Logicalis CEO Jon Groves On His Plans To Be ‘The Most AI-Infused Partner Out There’
‘The real value in the future will be working with customers and their data management, their data policies, their data lakes in the context of implementing the right platforms. And that’s where what we’re doing now inside of Logicalis is really going to be valuable,’ says Logicalis CEO Jon Groves.
Logicalis CEO Jon Groves is embracing the company’s roots as a VAR and MSP while it invests heavily in artificial intelligence.
“I think about AI in a couple of different ways,” Groves told CRN. “I think about it internally—enablement—for us. What does the AI partner of the future look like? I have workstreams and initiatives around that. That’s probably my No. 1 priority.”
Groves said that Logicalis, ranked No. 73 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500, is deeply focused on delivering value to customers, especially through intentional security platforms and driving real business outcomes, all while maintaining a global reach with strong local engagement.
Logicalis has already moved to make AI an integral part of its own operations and in doing so has already brought the benefits of AI to customers without them even realizing it.
“We have an agentic AI platform that our customers experience just by being our managed services customers,” he said. “There’s no additional cost. They’re experiencing AI operations in their environment on a 7x24 basis. I want us to stop valuing managed services in the context of ‘I did X number of tickets for you. I put out X number of fires for you.’ I want to start building into the environment that ‘I’ve reduced the number of tickets for you. I’ve created a more sustainable, more reliable environment for you in these ways.’”
There’s a lot going on with Logical and its plan to be an AI-first VAR and MSP. Here is more of CRN’s conversation with Groves.
How do you define Logicalis?
Logicalis, first and foremost, we are a reseller organization, a dynamic reseller, and we’ve invested deeply in the value side of that equation. I love being a VAR, by the way. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a VAR. I think it’s been one of those things that have been devalued by opinion over the years. But we are very much a value-added reseller. We do focus heavily on the ‘value’ part of that. From an MSP perspective, we’re looking at deep investments around driving real business outcomes for our customers. We’re driving very intentional security platforms for our customers. We’re trying to focus on what’s most important to our core market segment. On top of that, I would define us as a global company with a diligent and vigorous local focus.
As a VAR and MSP, what is Logicalis seeing in terms of AI?
It depends on who I'm talking to as to what they mean by ‘AI.’ It also depends on their focus. I think about AI in a couple of different ways. I think about it internally—enablement—for us. What does the AI partner of the future look like? I have workstreams and initiatives around that. That’s probably my No. 1 priority.
Then there’s the question of how do we go to market? How do we bring value for our clients in AI? I’m not dealing in the upper-end enterprise market. I’m dealing in the lower-end enterprise and upper-end commercial markets. And in that space, there’s a lot of need from our clients for both capabilities and vision. And how we assist them organically develops from our own journey. And so we’re on a journey internally around AI. In fact, I was recently on a data governance call with an enterprise where we’re implementing a comprehensive data management governance plan for them even as we’re preparing for more of an agentic AI experience within Logicalis. Their engagement is infused with AI, whether they know it or not.
For value-added resellers in the future, AI is an enabler for more than just AIOps or service desk or even professional services. I can see personas and a variety of orchestrated agentic AI capabilities delivered more efficiently with more automated approaches to the business. I see all of that as the low-hanging fruit for us to address and engage with. But there are also the intangibles. How fast can I process an order? How quickly can I provide information to my clients about where they stand? How quickly can I engage with my OEM partners and provide streamlined data sources or AI agent capabilities? In my mind, there are so many opportunities for Logicalis to be an AI-first organization. That’s my No. 1 priority.
Before we go to the next point, where has Logicalis already started using AI agents?
An easy low-hanging fruit is in the legal side of the business. Management of contracts, quality control of contracts, all that is an AI experience now. That was one of our first engagements. [Now] we’re about to upgrade our ERP system, the next area we’ll see quite a bit of AI infused into. Another area where we have been investing for a couple of years has been AIOps. If you look at our managed services organization and the way we provide insights to our engineers and to our customers about what’s going on in their environment, we’re moving them from a reactive environment to a proactive environment. I liken managed services to the fire station. They sit around and wait for the fire alarm. They can put it out, right? There’s a problem; they’ll fix it. Whereas I think future managed services organizations are really going to be more like the fire marshal where we’re actually saying, ‘Hey, listen, what you’ve got developing here is not good. We need to fix that.’ There will always be firefighting. But I believe the value proposition is moving into this fire marshal kind of model.
