From Legacy to Leapfrog: AI Innovation at Avnet with SVP & CIO Max Chan

On the 54th episode of Enterprise AI Innovators, hosts Evan Reiser (Abnormal AI) and Saam Motamedi (Greylock Partners) talk with Max Chan, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Avnet. Avnet is a $20 billion global technology distribution company that plays a critical role in the electronics supply chain, supporting the design, production, and delivery of devices worldwide. In this episode, Max shares how Avnet is utilizing generative AI to transform the way work is done across product design, quoting, customer service, and IT. He outlines their strategic maturity model for AI adoption and why CIOs must lead with experimentation.

00:00 Intro
00:25 About Max Chan
01:19 Highlight Your Career and What You Do as Avnet's CIO?
05:02 Avnet’s Generative AI Playbook From Productivity Wins to Business Transformation
08:46 Exploring a Generative AI Use Case in Circuit Board Acceleration
12:18 About High ROI Use Cases in Knowledge Access and Support
16:21 When a Promising AI Use Case Falls Short
18:58 How AI Tools and Hackathons Power Everyday IT at Avnet
22:34 Lightning Round
28:10 Outro

Quick Hits from Max:

On evolving IT’s role: "[We] moved away from the monolithic type of solutions into a more cloud-first, digital-centric composable architecture. That change truly helped with driving any and every innovation that we are talking about today.”

On framing enterprise AI: "We bucket [AI use] into three types. First, we talk about out-of-the-box generative AI tools… The second bucket is what we like to call embedded AI… Last is truly custom AI solutions."

On generative design: "The engineers, instead of coming with three designs [and having] the customer look at it, come back with some recommendations or questions, [and then] they go back to the drawing board; now they can immediately get in front of a customer [and] say, 'hey, look, these are the things that we can do if this is what you want [and] these are the parameters that you're changing.'"

Recent Book Recommendation: Competing in the Age of AI by Karim Lakhani.