At TD SYNNEX, mastering artificial intelligence begins with mastering skepticism. As staff advance through the enterprise's four-tiered AI fluency framework, they must prove their ability to vet data origins, verify underlying computations, and identify built-in biases. For Kristie Grinnell, executive vice president and chief information officer, cultivating these exact competencies is foundational to transforming how the multinational technology distributor operates. The firm closed fiscal 2025 with an impressive $62.5 billion in revenue.

Grinnell directs internal IT infrastructure and digital integrations alongside external vendors and resellers, while also acting as executive sponsor for the corporate AI Fluency Strategy. Her primary obstacle transcends mere software deployment; workers require psychological safety to tinker, test, and completely rethink their daily workflows. “The hardest part of this has nothing to do with the technology,” she remarked. “It is absolutely a change management piece that we’re getting to.”

Embedding AI Fluency Into Core Business Operations

The program synthesizes technical capability, digital tooling, and shifting mindsets. Hands-on technical training runs parallel to data readiness initiatives, streamlined software access, and education on discarding obsolete operational habits. Grinnell draws a parallel between fluency and learning a foreign language: basic understanding allows individuals to participate, whereas advanced proficiency unlocks complex dialogues and strategic choices.

Active executive leadership remains central to this rollout. Every single member of the executive leadership team was tasked with drafting a bespoke plan for implementing AI across their respective units. Despite varying regional adoption rates, these blueprints illuminated shared opportunities to slash manual labor, cut overhead expenses, and accelerate operational throughput. Within technology distribution, speed and agility dictate whether a reseller remains loyal or seeks out alternative partners.

Consequently, key priorities now target credit processing, customer support, quoting systems, and pricing models. Rather than developing isolated solutions region by region, TD SYNNEX is constructing an internal AI factory designed to make digital solutions modular and repeatable. “If one region can do it for themselves, then all of a sudden we can reuse that and scale it faster across the company,” Grinnell noted. The overarching goal is translating regional insights into enterprise-wide assets.

Empowering Employees to Re-Engineer Their Workflows

Grinnell acknowledges that personnel brand new to AI cannot instantly be expected to overhaul legacy workflows. The enterprise initiates the journey through personal productivity, urging employees to leverage AI tools as digital assistants. Leadership must foster a secure atmosphere for experimentation by visibly incorporating the technology themselves. A designated leadership playbook features a 30-day challenge, while Grinnell regularly prompts colleagues to highlight wins during weekly staff meetings.

Active C-suite engagement amplifies this cultural shift. During a corporate town hall meeting, a regional president queried Copilot regarding prospective growth strategies, proving to peers that machine learning can stress-test strategic thinking. “We need you leaders to do this yourself and show everybody else that you’re using it,” Grinnell stressed. Her personal workflows involve utilizing smart agents to aggregate industry headlines and analytical reports prior to starting her workday.

For deeper process re-engineering, human resources, IT divisions, and external advisors have co-created specialized workshops anchored around concrete business bottlenecks and desired outcomes. Grinnell frequently challenges teams by asking whether a struggling workflow requires a faster horse, an automobile, or a rocket ship, thereby separating incremental tweaks from transformative evolution. The ultimate objective is identifying where unique workflows can forge competitive moats that rivals cannot simply buy off the shelf.

Balancing Open Access With Strict Governance

The TD SYNNEX AI factory, known as Fluidworks.ai, delivers a unified workspace tailored for employees with diverse technical skill sets. Certain personnel will interface with pre-built agents using conversational natural language, others will construct workflows utilizing low-code or no-code platforms, and professional engineers will tackle mission-critical systems. This proprietary factory safely integrates applications with authorized data repositories while enforcing rigorous security controls over deployment.

“Every agent needs to have an owner,” Grinnell emphasized. Every single automated agent must be formally registered and assigned a unique digital identity, with permissions mirroring those of the human operator. Human supervisors retain total responsibility for tracking their agents' outputs, ongoing training regimens, and overall efficacy. Transitioning an experimental tool from personal use into a shared team or enterprise asset similarly follows strict governance protocols.

This framework of personal accountability is enforced through formal certifications tied to every fluency milestone. Foundation training mandates evaluating underlying data sources and reviewing generated outputs. Developed alongside human resources, the corporate policy follows a standard Grinnell characterizes as “hard to pass, but safe to fail.” While employees enjoy the latitude to experiment and learn from mistakes, the mandate remains unyielding: individuals remain entirely responsible for the consequences of the AI systems they deploy.

Shifting IT Operations Toward Proactive Strategy

Grinnell’s specific departmental roadmap is dubbed intelligent IT. The initiative seeks to transition the technology division from a reactive support unit into a proactive partner capable of identifying emerging opportunities alongside business units. One prime deployment is an agentic security operations center, where autonomous agents triage incoming alerts and isolate anomalies demanding human oversight. This shift fundamentally alters how personnel allocate their time and process critical information.

Grinnell highlighted the transition of tier-one security analysts away from passive screen monitoring toward active threat hunting. “Now, all of a sudden, we’ve given them a more value-added job to do for TD SYNNEX,” she stated. This milestone bridges automation with broader human capital strategies: smart agents absorb routine monitoring duties while workers concentrate on complex investigations requiring nuanced human judgment.

Furthermore, the organization is piloting forward-deployed engineering structures to collaborate intimately with commercial divisions as expansion continues. “We have to start co-creating with our business,” Grinnell concluded. Her ultimate metric for success is whether the IT division can actively shape solutions and commercial outcomes early enough to fuel sustainable growth, all while empowering every employee to utilize AI safely, capably, and responsibly.