We have an agentic AI platform that our customers experience just by being our managed services customers. There’s no additional cost. They’re experiencing AI operations in their environment on a 7x24 basis. I want us to stop valuing managed services in the context of ‘I did X number of tickets for you. I put out X number of fires for you.’ I want to start building into the environment that ‘I’ve reduced the number of tickets for you. I’ve created a more sustainable, more reliable environment for you in these ways.’ We’ve been talking about that as an industry for a long time. I think a lot of people put a lot of lipstick on the pig for that.
An area where I’ve been a little frustrated is the AI help desk agent. It’s not that my help desk agents will be replaced by agentification. Instead, it’s more about leveraging AI agents up to deliver the more mundane, repetitive solutions in the environment and then learn as it goes through that. The technology’s there, and we’re working on that. The challenge in a multitenant environment is that a lot of the systems like help desk systems are really built around the context of a multitenant environment. So leveraging an AI platform and AI agents is a little tricky. But we’ve been investing heavily there.
How long do you think it will be before you’ll have something you can roll out to your customers in that area?
We’ve got a plan, and ultimately we’re going to establish a new model for them to experience that. I think most of our customers will. But we’ll have to help move them on the journey. In other words, I’m not going to be able to fix that ecosystem the way it is. We’re going to have to build a ‘Nirvana’ environment and slowly move them to that. I would say we’re probably six months out there. Honestly, the technology is not the challenge. The challenge is the processes and procedures.
As you’re rolling this out internally, does Logicalis see this as an opportunity to reduce head count?
Everybody asks that, and I understand why. From a business metric perspective, if you look at my OpEx as a percentage of gross profit or net revenue, you would clearly see I have no intention of reducing head count. I’m operating the business at a very tight, optimal level. I don’t see AI as a cost reduction tool in any way. But what I do see is an enablement tool for the future. Take, for example, my service desk organization. I can’t decrease it any more with the amount of customers I have, but what I can do with AI as an assistant is grow it from where it is to a bigger revenue stream with less cost. If you look at us over a three- to five-year period, as we continue to succeed in implementing these strategies, you’re going to see our OpEx as a percentage of gross profits increase through our gross profit increase, not OpEx reduction. And for most of us in this space, I think you’re going to continue to see that. Honestly, most of us in the channel community are running pretty lean organizations. We’re pretty tight in the way we operate. We run a narrow-margin business, and we’ve learned how to operate in that context and drive profitability. I think where this narrative around AI is going to cause great head count reductions is really in the big cloud providers, the big social platforms, areas where during COVID they did a ton of extra hiring, and in fact overhired. Now they’re beginning to see they’re way overbuilt, but they run a different business than we do. They don’t run a narrow-margin business. They run a high-margin business. And the truth of the matter is, they ebb and flow in their resources. And I can see where AI would be a force reduction for them. I don’t think you’re going to see that type of outcome in the channel.
Understandably, there’s a lot of fear around that, but one of the things that I tell our team all the time, and they’ll hold me accountable to this, is that AI is not a force reduction strategy for us. It’s a growth strategy for us. I tell them that publicly, and they have the right to call me out if I reverse on that. I really don’t see that happening. If anything, I think it’s kind of exciting. I’m old now, but I remember, especially in my earlier years, new waves of tech were exciting because they gave us new opportunities to grow and learn and got our brains to grow. But somewhere along the line, we’ve lost that enthusiasm about AI. I don’t think AI is going to kill a bunch of jobs. I think it’s going to create a lot of new jobs. There are some jobs that are going to shift and change and modify. ... But do I think that there’s going to be a surplus of IT resources because of AI? Not at all.
How about externally in terms of how Logicalis works with customers?
We’re doing a lot of AI work, but where the AI work [comes is] really [in] infrastructure readiness. None of our clients, whether they are in the cloud or in a hybrid environment or totally on-prem, are really ready for true production-level AI. And if you look at their infrastructure, at what they built that infrastructure to do, it’s very difficult to use for AI.
We interface with AI today with our infrastructure, our data centers, our data sources. We interface with it from a human-to-machine perspective. AI is fundamentally changing that. The machine-to-machine traffic pattern versus the human-to-machine traffic pattern is fundamentally different. It’s more impactful on the infrastructure than the cloud was. You remember in the cloud days, we had all of our data in the data center, and when we added cloud, we added a different link. We just ‘hair-pinned’ in and out of the data center, which is highly inefficient. Later we came up with new technologies and new capabilities to create an environment that let you go directly to your data source wherever it was. That was a big shift. Cloud shifted the way we did the infrastructure.
