娇色导航

Welcome to 娇色导航Leadership Live.

I'm Lee Renick, executive director of 娇色导航communities for CIO,

and I'm thrilled to be here today at the 娇色导航100 and Symposium and Awards

with Max Chan, SVP, 娇色导航of Avnet.

Max, thanks so much for joining me on the show today.

I really appreciate it.

and congratulations to your award winning 娇色导航100 award of your project.

So could we kick off first by maybe you could introduce yourself,

tell us a little bit about your role

and then maybe tell us a bit about the project. Absolutely.

First of all, thank you. Thanks for having me.

I'm really, really proud of the team. Right.

This is I think this is the fourth award that we have won in the last five years. So congratulations.

Very happy with the many projects that the team are doing.

And obviously they're delivering business value and a lot of innovation with it.

as CIO, at Avnet, and maybe

let's talk a little bit about Avnet because it's not exactly a household name. Okay.

We are one of the largest,

technology distributor and, supply chain solution provider.

we sit in the middle of a technology value chain.

And the interesting thing, that what we do is that we offer,

designed supply chain and logistic

capabilities, expertise to, our customers to help them with the entire technology

lifecycle from concept to design,

new product introduction to go to market all the way to repatriation. Right.

The management.

So we always try to also talking about how we can actually,

bring a customer in and maybe talk about customer.

Interesting thing about us. as distributor.

Right.

We have both the upstream supplier partners,

that we serve as well as the downstream customers. Right.

Actually gets the product ready. Yeah.

Right. so we always pride ourselves.

So being able to bring in any of our customer

into any part of the lifecycle and then scale from there. Wow. So very exciting.

and, obviously as a CIO,

I'm responsible for not only the, it's

spark, for, for the organizations

I also run the digital transformation, the digital strategy.

and I also, manage,

a shared company, within our portfolio.

that deliver solutions to our customers.

Oh, well, within the space that we, we deal with. Right.

So you're really then acting in both areas, really connecting up

that technology base for for the company right across the board. That's right.

Congratulations on the award.

And, we were just chatting before we started recording about

the importance of data and you're asking me, what do you hear?

And I said, well, what I'm hearing is that a lot of,

the CIOs I've spoken to during Covid put a lot of their data into the cloud.

You know, that was a solution for that time. That made sense.

But then now they're really evaluating it, and they're looking at those costs

around cloud where they need their most important data on the edge.

And a lot of saying now they're looking at repatriation

or bringing bringing their cloud back on or their data, excuse me, back on prem.

So we'd love to hear your thoughts about that. You know,

lucky thing,

is that we're not 100% in the cloud, right?

and we, we are facing the same challenges that everyone is in cloud.

If you don't manage it well, it's going to be very expensive.

we we learned that, early on when we started our journey,

our transformation, to the cloud and, and and without putting in,

the proper FinOps, capabilities and overall governance, etcetera.

what we found is that, oh, my God, the, the, the,

the costs really skyrocketed.

and later we, we actually put that discipline

around it, implement this kind of looking at how we can optimize.

Now we are getting it to the right level.

But like I say earlier, we're not 100% in the cloud.

We are focusing on use cases that

truly elaborate cloud enabled capabilities. Right.

And we bring we prioritize those workload and bring that to the cloud. Right.

the rest of it is really a matter of what it makes sense. Right?

some of it we still keep, internal.

In fact, as we are talking about generative

AI and large language model, right when we started,

just like everyone else, we leverage what, providers, offering in the cloud.

But we all knew from the very beginning with the cloud experience and also what,

the, the, the providers are doing, it's very expensive propositions. Yeah.

And, now that we have gotten a few use cases in production,

we have been able to, starting to evaluate

maybe some domain specific model. Yeah.

Doesn't have to sit in the cloud. Right.

That's where we are starting to dabble into, in-house hosted,

manage, small language model or domain specific language models.

and this really is in line with many of the research

that I think IDC has published as well, thinking about, hey, with the compute,

with the power over the cooling and also the sustainability agenda, right? Yeah.

The cloud proposition with AI is going to be very expensive for every one of us. Yeah.

And and trying to rationalize that is really very important. Yeah.

And I think, you know, I was just thinking about this as you were speaking

because you're working on prem and you're still you.

I'm, I'm assuming you have teams to support that you can still evolve

your on prem cloud storage or your on prem storage

so that you're retraining your staff or upgrading your staff,

you know, and training them and making sure you have

the proper skills to manage it there.

So I think that's probably it feels very agile to me, in a sense. Right.

From a business perspective, you know, is is both agile and it's also a necessity. Yeah.

Yeah.

Because as far as a distributor is concerned, we are a low margin business. Right?

Right.

And if you are thinking about it, it's actually

is as much as 25% of your operating income. Yeah.

percent. That's a lot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, so we have to look at how we do it.

in the agile manner, we are able to react to the, the,

the business need and and also, be proactive. Yeah.

You know, providing what the businesses. Yeah.

Is requiring and there's no other way, than to really embrace it ourselves.

Train trained internal team. Sounds.

Really

sounds like you're doing you have all the right approaches in place. Congratulations on that.

We've been talking a lot today, and I think you may have heard me mention

this, that we released a state of the 娇色导航report.

79% of the 娇色导航surveyed said they have an educational partnership

with their CEO and their board of directors and business leaders.

