Is AI The Future of Wholesale Distribution?

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

Hey, good morning, Tom.

Good morning.

Good to see you. Thank you. Yeah, some new little Lead Smart swag. So good. Good day here. Hey, I just wanted to welcome everybody this morning to our episode this week of around the Horn. Kind of some exciting news. Next Friday, this turns into both LinkedIn Live, YouTube Live, Facebook Live, and will also be a podcast that will be available on all of the traditional channels. Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, all across the board. Wherever you find those, this will be available so you can save it on your phone. Come each Friday morning through your LinkedIn vite. We LinkedIn invite whichever might work. But what we do here each week, I noticed in our attendee list that there's quite a few new people coming today is we gather up kind of a lot of the news of the week in M and A and technology and SaaS, technology and cloud computing and as I mentioned, mergers and acquisitions things going on throughout wholesale distribution. Tom and I both work for a company called Lead Smart Technologies, who is our sponsor today. And Lead Smart works with manufacturers, wholesale distributors, and independent sales agents around the world to help them gain greater insight through CRM and customer intelligence into their customer behavior to help them grow their business. So what we do each week is we either have a guest of us here chatting, we look forward to questions. And that's great. We just saw something from our friend Will Quinn that's at a smart factory at Wichita State. So that sounds kind of neat that he's doing that today in Kansas. We'll look forward to hearing more about that, but we encourage your questions. If you've got thoughts or ideas about a guest or a topic that we should be talking about in the near future, please let us know either through here or through a direct message on LinkedIn. So let's dive in today. Tom, unless you have something to add.

No, no, I think you've said it. Well, let's. Let's do it. Super.

So what's going on in the world this week? I think we're going to spend some time talking about scary science stuff related to or potentially scary Science stuff. So let's, let's dive in about. I think we'll look at this first one article about how will AI impact the manufacturing workforce from the Manufacturing Institute.

Yeah, I'm excited about our conversation today because this is more up my alley. But yeah, you know, obviously there's a lot of buzz, a lot of hype, maybe even you could say around AI and ChatGPT. And you know, it's interesting, you know, it's not that this technology has been around for a while, right? OpenAI and some of the technology has been around for a long time, but the, there's never been a use case and now we kind of have that killer app, use case, right. That is showing up that the mainstream who maybe never even heard the word AI before, sees what that really means, right? With the chat GBT that's there. So it's, I believe the adoption of AI has been greatly accelerated. And I don't know, I don't know, I just hear tons of people talking about it, right? Even our prospects and customers that probably a few weeks ago wouldn't have, you know, AI is what. What is that, is now talking about that and what that means and how that can come together. So I think that it's great. I really believe that AI has a lot of potential in wholesale distribution, mainly because think about it, wholesale distributors, manufacturers, we have data, we have tons of data that we can use to start doing AI. We'll talk a little bit more about some of the use cases of that, but I'm excited about. ChatGPT is really a prototype of what can be done with AI. But like I said, it's really accelerated the visibility of it and I think it's showing businesses and people what's possible. And I think it really will accelerate the adoption within these organizations, which I'm excited about seeing.

Yeah, I think you're right on track with that. I just think it's kind of interesting in that first article there talks about the opportunity for AI to take over monotonous and repetitive tasks.

Right?

