Has Inflation Peaked? A Look At The B2B Wholesale Economy.

Foreign the Horn in Wholesale distribution with Kevin Brown and Tom Burton. Sponsored each week by Lead Smart 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.

I thought I was going to miss it again.

I'm not dancing, I'm playing the drums today.

Whatever you want to call it. Whatever you want to call it.

Just embarrassing, huh? You afraid to see me in public?

It's Friday. It's Friday. I'll let you slide.

All right. Thank you. I've been behaved all week, so that's pretty good. So what's happening?

Not much. Got some good stuff today, so.

Yeah. Hey, is it raining up there?

It's thinking about it. I don't know if it's raining yet.

Tonight, so you usually get it first. So. By the way, go ahead. I'm sorry.

It's supposed to rain this afternoon, I think.

Yeah, that's what we're supposed to get later tonight. You know, just, I, I really, you know, want to let our friends in the Midwest and the east and other parts of the world that are joining us where, you know, they've got struggling weather. Feel for us. It was 49 degrees when I woke up this morning. Holy crap. Yeah. That's cold, huh, man?

Yeah. Did you have to blow out the sprinklers to make sure they don't freeze or anything like that? No.

How I recognize it is, I checked because my wife, who has a broken thermostat, had the door cracked.

Okay.

You know, you just deal with these things as you go, but, you know, I know. You know, we've got listeners in Europe and Eastern Europe and Latin America on with us today and the UK and, and certainly across this country. So feel for us in California. It's quite cold today.

Yeah.

Yeah. All right. So, yeah, lots going on in the news today. We're going to talk about quite a few different things before we get going though. Why don't we do our little housekeeping that we do every week? I'm Kevin Brown. This is my good friend and business partner, Tom Burton. We are the co founders of Lead Smart Technologies. Lead Smart is a AI enabled CRM and customer intelligence platform that's solely developed for manufacturing and wholesale distribution. So we are the company that you turn to when you want to digitally transform and work your business ahead. So all good stuff there. We get together, though, every Friday morning and discuss the happenings in the week of technology, M and A sales and marketing economic issues that may be going on. But we try and kind of, as we just sometimes say, peel back the onion and look at the story behind the story about how those relate to manufacturing and distribution. What we'll be talking about today is though, the newsletter that we send out every Friday morning. It's called around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution. Surprise, surprise. That goes out to thousands of people. And that's where we publish all the articles that we'll be talking about and reviewing. So if you don't get that newsletter each week and you would like to two simple ways to do that. You could send us a quick note and letting us know. You do that and by email at hello at lead smart tech dot com. Hello@lead smart tech dot com. Or you can go to the website that we have for the podcast, which is around the hornpod.com and you can see all of our previous or not see, but listen to all of our previous episodes there and sign up for the newsletter. So we would appreciate it if you would do that and get that out to you. So two little final things to cover regarding our housekeeping. Try and make this quick. Is number one, our larger audience than we have here on Facebook Live, LinkedIn Live and YouTube Live. This morning, our much larger audience is on the recorded podcast. So what we do here every Friday morning is recorded. It goes through an editing process through an editor that we've brought in to help us with this. And later in the day, this is up on all the popular podcast formats at Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, Odyssey, across the board. It's there on all of them. If you happen to be one of those people that's listening versus watching. What we're referring to in these discussions in these articles today is what's up on a screen that those that are live with us can see that are the articles that we talk about in the newsletter. So final point of our housekeeping. If you like what you hear and you're enjoying being with us each week, please follow us on LinkedIn, the Lead Smart Technologies page, YouTube, Facebook, the same thing. Hit the like button. If you're listening on the podcast, please leave a review so others can see this as well. So all right, Tom, I'm done selling. Go ahead, man.

I feel like the house is really clean now.

Gotta do it, gotta do it.

So, yeah, it looks like we have Ron and another from Chicago. So we've got Chicago well represented. And yeah, if you're, if you're online and with us, please jump in. We'd love to hear from your front, where you are from, and join in the conversation. So let's get started with nothing but.

Nothing better than getting some feedback from those that are listening. And, you know, I talk to people regularly who listen, and sometimes they're on their phone listening and doing other things and it's hard for them to comment. But if you're at your keyboard, become that keyboard warrior and share some of your thoughts with us on what we're talking about.

You know, I've heard from people that people like the comments better than they like whatever we're saying. So let's, let's, let's balance that out.

Next thing you know, some of these people are going to start their own podcasts and there goes our audience.

Yeah, well, could happen.

All right, first article, Jobless claims increasing again. Seems, seems counterintuitive that that might be good news, doesn't it?

Well, I think they consider it good news for inflation.

That's exactly right.

And obviously, as you've seen in the last two weeks, that the stock market, I think, is up 10% in two weeks as kind of a relief, quote, unquote, relief rally, that maybe the inflation is on its way down and the rates have reached their peak. That may be true. I think there's a little bit of, what do they call it, Irrational exuberance is the word that was used before Greenspan.

Right.

Yeah, one of those. On all of that. But yeah, I think this just, you know, further, I guess, aligns to that, that, okay, fewer people are being hired, more people are out of work, there's less job, more jobless claims, that kind of stuff. So you could look at it both ways. Right. It's going to be, is this a sign that inflation is decreasing? Could be. But is it also foreshadowing some of the other things we've talked about in the past related to downturns and all of that? I think it's obviously not enough data here to really say one way or the other.

