So The Fed Cut Rates. Will That Help The Supply Chain Slowdown?

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

Oh, better put you full screen so everybody can watch.

All right. Good. Finance.

Yeah.

A little slower this morning. Not a long week. It's hard keeping up with you.

Well, we move into the new Lead Smart headquarters next week. Yeah.

That's the temporary headquarters before the big new facility is ready but well big by our standard. So it's kind of fun. We're going back to office. We haven't been everyone back to office since before COVID I guess when we were had our other Irvine facility. So that'll be a positive thing. So yeah, we got a little bit smaller facility to get the team back together now. And while we're looking for something much bigger for the future which will be exciting. So pretty much if you're, I guess with our team, if you're in this country then you, then you're going to be coming to the office again on a, on a balanced schedule. It has to have a little flexibility. But I think it's exciting so that the challenge is your commute, right?

Yeah. Well, we'll figure that out.

Yeah. Because we don't have that jet yet, right?

No, I don't have Air Force or what is a Marine one to take me from one place to the other.

No, it's. Remember when I was heading down a couple months ago to meet you in Florida and I got stuck in Denver for like eight hours before I have finally ended up on a red eye.

Yeah.

So I used pretty simple fast instructions to chat GPT and made the, the lead Smart jet. So took a lead Smart blue that we have in our logo and put our logo on the tail. So yeah, that's very.

Hey, good morning, Brian. We should, we should have a little grand opening, invite some of the local people. Brian's local, right?

Yeah. We got other customers and prospects local and yeah, we can do that. We'll do a little open house. I think we do that when we get in the other facility. That'd be great.

Okay.

So happy to have Brian who's with us today. So I'm not sure that's why people tuned in though today to Hear about our offices? So no.

So let's get on with it.

Very good. Well, let's. Let's dive right in. So I'm Kevin Brown. I'm here with my lifelong friend and business partner, Tom Burton. And we get together every Friday morning or just about every Friday morning. Last week we were both traveling and. Last week. Yeah, last week we were both traveling and we get together and chat about the news of the week. Looking around the news in the economy, supply chain, distribution, manufacturing, artificial intelligence, sales, marketing, robotics, M and A. We look at it all, and we put that together in a newsletter that we publish every week. It's called around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution. And as you can imagine from the title of the show, those two things match. If you would like to get that newsletter and you don't, we would be happy to send that to you. Then you can reach out to us three simple ways. First is, hello@lead smart tech.com. we'll get that out to you. Secondly is if you're active on LinkedIn, you can just go to the Lead Smart Technologies page and you'll see a link to our newsletter there. Or you can just search around the Horn and wholesale distribution on LinkedIn. And third, the show has its own website, and that is www.aroundthehornpod.com aroundthehornpod.com. and you can sign up for the newsletter there, and we'll get that out to you. So what we do is we get together. It's unlike traditional podcasts and. Or live shows. It's kind of funny, Tom. It makes me think I get these new. These, what we call them agents or promotional people that work with people that want to be on podcasts that send us things every week. Oh, hey, my guy just wrote a book about, you know, selling or something like that. You should have them on your podcast. And they've obviously not listened to our show because our show is a different format. So we do this every week again. And in this show, we're going to review that newsletter. We'll have it up on the screen. So if you are listening and not live with us and you're listening on Spotify or Apple at a later date, you can certainly get that newsletter to review. So we appreciate everybody that's being with us. We always ask one thing that we would be grateful for. If you like what you're hearing on the show, whether it's from Tom and I or the guests that we regularly have, follow us on Follow lead smart on LinkedIn. If you're listening on YouTube, click the subscribe button, get the alerts, hit the bell there. You'll get alerted when we go live. That's helpful to us as well. If you're on Apple or Spotify or any other podcast, please leave us a review and subscribe and that helps us get this out. We have typically five to seven countries with people logging in and downloading the podcast and or coming with us live and hundreds of hundreds of people that join us either on the live broadcast or the recorded show. So we appreciate that. Lastly, we couldn't do this if we weren't sponsored by the company that Tom and I work for, Lead Smart Technologies. Lead Smart has developed what we call a AI enabled customer intelligence and smart CRM platform for wholesale distributors and manufacturers. We don't work with anybody outside of distribution and manufacturing in your business my 35 years and so distribution has a similar. You brought together develop software platform data from across your business and brings that into flows and tools business gain faster product as well. We have people that are seeing, you know, exponential growth within their companies, 20, 30% growth from their teams that are using our platform. So if your company is digitally transforming or expanding, you might have some legacy technology that's a struggle for your team that's not well adopted. Reach out to us at any time@helloadsmartech.com or follow either Tom or myself on LinkedIn and follow more of what we do. Love to talk to you about your digital transformation. So.

