WWT CEO Jim Kavanaugh: ‘We Are An AI-First Company’

Jim Kavanaugh has transformed World Wide Technology into an AI global powerhouse with a groundbreaking AI lab, a host of critical vendor partnerships and his belief that the company’s most valuable resource isn’t technology -- it’s people.

When Ken Moreano witnessed the “world change” as generative AI’s impact began to spread across the globe, he understood his colocation company needed to pivot to the AI future.

Moreano, co-founder, president and CEO of Scott Data Center, envisioned a new revenue stream for the Omaha, Neb.-based colocation provider through which customers could easily access on-demand or long-term leased GPU resources to accelerate AI research and GenAI development on their own terms.

“We knew about the AI technology, but we weren’t aware of who was ready to deliver it today,” Moreano said. “Every data center is probably going to have to do something in AI, but how do you actually get started?”

To find out, Scott Data Center turned to high-flying solution provider World Wide Technology.

After spending just eight hours inside WWT’s advanced AI labs, Moreano knew the answer. The company hired WWT to manage the project, provide AI consulting expertise and build out proofs of concept for the design and installation of a new GPU-as-a-Service offering featuring Nvidia and Supermicro hardware at its core.

“They took us under their wing. We began having serious conversations around a private, secure GPU offering with storage, network and managed services wrapped around it,” said Moreano. “We leaned on the high-performance architecture of what WWT had done, both in their labs and in the high-performance computing world.”

St. Louis-based WWT, No. 7 on the 2024 CRN Solution Provider 500, engineered rack configurations tailor-made for the AI era while also mapping out the data center provider’s AI future.

“I could give you 15 examples where there were real problems and we’re like, ‘OK, how are we going to solve this?’ And WWT was right there for us,” Moreano said.

Even when Scott Data Center deviated from Nvidia’s reference architecture, WWT successfully built custom IT stacks that now power and support the company’s AI mission while also significantly helping on ROI.

Thanks to WWT, Scott Data Center was able to launch a cloud-based GPU-as-a-Service offering that gives customers on-demand access to the powerful GPUs needed for the AI era.

“We’ll have 816 Nvidia H100 GPUs for GPU-as-a-Service thanks to WWT’s expertise,” said Moreano. “A real catalyst around this was not only WWT’s knowledge of the architecture and design of these components but coupling that with the challenges of supply chain and the right AI vendors to work with -- they were so instrumental in each of those pieces.”

The data center provider’s GPU-as-a-Service proof of concept was a huge success, marking a milestone in Scott Data Center’s transformation from traditional colocation services to a cutting-edge GPU-as-a-Service provider. Customers can develop and deploy their own AI applications, with Scott Data Center now focused on scaling its AI infrastructure and capabilities with WWT’s guidance.

Success stories like WWT’s project with Scott Data Center illustrate that the company, like its co-founder and CEO Jim Kavanaugh, knows what it takes to win in the AI era.

In his former life as a professional soccer player, Kavanaugh absorbed important lessons and habits that he has since leveraged to mold WWT into a $20 billion IT dynamo at the cutting edge of the AI revolution.

“It taught me grit, teamwork, determination, failure, being able to take constructive input -- I took all those things and built them into how I wanted to live my life,” said Kavanaugh. “These values and behaviors are really important, especially when you’re going through massive transformation and change, which is exactly what AI is.”

Just six years after Kavanaugh represented the U.S. on the men’s national soccer team in the 1984 Summer Olympics, he co-founded WWT with now-Chairman David Steward as a small IT reseller in 1990.

In the 34 years since, WWT has successfully transformed and restructured itself during every major technology transition -- from the internet and cloud computing to machine learning and digital transformation.

Now Kavanaugh is transforming WWT again into an AI and GenAI global powerhouse with a $500 million investment in technology, infrastructure and personnel for its AI lab, all without private equity funding.

“We are an AI-first company,” said Kavanaugh.

In addition to building out the AI lab in its Advanced Technology Center, WWT has revamped its 10,000-plus strong workforce into AI experts; created homegrown GenAI products to take employee efficiency to the next level; forged groundbreaking partnerships with the leading AI vendors like Nvidia; and provided innovative end-to-end AI solutions to its customers.