So what are your thoughts on that?

How has your role evolved?

You know, I think, I've been with the company for,

close to 12 years and I've been 娇色导航half that time. Right.

for being the company.

So I have had a great relationship working with the

the currency of, since I joined the company.

b before I became the CIO. Right.

and a few years

ago, when cybersecurity is such a hot topic,

we started that motion of educating the board,

educating the executive team, the importance of cybersecurity

that has taken on further, to focusing

on digital transformation, etc..

So, yeah, I mean, that is critical.

and I think for many of, my 娇色导航appears out there,

I think you probably have seen that if you do this.

Well, just like, what you see, your board

members will probably, invite you to, to to be,

you know, in education, the agenda, your reports as well.

And I have that privilege.

I feel able to go to other boards and talking to them about, our AI journey

back to the point about agility and being practical about approach. Right.

Because out of necessity. Yeah.

people loved our story.

Talk to me about how we started with AIS about seven years ago

and how we accelerate with generative AI in the last year or so.

and they find that a lot more practical, a lot more approachable is not the

consultant speech that they get or the people who have gone so far ahead. Right.

They struggle with to see how they, you know, how they bridge

that gap from here to, to to to light years away. Yeah.

So yes, that is definitely, a trend.

And I think it's really up to it, to the 娇色导航like ourselves. Right.

To be able to position ourself that way, to be proactive. Yeah.

Becoming that, education partner. Yeah.

Especially with the democratization of generative AI.

Everyone knows about it. Right?

So it's like, kind of in the cell phone, you know, came out all of a sudden.

It was a democratization. That's really interesting.

Well, we are, as you mentioned, learning a lot

about how IT leaders are working with generative AI.

What I'm hearing is more internal productivity first.

And then if they do have like a customer base, service industry kind of thing,

they might be doing the chat bot stuff or, you know, that kind of thing.

just wondering, you know, you've talked a little bit how you're working with that.

Obviously, you were working with a lot of LMS

language models prior to generative AI.

So you're in that space.

really what you think the tips might be for 2025

or what trends we might see going into it. Any thoughts there?

No.

I think, you know, just like everyone else, we,

we we started with, use cases that we can control. Right.

So, you know, use cases,

be content generation is or, or sentiment analysis and stuff like that.

As we get that under our belt, we feel more confident and comfortable about that.

Then we dabble into other areas.

For example, we have a use case, which is very exciting.

about, cleaning up our data. Right, right.

So leveraging generative AI as well as non generative machine learning. Yes.

To help us identify,

description, inaccuracy or incorrect classifications

and then identifying it, cleaning it

up, regenerating those in description.

While this might be driving internal productivity because think

of it this way as a, distributor, right?

We at any one time we deal with about 16 million hot. Right.

And those keep coming in. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Upon those keep selling their price book or spec sheet or. Yeah.

Yeah. Every quarter.

Right. Right.

So having a group of people trying to go through that, inaccuracy and try to. Yeah,

it's a daunting and almost an impossible task.

And then using that. Right.

If you are talking about dosing accuracy amounting to about 15%. Right.

Generative AI is able to then

AI and generative AI helping us clean it in 24 hours.

That 15% that helps us with

15% more chances of conversion. Yeah.

And that becomes an external right.

Customer experience improvement, etc.. Right?

Right.

That is just one of the many example that we have.

The other one is on our design services.

What we do is that we have a design hub that provide customers self-service capabilities.

Right.

Bot diagram and turning into a spec sheet and a fabulous etc..

This was, a project that we won last year.

for the Design Hub

project and now regenerative AI, allowing the customers to now ask

questions like, all right, help me reduce the physical footprint 30%. Wow.

By the way, I want to, drive my,

go to market timeline to three months shorter.

Going in, getting the right data, providing,

allowing them to get the right pin to pin placement,

the lead time for the different things. All right.

So again, this help us with external, services and customer satisfaction.

But none of this is a is, is is going to be, easy if you don't have the right data. Yeah.

We talk about, you know, clean data.

I mean, that those are so important.

And we are again, back to, you know, the cloud conversation, everything.

We make sure that everything that we bring to the cloud, we allow

for downstream consumption like those, properly transforming things.

Well that's fantastic I appreciate you sharing that.

So basically your tips are make sure your data is in the best shape possible.

Data is number one. Yeah.

Always be number one. Yeah.

The number two thing is that stop

being stuck into a PR feature.

You have to prioritize.

Look for one that or 2 or 3 that can scale and then go scale. Got it.

Because if you don't scale you're going to be working with hundreds and hundreds.

And I think I saw one of IDC report this.

Well or that that, you know, everyone may be dealing with like 39 to, you'll see you.

Yeah.

And then only five, actually goes to production. Yeah.

Why deal with the 39 is eight.

Focus on the five. Yeah.

And then go scale 1 or 2 of them. That's.

That is where, you know, where, where it should be.

And number three is there are so many providers, so many, models out there. Pick one.

because, yeah, at the end of the day. Right.

yeah. One. Learn from it.

Yeah.

You need more then decide what to do from there. don't do it.

Just try everything.

Because then it goes back to the number two bullet

points is you're going to be stuck in there for your CTO. That's fantastic advice.

Thank you so much for sharing that.

I really appreciate it and I appreciate having you on the show.

Max, thanks so much. Thank you.