All right. Yeah, let's do it. You were a little underwater there for a little while when you were speaking, so I don't. I hope your Internet's holding up.

I'm dialed right in. How does it sound now?

It's better. Yeah, it was just for a little bit. You were underwater when you're. Okay.

Well, that's, that's the, the plug for our sponsor was underwater.

It was underwater. Yeah, it was. Sound like you were snorkeling somewhere. But anyway, so guess what? There was a rate cut this week.

Boy, was that surprising.

No, not really. Not really. I even, I even thought there was going to be one, so.

Yeah, well, you. I was thinking it might be, might be a half a point as opposed to a quarter point. But it was, I thought it was interesting with that the only dissenting vote on the cut was from the person that said it should be a half a point.

Yeah. And he, he thought. Right. He was the new, the new governor that was recently came in to the equation. So looks like. And pretty much what we've been saying or talking about, I guess over the last month or so is quarter point, then another two more quarter point cuts this year. And then I think they're saying one in 2026 and one in 2027. That would bring it down roughly to a 3 to 3.25 range on the, on the total on the rate. Yep. And then that would be kind of the floor at this point. And although the bond market's not really buying it, the bond market is at least haven't looked. I was up a little bit today. Yeah. About 4 point of 10 years at about 4.14. So it's not entirely buying that model. But anyway, that's what they're, what they're saying.

Yeah. Well, listen, the, the risk is looking higher and higher. The Conference Board's leading economic index came out on yesterday, right. The day after the rate cut and they were talking about a big drop in the, a decline of, to 2.8 of their, their headwind indicator, basically as they're describing it now. So as we start looking at this, we're going to talk about this with some other article today about labor and the overall economic situation right now they just keep using in the conference board's leading indicator component, they just talked about economic headwinds, persistent labor market challenges and weak manufacturing orders and other signals, a continuing slowing in economic activity. I would think, Tom. And you know, again, back to not being an economist here, but I think we have some pretty risky waters right now that if the labor market has any more challenges that go with it, we see the next labor report or jobs report come out, there's anything negative there, we could be seeing something pretty significant where they would need to take more action. I think there is the risk right now, very much so, of, of this Fed being late, late to getting these cuts. I mean, there's a lot of people putting pressure on them now. I think we were talking about, we've talked about this a bunch lately, right. That we live in a. I even made a comment on this on LinkedIn earlier in the week that there is we live in a world right now where we have instant data and we're looking at so much of this data and it was particularly talking about labor statistics as just being, you know, trailing indicators. ITR Economics did a, did a post about this and Taylor St. Germaine, that was with us a few months back's company and I kind of commented on this a little bit is that, you know, we live in an AI of, in a world of instant information. Right. Whether it's we're asking AI questions Or it's, you know, looking to wherever you get your news, whether it's Instagram or it's the Wall Street Journal, whatever. We have breaking data right in front of us. But we're using trailing indicators so much in these things that could end up being late on this one.

Well, I think the. And again, going back to employment, right. Even if you have the soft employment market as it relates to new jobs, the big wild card will be unemployment rate. Are people actually being let go or leaving their jobs so that the unemployment rate is going up? If that, if the unemployment rate goes up significantly next year, then yes, I think you could end up seeing, I don't know, some different, some different results. If the job market stays soft like it's been, but the unemployment rate stays more or less stable. I don't, I think you'll. They'll continue to take the course that they're on because remember, they're really only looking again in their world. And two primary things is jobs and inflation or cpi. Right. Those are the things they're trying to stay balanced on. So unless we see some substantial inflation increase for some reason from tariffs or otherwise and, or we see a change in the job market. Not the job market, but the unemployment rate, I think what they're saying is going to more or less makes sense. But obviously there's a lot of big ifs.

