With over 25 years of experience in the IT industry, Joe Flynn, the Modern Workplace Director and Distinguished Technologist at Insight Enterprises, loves that technology constantly changes and provides new challenges, pushing him to learn more every day. As a leader for a vendor-agnostic organization, Joe is equipped to advise clients on the solutions that drive the best value for their business. He is a champion across many technologies and approaches knowledge-sharing not as a one-time project but as a continued mindset.

John Shegerian:  Get the latest impact podcast right into your inbox each week. Subscribe by entering your email address at impactpodcast.com to make sure you never miss an interview. This edition of The Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com. This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts and impact partners. Closed loops platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closelooppartners.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of The Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so honored to have with us today Joe Flynn. He’s the Modern Workplace Director and distinguished technologist at Insight Enterprises. Welcome Joe to the Impact Podcast.

Joe Flynn: Thank you, John.

John: Hey, Joe, before we get talking about all the important work you’re doing with your colleagues at Insight, can you share a little bit about your background? Where’d you grow up and how’d you get on this fascinating journey?

Joe: I’ll keep it short there. I’ve basically been grown, been in New Jersey for most of my life, but as a kid computers tend to just come natural to me. Father started a side business doing computers and I just gravitated to it almost every day always found myself on it. So since it came easy, I decided to try to go into it from a career perspective. So starting my career out of Verizon Wireless, actually at the time it was Verizon Wireless, which obviously it dates that at this point. Then merging into consulting and where I’ve been at Insight for the past 15 years. Honestly, I can just say. Technology keeps me involved. It keeps me interested and I enjoy it a lot. So it’s a good company to work with from an insight perspective.

John: That’s awesome. Joe, what part of Jersey did you grow up in?

Joe: Northwest. So about 40 minutes west of New York City.

John: Which town?

Joe: No, I grew up in West Orange. I live actually in Hackettstown today.

John: Got it. I grew up my in Saddle River and then we had a farm in Toms River. So I know the area real well. Of course I know West Orange very well also. So I’m another Jersey boy. I’m just a lot older than you. Joe, talk a little bit about insight. For our listeners and viewers, just to get a little tee up here insight you could find Joe and his colleagues at insight at www.insight.com. Their annual revenues over $10 billion a year, over 15,000 employees. What does Modern Workplace Director and distinguished technologists mean?

Joe: That’s a lot in itself. I’ll back up and just say what insight means from a general. Insight, we consider ourselves an AI solutions integrator, one of the leading ones. What I like to tell customers when I talk about insight is, is we’re almost like that master builder for modern business tech. We don’t just sell you the tools, we can blueprint the right mix of hardware, software, services, and strategy to ultimately build that foundation for a secure scalable solutions that work together and help a customer see the value and most importantly get success out of what we can help them achieve. So from my part of it, I’m tied to modern work and specifically today tied to the device side of modern work. It’s everything pertaining to procuring of the devices, to the lifecycle services of the devices. So if you think of provisioning and deployment, warehousing, sustainability is a big piece. The daily support from end user experience on those devices all the way through disposal. So I have a team of people that’s always think about is how do we help customers get the most value out of those types of endpoints? If you think of it’s laptops, desktops, anything that touches an end user, even as far as immersive wear. Because that’s actually building up from an industry perspective. We’re always trying to think of what we can give the customer not only from a service, but also a knowledge perspective that to gives them the more value to decrease that total cost of ownership.

John: Is it advisory services as well besides selling or how does that work?

Joe: No, absolutely. The benefit from an insight perspective is we can do it all. From the planning execution, all the way to the maintenance and support. So if I look at tied to the devices, I always tell customers my role is to look from a procurement to possibly the consulting. So helping customers get off of technical debt with how they roll out devices, how they manage devices, how they simply support the devices. So nowadays that tends to be very cloud focused driven. All the way through, like I mentioned managed services. From a device side, the managed services could be like a managed endpoint service where we’re managing those MDMs or those configuration platforms or a Dex platform. In our case, we partner with Nexti from a digital experience. But if I look at the other aspects of insight as a whole, just generalizing insight. We have capabilities around both consulting and managed across the data center, across the Microsoft Stack solutions, ServiceNow solutions, AWS, you name it, we can have the, we have the expertise across all. I think that’s what differentiates us for most of our competitors is because now I can only sell you a device and the services side to the device. But now I can pull in experts from a networking perspective to make sure you have the best connectivity experts from a security perspective. We can pull up ServiceNow, experts from an ITSM perspective, so users are getting the right request. Think about HR onboarding of new users, all the way to the AI capabilities of our company to how are you leveraging AI local to the device or more importantly, what AI use cases are you building out within your company to drive more revenue and value. It’s a lot.

