01732 759725 08 generating real productivity gains inside the business. The biggest thing for us with AI is culture. The technology is there – it continues to evolve at pace, as I’ve said – but what’s really important is making sure we’ve got a culture inside our business that encourages people to look at how we can adopt AI inside the organisation. One partner I am fortunate enough to work with only set up his business a couple of years ago, but because he built it with AI at its core, his organisation of 15 people has the output of a 30 to 40-person business. TR: And, of course, many of the vendors you have relationships with have AI built into their platforms for transcription and things like that. JC: Yes, if just we look at Zoom – clearly Microsoft are dominant with Copilot as well – but if we just look at Zoom with their AI Companion technology, it’s incredible how they’ve built that into their platform. Using Zoom, as end users first of all, not only are our meetings transcribed, they are then put into documents, then the task list is sent out automatically. We’re using Zoom whiteboard functionality to work on and chief executives of some really good resellers and consultancy businesses, where we talk about what’s happening in AI, how it affects our own businesses and, of course, where the opportunities sit. The first thing I can tell you, and I’m stating the obvious here, is that the pace of change is unbelievable. What we talk about in one quarter is already out of date by the next. The second thing is that we are all looking at how we embrace AI in our own environments, in our own companies, to improve what we do. We got it wrong at the beginning, by the way. We wanted to solve all our problems by doing great big AI projects. That was the wrong approach. What we’re doing now I liken to lots of little AI fires going off across the organisation, whether that’s our HR department putting all their policies into AI, our marketing department improving the efficiency of how they work with vendor finances, or even our pre-sales team creating what we call Nisha AI, an AI chat bot designed to answer questions about products from our internal and external sales teams. That’s working really well. None of these things are massively exciting or revolutionary, but they are Technology Reseller (TR): The last 12 months have been challenging. What are your impressions of the market? Joel Chimoindes (JC): It’s been a mixed bag. To put it simply, IT spend has been going into two buckets: the must-have bucket and the nice-to-have bucket. And at the end user level, money has been going into the must-have bucket, on things like laptops, the Windows 11 refresh, security and AI, with lots of investment in components and storage and servers. That’s really where the money has been going and that affects where growth is being seen in the channel. The pot of money at the end user level is only so big, so demand for some of the nice-to-haves has been suffering. TR: You mention AI. You’ve invested a lot in AI to improve your own internal processes. Are there things your partners should be doing more of on the AI side? JC: It’s a big subject. I’m very fortunate that once a quarter I host a roundtable with half a dozen MDs Technology Reseller talks to Joel Chimoindes, CEO of cloud solutions and services distributor Konekt, about his impressions of the market, the opportunities for channel partners and his plans for 2026 Only Konekt INTERVIEW Joel Chimoindes
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