AI for Reps

Most in the electrical industry have benefited from it via the data center buildout over the past few years. Much electrical material has been specified and purchased to physically build data centers, has been and will be for power generation facilities, and has supported increased commercial and residential facilities around the newly built data centers.

While cities and states debate the future of new data centers in their communities, the data centers that have already broken ground reinforce that the data center ecosystem will continue to be strong till at least 2030.

Concurrently, our industry has had much discussion, and many have initiated AI efforts within their business.

For distributors, earlier this year, Channel Marketing Group published an eBook titled “The AI-Enabled Distributor.” While some of the content may be a little outdated (given that Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and CoPilot seemingly evolve regularly), the core is current.

And, for distributors, we’re conducting an AI Maturity survey to better understand the state of Distributor AI. Click here to participate and receive a copy of the results.

AI for Reps … and the Future

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with a number of reps who are using AI within their firm, beyond the enhanced functionality resident in their rep management systems (Flow, Oasis, Trade Tech Solutions and RepFabric.) Those with custom systems are also developing AI tools.

And, as part of the next Rep of the Future research we’re currently conducting, we’re asking reps and manufacturers about utilization of AI within a rep agency (if you are employed by a NEMRA rep or manufacturer, click here to take the ROTF survey.)

An early finding from feedback is that a number of reps are using AI for business development, operational improvement, and analysis. Further, more see that understanding, and utilizing, AI will increase in importance in the coming years.

Gaining Insight into AI for Reps

To support its members, NEMRA has asked Nick Pericle from Tenexity, a channel-oriented AI expert who has spoken at AD meetings, works with some leading electrical distributors, will be talking AI for reps today at 4:30 – 5:15 ET.

The whole session is hands-on. Nick will show AI actually doing the work live instead of talking about it, with a focus on what each of the tools can do.

NEMRA Talks AI with Nick

According to the session description …

“You’ve been hearing about AI for three years. On Monday, you get to watch it work.  In this live, hands-on session, Nick Pericle, Founder & CEO, Tenexity Inc. skips the theory and goes straight to the screen. He’ll take the everyday work of a rep agency and a manufacturer sales team and run it through the AI tools most of us already have, in real time, with the messiness left in.”

Some of the areas Nick may discuss includes:

• Sales: prepping for a principal or customer call in a few minutes, following up on open quotes, and pulling a territory or pipeline summary together from notes and email.
• Back office: reconciling commission statements, cleaning up POS reports, and pulling data out of PDFs like order acknowledgments without retyping it.
• Innovation: building 3d models, analyzing pictures/videos using AI, using AI as a software engineer.
• The tools: what Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot are each really good at, so people know which one to reach for and when.

Click here to register. If you don’t have your, or your company’s NEMRA portal login, email Mary James Banter.

Can’t make it? Register to get a copy of the webinar afterwards!