Well, they actually speak to that a little bit in this article and they talked about it. Is this rising number is not enough to trigger a concern about employment rates? It's right now they mention it, you know, they added it. And as a side note, right. The good news about looking at this particular data set, and we look at different data sets each week, where it's manufacturing, indexing or, or supply chain issues, and things with that and other economic factors. But the nice thing about this one is we see it every week. And, you know, we. We talked about that. I think it was either last week or the week before. Very briefly about the jobless claims. There was a factor in there that worried me, and I didn't think about it when we were talking on the podcast. Thought about it later was, you know what? Auto workers were on strike at many plants. We had the Hollywood walkout. We had. They had just solved the writer strike and not the actors strike. Well, now all of those people are. I shouldn't say all of them, but many of them are back to work. So what could have been potentially an artificial number here about people that were on the unemployment rolls and going to be going back, I think this is a much better number than like we saw a couple weeks ago.

Yeah. I mean, the other side of that coin, though, is that this is the holiday season and there's a lot of hiring that tends to happen around the higher holiday season.

You think that's happened yet?

Well, I think it would have happened or could have happened, but I don't think it has happened to the degree that it has in previous years based on, you know, again, whatever little data that I have on this, so.

Right. Yeah, I thought it was interesting, you know, this. This data that comes out, you know, each week like this is, you know, they talk about it's the most timely data on the economy's health. So I thought that was kind of interesting. You know, they talk about labor market is slowing as higher interest rates curb demand. That's consistent with slowing economic activity. So, you know, the other side of this is, is that we've also seen, I think we're either on the second or third week in a row that mortgage rates and interest rates are falling. So there's kind of some, I don't know, I'd like to see some things. Not, not expecting us to get back to, you know, 2.8% mortgage rates, but seeing some freeing ups, as in capital in the markets and, and letting. I think the bulls want to run.

Right.

We hear that from our. Our customer base and that have, you know, their businesses are strong. Maybe they're cautiously watching what's happening, but their businesses are strong. Wall Street's Walt has never really cared about any of this all that much. There's been dips, but, you know, charge charging ahead historically. So I think it's going to be a good thing to continue to watch. The reason I popped this article in, though, made me feel Good. That maybe we're going to come out of this Jerome Powell era for, you know, fairly soon.

We'll see.

Yeah, hope so. All right, let's jump ahead. There's a good article here in, in Forbes magazine about improving supply chains to ensure manufacturers long term viability. Quite a few good points in there about, you know, some best practices and so forth. But they start talking about, you know, the AI tool going into that as well. You have any specific thoughts on that, Tom?

Well, it was, it was interesting when I was reading that article, I was like, wait a minute, I could substitute the word supply chain here with sales or revenue processes. And you know, supply chains, right, are all based around process to a large degree. Right. How things move from one thing to the other and how they're progressing and so forth and more and more. And obviously this is what we do for a living, is we work with companies on how to build a sales or revenue generation process in their business. And a lot of times those processes have multiple steps, it has data from multiple sources and we want to use AI. Which I just found interesting is I'm not a supply chain expert by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I can barely spell the word. But when I started to read that article, I could see a lot of similarities in terms of the things that you would do for managing supply chains that we do for measuring or are, you know, monitoring and, and automating the revenue generation process.

Well, I think you're spot on with that. Right. And they talk, we'll talk about this in a moment. They put some very specific bullet points and you could push those on either side supply chain or what I'll call the, you know, revenue chain. Right. Or customer chain on the other side of that. But what I found intriguing with this as we started starting to talk about, you know, sharing data across, and I'll just hit these key points. They talk about, they talk about access to accurate manufacturing and supply chain data. So they talk about real time normalized data across ERP and other planning tools, cross functional visibility. So it's visible across key parts of the organization, trend detection and synthesized insights. So we're seeing patterns and so forth. And there's no better way ever that we found to see patterns outside of the human mind than with the AI tools that are going to bring this to us. And they're not just going to show us by going in and asking questions. We're going to get live alerts about what's going on with trend detection, on things with us as well. And then you talk about a proactive decision making and action based prioritization. And to your point earlier, right, you can take this. We have supply chain getting stuff into a building and the revenue chain with it, leaving the building. And both sides of these need all of those same exact things. Right. We had an opportunity where we traveled together, which is rare, to the Net alliance event last month in Denver and I had the privilege of talking to their audience or member audience about what we call the four pillars of digital transformation. And we talk in that, which is really on the revenue side of things where we talk about making sure that we have great ERP data, we have a robust AI enabled, kind of modern industry specific CRM, we have great marketing and marketing automation tools and we have an E commerce platform. And then they're all talking. Well, what we're starting to see even more now and more and more is that our customers, when they come on board with our AI enabled CRM and customer intelligence tool, they're actually buying licenses for their operations people and some people in their procurement department because now they want this data moving across all facets. So I think that line of supply chain and the revenue side of the business are blurring and going to go away soon. And now just we have data about our business.