John: How long has Insight been around?

Joe: Since like, I’m pretty sure the late eighties, early nineties.

John: Got it.

Joe: We’ve grown through acquisition. Insight started as a Varla. Selling hardware, selling licensing. Over the years they’ve acquired companies to build out the services business. As we’ve progressed into the later years, if you look online through our acquisitions, we’re always filling in, shall we say, gaps with what we have from a solution perspective. The latest one was what we purchased is InfoCenter, which was a ServiceNow brand. I’ve mentioned to you from a device perspective, tying in the ITSM platform is key for users requesting devices, break fix of devices, refresh of devices. So being able to pull in a partner of ours that’s now within Insight to help a customer who’s on ServiceNow to really get the value out of it, it streamlines and automates that entire process. Not only for the IT side of the customer, but also the end user side.

John: Got it. Are you still considered a value added reseller, but just with all now a full stack alongside of it, or do you not even consider yourselves a bar anymore?

Joe: We still, at the par a lot of our big revenue is still hardware and software sales.

John: Got it.

Joe: But the solutions integrator. That AI solutions integrator, like I said, now we can take what we sell and provide you the best solution. Whether it’s through designing it, implementing it, supporting it, or managing it at that point.

John: Joel, if you’re Coke, who’s your major competitor? Who’s your Pepsi in your industry?

Joe: We got quite a bit. All up insight obviously you’re going to see like the CDWs Shi [crosstalk].

John: Got it.

Joe: If I look at from a hardware perspective, let’s say das a device as a service, it’s going to be those same two plus the the OEMs.

John: Got it.

Joe: Everybody’s trying to get their piece of the pie when it comes to device as a service.

John: That’s right. So now let’s talk about your specific two roles. Now that we understand who Insight is, modern Workplace Director and Distinguished Technologists. I love those titles. Where do you sit now and where do you facilitate these transactions with your clients and create seamless services for your client base?

Joe: Today I facilitate in what we call our device center of excellence. Within device center of excellence we’ve been, our primary focus lately has been what we call flex for devices. That is our device as a service offering. It’s tying the purchase or lease of a device to all the required services all the way through the end of life of that device. What’re always trying to do is we try to reimagine what we consider das as a solution. John, you probably know many people in the industry consider das just a purchase of a device, usually through a lease, and it’s usually tied to some form of a warranty, whether that’s Extended Warranty, next business day warranty. What we try to do is we tried to reimagine it. What can the customer more value the customer get out of it? Because it’s not about just selling the employee or the customer new devices, most customers have an existing fleet of devices that may need warranty. Break fix may need retrieval from employee exit, they may need to be refreshed. Perfect example, October, we have the end of life for Windows 10 coming up. Refreshing of devices. So we’re trying to figure how do we tie all of that into together while providing the customer the right path to the right device for the user. But most importantly, how do we ensure that they’re getting the best user experience in those devices while driving down the total cost of ownership.

John: Understood. You’ve been in technology since your dad started his firm. You grew up in it, so it’s in your DNA, but at Insights specifically, you’ve been there 15 years. What have you seen in terms of IT decision makers and the shifts and their priorities and the challenges that they’re facing? Obviously 15 years goes back pre COVID and even I would want to say, it’s actually pre the rise of cybersecurity as part of our vernacular lexicon and pre AI. And now cybersecurity’s a real thing and a big part of everything we all do. AI is a big thing and growing as is data protection and cyber. What have you seen in terms of of device ownership and management? What are IT directors looking for and how’s that shift over the last 15 years? And where are we today and where are we going?

