Leading a Company Through Unprecedented Change with Joyce Mullen, President & CEO of Insight

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Joyce Mullen, president and CEO of Insight, about Insight's internal Gen AI transformation and how Joyce's role has evolved since her last time on the show. You're listening to Joel Beasley, modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) So you were the president at Insight for North America last time we talked, I'm pretty sure. And then now you're the CEO of the whole company? Is that how it works?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:00:31) That's how it works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) What's the difference?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:00:34) Well, first of all, I get to think about a lot more things. I get to work with a broader group of teammates and partners and clients. Our global business is, we're thinking carefully about how to grow our global business. We've done an acquisition in Europe, and we got to hire a new president of Europe, and we're thinking about expanding our capabilities in Asia. So anyway, I love global businesses. It's kind of what I had done forever at Dell. And so now I get to think about that. And we also got to hire a brand new and much improved president in North America. So that's been really fun. So anyway, it's been really, really fun building a global team and thinking about how to position ourselves to meet the needs, evolving needs of our clients. So that's been really great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:27) So what are those needs today?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:01:29) Well, as you know, I mean, the choices that are available to our clients around technology are incredibly vast and very, very broad and, frankly, quite complicated. And what we figured out is, and I'm sure everyone has figured this out, including our clients, is they don't have the time, the money, or the appetite to really try to understand what all these choices mean in terms of outcomes. They know they need to be a digitally enabled company or a technology enabled company. They know they need to leverage technology to do things bigger, better, faster. They don't always know exactly which type of technology is going to deliver the outcomes that they require, and they don't always understand kind of what's involved in getting to those outcomes. So, you know, I think since we talked, we've been, we had our investor day. We have declared that we're going to create a new, we are creating a new category in our industry. We're calling it solutions integrator. And the reason we got there, Joel, is really because from where I sat at Dell, it was really obvious to me that SIs, systems integrators, were doing a lot of the services and trying to understand the products that went into delivering the outcomes. Resellers were trying to figure out how to add services so that they could do more of the work and create more value for their customers. And we think at the end of the day, these digitally enabled outcomes are going to be put together with a combination of hardware, software, and services. Sometimes that hardware might be in a public cloud. Sometimes it might be in a private cloud. Sometimes that software might run as a service. Sometimes it might be a license. But always there will be services required to figure out how to put those things together to deliver the outcomes our clients are looking for. And so we think this merits a new classification. And as I said, we coined the term solutions integrator. And so our goal is to be the very best solutions integrator in the industry, and we believe other sort of competitors and other participants in this space are following suit. And that means that you have to have much deeper technical expertise, and you gotta maintain the really strong relationships you have with the best technology providers in the world, the OEMs, and understand where they're going with their road maps and understand how to put all that together to help our clients solve whatever problem they're trying to solve.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:59) That sounds like a lot. That's a lot. You guys are doing a lot of it. Has Gartner or any of the big agencies picked up this phrase solutions integrator yet? Are we still pushing that?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:04:08) Well, we've just been talking about it for a little over a year. We are hearing it repeated in our competitors' earnings calls, which we think is a good sign. But we haven't really started working with Gartner yet on this. And the reason we haven't is our goal, our thought here is we've got to demonstrate that we're doing this. We've got to put points on the board and make sure it's really clear that we are delivering the kind of value that we're talking about. We're trying to do it differently. So if you think about how systems integrators work, it's really all around time expended and kind of that sales process is complicated and those relationships and those contracts are long. We try to differentiate there in a couple of ways. One is we focus on delivering results fast and then earning through our expert execution the right to do more. Our goal here is to become the partner our clients can't live without, and we do that by creating value, earning the right to do more, creating more value, earning the right to do more. And that is a distinction. The other way we distinguish ourselves from the very big SIs is we focus