But what's so interesting about this is we hear pretty regularly, you know, people talk about, well, it's, you know, gonna replace jobs and people are gonna be out of work. And it's interesting they talked about. Here it says, it said over. One of the quotes was, over the last 12 years we've seen a lot of technology adoption, but we have not seen a lot of job loss. In fact, we have seen job gains. It was quoted from one of the people that said, there's a lot of opportunity to reimagine jobs and to add value that AI will help to illuminate. And I thought that was kind of interesting because people get, you know, nervous about, you know, whether it's robot robotics or, or technology. And it's great. But this thing talks about too, in this article. They, you know, says that's awesome chat GPT do by expense reports. Pretty funny. We're going to talk a little bit more about what it can and can't do in a few minutes. But. But I like that one. That's good. So, you know, they talk here about, you know, AI, it says one of the quotes that I appreciated was, was, can you can teach AI to do X and you can teach AI to do Y. However, combining the two may be really difficult for AI. So said, while human can do sometimes things better, you're going to continue to see humans in roles that center on making decisions and telling stories. So I think it's really kind of unique about how this is kind of all playing out, is it's going to be. I kind of look at it as this grows, whether it's AI, it's AI built into existing technology, it's helping with decision making and so forth. We're pretty early, right, with this. People that I've talked to that are using technology to try and help within wholesale distribution that has AI have found some struggles, but things are moving in the right direction, you know. And so this can be a big help to us over time, but I think we've got a long way to go. The good news is there's going to be huge opportunities for it within manufacturing. Another thing that I was really appreciative of this article talked about. And it's something that, you know, we talk about not only, you know, here on around the Horn each week, but we talk about pretty consistently with our customers as well, is the whole concept of your, of who you're hiring. Right. You know, we talk a lot about in Tom, you, you mentioned this quite often, you know, about the B2B buyer is changing. We kind of hammer on that consistently here on Fridays. And, you know, 50 plus percent of B2B buyers now are millennials. So the first of that is we're either at or will be very soon the same thing with sellers. Right. So we've got salespeople retiring every, every day. You know, people around our, our age that, you know, started, started early and now we need to start thinking about who we're going to be hiring. And so that was something that this article talked about. As well, is like, you know, look at the opportunity to hire a different level of person. They talked about, you know, recruiting and teaching adaptive skills for people getting involved with, you know, local community colleges or universities to help get talent. Because, you know, we can teach people about wholesale distribution.

Right.

We can teach people how to manage distribution networks at a manufacturer's level. We can do the same for a distributor calling on end users, we can teach that. But it becomes very difficult to teach, you know, someone that doesn't have an adaptive learning style to embrace the technology that will be coming shortly.

Yeah. And I do think it's super important. Unfortunately. This is right, this comes with hype. Right. There's a lot of generalization. But think of an organization. You have manufacturing, you have your actual manufacturing organization, your plant, but then you have sales, you have customer service, you have marketing, you have things that are obviously supporting that business. The way AI is going to be used in each of those areas is quite a bit different. So if you look at our world is sales, marketing, customer service, things that are customer centric. And if you just look at it from that perspective, and I do believe the opportunity for adoption of AI in the sales, marketing, customer related area is going to be, and I can talk a little bit more about why, but will can be much faster maybe than other parts of the business. But if you hire, if you're looking for people, I completely agree. It's not going to replace people, it's going to enable people and it's going to enable, if we just look at it from a sales perspective, it's going to enable that salesperson to support that buyer journey, to be that trusted advisor, to do the things that we've talked about before much, much easier and with much, much more relevance than they would be able to do today. So, and even driving, you know, and optimizing what sales and marketing and so forth activities are taking place. Yep. So it's, it's going to be a great enabler. Yes. You're going to have to have people that are willing to use that and take advantage of it. But you know, I think that is, that's perfect for the younger generation. They're looking for this type of stuff too.

Yeah. And I think you're, I think your comment there about enabler is kind of really nice comment to go with this. Right. It's not going to replace, it's going to become, you know, a part of a broader function that's going to enable, enable growth. So I think that's good. Why don't we Jump in chat a little bit more here, no pun intended there about Chat GPT because there are some interesting kind of takeaways from that article as well that, that I liked. You know, we, I played with that earlier this week. I sent it over to angel that's doing our HR work as we're, you know, expanding our company and I used it to do some job descriptions and it was kind of interesting. Now, you know, you know that for those of you that are new today, I come from 30 plus years in wholesale distribution and Tom is a computer scientist and a technology guy. So Tom playing with Chat GPT and me playing with it is probably a little different. But you know, I was pretty impressed with the baseline of some of the stuff that it came up with. I, you know, client success manager, you know, I wrote, you know, what I didn't do, which is interesting, I want to mention this quickly, is, you know, you can put tone and feeling into things, right? So what I could have done is said instead of saying, you know, help me generate a, you know, 400 word or 200 word or whatever client success manager job description, I could have said do it with an empathetic tone or an upbeat message or things like that that you can add to it. And I'll probably try a little bit of that again sometime soon. But it was interesting because what it did is it brought up some really good baseline pieces. So when I compared that to the job description that we have and that what it came up with, tons of crossover, that in retrospect that I kind of started from that standpoint and then again brought that human element in, it probably would have saved quite a bit of time.

Well, in Chat gbt, you know what you're using that for, right? Is obviously you're using, you know, you're. And there's going to be a use case for this for sure. Right? Because it's global, in other words, it's trying to tap into the entire Internet and it's a bit of a prototype right now. And I think the data is all only up through 2020.

