Getting The Most Out Of B2B Ecommerce Growth

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Welcome to around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution with Kevin Brown and Tom Burton. Sponsored each week by LeadSmart Technologies. Tom, Kevin and their guests review the news of the week and dive deep into the topics impacting manufacturers, wholesale distribution, independent sales agents and the global wholesale supply chain. Whether It's M&A SaaS and cloud computing, B2B, E commerce or supply chain issues, we peel back the onion with our guests into the topics that impact your business the most.

All right, let's dive in, huh? Let's talk before we do that about who we are, what we do and why we're just two ugly old dudes chatting here on LinkedIn and these other platforms. But I'm Kevin Brown, that's Tom Burton. Tom is my co founder, business partner, lifelong friend, and we are the founders of Lead Smart Technologies. Lead Smart is a AI enabled CRM and customer intelligence solution that is specifically developed for manufacturers and wholesale distributors. We don't sell to construction companies or law firms. We wouldn't sell to a school district. We take care of manufacturing, wholesale distribution. My background is, my entire career is in that arena. Tom's background is in technology and we get together every week to review through the news and happenings in the world, the us, North America, related to the economy, mergers and acquisitions, e commerce, AI, all kinds of different technology solutions. But we try to bring all that together in a way that benefits the folks in the whole what we call the wholesale distribution ecosystem. Manufacturing manufacturers, representatives and distributors. So blah, we got that out of the way. The last piece of that is we're going to be discussing this morning the around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution newsletter. If you don't get that newsletter and you would like to couple of easy ways to get it. You can go quickly and easily to www.aroundthehornpod.com where all of our past episodes are and you can sign up for the newsletter or you can send us an email that said to helloadsmartech.com and we will get that out to you right away. If you're listening on the podcast later today. This is a Friday morning, September 8th, and you're listening another time to the podcast. You will not be seeing the screen that we have here on our live broadcast where we talk, we look at the newsletter and we talk about the articles of the week. So Tom, I covered our housekeeping. Dive in on article number one, if you would.

Let's do it. So as usual, starting off a little economic news, US Manufacturing sector stabilizing at weaker levels though in August. So Kevin, what's your take on that?

Well, I think it, you know, it's kind of important to, we talk about a little bit of different things. In fact, we were talking about this a few weeks ago when Ian Heller was on with us about, you know, all the different factors that we can look at. And they all have a little bit different spin and a little, a little different bend to them. You know, this is tied to the, you know, purchasing Managers index. It's a great index. Obviously, you know, you want to be over 50% because that gives you kind of the sentiment of what's going on in the marketplace. So, you know, the good news is, you know, things increased in July, improved, and, and it had slumped in June. So I think this just ties back to, and, and I, I threw this article in because, you know, I just was saying this conference I was at and I was listening to a couple of, of very well known, both venture capitalists. They're authors, they're podcasters, they're event guys, and their entire business is tied to what's going on in the economy as venture capitalists. And you know, the sentiment out there when you look at a lot of the arena is that we've probably hit that bottom and we're, we're starting to make some moves. There was some, some rumoring this morning that I think I read something on Yahoo Business this morning that I think it was the New York Fed chairman was feeling like we've probably maybe settled into a spot, maybe we don't need a lot of additional increases, if any. So there's that sentiment that's kind of moving. You know, I think you and I are on a little bit different pages of that. I think, you know, we've, I kind of look at it as maybe we're getting through this and we, we didn't even feel it fully. And I think you've got a different take. But this is kind of giving us this article talking about manufacturing sector stabilizing within July and August is, I think it's a good, a good bellwether to get that positive conversation started.

Yeah, and I don't want to talk about my, my less bullish view of things, but I do think that we, I think there's another shoe to drop that I think is being ignored a bit. And we've talked a little bit about this predominantly around commercial and consumer debt and a lot of things being coming to fruition on that. But aside from that, which is really a separate situation. Right. It's a situation that's been created by this. But as it relates to inflation other than gas prices here in Santa Barbara, which continue to go up every single day for whatever reason.

What is it this week?

Five something? Five, I don't know, 5:15 or something like that.

When I left for the airport the other morning, I needed to get some gas and 579 for mid grade.

Yeah, but a week or not a week ago, but maybe two weeks ago was 4:15 or something. So it's gone, it's gone up a lot in the last.

Good for you. I haven't seen, I haven't seen below $5 in three or four months anyway.

