What struck Sam Aldinger about the Applied AI for Distributors conference last month in Chicago was that attendees were seeking ways artificial intelligence could solve problems now, not in the distant future.
“They were looking for very tangible, specific use cases,” Aldinger, founder of Highland Consulting LLC, said. Among the technologies that drew a lot of interest, he said, was order automation, using AI to speed the process from quote to order taking to invoice, because conference attendees saw that as something “within their grasp of doing.”
Aldinger made the comments on a recent podcast of The B2B eCommerce Show, where he was joined by two other consultants to distributors and manufacturers who attended the Applied AI conference: Jay Schneider, founder of B2B-Squared, and Jason Hein, founder and CEO of Acumental B2B. The podcast was hosted by Justin King, a B2B ecommerce consultant and global managing director of the B2B eCommerce Association.
Here are four insights they took away from the Applied AI for Distributors event.
1. Start thinking about GEO as well as SEO
Ecommerce experts have long focused on search engine optimization, or SEO, the art and science of ensuring content from a website shows up high on Google and Bing in response to search queries. But at the Applied AI conference, Hein said, many people were talking about GEO, optimizing for the generative AI summaries now showing up at the top of search engine results pages.
He said distributors need to focus on packing their websites with the kind of information relevant to the queries potential customers are typing into search engines so that they are cited in those prominent generative AI summaries. “You want your site to be cited as an authoritative site,” he said.
Distributors should also think about how their website content can be accessed by other question-and-answer sites, such as Quora and Reddit, Hein said.
2. Help AI agents navigate your website
Another big topic at the Applied AI for Distributors conference was the likelihood that AI-powered buying agents soon will be handling purchasing directly: scouring distributors’ websites for the best prices and availability, and placing orders, in some cases with the distributors’ own agents. Keynote speaker Trent Gillespie of Stellis AI predicted that this agent-to-agent commerce will soon replace ecommerce.
To win at the kind of AI-driven commerce, distributors need to help buyers’ AI agents find what they want on their websites, Hein said. Unlike humans, agents haven’t learned how websites work, so they need to be told, he said. He compared it to someone at a shopping mall who doesn’t know the difference between an Orange Julius smoothie stand and a PF Chang’s Asian restaurant needing someone to explain the difference so they know what to expect and where they want to go.
Enter Model Context Protocol, or MCP, a standardized way for AI systems to provide information to the large language models that store the vast amounts of data that typically underly AI applications. Hein said companies will need to learn how to use MCP to provide agents with a roadmap to their sites.
Sites that use MCP to provide guidance will enable agents to find the products they want quickly, Hein said. Given that users expect AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude to provide answers almost instantly, an AI that can’t find an answer quickly on one distributor’s website will move to another one, and agents will learn they get the best results from certain sites that are easy for them to navigate.
“Agents will develop preferences based on how quickly and how correctly they can find things,” he said.
King noted that mastering MCP should not be overly challenging. “A basic MCP is not a heavily lift for most companies to go through,” he said. “This is something companies should be doing and playing with now so they can prepare for the future.”
3. Distributors are looking for quick wins from AI
The podcasters commentators all were impressed by how focused the distributors attending the show were on finding those AI technologies that they can implement quickly to solve pressing problems.
Schneider saw that in the discussions attendees had with the 41 exhibitors and sponsors at the show, including on a familiar topic: How much work would they face to restructure their underlying data to make a given AI system effective.
“People were trying to get a really good understanding of not only what the solutions were, but what they were going to need to do on their end to best utilize them,” he said.
Aldinger observed that some companies sent several people to the conference from different departments, including strategists and those actually designing technology projects. “They were feeding off each other,” he said, “asking ‘Is this something we can adapt into our processes or roadmap?’”
And the companies exhibiting and speaking at the conference were those that offer AI technologies that are designed to produce results quickly, Hein said.
“The great thing about this event was that so many of the platforms that were there were so practical and tactical,” he said. “They positioned themselves to be technologies that will get an ROI that is measurable because it is so precisely and narrowly target.”
And, he added, “That’s the thing that makes C-suite executives pay attention.”
4. What helps AI agents also helps human buyers
Websites that are easy to navigate and that offer well-structured product data make it easy for AI agents to find what they want, Hein said. And people, too.
“It’s important to consider the agent/human mix because both of them benefit if I do a better job of structuring my data,” he said.
He added that as distributors improve their websites they must keep in mind the educational content that can be crucial for human customers at a pivotal point in the buying process.
He says a lot of ecommerce executives focus on the content on the home page that will drive a visitor to a product page and the information on the product page leads to sales. But sometimes the prospective buyer gets to a product page and encounters something, such as a product attribute, he doesn’t understand.
“During that discovery process the user has a moment when he doesn’t know what that is,” Hein said. “You want to in that moment provide the user with the definition of that attribute right there, so they don’t leave your website and go elsewhere to learn about it.” That’s because once they leave, they don’t always return.
King related how the growing ubiquity of AI impacted how he thought about a recent website redesign. Recognizing that AI bots like ChatGPT start with users asking questions, he said he thought about the top 50 or so questions people would ask related to that website. And it occurred to him that perhaps the site should answer them explicitly, such as on the FAQ page.
“Instead of hiding the answers in the middle of blog posts, maybe the answer is having deeper FAQs,” he said. “Here’s the question and here’s the answer. That’s the stuff that feeds ChatGPT.”
That’s an idea all distributors can consider as they reevaluate their own websites through the eyes of AI-based systems. And it’s the kind of creative thinking prompted by the probing questions asked and, to some degree, answered at the Applied AI for Distributors conference.
The discussions are just getting started, as AI begins to impact every aspect of wholesale distribution. There are sure to be more AI-related takeaways from Distribution Strategy Group’s Profit & Productivity Summit 2025 coming up Nov. 10-12 in Chicago.
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