No, and I, it's exciting to me anyway because I think in my whole career revenue sales, even marketing to a large degree has been maybe more art than science. And who are the, you know, who's the great salesperson, who's the great, you know, network or who, you know, whatever. And it hasn't been systematized as well as it could have been. And I think that the opportunity that we're seeing again using data AI in the same way that we systematize supply chains or manufacturing lines, we can start to systematize the revenue generation process as well. And it doesn't mean that you're replacing people by any means. That's not that at all. But you can get, you can get a lot more efficiency from the people and the people can be more successful with it. And we're going to talk about some new AI tools that have just been released in a little bit. But I was doing some testing last night with some forecasting and doing some AI with forecasting and how to do that more again consistently and predictably, which forecasting has always been generally an art. Right.

Am I going to be rich?

Didn't look that way. Looked like you needed to work harder is what it came back with. But anyway, my point is, is that I Think there, when I looked at this, there's a lot of similarities and parallels and whether it's supply chains or otherwise, there's an opportunity to really systematize things that have historically been difficult if not impossible to systematize. Yeah.

So, yep, I think it's a great comment from RP here.

Yeah.

RP says in his experience there's never been a time when all of this data is so connected. It used to be all about product information that fueled how products move through the supply chain and now the same focus and leverage is being used on customer data order to cash in every aspect where data is being used. You know, and we're gonna. That's a great point, Ron. So thank you for sharing that. I couldn't agree more. We're talking about this a little bit later where we kind of start talking about data lakes and where we can bring all these things together. You're working on some really cool stuff related to that. I kind of hinting at that lately with some of our customers or potential customers. And I'm pretty excited about where we can bring all these different pieces of data in. So we're going to come back to talking more about technology and AI in a little bit. But just in the last maybe month or so we've had a couple of conversations about ransomware and cyber attacks and so forth. And you know, we're trying to take a look at all of the things that are out there that are in the news that are going to be things that if you're a wholesale distributor, regardless of what you distribute, it could be kitchen products or home and garden products or turf products or you know, ball bearings or electrical equipment. Doesn't matter what it is. Right. If you're in the distribution business or the manufacturing business, you're facing similar challenges. And our goal each week and really why we're here is to kind of look at these things and bring some insights into it. Typically we have guests off and on coming with us. We're going to have some more guests till this year and really give you some insights and things. And we've just, I would almost say we've kind of been remiss in not talking about cybersecurity and so forth. And you know, I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Tom, I was at a conference a while back and I, I met a small to mid size manufacturer doing mostly business in the US and Canada, family owned, family run. And they got hit about a year ago. All of a sudden all of their terminals were either blank or had messages about the attack and they spent tens of thousands of dollars and weeks and weeks and weeks to sort through it. They turned out their data wasn't compromised with customer data, but it can be. So I think it's something for us to talk about. And now we've got this article about Henry Schein being hit in mid October and last week we talked about Ace Hardware.

Yeah, I mean, so I think these two article, well, these two articles definitely are go together. You know, the first article was yet another somebody hit with a cyber attack. And I think they lost some pretty customer data, got hacked financial information and all of that. And I think it was pretty interesting when you looked at some of the statistics they were talking about, about how much it was a public company. What, how did that affect their earnings per share and what was their loss? And I think what they say, $60 million or something that could go against their bottom line from.

Yeah, so publicly traded company, one of the largest names in medical and dental distribution, maybe the largest outside of a McKesson or a Cardinal. And they get hit with this and it pummels them for weeks. I mean, literally they were going to their customers and saying, please call us to place your orders. Now think about the millions of dollars that they've spent over the last X number of years to get out of having people call. And the only way they can operate is to be able to do that. Now they said they were still getting orders out successfully and doing their thing, but literally they had to go talk to their shareholders about this. In their third quarter earnings report, it's interesting, they talk about this group known as Black Cat. I did a little bit of reading about them and there's kind of two sides to what they do. It's, they'll work with other ransomware and cybersecurity companies to help them recover the money and then they do their own attacks as well. And they don't know. They believe that this is the same group that hit Ace Hardware. But the, they're, they're confident of that. But they also believe this is probably who hit MGM hotels and casinos. Right. So, you know, is that group going to come after a family owned distributor in, you know, Waukegan, Illinois or wherever it might be? Maybe not right now, but the offshoot group of those types of people that find a way to get into some of these smaller businesses and are interested in getting $150,000 versus $20 million. You have to be thinking about that at this stage.

Yeah. And I know we're going to talk in a minute about how to deal with this. Right. But there are, there are three. And I think the three things I'm going to talk about here are relevant to any size company and you're at risk if you're not dealing with them. One is just, you know, what we are dealing with here is just the security of the data. Who has access to what, who can get at stuff, Right. How, how secure is the data itself. The second piece is the privacy aspect of it. Right. So it's who can get at it, but who should get at it. Right. And the rights to it. And you can be, you can lose money just as badly by violating privacy rights, which kind of happened here. Right. They IDs and all of that kind of stuff. In theory. Right. There's a lot of potentially legal liabilities for doing that. And then the third, which no one talks about, but is becoming more and more, I believe is going to be a big, big issue with AI is the integrity of the data. So let's say I'm a hacker and I start, I don't steal your data, but I start putting in bogus data and I put false data into your system. And all that system now correlates goes back into my supply chain, AI or my, or my customer facing AI or whatever.

Think of the liability lost. You, Tom, lost again.

