Every distributor in America is running some version of the same paradox: an ambitious tech roadmap built on top of a customer base that still emails PDFs, faxes orders, and re-keys data into three systems before lunch.
The instinct is to fight this. To build a beautiful commerce experience and assume customers will eventually migrate to it. They mostly won't — not on your timeline, anyway. Buyers are creatures of habit, and the habits in distribution were formed across decades of phone calls, faxed POs, and account managers who knew which suppliers to chase on a Tuesday.
"Meet the customer where they are," Brandon told the room. "If you can't make it more seamless and frictionless than what they're doing today, it doesn't matter how good your product content is."
The distributors winning right now aren't the ones with the prettiest websites. They're the ones who built punch-out, EDI, and seamless reorder capability — and who understood that "the buyer wants a website" and "the buyer wants to never talk to a human again" are often the same sentence in different fonts. The investment is unsexy. The payoff is stickiness, and stickiness compounds.
The universal move: Audit how your top 20 customers actually transact today, then ask them how they want to transact tomorrow. Partner with them and build for that, not for the demo reel.
This is the structural problem hiding inside almost every mid-market distributor in the country. Walk in, and you'll find the same pattern: scheduled reports flying out of legacy systems, landing in inboxes, getting copy-pasted into Excel, and being treated as the source of truth.
It looks like infrastructure. It functions like infrastructure. It is, in fact, a chain of human handoffs that breaks whenever someone goes on vacation.
This is why pricing decisions take a week to make. It's why margin leaks go undetected for quarters. It's why two salespeople can quote the same SKU to the same customer at different numbers in the same afternoon, and nobody catches it until the invoice cycle.
Crowley's team replaced that pattern with always-on dashboards — exception views surfaced in division meetings, and a commercial dashboard that consolidated dozens of ad-hoc reporting habits into a single view sales reps could share with their customers on a live call. The technical shift is real, but the harder shift is behavioral. Reports are something you receive and then file. Dashboards are something you live inside. Most organizations underestimate how hard that transition is on people who've built careers around being the person who runs the report.
The universal move: Find the report that gets emailed most often inside your company. That's your first dashboard — and your first culture change.
Distribution's build-vs-buy conversation has gotten lazy. "We're a SaaS-first shop" is a posture, not a strategy. So is "we build everything in-house." Both slogans let leaders skip the harder question.
The honest version: some problems are commodities (buy the SaaS, move on); some are genuine differentiators (build it, own it); and a surprising number of interesting problems sit in a middle ground where the answer depends on a three-to-five-year TCO calculation that almost nobody actually does.
Crowley walked through two parallel projects his team launched in roughly the same window — one bought from an emerging vendor, one built on cloud infrastructure with a partner. The numbers on the build came in dramatically more favorable over a multi-year horizon. Not because building is always better. Because they did the math and had the engineering culture to support what they built without it becoming a single-person liability.
That last part matters. The reason most distributors should buy is that they don't have the talent or the documentation discipline to maintain what they'd build. The reason a few should build is that they do — and the run-rate savings over five years can fund the next three transformation projects.
The universal move: Before your next platform decision, write down the all-in five-year cost of both paths, including the cost of not maintaining the thing you build. Most teams skip this and regret it in year three.
Most distributors are over-indexing on the wrong half of AI policy. Allow-lists, blocking, restriction frameworks — important, but defensive. They tell you what your people can't do. They don't tell you what your people should do, and they generate exactly zero productivity.
The teams pulling ahead are spending equal or greater energy on enablement: small-group sessions, function-specific use cases, internal champions in each department who can show a peer the one prompt that saves them ten minutes a day. Crowley described it as "little sips of information." Not "AI is everywhere, figure it out." Specific, contextual, applied. The frontline doesn't want a manifesto — it wants a VLOOKUP shortcut and a real example of how the customer service team got their afternoon back.
The other underrated move is visibility before restriction. You can't govern what you can't see. Tooling that surfaces what employees are actually pasting into prompts — not as surveillance, but as a feedback loop into where the use cases live — is doing more for real-world AI safety than any acceptable-use policy document ever has.
The universal move: Run one 30-minute Copilot session per business function in the next 90 days. Skip the policy memo until you've watched what people actually try to do.
Worth sitting with for a second: distribution went from green screens to glossy commerce sites to… chat interfaces. Pure text. Same value, often more.
The reason isn't nostalgia, nor is it a UX trend. It's that buyers under 35 have spent their entire adult lives transacting via messages. They DM their friends, they text their dentists, they negotiate on Marketplace. Asking them to navigate a 14-step checkout flow when a three-message exchange would do the same job feels, to them, like being asked to send a fax.
Customers are already asking for intelligent chat on commerce sites. The distributors placing this bet early, not in a half-baked chatbot way, but in a serious "this is how we'll transact with the next generation" way, are buying themselves a five-year head start over competitors who wait for it to become obvious.
The single highest-leverage habit in the entire hour wasn't a tool, a platform, or a vendor. It was a meeting.
Crowley's team runs a monthly review with senior leadership: big rocks, status, blockers, what shipped. Then, and this is the part most IT organizations skip, every project gets an ROI check 30 or 90 days after go-live. Investment versus delivered value, on the record, in front of the executive committee.
The CEO calls it his favorite meeting of the month. That's not because the meetings are entertaining. It's because they close the loop between what was promised and what was delivered, which most companies leave permanently open.
That's the through-line of distribution's real transformation. Not the AI. Not the cloud. Not the dashboards. The tight loop between investment, evidence, and the next bet. The companies running that loop are pulling away from those still treating IT as a cost center, and Outlook as a database, and the gap will keep widening for the rest of the decade.
Brandon Lassiter is Chief Data Officer at ProfitOptics, where he's spent the better part of three decades working the seam between data teams and business leaders — translating one to the other in language that produces ROI instead of slide decks. His focus is on helping distributors and manufacturers stay ahead of where their customers are headed, rather than catching up to where they already are.
When he's not on a panel stage or inside a transformation project, he's somewhere with his family, adding stamps to a passport, or catching live music wherever he can find it.
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