Joe: Over the shift, obviously Cloud has been one of the biggest drivers we’ve seen over the 15 years, at least in at Insight. I would just say in the past few years, if we look at what we all hate to say it, the COVID era up to now customers are really being driven to the cloud. They want to get off from a device perspective. Stay off of the on-prem dependencies, go cloud driven, because employees now are everywhere. They’re not just in an office, they’re sitting at home traveling. So being tied to the on-prem environment it’s harder to support and for our employees it’s not a great experience. But from a shift perspective, the biggest thing I can honestly tell you within the past two years is customers are definitely look and more interested in a das solution, device as a service solution, and they’re trying to figure out how do they get lower, the total cost of ownership of those devices. That comes with pros and cons. Because right away they’re thinking, if I just extend the life of that device, I can easily lower my total cost of ownership. That sounds right but many customers don’t have the process or the tools in place to ensure that that’s the right decision for them. What I mean by that just digging a little more, for instance, I can extend the lifecycle and this is what we try to do with every customer from three to four or four to five years. But without the right tools to know if that’s the right choice, like three to four years, your employee experience could absolutely plummet[?]. What happens when that occurs, they get frustrations, they lower productivity. We talk about it affects soft ROI because productivity is definitely tied to soft, but as much, that’s very hard to prove out. We all know that. Most executives will tell you soft ROI is very difficult to prove out within an organization. But if I can tell you I can extend your lifecycle while I’m monitoring the health of that device, making sure the user is ultimately having a great experience, but then replace it or advance exchange it in that regards, at the right point of time, like three years instead of four maybe three and a half. Maybe we see that device starting to decline From a experience perspective. It may go to 48 months, it may go to 50 months. But the point is it should be refreshed at the time it’s actually needed, not a set time. Right now, if we look at traditional das is, leases are three years, four years, maybe. Most of them are three years and a lot of times at the end of those three years, what’s a customer doing? They’re turning in a device and they’re buying a new device. That’s great, but you’re not really getting the most you can out of that device and secondly, what happens to that device at the end of three years? Now, if you think of sustainability perspective, now customers are buying an entirely new device. So if I look at the embedded emissions of a new laptop, like they’re ranging from approximately what, 150 to 250 CO2 emissions per device if you look at manufacturing, shipping, and things like that. So if I can tell them, look, three years that was great years ago, no doubt. But now we have laptops where things simply don’t break. There’s not many moving parts, let me push you from three to as much as five. If I can get you to even to four, I’m saving you a ton of dollars from that regards of how much you’re going to spend, and also I can help you achieve better sustainability goals at the same time by extending the life of that device just one more year.

John: That’s so interesting. So we saw the rise of the cloud as you said, but we’ve also seen the rise of cybersecurity AI and also, let me throw into others circularity. We’re shifting from a linear to circular economy. That’s not going away as a trend that’s going to ever grow. Sustainability is not going away as a trend. So how do you then balance the importance of Cybersecurity and safe AI accessibility, sustainability, circularity with making your IT decision makers who your clients are, happy with cost effectiveness, and also being able to report back to their C-suite on their own impacts and their own emissions by keeping their emission levels down or reduced or net zero with their IT leases or purchases.

Joe: You probably have like a 24 question there. But let me see if I can [crosstalk]

John: Sorry about that. Only because I’m in the electronic waste business and that’s my life and I know it’s your life. I can talk in a little bit of shorthand with you, but I don’t want to overcomplicate it. I want to you take the onion and peel it back the way you’d like to so our audience and our listeners can really understand really how important what you do is, because you’re balancing a lot of issues is really what I’m asking.

