Is AI a Business or IT Function?

Foreign.

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.

Good morning. Hey.

Hey, how are you?

Hey, the sun's out.

Whatever. Don't brag. Come on, don't.

We live in beautiful, beautiful, sunny California every three weeks.

What's funny about that, right, is that, you know, you're three hours, two and a half hours plus north of me and you're supposed to have the, the May gray June gloom drag out longer than I do down here. And you were down from, you know, you're up in Santa Barbara and I'm down here in south Orange county and we were together in San Diego yesterday and it was darn close to raining.

Yeah.

You know, so I don't know. I don't like it anyway.

Hey, Brian. Good first Friday to Brian as well. So, Kevin, what do we have in store today?

Well, we're going to talk about quite a few different things today. I'm kind of excited about, you know, we're going to talk a little bit about some surveys that have just been posted out there recently about social media kind of taking the front forefront in marketing. And that may not be surprising. But as we start talking about wholesale distribution and the like, there's some interesting statistics there. But you know, one of the things that I threw in here, Tom, for us to discuss it as we talked about a little bit yesterday was you always use the term, I love it. You know, what's keeping people up at night. And we have not spent a lot of time on, on our broadcast here talking about cybersecurity and ransomware and technology threats and so forth. So it's an important piece of the pie, I guess you would want to, or the discussion you would want to say when it comes to business growth, buying technology and overall business health. So some good stuff there. And then great, great information that I know you've been talking a lot about in the last few days as we've had discussions about AI changing work. And we talk almost every week a little bit about AI, but this one's probably the most, one of the more impactful articles that we've had and it's from some great research from Microsoft So that's where we're starting with today.

Okay. All right.

So let's, I guess, maybe do our housekeeping that we do each week. We'll try and do this pretty quick. I'm Kevin Brown. That's my lifelong friend and co founder, business partner, Tom Burton. And Tom and I are the co founders of a company called Lead Smart Technologies, which is the sponsor of our live sessions here. We're live on LinkedIn, Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and then later today, this broadcast will be available on all the popular podcast formats as well. And what we do each week is we bring together news and information from the general economy, from technology, from mergers and acquisitions, sales and marketing, all of those things that are going on around us. We bring that together in a newsletter that we publish every week. It's called around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution, which is just like the podcast that we're doing right now. And we send that out to a few thousand people. If you don't get that email and you would like to see this recap of the week every Friday morning, simply send us an email. It's very simple. Helloadsmartech.com and we'll get that out to you. But again, we're doing a live broadcast now. It goes to the podcast this afternoon. If you're listening on the podcast, though, later on, what the people that are live with us are seeing is that newsletter that I mentioned. So we'll be referring back to that on an ongoing basis. So kind of picture in your mind that if you were with us live, you would have been looking at that last thing that goes with this. That's kind of important. It helps us. If you like the content that we're developing, share it with your friends. When you get an invite from us, forward it out. Like, follow. If you're not following us on any of the social platforms, most specifically LinkedIn, follow the lead Smart Technologies page. You'll get all of these updates as well, and that helps us get this message out. So got it out.

All right. Good. And yeah. Welcome to everybody who's on the Live, Feel free. Please jump in, ask questions, tell us where you're from, what you're doing in this first Friday of June. But let's get into the news.

I was going to tell you before we dive into the news, Tom. I thought it was kind of neat. I was looking at, you know, we have a. A small group of people that accept the invitation on LinkedIn and it goes to their calendar, and that's probably a, I don't know, a sixth or an eighth of our audience that does that each week. But I noticed I think we've got people from at least three, I think four different countries that were scheduled to be joining us today. And that's before the podcast gets out to the, to the Metaverse and the universe and the Ecosphere and all of those places.

We're going to have to break out our Spanish and German and some other, other languages.

Portuguese I know as well. But yeah, we had some European folks today, some Latin American folks as well. So it's good news. So let's dive in. Right, so those of you again, if you're listening on the podcast, what just popped up on the screen in front of us is our newsletter. And the first article that we were going to talk about was Different System, a research study that was done from Media Post, talking about most firms are spending more on marketing and especially on social media. So, Tom, you formerly were a co owner of a digital marketing agency. Why don't you take the lead on this one?

