WWT Co-founder and CEO on Cisco, ' The 'AI Bubble' and 2026 Big Investments

by Mark Haranas, CRN

WWT is one of the most innovative IT companies in the world as sales continue to surge in 2025. The St. Louis-based company ranks No. 9 on CRN's 2025 Solution Provider 500 list, with Jim Kavanaugh recently receiving CRN's Best of the Channel Lifetime Achievement Award.

"Our growth has been really amazing. It's over 40 percent growth in 2025. I don't see any signs of it slowing down next year," he said.

In an interview with CRN, Kavanaugh weighs in on networking leader Cisco, if the AI bubble is real, how WWT is winning AI customer deals and his company's biggest investments for 2026.

"You will become obsolete in certain areas if you don't lean in and figure out how to be a lifelong learner and a specific student of AI," he said.

What is WWT's approach to winning AI deals?

We try to lead by example. So internally is a methodology and approach we try to communicate to our clients, and that's starting all the way with the CEOs—and could be CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, all the way down to midmarket and SMB customers.

The first thing we believe is that this needs to be a CEO-led effort.

They need to communicate to their organization to make sure everyone understands that they need to be embracing AI and where that organization is going around AI. That learning process and understanding of how it's going to be applied in your area is not only going to improve the efficiency, scale and innovation of that company, but the individuals.

You will become obsolete in certain areas if you don't lean in and figure out how to be a lifelong learner and a specific student of AI—and that applies across everywhere.

How do you help WWT customers go from AI design to implementation and production?

We're helping [customers] identify use cases in the specific areas and then prioritize those use cases and moving their team to advisers—like a WWT—to help them understand how you build an enterprise AI architecture. It's going to align with those use cases that you're building out.

As you build out the architecture, unify the data strategy, select which and how you're building your structure so you don't get locked in too much to any area. Because the different models continue to evolve and get better and better.

So how you write a headless front-end structure that allows you to write APIs into different data sources and different models, to build out your enterprise AI architecture. Then go fast, and building out your use cases is the methodology and approach that we're using internally and that we're advising our clients.

As you build out that architecture and you align the technical capabilities that we'll continue to iterate on—along with the line-of-business use cases—you will eventually start seeing a flywheel effect of AI capabilities.

What is WWT's vision and strategy for 2026?

I'm very, very bullish about next year. This year has been a great year for World Wide. Our growth has been really amazing.

It's over 40 percent growth in 2025. I don't see any signs of it slowing down next year.

There's constant talk of this AI bubble.

My view on the bubble is that, as long as the largest of the large players don't get too far out in front of them—eventually, you're going to want to see profitable models coming out of the OpenAIs and the Anthropics—but the capabilities and the performance coming out of these large language models are getting better and better and better.

If you are building out this AI platform and journey inside your company, and you're tapping tokens, which is the economic way to track it—those tokens are getting faster and better and more performant. The cost of them [is] going down exponentially.

So as you build out your flywheel or manufacturing process around AI use cases and capabilities, the performance of the models just gets better and better, and they get cheaper and cheaper.

As that comes out and you start to see organizations and enterprises—not just consumers—leveraging these models, we will see a flywheel effect of innovations and efficiencies that will take place.