The Maturing of AI for Electrical Distributors

While a technology, AI has quickly evolved from a novelty that seemingly everyone tested last year to a business workflow process to be considered – a tool to support profitability improvement, and a tool for revenue generation.

In other words, it is gaining maturity even while we hear how the infrastructure (OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, CoPilot, Perplexity, etc.) seemingly changes weekly, if not daily.

“Maturity” I’m defining as everyone is not being inundated daily (and at times multiple times a day) with another service from a company purporting to have an AI offering that you “must have today to improve your productivity.”

These seemingly were individuals who had never heard of the electrical distribution industry but knew coding and knew that they had the solution to every electrical distributor’s problem. Just “trust them.” They would improve salesperson productivity by 40% in 30 days, increase inventory turns significantly, improve profitability, and more.

And yes, they knew technology, but did they know distributor decision making? Sales processes? The value of customer relationships? Distributor data quality (and all that means)? Driving digital transformation, adoption, and cultural change? Or that distributors also had a business to run versus dropping everything to decide and implement quickly.

Remember, many of these companies are funded by VC money and VCs believe in “land and expand” sales strategies. Just “get the order, quickly.”

So, the noise has quieted down, and AI is being strategically, and logically, implemented for “the right reasons” within companies. And “the right reasons” apply to the application, the company’s capabilities and resources, and the company’s timeline.

Now that distributor management better understands the potential, possible applications, and value, it is deploying AI tools either for specific needs, specific departments, or company-wide.

It is maturing.

Channel Marketing Group is teaming with ECI to better understand where distributors are on the adoption curve and are launching a State of Distributor AI Usage survey. We’re asking if, why, what and has it been successful. Essentially, we want to gain a sense of where the electrical distribution industry is relative to AI, its adoption and what functionality has been beneficial

The survey is open to everyone within a distributor. The survey should take 3 minutes to complete.

ECI … eCommerce with AI

You may be asking “who is ECI?” ECI Software Solutions has a number of solutions for distributors and manufacturers. Within the electrical industry they are best known for their EvolutionX eCommerce platform, which is an easy to deploy, easy to use, robust, SaaS-oriented model that integrates AI features to enhance product content and provide distributors with enhanced analytic reporting to enable distributors to derive an ROI from their eCommerce investment. And while it is robust, it is also affordable.

Take Our AI Survey

In appreciation of your time, everyone will be registered for one of two drones, an executive summary of the results and a copy of Channel Marketing Group’s The AI-Enabled Distributor eBook, which was published earlier this year.

Click here to take the survey

And, as distributors continue on their AI journey, whom do you follow on LI for AI insights? What consultants do you recommend? Any software solutions you’d recommend?