Think of the liability that can be created by that process that's there. And we don't think about that. We think about, we're gonna, we're gonna put a moat around it or a fence around it so people can't get at it. But also people can. Can they inject or can they put other false information into that system that now has other ramifications.

Right.

My point being those are the three areas of security. Cybersecurity that any company at least has to be aware of in what they're in their, in their business, no matter what their size is. You and our company, any company needs to be aware of those three things.

Yep. Well, you know, it's interesting too, as you talk about that, you know, in this case, they lost, I believe they lost both customer data and then some major data related to their manufacturing partners. But, you know, they talk about having, you know, insurance, cyber insurance in this setting, but it's got a $60 million limit. Well, if you, you know, start losing some major data tied to manufacturing partners and that ties up in some lawsuits and some things like that, those limits are going to be really problematic. Right. You have some big issues at hand with this. So we're Going to kind of continue to talk about it. Let's kind of look ahead at this. This. There's a Tech Radar article about building cybersecurity strategy on a constrained budget. And I don't really want to talk about budgets because, you know, I think there's a lot of people, you know, who are in our audience and our customer base who may not even have a budget for this yet. Right. But it could be happening to them. You know, we've got a lot of companies that are now, you know, migrating to the cloud and that's going to be a big help for them and from a cybersecurity standpoint. But they've got a lot of on premise data and so forth that's left as well. So kind of a big issue that's coming. This, get this article is nice. It gives some good kind of bullet points. It talks about having strong access control into your, any of your system, doing vulnerability assessments, having a plan of what you would actually do. Right. In this, this company I mentioned I was talking to one of the family members and executive leadership from the company. The last thing that they had been thinking about was something like this in their business. They had to go figure out how to respond. So I think this, this is really the piece that I liked out of this bullet. These bullet points that they share in this article was that, you know, having a plan and then also having an awareness within the organization that these types of things are happening out there and what could we do. So I liked about that they talk about MFA or Multi Factor Authentication. You know, we're just seeing more and more of that in every facet of our life about having to, you know, provide two ways that we get into a system. They talked about access management and then ongoing continuous monitoring. There's lots of software tools out there that can help with it. So. And then it was, you know, just, I want to continue to kind of wave this banner a little bit to our audience about to be thinking about these things. Right. And because the last thing you want to do is find yourself locked out of your own system and not being able to be able to do business.

Yeah. And also ending up with a legal liability that nobody wants. So.

Yeah, well, I mean there's business impact, there's legal impact, and there's just the general impact that it has in your overall business. So. So jumping, moving along here, interesting article here that we posted, came from Reuters, you know, Elon Musk. And along with all of the other businesses that he has, he's got. And it's it's tied to SpaceX. They've got the Starlink satellite Internet service. It's pretty astounding if you look at it. Why does that fit in and matter to wholesale distribution? We'll talk about that in a moment. But they just did a 90 million dollar contract with the government of Mexico. It's a short term contract, I think it was a year or less. But it's going to literally provide Internet access across the country. And it's pretty cool to see. And you know, historically kind of satellite based Internet has not been that solid or that reliable. But what they're putting together now is astounding. And if you haven't taken a look what Starlink offers, if you, if you live in a rural area or you're traveling to a rural area regularly or vacation home that you want good Internet at, you really look into that. Because I just, I mentioned to you earlier, you know, my first exposure, I knew about it, hadn't paid close attention to it, you know, you know Tom, and you know, quite a few of our listeners know I love to race sailboats. There's a race every year across from Southern California here in Los Angeles or Long beach to Honolulu, Hawaii, 2200 plus miles. When I was single and racing consistently, I couldn't do the race even though I had many opportunities to do it because I couldn't be away from my business for two, what could potentially be two weeks because you had no access, let me rephrase it, very limited access and it was extremely expensive. This year's Transpac race across to Hawaii. I had multiple friends that were doing the race on boats where they were broadcasting live from a boat doing 20 miles an hour blasting across the Pacific in the 1500 miles from shore. And their Facebook Live feed is like we are right now. So this is a cool technology that's coming around that's worth taking a look at the value of it, I think to our customers. I'll let you comment on this first before we talk about it, but I think it's an important thing to watch for our audience here.

Yeah, I think we're going to see whether it's Starlink or whatever. I think we're going to see the adoption of more satellite based always on connection become more and more prevalent even here in the U.S. right. If you look at our connections, the way that we do things in the US is we connect from one network to another and you know, depending upon if you have a good cell connection or whatever, it's, it's, it's actually not really good when you think about it.

Right now.

Yeah, it's a very flaky and very inconsistent.

Yeah.

And when you start to look ahead again, you know, AI and Internet of Things, you know, the whole Internet of things thing, which has been a bit of a. I would say an underachiever in terms of its original hype, I.

Believe is going to consumer level, for sure. I don't know. That is, it's, it is in other areas, but you're right.

Yeah. But I think the opportunity for it goes up exponentially when you start looking at it again. That's a data source to help drive AI actions. And so having that sort of always on, always reliable connection is going to become more and more of a need, not just a luxury. And I think we're going to see more of that. Whether or not we end up giving away free Internet to everybody in the country, I don't know. I wouldn't rule it out because I think there's a lot of benefit for doing that. You know, it's. If you, if you look at the cost of that compared to the other things that we're spending money on, it's really relatively small. But my point being is that I think we're going to see more of this and, and my hat's off to Mexico to making this move.