Yeah, well, it's interesting to me. We've come a bit full circle. So one of the reasons I got involved in digital Marketing back in 2008, 2009, I was working it intuit actually at the time was I was very excited about the idea that you would have, you could use marketing and have a way to track the results of marketing, right. Advertising or whatever. You know, prior to that, if you think about marketing, you put an ad in a newspaper or magazine or whatever the case may be and you kind of just hoped that it worked out okay and hope that that attracted people, attracted prospects and built your brand and all that. And with digital marketing, as an engineer, I was excited that, hey, we now had ability to have, you know, attribution. We can track and see what, what campaigns are actually turning to customers. Well, we've kind of come full circle and the whole idea now and it was interesting. In this article, talking about social media, we've used this word term dark social. I know some people don't like it and whatever, but what that means is, is that as a buyer, right, we're all out looking around, doing our research, trying to decide what products, what services that are important to us, whether we should be taking time to invest in and purchasing them and so forth. And we're doing a lot of research on social media, Google, all of that. That's not. We don't know about, Right. No different than you just talked about the podcast. Right. We don't know everybody who's listening to the podcast or even Watching the show here.

Right.

Or how many of those people watch the show and then decide to go look at lead smart website or whatever. We don't really know that data. So with social media and I think this is what was being seen in the. Is that companies are realizing that I have to kind of be everywhere, I have to be present everywhere, omnipresent everywhere. Because we don't necessarily know where people, our prospects are researching and how they're researching. We just want to make sure that we're at that party. I'll go one step further, which wasn't in the article. But if you are going to be omnipresent, then what are you omnipresent with and what content? And that's a different story. But I just found it interesting that more and more and less money is being spent on traditional. That there's still money but less money being spent on traditional Google pay per click and pay ads and things.

Well, they're making it harder, Right. Those companies are making it harder to get results the way that you used to be able to get results as well. And there's other methods to do that now.

Well, and it's just not the way buyers necessarily buy. Right. So it's just again, you have to adapt to the way buyers buy and if buyers, especially now, you add AI into the equation and chat GPT or Bard or whatever. Yeah, as a research tool. Think of it as a research tool. Now again, if, if a. And I think we even talked about this on our previous show, right. When I went to chat GPT and I said what's a good hard hat? Or what's a good place to buy a hard hat? And it came up with a list of companies, distributors on where to buy a hard hat. Well, wouldn't you want to be part of that list when research is going on? So again, it's. To me this is just another sort of shift in the whole new world that we're in and that marketing is going to also take on a bit of a continued take on a different role. That's not. Everything is not directly attributable. So you have to be, you have to trust the process a bit and know that there are a lot of activity going on with your prospects. But you want to make sure you're visible and if at all possible helping to influence and guide them as they're going through that research.

I think I could see us doing a whole separate, you know, shorter, whole separate broadcaster show sometime talking about the dark social idea. You know, it's interesting as you bring that up, I kind of, it's almost, I'm not a big fan of that term, but the concept is very, very important. Kind of think of it like blind social. But you know what just came to mind? I'm going to throw something out to you and I really. You didn't know I was going to say this because it just came to my mind and I'm very cautious about this because it's June 2nd, we only allow each other one compliment a month and so it's only the second. But you said. I'm going to say this. You said something extremely profound. I want to say this was five years ago was before LeadSmart. We were working on a consulting project together and you were kind of doing the digital side of things and the tech side of things and I was doing the go to market strategy stuff and, and you made the comment and I think it was with somebody else, but it just has stuck with me. Right, because you're a computer scientist by education. You're a geek. You know, you, you are a fine businessman, but you're core, at the core. You're a, you just said an engineer a minute ago. But you, you used in a conversation we had you, you said you hated marketing for your whole career until there was now science involved in marketing and hence you got involved in a digital marketing agency. Well, now I just hit me. It's almost like marketing now is going, I don't want to say full circle, but with dark social and things where you're. They're not, it's not attributable. Right? You're, you're guessing if you try and do attribution and that's okay in some instances, right. To do, you know, swags with, with attribution in marketing. But we're coming back around to that. We can't see and we can't have science behind it the same way. I just wanted your thought on that because it just full circle is, is an overstatement, but it is a bit of full circle.

I mean it's obviously the mediums are very different than they were now or now versus then.

Say thank you for the compliment.

Thank you. Oh, thank you for that. Yeah, thank you for that. No, but it has come full circle to a degree on those things that are there. Obviously our ability to be more omnipresent at an affordable. And you know the other thing too. Think about it, right? If you put an ad in a magazine, you would spend weeks working on the creative. All of that. You put it in there and if it didn't work, you were basically screwed. Right. You couldn't go into the magazine, oh, let's go change this, let's do an a B test on this. Let's do all of those things. So certainly our capabilities for testing and, and changing and updating and all of that and being way more dynamic is a million times better than it was then. But as far as attribution goes, you're right. Attribution is becoming harder and harder, especially with customers that are finding out and discovering things through research that you're not able to track. They're on other platforms. But I think again, the opportunity then is to make sure that you are omnipresent and omnipresent with the right content and the right data that actually ideally sticks out and helps that customer and guides them. It's a problem. The problem doesn't only exist for buyers, the problem exists right now for sellers because there is so much information. It's very easy for sellers to get or I'm sorry, buyers to get, very confused, end up down rabbit holes and not making decisions either.