But yeah, I do think, you know, if we're looking at just some of the economic aspect of things, the interest rate situation, inflation, all of that, I do tend to agree that that's coming to maybe a bit of a leveling out. I think though that there's just another shoe to drop that hasn't really been looked at, which is the ramifications of the debt that we have out there. And we saw a snapshot of that with Silicon Valley Bank. Not so much debt wise, but just the way with Treasuries and all of that, it still manifests itself with the higher interest rates. We'll see. But I don't want to get too far ahead of ourself until we see some of that playing out. That's why.

Well, let's chat about that or just unpack that just a touch further. It really comes to mind is this ties in, right. Our, our focus here is on wholesale distribution and manufacturing. So you had mentioned consumer debt. Right. And that's getting hammered because interest rates are, have gone up. Right. So now you're, if you've got a high level of, of consumer debt, your interest rates are higher. Right. I, I see the trickle down of this from a standpoint and I, I throw, feel free to throw stones at this and anybody want to comment on this, that's fine. My mind, I'm looking through this and saying, okay, so consumer debt, if they're buying less. And there was, you know, some of the articles we've read in the last few weeks talk about maybe they're buying less, you know, large manufactured items. So that could tie into things. When we start talking about the world of wholesale distribution, hospitals are still being built, roads are still being fixed. Right. We were probably going to see more data on a slowdown in residential building.

Right.

But commercial building is what impacts more of our typical listener here. So I'm kind of wondering if we're going to see this because Our audience and our customers, Elite Smart have been bullish through this whole economic turmoil. Right. So I think your, your position is kind of tied to global economy, is that correct?

Yeah, I would say that, I would say that.

And then I think but if you take a look at that, there's this consumer side and then there's this commercial or wholesale side of things and I think that's probably stabilized and going to hopefully continue to stay strong.

Yeah, well, and even just looking at it from that perspective, there's a lot of commercial debt, especially around real estate, that's much shorter term debt than you have with your traditional 30 year residential mortgage. Yeah. And a lot of that debt was taken on, even look at multifamily and a lot of the things that were done in that area, it was taken on at low rates and those three to five year terms, those rates are now getting expired or they're having to refinance, they can't refinance at the same rate. So yeah, there's an economic trickle down. So yes, I'm looking at it, I think a bit more macro than I am at the micro level. But of course, you know, there's all this stuff happened that we've been dealing with has been at a macro level, not at a micro level.

I think you're right. You know what's interesting is I look at this PMI and I look at the Fed and there's some other factors we're going to talk about in a few minutes with what the FTC is doing on some things and especially as we move on to the next article in a moment. But before we go, it just, it makes me continue to think, Tom and I, I bring this up all the time. The, the baseline economic factors. Right. And, or this PMI we're talking about. Right. The legal ramifications that the FTC is using. How the Fed looks at the economy of your consecutive quarters, you know, of XYZ happening. I just start to starting to think, you know, we're really probably using antiquated metrics, I'll just call it that way. Antiquated metrics for a marketplace and an economy and a global economy that is just so different than it's historically been that I'm sure there's somebody out there, you know, smart guys writing books, economists about maybe different ways to track or manage to really look at what's happening out there. Because there's two sides to every coin.

Right. Well we should put it all into chat GPT and look at all the variables and have it Come back with some answers. But yeah, I think the problem is the benchmarks that we use are definitely antiquated. There's so few of them, Right. There's so few of them and yet there's so many variables that impact all of these things. We've just touched on a handful of them. But there's literally hundreds of different variables that can impact things one way or the other. And we tend to look at things through, whoa, core inflation or, you know, PMI or some of these other things that are there. And those are just one piece of the bigger equation. Anyway, I agree with you. I wanted to hit on Tom's comment. And by the way, Tom, just for the record, I would welcome you as a co host with me on the, on the podcast here, regardless of what Kevin says, I would welcome, welcome you here. But he says, what is the cost of gas doing to distribution? I think that's a good question. Right. If that continues to rise and we don't know, what does that do to distribution and everything else that's, you know, delivery, all the freight stuff we've been talking about.

Yeah.

Again, at all. Don't know.

Well, I don't, I don't know if he's in a position to comment on this, but the comment here in our chat on the live broadcast that we're on this morning above Toms is from Mike Mortensen with arg. And if, I don't know if Mike's in a position where he could comment or type something and he might be listening on the flyer in the vehicle or something. But Mike runs a large distribution company in the Pacific Northwest in Alaska. And I'm sure in Alaska fuel prices are probably similar to what they are here. And so he may have a comment on that. But I mean, no matter how you slice it, right. If you're in a place where you're paying, you know, 10, 20, 30% more in fuel than you were six months ago, right. Or two years ago, whatever it is. And you're running a fleet of delivery trucks, it has a big impact, right. On your business. No matter how you slice it. It's just same, you know, same thing is I'm sure people are evaluating, no different than a consumer would be is do I really want to drive to grandmother's house this weekend or could I just, you know, find a different way to get with grandma because it's expensive, you know, no different than sending a delivery truck out and, you know, the majority of wholesale distributors out there. Well, there you go. Mike just said paid 545. And Mike's got a fleet of trucks and a bunch of sales guys out in trucks. And so, you know, paying 545 a gallon of gas is going to have an impact on your bottom line.

