CDW Summit 2026: IT Leaders Seek a New North Star in the Age of AI

The idea that IT leaders would present themselves in such a down-to-earth manner would have seemed out of place more than five years ago. But this change in tone and style is a sign of the times. And the idea that it’s important to infuse fun, excitement or positivity into their IT management styles was one that Arndt clearly embraced more easily than Ivey, who viewed his role as an IT leader as more of an honest broker and a skeptic — especially when it comes to the AI hype cycle.

“I think it’s your responsibility to be the voice of reason and to help guide this. And if you don’t have a skeptic in the room, then guess what your job is: to be the skeptic,” said Ivey. “If you have a skeptic in the room, then it’s probably not helpful for you also to be a skeptic. But you need one. And so, go find one, bring them in the room, just so they can poke holes in this thing early on. And I think you’ll survive and build a bulletproof project if you just bring in a naysayer early.”

Arndt said she prioritizes a highly collaborative but honest and authentic approach to IT leadership. For her, having a positive relationship and effective communication with her non-IT counterparts is critical to her role as a security leader.

“Our technology organization has a phenomenal relationship with our hospital leadership, and they talk constantly,” said Arndt. “It’s something that we focus on a lot in security: speaking the language of people that we serve so they really understand what’s going on.”

Those conversations, which might seem more casual than they were in the past, are extremely valuable in Arndt’s pursuit of getting her non-IT counterparts to receive her concerns about risk management.

“Having those open conversations where you can just be yourself and feel like you’re not just trying to put on a show for your leadership … I do see that happening,” added Arndt. “They know there’s a lot of unknowns, but they’re really excited to investigate those reasonably and from a risk-balance basis.”

DISCOVER: How to optimize your organization’s infrastructure for artificial intelligence.

Linking AI With Strategic Business Imperatives

As she walked out to the main stage to welcome the more than 600 attendees at the Sheraton Dallas Hotel, CDW Chief Commercial Officer Liz Connelly acknowledged that everyone in tech has been talking a lot about AI, and that many people are eager for the next step.

“OK, we know you’ve heard a lot about AI,” said Connelly. “We won’t be spending time simply admiring the opportunities and challenges around AI. We’ll be sharing our well-informed point of view on what to prioritize, what to build and what to do next. Because the question is no longer whether AI will change business. The question is how organizations can use AI to deliver real and measurable business ambition outcomes.”

To highlight just how CDW was putting its money where its mouth is, Connelly brought out the company’s recently hired chief strategy and transformation officer, Hang Tan.

Tan, who has been tasked with advancing CDW’s AI strategy, highlighted how CDW has decided to treat itself as “Customer Zero” as it deploys and learns from its own AI implementations.

CDW Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer Hang Tan speaks about CDW’s six AI imperatives, which are informed by its “Customer Zero” approach to AI, at the 2026 CDW Summit.

During his presentation, Tan shared six core AI imperatives that CDW has developed that he believes can also help guide its customers’ thinking around AI:

1. AI-ready infrastructure: “This is more than just securing GPU capacity, because when we're when we're talking about agents, agents will put entirely new demands across all of your infrastructure — your public cloud, your data center, your network, and your endpoints.”
2. Getting your data ready for AI: “This is all about giving AI secure access to your unique business context. But then, once you do that, your AI will start to generate data. How do you manage the AI-generated data, and how do you extract insights from that data?”
3. Activating AI in existing software platforms: “As these platforms introduce new agentic capabilities, you have a very tricky or important set of decisions to make: Where does it make sense to activate AI within each of your platforms, but where does it make sense to actually develop AI capabilities on top and across your platforms?”
4. Adopting assistants and agentic platforms. “Everybody here in the room are well down the path of adopting AI assistants, but the magic really happens when you move past the, ‘Hey, let's give everybody Copilot and have them experiment on their own,’ to how do you get to shared learning, shared experimentation, shared skills, shared agents? That’s where the benefit, the productivity, will really scale.”
5. Security: “How do you evolve your identity and your security controls to extend beyond just users, devices, but to also extend to agents?”
6. Financial discipline around AI: “It’s more than just tracking what the spend is or controlling the spend because, remember, if you really want to demonstrate business outcomes, you need to instrument both the AI, but also instrument your processes.”

The tone that CDW’s leadership was taking with AI was clear and focused on outcomes, and a sign that IT is intent on getting to a place of real progress when it comes to AI. The tech industry has spent a lot of time talking about how AI will change things, but many in IT are eager to see more proof of this change — and not just doomsday warnings or the frothy hype.

Humanoid Robotics Is Funny Stuff, but Also Serious Business

As Arndt and Ivey debated the state of IT and how drastically AI will reshape their industry, CDW Senior Vice President of Vertical Markets Mike Grisamore interrupted their conversation to bring out a special guest: CDW’s own humanoid robot, named CH3T.

The robot actually made its debut six months earlier, at the 2026 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas. Nonetheless, the robot was an instant favorite with the audience at the Summit as it teetered out onto the stage wearing scrub pants and a Team USA hat, a nod to CDW’s role as an official sponsor of the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

CH3T comes out on stage to hang out with CDW’s panelists and moderators during the CDW OTR mainstage event at the 2026 CDW Summit.

“CH3T, by the way, those are some sweet scrubs you got,” teased Grisamore. “Apparently, when CH3T first joined us, CH3T came out, and having CH3T without pants on was a little disturbing to some of the nurses. So, CH3T now has scrubs, which are pretty sweet. And I know normally you wear your Crocs, like every good clinician does, but I do like the CDW red.”

While the bit between CH3T and the hosts was fun, and audience members seemed to marvel at the technical prowess of a robot that walked and responded to human interaction in real time, Grisamore noted that despite the lighthearted banter between him and the humanoid robot, CH3T was more than entertainment. He represented a meaningful investment on the part of CDW in promise of physical AI.

“We think about physical AI, and looking at them just as platforms, because we know that investing kind of in what’s next, it doesn’t always fit into everyone’s immediate budget,” said Grisamore. “Not that we have a massive budget to do it, but the opportunity to carve out a little bit and start thinking about, ‘All right, how do we take CH3T, or, you know, two generations past CH3T, and start thinking about, ‘All right, what are the use cases where there is a return on investment?’”

“We’ve got one of CH3T’s brothers that is pushing wheelchairs around, and we’re thinking about transport. We’re thinking about utilization, because CH3T, when he’s not pushing someone around in a wheelchair, he could be going and restocking supply closets,” added Grisamore.

Maybe CH3T is proof that IT can be about a little bit of fun and a little bit of business at the same time. And that IT is in a place where it can do more, be more and achieve more than it ever has in the past.

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