Around the Horn In Wholesale Distribution - Episode 45

Sa Sam. Hey there. Good morning.

How are we doing?

Okay. Another dreary day in paradise.

You know, same, same thing going on here. It's just, just kind of frustrating. It's, you know, we're past the middle of June now and it's supposed to be, we're supposed to be past June gloom, right? Supposed to be happening here in Southern California.

Oh, no such luck. Yeah, longer.

Good, good. Hey, you know, do a quick introduction, a couple things I wanted to hit before we dive in today. But you know, you were, I want to readdress for just real quick that live golf and PGA thing we talked about last week about, you know, the idea about, you know, wanting to be willing and open to make change and so forth and adapting and so forth. But I wanted to hit on that before we dive into the news today. But before we get started, Kevin Brown here with my lifelong friend and, and co founder of Lead Smart Technologies, Tom Burton. And we always kind of talk about what we're going to do here on our around the Horn and wholesale distribution session today. So the agenda for today, Tom, we're going to talk a little bit about chat GPT in your car, right? We've been talking about Chat GPT.

Can't wait. I can't wait.

Yeah. So we, it's interesting, you know, kind of pre show we chatted for a few minutes. We had some different takes on it. So we'll have some good discussion on that. You know, implications and so forth. Some interesting research out from Forrester and as well as from E Commerce360 about manufacturer versus distributor websites and where buyer preferences are and that brings up just a huge can of worms that goes with that. And then there's great, some great article stuff that we'll talk about today regarding customers starting to use AI and what does that mean for us. And I had a couple of use case experiences with that myself this week. So some of the things we're going to talk about today. But to start with, who are we again? Kevin Brown, Tom Burton, co founders of Lead Smart Technologies. Lead Smart is a customer intelligence, sales enablement and AI enabled CRM solution that was developed and designed specifically for manufacturers and wholesale distributions and independent sales agents that function in the wholesale world. So don't sell that product to doctor's offices or construction companies. It's built for a specific industry. So we come to you every week with what we've done is we've kind of taken a look that goes on around the news, that goes on around the world and wholesale distribution as it Relates to the economy, e commerce, artificial intelligence, technology in general, mergers, acquisition sales, marketing. We consolidated all that into some great articles. We put it into a newsletter every Friday morning that goes out O Dark 30 here in California to a few thousand people. It is called around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution. Just like our show and podcast here. If you don't get that each week and you would like to just send us an email@helloadsmartech.com hello elitesmarttech.com and we'll get you signed up for that. We've had some good experiences to talk to some people this week who we didn't even know were getting it but brought it up in a phone call. So that's great to see. Last piece of this little intro is if you enjoy what we do each week, Whether you're on LinkedIn Live, YouTube Live, Facebook Live, or listening to the podcast, hit the like, the subscribe or the follow button, whichever one is there so you can share the information out with your friends. That helps us get more audience, which means we get more comments and so forth as well. So what I missed Tom.

Sounds good. Good morning to Mike. Yeah, if you're out there, please jump in, especially if you're in a sunny place and tell us where that is. Yeah, because we're, we're, we're in. Look, I was talking to my wife this morning. I think we're four weeks without any sun other than like a little glimpse maybe at 5:30 in the afternoon. Yeah, four weeks straight. So it's pretty.

I'm spending my day tomorrow out in what we call here in Southern California, the Inland Empire, out kind of near Riverside. And I'll be out there all day tomorrow from 6am to about 5pm and it's, I looked at the weather because it said sunny in 85. It's like, well, perfect. If we could just get that weather here at the beach, it would be great. So hey, you know, before we dive in today, just kind of a quick little thought, interestingly enough, you know, we talked last week about, and you had some, some great comments related to the Live Golf Tour, you know, and PGA Tour merging and you know, as of early last week, well, I should say a few days afterwards when we were talking about it last Friday was that, you know, there'd been no, no response yet from some of the major players. Here we go. Andy saying up In Portland it's 70s, so enjoy that. Andy.

I guess there's not a lot of empathy, right?

No, no, no, Andy doesn't. That's right. Well, and Andy's an East coast guy, then an Ohio guy and then a. So for those of you listening on the podcast, we just, we get live comments throughout the morning here from, you know, listeners and friends and followers and so forth. So Andy's up in Portland. And you know, I, I've, in fact, you know, it's interesting, I, I make this comment regularly about a day that I spent one time, I think it was in March, one time in Seattle. And I was just up there for the day for a couple of meetings. And what's funny is that Andy was in this same meeting with me. It was probably the prettiest day I've ever seen in the Northeast or in the Northwest, I should say. And what I realized was to get that sunny day they need with all the green trees, they need a whole lot of rain and a whole lot of gray to get as beautiful as it was. So that's kind of funny. But back to that golf tour piece, you know, we tied that back to change, right? It wasn't just about the news. It was about can we adapt, can we change. And you talked about some really neat stuff with that. But what was interesting is I read something last night that says, you know, we haven't seen the responses yet or major responses from some of the golfers who had passed the big money up. Well, like everything, you talk about this all the time, right. You're going to use a different approach to it this morning later in a discussion, but we always say follow the money. What it appears that's been going on, this was speculation, but is that those players that skip that live money are going to get an equity position in the new organization.