Overwhelmed.

Overwhelmed. And I think this is true even in buying product, commodity products and so forth. It can be very overwhelming. But one thing I do see more and more on some of the prospects we're Talking to with LeadSmart is we're seeing more and more questions and more and more emphasis on how do we effectively market, how do we kind of attack this dark social situation, all of that. So the awareness is getting more and more, which is great. But now it's just a matter of how to best deal with that and know that you're not going to be able to know necessarily. Okay. I ran a Facebook ad or a LinkedIn ad or whatever the case may be and I can attribute directly to there. Now there are some ways to do. You may have heard the term self reported attribution and things like that.

That's where I was, but that's what I was hinting at earlier.

But anyway, it is a bit of a full circle.

Yep. Well, so we've spent a long time on this article that I wasn't planning to, but that was really good conversation. But before we go on, the thing that really kind of triggered for me out of this, besides what we talked about here was. And I think that whole. I think I like, maybe I like fuzzy social versus dark social.

Dark funnel. A lot of times people call it the dark funnel too.

Yeah, I think it's the dark that makes people struggle. Right.

Because like it's bad, it's not like the Dark Web or the, it's not.

It'S not bad, right? But no, the idea was though, out of this, this article in this survey talked about people are upbeat on the economy. It was discussing that between either somewhat positive or extremely positive. You know, almost 80% of their respondents were basically bullish on the economy, which is great, right? They're going to spend on marketing and they're driving their businesses ahead. So that's good stuff. Right? Let's jump ahead, huh?

All right, let's do it.

All right. I'm going to throw this back to you again. You, you, I, I, I, I think about this. When I was reading this, it talked about sleepless nights for CEOs and you comment, you know, a lot of times about what's keeping people up at night. And we've not spent much time, if, if really if any time. Here we are, right, episode 43 and June of 2023 of this crazy little journey we're talking about here called around the Horn and wholesale distribution. We've really not spent time talking about cyber security and so forth. And, and as we do that, I realized as I was reading this this morning and again yesterday, I was just kind of thinking, you know, you talk regularly. When we think about most specifically distribution or distributors and dealer networks, the amount of data that these companies have in their company, it's astounding.

Right?

They've got could be 20, 30, maybe years of 100 invoices a day that they did and all of the other e commerce data and so forth. And that's dangerous in the hands of somebody else. And if you're, you might not be a technologically advanced company, but you could, you could be that and be still be a quarter of a billion dollar a year wholesale distributor. What, what risks are these people facing? And it's, there's a reckoning that could happen in this, I like this article kind of when this was from Palo Alto Networks and obviously a big, you know, networking company and they're trying to protect people. But I enjoyed and appreciated what this talk but I wanted to get your thoughts.

Yeah, it's, it's interesting. I, I didn't know you were going to put this in here, but I was listening to a podcast on my drive home last night about, you know, the whole, I guess area of cyber security, cyber fraud and so forth and the role of AI on that, both on the, from both the, the, the bad and the good side of it. From that side of things. One of, I think there's two big Issues, potentially, at least for the market that we're in, is what they were talking about here is more of like, you know, ransomware and, and hacks and things like that that I think the biggest thing that keeps people awake on that is the unknown, right? What is the unknown of what could happen and how severe that could be on our business? And it could be very severe. And that's, you know, again, that's just ransomware. That's not even. I believe you're going to see more and more hacks on trying to get at data because data becoming the sort of valuable asset companies are going to find that their people are trying to get after data. And we certainly see this. The degree that people tend to protect their proprietary data is not very good at this point. But the other area that this podcast was talking about, and I think it's relevant certainly to our market, is called cyber fraud. These organized groups are using AI and other things to figure out how to fraudulently purchase, probably purchase and return do kinds of things that ultimately are just fraudulent transactions and fraudulent actions on what they're doing. And what they were talking about is that through the use of AI, even though the bad actors may be using AI to help facilitate this, we can also use AI on the other side to identify trends, identify situations, to identify potential cyber fraud, or potentially even identify cyber security issues before they happen. And just the one last thing that I really thought we talk about this, but I thought they hit home really well on this conversation, was we have data, right, in our organizations and we can go look at data and make decisions. But because we have such large quantities of data, there's a lot of insights that it's just impossible for an individual to see, right? There's impossible to see those trends that because there's so many different disparate pieces of data and interrelationships that I can see and can spot and put into place. So it gives us an advantage potentially to head off some of the issues that are in this article and as well as some of the cyber fraud situations.

