Insight’s CEO has opened up on its plans to become “the leading AI-first solutions integrator” as it unveiled another set of quarterly results dented by vendor partner programme changes.
The NASDAQ-listed outfit saw Q2 net sales and gross profits head south as it continued to weather recent incentive shake ups from Microsoft and Google.
The $70m gross profit headwind Insight previously said it expects these changes to create in 2025 will still be felt into Q3 before the situation is “largely normalised” in Q4, CFO James Morgado said on the earnings call.
On the plus side, this was Insight’s second consecutive quarter of hardware growth. Besides Google and Microsoft, it counts Intel, NVIDIA, Cisco, HPE, AWS, Lenovo, NetApp and Dell as its key vendors.
Hardware net sales rose 2% year on year, even as overall net sales dipped 3% to $2.1bn and gross profit fell 2% to $442.3m.
“We’re adapting our ambition”
Having in recent years resolved to become the world’s leading ‘solutions integrator’, CEO Joyce Mullen revealed that Insight has now modified this aim.
“We’re adapting our ambition to becoming the leading AI-first solutions integrator,” Mullen said, claiming that this goal was recently strengthened by Insight’s appearance in Gartner’s inaugural GenAI consulting quadrant.
The move echoes Nordic peer Advania’s fresh ambition to become an “AI services provider”.
“Here’s what we mean by that,” Mullen said of Insight’s new nomenclature.
“We are aggressively adopting AI internally across all disciplines and all regions. We’ve enhanced our services portfolio by integrating an AI-first approach. We are adapting our offers to support our clients’ focus on delivering measurable and meaningful business value through pragmatic deployment of AI solutions, delivering results fast and earning the right to do more. We offer our clients full lifecycle AI services including consulting, implementation, training, governance and managed services support.
“And while it’s still early in terms of project deployment and the initial deployments are small, we made good progress on multiple fronts – for example, we have deployed hundreds of agents internally and for client projects and we’ve completed over 200 AI assessments with our clients, more than quadrupling the number compared to the last quarter.”
M&A remains “key to our ambition” of becoming the leading AI-first solutions integrator, Mullen added.
Asked by an analyst on the call why Insight’s “main competitor” continues to make layoffs even as PC sales recover, Mullen indicated that Insight is holding headcount “flat” despite it leaning more on AI.
“We are really excited about the opportunities to implement AI technologies in almost every process,” she said.
“We are going after this pretty hard and we’re getting rid of a whole lot of soul-sucking work.
“And we’re also looking just to speed up all of our internal processes, which will eventually result in better service to our clients.
“The productivity improvement is real. We see it very markedly in our software development efforts. We see it more gradually taking hold in all the back-end business processes and what that allows us to do is basically hold headcount flat while some elements of our business are growing.”