Yeah, yeah, I believe that's true. Even the new commissioner said that there was going to be some pretty, you know, like, I mean, think about, it's a for profit company, so you have option grants and just like you would in any other, any other thing. So yeah, they're, you know, they'll figure it out. There's enough money and stuff to make it all work. Good.

Well, let's dive into the news a little bit. Let's. Again, if you're listening on the recording or in the podcast, what our live listeners are seeing is a copy of this email that we send out each week. We've talked a lot in the last few months about the port strike.

Right.

Or the potential of port strike and the work slowdown. So good news is here on the west coast is that there's a tentative deal that struck. It looks like a six year deal. The Department of Labor jumped in and helped negotiate some things. I think they were in Seattle it said for the negotiations. But it impacts 29 West coast ports. So, you know, the clogging of ships out in Long beach and LA harbor, which is the biggest on the west coast, should be narrowing down pretty quick. But still some big impact on the, on supply chain that's happened because of it.

Yeah, it'll also be interesting to see. I mean it's a six year agreement. It'll be interesting to see if that six year agreement holds. That's just my, I, I, it seems like just in the dynamics of what we live in today, whether they'll actually be able to actually make that six year agreement work over six years, I don't know. But it'll be interesting to see. But at least it's good that it got settled out and some of the clogs can open up again.

You know, it's interesting you say that because, and this could be a can of worms, I want to be careful not to open up too far. But you know, it just kind of brings the union piece into things here and obviously there's always been some level or a place for unions, especially when they first started. But when you read some of the stuff that's been going on and this article, and this was from cnbc, you know, talks about some of the work shortages or people just doing their job slowly on purpose where they've had to literally shut down some afternoons because they can't get enough done to have it worth having everybody there. And it just, that just kind of frustrates me. You know, it's just a big game and I hate to see it.

Yeah.

So to, before we go on, two other impacted pieces here though, right, is they got this deal which, you know, I think once it's announced in the news like this, they're going to ratify it. There might be some last changes to it, but it wouldn't have been let out this far if they weren't planning to get it done. But now you've got the same International Longshore Workers Union in Canada is already voted to strike and it could be as, as early as next week. So maybe there's some points from this deal that talked about that they could make come into that because that could have huge impact in Canada. And then the other side of it is the supply chain issues. It's not that we're out of the woods completely because there's a, I just read about this a couple weeks ago and it was in this Article talked about a water level was really low in the Panama Canals. Darlene and I were out to dinner and ran into some friends who had actually had an opportunity to cross the Panama Canal a couple of months ago and they were talking about how low the water is. So that's slowing things down.

So how does the water get low in the Panama Canal?

It moves from ocean to a lake there and that lake I guess is impacted by, by lack of rain and so forth. So. Okay.

That was the hardest rain I've ever been in my life.

So I'll, I'll, I'll come back next week as an expert on water levels in the Panama Canal.

Please do.

I'm actually intrigued by that. So I'll be reading about that I'm sure tonight. Let's move on, my friend. So you want to jump in here? You want to talk about this Forbes article first?

Sure. You know I, it's, it's interesting right. Is basically everybody is what it's saying.

Yeah.

Manufacturers wise is intending to raise prices in the second half of 2023. I think in reading through this and it's not surprising right. Is that it's if you can, why not. And so a lot of people are, you know, you're going to be able to get away with it. I think that this is the second major set of price increases I believe according to the article that's occurred on a lot of the manufacturing front. But.

Exactly.

You know I, I even see this in some software like I'm, you know some software that I use, business software just raising the prices because they can. Yeah. And you know it's, and I think that is probably some of the risk that we have to this whole inflationary battle is that hey if people are going to be able, be able to raise prices, they probably will. And you know we've probably not even seen a lot of that.

No, I, I think you're right. You know I, we to your point about technology prices. I, I kind of laugh about that as we haven't raised any prices or change any prices in three years at Lead Smart. But we were, I don't know if you were on the call. I think don't think you were on a this call with me. I was on the call with a new large electrical distributor that's coming on with our product here shortly and I was talking to one of their people last week and they were saying that in some e commerce software that they're looking at is when they can get the people to call them back. I think he Said the pricing has changed three times in like four months that he's been gathering information and trying to put something together with him, which is just astounding to me.

Right.

I mean, how do you do that to people? But you know, it's one thing, right. When we're in the pandemic and you're trying to get latex gloves and, and isolation gowns and you know, N95 respirator, that's a different story. But, but in general, but it was interesting. This was, they mentioned these were companies that were pulled and this was four. Forbes did this with some pretty prestigious companies that do polling and so forth. There were companies between 10 million in sales and 100 million in sales that were talking about this, these manufacturers. So it was kind of interesting, but was. It hit a bunch of other statistics that I thought were interested and it talked about investments in artificial intelligence that they're working on and making. It says 69% of them are already adopting and seeing a return on investment in some level of AI. So I thought that was kind of neat to see.