Well, I thought this was interesting. You made a comment in there that said 34% of CEOs that they had surveyed said they would pay ransom in case of a ransomware attack. Which is interesting, right? Because that's exactly the opposite of what law enforcement and cybersecurity experts say you should do. But I think that this is, you know, what triggered for me when I read that was that's like, you know, the old saying, right? Hope is not a strategy. It's Saying, okay, I'll just pay it because I haven't done the heavy lifting and the work within my organization and you know, I just want to bring that back around. Right. As we talk about, you know, whether it's the target customers, you know, we work with at Lead Smart, whether they're wholesale distributors or manufacturers is, you know, we might, you might think about, you know, a distributor of pipe valves and fittings, not thinking that they're attractive to a, you know, a Russian hacker. But if you stop and think about one, that two things come to mind. One, what you said, which I thought was great was, you know, the, the playing games with your e commerce system, using AI purchase as returns. It doesn't have time or fraud.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and then the other side of it is, wait a minute, what if I could hack into XYZ company, pull all their data out because that helps me build a model over an AI model over here. Their data is helpful and you just don't want that running around. So you know, we need to be thinking about this more. But you know, when I think about 34 saying they would just pay that the ransom, it's like, wait a minute. I mean there's treasury implications, right. There's financial implications that your controller, your CEO, your CFO needs to be thinking about is. All right, so what do we do? Do we keep 1% of revenues set aside for that?

Do we.

What I mean, is there a calculation somewhere? I doubt it. You know, how do you, if that's your strategy is I'll just pay the ransom. One, you don't know if that. Right. If you're going to get back your data by paying the ransom. And two, how do you plan for that?

Well, and it sets a bad precedence because again, these are organized groups and so if you pay once, then they know you're likely to pay again and again.

Right. You better be more secure than that, you know, than, than the Pentagon if you were, if you're going to pay that ransom and not think you're going to get hit again.

So yeah, there's a lot of. But again, the, this is a place where intelligent use of AI and use of your data. Think about it, right? The, the, the, the criminals always try to go for the weakest links.

Yeah. Low hanging fruit.

Low hanging fruit, the weakest links. So do things to start thinking about how not to be the weakest link. That's probably your best form of prevention. Paying a ransom pretty much shows you're a weak link.

Right? Right.

It's in. So anyway, it's, it's, I think it's just a lot very misunderstood which is part of the, the reason that it keeps people up at night. And some 34% would actually consider paying the ransom.

Yep, that's good. All right, thanks for the feedback on. Now let's jump ahead. This, this digitizing production change that I, there was some cool stuff in here that I liked. So our next article that we talk about here is coming from our article why Small Suppliers are key to Digitizing Digital. Digitalizing. Excuse me, production chains. And, and I want to almost take some of the data out of here. And this was a good read. If you apply it, I'll say to the supply chain side of the business or the manufacturing side of the business and then you take this same data and push it the other side of the business to the revenue customer facing site. So you got supplier side, customer side, I'll call it. Because this really talks about, you know, the core of it. Right. Is sharing data to manage your supply chain. They made a great comment in here. They say a digitally linked production chain will not only become a precondition for doing business over time, it will also offer competitive advantage for manufacturing companies. It says on the path towards a smart industry or industry. We talk about this pretty regularly. Industry 4.0. Manufacturing processes will work more and more autonomously. So if they're going to work autonomously and you're going to start pulling in AI to do that and let those things run right, then you need to be digitally connected to your supply chain because they're going to want to do that as well. So I really liked how this kind of got that started.

Well, weren't they and wasn't the biggest punchline here is that the key for this working is the smaller suppliers. Without them in there, the chain gets broken, the digital chain gets broken pretty quickly, right? Yep.

So let's take that to the other side.

Right.

Let's take that to the revenue side of the business. Right. And we, we talk to companies, most specifically manufacturers. But you know, we, we had some conversations recently with a, you know, Fortune 100 company that's a distribution company in the health care world recently and they're struggling to push data back to manufacturers that they partner with, including technology companies. And this data sharing has never been more important than it is now. And you know, we've got people that join the show regularly from some large multinational companies who still struggle as a manufacturer. Right. To connect elect, we'll just say electronically to make it easier. Right. With their distribution network you know, we try not to pat ourselves on the back too much about what Lead Smart does, but that's the core of what Lead Smart does is connecting channel partners together and sharing data. But this is, it's literally something that you are not going to be able to compete over the next few years, maybe even it's going to start in the next few months the way that others do. If you're not able to on the supply side of your business and the sales side of your business, com digitally communicate or electronically communicate with all your partners both in the supply chain and the distribution channel.

Well, and do it securely, just.

Yeah, right, good point.

The risk obviously of opening up your firewall and communicating and collaborating is the potential security aspect of it as well.