Yeah, I think, I think it's fantastic. And so, you know, it's interesting if you look back at the history of some of this stuff, right. Is, you know, Mark Zuckerberg was talking, you know, five years ago about having balloons that were floating over parts of Africa so that, you know, other parts of Africa that don't have Internet service can get it and wanting to have the connected world. Right. And obviously there's an economic factor to that with these businesses wanting to do that. Right. More people on Facebook, it can sell more ads, you know, those types of things that didn't come together. But what we're looking at here is super valuable. And I want to expand upon the comment that you made, right. Because, you know, Internet of things, AI as we're talking about all of these pieces, it's look, I mean, we talk to people in our business every day who have salespeople are out in rural areas and they're without cell service.

Right.

We're going to talk in a little bit about the value and the things that are coming with what co pilots, as we've talked about, related to AI are going to be able to do to help us. But as simple as we are today, you Know when we lose the cell signal, we can't be on the phone anymore. We're also not. And we're in that area not able to do a remote update to our CRM or get ERP data from our phone or whatever it might be. You know, I make a simple drive every week to see at least once a week to see my parents and I go through a mountain pass. And half of that drive, it happens to end up being good podcast listening time for me. But a lot of times I need to be on the phone on business stuff and there's just no cell signal. There's. And I live in a major metropolitan area. Right. So I think where we're headed with this is really powerful. And you know, when we were talking offline earlier, you mentioned, you know, early on people talked about 5G was going to be the, you know, the way around all of this. But 5G doesn't matter if you don't have a tower. Right. And so I think this satellite piece is really going to grow. The reason I put it in here for us to talk about today is something to be thinking about and looking at from a wholesale distribution standpoint. The value of that is going to be to our people that are working in remote areas or just having really consistent data. Because we're not worried about how far you made a comment earlier. Right. We use Within Lead Smart as a company, we do our internal communications on Microsoft Teams. We're regularly on teams, call either you or I or other folks in the company. And you've commented, right. When you leave the office there, where you're at in Santa Barbara and get to the car, you're going to drop that team's call. Well, it's, it's because you're moving from the WI fi in your building out to cellular. And, and it's a struggle. Right. And if you're on satellite across the board, you have a lot less than that. So. Good stuff. All right, what's next here? Tech talk, you're going to get excited about this. I think there's a few different pieces we have today and that we can talk about that. But tech talk, we're talking about some new features from OpenAI. They did the big event last week. We talked a little bit last week in the broadcast about some of the stuff that they're talking about, but there's some cool stuff about the, the way that they're starting to target enterprise level customers. What are your thoughts on this one, Tom?

Well, there's a lot of thoughts in the interest of time.

Shocker.

Yeah, trying. I try and try and be brief.

But I have a customer call in a half hour.

Okay. Yeah. So you know what you were. So first of all, OpenAI I believe is trying to move themselves from being hey, I got this big kick ass model to an actual platform for developers and to people to build on. It's a very different business model. It's a business model that says and makes sense if you align with kind of how Microsoft's history has been. How do I build a platform and provide a platform for people to actually utilize this in business? So, and then of course they have the model themselves. And by the way, Sam Altman today, I believe said that they're actively working on GPT5, which there was no time frame on, but is going to have literally super intelligence compared to what they're doing with, with four that's currently doing.

On the founder of OpenAI. Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, so there's, there's a. Certainly OpenAI seems to be taking the lead at the moment. I'm very interested to see where Apple and some of the other ones show up here in the next few months. But they seem to be taking the lead as, hey, this is the platform if you want to build AI based business applications, this is the platform you should be using. What they released on this call or on this developer day, which was a week ago Monday, so almost two weeks ago now was they released a new turbo version of their model which I have tested and is working much better. Okay. It's cheaper, so it's cheaper to access through the APIs. They, they created a tool that you can kind of build your own chat GPT for different purposes, which is pretty cool. I've, I've been playing with that a little bit. And then they've built, they also released a couple things. They released a thing called an assistant which allows you to build again through programming, build basically your own chat GPT using your business data and even communicate to your business applications. The, one of the things that's really, I think that hasn't gotten a lot of play, but I think is super important in what they released is, you know, chat, when you think about chat GPT, you think about natural language. You know, you put something in like a document and, or you ask it to make you an email and all that kind of stuff. But the other part of it is, is the other part of it is that they now have tools to really process and analyze structured data, spreadsheets, data from your CRM, data from your ERP and what's cool about that is the way that it goes about that is if you put a spreadsheet in of sales data or whatever, it actually writes the code in real time to analyze that spreadsheet and then goes through the analyst based around what you ask it to do. So I was talking about forecasting. If I put in a spreadsheet and say can you build me a 90 day forecast for this based on this previous sales data or the data that I have here, it'll in real time write code for you and then run that code on the spreadsheet and then give you the result. Which is pretty remarkable when you think about it. You know, I mean think about how much time it can take to even go and build like you know, pivot tables and stuff in Excel. If you don't, it can take a long time. Now you have the system actually writing code. So my point being this is all new features that have been put in here that really open up the door from a business application part of it and providing the platform to doing it. And I think sometimes the model, hey, we got more power in the model overshadows some of the infrastructure that's going in to actually make this stuff really work.