Yeah, I, I had a question on that is, you know, those must be much the much larger manufacturers. Right. Because we certainly don't see that in the manufacturers that we're talking to that are more in the mid market. So I thought that, you know, they didn't obviously talk about who were they looking at. But there's no way we're seeing that sort of, you know, adoption of AI in the, in the world we're in.

Correct. I would agree, fully agree with you. What was interesting though is, and I'm interested in your take on this and this is this could be a battle discussion for a group of people. But it said a couple of statistics here, 86 of these executives interviewed said they have a, they support federal regulations of technology and almost 95% they said they believed that AI would likely become a top issue for voters. And then 83% expressed support for a formation of an AI presidential task force.

And did they, did they give some of the reasons behind that or.

No, just. That's it, that's all just was, this was just the recap of the research. But it just, I mean, I. Look, I mean, I don't know about the top issue for voters, but just the fact that they support regular regulations related to this. I think there's some people that have gotten scared out there, you know, and, and rightly so in some instances. Right. Because AI in the hands of the wrong people can do some bad stuff if we're not Careful.

Sure. But it'd be interesting to get more perspective on that from the, just the business side. Right. Not the, you know, hey, I'm afraid that, you know, the bad, with the bad actors are going to do, but is there some, some aspect of that regulation that they believe will. Could benefit their business or, or possibly, I don't know, buy time or, you know, not allow them to get overtaken? But I don't know, it'd be interesting to know the viewpoint on, on that part of it.

Yeah. Well, you know, I, what, I wonder about what. I mean, what comes to my mind as an executive in our company is, you know, I'm not crazy about too much regulation with this, but I think there is because there's going to be so many bad actors with this.

Right.

It just, just the nature of the beast and technology as we get bad actors involved with this. If there was some, you know, we, we look at, you know, we have ASTM standards, we have NIOSH standards, we have, you know, Transportation Safety Board standards, we have all kinds of standards around us. If there were some standards put that these organizations met. That's what comes to my mind. It's like, how do I know who to trust?

Right. Yeah. And I, I do believe that models, the AI models will start to have Good Housekeeping seal of approval for lack of a better thing. Or maybe it's probably going to be more like a rating system like you have on movies in some ways.

Yeah.

Right. Is, you know, what's involved in it, what are the different levels, all that kind of stuff. I believe that will come. Now, does that have to be government regulated? Can that be done through just industry and we'll see. Right. But I think there's two parts. The, it's, it's, it's very hard to get a result through just saying there's going to be a government regulation. There has to be an agreement on how we're going to go about this. And I think the NIOSH and all that stuff's a good example.

Right.

Use that so you understand that certain things have occurred and certain checks and balances have occurred before you go do something. Same same concept here. Anyway, I know that's not what this topic is about, but I think there's a lot of ways to handle it without necessarily getting government involved. But I do believe that there has to be some understanding and oversight so that people have confidence in what they're getting involved in.

Totally agree. I think that's exactly where we're at. So the last piece on this article that I thought was really interesting. Says manufacturers are continuing to bring their factories closer to home with nearly half reporting that they have already reshored some facilities and another third planning to do so. So you know we talk about that pretty regularly about on shoring, near shoring, reshoring, bring manufacturing closer, helping out with the supply chain issues that we see on an ongoing basis. So I thought that was kind of a nice aligned with one of the.

Articles from last week about all the board conversations having reshoring.

Yep, exactly right. So good article. Forbes magazine that was there. I enjoyed enjoyed reading that. So boy, this one's Next up here. B2B buyers prefer manufacturers e commerce sites. So this was from Digital Commerce360. I find their their newsletter and information they put out some of their research each week pretty interesting. If you don't subscribe to that it might be worth it. But of course you can get the highlights of that each week from from us here on around the Horn. Just before we jump ahead, Mike Mortensen. It's great to have you with us today, Mike. In fact, Rod, Rodney and the east coast made a nice comment earlier back to our Panama Canal thing. So thanks for that Rodney. Well that'll help with my research. But you know, Mike made this comment about AI models with guidelines contained within closed data environments can be powerful, good, loose in the global data environment. It could be destructive. So Tom, I'm going to let you dive in on that comment. And Mike, thanks for that. Appreciate it. I just met Mike recently, is obviously a sharp business guy if he's coming here to listen to us each week. But boy, I don't know.

I don't know if that's true or not.

We'll see. Well, our downloads on all the podcast formats are growing. In fact, you know what, I didn't mention this. I was looking the other day. You know you're usually the data guy here, but I think last week we had Downloads from about 9 countries of the podcast. So a handful of them in Europe and Latin America. So it's nice to see. But this is great right now. Mike triggered something here. Tom and I know you could talk for an hour on this is, you know, first party data, third party data, you know, data that we're looking at with AI that's our own data within our organization for outside of. Why don't you hit on that a little bit?

Well, I think we can tie it right into this article, the one that you just Talked about. The B2B buyers prefer manufacturers e commerce sites.