Yeah.

So.

But you know, we spoke about this a number of times, even with some of our guests in the past that you know, when you talk about, I'll call it on the revenue side of the business, right. Is you've got a lot of people in the dealer and distribution world who are so cautious about sharing. You know, they don't want, you know, XYZ behemoth manufactured to know where they're selling their stuff. Now they may do some zip code reports or as we call them, POS reports and so forth, but truly integrating together so we can optimize and you know what's interesting about that is when we bring it, when we do it on the supply side or the supply chain side of things, we're optimizing production, right. Everybody's production gets better, everybody's efficiencies gets better and it should drive down everybody's cost when working communicating effectively. Right. And if everybody's driving down costs, it then benefits the end user customer. When we get to the revenue side of the business, if we're sharing data back and forth about what's going on at that, what do we do? We, you know, if, if you know, ansel glove and you know, it takes somebody in this safety and medical world both is communicating very clearly with their distribution part partners, whether they're a large safety distributor or medical distributor about this hospital or about this factory. If everybody's really entwined in sharing data about how to benefit that end customer, the brand loyalty goes through the roof. Right? Brand loyalty goes through the roof. Everybody wins because you're selling more. And at the end of the day it's, it's, it's kumbaya.

Right?

But we're not there today. We're a long way from there today.

Or a long way, but there's a lot of value. There's. Every day there's more and more reason to be looking at that other than just, you know, convenience or, or organization.

Right. Yep. It's good. All right, well, we have this little M and A roundup again. It was, it was a good, it's been good. The first part of the year, the first five months of the year, this modern distribution management published this. It came from another third party research, plus some of their research together. So Tom Gale, Mike Hockett at MDM and your team, thank you for this. As you know, we say regularly. You know what, we're, we're not, we're not reading our own research or we're consolidating data that we found from around the world that benefits wholesale distribution. And again, Tom, I want to kind of dive in here. Two points is if you're listening to the podcast, which means you're not seeing the two handsome devils that Tom and I are, you're also not seeing this newsletter. So every Friday morning we send out this newsletter. It goes out to a few thousand people and it talks about what's going on around the world in the economy, technology, M and A sales and marketing and so forth. So if you're not getting that and you want it, helloeadsmartech.com is the email address. We'll get that out to you. And obviously one more blast plug for the, like the click the follow, whatever it might be.

So I just realized, God, this is like a duh moment. But what we should do in the show notes of the podcast is linked to the newsletter for that week. So if somebody wants to see the newsletter for that week, it would be in the show notes.

Do you hear that, John Taylor, our editor?

Yeah. All right.

John's got it.

Okay. Yeah, we, that would make things anyway if someone wanted to see this.

But yeah, no, that's good, that's a great, a great point. They can make that available. But so the back to this M A roundup, I think it's important. You know, again, you know, back to your mantra, don't watch the news, right? Is, you know, stock market had a pretty good week. You know, some companies out there had good results but still got pummeled. But we've got this back and forth, you know, this lukewarm, you know, economy right now. But there's no shortage M and A deals being done. You know, they, they talked about 50 deals in, you know, in the industrial world, 50 deals done in January dropped down in February to 29 and 22 in March, but 37 in. In the previous month, last month. So things are moving along. Nobody's afraid to go out and spend money and buy. We report on that in our industry scuttlebutt section here just about every week. So we appreciate this information getting out there. I look at this and I think we've been very consistent right. In the things that we say and we talk about is looking for the bright spots as opposed to doom and gloom in the economy.

Well, I think this is going to continue for and I think that again, you heard it here first. I'm going to say this is that the speed of the M and A. And this in my opinion is going to pick up not so much because of economy or good economy or bad economy. But I don't know how many of these deals were PE private equity driven. I don't know if it said that in the article that are there. But you just think about everything we've just been talking about, whether it's supply chain with smaller suppliers, whether it's having data, having access to data, customer experience. There's going to be, in my opinion, a lot of companies looking to capitalize on that through acquisition and acquiring companies that have good data and that have, you know, a bit more technology sophistication or even if they don't and they under their wings and incorporate that technology sophistication. So I think there's going to be and there's certainly no shortage of money on the sideline with private equity. So I think they're going to see more and more of this. I don't know necessarily if it's an indicator of economic strength. I think it could be. I'm not saying it's not. But I also think there's a lot of other variables that are going to drive the M and A activity over the next few months. So anyway, that's my prognosis. You heard it here first.

That's good. Okay, I like it. We'll have maybe we'll put that in the show notes as well.

Yeah, there we go.

Although if we did that every week, we would have a feature every week of Tom saying you heard it here first.

Yeah, maybe I need to make like a list of all my you heard it here first.

You should. And then let me have it so we can go review it.