All right, let's move ahead.

All right, so this, this lovely woman at the FTC is doubling down on her fight with Amazon. So this article's from cnbc. In fact, previous articles from Reuters, from cnbc, we've got this article about this Amazon lawsuit from the ftc. It's been talked about for a couple of years now that it's likely coming. They did their, what did they call that meeting? I wrote a note. Last rights meeting is what they called the meeting that the FTC had with, with Amazon over this, this monopoly type thing of the FTC looking to break up Amazon. And it's so really interesting thing and the reason we included that this weekend to talk about that whole thing is, you know, we spend time each week talking about E commerce.

Right.

We have for the most part most wholesale distributors are getting involved or have a plan in place or are developing a plan to include E commerce. And many of those, their E commerce solution is not just selling on their own website, but it's on, selling on, on marketplaces and so forth. And there's no big bigger marketplace that you can do that than on Amazon. And then what we're seeing as well now is major brands are manufacturing brands are putting their wares available, you know, online and looking at Amazon business is just another distributor of their product. There's some big impact that can be coming out of this and it's something that, you know, we might look at it and say, well, you know, my wife gets 10 packages a week from Amazon and I get, you know, one every two weeks or whatever. And it's nice that we can buy a pair of shoes or whatever, but it's very different when we start talking about the impact that can have on selling tools or safety equipment or whatever it might be. So this is something to pay attention to.

Yeah, and I don't, I honestly don't know a ton about what this latest lawsuit is and exactly what she's proposing and how it would be broken apart and all of that. But you know, there's, I do, I am concerned a bit is it seems like there's a lot more meddling with the FTC and a lot of these things and especially on some of the M and A mergers and acquisitions type of things. Agreed.

Yeah, good point.

Really, that really affects the startup economy and the, and the, you, you know, it's aster where you just were in the whole venture capital world. Right. Exits come from, from lar. Ultimately exits come from large M and A transactions and when you start messing with those or, or causing somebody to think twice about doing one, what does that do as far as a trickle down? So.

Right.

I, I again I don't know the specifics of this. I do, I should probably know more about some of this but there is some, some.

I was going to talk to you about how uninformed you are.

Yeah, well, I don't watch the news so there you go. I didn't, I didn't come to this every week. I wouldn't know anything that was going.

That's right. Well the key components of this, right are the overall business model of Amazon. A big part of it being fulfillment by Amazon and how that they manage things and control things. The overall logistic programs and then third party sellers and the pricing models that they push. Now I look at this, right is I don't want to, you know, I'm not in the know enough or an expert in this, in this arena to, to really throw rocks. Here's how I look at it. And you and I have both had in different businesses, right? And my wife as well, and your wife as well have all had Amazon businesses before. I've worked with brands on a consulting basis that are doing things there and I've had my own experience selling online and my wife as I said, has as well. All of us have very challenged or negative experiences with some of the policies from Amazon. Right. You know that through the pandemic my wife started importing some products and we just got absolutely hammered by some policy changes and some things that went on during the pandemic and Amazon financially hammered by this investment we had made. But I do not want the FTC going and meddling in this business. Right. The marketplace, in my opinion, one guy's opinion, the marketplace should balance this out. Right. I've got two emails this week from Walmart's business program that they're offering in their business, you know and if there's anybody that could come after Amazon, I don't think anybody's ever going to squash Amazon but there are people that could nip at their heels and force them to look at their policies and, and Walmart would be that one. I just, I the, the meddling of this because in the challenge, I think part of it I have with this is that so much of this is agenda driven politically and individually. And you know that there's in this article, it talks about a meta head or Facebook. This same FTC commissioner came after them as well and they actually filed a court action. So let me rephrase that. She had talked about the need to come after Facebook and Amazon. She wrote this major paper that they say went viral before she was ever even appointed at the ftc. Biden administration brought her in. Right. And then she goes charging after them based upon what her paper that she had written was. So both Amazon and Facebook tried to get her recused from anything related to them. Weren't successful. But a big part of this is very politically motivated and individually motivated and that's my frustration with it.