Yep.

The re the reason that they prefer it, as they said, is there's. I can get better data there, right. I can go to the manufacturer side, I can get more data, I can get more details, maybe more reviews, whatever the case may be. Which makes sense, right? Because if you went to a distributor website, they're dealing with potentially lots of manufacturers that they're supporting and selling on that marketplace. What's interesting, and this is some testing I've been doing the last couple of weeks and is building what Mike calls here closed data environments or private models, if you want to call it that. What's interesting is the speed of which I have been able to build out some private closed data environments or private models, but using either data from within a company or in the example here, I could take, if I was a distributor, I could actually build a closed and data model but using data from manufacture websites so I can go and read. I mean it's all public data from there. So I can take data, combine it with my own piece there and create an experience as a distributor that could be better as good or better than going to the manufacturer website.

So we can tailor it to our own needs in that case, right.

Versus even to the context. Right. If I'm a distributor, whether I'm a regional distributor or depending upon if I'm industrial or electrical or whatever the case may be, I can now even tailor the experience through a generative chat model or chatbot or experience even on my own website. That's incorporating a lot of that manufactured data that people want, but at the same time adding the value from the distributor perspective. So it's. What's interesting about this is that I can totally understand why B2B buyers prefer going to manufacturers e commerce sites currently because of that depth of data and depth of understanding. I see this as an opportunity as a distributor to leverage AI closed data, private models, pulling things from other sources and building their own models that actually could exceed the experience possibly that they would get from a manufacturer. Which is what we're going to have to do if we want to continue to compete on the, on the e commerce side.

Well, it's great. And this, this brings up, you know, kind of such this. Good point. Right. It's the next level of something we've talked about, you know, a number of times in the past. It's something I've lived with my whole career being working for a large distributor and then as a manufacturer's rep and then a manufacturer. Right. It's the look, distributors play a very specific role that's Critical. They're the local people, they can have the local inventory. You know, the original traditional model has been manufacturer ships pallets, distributor ships boxes or each is right. And, but now, you know, we're seeing more and more manufacturers who they're selling at full list price but they're putting retail storefronts on their websites and, and also, you know, Amazon stores of their own that are there as well. And so, but this is that rub that's happened forever. It's like, well, is it, you know, the, the story has, has often been well it's, you know, it's good for the brand, it's good for, you know, good for everybody that we're out there. Well now this is saying, hey Mr. Distributor, you need to. And I'd love. We have a couple distributors that are, that are here with us today. I'd love their. It's great. I'm so I'm looking at some of the people that have logged in and commented both on the different platforms. We have a really broad mix today with us of technology people and wholesale distribution folks. So it's kind of neat to see the crossover there. But the idea now is in my view of all of this, right, if I'm in perfect scenario is I'm a manufacturer. I decided to post my products online for sale as well. I'm selling at my list price. I know rarely do my distribution partner sell it list price. I have that there. But now I could build a model in theory, right, that I could give access to, to my distributors. You know, they're already doing this, right?

You don't even have to do that. You don't even have to go that far. Okay. And that's, that's the, the beauty of it. And you know, Mike I think actually said this. Well he says approve third party data sources that enhance your environment. So back up for a minute, right? You just said it. The job of the, the manufacturer is to create products. That's what they do, they create products. Or the distributor's job is to provide a solution to their customer. That solution could have different products, it could have services, it could have value add, but at the end of the day they're providing a solution ultimately to their end user customer there. So yeah, by the man as a distributor, that's the beauty of this. I can go build a distributor, my own distributor, private model using as Mike called here, approved third party data sources which could just be simple links to the website I'm sucking in. I'm indexing the websites of my distributors or I'M sorry of my manufacturers.

Right.

Or whoever that I'm representing and then layering that with some of my own data and my own expertise to create a conversational type environment that could be a much better solution or much better experience for my end user who again is looking for that solution.

Right.

So they have the best of both worlds. They get the data from the, the manufacturer but then they also get the value add from the distributor incorporated into the experience through the generative AI model there. So the manufacturer doesn't actually, actually have to do anything. We don't. It's a distributor as kind of the ball is in the distributor court to kind of pull all this together which is what I'm learning over the last couple weeks of how Fast now ties.

Into a bunch of the stuff that you've been building into lead smart, right, that you've been showing me with some of your, your late night mad scientist stuff that you've done. But it's really, really cool. You know where we're aggregate aggregating might be too simple of a term. You know, maybe there's a. I'm going to come up with the next term for that. You know. So that's where we're really looking at taking it right. Our, our product and product, a family of products is to be able to aggregate this disparate data right across an organization. You're erp, your marketing automation, your E commerce data right into a narrative that can be used to sell more product and help your customers better. So that's great. David Gordon made a nice comment. It's nice to have you with us today, Dave. In fact, David is. I'm just going to mention him real quick because we were emailing yesterday and I've got to get back with him is he's going to join us soon. David is one of the top researchers, consultants and speakers and writers in wholesale distribution in general but very, very well known in the electrical market and so love it when he shares a comment here. But you're talking about their number of data sources that syndicate information distributors from manufacturers. Some match the enriched content to distributor ERP info. And I love that he mentioned that because it was something I was thinking a few moments ago. A lot of the buying groups are actually working on trying to do that on behalf of their members right now. But they're less AI driven at least. And I'd love David's comment on this if he's aware of some that have strong AI components to it. But from what we've seen is from the Most part is that most of the manufacturers data is just being, you know, to your point, PDF driven and it's, it's aggregated and then consolidated across platforms.