That's right. We can review it at the end of the year and see if I'm batting less than 300. So.

Well, good, good. The good news is is that nobody at leastmart Technologies is using this Podcast as part of our performance review.

Yeah.

So we're sliding into our industry scuttlebutt section here. You know, I want to spend a couple minutes on, on these, you know, Partstown, they've got multiple different platforms for E commerce. If you don't think things are moving fast with E commerce, take a look at what's going on at Partstown within their marketplaces. They have multiples of them and they are killing it. And you know, things are going strong there. So 2.4. They're eyeing 2.4 billion in revenue in 2023. So something to look closely at as well. AD did another, you know, in my notes that I sent over to you, I put merge slash acquire. And it's interesting as you watch the press releases how other organizations have covered it. A group of them have said acquired and a group of them have said merged. And AD is obviously affiliated Distributors, one of the the largest buying groups in, in North America and they cover the, the gamut. Nine, well, nine divisions. Because this acquisition slash merger of the Baron Group will come right into the pipe valve and fitting group within there. So they're just continuing to add, it's, I think it's another 80 plus distributors that are involved in that. That'll put them up probably over 900 distributor owner members at AD. So congratulations to AD, the whole team there and the team at Group Baron that's coming across. I think that'll be a good experience. And we'll be participating in the PHCP or that big consolidated group of pipe valve and fitting and plumbing and so forth with AD will be participating in their event like we normally do. So we get a chance to meet those folks from the Behring Group. So and then congrats to VSG, the large distributor Dakota Supply Group. 125th anniversary. Good news for them. They are getting ready I think. I also just read their broke ground in another huge distribution center and facility. So good for them.

Yep.

Congrats to, to Dakota Supply Group. So all right, here we are in our Tech Spotlight feature that we do every week. Will AI fix work? Here you go, my friend. I left the rest of the show here because I know you're fired up on this and this was, this is one of the better articles that I've read and it's, it shouldn't even say article. It's research that Microsoft did.

This is a bit more. This is a bit more. And it's, you know, you could say, well it's written by Microsoft so it's biased with their thing on AI, but I thought it was very well written. It's much more than an article. And the key punchline in here, one of the key punchlines in here is part of their survey, is that people, there's kind of two sides. People are definitely nervous as AI going to take jobs and specifically my job, whatever that may be. But on the other hand, people are very overwhelmed at work and overwhelmed keeping up, whether that's with email or phone calls or meetings or everything that goes on. And in fact it was very clear is that this overwhelm and this sort of administrivia world that we're in is stifling innovation. And you know, I don't know about you, but I was out, what we were out at a meeting yesterday in San Diego. I came home last night, I turned on my computer and I had 363 emails. Now a lot of those were 360.

One of them were from me. But.

Yeah, yeah, which is all go to spam. But, but even if you have spam emails or emails that are not relevant, you still got to sort through them. You got to find out, you know, one's for the others. And you know, think about, I mean, all have, we all have this, right? We all have this bombardment all day long of different things, whether it's email, phone calls, text messages, Skype or zoom calls. And then if you're in an office face to face meeting. The bottom line is people are feeling very overwhelmed and not feeling like they're making any progress at work. They're just kind of keeping up with the administrative aspect of it.

So Tom, you're, you're, what you're talking about, there is item number one of three key things they talked about. So because we've got podcast listeners that can't see this, let's, let's, let's really kind of package this up for people and really look at what this is. So Microsoft interviewed and surveyed 31,000 people in 31 countries. They say they analyze trillions of Microsoft 365 productivity signals along with labor trends from LinkedIn Economic Graphics.

Right.

Remembering that Microsoft owns LinkedIn. And they put this all together in this survey and this research that they did. And they talk about the pace of work is outpacing our ability to keep up. They talk about a shift to AI is underway that will completely transform the way people work. You started talking about the first one of these. They say that they've got three different, three key factors in this. And the first one they referred to was digital debt Costing us innovation. So why don't we just unpack that one first about digital.

That's what we were just talking about.

Right, which is what you were talking about.

Yeah, that's what we're talking about is the overwhelm of just the digital overwhelm in our business or our life. Our business life. And it's stifling the innovation. Could you try again? Is Alexa ordering food for us, for you or what? Now you're on mute.

There's nothing to cancel. Have I mentioned that I hate Siri?

Okay, well order some food while you're there.

Yeah, really? So did you catch what I was saying just there about those three key points?

Yeah, no, that's what I was saying is the first one we were just talking about. So, so that's number one. But the punchline on that was, is that the people were more excited that we're at survey were more excited about AI potentially helping that overwhelm that digital debt that was there and providing them handling a lot of the just the digital noise in their world so that they actually had some attention and bandwidth to focus on something that was actually innovative and more forward productive. So there was more excitement about that than there was concern that I'm going to lose my job. Which I thought was an interesting vantage point.

