At the NAED Eastern back in February I sat down with Karthik Chidambaram from DCKAP for a discussion about the industry. While a conversation, in reality Karthik was interviewing me (yes, unusual.) I’ve known Karthik and DCKAP for a number of years. In fact, I’ve introduced DCKAP to a number of distributors and technology clients who sought solutions to extract information from ERP system to connect to other system, typically an eCommerce platform.

We typically talk once or twice a year to catch up on the industry. This was the first time we met face-to-face as DCKAP is now an NAED Allied Provider.

While we did the interview, and you can view it here, but what might be the most important part to distributors is what I asked Karthik about AI and how his company can help distributors, reps, and manufacturers given their integration expertise.

Why Distributors Need to Integrate to Really Get AI Off the Ground

“When I want to know what’s truly happening in the industry I speak with David Gordon, President of Channel Marketing Group. 

And when we recently chatted for the Driven by DCKAP podcast, the idea was to understand what’s really happening beneath the surface of the distribution industry’s growth numbers. The industry closed last year with low to mid-single-digit growth overall, and this year is shaping up similarly. 

We talked about where growth is coming from in the distribution industry right now, why data centers are not the opportunity everyone assumes they are for every distributor, and what actually separates strong distributors from the rest. Dave’s answer to that last question was simple and stuck with me: people first, then making it easy for customers to do business with you. Not technology. Not price. People and friction reduction.

AI and Distributor Modernization of Their Tech Stack

But the part of our conversation I keep coming back to is how it ended. We got into the question of AI, integration, and what it actually takes for a distributor to modernize their tech stack in a meaningful way. 

And David put his finger on something that I think a lot of people in this industry feel but haven’t quite articulated:

• “the tools are available, the appetite is there, but the data foundation that would make those tools work is still missing for too many distributors.”

That gap is the real problem, and it is sitting squarely at the intersection of manufacturers, distributors, and how they connect.

The AI conversation in distribution has moved fast. A couple of years ago it felt theoretical. Today distributors are actively asking how they can use AI to identify growth opportunities, optimize their inventory, surface the right product recommendations, support their sales teams with better intelligence, and streamline the back-office processes that eat up time and margin. The interest is genuine and the use cases are real. But when you start pulling on that thread, you run into the same wall almost every time: where is the data coming from? How clean is it?

Distributors carry thousands of SKUs across hundreds of manufacturers. A meaningful portion of that product data lives in manufacturer systems, and accessing it in a structured, reliable, machine-readable way is harder than it should be. Some manufacturers have invested in tools that make their product information genuinely accessible. Many have not. 

What exists instead is a patchwork of portals, flat file exports, and manual processes that were designed for a different era. They worked well enough when the goal was getting a price list updated. They are not built for the kind of continuous, dynamic data exchange that AI systems require.

This is not a small inconvenience. It is a structural barrier. When a distributor wants to deploy an AI tool that recommends the right product to a customer at the right moment, that tool needs accurate, current product data to work from. When a rep wants to use an intelligent system to identify which accounts have the best upsell potential, that system needs to know what the distributor is carrying, what it costs, and what is available. When a distributor wants to automate parts of the quoting or ordering process, the data flowing to their ERP system needs to be clean and consistent. If the underlying product data is incomplete, outdated, or siloed in a way that needs manual effort, none of these tools work the way they are supposed to.

David framed this as an API problem, and he is right. I think it is worth being more specific about what that means in practice. Syncing systems is not just a technical add-on. It is a commitment to making data accessible and improving efficiency across systems. 

When a manufacturer builds and maintains the right integrations, they are essentially saying: our product information is accurate, structured, and available to the ecosystem around us. When that API does not exist, or when it exists but is incomplete or poorly maintained, the entire downstream ecosystem suffers. The distributor cannot automate. The rep cannot get intelligent. 

The AI tool cannot learn from good data. Everyone is working harder than they need to, and the technology that was supposed to create efficiency ends up creating more manual work to compensate for the gaps.

Platform to Integrate Systems

At DCKAP, our platform is built to integrate systems, and we write APIs where none exist, which means we can help a distributor connect their ERP to the tools they want to use even when the manufacturer has not made it easy. But the more powerful move is to go upstream and help the manufacturer build that connectivity in the first place, so that every distributor and rep they work with benefits, not just the ones with a platform capable of working around the gap.

That is a different conversation than most integration platforms are having. It requires working with manufacturers to understand what product data their downstream partners actually need, how it should be structured, and how to make it accessible in a way that supports the modern tools distributors are trying to adopt. It is a harder problem to solve than connecting two systems that already have APIs. But it is the problem that matters most right now, because it is the one that is quietly blocking the AI transformation the distribution industry keeps talking about.

The distributors who figure out how to get clean, reliable, connected product data from their key manufacturers will have a real advantage. They will be the ones who can actually deploy the AI tools, run the automations, and serve their customers faster and smarter than the competition. 

The distributors who keep working around the data problem with manual processes will fall further behind, not because they lack ambition, but because the foundation was never built underneath them. That foundation is the integration layer, and getting it right matters more than almost any other technology decision a distributor can make right now.”

Take Aways

• With technology transformation evolving to AI tools, new integration methodologies will be adopted and needed. While you can wait or build it yourself, there is a cost be it in internal expense, acquiring people, or time. There is value in speed to market by having someone assist in this area. This is true in AI. It is true in eCommerce. And some companies need help in moving data from ERP systems to CRM systems (and back again.) Data movement will be integral to success as distributors, and the entire channel, “stitch” together solutions as no one system will be your “sole solution.”
• And while you may not have the need today, I’d suggest reaching out to Karthik and his team to understand their capabilities to help you as you build your tech stack of tomorrow.