The Spreadsheet Default
I needed to build a commission reporting structure recently. If you’ve spent any time in distribution, you already know what that means: open Excel, start building tabs, write formulas, set up conditional formatting, and spend the next several hours grinding through mechanical work to get something functional. It’s not glamorous. But it’s always been the default.
This time, I didn’t open Excel.
I’d been spending time with a no-code AI building tool called Lovable, and I had a thought: what if I could build something better than a spreadsheet? Not just a report that sellers scroll through and squint at — an actual interactive tool where they could see where they stand, what’s moving, and where the opportunities are. Something that makes their numbers feel alive instead of trapped in rows and columns.
So, I described what I wanted. Not in code. Not in formulas. In plain English, the same way I’d explain it to a colleague sitting across from me. Within a couple of hours, I had a working application that was more intuitive, more visual, and more useful than anything I could have built in Excel — even with a full week of effort.
The Part People Get Wrong
Here’s the thing that hit me afterward: I didn’t learn anything new about commissions. Not a single thing. I’ve been building comp structures for decades. I knew exactly what sellers needed to see, how they think about their numbers, and what motivates behavior. That knowledge didn’t change at all.
What changed was the distance between what I knew and what I could build.
Is there a worry out there that AI will override thinking? Sure, there is. I hear it from distribution leaders all the time — this concern that leaning on AI means you stop using your own judgment, that the tool starts doing your thinking for you. But I take the opposite approach: AI makes me faster at what I already know. It doesn’t replace the thinking. It removes the hours of mechanical work that sit between an innovative idea and a finished product.
That’s a different thing entirely from making you smarter, and frankly, the “AI makes you smarter” framing intimidates people for no good reason. What AI does is compress the time between having an idea and executing on it. It removes the mechanical overhead that sits between your expertise and your output.
Think about how many times a day you know exactly what needs to happen — but execution eats your time. The email that needs to be drafted. The analysis that needs to be pulled together. The customer research before a meeting. The presentation that takes three hours to build for a 20-minute conversation. None of that work requires you to be smarter. It requires you to be faster.
What Speed Actually Looks Like in Distribution
In distribution, we’ve always valued people who could think on their feet. The branch manager who reads a customer situation before it escalates. The sales rep who spots a buying pattern shift. The ops leader who knows which process is about to break before it shows up on a report. That kind of judgment takes years to develop, and no AI is going to replace it.
But the gap between recognizing a problem and acting on it? That’s where most of the day disappears. You see the issue at 8 a.m. By the time you’ve pulled the data, built the summary, drafted the communication, and looped in the right people, it’s 3 p.m. and you’ve spent seven hours on execution that your gut figured out in seven seconds.
AI compresses that gap. Not by thinking for you, but by managing the mechanical translation between your insight and the finished product. You still provide the judgment, the context, the experience. AI handles typing, formatting, the building.
Back to the Commission Tool
My commission reporting tool wasn’t impressive because of the technology behind it. It was impressive because I’ve spent enough years watching sellers interact with their comp data to know what matters to them. I know they don’t want to dig through 14 tabs. I know they want to see their trajectory, not just their current number. I know they want to compare themselves to plan without having to build their own formula to do it.
That knowledge made the tool work. AI just made it possible for me to build it in hours instead of weeks — and to build something far more capable than a spreadsheet could deliver.
The result? Sellers got a tool that helped them manage their business, not just report on it. And I got back days of my life that would have been spent wrestling with Excel.
What This Means for Distribution Leaders
If you’ve been in this industry for 15 or 20 years, you already have the hard part figured out. You understand your customers. You understand your operations. You know what good looks like. That expertise is the part that takes decades to build and can’t be shortcut.
The bottleneck was never your intelligence. It was always the mechanics — the time it takes to translate what’s in your head into something other people can see, use, and act on. AI removes that bottleneck. It doesn’t make you a different professional. It makes you a faster version of the professional you already are.
And that reframe matters because it takes the intimidation out of the equation. You’re not being asked to learn a new discipline. You’re not being asked to become a data scientist or a programmer. You’re being asked to take what you already know and remove the friction between knowing and doing.
The Question Worth Asking
Every distribution leader I know has ideas that never make it past the thinking stage. Not because the ideas weren’t good — but because the execution felt too heavy. The analysis would take too long. The tool would be too hard to build. The presentation would eat up the whole afternoon.
AI changes that math. The ideas that used to die on the vine because you didn’t have time to execute them. Those are now the ideas that separate you from your competition.
So, here’s the question: what’s sitting in your head right now that you haven’t built yet — only because the tools felt too slow?
Want to see how distribution leaders are closing the gap between expertise and execution? Join us at the Applied AI for Distributors conference, June 23–25 in Chicago.
As Chief Operations Officer of a Distribution Strategy Group, I'm in the unique position of having helped transform distribution companies and am now collaborating with AI vendors to understand their solutions. My background in industrial distribution operations, sales process management, and continuous improvement provides a different perspective on how distributors can leverage AI to transform margin and productivity challenges into competitive advantages.