The Profit and Productivity Summit, set for November 10–12, 2025, will close its first day with a keynote session from Stu Tisdale, senior vice president and chief experience officer at ADI Global Distribution. Tisdale, a distribution executive known for advancing customer-centric digital strategies, will take the stage Monday, November 10, from 4:15 to 5:00 p.m. His fireside chat, titled “Turning Order-Taking into Order-Making,” will examine how distributors can modernize sales and customer experience to improve profitability in a challenging market.
ADI, one of the world’s largest security and audiovisual product distributors, serves more than 110,000 customers globally. Tisdale will draw on that scale to illustrate how the company is moving beyond traditional sales practices and reshaping its operating model. At the core of his message is a shift: moving sales representatives away from routine quoting and order entry toward higher-value consultative selling. At the same time, ADI is investing heavily in self-service platforms to reduce service call volume and free up resources for more strategic engagement.
Tisdale will outline how ADI is unifying e-commerce, loyalty programs, dynamic pricing, and data science within a single digital framework. By operationalizing analytics, automation, and AI-driven tools, the company is finding measurable improvements in margin, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. His session will highlight the practical realities of implementing these tools in a complex sales organization, from eliminating manual tasks to navigating the challenges of dynamic pricing.
Voice of the customer data has also been instrumental in shaping ADI’s roadmap. Tisdale is expected to discuss how the company uses customer feedback to prioritize digital investments and refine its loyalty strategy, ensuring new tools address bona fide business needs. These changes are not just about technology adoption but about cultural transformation—aligning teams, processes, and incentives with the goal of creating more value for both customers and shareholders.
Tisdale will expand on how ADI’s digital initiatives are cutting cost-to-serve while lifting margins. By combining data science with AI-powered sales tools, the company is improving sales efficiency, enabling faster and more accurate quoting, and helping reps focus on consultative opportunities rather than transactional tasks. These efforts represent a broader industry shift, as distributors increasingly recognize that sustainable profit growth requires smarter, not just bigger, operations.
The Profit and Productivity Summit, hosted by Distribution Strategy Group, will feature leaders from across the distribution landscape. Sessions will explore how companies are embedding AI into core workflows today—automating quoting, predicting demand, cleaning supplier data, streamlining purchasing, and capturing rebates—to unlock productivity gains measured in millions.
“Distributors are under pressure to grow profits in a market where simply raising prices isn’t sustainable,” said Ian Heller, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Distribution Strategy Group. “This summit is about giving leaders the playbook to do it—tightening processes, unlocking trapped capital, and using AI to work smarter across the business.”
With his closing-day keynote, Stu Tisdale will provide a blueprint for distributors navigating these pressures, offering practical lessons from ADI’s ongoing digital and sales transformation.
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