Yeah, no, I, I completely agree and I think that there's again there's you're willing kind of a big stick with this thing that you may not quite understand some of the consequences you're creating. And even if all it does is cause a company to think twice about doing an M and a transaction or something like that or multiple companies to start thinking twice or being more cautious or whatever, there's a trickle down to that.

Right.

That it's sometimes we don't know different than we were just talking about. Right. There's a longer term hangover that can occur from that especially on something that I'm not sure the FTC fully understands anyway of what they're actually doing.

But also if you're, if you're agenda based or politically based in your decision making versus the better good, right then you're not thinking about the trickle down effect. And I think what you just said is great. So quote in this, it says, in this article, it says a challenge to Amazon's alleged monopoly could ultimately result in, in a breakup of the more than trillion dollar business if they file this lawsuit and win. Now by the way, side note, they filed multiple lawsuits against Amazon, have lost already and have lost each one but none of them on this the magazine. But to your point about the trickle down effect, if Amazon started getting broken up into pieces, I'm sure there is going to be the trickle down is going to be the squash a whole lot of small cottage businesses and, and garage businesses and things like that because what's Amazon's not going to change, you know, Wall Street's not going to change their expectation of Amazon. So you know, fees are going to.

Go up and there'll be a consequence no matter what.

So anyways, we're continuously here watching E Commerce and so I thought that was good for us to pop in which pops us on to our next article from Digital Commerce360B2B E commerce survey companies largely experiencing growth. Some good charts in there. I don't know if you looked closely at those. Any thoughts to kick us off on that?

The charts were great and the one thing that really jumped out at me in this, when you take a look at this article is the percentage of people that buy from certain channels. And only 51% of respondents said they bought anything through a sales rep. And I think the highest level, I don't have the chart in front of me, but I think it was 70 something percent. So 51% was kind of right in the middle and the median. So 51% of the people said they buy at all through a sales rep right now. Now granted, I understand that this is very industry specific and you know, you're looking at this at a very broad way, but that aligns with a lot of the things that we've been talking about and seeing is that people wanting to do more and more things without having to necessarily deal with a sales rep. We see this more and more outside of the distribution world all the time. But I think more and more it's going to be the case. People are looking for things that they can do more on their own.

Right.

Yet at the same time, as we've talked about, the customer is expecting a similar level of experience and expertise that they may get from dealing with a good salesperson on the other end of it. So it's an interesting challenge. And I also think it's important because I personally believe it's problematic that people don't want to deal with salespeople. I think salespeople can add a lot of value. They keep customers or prospects from getting lost and going down rabbit holes and getting confused and making wrong decisions or no decisions. So to me it's a little bit scary that that's happening. But I think at the other end we have to be able to somehow create an experience. And again, I think that's where AI can really help us as we go forward is provide that better experience even in that more competent experience, even if they're not dealing with salespeople. So that was a long answer to that question.

Just gonna say you need to take a breath and grab some.

Some water.

Yeah, that was good. No, I like. No, I liked what you're saying there. And what triggered for me out of this. Right. Again, we're talking about a B2B E commerce survey. And again, this is, you know, the easy conversation with this is right to Bury my head in the sand if I'm a manufacturer, wholesale, distributor. And so I'm not seeing that. Yeah, it's good. Congratulations. Times are changing, right. Things are coming along differently. Oh, good.

You're pop up.

We can look at a couple of those charts.

That's great.

So that's really, you know, really powerful to be in a position where it's not impacting you yet. But the reality of it is the world and the marketplace that we're looking at right here. And Will Quinn's comment here, it's generational, right. Gen Z wants to purchase online without sales interactions. Because I say this all the time, right. You know, the, the guy that just took over for your longtime buddy Fred at the, at the plant down the street that you sell bearings or hard hats or whatever it might be to. Or the, you know, if you're in the restaurant supply business, you know, Ralph that was running the, the, you know, the commissary at a university or something, he's retiring. The person that's coming in behind him, that's been the assistant buyer.

Right.

Went on a date last night using Uber and orders ordering his lunch day from doordash to be delivered.

Right.

He just is in a different world. The wins Will Quinn's comment here. And that's where we're moving, right. We talk to people day in and day out. I was talking to a wholesale distributor in the building materials arena the other day, you know, and he's like, well, you know, most of our salespeople right now are struggling to, you know, get their head around technology. You know, they're in their 50s and their 60s. Some of them are doing a good job, but many of them are not. And we talked about the fact that every time he goes out and hires now, there's going to be people asking about what their tech stack looks like. And it's the same thing, right. When we look at E Commerce is it needs to be omnichannel. Right. We, we both participated in the Industrial Supply Association's summer sessions about Omnichannel. You wrote a book about. It's over your shoulder there in the revenue zone. You talk a lot about, you know, experience and getting selling to people, how they want to sell. So we've got to be prepared for these changes.