Yeah, we'll talk about that before we close out on this article.

But, but think about. Okay, so here's what I, I tried with it. I went in there and I said, what is the best way to buy safety equipment? That's what I put in. And it actually came back and gave me a pretty good answer and even specifically said Granger and Northern Safety in there. Then I asked it the next question. I said, well, am I better off buying from a national Distributor or a more regional local distributor. And it actually came back with a very good answer to that. Right. And then I said. It said, well, it depends, you know, a local distributor, a regional distributor will have better service. Likely they'll be able to deal with your needs. If you're going to need to be doing things that are like. They didn't use the word fit testing, but that kind of thing. Right. If you're doing things that need to be, then you should consider a regional or local distributor versus, you know, buying just something from the national. So very relevant answer.

Right.

To the whole thing. And then I said, and then I said, do you recommend any local safety distributors? And it actually came back with Mallory Safety. And it said, you know, Mallory Safety is a. And I think they said, is a regional, good regional distributor, but you should check out your, you know, where you are and where you're located.

It wasn't, look, it didn't see your IP address or anything. No, no, no, it's local.

Right. But it doesn't. Right. Again, this is a prototype. Yeah. But think about where this is going. Okay. From a buyer perspective, right. We've, we've gotten used to going to Google and searching for things. This takes Google Search to a whole nother level and builds a collaborative conversation essentially to find information and it's going to enable the buyer even more. That's the external aspect of it. Right?

Yeah. So we didn't talk about that experience you had. I'd like to unpack that a little bit and the, the idea behind that. So first off, I think Andy Mitchell from Mallory is with us today. So, Andy, you owe Tom and I a beer. Tom, a beer, me a steak and for the, for the plug there. But I'm really interested in unpacking that, Tom, and you, you would be able to discuss that a little bit better. So when, when you, when it gave you that information that was, you know, started with Granger, Northern Safety and then brought Mallory and when you expanded that questioning, right. That standpoint of it, where did that. Do you think it pulled that data? Is it because Granger and Northern has the most products online and Mallory shows privately held and, you know, individually owned and with lots of locations? I mean, what's your gut on how it came up with those three?

I mean, obviously I don't know the entire algorithm, but it's probably very similar to the way search works currently.

Yeah.

Right. And you know, SEO and search engine optimization. Right. You know, they're looking and they're prioritizing and they're Ranking what they believe is the most relevant information.

Yep.

So I'm sure there's some ranking that, you know, I'm sure there's some ranking that can occur. Right. Or is occurring clearly behind the scenes based upon, you know, again, I don't know if they're using traditional, you know, types of rankings like they would with Google or they have their own ranking or all of that. But this is just, I see in the future, right, in the same way you can buy, you know, pay per click and you can buy, you know, access in Google, you'll likely be able to buy access and something like this. I believe Microsoft. And don't get me going, I have a lot of.

No, I hear you.

This is good Microsoft anyway. There's a lot. But there's one thing I really want to touch on here as it relates to businesses and Lars just asked a question and then I believe it's also. Brendan asked another question I want to get to in a minute, but Lars asked a question that says how can AI improve lead automation quality? And what's really important for us to differentiate is that ChatGPT and Open AI, those are, you know, kind of global, right? That's global. It's not within my company. It's like Internet and intranet back in the, in the day. These same capabilities are going to be available within your company and with your own company data and within the realm of just your company data. So that you could have a salesperson sitting there and going, well, who, who should I be calling on today? What leads should I be working on today? Who are the, you know, best qualified or whatever the case may be. And it's really, to me that's so yeah, you have the buyer being enabled with, you know, the things like. But how do you enable your internal team? The good news is I believe it's going to be much. It is much. You know, there's things you can do right this second to start preparing and using that for within your business. And it doesn't have to be a major multi year endeavor. There's things you can do right now to start getting ready for this internally in your business. So that same experience can happen internally as well as externally.