Well, I think that's, I'm glad you kind of refined all of that. And you know, big takeaway for me looking at this as the, as the non computer science guy on this is I just was looking at my notes, right. One of the comments that was made is that the AI vendors need a solid market ecosystem for all of this. Right. And it just what triggers for me is, you know, and the good folks at Distribution Strategy Group did a great AI event early in October, brought about about wholesale distribution, you know, and at the end of the day I think what we're all going to try and have to find is and Tom, you, you know a lot more about this, so feel free to correct this or throw some rocks at it. But in my mind I'm going to end up having to do much of what I do today over the next few years. We're going to talk about why this will change later. But in this setting is I'm going to have to say am I a Google, a Google person that's using Google Sheets and you know, their Google Docs and that type of stuff, or am I a Microsoft person? I'm gonna have to do the same thing again related to the generic day to day AI tools that I use and then I'm gonna have to go look on business Specific tools is which ERP system that I'm gonna, that has the right AI tools and which CRM am I going to pick. And they're gonna have, people are gonna have to make decisions about which horse do they want to ride through this process over, at least over the next few years to get them to the next level. Because I think right now, one of the big challenges that's happening for folks is everybody I talk to every day is interested in what AI is going to mean to them, but how do they get there? What do they do first? And there's countless, you know, webinars and podcasts and things going on about, you know, that to start with. But the reality of it is a guide right, for this through the right vendor is going to be really valuable.

Yeah. And I, I, I, I, I'll push back a little bit. I don't think that if, I don't think, actually, I think if, if we look ahead, we're not going to have to be picking and choosing so much as we move forward.

I think for the short term. Right.

Yeah, the short term right now there's a lot of point solutions that we, you know, try and, oh, am I going to use this? Am I going to use that? Yeah, I think, and I think the proper way and this, if you talk about guidance, the proper way to be looking at it is what am I trying to accomplish? And I believe the technology, whether you're using OpenAI or Cloud or whatever, the technology should almost be irrelevant to you as a business user. Right. You want the outcome. So it's like, you know, even today we were just talking about the, I have to worry about what network I'm on, to run, to use certain things. You shouldn't have to be thinking about that. Right? That's, that's infrastructure. That's behind the scenes, what I should be focusing on there. So I do believe that we'll actually, some of the things that are coming are going to allow us to get away from having to pick or us decide what it is. But the guidance that is required is what are the outcomes? And I'll just say we had a customer meeting yesterday. We had, you were there live. I was on Zoom, and they were talking a lot about their sales goals and challenges that they were trying to address over the next year. And I was replaying that meeting in my head afterwards. Everything that we talked about that they, you know, we were talking about forecasting and all of that and the, and the challenges. Right. Some of it was like, kind of overwhelming to them. Like, oh my God, I don't know how we would do that and we don't have the resources. Everything that we talked about could be solved by the right AI solution. Which is why I went back last night and started playing with forecasting. Yeah, I was like, wait a minute, there's got to be a way to accomplish this right? Without all of this. Like, oh my God, this is really too hard. We have too many disparate pieces, all of that kind of stuff, all of that. So that's looking at what am I trying to accomplish and then figuring out how that's actually going to be. And the good news is I am yet to find really anything that if it can't be done now won't be able to be accomplished in the business world. On some of these things like that we struggle with right now related to.

Right. So I should have probably prefaced my comment. Right. Where we're at today is Joe's Supply that has 17 branches based in Omaha is thinking what do I do now? The things that you're describing, we're going to talk in our next article. We're going to go into some crazy things about what could be accomplished. And, and you'll get to pat yourself on the back with Bill Gates agreeing with you. I just, I'll get to my com my thoughts on that in a moment. But right now, right today, not where we're at in five years, but today, people are trying to figure out what do I do right. And what they do today would be problematic for Joe's Supply, that is a $200 million a year company that's got 17 branches based in Omaha. It would be problematic for them with let's just say four people in their IT department to go, I'm gonna go start using ChatGPT or one of the GPTs out there to go try and do what's available and could be done. Right. And so what they need today is a guide. And what they're going to find is they're going to find a guy. And that was my point. I probably should have didn't prepare it well. But they today need a guide from their product suppliers of their, I'll say their technology providers. On the basic day to day business stuff, you're going to pick, right. And I think Microsoft is way ahead today.

Right.

And but you're going to have to pick there. And when you look at the tools like ERP and CRM and related tools like that, you're going to need to find the right provider. And in my view it's that gives you a holistic view of your business versus you use the term regularly spot or you know, point software products that do a one off. I'm good at this. We're gonna need to start looking at how can people help me get a view of my overall business. Now I make a comment here that is very self serving to our company with some of the directions you're taking our team and we try and leave that out of this podcast regularly. But I think where people are gonna have to make some decisions within the next today, in the next two to three minimum two to three years is who do I partner with for these things? Does that. Is that a little, should I preface that a little bit better? You're gone. I can't hear you.

Tom, can you hear me now?

I can and I just wish I could. You have that problem regularly with your microphone and I wish, I wish I could control when it happens. I can just hit a button and your microphone stops.

It's AI. All you have to do is basically say program it. Mute Tom's microphone.