Well, I think there's big ifs and big risks.

Yeah.

Right. Is what's there right now. I was listening to something.

I don't know what your thought is, but even if they cut rates by, you know, let's say they cut them to two and a half. Right. Or they really did some serious slashing, I don't think that's going to do much for the job situation.

No, probably not. Well, and you know, what's interesting is, and I just read this, you know, I think, I think we've talked about it a couple times here, but I read this probably two months ago now was one of the challenges, I think that's, that's out there is, you know, the. What did, what was the article term that they use? It was kind of like bandwagon layoffs. Right.

The.

It was kind of interesting from that standpoint was they were just talking about the companies that are, you know, once, once it becomes clear that I can, I can do some layoffs or. I think the term a lot of people use is right size that I'm wanting to right size my company and I can use the economic factors or whatever's going on out there as an excuse and I won't get too much bad press or, you know, maybe it's a union issue. Whatever it might be, there's, you know, there's a scapegoat for it. So the question would be, can you identify, you know, is there really that much of that going on as well with it and finding a balance?

So reflect in the unemployment rate. If you have a lot of companies doing layoffs, you're going to see fewer people employed.

But I guess, I guess the question is, would that though if, if you see a lot of that that just says, hey, I want to increase profits, I found a way to have fewer jobs and I lay off X number of people. And that is now an impact on that report. Is now that report a true reflection of what's really happening in the job market based upon economic conditions versus, I don't want to say greed, but just because somebody decides they want to right. Size their business.

Well, I think there's two parts to that. I think it is a bit accurate because I don't think that those companies, even if they were to lay off people are going to be rushing back to hire them. So I think they're going to look at, okay, we've right sized as you, as you called it, but now how do I optimize using AI or other things so I'm not having to hire those people back in the future? Even as if economic conditions.

When was the last time you heard about a layoff and then you heard about all those people getting rehired.

Right.

It just, it doesn't, I mean that.

They got rehired in another place or another location, whatever. But yeah, I think there's a, I do believe that maybe it's from a PR perspective. Right. You're not going to get chastised for making layoffs or right. Sizing at this moment or around. No one's going to get beat up for doing that. But I just don't know that those jobs will come back. And obviously it depends on what are the jobs that are, you know, being affected through layoffs and so forth. So there's a lot to unpack on getting to the bottom of that.

I, I guess my, my thinking though, on that is is that truly a reflection of what's going on in the economy since the Fed puts so much energy in focus on the job market. Right. So is if, if there is a lot, and even if it's, I guess if it wasn't, you know, somebody saying, hey, we're going to replace these Jobs with AI. Yeah. That's a true indicator and a true reflection.

Right. But if it's not a reflection of the economy. Right. The economy could be going great. And I still want to replace those jobs.

Yeah, but, but somebody an excuse. And I don't, I guess I look at it from the standpoint as if, if, hey, you know, at Lead Smart, if we decided to cut 10% of our workforce because we found a way to be more efficient and we've done other things or whatever, that is not an economic indicator. That is a business decision. Right. It's not, it's not, it's somebody saying, hey, you know, what if I've lost, you know, some major contracts and this, that and the other half, things are happening. Yeah. Whole different story. But that's where I think and it's probably not enough of it to impact the overall piece. It just makes me go back and I'm Danny Downer here about the data that's being used for all these decisions in general. And as I've been saying for a few years now is I think we're in a place where we need to not wholesale change them, but maybe modify or refine or look at different things. Because, you know, I just, as I said, I'm sure Jerome Powell is a very nice man, probably great to sit down and have a beer with, but he just is like so drab and boring and it's like I feel like I'm listening to economics, you know, well, back in the 80s when I took economics classes in college, right. It's like that's, that's the feel that I get from listening to him and the Fed and the same indicators going with it. So I do think we sit to see a risk and I would throw this out and I heard this yesterday and I didn't have time to back it up and listen further on. It was on CNBC and there was an analyst or you know, could been USB's senior economist or whoever it was, but they were talking about getting to that 3% target by the end of next year, not into 2027. And I think that would be a very, very reasonable thing to see if things accelerate at all in CPI or inflation or the job market. I just, there seems to be, and I guess let me add one last thing to this, Tom. We can, we can move on. Is the, the component of this that says tariffs, which has, you know, they've been the blame of so much uncertainty and so forth. We, we're going to discuss an article a little bit later in Today's show that. Right. Tariff uncertainty is the new norm.

