A recorded episode of 'Around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution' featuring Taylor St. Germain discussing experiences at an Applied AI for Distribution Conference, themes around AI adoption, and distributor use-cases. The conversation includes informal banter and references to event organization and speakers.
Chapters
Sa Sam, this is the prerequisite. Taylor, as you watch Kevin dance when we start the show here, how do.
You not dance to that music? Right? I mean, come on, just. You don't have any groove in you if you don't want to move when you hear that. How you guys doing?
We're doing okay. Said welcome back to California.
Thank you. Yeah, you know, being gone for just left Monday and got back late last night. But I tell you what, having I was in the distribution strategy groups Applied AI for Distribution Conference which is just a great event. Our friends Ian Heller and Jonathan vine put this together with their team and it is interesting. I think they had. I was thinking about this as I was leaving yesterday. I think they had a team of about five or six folks with them. And to put on an event with just a small team, that in itself was quite a. Quite a feat. But great speakers, all different facets from an HR component to putting guardrails on your AI plans and understanding a little bit more about what you can do and where you're at. And then some great real world examples from some, some large distributors with some of their tools. But you know, one of the things I love is this Chicago.
Taylor.
Chicago is one of my favorite cities to travel to and probably if you know as far as a good big city goes, by far my favorite in the US and but this event was so easy because it was at the o' Hare Marriott. So off the plane with your bag at the hotel in a couple of minutes. Some decent restaurants nearby had a fantastic evening out with a good friend. Paul Kennedy and Stephen full up from. From DSG or Dakota Supply Group and evening with them was great. But then time to go to the airport, man, it's fast and easy. So when you're in that Rosemont area. So it's really good event but it is nice to be home because I'm home for a week and then it's two more weeks on the road. So east coast gonna be visiting week after next. A great, great customer of ours in Maryland and then onto the some meetings with the good folks at the national association of Wholesalers and distributors in D.C. and then the following week to Orlando with Affiliated Distributors and Whirlwind. It's time of the year. So anyways, that that's off we go. So we got Tom Burton in Ventura, California. We've got Taylor in Castle Rock, Colorado. And I'm here in a couple hours south of Tom and Laguna Niguel. And we're going to dive into the News of the week and the economy and supply chain and how that impacts wholesale distribution and manufacture. But we're happy to have Taylor with us today. But before we dive in and talk a little bit more about the work that Taylor does with itr, economics and so forth, again we introduced ourselves, but we get together every week and we talk about, as mentioned, the economy, the supply chain, mergers and acquisition, sales, marketing, AI robotics, all of the things that are going on in the world around us. And what we try and do is we kind of, as we say, peel back the onion a little bit on that and talk about the impact that that has on our normal and typical audience, which is wholesale distributors and manufacturers that join us on a regular basis. But how we go about this discussion is that we publish a newsletter every Friday. We have a team that works with us on both the newsletter and the podcast itself that's got front end support with Lily doing the newsletter and getting that out for us. And that newsletter again is called around the Horn. And Wholesale Distribution and Manufacturing goes out to 10,000 plus people each week. And we break break down the news that we think from what we see throughout the week might be important to to our readers. So if you don't get that newsletter and you would like to three simple ways to do that. You can send us a quick and easy email@helloadsmartech.com and we'll get the newsletter out for you. Just request the newsletter. If you're active and regular on LinkedIn, you can certainly just search around the Horn and wholesale distribution newsletter and it'll pop up. Or you can go to the Lead Smart Technologies page and that will have that available for you there and you can sign up there. We also have a website for the podcast which is www.aroundthehornpod.com and you can sign up there as well as subscribe. So for those of you who are listening to the recorded version, because Tom and Taylor and I are live on LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook this morning at 9:06 Pacific Time. For those of you that are listening to the recorded version on Amazon or Spotify or Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast, you won't be one seeing these three handsome faces, but you also will not be seeing the newsletter that we'll have up. So if you're listening in or maybe listening in on the podcast for the first time and you're wondering where all this information is coming from as we're just going through the articles that we posted. So we'd love for you to get that newsletter finally in closing out on all of that before we dive in, we couldn't have our show every week. There's costs that go with that, there's people involved in production costs and so forth. So we have the sponsorship of the company that Tom and I work for, which is Lead Smart Technologies. At Lead Smart, we've developed a product that we call Channel Cloud, which is a AI enabled, what we call smart CRM and customer intelligence platform that's been solely developed for wholesale distributors and manufacturers. We have versions for each. It allows companies to see deeply into both their customers, their teams and their overall business to get insight on what we call siloed data. We use the term calling it corralled or siloed data from across their business. So the ERP data, the marketing automation, the E commerce data, the other pieces of data that you have about your customer and your business and all the different journeys that their customers are taking across those areas, we now bring that into one single platform. We use artificial intelligence and other tools to bring insights into that to help you make better decisions. So if you're a wholesale distributor or manufacturer, which most folks are that are with us, if we can help you on your digital journey, where you want to find significant double digit growth within your organization by understanding your customers better, serving them better, and understanding your organization as a whole better, we'd love to talk to you. Happy to talk at any point in time. So enough of that. Let's kind of dive in a little bit as we're ready to dive into the news. But Taylor, before we get rolling on this, I had a chance to meet you and met very briefly at first when you gave a great talk at the ISA 2025 spring meeting. Brandon Breen and his great team put on a fantastic event. Two of them, spring and fall. We tried to be at all of those. I had an opportunity to be part of a great panel.