Well, and we'll talk more. I know we're going to talk a bit more about this coming up on to some of the other articles. So I'll save some of my conversation about search and yeah, but I do want to just before we leave here also. Sorry, wrong one. I wanted to add something that Mike said here. Right. Is that manufacturers want to go there but are being forced by distributor channels that are not capable or willing to invest in digital platforms. And that is my point is bravo. That is exactly my point. The beauty of it is as a distributor I have a huge opportunity here by doing some of that and because I can add the additional value of what I'm doing as a distributor combining with the product data and knowledge of the manufacturer. So I really and I have the relationship with the end user. So let's not let that relationship get away. Let's keep that relationship with the end.

User, let's enhance it, let's enable it further, let's grow it. Right. And I think what we're going to see is, and I'd love to both David and Mike that are making some comments here, by the way, David's going to join us in probably late July or early August here on around the Horn as a guest and maybe Mike would consider joining us. I love his comments today. It'd be great to have him join us sometime as well as we talk about these things. But you know, I can, I can tell you based on my life experiences, there are distributors who drag because they're so good, whether it's at enabling their sales team using technology, whatever it may be, their own marketing efforts and probably a big, a big part of it is in marketing efforts that they're dragging along with them some of their key suppliers. Now you've got some top tier global manufacturers that maybe do a great job with all the content they have available but you've got some smaller niche organizations that are still living in the stone age sometimes when it comes to, you know, how they share data, how they share product information, so forth. So I think what some of this AI is going to be doing, let's kind of nutshell all of this for, for the sake of time today, but is we're entering a place where, you know, a distributor could be a small distributor can compete with the big guys, a big guy can, with putting the right resources to this can far surpass what his manufacturers could do because of all the tools that are available specifically with AI that can really can harvest all of this information out there.

Yep. And it allows a regional distributor to be. Or a small distributor, local distributor especially that niche even gets you even more power of that. And anyway there's. And we're, you know, there's more. We'll actually be showing some of this more to come because one of our buying group partners we're working on something like this with is. And they're looking at that on how they help their members facilitate that as they go forward. So I really believe there's a huge opportunity. I do agree with this article. It's probably happening right now, but now is the time for a distributor to kind of take back control and they can do that in a really powerful and valuable way for the, for their customer. So.

So this, this article kind of before we go out of this, you know there's, there's some. This was done combination of groups worked on this. But Joe Sisman from, from Forester. Tom, do you remember Joe? You met.

Sure.

Joe was. Joe was a keynote at Affiliated Distributors E Commerce and marketing event last fall. And the great speaker, a really interesting guy. He. He does. He's a senior guy at Forrester Research but he also competes in BMX bike events like trick BMX bike stuff which is pretty cool. The video he showed in his session. But had a chance to talk to him. In fact he and Joe and Dirk Beveridge and I got a chance to chat for a few minutes after the keynote that he had done. But really interesting stuff here. But in that research, Basically they say 70% of B2B buyers will increase their online purchasing of goods and services in 2023.

Right.

So manufacturers, to David's point, to Mike's point to this discussion is, you know, manufacturers need to continue to enable and provide great data to their distributors and if they don't do a good job, somebody else will and, and. Or the distributor will do it for themselves because the tools are becoming more and more available.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Yep. So I mean, Mike just nailed it here.

Right.

It's shocking to him and, and Micron's a large organization in Alaska and a distributorship in Alaska and to see this paradigm shift. And you know, it's interesting as Mike says, this is, you know, we talk to both manufacturing companies and distributors every day in our business as we, you know, enable their technology expansion or digital transformation, so to speak, in the companies that we see. It's astounding to me. The number of quarter billion dollar a year, half a billion dollar a year in sales, distributors and manufacturers who might have 15 people in their IT department but have never implemented a robust E commerce system. They have never even, they've never even truly deeply considered a CRM in their organization. It's astounding to me, but we see that. So Mike, you know, the, this paradigm shift as you describe it, I think there's, there's people that are going to be on this curve and sticking with it and there's going to people that are going to crash and burn in this shift.

Yeah. And I, and I think also I want to acknowledge what David's saying here as well is that research show engineers go to manufacturers websites, contractors, buyers go to distributors. AI has opportunity for distributors as well. And manufacturers don't have, you know, the customer's visibility. No, they don't have that customer visibility. And yeah, engineers will likely go to manufacturer's website because they want that technical data.

Yeah.

But I believe what this was saying is these are more buyers. Right.