Yep. But anyway, interesting, interesting data points in there. You see how that continues to play out over the next period of time.

Yep.

Good.

Well, this is, I'm going to let you take the lead on this. This next article about it comes from CIO Magazine or Chief Information Officer magazine. Should you be worried about the informal rise of generative AI in the enterprise? So I'm going to let you start and shoot from the hip and I'll dive in.

So basically what the article is about is employees using ChatGPT or Bard or any sort of generative AI tools that are out there sort of in a informal or if you want to call it rogue way within their companies, without approvals, without really any oversight, without anything going on. And you know, there's a lot of concerns on that. The most obvious one is are you putting confidential or proprietary data right into these large language models that can then be, you know, that was training those language models. Now, you know, we were talking about this before the show, Kevin. There are ways to turn that off and on. There's, there's been more and more options now in these tools, but if people don't know that or they're not aware of it or whatever, there's a lot of things that, that you can do with, with those things that are, that are there. So it's what I found and I've been putting a lot of time into this over the last few weeks as I talk to more and more customers about this and, and really start to dig in about data. You know, we've talked a lot about data, but what is it going beyond, you know, clean data and data hygiene and all of that? What are the things that companies are starting to worry about as it relates to their data? They're of course related to security or privacy on that data, proprietary data, all of that kind of thing. That's a big deal. But then there's also data integrity. Is the data that I'm putting into this system, am I feeding it with data that's actually factual or relevant or correct or approved? It's interesting. My background back in the day was change management for software, managing the change process of software to make sure that things that people were writing code for didn't get into production and mess up the whole production world? It's the same thing here. It's like change management or configuration management on data to track. Is this the right data? Is this approved data? Should this be data that we're using to drive our large language models? Can I prove or do I have some sort of audit trail back when I used large language models to go back into the data that's there? All of this, which is in this article, all of this starts to open up this can of worms about data integrity, which goes way beyond data integrity and data privacy. And I'll add one more thing to it that just came out this morning. In addition to data hygiene, which is, is the data clean, not full of duplicates and all of that, one last thing on this is that Microsoft this yesterday or this morning announced that they will indemnify people that are using their new Copilot applications that are coming out after the first of the year. If they get sued for copyright violation, they'll actually indemnify them. That's great that Microsoft, a trillion plus billion, trillion dollar company can do that. But it shows the amount of concern that's being generated around this subject.

Yeah, I think that's a bunch of malarkey though. I'd love to read the TNCs on how Microsoft will really indemnify you. I'm sure that's probably half of the or 2x the terms and conditions of buying new software of what they'll really do and what they won't do. Because that's a pretty broad statement. It's nice to hear. But I think the reality with all of that is that, you know, in the meantime you get sued. You know, how soon is Microsoft going to step in?

I don't know. I think it's a great marketing PR thing. Absolutely. But what it shows is the amount of concern that companies are having. And you can, you can imagine probably as they go to market with this, some of the concern they're getting from the Fortune 500, who they're selling to first.

Right.

Is to. Well, what about, what about, what about, you know, all these different things you're incorporating these co pilots into. Yep.

No, I think that's, that's, that's well said. So there's a whole other take on this, Right. That's another side. And this is just why I love what we do each week because you and I will read the, you know, even our guests, when we have guests, right. They'll read, we'll all read the same article and have different takes. And I looked at this, you know, the data side of it is critical as you were describing it, but the privacy side of it is so critical. And a big part of what this article was talking, you know, about is look, there's all these different tools out there, right? And I, and think about it. Just let's, let's take it back. If I'm a, you know, say a half a billion dollar a year manufacturing company and I'm a hundred million dollar a year distributor, we talk every day to these companies in the course of our business with lead Smart and our Channel cloud product we see everything from a 10 or 15 person IT department to you know, a multi branch company that has one person that has, you know, strong strengths in it. And maybe not so much. Right. Sometimes it's just we see in an organization it might be somebody that you know is doing another role in a company and had an aptitude. So they're now our CRM administrator or whatever it might be. But if you have, don't have a CIO as an example, who has to wear that hat, what senior executive and, or the CEO at the end of the day has that role.

Right.

And it really triggered for me some of the things, you know, that you and I. I had a need to take a look at something yesterday. I sent it off to you for your thoughts on it. You came back 10 minutes later and you had run it through chat GPT. But there was data in that that we just put into the Internet. Right?

