CDWCDW Corporation

“The program is a disciplined multiyear effort to simplify and rewire our operating model, reducing complexity, modernizing quote to cash and supporting processes and embedding AI to enable faster, better decisions across the enterprise. In addition to improving the end-to-end experience for our customers, partners and coworkers, Geared for Growth investments are beginning to translate into real productivity improvements across our operations and will support our commitment to return to our targeted SG&A efficiency ratio and enable greater value creation. To that end, we have already identified substantial opportunities that will enhance our cost structure and will begin to accrue benefits in the second half of this year. As we look forward into 2027 and 2028, we would anticipate run rate improvements in the range of $100 million to $200 million.”

“A recent engagement where the customer turned to CDW to design, configure and implement a private AI factory hosted within a colocation environment brings this to life. Our advisory services team worked closely with the customer, a large financial services company to design an end-to-end solution that included accelerated compute nodes, high-speed fabric-based networking, enterprise switching and supporting compute infrastructure. The team also configured AI orchestration, containerization and workload management software. The comprehensive solution delivered a production-ready platform that provided greater customer control over data, cost and governance and generated a nearly 8-figure deal, which included a significant professional services component.”

“you should think of that $100 million estimate that we gave as a gross annual run rate impact. Now as you noted, some of that will get reinvested. I would say, upwards of half, maybe a little bit less there. But that reinvestment will include an expectation of ROI. So there's a compounding component of this. The $200 million would be what we see in the way of line of sight if we go further out a year or so and into 2028.”

“At the enterprise level, AI is being embedded across our core systems and end-to-end workflows under our AI-powered modernization initiative, which we call Geared for Growth. Geared for Growth is translating AI-enabled productivity into operating leverage, supporting margin discipline while providing investment capacity to sustain scalable growth. We expect the benefits from Geared for Growth enterprise initiatives to begin flowing through in the back half of this year, building over time.”

“AI-driven enhancements across how we sell and operate include coworker AI fluency, deeper data integration and platform readiness and productivity gains from tools such as Agentic RFP capabilities. During the quarter, we furthered our progress embedding AI into our go-to-market motions with our CDW Assist Super Agent, which helps sales professionals prioritize opportunities and engage customers more effectively through insight-driven AI-supported workflows.”

“In addition to the normal level of increased incentives related to higher gross profit achievement and seasonally higher Q1 expenses, we are also investing in productivity enablement in the form of AI tools and training that will lead to an enhanced expense efficiency in the second half of the year and beyond.”

“To address this constraint, we have finalized a relationship with provider Boost Run to deliver our customers access to high-performance AI infrastructure through a flexible GPU-as-a-service model while remaining fully composable of on-premises and cloud environments that may be planned or in place.”

“we've already seen some great uptick in the sales organizations for the AI tools that we've rolled out. So when you roll positive tools into the organization that are driving more precision selling, speed to value, things like that, that all helps in terms of the change management.”

“Our ability to address the shift in near-term customer priorities and meet ongoing AI hardware infrastructure investment fueled strength across networking, storage, servers, power and cooling, which drove heavier infrastructure hardware mix in the quarter.”

“FSI tends to be on the leading edge of technology, and indeed, they are when it comes to AI and infrastructure build-out. So those customers were very focused on servers and storage and all things supporting AI inferencing.”

“our financial services customers focused on storage and server purchases to enable AI inferencing.”

“The hard part of AI is not the model. It's the orchestration. AI increases complexity and value shifts from access to execution quality, depth and comprehensive end-to-end solutions, a shift that reinforces the relevance of our model across all of our customer end markets and sizes, small, mid-market and enterprise and expands our opportunity set”

“AI adoption is a compute-intensive shift that increases both services intensity and hardware relevance. It reshapes how customers build, operate and secure their environments, requiring them to connect data, embed AI into existing systems, balance cost and performance and govern usage at scale, all while continually optimizing infrastructure.”

“We are building CDW to be AI first and outcome obsessed. And at the center of that is our coworkers who every day turn complexity into real outcomes for our customers and partners. To achieve this, AI is an operating capability at CDW, not a bolt-on, and it is being embedded across how we operate, how we sell and the solutions we deliver.”

“When I think about geared for growth, it's really driving efficiency, productivity, coworker empowerment. And it's across all the vectors that you would expect. It's our AI tooling, it's our partner relationships, it's the solutions we're developing and driving efficiency and effectiveness across all of those.”

“Geared for Growth to us is actually all in service to our customers. At the end of the day, we've done a lot of foundational work over 4 years to get to the point now where we are able to be focused on AI first and our customers' outcomes and in doing so, supercharge the power of the business through AI.”

“I think what we're going to see is AI is, as we all know, becoming ubiquitous and embedded across every component of the stack. And so we're very optimistic about how we can capitalize on that to drive margin accretion going forward.”

“I would say that the AI deals per se have a couple of components that make margin accretive. higher-value services attach and continuing recurring revenues. And overall, that's a larger sized deal typically and a higher margin deal.”

“AI is increasingly being embedded directly into the technology stack across end user and collaboration platforms, networking and security environments and the data center, driving smarter orchestration, monitoring and optimization.”

“Think of it as a wide spectrum. It certainly is focused on driving effectiveness into our sales and customer-facing organizations, but equally, embedding AI across our core end-to-end processes, which will indeed drive efficiency.”

“Across all sizes and industries, customers navigated the operational challenge of moving AI from exploration into real production environments.”

“License growth was strong and focused on AI readiness and standardized core workloads.”