Right.

And people are figuring out how to adjust to that and, and figure their business out and how to run with that right now. So I think we're, you know, even if, even if there's some modifications to tariffs or, you know, we have to move over to that Rule 301 or whatever it is and, and you know, starting, you know, as you've said, start from scratch. I say modify. Even if that's going on, we just, it's still some uncertainty. But tariffs I think are, it's pretty, should be pretty clear in my, my belief, my belief is that it should be pretty clear to people that we are going to have tariffs.

Yeah. And I do think that tariffs have been, been starting to, if not built into the DNA of a lot of companies decisions and thought process and strategies and so forth.

I think that's well said, Tom. And I think we're just at this place now where the, it's probably becoming, at least for the Fed, it's probably becoming or getting close to being unreasonable to talk about uncertainty related to tariffs. Right. Because business is charging ahead the stock.

Market, that is the normal. Right.

So homes are being built, plumbing pipes are going into the ground. Right. It hasn't, you know, where, I don't even know what we're where. Where are we at? Where, you know. Well, it's May, June, July, August, September. Five months since Liberation Day. Right. And the discussion of the tariff started a few months before that. So anyways, it's, it's interesting. I think we can kind of jump ahead.

But I do want to say one last thing though, related to the job situation. Right. So, and I agree with you, I think, I think this is what you're saying. The layoffs or the job reduction that we potentially will see over the next 12 months will not predominantly be driven off of bad economy. Right. If you look in the past, most layoffs happen because economic conditions, people feel it's high risk to keep the people on. They have to reduce to get in that situation. I think you're going to see more job reduction not because of bad economy, but because of opportunity for efficiency or at least perceived belief that there's an opportunity for efficiency through AI and other technologies, not just AI, but AI things that are there. So you're going to see a reduction. But I agree with you, it doesn't mean that the economy is bad. In fact, the economy may be picking up because of the efficiencies that are coming out of that. So yes, I agree that in this scenario the traditional reason for layoffs may not be the traditional way that it's actually occurring.

Well, it, it. So I think we're in alignment. I think you recap that fairly well. I think the, the, the key takeaway for me on this is the focus of it is, let me how I put this. If though, if that does in fact happen, what you just described, and there are some, maybe some less than accurate data in the jobs number that's not tied to really what's happening in the economy, it's tied to what's happening in a business, then we're probably using a false number and that puts us at risk for keeping rates too high, too long, where it could be too little too late.

Right. But, but I think the idea then I'm saying, okay, we're going to cut rates and that's going to create new jobs. I'm not sure that's a good correlation anymore because you're not, even if you're spurring economic activity, you may not be getting those things that are there.

So, but I, so man, new can of worms with that. I like that. This is great. So I agree with you that you might find the efficiencies in upgrading the new jobs. But if we can one get interest rates down and to get, you know, while the big beautiful bill helps with taxes and so forth. Right. And if you can get that in place and we can spurn some manufacturing back in the U.S. right. We're going to create dramatic. I would suggest we would. And again, I, I'd have to go research this to come up with some numbers. I would suggest we would probably be creating a lot more jobs both in the construction arena of building new plants, new manufacturing facilities, all of the infrastructure that needs to go in place, we're going to create a lot more jobs than we would be lost being, being lost because of efficiencies in a business.