on what we call the corporate space. So think Fortune 300 and below. And the reason we do that, we're one of those companies, by the way, and they have big IT budgets. They don't always have access to the technical skills they need in this very diverse technical environment that we're operating in. And we have an opportunity to really put together the solutions that are most important to them. And so that sweet spot for us is also quite important to our strategy. But frankly, it hinges on making sure we get in, we listen carefully to our clients, we deliver the outcomes that they're looking for using the best technology in the industry. And then if we don't do a good job, we don't earn the right to do more. So we're having some success with that. We'd like to have a little bit more before we start trying to get Gartner to, you know, put together a magic quadrant on solutions integrators.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:11) Well, you'll be at the top, I'm sure. Okay. So let's bring this down to a little bit more concrete. What is an initial, let's say one of those Fortune 300 companies. What's an initial engagement project? What does that look like?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:06:25) Well, I mean, unfortunately, it's not an easy answer because it really depends on what the customer is trying to do. So if they come to us and say, hey, we need to figure out how to secure our environment. We're quite concerned with making sure we have a, we are, we have an infrastructure that is designed for security. We would start with an assessment of their current environment. If they say to us, you know what? We've just had this breach. Can you come help us get these guys out of there? That's obviously quite a different approach. We would go in and try to understand exactly where they are, and we gotta figure out how to put the right kind of safeguards in place to get the bad guys out and understand how to reconnect their network, etcetera, etcetera. So it really does depend. If a client says to us, you know, we need a new way to manage our devices across our 5,000 locations and 100,000 employees. You know, we start with, okay, well, we've been, and we've been supplying those devices for a long time. We already have a lot of knowledge, so there's less need for an assessment. And it's more around just moving immediately to the design phase. But generally, I would say if you're sort of trying to categorize it, it's assessment, learning, really trying to understand the customer's environment, designing the appropriate solution to deliver the outcomes, building that solution, either on-prem or in the cloud or wherever, and then helping them migrate their environment to that new solution, and then managing that environment on an ongoing basis to relieve them of those operating costs and the complexities associated with training teammates so that they can manage such complexity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:09) Are they coming to you with things like, hey, generative AI is exploding. We don't really know how it can apply to us. Can you figure that out?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:08:16) I love that. And yes, everyone. I think everyone in the world is asking about generative AI, and we are in such the early days of really figuring out how to exploit the opportunities associated with that. But I am very optimistic about those opportunities. First of all, there is so much soul sucking work that people have to do every single day that is bringing them no joy, and there's an opportunity to eliminate that. So that makes me really excited. Second, so we expect that that will allow us to increase our teammate engagement and, like, unlock innovation and productivity improvements, etcetera, etcetera. There's also so much opportunity to eliminate soul sucking work between partners and customers, suppliers, and us or whatever. And that's a huge opportunity. Again, the notion of us spending time on things that are far more powerful and exciting is really exciting. So I think there's, but I should say there's some parameters. There's some safeguards. There's some policies. There's some governance that has to be put in place because while I totally believe that technology generally is used for good, there's a lot of opportunities to exploit it for not so good purposes. And we gotta make sure that our clients are aware of that. And then if you step back from that, you know, it's hard to use generative AI if your data is not set up appropriately, if you can't access it, you can't figure out how to move it in and out of your applications or whatever. So there's a lot of infrastructure plumbing work to do to enable our clients to leverage Gen AI, but it's going to be really exciting. We're just, like, we're not even, you know, I don't think we've had our first at bat with Gen AI yet. This is really, really early. This is very early innings if I'm trying to use my baseball analogy here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:03) Yeah. I started putting my hands. So my progression is, you know, software engineer, then the podcast took off. That became the main thing for the past, you know, seven years or so. So I haven't had hands on keyboard engineering in the past several years. When the GPT stuff started to really come out in January, February of last year, I looked at it. I was like, okay. And then around March, I started to put my hands on the keyboard and see how it could actually apply and run tests with it. I was blown away. I was like...