Well we didn't because, because in our work I have it set up so that we're not training the model. But, but if you didn't know that then in theory, yes it could.

Right. So the, and the vast majority of people aren't are jumping in right now using Chat GPT or any of these other tools.

Right.

And what's happening right now, and I don't know how an organization could keep up with it is every day I see updates for all of, whether it's Jasper, Octopus or you know, all of these different, you know, tools out there. And then marketing starts to say, hey, this is the coolest one I heard about at a trade show. I'm using this now. And then another one is saying I'm using Chat GPT and if the organization doesn't have a plan for using AI tools and a structured plan that says this is what's allowed and this is what's not allowed, you can get in a big problem to the point. I'm going to use a couple examples. One from the article, Samsung put an internal ban on using ChatGPT because they learned it the hard way. Right. Someone was trying to do some research and probably looking at code and they put onto Chat GPT sourced un. Unbeknownst to themselves what part of what they put in there was code that was responsible for software that runs their semiconductor equipment. Well, that's out in the Internet now. Right. And so what percentage of ch and this would be a great survey to find What Percentage of ChatGPT or Jasper or whatever it might be users out there or you know, Bard or whatever it is, have the forethought that you have to flip that switch to not allow that data out there. And obviously we saw what happened at Samsung.

Well, and OpenAI, the people that make ChatGPT, they released a new product last week called OpenAI Enterprise, which allows you to have. Because up until now there's been no sort of enterprise version, team type version where you can say, okay, here is what your company should use. And then they can create the settings at the corporate level. You all log on with your individual accounts and depending upon the individual accounts, they may or may not have the. Depend upon what you put into place. Yeah. So you're starting to see at least now, a framework for some enterprise control on some of these tools. But which is important. But the OpenAI enterprise is probably only going to be purchased by the biggest of companies right now. To your point that the companies that, you know, we see a lot, the small or medium sized businesses, they're not going to have open AI enterprise. And yeah, there's a lot of. So I agree. But it all comes back to ultimately the data. Right. It's like the more I look at the functionality as I, even if I look at Lead Smart, if I look at the future functionality that we're building for AI, everything keeps coming back to how do I track and manage that data and have the right data and have the right privacy, the right integrity, right. And the right hygiene. Those are the three things. And what I, every, every time I try and look at new functionality, I end up going back to that point and taking a step back. So I think as an or as a world we're really starting to go. We got all caught up in functionality. There's more functionality coming every day now. We have to backtrack onto those other things. And that inherently starts to address some of the issues you brought up as well.

Yeah, well, I mean I just, I think that it to both of our points at this right now.

Right.

Is the reality is these are wonderful tools, they're business changers, they're great for, great for everybody out there. But you need to understand what you're doing, how you're using it. And whether you're an IT person in a distribution company and or you are a senior executive, you need to be thinking about how this is being used. I had an example that I caught myself on a number of months ago. You and I talked about this offline and you use because of the AI and GPT type tools that your team is building into our CRM and customer intelligence Solution right now you're on this stuff nonstop. Some of the stuff you send me on the weekends that you've been working on is just astounding. Right. But I'm just you know, on my side of our organization. I'm a day to day user of these tools but I was doing something in my personal life a few months ago and as you know I do a lot of faith based volunteer work and I was looking at a security plan that we had been first safety and security plan for our facilities and our sanctuaries while people are there for worship. And and I had received from our global headquarters of our faith. I'd received a document to say hey, modify this within your needs. But we had one from pre pandemic and so I just was like well I don't want to read these 12 pages, right. I want to find the differences. And I literally was starting to copy and paste, getting ready to put those into chat GPT and I triggered it was like wait, why would I go put a security plan of where people gather, right. For bad actors to read the actual security plan and, and those are the types of things, right? That's a personal issue. Right. But dangerous and but if you start thinking about that, right. Because of the way you can work with code and write code and so forth through these things you may have somebody unbeknownst to themselves not thinking through that and putting critical think financial data or whatever it is. Right, of course.

And the new, the new tool that we should cover some one of these days which is just unbelievable in chat GPT is they used to call it code interpreter I think is now called detailed analytics or whatever the things that it can do are. Are unbelievable. So. But it aligns with everything you just said there. I want to hit on a couple comments here before we move on. First of all, yes, you're right Will lead smart. You know especially having our trillion dollar valuation, right. We can afford to get that enterprise version. So yeah, for sure we will be doing that. Plus I have to do that to keep Kevin from putting a lot of private data and stuff out there as well. So I have to protect our.

