Regardless of what you’ve heard, AI isn’t coming for your job, it won’t remove all human connection and won’t run your company out of business. It will however change your life. How that happens, and what changes is nearly entirely up to you.
I’ve had over 20 years’ experience optimizing distribution sales organizations, building better sales processes and writing software to help our industry evolve. I’ve had many years of experience with AI and I’m excited to help you navigate the noise.
First, let’s debunk some common myths.
Myth: AI Will Replace Humans
The most common misconception with Artificial Intelligence comes from imagining extreme scenarios perpetuated by sensational movies, futurist writers or tech-loving friends: All the human-replacing hype is just that. It’s hype.
Most people don’t realize that you’ve been working alongside AI for over 20 years. If you’ve ever had a computer or phone auto-complete your word, sentence or correct your grammar, then you’ve experienced a type of AI that has been widely available since the early 2000s. More recent AI helpers include facial recognition to log into your iPhone, your suggested movies on Netflix and the fact that Amazon Alexa knows your voice, and most of the time can figure out what you are saying.
These are all tools that help us do daily tasks, not replace us humans. If you’ve tried AI writing assistants, you’ll see that this is like a giant autocomplete, but needs the right human prompting to be helpful. It needs you to share your strategy or ideal outcome before it can do any work with you.
So, if you’re optimistic about automating repetitive tasks (like account planning), providing insights (like suggested products) and supporting (flagging accounts that need follow up) rather than replacing human efforts, then you too are optimistic about AI.
Myth: AI Is Always Right
An easy extension to the concern that AI will replace us is the misconception that AI is always right – and it’s not. AI is a series of programming decisions to create additional ways to think through a problem, not a database with every answer and every permutation of potential song lyrics. Which means that sometimes this thinking will be flawed.
The AI tools you use are built with the training data that you (or someone for you) has provided. And if the data set is small, incomplete, biased or just plain young, then this will affect outcomes. And possibly yield a response that is not always right.
Myth: AI Implementation Is Complex and Expensive
Pretty easy to believe that something that is supposed to be an absolute game changer will be a huge investment and very complicated to deploy. And yes, there are complicated and expensive ways to deploy artificial intelligence into your distribution sales organization, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
Cost-effective and user-friendly AI solutions are already being designed and deployed at companies of all sizes with all levels of sophistication. Unlike other technologies where the longer the feature list the more it will cost, the more you know that you want from AI, the better your scope of deployment and often the more you can save or predictably offset.
AI in Distribution: Misconceptions vs. Reality
Beyond the common myths, there are other misconceptions that are spreading through the distribution industry. One is that AI will automate customer-facing jobs. It’s easy to start thinking that if robots are taking over distribution centers, then they are probably also coming for our sales and customer service jobs, too. But in truth, it’s not so easy to do this where relationship management is concerned.
Recently, my favorite take-out pizza place used an automated bot to take my order. I was first taken aback, but being a technologist, I had to try it out. The order was good, but this is one of my local favorites, and I’ve been calling in for my Friday night pie for years.
So, automation, while efficient, means I’m talking to a bot, and buyers aren’t usually loyal to a bot. The next time I called in, I was greeted by a live and local person who recognized my name (yes, I’ve ordered quite a few times over the years).
So, I had to ask, what happened to the bot? The answer probably won’t surprise you either. They had a few mistakes, but mostly the issue they had was with upset customers who are loyal to the people in the local shop – not the AI.
I’ve worked with distribution teams on efficiency for over 20 years, and well before we started talking about AI, the focus on optimization has always been about how to streamline process and make room for more relationships – not less.
Misunderstanding AI’s Role in Sales Skills and Interactions
As we see mind-blowing examples of AI writing emails, automating research tasks and even making robo-calls, it’s easy to let the mind wander to a world that has AI sales-bots instead of the highest paid employees in our company. Will efficiency-craved organizations let AI take them this far?
I don’t think that’s the right question. McKinsey said in a recent study that 65% of a sales rep’s time is spent not selling. And if you’ve sold or managed a sales team closely you probably are not shocked by this stat. Most of even the best sales rep’s day is spent in internal conversations, writing reports and asking for support for initiatives to grow accounts or get more inventory. And yes, often a good chunk is spent working on understanding their own performance. Complicated compensation plans mean your reps will be trying to figure out how they get paid on whatever just happened.
Instead of thinking about an AI-driven sales world of bots and robo-dialers, I like to ask a different question. How can we use humans for the most important tasks, creating relationships, building trust and developing client strategies that build client confidence and protects against account turn over?
Practical Uses of AI in Distribution
Instead of looking for the AI party tricks or searching for what job it should eliminate, wise distributors should look for the tasks that are already helpful but might improve by having more attention to them.
Account planning is one of these opportunities. AI can spot anomalies of spend much faster than a sales rep, who might be biased, could. Also, while it’s still early and most of our data sets are not yet trained, there is a huge opportunity to help sales reps create suggested product lists and even ghostwrite parts of emails to clients. This not only saves time; it also helps increase profit.
Knowing the Limits of AI
Smart distributors are getting started every day by taking very practical steps. One practical application is mapping the current sales process, and then identifying small tasks inside the process that need to be done regularly. Start first with the tasks that have very clear examples of how to do this task well and then document this clear expectation before ever writing a prompt or buying an AI tool.
Using your definition of success will help train the model and get you closer faster to success with AI. Of course, there are limits. AI struggles when not trained or when it is asked to make judgement calls on exceptions to rules. This comes up in sales all the time when we rely on a relationship owner to make a suggestion or propose pricing for a client who might need a break this month, or for this line item.
If the tradeoff is in exchange for future business, AI is not likely to make a great decision for you. Instead use AI tools to identify what questions you should be asking internally to make sure the right players have answers to the right questions when making a call like this.
Chris Van Ittersum, the CEO of SupplyMover, brings two decades of experience as a critical ally for SMB distributors navigating a landscape long challenged by poor innovation and technical advancement. SupplyMover powers sales teams from 2 to 2,000 in improving client relationships, increasing profit, and leveling the playing field with large national distributors.
Chris’s commitment extends beyond delivering superior software; he's a partner in growth, ensuring that every distributor is equipped to thrive in a competitive market. His vision and dedication have not only changed the operational capabilities of SMBs but have also reshaped their potential to succeed against difficult odds.