So let's unpack this a little bit more. So first, Will made a comment here about predictive maintenance and I'm not sure if Will's comment responding to Lars is tied to in a plant or whatever because I think, when I think predictive maintenance will tell me if I'm wrong here. I'm thinking about you know, operational functional manufacturing plant. And that is a phenomenal use case. What we're talking about here with lead automation from Lars comment, I think is, you know, we have so much data out there and you know, an organization like A3M could be spending boatloads of money with a zoom info or another organization that's, you know, scraping, bringing tons and tons of data in. That data goes into CRM. And I think, you know, Tom, to your point, right now we have all these leads. We have existing customers, we have customers that are buying specific categories of products. We have customers that aren't buying key products. We have leads who might be interested in one product from this show, but another product from another show and gathering that data together. You know, there's great tools. We do a lot of that with Lead Smart already where we can kind of pull that together in that silo data. And I think this is where you're headed, Tom, is we've got data all over organizations. Whether it's lead or it's existing customer data, e commerce data, there's going to be phenomenal tools where AI will help us really even dig deeper into what's going on at that lead.

Yeah, there's, there's two things that have to be remedied. One is we have to move from silo data to a centralized data platform for this. And that's for data that I have within my company or even data that I'm getting from my partners. Right. And so forth that is relevant to my company. And then the second piece of that equation, so once I have a way to centralize that data, one of the things we do see in a lot of companies, and especially smaller distributors and smaller companies, is they have a lot of transactional data about what customers are buying or what customers have bought or what products are bebought. But they really don't have a lot of data about the customer themselves. What they're looking at doing in the future, what their, you know, what their opportunity is with customer service, all of that kind of stuff. And so to be able to take all of that together, maybe the customer centric view of the world, plus the transactional view of the world, putting that into a centralized data platform, for lack of a better word, I don't get into the tech technology of it, but then that opens up the door very, very quickly for leveraging the types of capabilities that you would get with a thing there.

And I think so I want to make sure we finish on the lead part of it. With what Lars was talking about, there Because I think what's interesting about that is, and we spend every day, all day talking to our existing customers and potential customers of our platform is very few organizations are taking advantage of what can be done without AI in this setting.

Right.

Which you can do within the right setting. We do that with Lead Smart and taking that silo data and bringing that together and getting an overall view. I think Will's comment here, Proton AI being a good example. I think that's an interesting comment. I think the challenge is there's issues with AI still. As an example. We'll share this in a minute when we close out on this article momentarily, some of the concerns that the founder of ChatGPT says about how they work. But you know, I would go back to Lars comment about leads and then leads transfer into customers and customers transfer into this overview of understanding the silo data in the business and you know, products. And there's other products to Will's point, like Proton. You know, there's a big difference between focusing on a predictive selling tool for a distributor salesperson that says Joe bought sandpaper, hence Joe needs to buy a dust mask and safety glasses. That's kind of sales 101. Now it's prompting people that yes, you may already know this and now I've got an app that tells me to do that. But what Tom was talking about earlier that I think is the big differentiator from some of these AI products that are popping up right now is that there is transactional data, but then there's customer facing data. There's the notes, there's the details, there's the, the experience. There's, you know, great example, right. Is if you're scouring with AI a PIM tool, you know, product information tool for your e commerce and you're scouring all of your invoices. That's not taking advantage of the data you have in your system about how much training your people have done for that customer or the other places that you've had interaction with that customer. And that's what Tom, I think, and Tom, correct me if I'm wrong or add to it, but that's kind of where you were leading is this is bigger than saying Joe bought sandpaper, you know, and I'll use Lars as an example here, right. Joe bought 3M abrasives, hence Joe needs to buy an 8210 dust mask.

Right? I think we do. I think we do. We see it all the time, right. Companies do a great job of the 360 view of their products and their transactions with their ERP system. What we also want to do is have that 360 view of our customer and not only our customer, but the partners that we have working with our customers and how they're working with our customers. Right. As much as possible. If I can now have a 360 view of the customer, whatever that means, sales, leads, support, service, training, whatever you said. Right. Combine that with a 360 view of the transaction, the products and the transaction. I merge those two things together. Now I have a really, really amazing platform to do the types of AI that ChatGPT is demonstrating. And so we have to look at this more holistically rather than going in and saying, well, I'm going to create an AI for this and an AI for that and an AI for this. That's, you know, call it point product AI. Right, right. That's kind of what we have going on right now. But it doesn't, it doesn't have to be a major project to look at this holistically and start going. And that's how you're really going to be able to take advantage of the, of the types of things that you see with a Jack with a chat GPT.

That's a good point. And I'm glad, you know, kind of will mentioned that with Proton AI there's few other companies that are popping in and doing this stuff and, and I think it's great that people are kind of trying to lead us that direction. I always find it kind of interesting right now is, you know, we talk to so many distributors and dealers and wholesalers who have never even had a generic CRM, let alone an advanced CRM and customer intelligence tool. And now they're looking at who onboards our customers.

