WWT CEO On Building New GenAI Apps, Nvidia Alliance And ‘Dumping Gas’ On The AI Boom

World Wide Technology is now an 'AI-first company,' says CEO Jim Kavanaugh, as WWT creates homegrown GenAI technology, builds state-of-the-art AI labs and crafts a bold go-to-market strategy aimed at accelerating customer AI adoption.

World Wide Technology is building its own innovative generative AI applications, including a ChatGPT-like offering, as part of WWT’s master plan of becoming a global leader in AI—all backed by a $500 million investment without any private equity needed.

The $20 billion St. Louis-based company has also built groundbreaking AI labs for customers to test out and create AI real solutions.

“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. We’re basically dumping gas on the fire that we already had lit, and now we’re accelerating that,” said WWT’s CEO Jim Kavanaugh in an interview with CRN.

From hiring as many data scientists as possible to leveraging its homegrown GenAI technology to take the RFP process time from two weeks to less than an hour, WWT is on the cutting edge of the AI revolution.

The world’s largest AI hardware and software vendors—from Nvidia to Hewlett Packard Enterprise—are seeking WWT’s expertise and skills to drive customer adoption.

Craig Weinstein, vice president of Nvidia’s America’s Partner Organization, said WWT is one of Nvidia’s most important AI partners.

“It's because of WWT’s ability to deliver this end-to-end, full stack solution for enterprise customers,” said Weinstein. “They just they take them from the initial concept phase of, ‘What is the customer planning to do around AI?’ All the way to implementation and support. It makes them just a super reliable and trusted partner of ours.”

Kavanaugh takes a deep dive with CRN to talk about WWT’s internal AI innovation and go-to-market strategy, new GenAI offerings for customers in 2025, what every CEO should be thinking about if they don’t want “to be massively disrupted,” and if AI will replace human jobs.

“To sit there and say technology is going to come and take over and drive everything —I think that’s completely wrong,” WWT’s CEO said. “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.”

Here’s more of CRN’s conversation with Kavanaugh.

WWT recently launched its own ChatGPT-like GenAI solution called Atom Ai. How is Atom Ai helping WWT become an AI company internally?

We call our own ChatGPT, Atom Ai, which is built on a RAG [Retrieval-Augmented Generation] model.

That is the application that any of our employees can write prompts into. And we keep feeding that RAG model more data, that if you wanted to search around HR capabilities—which you would normally have to go try to find in a manual or find in different information areas—well, now you can write to a prompt Atom to get that as a self-service module.

If you think about the data, the white papers, the proof of concepts, the engineering documents, the videos we’d done—so think about structured and unstructured data that we have in our Advanced Technology Center, which is a lab of labs —we're aggregating all the data that we have. This is where our engineers and our salespeople can go out and write prompts into Adam.

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.’ 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.’

So we are bringing these together to create this self service capability.

When do you plan on making Atom Ai available to your customers?

Early next year.

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. And the richness of the data and the insights are getting better and better every day.

What’s another homegrown GenAI solution you’ve built that WWT is leveraging internally?

We have built an RFP Assistant and analysis AI capability.

RFP Assistant will take documents—it could be a 150-page RFP that came in—and we will ingest it into our AI engine. It will then interpret that data, and it will kick out an agenda in a response. And if that agenda or document has 200 questions, it will go through.

When we first started roughly 12 months ago, it was hallucinating. It just was not providing the accuracy of data and comprehensive data. As we continue to iterate through this—managing, organizing our vector databases, writing agents into different sources of data that we have, etc. 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.

So RFPs at WWT went from taking two weeks to 45 minutes?

Yes, so think about going from two weeks to 45 minutes. It’s very exciting to see.

These things that you're continuing to iterate on. They will continue to get better and better and richer. But that's because you have to start down the journey of building those generative AI and RAG models with the right people that understand it.

Talk about WWT’s AI labs for customers and partners that you’ve built. Will it continue to expand?

Foundationally, we're helping organizations be able to come in and look at AI infrastructure. So Nvidia, they continue to lead the charge in regards to innovation around almost all things AI.

But having the Nvidia platforms, chips, systems and software in our labs to help educate customers around, ‘What is possible? How do you actually manage and build these platforms if you’re going to build out your own generative AI platforms?’

We have other platforms and compute systems in our labs—whether it's Dell, HPE and Cisco—we have the network platforms. Or whether you're going to go strictly with Nvidia on a vertical stack with InfiniBand or you're going to leverage Ethernet from a networking standpoint and then different storage players.

There's a lot of complexity in regard to building out those platforms. We have the hardware and software from a platform and infrastructure standpoint.

One vertical capability that crosses markets that we found as a really growing space is helping some of these large companies that are service providers and the cloud hyperscalers, along with the emerging NCPs (Nvidia cloud providers) that are building out their own AI as-a-service models.

We are helping leverage our labs to help them evaluate the technology that they’ll then implement into their platforms or their data centers to actually deliver that AI as a service to customers more as a utility. That we see growing domestically and around the world.