Joe: We are. I’ll walk across the device lifecycle and tie each of those issues into it for the most part. I look at simply just provisioning and deployment of device. We try to get customers off of their on-prem legacy solutions to a cloud solutions. Those cloud solutions could be, and we call it zero touch provisioning. That could be technologies like a Windows autopilot, an Apple Business manager, a Chrome zero touch that point. It’s all based on the device. But if I can get them to there, then I can ultimately lower their on-prem infrastructure because they no longer need to support that. But now I can set up a device anywhere. User can set up a device at home, they can set it up in the office, we can set it up for them at that point, and then we can ship it directly to the users. The benefit there is what we’re finding is now I can decrease how many times the device is shipping nowadays with the users, because most customers have changed focus, I’m going to shift the device specific to the user, directly to the user. I don’t want to ship it to it and then ship it out again. They want to just go from, for instance like from an insight to the user, not from insight to IT, and then IT shipping it to the user.  So we can help in that aspect. But the best part that insight we provide, and I love this solution we have, it’s called Advanced Asset Management. Is now we’re able to give the customer visibility on what asset state that device is in. So, for example, if it’s in our warehouse, if it’s being shipped, if it’s been shipped, has it been delivered, great. Is there an exception? Did they try to deliver it? No one was there. Potentially did we ship it overnight or two day or three day or however? And by the way, it’s a week later and it’s still showing in transit. That’s a loss or stolen device. So that’s a ties back to security potentially. But then if the user gets it, what happens with the previous device that they have if it was an advanced exchange. So we monitor all of that. Are we capturing that old device back potentially to refurbish it? Because everything we do, we get devices back. We’re always figuring out how do we repurpose that device. We do track how many times a single device comes back to us and goes back to the customer [inaudible] repurposing that device, extending the life. But then as that’s going, a device goes through its lifespan. That’s where the Dex Tools digital experience tools come in. Because now I can tell you your application reliability is rated good, your boot speed, your login speed, your battery health, the computer’s running fairly decent, your users are going to be happy. You’re probably having less support issues. If those start degrading what’s going to happen is, again, we talked to, said it before, user experience is going to plummet. You’re going to probably have security issues because your patches are not going to install. There’s going to be other issues happening to the device. So monitoring that and doing proactive exchanges, say, give you example, if a battery happens to just not charge as it used to then we can tell the user, Hey, user, we’re going to send you a replacement device, we’re going to capture that device back, refurbish it, repair it, possibly warranty, repair it, and put it back into the customer’s stock to be reused. But then we get to the disposal part of it. Because at the end of the life, we want to dispose of the product, but we don’t want to dispose of it. We want to actually resell it. I’m proud to say, with all the customers we have in service today, we tend to resell eight out of every 10 devices that go for disposal. So we’re doing everything we can to try and to drive the resale value of those devices. For a customer, it’s important because they get the money back. They can invest it in their own technologies, they can invest it in potentially new product as the refreshers come down the line, they can revest it on other initiatives within their organization. It’s entirely up to them, but they’re getting dollars back and then they’re also driving their sustainability goals. So from sustainability, John, like just from extending the life of the device to repurposing devices over time, to doing warranty repairs on a device, putting them back in stock and to driving the resale value of a device. Those are all benefits from a company, both from a metric perspective, KPIs compliance, but also a financial side.

John: Really you’ve cut their costs, you shared some money back with them. So you’ve deferred and mitigated their expense when it comes to doing the right thing i.e., circularity sustainability, net zero emissions and you’ve also helped them improve their sustainability credentials, which of course, they’re all reporting on now because analysts want to see that on Wall Street and even for privately held companies shareholders want to see that. So you’ve given them wins in the new area and the new trends, the growing trends in circularity and sustainability and net zero. But then you’ve also given them wins right in the pocketbook, which is really what we call now in the sustainability world, materiality. Material to the businesses being profitable. Being more profitable means you’re cutting costs. So you’ve helped them manage their costs when it comes to device efficiency and device effectiveness as well. So you’re juggling a lot of balls, but you’re really hitting them all out of the park where you can.

Joe: It is. Then the asset management solution that I mentioned earlier that we have think about for most customers, they don’t realize just asset retrieval alone. Most customers don’t even have a process of how to retrieve an asset if an employee leaves. Being able to retrieve those assets, perfect example, we did one customer we turned on this service, that I’m talking about. They had 400 devices sitting out in their business that were just never returned. No clue where they were. They didn’t take the initiative to try to pull them back. Just within 30 days of turning on this service and us reaching out to the last known users and those type of things, and getting the devices back we had over 51% of those 400 devices starting to get returned. We showed tracking, they were sent to the shipper. Here’s the crazy part. Almost 60% of those devices that were in process of returning were a year old or less. So think about the financial impact there of devices that were just sitting in the field ultimately that the customer can pull back in perfectly great devices. If you think about it, less than a year is almost a brand new device still repurpose it and put it back for another user if they have to.

John: [crosstalk]

Joe: [crosstalk] is huge because customers don’t realize the devices that just go put in a drawer. If you see behind me, I have a wall of devices, I test them test different things all day long but we have end users when they get a replacement device, they’ll take their old device not even think about it and put it in their drawer, and next thing know it’s three, four months later and that device is still sitting in the drawer. So what was going to happen, that user possibly could take out that device one day, open it up, turn it on. It’s behind on patches. It’s not running very good. It ends up being now a security issue for your network. Soultimately, you never want to put it back on the network when it’s sitting that long without some remediation. There’s a lot that goes behind it. But asset visibility and to the entire fleet is huge. It’s not just new devices we’re talking about, it is everything because old devices are going to need just as much attention as the new devices.

