tomorrow. Are we missing some things? Which corners should we be looking around? I feel confident about the investments we’ve made thus far, but it’ll be completely different 12 or 24 months down the line.

I worry about the things that I can’t control, which are the macroeconomics. Many of our partners are small- to medium-size [companies] servicing the SMB market, and many of them are small- to medium-size managed service providers. As interest rates stay up, people have less disposable income to be able to place some bets, and so they sweat their assets, ‘Hey, can I hold onto it for one more year?’

And then being a global company, there’s always a hotspot. Who would have thought we would have seen as many conflicts that we are in today? The headwinds we had in the U.S. just a couple of years ago, they moved to Western Europe, and then you’ve got multiple conflicts that are going on from a global standpoint.

What would you describe as your biggest achievement at Ingram Micro?

I was here at Ingram Micro for 10 years; I went away for five and now I’ve been back for 15. The greatest recent achievement was taking the company public again after being private for two stints since 2016. This journey we’re on right now is going to be probably the greatest opportunity that we have because when you sit with customers and really understand where the challenges are, being able to help solve for those in a way that’s never been solved before is exciting.

Was being CEO of Ingram Micro always the plan?

Never. It was not my plan. I originally left to be CEO of a small software private equity and venture-capital-backed company, and when I sold it and I came back, what I wanted to do was continue to make an impact. When I came back, I never had the idea or the ambition to be CEO. And as I still had an impact, that just created an additional opportunity. As I moved up, I’ve been surrounded by some great leaders. And many of them have moved up as I’ve moved up, so that’s probably one of my most proud moments, too, to see some of the people I’ve worked with and around be more successful too. I’m grateful and honored and blessed to have the opportunity to run a Fortune 100 company.

What’s your advice to anyone looking to make the step up to CEO?

Make sure you’re a good listener first and foremost because that’s how strategies are built. Second, be curious. Third, surround yourself with good people. And fourth, make sure as you move up into an organization, you surround yourself with people who aren’t like you because you need to have different points of opinion and good conversations.

I call them ‘intense moments of fellowship,’ which is just a good debate. Those need to happen. Otherwise, my opinion is you’ll get stale as you move up.