So that's one of the areas that we're spending a lot of time in our labs on: helping customers in that space to really driving AI as a service.

Where are AI customer wins coming from? What are some popular use cases for WWT?

At a high level, leveraging AI to discover and protect around deception technology, deepfake-type technology.

Also building out capabilities that connect to a company's digital transformation strategy, and that may be around creating a digital twin.

You could create a digital twin of an individual, so it may be some type of chatbot that you are digital twinning for quality reasons or for customer service reasons. You also can create digital twins of a manufacturing facility, or it could be in the QSR space—fast food. Replicating a food industry and the workflow around the service that's being provided. These are things that we have in our labs today that we're working with customers.

Other areas leveraging that digital twin capability and generative AI capability: looking at multi-language large language models to allow people to come in and work from a customer service standpoint. It may be a global company that has customer service that you have people calling in with different languages, and you're going to create a bot that allows that to work and handle hundreds of different languages. Same thing, if you are looking at fast food drive-through .

So there’s these applications that we're working specifically with businesses and customers around those technologies that we have operating in our lab. It’s incredibly exciting.

WWT always creates a five-year plan for your overarching IT strategy, goals and customer sales growth. You started a new five-year plan in 2024. What does it look like?

We have worked on five-year plans almost for 25 years. Now, we've opted to actually look at more of a three-year plan because things are moving so fast. We do have a three-year plan that is very much AI-led.

If I looked at the big picture … Today, if the board, the CEO, and the line of businesses are not thinking about digital transformation; or they're not thinking about AI and generative AI and what that means to their business; or cyber and how are they going to do these things securely—they're going to be massively disrupted.

WWT is going to work with the CEO and align and bring together both their executive teams that run the business and their IT leadership teams—and getting them to collaborate in a more collaborative way to understand how they bring these capabilities together to help drive differentiation, scale, and efficiencies within the business, but to do it in a very secure way.

That's a big focus that World Wide has: to help organizations think about these things because they're so intertwined.

AI is not a technology or a business outcome that runs on its own. It's integrated into so many different things. It needs to be done in a way that is very thoughtful around policy, governance and cyber.

When we help bring everything together and offer our labs that we have created for customers to get in and actually test, evaluate and assess some of the latest and greatest technology without them having to try to build those labs and capabilities internally, because they just don't have the time to do that—that's what we do.

Then we help them to think about, ‘What is possible? What's the art of the possible when you're thinking about digital transformation, generative AI, and doing that in a very thoughtful, secure way?’

When I look at our three-year plan, that's where we're looking internally and trying to look at where the market is going. We believe, in the spirit of Wayne Gretzky, to skate to where the puck is going.

WWT is one of Nvidia’s most strategic AI channel partners on a global basis. Why is Nvidia and WWT tied so closely around AI?

Nvidia is bringing out a lot of software on top of their hardware. So not just operating systems, but playbooks and workbooks and work methodologies that allow you to drive the applications.

Because on the enterprise side, that's where Nvidia believes—and we believe—that is going to drive the consumption of more infrastructure. It’s about demonstrating to enterprise customers the generative AI outcomes that you can deliver.

The announcements from Nvidia, from [Nvidia CEO] Jensen [Huang] are going to be pushing along these lines of applications, generative AI use cases and things that Nvidia is doing around workbooks and methodologies to help turn up capabilities faster.

You will see World Wide having these same capabilities: these workbooks, these software applications, in our labs to help customers understand and then implement those capabilities in our environments in a more efficient, effective way.

Overall, what is WWT’s internal mindset or focus when it comes to GenAI?

World Wide’s mindset is we all have to be thinking about: how do we learn faster? How do we collaborate faster? How do we innovate faster? And that's bringing in really, really smart people and building these relationships.

[We are] investing over $500 million into our go-to-market around AI and getting everybody at World Wide understanding the mindset of how we're going to market and how we're going to consume AI internally to drive operational efficiency, scale and differentiation.

And with that same mindset: how we're going to help customers do that? That is a major focus of ours.

So our mindset is focused on both go-to-market, internal adoption and implementation of AI; and then really creating a mindset and an ecosystem in our Advanced Technology Center and in all of our innovations that they have to have components of AI.

In some cases, AI is the leader. In other places, AI may be a factor in how we're driving an enterprise architecture around networking—but AI is leading the charge.

Will GenAI take away human jobs?

There is a level of anxiety in companies around what is GenAI going to do to jobs?

So my commitment is I can't guarantee anything, but what I can guarantee is we're going to do the best that we can to retrain and create this ecosystem to give our employees the opportunity to innovate and to lean-into GenAI and create new opportunities for them as things continue to move and evolve and change.

The world is going to continue to change.

We need to be relentlessly committed to the values and behaviors that are important to World Wide, and that is: supporting our employees, the development of our employees, and being honest and transparent with our employees.

So my point leaving here is: 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.

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.

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.