John: Is that under your device as a service? You’re under your das model?

Joe: It is. It’s what we call flex for devices. Flex we kind of broke it out. So it’s called Full Life Experience, but it is. It’s a subscription model, it’s a per unit per month price. So then best part about Flex is customers from a budget perspective. They know exactly how much they’re buying. So if you think of a customer as five, 10, 20,000 devices, they know it’s going to be this much per device per month. The best part about that is for companies that are very mature and and do shared services, they can easily charge back different parts of their organization because they know if this part of my organization has, let’s say, 500 devices, I know I may be paying $5.

John: It’s a fixed cost.

Joe: Correct. All tied into that device.

John: I’m want to come back to that, this issue in a second. Take a station break. Hey, we’ve got Joe Flynn with us today. He’s the Modern Workplace director and distinguished technologists at Insight Enterprises. To find Joe and his colleagues and all the important work they do please go to www.insight.com. Joe, isn’t this a ubiquitous and massive problem that most people don’t talk about? Most organizations don’t talk about lost or non track devices with people who get fired, people who quit, people with the, like you said at the top of the show, the disperse workplace, the post COVID workplace, didn’t that become a real big problem? You came up with this solution as a way to really reign that problem in for these organizations because we’re in an adjacent or nexus type of industry of yours that so many organizations have they can never reconcile their purchase and at least manifest with what they have today. Somehow things get seep out and there’s a lot of leakage and there’s a lot of losing of devices or misplacing of devices. That’s really a bigger problem than people even talk about. Is that correct?

Joe: It is. Even recently, Gartner put out a report there that says it’s just endpoint visibility and automation tied to the endpoints is in the top three investments for most digital workplace leaders. That endpoint visibility ties into asset tracking, tighter endpoint control, and even audit trails. Because now the best part about our services, from the moment a device is purchased or even existing users devices within our service, I can provide them an audit trail the asset state. Whether it’s in stock, in use, in transit let’s say it’s been disposed off, I can provide them from the life of that device. At every point, what changed from an asset state perspective of a customer? So they know who was the last user? Did it switch users? Did the device ship back to Insight? Did the device ship back to the customer? So visibility is huge, and if you think about it. You nailed it. It’s lost devices, it’s devices that are accounted for. I was in the Microsoft world for a long time before the device world. So tying into the Microsoft E5 platform from a security perspective a device sitting there would scare the hell out. Just being honest.

John: Well, that comes down to my question. Who gets more excited about your device as a service and your advanced asset management services? Is it CTOs and IT decision makers or is it SISOs or is it all the above?

Joe: It’s all. Because we’re bringing process to your CTOs in that sense. But we’re also bringing a means of visibility of the device. Like I mentioned, the usability of the device to a CSO perspective. But how they know they have devices that are running potentially up to date they know where their devices are from an audit perspective. That visibility gets them sleeping at night better. But from a CTO perspective we’re creating a clean process. We’re creating a number that they could budget on a monthly basis, and we’re driving that total cost of ownership down, trying doing everything we can to extend the life, but most importantly keeping the user experience as high as possible.

John: Talk a little bit about AI. Talk about how AI has made insight a better company with better operations and more services for your clients, and how AI has created a world that they’re more clients that actually need your services because of the rise of AI and all the reconfigurations and everything that’s going on right now, these are reshuffling of the deck when it comes to technology. How has that positively impacted Insights sales cycle in business?