(Joyce Mullen at 00:10:31) It's really cool, isn't it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:32) Until you start putting your hands on the key, like, so people always argue about, oh, jobs being lost and things like that with AI. And it actually happened the other day. So the other day, I had three separate CSVs of all of our past guests. Right? Because different producers had different files. Columns were partially filled. There was just this scattered data in these three sheets. And so I went to go write the Upwork job post just to pay something like $200 because I could do it, but I don't want to sit there and mess with it. I was like, I'll just pay someone $200 and I'll get it done. And so I wrote up the description of what I needed done and how I needed the data cleaned up. And then, I thought right before I hit post on the Upwork job, I was like, you know, I wonder if GPT can, like, accept files and I wonder if this could do that. And so I went over to GPT and it did it and it solved, like, four different problems along the way without my interaction. So it tried to do it one way. It's like, oh, I found a problem with a, b, and c. I'm going to try another way, and it just kept saying I'm going to try another way. It did that four times and then spit out a combined CSV exactly the way I wanted it. It was bonkers.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:11:40) I love those stories. And there's so many of them. The question is, how do we scale it effectively? How do we train our team? So we just rolled out some training internally around how do you use our Insight GPT, which is our internal Chat GPT version, and how do you interact with the technology? How can you get the right answers the first time because you prompt more effectively and all that sort of thing? It's, I think it's got a lot of opportunity, and the work that it's eliminating is not, like, the most meaningful work. Right? I mean, so we always tell all our teammates here and all of our clients, I mean, you know, generative AI will not replace you, but it's a really good skill. And if you don't learn it, you could be replaced by someone who knows how to use it. So I think the opportunities are significant for all of us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:32) I also noticed because I've been thinking a lot about this about, typically companies will slow their hiring in an area where these efficiencies are happening. So it's less of, like, laying off and more of just, like, not expanding that section and letting that be as efficient as possible because what happens is there's natural attrition in the system.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:12:52) Yep. Exactly. And that kind of, we're doing that internally as well. I mean, it just puts a little pressure on the system and on the leadership of those groups to say, okay, this is a means to an end. And it gets people excited, and you start thinking about the art of the possible with it. It's really cool kind of innovation we're driving. Plus, we're also seeing people that we would never even think of. We decided to crowdsource ideas internally to try to figure out where our teammates could use it, and we, like, found tons of different use cases that we would have never thought of if it were just a, you know, a group of 20 of us sitting in a room.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:31) Oh, 100%. By the way, I love the phrase, eliminate soul sucking work. I think that's...

(Joyce Mullen at 00:13:37) Yeah, I stole that from Bill McDermott, by the way. He's the first person I heard say it, and I've used it incessantly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:45) You gotta run a marketing campaign. Get your soul back.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:13:49) It's a good idea. Exciting time to be in technology. I feel like I say that every single year, but it always is true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:56) I think it's getting more exciting faster.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:13:58) Yeah. I agree. The pace and the rate of change. Let me tell you about one example of a generative AI use case that I got really, really excited about. So we had three summer interns here working with our sales teams, and they figured out how to do a whole bunch of research and background work to try to help prepare salespeople for meetings with clients. So they use generative AI to comb through 10-Ks to 10-Qs, earnings calls, recent news articles, and figure out what was most important to our clients. And then they built using Gen AI a PowerPoint presentation that says these are the things that this customer cares the most about. This is what they're doing about it and map those actions to solutions that we provide internally at Insight to our customers. So anyway, it was a really tremendous opportunity to showcase the benefit of really curious teammates with not a lot of experience could figure out how to use these tools and put them to work so that we could make sure our sales teammates were more productive when they went out and saw our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:11) Oh, cool. What's the thing you are most excited about this year?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:15:15) Well, I think there are a huge number of technical, silicon type product introductions this year that are really going to help us do everything we've just been talking about much more efficiently. I mean, the road maps from Qualcomm, AMD, NVIDIA, Intel are really quite amazing. And then, obviously, there's a bunch of new guys thinking about their own silicon. I'm excited about figuring out how to build this capability into the edge devices a bit more effectively. So that's going to drive a bunch of, I think, a bunch of improvements.