That's what this article was about. And you know what, I'm glad David commented on it. I'm glad you mentioned it, Tom, because that is what, and I couldn't agree more with what David commented because that's what we've seen and that's what research would show. What this article is starting to say is that they're wanting to buy from manufacturers.

Right.

I'm going to, I'm going to share a copy of this today's broadcast with Joe at Forrester and ask him for some feedback on it. We're connected on LinkedIn and we've emailed a few times since we met him in December and see if maybe even he'll join us because that'd be great to have a discussion with. All right, so we're going to jump ahead. This is going to be fun. Let's, you know, each week again, if you're listening on the podcast with us, which we do this show live on LinkedIn live, YouTube live, Facebook live, every Friday morning, it then later in the day is put in through an editor that we use into a, into a podcast that's available on all the popular podcast formats. If you're listening on the podcast, what the people that we're talking about, Mike and, and Mike Lauer that was with us earlier and, and Rodney and so forth that made some comments today are, and David that have made these comments today, they're, they're all around the country here in North America. We're looking at this newsletter that goes out every week. And again, if you don't get the newsletter, if you would like to, just email us@helloadsmartech.com and we'll get that out to you. So one of the features that we do each week though is, or most weeks now is it's called a special feature. And this week's we talk about Mercedes drivers can soon turn to chat GPT for voice control. Wow.

Yeah, maybe. So it's, it's interesting because I, when I first read that, and I know you use, you know, Alexa in your car and I use Siri in my car and for different.

Sucks.

Yeah, well, you know, anyway, it's, it's, they're, they're, they're adequate but not great. And what they were saying here is that, yeah, pretty like literally, if you have a Mercedes and you have, I guess the sound system that's in the Mercedes, you'll be able to get a, you'll get a thing saying, do you want to join the beta program for chat GPT? And what that allow you to do is actually have conversations through your sound system in the Mercedes. And what they're saying is, is the value of that could be, is, you know, you're driving and saying, okay, I, where's the local gas station? And they say, well, pull off over here. Was there a good taco place next to that? Oh, yeah, there is. And then have a conversation right back and forth. And I could certainly see some value of this, but I don't at first to me how that's like game changing in terms of its capabilities, but I can in the right direction. But then as I started reading, I did a little more homework, you know, and you talked about follow the money earlier. I think there's a new term that we need to be thinking about now called follow the data. Because data in the AI world is the new, the valuable oil, right? It is the oil, it is the fuel that drives AI. And if you read the fine print on this new Mercedes project or initiative is Mercedes has access to all of your data. If you accept the terms and conditions of the service, they have access to all of your data. Well, from, from the chat GPT process that you're going to go through and in their car through their sound system, this is going to allow Mercedes now to create their own AI models based on data from luxury car owners.

Courtesy. Courtesy of Darlene Brown.

Courtesy of Darlene Brown and others. Right now you go, well, why would they care about that? Well, data models. And in particular, I'll just call them niche data models. But because you have these large language models, these huge ones. But the future is really going to be a focus of a lot of more. I'll just call them niche data models and that are specific to a thing now. And you start thinking about, okay, I'm building a data model that is coming from data from Mercedes owners which is a certain demographic, a certain, you know, so forth. That's a super, potentially a very valuable asset for them to be gathering or getting as a byproduct of offering the service. And like I said, you got to kind of follow the data in this day and age.

Well, it's funny you made that comment earlier, right. And I think as in our intro to our broadcast this morning, I made the comment as well. Right. We said follow the. Used to always say follow the money. Now we're saying follow the money and the data.

Yeah, right.

Because it's still follow the data.

You'll find the money.

You'll find the money.

Yeah.

So it's interesting to watch it. But you know, there's so we, and that's why we do this each week. Right. And, and for those of you don't know, you know Tom, Tom and I have been friends since kindergarten. Go ahead, Tom. I had more hair than, you know, I've caused him to lose his hair. But you know, over 50 years we've been friends. Tom is a computer scientist by education, has started and exited multiple software companies and also run those companies. So he brings a technology to business side. Tom runs product development and all of our expanded AI tools that are coming into our system right now. Tom's manage all of that and I've spent 30 plus years in wholesale distribution. So we came together to start our company to serve wholesale distribution and manufacturing. So we always have a little bit of a different take on this. So Tom, you know, you went to the data, which you should. Right. And by the way though, your compliment for this week though is, you know, I was listening to you talk earlier about distributors and manufacturers and you're one of the few people out there in the technology world that really understand distribution after the, you know, the consulting that we've done together before we started Lead Smart. And so congratulations to you on, on getting it because most people in the tech world do not get it. But here's my take on this article, right. We're not there. Right. This is about a short term test that Mercedes is doing with I think 900,000 vehicles here in the United States that are equipped with their hay. Mercedes Technology.

Right.

But your, your point? I've never. I'm an Apple guy. Everything I have is Apple. But I've never been a fan of Siri. Just doesn't work well for me. But I'm a big fan of the Amazon device.

Right.

If I say the word, she'll answer me here in my office. But using that and having it available in my car, I use it constantly because I get a much greater answer than trying to ask. Siri says, you know, some generic data Alexa does, takes it to the next level.