“Fortunately, we have been working in the big data and AI space for 10-plus years. The generative AI innovations that have happened over the last 15 months have taken the world by storm and have allowed us to build on our own platform and capabilities,” he said. “We’re basically dumping gas on the fire that we already had lit, and now we’re accelerating that.”

With those investments, the company is now competing for huge enterprise accounts against the largest systems integrators on the planet such as Accenture and Deloitte.

“We’re competing more and more with the established global consultancies than ever before,” said WWT CTO Mike Taylor. “Competing and winning.”

While direct AI sales are not yet contributing a lot of revenue, customers are paying for top-notch AI advisory services.

“Demand for AI advisory services is significant, and it is growing at a very significant rate,” said Kavanaugh. “We are seeing revenue on AI on the infrastructure and the advisory side that is happening today.”

Several enterprise customers currently are using at least one AI solution from WWT, and the solution provider’s pipeline is growing.

“Fifteen months ago, AI was maybe a discussion that was in less than 5 percent of our [customer] briefings. Now, AI is probably a top discussion in 95 percent of the executive briefings that we have. So everybody is trying to figure it out,” said Kavanaugh. “If activity is an indicator of where the future is going, activity is incredibly strong.”

WWT Reskilling Employees, Hiring AI Experts And Recent Graduates

WWT employees are the biggest thing on Kavanaugh’s mind when it comes to planning his company’s AI future. Kavanaugh has been on a hiring spree, revamping its entire workforce to meet the AI revolution head-on.

“We’re hiring as many data scientists and data consultants as we can find,” Kavanaugh said. “At the same time, we have our data science and management consulting group that is maniacally focused on developing and hiring a whole slew of new recruits coming out of top schools around the country and around the world.”

Kavanaugh is putting new hires through WWT’s homegrown AI and digital transformation boot camps. The company then matches new recruits with WWT professionals who have years of expertise in order to train them in specific AI areas, such as GenAI.

“We’re really pushing our entire workforce to become more educated around what is GenAI, how are we going to use that internally to drive efficiencies, scale and differentiation to our capabilities?” said Kavanaugh. “So we are focused on retooling and retraining our operational people to be thinking about this.”

In addition, to quickly meet customers’ hunger for AI solutions WWT has merged previously siloed business units to drive better and faster outcomes.

“One thing that I’m pushing very hard on our team is this has got to be a very collaborative, integrated approach to generative AI. It can’t be a silo of data science only works with data science. Software development works over here in a silo. Cybersecurity works here in a silo,” he said. “Bringing these teams together in a very collaborative, iterative way is really bringing opportunities and solving problems at a level that I’ve never seen before.”

Meet Atom Ai

This collaboration strategy has WWT’s AI innovation engine roaring. While many tech companies simply talk about what GenAI can do, WWT is actually building products to reinvent itself for the AI era.

This year, WWT created its own intelligent AI-powered virtual assistant, Atom Ai.

The ChatGPT-like chatbot leverages large language models and data sources -- such as historical WWT proof-of-concept documents and ServiceNow records -- for information retrieval. Nearly 3,500 employees across WWT from sales teams to the human resources department are now leveraging Atom Ai to boost productivity.

“They can write a prompt, ‘I’m looking at an opportunity with a large enterprise bank around cyber and firewalls. I want to know the top five customers, and I want you to stack-rank who those are and what we did for them,’” said Kavanaugh. “Atom will kick out, ‘Here are the top five customers. Here are the use cases that they have. And here are the things that you need to be thinking about.’”

WWT will offer Atom Ai to its eagerly awaiting customer base in early 2025.

In a recent pilot, WWT launched Atom Ai for the U.S. Army Global Enterprise Modernization Software and Services program to provide instant, accurate responses for Army soldiers and civilians.

“We can open this up to a customer or a partner so, all of a sudden, that model then has multifaceted benefits, capabilities and use cases,” Kavanaugh said.

In addition to Atom Ai, WWT has created a midsize language model to help customers in highly regulated industries better interpret new regulations and policy documents to meet those requirements.

WWT’s Regulatory GPT Assistant is targeted at the healthcare, utilities and financial services markets, as regulations in these industries can quickly change, said WWT’s Taylor.

“This model that we’ve created is now a validated source for them to go seek out: What are the regulatory compliance [issues] they may be subjected to? What are points and positions that we’ve developed with other customers around how they would represent their policies, procedures and compliance with those regulations?” said Taylor.