Actually you should just take my computer from me and my Internet access.

So. So yes, you're right Will. And then I think you know, Tom is exactly right. Every organization needs to believe their data store is under attack. You have to look at it from a lot of different ways and protect it. Same for individuals who do business online to give some personal information to pay. And when you talk about attack Tom, may you're talking about it, not just somebody trying to steal data in a company or hack your file systems or whatever. It's how is that data potentially going to be used? Like you just said, is it going to potentially drive what people believe are copyright? There's just a lot of aspects to data that nobody's ever really thought much about before that goes beyond just I, I have it or I don't. Yeah. And anyway, I'm, I'm going to be writing some stuff up on this over the next couple weeks on this be and we can share it because it really, really is interesting and is, I think the next, in the next 12 months, this is what's going to be the conversation around AI. It's not going to be the functionality. It's going to be about data.

Yeah, well, and I think you're going to see that privacy piece right there next to it. Right. And that the kind of in wrapping this up on this topic.

Right.

They just. One of the comments here is generative AI is on the loose and enterprises. And the, the point being to this is you need an, you need. And we talk about this regularly.

Right.

We've even posted some articles about how to put a plan together in place within an organization of how artificial intelligence is used and how these tools are used and what can be there and what can't. Because, you know, back to what we were talking about at the beginning of all this, right. Is if you don't have that all your different departments might be using things for different things and then one department has a little success and they say, oh, I was doing this, you should try it for this. And next thing you know, you have the, you know, your data's on the loose out there for bad actors. So anyways, good, good stuff. Thanks for comments on that and thanks for Tommy and others commenting on this as well.

So I know we don't have a lot of time, so I'll kind of just touch on this next one quickly. The tech talk. Yeah. The four main types of AI explained this was a different take. I like the article because it was a little bit of a different take about sort of the, if you want to call it the evolution of AI and looking at things that have historically been, well, you know, even back, you know, before ChatGPT hit the scene, AI was doing this was around and has been used for predictive analytics for a long time. So you give it something to give something back. They call that reactive. But then it talks about sort of the stages of how it's evolving to the point where it's proactively thinking, right. And you hear that a lot of the. Well, does it, you know, does it start to think? Does it have emotion? Does it have all of those sort of capabilities? Anyway, the article, without getting into it in a lot of detail, the article talks about the four evolutionary steps of this and kind of explains it really well. And I think it's a really. If you're interested in AI, I think it's a really interesting article.

Well, just, you know, because I'm the resident AI expert, I thought I'd chime in on this briefly is. I'll wait for the comments to come. But you know that that reactive AI, you know, the article talks about, that's that tool behind when, you know the, the IBM's deep blue, they called it, right. In 1997, Beat the Grandmaster chess champion Gary Kasparov.

Right.

So that's what that used back in 97. And it talks about, you know, limited memory machines is kind of that next layer that was, you know, early 2000s. And this is good. There's some good timelines here. If it's something that's interest you, I think it's a value. I think at the end of the day, the more we all understand about what's behind AI without having to become AI experts, right? But we understand the pitfalls, the limitations and the cautions that go with it, everybody's going to be in good shape. So that. That's an article from TechTarget.com if you're kind of geeking out on AI stuff, they publish stuff every day. It's good newsletter. So every week we have. And Tom, before you slide too far on that, I want to do a little timeout. Pause. If you are live with us, then here on Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube Live, you're seeing the newsletter we send out every week. It's called around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution. It's focused on manufacturing and whole companies and wholesale distributors. If you don't get that, and you would like to, you can find a way to get that by emailing us@helloadsmartech.com or at the website for this podcast, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com. and that's what we're talking about. So we'll have many people, right? We have a lot larger audience on the podcast. Typically each week five to seven countries are downloading and that's what we're talking about because you can't see us if you're listening on the podcast. So each week we do what we call industry scuttlebutt a little bit about M and A and so forth. So, you know, there's two things out of these three. There's three articles we do every week. I'm only going to mention two of them. One big shout out to Brendan Breen, now the CEO of the Industrial Supply Association. We started working at Lead Smart with Brendan when he was new to the organization and a vice president. In fact, I had breakfast with him in Princeton, New Jersey in late 2021 when he was just in the running for the president's job. And he's done such a great job and it's a wonderful organization that he's just been promoted to CEO. And I believe they've never had a CEO before, only a president. So big news. I was texting with him the other day. Friend of the show has been on with us a few times and congratulations to him. The Hardy, the Heating, Air Conditioning Refrigeration Distributors International Group, the trade association, some good revenue numbers. Their members are posting some nice growth through July. That's nice to see the great folks at Hardy. We have quite a few Lead Smart channel cloud user companies that are members of Hardy. So that's good stuff. So let's bump through the last couple that we have here. Every week we have an additional feature that we call goodreads and that is something that typically might have something to do with leadership or personal development. This week we had an article there about how does your company compete? That came from Inc. Magazine. It's some good thought provoking ideas about, you know, what are you doing to build a culture that's able to compete in your marketplace. And, and the, the feedback that comes from that. It really is irrelevant to whether, you know, you make conveyor belts or you distribute food. Right. Or you're a semiconductor company. Some great overall thoughts with that. So yeah, good. Any thoughts on that or article or any of the previous ones that comment on Tom.