I mean, that'll be interesting to see. I think there will be jobs created in certain areas and big job losses. I mean where the layoffs are occurring are knowledge workers, middle management, things like that. That again the perception is can be made more efficient through AI and technology.

But you know, we've lived in a world right of historically right of the assembly line was supposed to put everybody out of jobs.

Yeah, yeah, right.

The Internet was supposed to put everybody out of jobs. And we never saw that. It's, you know, it's interesting though. I look at things as our, our youngest son is three years out of school now and you know, kind of sorting through what to actually do with a career after, you know, his college career. And you know, he was here in town from Colorado last, was it three weeks ago. We spent some time talking and I'm, I'm really encouraging him to look at the trades. Sure. Look into the. Look at the trades. You know, you can. The financial spot he would like to be in, in his life and what, how he would like to live his life for his wife and his new daughter. He could achieve that in Colorado Springs, where they moved to by welding, by plumbing, by becoming an electrician.

Yeah, absolutely.

Just, you know, and, and I just described him do that for a few years and you want to hang up a shingle with your contractor's license, we'll help you get a business started.

Yeah.

So anyways, good, that's, it's going to be interesting. But I think my in and I don't want to take us down any deeper rabbit holes remembering the premise or one of the tenants, I'll say of this administration is lowering interest rates, lowering taxes on shoring manufacturing and creating jobs. So I think we're going to continue to see that pressure there, whether it happens the way it's expected or not will be interesting. So. But those are a couple of the key tenants.

All right, let's move ahead.

Yep. So good. Canadian prime ministers has just headed to Mexico to kind of preemptively have some conversations with president of Mexico prior to the USMCA discussions that are going to happen at the beginning of next year. So USMCA is the United States, Mexico Canada agreement. It's what replaced NAFTA in 2020. So that's up for review. So I think there's probably a, this is a series of discussions about how do we put our heads together to manage the, the current administration in the US and the pressures that they're putting on us.

Well, and if I don't have the statistics right in front of me, but I think it was 70% of Canadian exports are to the US 80% of Mexican exports are to the US so there's look, they obviously the US in the middle here is the big consumer of all of this stuff. So yeah, it makes sense for them to try and figure out some strategic ways of, of navigating all of this.

Yeah, the. I'm trying to get back and find that percentage. It was the percentage this interesting says more than 75% of Canada's exports and more than 80% of Mexico's exports go the U.S. but what Canada is doing with Mexico is far greater than what they do with the entire EU is I think with the. Yeah, it's a, this was a comment from a senator I think that he's actually referred to in Canada said a lot of people don't realize that we trade more with Mexico than we do with the entire European Union. All of Europe, including the UK So Mexico is a pretty big deal for them and huge amount of trade for those two countries related to mining, which I didn't know about. Said Canadian companies are the largest foreign investors in Mexico's mining sector accounting for almost 70% of foreign investment. So a lot going on. Maybe this was a little bit of an eye opener for me not fully being aware of that how much they do together and then obviously with both of them, the vast majority of their, they're exporting coming to the US So you know there's hopefully there's an opportunity for, for level headed discussion as this USMCA thing comes together. Which would be good.

Well, I would assume that the tariff negotiations are. Or trade negotiations that are happening independently. Yeah. With each one have to be factored into the bigger picture here of the USMCA agreement as well. I don't think those are completely autonomous in terms of how they would fit together.

Well, yes, I think you know, this, that I'm sure the way the, the optics of this is is that they're getting together to talk about their trade. But at the same time there's an elephant in that room. Right. And if you combine all of that at 70, I think it would average out to 75% and you don't replace 75% of your exports Right. In one fell swoop with that. So it's pretty important this stuff comes together. You know, we're on a little different pages as we talked about with a spirited discussion a few weeks ago about where all the tariff stuff lands. You know I just in my mind is it you consider the source of, you know, of the verbose starting, you know, at the as far opposite end of the spectrum as where somebody's willing to, you know, I mean I do business negotiations and go in high and find a balancing act for where we want to be and where it's fair to end up. But you know, I think this, this, this president wants to start, start on the, the planet Earth and his, his expectations are on Mars and he has to come back to the Moon, you know to, to get things so we know that these expectations are high. What they want to find is. And, and, and the question is. Right. I always say this Tom. Right. Two components of this. The president's hat says he wants to make America great again, not the world. And I think that's really important to look at. I think previous US Administrations have wanted to just kind of hold hands with everybody. That's not what this president is saying. He says I don't care about you until after I've got things taken care of here. Right. And the second part of that is, is that trade has not been fair, fair or balanced for the US to benefit our people in our economy in this country for many, many years. And that's what he's saying. He's working. He just happens to be a bombastic negotiator of how this goes. And if you consider the source and you work through that and you know, I think that's why regardless of whether, you know, whether what the Supreme Court comes back on, what statute the president used to implement tariffs, the tariffs are going to be there and that's why people are negotiating these deals.

