GTDC Summit EMEA: Distribution community talks AI, economy and sustainability
CRN reports from Noordwijk, the Netherlands at a showcase gathering of Europe’s top distributors
CRN was in Noordwijk, the Netherlands this week for the Global Technology Distribution Council's EMEA Summit 2024.
The event brought together the main players in European distribution, including TD SYNNEX, Exertis, Westcon-Comstor, Esprinet, Ingram Micro, Exclusive Networks, Infinigate and more to network and hear about the influential trends currently impacting their businesses.
This is a big week for Europe with the European Parliament elections taking place, and a lot has changed since the last European election in 2019.
The past five years have seen a global pandemic, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a surge in energy prices pushed up inflation. On the back of that there have been massive hikes in interest rates, a cost of living crunch, and an economic slowdown in Europe.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel, Emily Mansfield, regional director for Europe, Economist Intelligence Unit told attendees at the GTDC Summit EMEA 2024.
"Another reason this is a big week for Europe is that the European Central Bank is meeting tomorrow. And we expect them to cut interest rates for the first time after ten consecutive rate rises.
"The economic outlook is improving. But there are still an awful lot of geopolitical risks that companies need to be keeping track of," she warned.
Mansfield presented the audience with a map detailing the Economist's global economic growth forecasts for 2024, which showed weak growth for Europe.
"The big story is that, of course, we've got inflation now coming down. We've got interest rate cuts coming in soon, that's going to underpin a gradual improvement in the economic outlook," said Mansfield.
"And as that strong investment trend continues, that's going to see growth rates pick up later this year. And then from next year onwards, we're looking at more like 2.8 per cent growth at the global level each year."
What does this mean for the IT sector?
"There are two big trends that are even more important for the IT sectors than this broad macroeconomic picture of a gradual improvement of interest rates and inflation," Mansfield told the audience.
The first, she explained, lies in what's happening with the electronic cycle after every company suddenly bought vast numbers of laptops as the entire workforce went remote.
"All of that hardware is now coming up towards the end of its probable lifespan. So there's a big surge in replacement demand that we're seeing this year and through next year as well.
"The other big trend, of course, is the uptake of AI, and this is driving demand, both for AI enabled hardware, but also software as well.
"What I'm hearing on the ground is that this is coming into some roadblocks, because of the fact that there's been quite rapidly evolving regulations around this. And there's also concern about data exposure. So that's a back and forth between IT and legal departments at the moment as they tried to iron that out."
Mansfield said only eight per cent of EU firms with ten or more employees use AI at the moment.
"Yes, that rises to 30 per cent when you look at big firms, but I think that shows there's still quite a lot of scope for growth.
"One big theme in terms of what's happening with AI at the moment is there was lots of experimentation last year. It was very open-ended. This year, the focus is much more on implementation. AI actually has to fit that business use case; it has to offer a return on investment.
"We're going to see all sorts of impacts that this has across the skills of your workforce, in terms of productivity growth and economic growth.
"At the moment the key sectors where this is really happening is speeding up coding, expanding the reach of marketing and making customer service more efficient."
Continue reading to hear from Softcat and TD SYNNEX and find out their best practices for sustainability...
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Building a sustainable business in 2024
The Channel Company's chief content officer Stuart Sumner took to the stage next to moderate a panel on how to build a sustainable business without greenwashing or 'youthwashing'.
"Similar to what greenwashing is, which is very surface level interaction or promotion of something that you're not really doing, youthwashing is the same way, but referring to with how we're interacting with young people," explained Melati Wijsen, activist and founder of Bye Bye Plastic Bags.
"What we're seeing as a trend with institutions, companies, conferences, is inviting young people to be inspiring for the inspiration session without going further in-depth and working with young people on a more long-term basis.
"That's something we are trying to change with youthwashing, to build those intergenerational reverse mentorship bridges that are more long lasting, that help build the communities, helps build the sustainability track record on a more long-term basis versus the one-off inspiration only."
Offering more insight into the term ‘reverse mentoring', Wijsen said companies usually interact with young people through internships and mentorships. But more can be done beyond these go-to methods.
"For example, on a youth board, or an advisory opinion, where young people locally or globally that are in similar fields, actually can share and brainstorm with you behind the scenes.
