Tom Burton tells distribution leaders to stop treating AI as a tool and start rebuilding the company around it. Agentic AI will handle customer-facing work and workflows, forcing harder decisions about headcount. Boards should ask how to redesign the business as an AI enterprise, not just add AI features.
Chapters
Fourth, I think boards and owners are going to start asking better questions. Let me give you four more quickies. One, I think AI will continue to move from tools to strategy. I think people including distributors are going to stop treating AI like it and start treating like management infrastructure. Second, I think agentic AI is going to change the game. You're going to see increasing number of AI agents that execute workflows including customer facing stuff with distributors who are going to have increasing usage of AI agents doing customer service tasks and other tasks. Three, I think that's going to make the workforce question get harder so you're going to start seeing increasing impacts on harder choices for management to make on headcount. And then fourth, I think boards and owners are going to start asking better questions. And then it was like, well maybe we can find some specific problems that we can address with AI. I think now boards and owners are going to start asking, hey, if we were to redraw the company as an AI enterprise prize with AI as a substrate, what would our company look like? And I think those are better, smarter, more useful questions than do something about AI.