There'll be some form of a tariff. Right. Again, how it, what it is, what it looks like, we'll know I think pretty clearly here in the next couple months. But.

Yep. Good. Well, let's, let's jump down kind of talk about a little bit more about freight and trade. So this is an article from cnbc. It says not just China, US peak season for freight stalls. They said that I think it was August that the freight rates had amount of freight coming had stalled dramatically and what normally for holiday shipments and stuff would continue. October has already stalled. The other component is front loading.

I mean isn't that just simply because of the front loading?

No, it doesn't. No. The article talks about there's a component of things here that and I had forgot about this until this article talks about it as well is that there are not just there's not just going to be tariffs on the goods that are coming on those ships, but the ships that were made in China and are coming from China are going to have these hugely higher port taxes as well that have been added. Remember we talked about that when this first. So that's coming into play now as well. So that will be an interesting thing to watch. I, I think my we've got so much that's happened related to you know, you've got in the summer months you've got back to school stuff and holiday things. I wish we could see non retail good reports that really impact our audience more in wholesale distribution and manufacturing. I wish we could see breakouts of shipments on those things as well, but we don't. I've not been able to find anybody that tracks that data. Okay, so want to jump down to this article from Procurement Mag about global volatility index?

Sure.

What are your thoughts on that?

Well, what does it tell us?

Well, I just looked at this and they, they talked about this being a collaborative effort between this group, a global supply chain. GEP is the company and S and P global. So first time I've seen stuff from them. Going to start sharing more from them. So they look at. Basically they draw from an S and P global is who does the PMI survey. So that is 27,000 companies worldwide. I'm just kind of reading from this. It says a weighted aggregation of six sub industries derived from PMI data, PMI comment trackers and PMI commodity price and supply indicators that come through that. So they say a positive value in the GEP global supply chain volatility index indicates strained supply chain leading to increased volatility. The higher the value, the greater the strain. Conversely, a negative value is underutilized supply chain capacity. So value of diff of 0 indicates that supply chain capacity is being stretched and the volatility could be coming in that setting. So this article talks to us about where am I at here?

They're. Where did I go?

I just lost my article there. Tom, I. Do you have that article handy?

I don't have it handy, no.

But anyways, the. Let me just find it again then real quick. I, I don't. I think I deleted it accidentally. So let me bring it up and why don't you tune in on any thoughts that you had. Did you write any notes down on that one?

Well, I mean it's what it kind of relates back to what we were just talking about on the, on the, you know, shipments in the courts. Right. So it's saying that there is spare capacity because the global slide supply chain activity has cooled down or reduced that. So which is interesting, I guess. Or if you start to put the two of them together then is the reduced imports also as a result of not just front loading or, or the port charges, but is it because there's just less things being made right to be to need to be shipped? Yeah.

So they talked about this. I just found some notes on this. Talked about the volatility that goes into this too. Talks about geopolitics, inflation, interest rates, copper prices and the swings in commodity prices as well. So what was the number on that? See, the US labor market shows signs of cooling with 22,000 jobs and so forth. So anyways this was. Is one we're going to start sharing a little bit more about and doing a little bit deeper dive with this. I like the data that comes from this group. It's procurement magazine. Ng so this is supposed to be.