Another homegrown GenAI product WWT is leveraging internally is its RFP Assistant, which streamlines the requests for proposal (RFP) process via advanced AI-powered analysis that speeds up the sales cycle.

“We now have scenarios where there are RFPs that may have taken us two weeks to actually respond and set up, answer questions and be prepared to respond, etc. -- they’re now ready for pricing in less than 45 minutes,” said Kavanaugh. “So think about going from two weeks to 45 minutes. It’s very exciting to see.”

WWT’s RFP Assistant is being used daily for all formal RFPs the company receives.

This injection of AI inside WWT is increasing employee productivity, sparking innovation across the entire workforce and creating tried-and-true AI solutions that enterprise customers are demanding.

“When you get one of these Atom Ai [instances] set up, you’ve got your data structure set up, you’ve got the model fine-tuned, you’ve got your vectoring done in the right way -- there’s now a trail of use cases that we can turn on like ‘that,’ which extend beyond supplying general knowledge,” Taylor said.

WWT’s AI ‘Proving Ground’ Labs Fueled By Its $500 Million Bet

WWT is putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to showing just how good the company is at providing game-changing business impacts for customers through AI. WWT committed to an investment of $500 million over the next three years to accelerate customer adoption of end-to-end AI solutions at global enterprise scale.

This investment includes building about a dozen AI Proving Ground Labs, which are tailor-made for customers and partners to experiment, test and innovate with hands-on access to the latest AI hardware, software and reference architectures in a secure and scalable manner.

“We’re iterating our Proving Ground Labs every day based on new technologies that come out,” said Kavanaugh. “We are foundationally helping organizations be able to come in, look, feel and play with AI from a platform and infrastructure standpoint.”

This includes helping cloud hyperscalers, large service providers and Nvidia Cloud Providers who are building out their own AI-as-a-Service models that are being evaluated inside WWT’s AI Proving Ground Labs.

“Because of the environmentals -- the power, the cooling, the weight -- it’s very different designing these high-density racks and platforms relative to data center. It’s not like engineering a traditional data center,” Kavanaugh said. “We’re helping customers really drive AI as a Service.”

One major successful use case inside WWT’s new AI labs is enabling customers to create a digital twin.

“You can create digital twins of a manufacturing facility, or it could be in the quick-service restaurant space -- fast food -- replicating a food industry and the workflow around the service that’s being provided,” said Kavanaugh. “Looking at other markets leveraging our digital twin and generative AI capabilities, multilanguage large language models to allow people to work from a customer service standpoint. So fast food drive-thrus or people going through airports.”

For many customers, creating an end-to-end AI strategy is a daunting task.

WWT provides AI workshops and technologists on-site in its labs to help customers formulate and create a road map for each step of their AI journey.

“Part of that journey is to figure out the aggregation of your data. What kind of RAG [retrieval-augmented generation] models do you want to build, or do you want to actually build your own RAG models, or your own large language models -- that’s an even heavier lift -- but it’s a longer-term strategy,” Kavanaugh said. “Those are very aligned with our go-to-market with Nvidia, to drive not only the capabilities around the infrastructure side, but the software and the outcomes that customers ultimately want to see.”

The goal is to make WWT’s AI labs a central hub for multivendor solutions by bringing technologies together from leading AI vendors like Nvidia and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

“The investment in their AI Proving Ground is one of the most state-of-the-art environments that we see for not only AI development but testing and deployment of Nvidia solutions,” said Craig Weinstein, vice president of Nvidia’s America’s Partner Organization. “It allows these solutions not only to scale, but WWT’s data science and software development teams help customers put their business data into that environment and then work with them on custom AI applications. So it is highly differentiated.”

WWT won Nvidia’s 2024 Americas AI Enterprise Partner of the Year award, marking the sixth consecutive year the company was honored by Nvidia with a partner of the year distinction in AI and deep learning.

While many see Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia as a global leader in AI, Nvidia, for its part, sees WWT as one of the most important AI solution providers on the planet. So much so, that they recently launched Nvidia Inference Microservices (NIM) Agent Blueprints together. These agent blueprints are a catalog of pretrained, customizable AI workflows that equip millions of developers with a suite of software for building and deploying GenAI applications for canonical use cases, such as customer service avatars, RAG models and drug discovery virtual screening.

