AI in Distribution

The announcements mark a significant shift in how ecommerce platform providers are positioning their technology for B2B sellers, moving beyond catalog management and checkout optimization toward tools built for a world where AI systems, not human buyers, initiate, and complete transactions.

Augment said Merlin has been collaborating with customers representing more than $20 billion in combined distributor revenue, including Ewing Outdoor Supply, Insco Distributing, Brooks Safety Solutions and Reece.

Roberts will share that approach at Applied AI for Distributors conference in Chicago, where he will join Natasha Broxton, founder, owner and chief executive officer of Alitura Group and Select Auto Parts and Sales, and Stu Tisdale, senior vice president and chief experience officer at ADI Global Distribution, on a panel.

The company’s primary AI platform, known as AI360, is being deployed across its sales organization to help representatives identify opportunities, improve customer interactions, and increase order size.

Justin Racine will lead GMSS Holdings’ digital transformation strategy, with a focus on advancing AI-driven commerce, enhancing customer experience and aligning digital and physical operations across both brands.

AutoZone, which operates 7,774 stores across the U.S., Mexico and Brazil, transitioned most of its applications to Google Cloud and is now moving into an AI-driven architecture designed to improve decision-making speed and operational performance.

America’s race to wire AI data centers is generating historic demand for electrical infrastructure. The distributors positioned to capture it built their capabilities before the boom, not during it.

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Nvidia and Meta spent last week making moves that have nothing to do with chatbots and everything to do with rewiring how enterprise work gets done.

Among the use cases drawing the most capital and attention, demand forecasting and inventory planning are at the top