Joe: I started before the device world that I moved into I was leading one of our, from a digital workplace perspective, Microsoft copilot initiatives for customers. Working with our internal IT from a internal initiative for Microsoft copilot. I definitely, I’m a fan of that and I’m a fan of AI. From an Insight perspective, we’ve had AI from an open Azure open AI capability internal to our employees before copilot was released, before any of those platforms are released. If you think of most companies are blocking chatGPT, because obviously it would train the model. We built out our internal stuff. Now to the point we have an entire organization that’s all they do is AI use cases and build out AI for customers. A lot of it starts with the data, starts with the planning but the biggest thing from an AI perspective is it’s you gotta determine what use cases are going to fit your business and drive the most value. But then we’ve shifted too. Right now we have an organization, internal organization, where all they do is work with all of our different solution lines. For example, myself from devices and we always have to come up with new ways of to use AI to help our business, to streamline our business, to make us more efficient, to provide more value to the customers. That’s going to be across not only within our offerings to the customers, but more importantly, how do we scale it internally to ourselves. Part of that even comes in making everybody from an insight perspective, what we call AI capable. It’s helping them understand what are the benefits of AI, helping drive used AI on a daily basis. I’ll be honest with you, John, there’s not much I do on a daily basis where I don’t start in some form of AI. Because I always tell customers it’s called like Microsoft’s portion, let’s be honest. It’s called co copilot. It’s not autopilot. It’s never going to get you to the end. But it will get you to 40, 50, 60% of to the end and then you gotta do your due diligence to get to the final. Even my daughters they’re in school, they’re in college now. My oldest are in college, and I tell them like, look, you should start what you’re looking up. Start your research. Those type of things in AI, because then you’re getting that much further and bringing it back to insight from a sales perspective. I tell our salespeople all the time, use AI to go look about your customers. What does IA see out in the web about your customers? What initiatives they’re doing? Because it’s going to capture information from all those public websites way quicker than you could probably ever do manually.

John: You have children. That’s great. Children in technology is always a fascinating topic now when I meet other parents. My children are older, they’re 39 and they’re 32, and now they’re having children. So my question to you with teenage daughters or college aged daughters, what’s it look like as a dad who knows so much, almost too much about technology and the beautiful things about technology? But also you and I know like everything else on this planet, whether it’s medicine or it could be anything. There’s always also downsides to everything. So how do you give them, dad and loving advice about keeping them up to whatever things they want to learn about, but also protecting them from themselves and protecting them from the crazy things that go on out there and the predators that like to go after children or elderly or others and that sometimes could make a mistake with technology and open themselves up for predatory behavior?

Joe: That’s a rough one. I have five daughters just [crosstalk]

John: Toledo. Amen to you.

Joe: Ranging from 12 to 19. Has got that age where the older I push in them all the time. Long passwords, make sure you don’t share your passwords type of thing be careful, based on the emails don’t just click on anything on an email. So I do push it a lot. I’m lucky because my girls all are savvy when it comes to technology. So in that sense. They’re always inquisitive. They ask a lot of questions.

John: Yes.

Joe: I try to answer as much as I can, share what I learn with other customers out there, with what I do at work. Because it only helps in that sense. But in turn that’s a hard one because the worlds of like a TikTok, and the Snapchat and all those type of tools. Honestly my wife and I we wait till our kids around 13 or 14 before we give them a phone at that point. Because I just don’t think it’s needed before then. But even then I leverage apps to block certain things on the phone. Whether that’s right or wrong, it’s just like you said, there’s so much out there.

John: [crosstalk]

Joe: It’s so hard to keep controlled. That’s a rough one.

John: Talk about advice to procurement leaders. There’s a lot of procurement leaders that watch and listen to this show and they’re thinking about all the issues we’ve talked about earlier, device acquisition, refresh cycles, saving money. The challenges that they now have with the dispersed workplace and hybrid work and of course circularity and sustainability and of course, AI and cloud. You take all those unbelievably important trends that are in every C-suite in the planet, whether it’s a big company, small company, privately held, publicly traded, and these procurement leaders are being really whiplash with so much now. When you are advising them, what’s some of the best advice that’s can be used by all?

Joe: We get pulled into a lot of RFPs from a procurement perspective. Especially with your larger customers.

John: Sure.

Joe: The hardest part I think many recent procurement individuals probably have to tackle is the fact that, like for instance, we talked about insights flex solution, and it encompasses a lot for that per unit, per month price. But when you’re comparing us to a competitor who may just, it’s not an Apples, apples comparison. So from a compare a procurement perspective, it’s not always about price. That’s the hardest part. Because you gotta understand if what I’m going to show you what could be possible, the art of the possible, you have to make sure someone else is showing you at least equivalent to get the value out of it. But then also from procurement perspective, it’s their goal is to get the price down as much as possible. Let’s be honest, they want to get the best price for their company based on what partner they’re going to go with. Don’t sacrifice price for user experience for user productivity, for value of the device, the total cost of ownership, because you’re purchasing that device is one piece of the total cost of ownership. You’re talking about now the daily support, the frustrations possibly from your user. How long are you going to keep it, the disposal of that device? Buying a device, me selling you a laptop or a desktop, is literally probably a fraction of what that total solution should be and what the total cost is. Think about it, we left out warranties, like I could tell you.