No, I think that's good. Just.

Yep. So let's kind of end the day with. We oftentimes not always in our newsletter have a special feature and this week our special feature is related to the We Supply America tour that's kicking off right now. We've got the website up. Will Quinn, that's with us that commented today. One of the three major sponsors of Dirt Beverages, We Supply America Tour is in for. And Will gets in a motorhome. I'm sorry, Will doesn't. But Dirk gets in a motorhome, spends his summer traveling around the country. This is Year Three talking with. In meeting with locally owned and family owned businesses that truly supply America. So this year he's factor. You and I know we were on the phone but together earlier in the week with APR Supply which was the first video they had but they were with Texas Plumbing and Midwest Meal and Wheel and Palmer Johnson Power Systems, IBT Industrial Solutions and so forth. So this video series is getting ready to kick off. If you don't follow that it's we supplyAmerica.net and Dirk Beverage. If you're not connected to Dirk or not following Dirk for some thought leadership or regarding leadership and so forth, he is the guy to to follow. I sent him a note this morning to see if he wanted to join us at the end of the show today. He's out but I strongly recommend taking a look at some of those videos because they're great.

Yeah, they're out. The production value and, and just how they've been edited and put together. I watched the first one with apr. It's really, really good. Really well done. I'm gonna go pick Dirk's brain on some of his production techniques and how his live streams work and all of that because he's setting the bar for us at another level. But, but well worth it.

Yeah, well Dirk was with us on this, on the show here last month. He's probably one of the most passionate guests we've had about wholesale distribution and, and, and the as he calls it, the noble calling of distribution. And the more I think about that it sounds a little grandiose but the more I think about it there's some real value to that. So we'll have him on again with us soon. But we always like to plug our guests when we can. So that's great stuff. So anyways, we did it Tom. Five, zero minutes. You're always sending me teams messages through this. We gotta hurry. Let's move along. And we did it. So good show today. Thanks for the note. Mike Mortensen about the insights this morning. I got a message this morning from the CEO of one of the largest distribution companies in North America. Going to be seeing him in a next month at a, at a trade conference and he thanked me for our thought leadership and wholesale distribution. So really kind of was a made me feel nice this morning. So I won't name him or the company but I was greatly appreciative of that. We have some great guests coming up over the next month or two and so we thank everybody for joining us. Tom, any exciting weekend plans?

No, but Tom May says he's going shopping this weekend to look for a shirt. I. I think he's, I think he's referencing your shirt, but I'm not 100 sure.

Tom, Tom, you know me. It's Friday. It's an aloha shirt. They're little flowers. Come on. So that's. That's me.

Yeah, but that's the requirement if he's going to co host.

That's right. Yeah. You'll need to go buy yourself a rain spooner and, and join us for that. So weather will change before too long and I'll. I'll shift out of Aloha and into my winter denim.

Back to your sweater gear.

Yeah, my sweater. Right. So anyways, go Trojans beat Stanford tomorrow. I hope everybody enjoys their Saturday college college football. And Tom, if that's it for you, then thank you everyone for being with us again. If you're on the podcast and you're not getting our newsletter, please subscribe to that and we'll look forward to seeing everybody next week. Until we do, be safe, be kind, and have fun.

Thanks, everyone. Have a good weekend.

We hope you enjoyed today's episode and our guests. Each week we try our best to dig into the topics that are impacting your business. So please reach out to us and let us know how you think we can make the show better or topics you'd like for us to tackle or talk about about more often and even guests you'd like to see. Join us. We're looking forward to bringing you next week's session and hope that until then, you stay safe, stay focused and do great things. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review to help others in wholesale distribution get access to the conversation. And finally, please check out our sponsor, Lead Smart Technologies and their manufacturing and and wholesale distribution industry CRM customer intelligence and channel collaboration platform. That's LeadSmart Technologies at leadsmarttech.com.