Yeah.

So it's gonna be. Was listening there closely to me, but now what we're talking about is that next level. So I already have some of this in my car. You use Siri in your car, but let's go to the next level, right? Let's look at what's going to come down the road. Now if I'm, you know, an electrical distributor, sales guy, pipe, valve and fitting, power transmission, hose, distributor, whoever it might be. And my, my team's out, you know, John or Judy are out on a job site and their meeting cancels right now. This is where I'm envisioning this. And I think this is our future. Right. Is where instead of saying, hey, Mercedes, it says, hey, Ford. Ask Lead Smart which new end user leads that I've gotten in the last two weeks that are worth $25,000 a year or more are within five miles of me because my meeting canceled. And now it pulls from our system because we have the AI enabled technology and it helps me recover my day. I'm traveling and I'm in my vehicle and boss calls and says, I need you to go call on XYZ customer. You're going to have to fly there because there's an issue with this. Okay. I got that message from my boss now. Hey, Ask Lead Smart what's going on. What are the tech. What are the help tickets that are available for this customer at this point in time? What's our shipment history with that customer? And then the next step is what are my flight options? And book me a flight.

So I agree.

And the way to think about how.

That'S going to manifest, likely.

Tom, your volume's way low all of a sudden.

Can you hear me?

I can hear you now.

Okay. What I was going to say is I agree with you. And the way that I believe you're going to see that manifest is the same way that you have Sirius XM in your car and you have different channels.

Yeah.

Right now you may have a channel, an AI channel. In a conversation or much like you would in teams or Slack where you have channels of conversation. Right. You're. I don't believe that it's necessarily going to be a generic everything under one roof. It's going to be okay. I'm out on the road and maybe I have one channel that's looking for restaurants for me in the An AI channel that's looking for restaurants and gas stations and all that stuff using global third party data. But now as you pointed out, I want to find out from my CRM or my data source what I should be doing.

This will only ever be available through Lead Smart Technologies in our channel Club product. You'll never be able to do this anywhere else.

Yeah, and when I, when I get my Sirius XM satellite capability. Right, but you then you would basically, you know, click a button and change a channel. Right. And say okay, now I want to have another conversation related to what you just talked about, which is hey, I've my, my meeting just canceled. Who else in the neighbor should I go see based around the criteria you just provided there a minute ago. So what I believe this will start to manifest not just in our cars but in our life is we will have channels of things. And that's where the data model I was just talking about, these niche data models will power these channels. So right now you've got this big massive channel called ChatGPT. It's powered by this big massive large language model pulling all this stuff off the Internet. And that's fine. And that will continue. But then you're also going to have these channels that are using the private data that you have that have very specific. Because you don't want that private data intermingled with the bigger channel of all of the. That everybody else can access.

Yeah.

Along the way. So that's how I see it will manifest and how it actually looks in your car or whatever. I don't know. Probably all entirely voice activated. So the channels, you may not even know about the channels. It may just happen automatically through the. But, but that's basically how I see all that manifesting as we, as we go forward.

Well, I'm looking forward to Monday when you'll have this roadmap for the product team. So. Yeah.

Yeah, good.

All right. Well I thought that just, you know, it's one. I love that we have different takes on this but as we saw that. But good info. So we also do a little industry scuttlebutt as we talk about each week with the newsletter. So a couple things I mentioned Dirk Beveridge earlier today. He's researcher, speaker, you know, keynote guy. Been around wholesale distribution forever. Dirk does a what he calls his We Supply America tour and he does that. I think this is season. Well, as you mentioned, your season three is underway. Travels the country seeing wholesale distributors. Great stuff that he does there. So if you're not following Dirk on, on LinkedIn, great guy to follow. Has some inspirational stuff. Doing a lot of work with HR right now as well. Just a little shout out isa the Industrial Supply Association. They've got their summer sessions going on right now with some great topics. You're speaking a couple of them coming up on these virtual forums that they're having on Omnichannel and a handful of different pieces related to Omnichannel, e commerce, marketing, so forth. You're speaking at two of them, I'm speaking at one of them. So that's coming up. And then Joby Strobo there, business development person there, got a promotion. So shout out to Joby. She's with us pretty regularly here on the broadcast. So if you're with us today, Joby, congratulations on your promotion at isa lastly, not lastly, second to lastly. We each week we have what we describe also as a good, what I call a good read. This week it's a good listen. These are usually coming from another source like an Inc Magazine or something like that. This week, Inc Magazine launched a cool new podcast and it's called this particular one is about the untold story about how the Internet almost didn't happen. So if you get a chance, go to Inc Magazine, look that one up if you're a podcast listener. And I found it pretty interesting. Only got about a third of the way through it, but it's pretty cool story. And it's a whole series of them on that podcast. Did you check that one out, Tom? Do you market?

I saw it. I haven't listened to the podcast.