John: Talk about warranties and talk about like the whole trend of fix and repair and back on the playing field again. Talk a little bit about that.

Joe: We try to position with customers with our solution is look, buy the right warranty that fits your business and your desire and your need. So for example, like we’re global. Actually, we say multinational because not anybody is truly, truly global. We’re multinational in how we can support this and there’s going to be areas where you can barely get a device to. So to be able to say, I’m going to be able to do an advanced exchange, or those type of things, probably not practical. So let’s be realistic. Those are areas that would probably be best for that next business day, three year warranty. So if anything happens, they’re covered. But then you’re going to have areas where maybe a three year warranty is just best, not the next business day, simply because a solution like Insights advanced exchange as part of Flex, I can get the user a replacement device by the next morning. Versus ultimately if next business day you’re going to get contacted by the warranties provider the next business day, not guaranteeing the potentially that it’s going to be repaired. So again, warranties are definitely needed, but the question is, which part of the warranty and what piece do you need? Because there’s sometimes you can get cost savings that could fund other aspects of the entire service or your entire device lifecycle. But there’s others you gotta just make sure it’s the right path to make sure the users are covered no matter what happens. Customers previous to most recently it was just a standard, I’m buying three years next business day. It’s based on every device purchase. I kind of think of it almost like a gym membership. People buy a gym membership and after on January 1st, and what happens at the rest of the year, they simply don’t go. More and more customers we speak to, they’re realizing that these devices there’s no more moving parts. Maybe the fan. But so they definitely break less. To be honest with you, five customers just did past two months and having this conversation all of them said 95 plus percent of their devices they did not use a single warranty request. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, that’s based on their tracking but that’s where I’m saying, okay, then let’s determine what is the right warranty for you. Don’t just blanket buy the same warranty for every device. Because you may have devices where you may not need any warranty, but you may have devices where you want a three year or even extended with next business day. Align your spend accordingly so you can get the best value.

John: That’s so fascinating. You’ve been at Insight 15 years, Joe. What gets you outta bed now, like this is a very exciting time for technology and of course the workload never gets less. Insight’s a growing company and technology’s part of all of our lives now. It’s embedded in our lives and both our personal lives and our business lives. What’s the future? Like, what’s the future for Insight as you continue to drive being the best solution based varal out there? So you have everything for your clients that can meet them where they are and meet the needs that that are ever growing right now as the world changes again with the AI?

Joe: Honestly, again, the technology is what wakes me up every morning. I enjoy it because I work at a company that I can touch the technology, I can talk to technology, help customers see the value of technology. AI is keeping me really into it at this point as much as there’s going to be some people maybe that get sick of hearing the word AI in general, because it’s really all we hear about from an industry perspective. But the things we can do, just to think of agentic AI and just be able to automate tasks, like to me that’s fun. Because now I can take, what do I do on a daily basis and how do I just create some agent, whether I’m leveraging things like copilot studio or whatever others out there to automate that on a day to day for me, and I don’t have to worry about it. I can go about doing other things. To me, I like that if I look at it, from a device perspective, I’m excited to see where AI local to the device goes. Because we always talk about AI at the Edge and most of the times conversation. The edge is your end user’s device and we knew we have the copilot plus PCs, you have the Apple Mac with their M four. Everyone’s bringing AI capabilities local. So where that goes, I still think we’re very early stages there. We have many more ISVs coming to drive AI local to the device. But then what gets me even more and more excited is like the immersive technologies is the glasses. Like the AI built into a glass. So if you think I’m a user who walks into a data center and I can simply say, Hey, based on what I’m looking at which hard drive could be bad? That’s a lame example I know because there’s lights. But ultimately you could ask just what you’re wearing any question pertaining to your environment or what you’re seeing or what you’re doing, and it could ultimately help you or guide you. One of the big use cases we used to have with immersive, actually where the HoloLens was around, it’s not around anymore, is remote guys or remote assist. Let’s go back to the data center, anybody walking into the data center with no knowledge, just wearing the HoloLens and they can have a subject matter expert 3000 miles away. Be seeing what that person’s seeing and actually draw in their space to kind of direct them with what to do. Now, and that was bulky in that sense, and most headsets today are still bulky. If you think of Vision Pro, which that’s awesome device, the Quest device. But now if you saw from CES, everyone’s coming out with just glasses. You have X reels, you have Digi lens and the likes of those. They’re building so much technology just in a pair of glasses and being able to do augmented reality tied to AI in glasses like that I’m really excited to see where that technology goes.