That.

Just got a little note from our streaming tool that it was struggling. You hear me okay, Tom?

Yeah, it's okay. It went, it froze for a second, but we're back.

Great. So it's just kind of interesting. You know, one of the comments Tom talked about is, you know, having kind of pristine data. You know, you really need good, solid, clean data and working with AI in most instances. And it's a challenge for a lot of companies. And it's not just, you know, regional or local distributors. It's, it's big companies as well are struggling with the accuracy of their data. And if your data is not good, then AI struggles with that as well. But I think we're on a good track here in a good place where I'm really intrigued with kind of the conversation today and we appreciate everybody's comments with this is, you know, I really look at it from a manufacturing standpoint and you know, Lars comment, lars being with 3M is that, you know, you look at that global view or a manufacturing company and they've got to be managing this data moving both from a distributor level and an end user level. So they've got multiple streams of data where a distributor is typically going to be focused on a singular, you know, end user piece of that. So this is where this, this, you know, kind of advanced tools that we're working with today and the AI stuff coming soon is good kind of. Go ahead, go ahead.

I know we're going to do a webinar soon that will get into this a lot more and do a much deeper dive on how, you know, how you actually do this. Yeah, and like I said, the good news is it doesn't have to be quite as overwhelming as it immediately sounds. And I do believe that that's, you know, the, there's no, there's no time like now then to start, you know, really start thinking about this. Otherwise the people that do are going to really be able to leverage this much faster as it comes available.

The real quick, before we jump ahead, two things is I don't Brendan, you have people to do your expense reports so don't try and get me on that one. I think that's kind of funny. That's good, good stuff. Nobody likes expense reports. But I'm not sure who made this other comment. We have a number of people that could show up as LinkedIn users. Sometimes we see names, sometimes we don't. But this might be Brendan as well. But I really like and agree with this, this comment about, you know, agreeing to disagree, maybe have chat GPT write an email campaign or a marketing copy, but not reply to customers impersonal, so on and so forth. You know, I totally agree about that. What I found interesting with just the little test and playing that I did with it for job descriptions was it. I wasn't ever going to allow it to be the end all and the final resource but what it did is it gave me all kinds of data that I could say delete this line, add to this sentence and it cut the time down for me dramatically in that process as I looked at it. So I completely agree with what this person read From Kayla Jane McLaughlin on their comment in this article which I thought was interesting. But I do agree on that personal impact and that interaction. This can just get us maybe listen, if you can have an AI tool that's scanning the Internet for you to give you really good data and hence, you know, that's the, what they call it. I think in the article they talk about Chat GPT because to code red at, at Google.

Right.

And then before Google has an answer to it, Microsoft's investing billions of dollars. And Microsoft's back end on that is what a great investment because all of that gets stored in Microsoft cloud. Right.

Well, it goes into the word, but yeah, I agree that about what, you know that comment unfortunately. Right. Like any other thing, it's going to create more noise, it's going to probably create more spam, it's going to probably create a lot of things where people are misusing it, you know, so, you know, unfortunately that's going to come with a territory but again that just, we just have to adjust so. Right.

Well let's, let's. Before we head out, I wanted to share a couple of things. That kind of closing that ChatGPT thing and the engagement with everybody today is fantastic. Thanks for the comments that came in with that. So that article talked about it was they were quoting some things from McKinsey and they said potential business applications, ChatGPT sales and marketing. We kind of talked about that. Operations, IT and engineering, risk and legal, research and development, human resources and employee optimization. So there's a lot of different places we talk about, you know, with our technology, you know, kind of a customer360, but it can be used in a lot of parts. You know, we have customers right now that are starting our CRM and customer intelligence in their operations side of their business. Right. But what's interesting is that the close out of this article says we're early. And then it quoted the founder of OpenAI which made Chat GPT and his comment is ChatGPT is incredibly limited and it would be a mistake to rely on for anything, you know, important right now. Its limitations include and it added a few things about, you know, it can, its writing isn't always great. So to, you know, this, this comment from Kayla on this article. Right. As well as, yeah, don't, don't turn, you know, your personal brand and your message over to this quite yet. So the end of the article said proceed with equal doses of optimism and caution and I think that kind of ties into the AI technology and software that we're seeing right now. It's early proceed with optimism of where we're headed, but caution of how broad it can help me in the company.

