Ingram Micro’s Sanjib Sahoo: AI Agents ‘Are Like Puppies’ That Must Be Trained

‘If you train them well, they’ll grow up loyal and amazing. If you don’t, they might come back and bite you,’ Ingram Micro’s Sanjib Sahoo says about AI agents.

Ingram Micro three years ago made “a big, bold bet” to build a platform ecosystem, powered by AI and data, at a time when “AI wasn’t that cool and there was no ChatGPT,” according to Sanjib Sahoo.

“We learned by working hard, sometimes failing, sometimes making mistakes, being imperfectly perfect,” said Sahoo, president of the Irvine, Calif.-based distributor’s global platform group. “Now we’re using that knowledge to help our partners grow in this AI world.”

And when it comes to agentic AI, he said it’s not going to replace jobs but rather reimagine them. He compared AI agents to puppies: “If you train them well, they’ll grow up loyal and amazing. If you don’t, they might come back and bite you.”

Sahoo, who spoke last week at Ingram Micro’s One event in Washington, D.C., outlined the distributor’s own patented AI factory, built on four petabytes of data collected over 40 years and more than 400 proprietary models, as well as a recent integration with AWS and Google’s Gemini models. The integration merges Ingram Micro’s proprietary intelligence with external AI ecosystems. “We are bringing the B2C AI experience into B2B,” he said.

[Related: Ingram Micro CEO On Launching AI Agent In Xvantage Platform: ‘It’s About Transforming How Technology Partners Grow’]

That distinction is what will shape the next chapter for Ingram Micro, which sits in between 1,500 vendors and more than 160,000 partners around the world, reaching about 90 percent of the world’s population.

Still, Sahoo acknowledged that adoption is lagging behind innovation. He argued that in this new landscape, success will depend on ecosystems, not silos. “We don’t want to just distribute products. We want to distribute outcomes and intelligence.”

“Imagine if your Salesforce integration took 60 seconds,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be crazy? We’re doing that. AI-based integrations, not API-based.”

He challenged the industry to move from “order taking to order making,” and from “fulfillment to demand generation,” reminding the audience that sometimes what got them this far won’t get them to the next phase of innovation.

“The industry is changing constantly. Innovation is changing constantly,” he said. “We can either read the story in this AI era or we can write it. We choose to write it.”

Bill Blum, founder and CEO of Bound Brook, N.J.-based Alpine Business Systems Inc., has already seen the benefits in his MSP from the advancements Ingram Micro has made with AI, especially around procurement.

“They’ve had a seriously positive effect on many of the transactions we do,” Blum told CRN. “They’re taking the human out of the mix for the mundane and bringing the human in to augment the technology.”