Yeah, it's kind of interesting. It starts off, it starts off with a woman kind of telling a story about her childhood. And I'm like, wait, am I. I listen to the right one and then she talks, goes in to talk about how her father was one of the the early developers of what we now know as the Internet and so kind of interesting. So I'd like to share those. So this week it's a good listen, not a good read. Last thing we'll talk about today in depth at all is what we do each week where we call our Tech Spotlight. And so this is an article and it references retailers, but Everything I read in there ties right into wholesale as well. And it's talks about customers are starting to use ChatGPT to shop and it talks about, here's what retailers and I say what wholesale distributors need to know. And this is an interesting topic, right, we talked about three weeks ago tomorrow about Walmart now is using. They're literally negotiating contracts with a group of vendors in a specific part of their company solely through AI, with no, no in person, no phone discussions, no zooms, no anything. They're getting the negotiations done using, using AI. So I, I like this article. There's some cool stuff in there.

Yeah. And no, we can chat more about this in a later show. I know we're short on time today, but the whole concept of what we know is search, right? Everything we've done today, whether it's shopping, is search. So we look for search, we search for things and then we sort through options and then we try and make a decision based on the options that we're sorting through. And what this was talking about or starting to talk about is that experience of search, as we have traditionally known it, is more and more going to get replaced with conversational, you want to call it, it's not even conversational search. I call it conversational discovery. Right. Whereas search is, hey, I'm looking for something now I have to search through all this data to figure out what it is I'm going to use. Whereas conversational discovery is using conversation back and forth to discover what it is that I need to know and in this case related to shopping. So I, I completely believe that conversational discovery will replace search, especially as it relates to shopping. And that will be true both as we talked about earlier with manufacturers and distributors for E Commerce. Obviously that conversational experience and discovery has to be good and have to make sense. Right now you can decide what you know when you search, what makes sense and what doesn't. But that's coming and will continue to come and it ties into everything else we just have been talking about today.

Yeah. So totally agree with that. Just what I found really interesting is the last kind of part of that was that they talk in that article about different SEO tips and different tools and stuff, that you can use some great AI to enhance website presence, enhance E commerce, and I think those transfer really well over to that whole arena of wholesale distribution as well. What kind of triggered for me though is I look at all of this, right, is I had an experience this week myself, I was trying to buy a piece of home entertainment equipment for my Father and you know I speak a little bit about my parents are slowing down quite a bit and need a lot more help and assistance with things and and I want dad loves to watch sports and television and I want his viewing time to be great. So I was struggling with TiVo. I'll just call them out who they are. Their website was almost impossible to navigate to get the answer I was looking for about the product, what I needed and if it required subscriptions and so forth with ChatGPT first time I'd done it. But you know what I got what I was looking for that I couldn't get from their website and their, their chat tool is antiquated in this day and age is the chat tool that they have. So we're going to see more and more of that migrating and the whole.

Great example, great example.

The last piece I'll comment on this before we finish up today. The it was pretty funny is we talked about about three weeks ago about that Walmart example I shared earlier. So I was on the phone last Friday with a large pipe valve and fitting distributor in the Southeast that's hopefully going to be joining us as a valued lead smart customer here in the next few days. But we were going through some portions of our proposal and contract negotiations and his response in the phone call as we were winding things down was all right, I needed to get this baseline information but you're going to have to do the rest through I'm going to negotiate the rest of this through AI with you. And he just started laughing and he referenced back to having, you know, heard what in fact the day we talked about that I think Mike Hockett was with us and from mdm. And so I thought it was kind of funny because that came full circle back at me because he was joking at, you know, tongue in cheek and a smile on his face but he goes yeah, we're going to have to use AI for the rest of this negotiation. So that was pretty fun. So as we're winding down Peter Newton John from come joining us from Miami Beach, Florida. Peter, thanks for being with us. Hopefully you caught more than what we're doing today. So last of things I didn't Tom mention and I I should have before we go today even looking through the the calendar that's upcoming for a lot of the events that we do each week is modern distribution management mdm. Mike joins us regularly. I don't know if Mike's with us today but they at the end of last week published their top list of distributors by category so if you haven't looked at that, it's of interest, go to mdm.com you'll find it very easily. And I should have put that in the publication. I was remiss in that as it went out today. So lots of good stuff coming up. Isa summer session. Tell me which date you're speaking again.

Tuesday, Tuesday. This coming Tuesday.

Tuesday. Yeah, I should probably listen to that maybe. Yep. So that's great session Industrial Supply Association.

Tuesday and next Tuesday if I'm not mistaken. But yep.

And I think I'm on the 18th is where I think we're my. The one. I'm doing a schedule. So lots of trade association buying group stuff coming up that we're heading into that season starting. Starting in July and through the end of the year. So good stuff. There's a lot of imelco. The, the European Electrical Buying group is having a big meeting right now in Rotterdam this week. So we'll start adding some international stuff into this as well because our international audience is growing. So. Boy, that's it, man.

All right.

Covered a lot of ground.

Yeah, thanks for all the great comments, good conversations and hope everyone has a good weekend.

Do great things, Be kind, enjoy yourself. We'll see you next week.

All right, thanks.