Yeah. And at the same time though, don't Ignore it. Right?

Absolutely. No, no, no, no. It's critical.

Yeah, let's move on. We could spend all day.

We'll move through these pretty quick because of time. So you know just that article, we talk quite a bit about B2B E commerce and so forth and this is just it further is reinforcing the concept behind you know, the, the experience that B2B buyers are looking for and, and, and give some tools and some ideas and some good statistics in there. So you know, I think my takeaway in short from this article and I love kind of the thoughts of, of anybody that's you know, focused with, with distributors that are working on, on E commerce is you know, we've seen from our travels and events and shows that we do, you know, there are distributors that are on the forefront, cutting edge of E commerce and then you have some that have bought kind of off the shelf tools to kind of say I have E Commerce. And now is the time though from what this is saying is to rally your B2B E commerce presence and not just have a presence, but make it hum and make that new buyer that we were talking about earlier, that millennial buyer, give them the experience that they're looking for.

Yeah, it's, it's look everybody what's happening in B2B whether it's on E commerce or really anything else for that matter, people want their B2B B2C experience in the B2B world, whatever that may be.

Yep.

And interestingly enough I, if you re read that article and you just tie it into what we've just been talking about, right. AI when used properly will really help to enhance the buyer experience. Yep. Right. Whether that's on E Commerce, whether that's research, whether that's whatever it is that they're doing, but that's what's going to be expected. You might see more of it maybe early on in B2C but that's what's going to be expected in B2B. So you know, to me the, if I were to look in the crystal ball, what's really going to differentiate companies and B2B and wholesale distribution over the next few years is the quality of experience that they're providing. And you know, tying that in to almost like we're just talking about is how you are using AI and these technologies to facilitate that experience and facilitate that experience with your buyer, facilitate that experience with your internal people. Because your internal people are expecting an experience too that you know, as we've talked about before, but this article just continues to reinforce that. We've talked a lot about it and.

Well, I want to, I want to kind of take that back to your. As you were talking about, you know, using Chat GPT, you know, I, I mean I, this is great. You know, we work together but we don't, we, you know, we don't see each other as often and usually we have so much to talk about that we didn't, we didn't talk about your experience with that and, and the questions you asked that I think were super insightful to this discussion. So it's the end of the month almost. So that's compliment number two actually for you. You get two a month. Great job on that. But I think it's powerful. Right, because obviously there's something that Northern Safety and that Grainger are doing in their E Commerce platform and their search engine optimization and all of those things that they're doing holistically online that got you that answer. Right? Because that could have been Joe's Safety in Montana. It could have been, you know, the Fastenal, you know, you're up in Santa Barbara. It could have been the Fastenal location that's there, you know, if it was able to see where you were. But something goes going on that got you that answer. I'm going to now want to go try and put the same type of questions in and see if there's anything tied to it by geography.

If it can tell, I don't, I don't believe so. I don't believe that's there but that it will get there. Right. It's, it's worse. It'll get there.

Yep. Well, great use case that you, you did with that. I love it. I love it.

Chat gbt as we just said, is a prototype. So and it's using data from 2020. So it's not, it's not even up to date but, but to show the kind of examples of what, where we're headed and yes, it will become IP based and geography based and all of those, you know, even who knows what else. Right. It's like, right. It'll know more about you and what you're looking for than you know.

But there's something that those companies that it brought to you are doing that, that made a difference. Right. And that was the reason I brought that up is that we can't just think that we're in, you know, B2B E commerce because we, you know, open a Shopify store or you know, we bought an off the shelf tool that plugs into our website and we have the ability to sell. So for focus on time, let's just talk kind of quickly about that. This Q2, Q4, I should say decelerating more than expected. And it's interesting. You and I have talked about this a lot, right. I think I comment on this most weeks. You always say don't watch the news, don't watch the news, don't watch the news. Right. And I talked to a number of people this week. In fact, I had lunch with a gentleman in San Diego yesterday that works in the electrical market and wholesale distribution and he was talking about some slowdowns that he's feeling in a couple of areas and it is tied to, in his particular setting. It really triggered for me as I was driving back yesterday, it ties to consumer sentiment. Right. And just the way his market works and what's going on and when, where he sells to, you know, consumers are, you know, a little nervous. Right. So now we see all these layoffs in technology and now you starting to see in some manufacturing worlds and some other, you know, arenas that wholesale distribution would sell into where people are just, they're not stopping, they're not doing big layoffs. But maybe they're getting a little more caution or, or there's a sentiment internally that it's like, let's, I'm going to hover my finger over the pause button. I'm not going to push it yet, but I'm kind of there. And that so much of that is driven by sentiment, by what people are seeing and hearing versus what the real internal business drivers are saying. It's like a what? Well, what if this does impact me in six months? It's really disappointing sometimes.