I'm messaging some people on your team right now and asking if they could work on that.

So. No, you're right. You're absolutely right.

And say it again.

You're right. Okay, but the, the point being, look, I like it. I recommend people to go out and start testing and exploring right now, discovering, learning about some of this stuff. But don't take the, the chat GPT or the point product or whatever as the end all be all as to how you're going to build a strategy for the next even one to two to three years on your business. That's all I'm saying. Because a, if you don't look at this holistically, you're doing a disservice to yourself and you're in a frankly, you're going to waste a lot of money and you're going to find yourself in a place that you don't want to be. So like, you know, go discover, go play around, go learn. But when you look at a strategy to your point, look at it, you know, find out, make sure you have the right guidance. Yeah, we're. I like this too. I enjoy it. We're spending a lot of our time not implementing CRM with our clients. We're spending a lot of time talking about the strategy of how we can then use these things to grow their business now and in the future. And yes, so I agree. That's my point.

It's well this time, this ties in well to the the next article that we have in the newsletter, I'm going to hit pause here for just, just a minute. I usually do this much earlier in our time together is that as we get to our good read here, we'll talk about just a minute before we is that if you're listening on the podcast, we're referencing consistently articles that we're looking at here and the if you're not getting the newsletter right, we're sending that out every Friday morning. If you're not getting that newsletter, you can get that from just sending us an email at hello atLead smart tech.com or going to our website for the podcast, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com. and so we don't want to confuse people that are listening and can't see us. We're looking at a newsletter that we talk about. So Tom, I want to bypass. We'll come back to the scuttlebutt stuff and let's go straight to the good read because it ties right into what we're talking about. Each week we have throughout this newsletter a series of articles. We start off with breaking news type stuff. We have sometimes a special feature. This week our special feature in the newsletter is an article from our friend David Gordon, who publishes H Vac Trends and Electrical Trends newsletter. He wrote a good article about artificial intelligence and how it can detect problems in your warehouse. But the Good read section we put in each week, this week it's an article from Inc. Magazine. It's entitled 4 unimaginable ways AI will change your life in 5 years ties right back to this discussion we've just been having. So Tom, start off with you told me so within the last 10 days you've probably mentioned one of these things in particular and it's something I'm struggling to get my head around. But once you dive into this first.

So long story short, and you should read the article, but basically what Bill Gates says is that software and technology, the way that we have known it in the past is, is a thing of the past. And you know, specifically right. Will be. Yeah, will. Will be a thing of the past. And specifically right. Think about how we do, how we interact with technology today. We go and we go into a screen and we enter in data or we run reports or we add sales information or I mean, who knows, right? We even go to Streamyard or whatever we, whatever we're using, right? Technologically and we go and we do transactions with it. We send information back and forth with the computer. What he's saying Is that, and this is what I was saying is this is all going to be replaced by conversation. You're basically going to tell or ask what you want and it will be done, right? So think about, you know, you have Siri or you have Alexa or whatever and you ask it to give you the weather or whatever. And there's little examples of that. But take it to a whole other level and certainly take it into business. Well, where you have your headphone on or you have whatever and you're basically using conversation back and forth to accomplish whatever you need, right? So if I need to place an order, if I need to get information, if I need to do whatever, it's what he's basically saying is going to be replaced through conversation. And one thing I didn't mention with the new release of OpenAI that came out a week or two ago is their voice recognition. I mean, if you have not done this, go download the app. I think you have to have the paid version to do this. I'm not 100% sure. Go download the OpenAI app and have a conversation with it about back and forth with their new conversational. I mean it is absolutely remarkable. The voice is amazing. And that is where we're going, right? And that's what Bill Gates is talking about. And so the interfaces and the way that we transact with technology is going to change. And so therefore going back to what we just talked about, right? Think about your strategy, you can't take way you've done it for the last 20 years and then say, well, I'm going to shoehorn AI into this when in fact just from a user perspective it's going to be very different.

So let's, let's unpack that a little bit. Right. And I want to use case this for our audience in a moment, but I've got a couple ideas with that. But you know, last week is, is OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, did their big, their big conference and showing some of the new tools and things out there. So you, I was watching you. You were gracious enough to send me a note to say watch these segments of it versus then trying to watch the hours of it. So thank you for that. But really what we were looking at with all of that is I was struggling because the user interface and user experience isn't great in ChatGPT. There's no nice graphics. I don't have a warm fuzzy feeling when I'm there using it. But the reality of it is we will have some when we're at Our desktop we'll have some interface and that interface is what handles everything for us because everything else will be happening elsewhere in that interface. So instead of me going to open Microsoft Word, Microsoft Word is available to me, but I'm using it through a platform of one interface that I use and my ERP data is I can just say what do I want? Right. Show me the orders in the last two hours for three inch toggle bolts, whatever it might be that will all get fed to me from a singular platform. When I'm at a desktop and when I'm remote. I got a little to start with. Right. I might have a little pod in my ear that can, I can just talk to and it can give me the same feedback.