John: Zuck says Met is going to come out with a pair of glasses that are like what you just described. The rumor is that if Sam Alban paid Johnny Hive $6.5 billion, that he’s also going to come out with something that is trying to replace the cell phone and trying to become the new technology platform such as glasses. That’s a very exciting race right there. If you just take Zuck and Sam Albanie together and Johnny Hive, that itself, the possibilities seem limitless right now.

Joe: It is. Meta has the meta the ray bands. Where it has camera built into, it has microphones built into it. And now they tie it to AI. So it’s AI through your phone. But your phone’s in your pocket. We were just laughing at work because people make fun of me because I’m like, yeah, I use it all the time. I wear the glasses, I take phone calls, I listen to music, and now it has AI built in. Any question I would take my phone out and actually search. I just ask the glasses.

John: Come on.

Joe: From an AI perspective, and it just talking point. People probably think I’m nuts because I’m talking to myself. It just tells me what I want to hear. Even as far as like, really funny example just in my lawn looking at the trees. I have a tree dying. I can just take it at glasses. Hey, based on this tree, like what’s the cause and what’s the potential cure? And it right away, like what tree it was, what disease it was, what a fix it could be. It’s so basic today, but it’s pretty impressive.

John: The eyes, of course, are so important to our neurology and our brain health and our knowledge base, but also the ears are. My understanding from some technologists, friends of mine are the glasses are also going to extend, not since they sit on our ears. There’s two things that they were telling me about just recently. One, they’re going to become basically non-visible hearing aids for those who are hearing impaired, the glasses will amplify any styles that you want to amplify coming in. Number two, there’ll be an automatic translator. I spend a lot of time out of the country where we have business around the world and sometimes I have these translation issues. They said, we’ll be able to translate real time and just feed you the translation right into your ear. Is this what you’re hearing too, in terms of the audio cut capabilities?

Joe: It is. As you were talking about that like one use case I can absolutely see with these glasses is just think of like a blind person A lot of times they’re walking with a guide who’s explaining to them, there’s a step coming up there’s [crosstalk] way. Now if they can just wear a pair of glasses that is watching as they’re walking that it’s almost like that guide is on their face, not someone holding up.

John: I never thought of that. That’s fascinating, man. You never get bored, do you, Joe?

Joe: I don’t. I’d absolutely love the technology. Like I said, the AI piece is fun because it’s new. But I think AI and the device, like we’re barely seeing the capabilities. I want to round back out because that’s one thing I want you to listeners to understand. Many customers speak to today are still hesitant on buying an AI capable or AI copilot plus pc or those type of things. If you look at refresh cycles, potentially four, five, some six years. I’ve heard, I’ve had customers even recently tell me seven years. If you refresh a device today to think about, I’m not going to get an AI capable device potentially for four to five years, you’re going to be behind the times at that point. Like this technology’s going to advance. The computers are capable. Like looking at it from a TV perspective, we’ve had 4K for a while and just recently, a lot of the providers had 4K content. The content caught up. Now the laptops are there. They’re AI capable, the content for that AI use cases is ramping up quickly with the ISVs. I always tell people, don’t be left in the past because you just don’t think you want to make that investment because you don’t see the use case today. That use case is going to be there within six months to a year or not, but by the time you refresh this device, there’s going to be thousands of use cases.

John: Well the fun part, Joe, is we’re going to have you back on because you are in an ever-changing and ever evolving and very exciting industry. So we’ll have you back on to share new and improved updates whenever you guys want. But we would love to have you back to keep sharing the technology journey through your eyes and insight with our listeners and viewers who are all very in interested in this is nobody you meet or know that whether it’s business or personal, they want to know more about the technology that’s available to them. I think you’re the guy. So thank you again for the generosity of your time and wisdom today. For our listeners and viewers who want to find Joe Flynn and his colleagues and all the important and great work that he described today that they’re doing at Insight, please go to www.insight.com. Joe Flynn, you’ve been an absolute pleasure and joy to host on the Impact Podcast today and really cool and interesting as well.

Joe: Thanks John.

John: Thanks again for your time and like I said, you’re always welcome back here and thanks for making the world a better and an interesting place.

Joe: Thank you.

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