"I think this intergenerational collaboration can really be that opportunity of leaning on each other's strengths as a generation."
Stamping out greenwashing
Business transformation director at Softcat, Al Wynn, believes the most important element to avoiding greenwashing lies in being authentic.
"No one's got the answers. No one's perfect. There are absolutely some imperfections in every organisation that we see, and some learnings, some gaps in knowledge. But I think you've just got to be authentic."
Following on from Melati's point, Wynn suggested that a simple way to look at reverse mentoring and capturing inputs from all different angles within an organisation is employee resource groups.
"Having one of those threads, one of those strands as an environmental thread is really, really important. It's quite amazing to see the amount of new people who join Softcat that are wanting, willing, and desperate to embark on our internal green team.
"It's fantastic to get that perspective from young people and individuals from every regional office. It breaks down geographical divides, ethnicity divides, gender divides. So you get perspectives from every, every perspective across the workforce."
Bringing it back to his point around authenticity, Wynn says simply doing what you can is incredibly vital.
"It's important to start somewhere, we've tried to push the barriers as far as we possibly can, within the realms of what we've got in play at one point.
"We've been one of the first within our arena to report fully across scope three. You don't have to do it. You're not forced to do it. But let's start with that and share and be transparent, be open and authentic in that.
"We want to be authentic with customers, we want to be authentic with partners, and we've set out our vision, our expectation with the partner community.
"We initiated that about four years ago now. And setting those expectations and the authenticity, I would say really elevates the partnership to a whole new level as well."
Sustainability and recruitment
Wynn told the audience sustainability is in fact "one of the hottest topics" when doing recruitment inductions.
"We do open Q&A where the leadership team joins and at least a third of a 45-minute session was just sustainability questions.
"Now bear in mind, they can ask me anything about the organisation, but a third of time on sustainability is really really significant. We see it with retention, we see it with recruitment, what it does to job satisfaction and morale is huge."
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Lack of trust from Gen Z
Wijsen said more than 80 per cent of Gen Z, young people born between the year 1995 and 2010, feel a lack of trust towards companies or institutions, as well as the loss of hope.
"That's a huge amount of our generation, already at such a young age. But this is backed by the fact that by 2030, we are supposed to have reached the 2015 goals of the United Nations, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. But in fact, we are not even 15 per cent achieved with those goals.
"So that lack of trust and that lack of hope comes from just a lack of translation of seeing real action happen in a scalable way."
She said the only way we can scale solutions is if the industry stays focused.
"We can't be everything to everyone. And the only way we can scale is when partnerships come together, empowering the strengths of each party.
"Everybody has a role to play. And I think that purpose also starts very much with choosing a focus, what is your end goal, and working towards that with a long term goal, as well as a short term goal.
"And that helps with the authenticity, the transparency, and the community building opportunity that exists when we talk about sustainability in the first place."
Bringing purpose to the fore
Manuel Aguirre, senior manager for global sustainability at TD SYNNEX, says it's the activation of purpose that really matters, which he believes should be done through culture.
"With any cultural transformation there are three key components being the leaders of the organisation embracing the purpose, then we need their teams to understand what that purpose means, the implications of that purpose. And then when that purpose is being put into practice we need to reinforce it."
Sustainability in the supply chain - vendors
The supply chain has a major impact on sustainability but is often overlooked, attendees heard.
Increasing cloud use and the compute power that's going to be required to power AI are two factors set to increase the sustainability impacts of the supply chain.
Wynn gave his three points on this.
"Data is huge, and that for me comes in two flavours.
"Yes, we want product data, because our customers are wanting that and demanding that informed choice of product and project selection.
"The other part of that is partner data. And why we want that is to align our goals, our ambition and our pace with our partners.
"We want to have a net zero value chain by 2040. If I look through all of our major vendors, and all of our major distributors, there's still a lot of gaps.
"There's gaps in there that I do not yet know with certainty when they're going to get to net zero. And we need to call on the influence of individuals in this room and elsewhere.
"If you think of where you are in the supply chain sandwich, actually we need to make sure we've got the voice of the customer as the reseller. So what a customer is asking for with the demand that's coming through there. We need to make sure that filters through to the distributors and the vendors to take shape with the change that's needed."
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