Weinstein said Nvidia is betting on WWT due to its unique ability to provide an end-to-end AI implementation strategy that can be scaled.

“[WWT] can take customers from the initial concept phase of, ‘What is the customer planning to do around AI’ all the way to implementations and support. Their AI services are some of the best we’ve seen in the industry,” said Weinstein. “They bring talented data scientists and consultants and high-performance architecture engineers to help their customers. They understand the ingredients of how to build out an AI solution.”

HPE CEO: ‘WWT Is One Of Our Most Strategic Partners’

WWT is not only a top partner for Nvidia, but a leading partner for other AI players. WWT was named Google Cloud’s Public Sector Partner of the Year for North America this year, as well as Zscaler’s Americas Partner of the Year.

For his part, Antonio Neri, president and CEO of Spring, Texas-based HPE, is betting heavily on WWT’s AI future to help their joint customers.

“WWT is one of our most strategic partners,” Neri said, praising the “tremendous value” WWT provides customers with its services prowess.

“We do an enormous amount of business with them. We like them because they do multiple things. They continue to invest with us in the key relevant areas of the market. Obviously, they are really focused on cloud and AI, which are very much aligned to what we’re doing,” Neri said.

Neri is excited that WWT already has the breakthrough HPE Private Cloud AI turnkey offering -- developed as part of the new Nvidia AI Computing by HPE portfolio -- up and running in its Advanced Technology Center, which houses WWT’s AI Proving Ground Labs. That ability to demo HPE Private Cloud AI to WWT customers is going to help businesses see the benefits of the AI service, said Neri.

“When you have accommodation, alignment on where growth is and investing together with a series of values that are very consistent from a leadership perspective, from a community perspective -- then it’s very easy to work with these people,” said Neri of the WWT partnership. “They make it easy.”

Competing With The Accentures Of The World

Led by Kavanaugh, WWT’s overarching business transformation over the years has elevated the company into bigger markets, larger customer accounts and a step up in channel competition.

Taylor said the company is no longer looking at the top value-added resellers as competitors, but instead, “What is Accenture doing? What is Deloitte doing? What are the global systems consultancies doing? Because we’re competing directly with those organizations now as we’ve evolved as a company.”

WWT is now going head-to-head with the largest global systems integrators and consulting channel partners in the world such as Tata Technologies, HCLTech and Accenture.

“We don’t win every at-bat, but more and more our customers are looking at a gap between the strategy that consultancies produce and the execution that drives the outcome,” said Taylor. “We’re looking at that and saying, ‘We have the deep and rich infrastructure and cloud knowledge. We’ve scaled up our data science capabilities over the past 10 years and our huge software development and software engineering practice.’ If we can connect that strategy to the outcomes that create business value, differentiation and scale for our customers, we’re in a great position to compete.”

Unlike many of its competitors, privately held WWT’s AI investment dollars are not being fueled by private equity or venture capital firms.

“Specifically at World Wide, we’re not looking for venture or private equity investments,” said Kavanaugh. “We do collaborate quite a bit with the venture groups and private equity to make sure we’re connecting, looking at possible acquisitions, but also what they’re seeing in the market and how we can work together to create a more effective innovation ecosystem.”

This innovation ecosystem strategy includes working with early stage AI innovative startups.

“[AI startups] normally reach out to us when they’re in the early stages and are wanting to get their products in our labs and to get our feedback and to be working with us. Then hopefully, as they’re getting traction, we can help them go to market,” said Kavanaugh. “We think about, ‘Are these companies going to be the companies of the future?’”

Many of these startups, such as big data specialist Dataminr, collaborate with WWT around cybersecurity, large language models and driving AI outcomes for joint customers.

AI Use Cases In Production

WWT has a slew of customers leveraging its AI solutions in production today, including retail customers utilizing AI to better forecast labor changes and predict supply and demand curves, as well as helping Fortune 500 companies defend against deepfake deception technology.

“We’re working with some large enterprises and large banks in regard to how to proactively defend against deepfake deception-type technology and bad actors leveraging AI to build out those capabilities. It’s been fascinating with some of the labs that we have built leveraging this,” said Kavanaugh.