Well, I think you're right. And what they talk about here with this digital debt scenario, right, is in this, this hit hard for me. I'd read most of this article a week or so ago and it didn't hit me as it did when I reviewed it again this morning. In your comment about all those emails, I. It really made me stop and take notice of my days. We talked about this a little bit in the meeting we were in yesterday down in San Diego as well. But I look at my role as I lead the sales side of our business, but I'm also the CEO of the company. So I may go from a call with a customer to a call with our accountant to a call with our lawyer in the course of an hour and that changes a lot. But this, this digital debt thing and it, it really references our over connection that we have. Right. We've got devices everywhere we go and I just think of myself, I'll use a good example is, you know, yesterday, the meeting we were sitting in and you know, we were off and on in that meeting for five hours and I had, when we took breaks, I got on my laptop and did some things in the meeting I was handwriting notes on my iPad, which is how I do my Meeting notes. In any other quick break that we had, I was looking at my phone. Now, happily, those devices are all interconnected that my handwritten notes were moving across and onenote over to the laptop and the phone. But we're just overloaded. And this happens to us every day, all day. And this digital debt term I think is really powerful because it talked about creativity and innovation and how. And it's interesting, it makes me think you have some flexibility that sometimes that I don't always have. And you get a lot accomplished on the weekends because you're not getting inundated. And when I look at some of the product path and product roadmap stuff for our company that you achieve over the weekend, it's astounding.

Right.

And that's because nobody's calling, nobody's asking for anything. The text messages aren't coming in. I'm not sending you a teams message. Justin's not, you know, whoever else isn't. And we're able to focus and we should be able to get to a place right back in our lives and we'll talk more about some of these AI tools that will help with that, where we can be innovative and we can take a step away. It just makes me think real quick. I remember when I started my first business, you know, we were still using fax machines, we were still using pagers. Cell phones were newer. They were just, you know, they'd been around for a number of years. They were expensive. And I remember asking my father, I said, how did you get business done? And he had worked for himself for many years and also some large companies. I said, how did you get business done before FedEx and fax machines? And he looked at me and he goes, I went into the office at 7:30 or 8 in the morning and I left at 4:30 and 5 and I came home and I got to spend time with you and your sister and your mother and work went away, you know, and there wasn't work.

Sure.

Well, now, you know, I don't have this and this is a bad thing to acknowledge, but I don't have the sleep rubbed out of my eyes before I'm looking at email in the morning.

Yeah.

You know, so there's an interesting piece that AI can help us with this digital debt piece. The next, the second piece they were talking was there's a new AI employee alliance. And so this went into. And I want to kind of take these. This is such a powerful study. It says so the, the first one was digital debt is costing us innovation. Second Point was there's a new AI employee alliance.

Right.

And this goes into kind of talking about, you know, employees that they surveyed were eager for AI to lift the weight of work. They were more impressed with that or more enthused about that than they were concerned about losing their job. The 70% people said they would love to be able to delegate, you know, mundane type things to AI, to lessen their workloads, to let them be more creative. So that's powerful. Right?

Well, if you remember when we talked last week about the AI enabled organization, that's basically what they're talking about in so many words there. And it's starting to pop up. In fact, even in this last week, I've heard of a handful of companies that have created what they're calling.

Tom, you went away.

There you go. How about now?

Yep. You said you'd had a handful of companies.

I've had a handful of companies this week that I've heard that have actually incorporated what they're calling center of excellences in their organization to deal with AI or to deal with their AI strategy. And that's again, looking at it from how do I create that AI enabled organization versus, I love the term, I've heard a couple times this week of shadow AI projects. Projects are kind of going off on the side and not really tied into the. And looking at things a bit more holistically. So I think, you know, that the alliance that you're talking about, there is a definitely things that are moving in that direction and that will be a very important charter of whether it's a center of excellence or whatever it is in any business is how do I, how do I reduce all that administrative and all of that digital noise and how do I use some of that time back to be more creative, innovative and just productive on things that need to get done?

Yeah. Well, it's interesting. It makes me think about our conversation yesterday in the car we were having and you had mentioned something about digital twins and copilot, so to speak, that we've talked about a number of times here on the show is, you know, 10xing productivity for people. And my challenge to you was for us to put our heads together and look at the company that we run and say let's 2x right? Forget about 10x, let's 2x productivity. Which really ties into this article. They talked about three out of four people said that they would be comfortable using AI for administrative tasks, but most people also said they would be comfortable using it for analytical work and creative work. So they're looking for this assistant to say, hey, summarize my meetings, tell me how to plan my day. What's the most important thing to me, it's kind of funny, it just makes me think about Genius Feed, that is our AI enabled tool within Lead Smart that says, hey, here's all the leads that you have that are due to be followed up on, hey, here's customers that aren't buying, here's the products they need to buy, and so forth. We're seeing that already and people are starting to embrace that more and more, which is what we're learning for this research.