I'll give you a good use case example from a real live situation that we talked about yesterday with our customer. Right. They want to be able to do more better trip plans. So when their salespeople are traveling, they want to be able to proactively go in, identify the right accounts they should be visiting and make sure that those go into a trip plan. Well, how would you do that? Today you'd go and even with our mapping capabilities, you go into the system and you start running some reports and you look at things and then you can add that to a trip plan. And Right. It's multi step. You have to go through it. The future will be I'm going to Chicago, right. Who are the top 10 accounts that I should be visiting? Let the AI figure out really truly the top 10 accounts you should be visiting. Not based upon, you know, based around data and analytics. And then put that into a trip plan and take care of it and book my trip and book my hotels and everything like that that I need to do.

Literally I'm going to go you one better with that to add to that. Right. Because every business executive and every sales leader wants this to happen. It's not just going to tell you who to go see right. From by looking at your customers. It's going to look who are the like customers that you don't do business with.

Absolutely.

And say you should go here instead of your existing customer that doesn't buy much and Joe Smith is the guy you need to see at this building.

Yep, yep. And, and, and, and, but my point, and you're absolutely right, the point being is you're not going to have to go through, and go through 10 screens and act, run five reports and get all of that and then come up with your thing and create your itinerary. You're basically going to speak it and it's going to be done. And that's, that's an example of that use case that seems very unreal. Right. If you think about it. But it's a lot closer than we think.

It's going to take us time. Right. And I think it's going to be good that the technology will be expanding versus it all being here today because I think it's going to take us psychologically time to catch up with all of that. Because a simple example for me, I have doesn't matter how many people I've had working for me that could do this for me. I, I always do my own travel plan. Not, not hotels, not concerned about car rental, not overly concerned about. But flights for some reason I've just always wanted to do those myself. Now I'm sure AI can very quickly learn by looking at the past flights that I've booked that I like to, when I'm doing this type of trip, I like to leave at this time of day on this airline. But it'll probably learn that today. But getting out of some habits and that's just one simplistic version of a habit. But getting out of some habits that we have to letting that tool work. It's probably good that we're easing into this.

Agreed. But the first time that you did the new way. Yeah. And it worked and you see the beauty of if it doesn't work and it's clumsy and it breaks and you end up, you know, on Spirit Airlines in the middle of the night, you're not going to like it.

But the, but no, I'm not getting on that flight.

But. But the first time this type of stuff works for you no matter who you are. Right. This is what happened with the iPhone and all that. When even non technical people got their hands on the iPhone and saw how cool and easy it was for them.

Right.

They were hooked. Right. Once somebody finds out how cool and easy this is and then it works, it'll be hooked and it will go very quickly. Right now is still clumsy and it's still buggy and all of that but hey, that's going to take care of itself much faster than we think.

Well, it's interesting right, to think about that. I was talking to somebody recently that commented about they weren't confident in the idea that AI could cure cancer. And if you stop and take a look at these things like we've just been talking about or other solutions from AI let's just say medical advancements, you know, at, at The AI conference I was talking about earlier in Chicago recently is the idea behind it was Zach Cass was his name, who was formerly with OpenAI.

Right.

The developer of ChatGPT. And he said, look, he goes, if the software is, is working as we know it to work and it is learning as we're growing from these big models, it can't help but make things change because there's just going to, it's going to learn and that learning is going to become true and it's going to go exponentially. Exponentially is probably not even the right word of being able to solve problems. And so we're so far down the road already looking at things like cancer, right, that now we're going to be applying this learning model and how it's, it's as long as AI continues to grow and work as we know it today and it's just going to get better. It can't not solve these problems.

Nope. No. And it will. And so the adoption will come when you try it and it works and you're realizing how game changing it is. And then it will spread like wildfire, much like the iPhone did or, or other things when that occurred. Anyway, I know we're running out of time here.

Yeah, yeah, let's. We're done with the newsletter today. There' some good stuff there. Again, if you don't get the newsletter, then just come back to us@helloadsmartech.com and we'll get that out to you quickly. Or you can go to our website for the podcast, which again is www.aroundthehornpod.com and we will get that out to you quickly. Tom, thanks for today. It's been a good day. Thanks to the folks that joined us. We're appreciative of that and you being with us. And again, that claim that we make is if you like what you hear, share it with your friends, follow us at lead smart on LinkedIn, YouTube and our Facebook and get the live sessions that we do each week. If you're listening on the podcast, share with your friends, give us a review and help us continue to grow. This, I think this morning when I looked at just the LinkedIn audience, which is, you know, we have a, probably a, about a quarter of our LinkedIn audience actually accepts the invitation each week. Probably less than that actually now. And I think we were at four or five different countries just on LinkedIn and I think the podcast is typically hitting seven, eight countries every week and growing in download. So it's good stuff. Great to hear from our friend Amy from Hubbard Supply in Michigan. Great to see you, Amy, and thank you for being with us as always. Everybody that's joined us, Tom, have a great weekend. Everybody else, as always, be safe, be kind.

We're going to be off next Friday, right? Next Friday. We have a buy. We have a buy next.

We have a buy. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. So we have a buy next week. In fact, we need to kind of publish the, the holiday downtime schedule. I think we have two of them we're missing in. We really only have, I think, four left this year.

Yeah.

So good.

All right.

In the new year. So thanks, everybody.

All right, thanks. Have a good day.

Be kind, do good things.

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 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 and their manufacturing and wholesale distribution industry CRM customer intelligence and channel collaboration platform. That's Lead Smart Technologies atLead smart tech.com.