That shift is nothing like what we’re experiencing with agentic AI. The line speed of security, the management of data, exposure, all those things are top of our customers’ minds. All of that is infrastructure work right now, which is kind of crazy. We’re doing a ton of infrastructure work for our clients around AI, and that’s not even getting them to AI yet. That’s just getting them AI-ready. That’s going to continue over the next couple of years, for sure. We’re seeing the craziness of that right now in the neocloud buildout and things of that nature. But we love that business. We’re built for that business.
The real value in the future will be working with customers and their data management, their data policies, their data lakes in the context of implementing the right platforms. And that’s where what we’re doing now inside of Logicalis is really going to be valuable. My goal is for Logicalis to be the most AI-infused value-added reseller in the world. To do that, I’ve got a lot of work to do, and I’ve been investing in it aggressively. We’ve been working on that journey for the last two years. That journey is the same journey that most of our customers need to go on. So you’ll see us talking with them not only about infrastructure, but how we are managing data exposure and governance.
We recently announced the acquisition of Maple Woods. It’s a managed services organization with a GRC [governance, risk, and compliance] platform. It started out in the context of good governance as a service for CMMC solutions, and now we’re moving that into governance for AI and how we can provide customers with the protection and models they need. So we’re looking at services around not only delivering AI or helping them build out AI models for their business, finding the low- hanging fruit, but also governing it and controlling the data exposure that’s inherent with AI. That’s a fun journey.
A lot of people in this industry point to an MIT report that found 95 percent of AI projects are not completed or do not provide return on investment. Have you considered what that might mean for Logicalis and its discussion with customers?
I think you’ll always see the percentage of failure in the early phases of complex IT projects is higher than later in the maturity cycle. And I think we’re going to see that in AI. I don’t know about MIT’s numbers. I wouldn’t say I can confirm or deny that level. I think the way we’re doing things really mitigates risk. And one of my narratives to the team is how do we deliver these complex solutions in a risk-adverse way so that we don’t strand ourselves or our customers.
So you’ll see us looking at, for lack of a better description, the low-hanging fruit. There are platforms out there today that are specific for certain areas of our business. I don’t want to deal with applications for all, and I don’t want to deal with applications that are custom-built for this or that. But I think the early phases of the AI journey are going to be product-specific, business-specific functions where you don’t have to have everything working perfectly to gain some of the benefits of AI. There’s a lot of entry points for businesses to begin to work in silos with AI. But the real value of AI after you do that is bringing these systems together, having the right data governance, the right data controls for building the information platform, the data lake, so you can tokenize your data and use it in an agentic way, where you can really go out and you can start learning from your data versus just reading your data. And that’s the thing that is exciting for all of us.
To get to your question, I don’t know if those percentages are right. It wouldn’t surprise me that at some level, because of just the nature of IT you’re going to see levels of failure or stranded projects. Twenty-five years ago, we were talking about why do IT projects fail? There was a lack of executive sponsor, a lack of, you can go through the list of all the reasons IT projects fail, right? You can probably say the same thing with AI projects right now.
Even as a lot of companies have invested heavily in AI, do you feel that you’re on time here, ahead of the curve, or worried about being behind the curve?
I don’t want to be on the bleeding edge, and I don’t want to be behind the curve. It’s like catching a wave, right? You can paddle too fast, or you can paddle too slowly. You’re never going to see me on the bleeding edge of technology. I don’t have the money to stand on the bleeding edge of technology like a lot of these companies do. However, we’re going to lean in quickly. And as I said, we’ve been on a journey to focus on us first, and I feel we’ve made great strides there. So from an execution perspective, I would argue we’re ahead. Of course, get any CEO on the record and we’re going to say that. But I do believe we have quantifiable examples where we’re ahead of our competition in this space. I don’t know about others, but my goal is for Logicalis to be the most AI-infused partner out there because I believe that’s the key to our growth and our continued profitability and the value we bring to our customers. I will say I feel comfortable with where we’re at. I think we're catching that wave. I don’t think we’re paddling too fast or too slowly. I would, in a moment of painful transparency here, say that most of us in the channel are a little bit behind in driving value for our customers in the AI journey. I think we’re rapidly catching up, but I think we’re all a little behind in that.
Part of the reason, honestly, is we’re infrastructure companies. We’re not always built around the Accenture or Deloitte kinds of business process improvement consultations. ... So that’s an area I’m excited about because I think we have a lot of opportunities.