Yeah. Well, we've talked about it, right. We create a self fulfilling prophecy. But it does seem to be very, you know, if you look at the GDP results that came out a couple days ago, they were higher than expected. You now are starting to, you know, hear noise about, well, maybe we weren't going to have a recession. Maybe, you know, it's like it's. And that's why it's like, it's just noise. Right. It's like you can't, you can't, there's nothing you can do about all that.

Yep.

So all you can do is keep strengthening the business, strengthening what you're doing and controlling what you're controlling. And yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of these sort of ups and downs because now you start to code these other, you know, news articles you have here and that doesn't these are not things that resonate of recession.

Yeah.

And.

So I look at that Fastenal article surpassing a billion dollars. I remember doing, you know, I've done business with Fastenal off and on for many, many years and kind of remember when they were first getting their, you know, their Chinese sourcing operation up and going for the, you know, for their company and, you know, some Latin America things going. And obviously they've got, you know, a huge presence in Canada. But as they grow internationally to see.

What they're doing.

We always try and, you know, kind of put the rosy sign on to, on to what's happening out there to keep people focused on the positive versus the negative. So that's good news. So hey, let's oh, the last thing we want to do is that less good read article. That's just kind of a, I thought, kind of interesting talking about the, the types of things that we could be seeing chat, GPT and related to the tools we use every day.

Right.

Excel, Office, PowerPoint, you know, Outlook and so forth. So I think that folks might find some interest in having a look at that as well. Which actually kind of reminds me, as we get ready to wind down, is we send this email that Tom scrolls through. I should have mentioned that when we started today. That's an email that went out this morning to. I don't know, I don't know what the number is. I think it's 7,8000 people now that that gets out to each day H F Friday morning. If you don't get this and you're interested in it, you getting it, you can put the note in here to the chat in our session here or catch me or Tom or on our LeadSmart Technologies LinkedIn page. Just send us a note and we'll make sure to get you added to that. So we've got a nice group of people that read that each Friday and a growing audience that comes with us each week here. So again, I don't know why, it's not that big of a deal, but I'm kind of excited about the podcast form of this starting next week as well. So the team that's working on that, I saw a note this morning. I hope you saw it as well. It's almost ready and the music's in and all the stuff happening. So it should be good.

Yeah, just real quick on that Microsoft Office. This ties back to the comment about I wouldn't let you write an email for me or reply to a customer, but that think about this. This will be In Microsoft Outlook, this will be. In Microsoft Word, this will be, you know, hey, I got to write a, you know, rather than saying new document and getting a blank page, you'll go through a chat process and, and immediately get something like that or even an email or whatever the case may be. So all of that is, is coming. It's really how do we use it, you know, effectively.

Yeah, that's great. Good.

Cool.

Well, that's, I think good wind down spot for us today. Any closing thoughts, Tom?

No, I'm, I'm, I'm really interested to see how this plays out and I know we're going to talk more about some, you know, this technology and we'll try and dive deeper as we, as we move along. But I do think it's as I said in the beginning, this chat GBT has accelerated the adoption or will accelerate the adoption much like, you know, Covid accelerated E Commerce. I believe this is going to accelerate much faster just based on the number of people talking about it.

I just hope the Microsoft investment doesn't screw it up like it did for LinkedIn, but I don't think so. I think this is critical to their growth and I think you're right on track. Listen, thanks everybody that contributed today. We appreciate it. We would love it if you enjoy what we're doing every Friday is when you get that invitation on Friday or you get the pop up that we're going live, share that with your friends. We get some more coming in and expand this conversation out. That's a benefit to all of us related to wholesale distribution and manufacturing. So at that note, we'll wish everybody a phenomenal weekend. We'll see you next week, hopefully and stay safe, do good things.

Yep. Take care.

We hope you enjoyed today's episode and our guest 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 subscribe 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 atLead smart tech.com.