Well, and just last word on this is that productivity and innovation and creativity kind of go together, right? And if you're not able to have some time to be innovative and creative, then you're not likely going to be very productive other than maybe firefighting on things. So those three things go together. So how you use AI to enable more productivity, more creativity, more innovation, and less of the stuff that isn't, that is going to have potentially a big impact. And yes, I could definitely talk about a whole lot of things, specifics on how that could be done and we'll definitely keep everybody apprised as we kind of pull these together.

Well, the last piece that we didn't address here was the third point, right? We, we need to structure this article as we talk about how valuable it was. The third point was that every employee needs AI aptitude. And the quote was, the paradigm shift to AI as a co pilot requires a whole new way of working and thinking. And, and it's really interesting. I listened to Tom Gale at mdm, did a short interview and discussion on this with Mike Marks from Indian River Consulting. And one of Mike's comments were be as focused. I don't, I want to be cautious quoting Mike, but basically the tone of it was be as focused on hiring people at a business school that have AI expertise as you are as hiring it from a technology standpoint. And you talk about this all the time. Tomorrow it's the business case. We're all going to need to become, we're not going to have to understand, you know, you know, the modeling part of it. We're not going to have to understand the language models, any of those things. We're going to have to understand how to maximize its use. We talked about this yesterday in a discussion you and I had about our hiring within this company of people that can client success, people that can understand. Right. How to maximize the use of this. So how we're going to work employees, what they're going to need to learn coming in, we're going to need to help them. And I love Mike's comment about thinking about hiring. The guy at a business school that knows AI as much as you're thinking about hiring tech.

You hear a lot that the 10x employee. Right. Who's the, you know, the A team or the 10x employee? We tend to think about hiring, okay, can that person do the job that we're hiring them for? But if you start thinking about, can that person leverage the capabilities, let's just call it the AI capabilities in our business to do 10, 10X the job through their use. That's a very different vantage point of hiring compared to what you're able to do. So, Kevin, can you lay 10 bricks? Great, we're going to hire you to lay 10 bricks. Or can I hire you to facilitate and use technology to lay 100 bricks in that same time frame by leveraging? It's a very different mindset of how you're using employees versus the way that it's looked at today.

Yep, that's good. Good. Well, great. Great article. I'd encourage you to read this if you're listening on the podcast and you can't see it. It's a research study and article that was done by Microsoft. It's called Will AI Fix Work? It's a great read. I'm going to actually read it again. The last thing that we have each week we have a feature called goodreads, and this one's an article for from Inc Magazine. It mentions you're doing remote teamwork. Wrong. I think this is kind of powerful because the crux of it was kind of more tied to remote office workers. But I would really challenge our traditional audience who we have a lot of road warriors out there, whether you're packing a bag and getting on an airplane to go see your customers, or you're pulling a pair of boots on in the morning and getting in a pickup truck and going to a construction site to supply them with the materials they need. Some of these tips about remote working and teamwork within that would be great for any type of company. So it's good. Good read that. Which is hence why it's under the good read section of our newsletter. So that's it for this week, huh?

Yeah. Do you want to touch on the events real quick?

Yeah, we get some updated events that we've added. We'll have more.

Look at all these.

Yep. Well, ISA is having their summer session and their virtual events, so Brendan Breen and his team, I think a few of them were going to be here this today. I think Joby was joining us. So a number of them. You and you and I are. Well, you're speaking at one of these. I'm speaking at.

So I'm on the 20th, the omni channel in customer experience.

Yep, yep. So that's going to be great stuff. And I'm working on the sales side, a piece of this as well. So it's going to be powerful. If you're not part of the Industrial Supply association and you're in that space, take a close look because it's a great organization to be part of more ad events, Net plus events, all kinds of other events. So we're trying to keep this up to speed. It's not the consummate list, but we're trying to add to it each week.

All right, well, good stuff.

Boy, we covered a lot of ground. We're done in 50 minutes. 5 0. We didn't think we could do it, but thanks for the conversation today. Thank you for everybody that chimed in with us and shared with us on the different platforms. And again, if you like what you hear each week, share it with your friends. Click the like button. Follow us depending on which platform you're at. So.

All right, thanks again. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Do good things. Be safe, have fun.

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 their manufacturing and wholesale distribution industry CRM customer intelligence and channel collaboration platform. That's Lead smart technologies@leed smart tech.com.