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:15:54) So we have a series of partner conferences that we always spend some time at, and it's really where we're looking at those roadmaps and the innovative changes they're making to products. We are pretty focused on cloud. Cloud adoption has been quite significant, especially accelerated during COVID, as you know. We've just bought two companies that help us with that. Well, actually, three in the last year and a half that help us with our capabilities there.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:16:24) We bought, most recently, SADA, which is a Google Cloud Partner of the Year, six years running. That gives us more capability in public cloud. We amped up our EMEA capabilities by buying a really strong Microsoft Azure project partner called Amdaris. And we bought a company that was also a Magic Quadrant Azure migration company called Hanu in India, which helps us expand our footprint a little more broadly and take advantage of talent pools all over Eastern Europe now and the US and India. So back to your point or your question, I mean, things like what's going on with Google and what's going on with Microsoft and AWS are certainly top of mind for us and making sure that we can deliver solutions to our clients.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:17:17) Every single client is multi-cloud, so many of the larger ones actually have, you know, two or three kind of public cloud footprints, but then our bigger customers also have a private cloud instance. And our ability to support all those solutions and figuring out which workloads go where, how to make sure the data works across those things is quite an important set of skills that we're bringing to our clients. And so we will spend a lot of time with the cloud guys this year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:49) Yeah. I saw the acquisitions. I was reading the—how do you say it? SADA? Is that how you say it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:54) SADA. SADA. And I saw the sale price and then the earn-out price. I was like, yeah, they're doing it right. You gotta have that earn-out on there. You gotta retain those founders for a little bit and get things transitioned.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:18:06) Yeah. They are a great group. And Tony Safoian is the CEO of SADA. It's a great story. Their family came over about 20 years ago or so, maybe 30 years or so ago from Armenia, built this company from scratch. The mom and the dad have been super involved. Tony, their son, has been the leader for quite some time. We are very excited about their reputation within Google, the Google services skills that they've built over time. And we think that, combined with our really strong presence in Azure and our AWS capability, makes us—we call it a multi-cloud powerhouse, you know, very humbly. But, you know, that's what we're calling ourselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:50) It's so funny when I get to do interviews with you guys. You guys have thousands and thousands of employees, and then you reference, like, oh, the bigger guys. And I'm like, oh my gosh. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The world's such a huge place.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:19:02) It's good. It's good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:03) Well, I wanna wrap up with, what's the thing you are most excited about right now?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:19:08) Well, I would say when I think about the market, there's a couple of things. One is, the industry has been through a lot of turmoil, both really, really high demand and kind of softening demand on the device side. A lot of people trying to figure out what's going on with the macro environment. And while there still are really horrible and very concerning geopolitical issues that we're all thinking about and worrying about, it feels like from an industry point of view, we are coming back to kind of a position where we're gonna have some reasonable understanding of demand, and we will be able to be a bit more deliberate and thoughtful about delivering the right kind of solutions, because we're largely past the supply constraints, at least around components. I agree with you on energy.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:19:58) But I feel like this is an opportunity to leverage the introduction—great results for their own customers, et cetera. So I feel like we've had kind of—I would say, we felt very reactive around the whole sort of environment for quite some time, probably the last two or three years. And this is an opportunity for us to really think carefully about the value we can create together, and the tools, generative AI, and all of the other improvements that we're gonna see in hardware and software are gonna help us do that. So that's fun. That's way more fun than trying to figure out how to find a router in a supply chain.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:48) Absolutely. Well, Joyce, we did it. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Joyce Mullen at 00:20:53) Well, thank you very much for the opportunity, Joel. Great to see you. So glad to hear that your family is having a lot of fun in Clarksville. That is, that's great. That's a beautiful place to raise three beautiful kids, I'm sure.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:21:05) Right. And give your—like, your wife, you should do a podcast with your wife.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:11) I mean, I'd like to hear that.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:21:12) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:12) She's making bread. She's got, like, sourdough starter. She's raising our youngest child—he has Down syndrome, so he has special needs. So she does training with him, and I mean, she just crushes it. And so—

(Joyce Mullen at 00:21:26) Oh my gosh. That's so amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:28) Yeah. That's amazing.

(Joyce Mullen at 00:21:29) Good for you. Well, enjoy that beautiful weather and environment and I'm glad you've found a great home in Tennessee.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:37) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.