Another example is a large mining customer that is leveraging WWT’s AI to better predict equipment failures, engine problems and other issues that could severely impact its business. WWT used its own IP and services, alongside Nvidia GPUs, to collect telemetry from the massive equipment the customer uses to operate and run mines, Taylor said.

“We used extraction methods to get this data off of the devices themselves, get it into a data lake and a set of data lakes, where we then started doing machine learning to try to look at events ahead of an engine or an equipment failure that would help us better predict when something needed maintenance. That was where we started, which evolved to all kinds of crazy use cases,” he said. “We started putting language on top of that data to better help people interact, ask questions, observe patterns, maybe introduce other predictive things into that model that was going to make a model better. And that’s the real secret of generative AI. It’s when you can wrap it around data sets or use cases. We’re seeing the first use case might take awhile because you have to organize your data and build this thing out. But the tail of extended use cases and adoption of that is happening so much faster.”

So fast, in fact, that market research firm IDC is forecasting global GenAI spending to grow annually by 59 percent over the next four years, reaching $202 billion by 2028.

IDC also is predicting that global spending on AI will more than double in the next five years, reaching $632 billion by 2028.

Taylor said sales and innovation around digital transformation somewhat hit a ceiling in recent years.

“You started to find the point where you’re like, ‘How much further can we take this?’ But that generative AI component to all of this has given us a new ceiling to chase after in terms of the outcomes and efficiencies we can create,” said Taylor.

Kavanaugh’s Leadership Style Driving WWT

As the CEO of a $30 billion technology powerhouse, HPE’s Neri knows it takes a tremendous amount of vision and leadership to drive big technology transitions like the current AI revolution. That’s one reason he is a big fan of Kavanaugh.

“I love the vision that Jim has established over the years,” said Neri. “He has driven significant growth for the company by making the necessary investments. What I like about Jim is he is a big, broad thinker. He also has a clear purpose with trust, humility and giving back to the community.”

Nvidia’s Weinstein echoed similar sentiments about Kavanaugh being one of the tech industry’s most prominent and respected CEOs.

“Jim has built a culture at WWT where everything starts at the top: their values, the way they’re embracing change and his humility and also passion for learning about not only what’s going on in AI but what are the foundations that WWT needs to build to innovate and collaborate and then adapt and then scale this globally. It has put them in a position to be a true leader around AI and digital transformation, and it starts with Jim,” said Weinstein. “Jim is the pilot of that mission.”

Taylor said every company’s AI initiatives need to be CEO-led.

“CEOs have to be in the room driving the discussions, driving the alignment between business and technology teams,” said Taylor. “And without that, companies are going to be left on their back foot, or maybe worse, a few steps behind. … This is where Jim has done a phenomenal job internally, but also talking directly to our customers. He stepped in, recognized how important AI was, and has been driving the organization for over a year now on, ‘What is it going to mean to our business? If it means this to our business, what does it mean to the market more broadly?’”

Kavanaugh: Our Company Is ‘Designed To Stand The Test Of Time’

Leading WWT through over three decades of transformation after transformation wasn’t a walk in the park. Massive market shifts like AI create a “level of anxiety” in the business world, Kavanaugh said.

“Part of my communication to World Wide is that we have to get comfortable with change,” he said. “Part of that is creating a level of trust within your company. You’re committing to your employees that you’re going to be honest and transparent about what’s going on and also communicate that you don’t have all the answers, and we never will. As a leader, if you start telling people you think you have all the answers, I think you’re on the downslope.”

One of the key reasons for WWT’s success has been Kavanaugh’s ability to build a culture of consistent employee support and development.

This philosophy led WWT to be named to the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list in 2024, marking the 13th year in a row WWT has achieved the award.

“People, values, behaviors, culture I believe are more important than ever when things are moving very fast and there’s a lot of change and disruption going on. So to sit there and say, ‘Technology is going to come and take over and drive everything’ -- I think that’s completely wrong,” said Kavanaugh. “It’s this combination of technology with culture, values and behavior. If you can get those right and bring those together and do it in a way that people trust you -- it’s going to be incredibly powerful,” he said. “That’s a focus I have in our executive team, to make sure that we continue to lead and hold ourselves accountable to the values and behaviors of World Wide and commit to understanding that the most valuable resource that World Wide has is not technology, it’s our people.”