Intel Chief Commercial Officer Christoph Schell Resigns

With Intel Chief Commercial Officer Christoph Schell resigning to become the CEO of a German automation company, the head of America sales, Greg Ernst, is stepping in as the interim leader of the chipmaker’s Sales and Marketing Group, which houses its global partner organization.

Intel Chief Commercial Officer Christoph Schell (pictured) is resigning from the company after leading its Sales and Marketing Group since 2022, the chipmaker announced Wednesday.

Schell, who was hired by former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, informed the company Monday of his decision to leave the company by the end of June to “pursue another career opportunity,” Intel said in a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan told employees in a Wednesday memo seen by CRN that Schell is leaving to become CEO of Kuka, a German automation company with annual sales of roughly 4 billion euros and approximately 15,000 employees. Schell has served as a member of Kuka’s supervisory board since 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile.

“Since joining Intel in 2022, Christoph has poured his heart and soul into our business and worked tirelessly in service of our customers,” Tan wrote. “He has helped to steer our Sales and Marketing Group (SMG) through a challenging period and built a strong team along the way. I am grateful for his contributions and wish him success in his next role.”

Greg Ernst, corporate vice president and general manager of Americas sales, “has agreed to step in” as interim leader of SMG—which houses Intel’s global partner organization—Tan said in the memo.

Tan called Ernst a “people-first, customer-centric executive with nearly 20 years of Intel sales experience” and said the sales leader will join the executive team and report to him as “we evaluate the best long-term succession plan.”

“He and I have been spending time together as we do deep dives on key accounts, and I look forward to working more closely with him going forward,” Tan wrote of Ernst.

An Intel spokesperson reiterated Tan’s points about Schell and confirmed that Ernst is becoming SMG’s interim leader in a statement to CRN.

“Greg’s nearly 20 years of Intel sales experience will make this a smooth transition for the team and our customers,” the Intel representative said.

Tan also said in his Wednesday memo that he has “decided to elevate” Jason Grebe, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Corporate Planning Group, to the executive team. Grebe previously reported to Schell under SMG.

“This reflects the importance of the group’s work to Intel’s overall execution, as well as the strength of Jason’s leadership build over his three decades of service to Intel,” Tan wrote.

The move by Tan to make Grebe’s position a direct report comes after the CEO announced earlier this month that he is creating a “flatter structure” for his executive leadership team by making more executives report directly to him.

A week after Tan restructured Intel’s executive team, he unveiled a plan last Thursday to make sweeping changes to the company by “streamlining the organization, eliminating management layers and enabling faster decision-making” in his bid to turn around the beleaguered semiconductor giant.

These changes will involve Intel cutting its operating expenses by $500 million this year and another $1 billion next year, which, in turn, will result in an undisclosed number of job cuts, Tan said in a public letter to employees last Thursday.

“I am taking swift actions to drive better execution and operational efficiency while empowering our engineers to create great products,” he said in a public statement. “We are going back to basics by listening to our customers and making the changes needed to build the new Intel.”

Schell Oversaw Major Changes Within SMG

During his tenure, Schell, a former HP Inc. executive, oversaw major changes to SMG, including a significant reduction in costs and headcount that were carried out as part of Gelsinger’s move last year to slash Intel’s workforce by more than 15 percent and reduce spending by over $10 billion in response to deteriorating financial conditions.

When Intel announced the job cuts last August, the company told SMG employees that it would cut the division’s costs by more than 35 percent, CRN reported at the time.

These cuts hit Intel’s global partner organization, which reduced direct partner coverage and reworked its market development funds while it increased overall partner funding, Intel Global Channel Chief Dave Guzzi told CRN in January.

“It’s very much just a financial expansion of the existing programs, in some cases, with a smaller number of partners, which means, of course, there’s even more money available to each of those that are still participating,” Guzzi said at the time.

The global partner organization also introduced a new regional engagement model last fall with channel leaders assigned to North America; Latin America; Asia-Pacific Japan; Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and India. And the group decided to focus its partner investments in 44 countries and regions “based on operational and economic considerations” starting this year.

These moves happened after Intel changed its coverage model for an unspecified number of channel partners, who now receive support from third-party distributors instead of Intel salespeople, in response to an earlier cost-cutting wave Gelsinger announced in 2022.

At the Intel Vision event earlier this month, Schell emphasized the importance of partners to the company but said that while Intel is making changes that will benefit them in the long term, he warned of “pain in the near-term execution.”

Among the changes he outlined, Intel has discontinued many of these rebate programs for partners in favor of reflecting discounts in the up-front pricing for its products, and the company is shifting its marketing investments to “account-based marketing.”

Schell also said Intel has “focused” its resources and “changed the processes quite a bit” to become “more agile and more flexible”—a major aim of Tan, the company’s new CEO.

“A big part of this is that we need to enable this ecosystem that Intel actually created many, many years ago to do more for us,” he said later in his presentation.

“So the opportunity to be more partner-centric, to pull you more into our go-to-market, and to almost outsource some of the coverage but also the product development when we talk about systems to systems integrators, to ISVs, is something that we really put into a priority play last year, and I want more of that in 2025,” Schell added.