Measuring volatility it sounds like which is much like you know you have the volatility measurement in the stock market how some. How much stuff is moving relative to where previously. So this is looking at the movement of everything versus just the actual results of those things. How much change is there? Right. What's the. What's the change and the pace of change between them?

It's. That is. Yes and I was just looking back to notes here with that and it, it's putting all of that together. So the number ended up being for August was 0.39. So we've got a negative number there. And you can see the supply chain slowing but it's talking about being near full capacity but slowing. So I do agree that's a good.

Index one to keep an eye on the volatility because that does start to show the pace of which change is make being made versus the things that are there. So good.

We'll. We'll continue to include that. I signed up for their newsletter so kind of next article for us is from TED magazine, the electrical distributor magazine. Our friend Scott Costa there that need to get Scott scheduled for later this year to come back on the show with us. But Border States the, the large electrical and industrial distributor great company they publish their supply chain update monthly. So I assume Border States as a large distributor has an economic partner that they or economists that they work with on. On this. But it's, it's a really good index. You want to bring that up real quick Tom, do you have that handy to bring up? So they, they talk about as we kind of look at that a series of different components. Right. They're talking about lead times related to commodities. They as we kind of scroll through that day and they do an analysis on each one of these. They do a three or four paragraph analysis on job growth points. Great. I mean I, I would almost say if, if I had one thing to read every month that I could only read about distribution and, and what's going on in the economy related to it. I think they do a really nice job of this. So because they give all the data in this case they're giving big picture data on the PPI but then they talk about CPI and PPI but why it matters and nice recap with these.

Yeah we should dump this into AI and have it kind of tell us hey, what are some insights and stories behind the stories based on the data that you're seeing here?

I think that's great. But we also saw some horrible hallucinations in the AI tool that we use for summarizing our notes for the show this morning. So we would want to you know it's interesting with some things and, and I we need to probably talk about this when we're together next week doing some 2026 planning. You know we use multiple different technology tools in the organization and and I think I mentioned this to you the other day about something we you you had done some used a helper agent as we call them in ChatGPT for something that was a significant decision in, in how we're running the business of lead smart and I think there's we're going to be at this place very soon where we're going to need to have multiple multiple agents. Alexa, Bob's here.

He's saying we purposely waited to talk about anything related to AI until we're.

Just getting started before our regular guest here Bob gets here. So yeah the AI stuff is all just getting started Bob. So but I am wearing an aloha shirt for you today since Bob always starts off with aloha and I'll be in back in back in Hawaii in November. Bob. So I'll check in with you from Hawaii back to Dallas. But Bob used to live in Hawaii. But I think with this Tom is you know we're probably going to be at a spot very soon where we're going to need agents to check the other agents work on these things when we start talking about you know major decisions with things because the you know if you're I think it ties to the idea that we've been talking about a lot lately about having an industry related foundational model and by industry so from that standpoint because if you just start throwing things like this out there I would be interested we should we should we in your copious time over the weekend. Why don't you plug this in.

I will and again I'm not this wasn't be a dissertation on the on the effectiveness of AI Are you saying.

I just ranted about something?

I think you went down a right right right turn somewhere. Isn't that a shock so but anyway let's go back let's go back to.

The article the article at hand. Okay you could so this is again from border states. They publish this regularly about they talk about container volumes and shipments and so forth, as we've been doing. This was interesting. It says average container rates continue to soften in August, down 50% over the past year, as capacity and software demand counterbalance the effects of geopolitical disruptions. So much of what we just talked about, what they did talk about in this, I thought was really interesting to see. And we haven't talked about this at all because there hasn't been anything in the news about Houthi rebels or whatever. But the risks of shipping through the Red Sea and around needing to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope is adding two weeks to global sailings as it ties it. So that is still very much a major factor. The other thing we're going to see, and I don't think we'll talk about it today, but before you go on from that, Tom, is we have an article in today's newsletter about a lot of work that's being done on the Panama Canal because last year, because of a lack of rain, the lake that the Panama Canal empties into before it moves on from there and is the water has been so low, hence the water in the Panama Canal was so low and there was a fewer amount of ships that could get through and it was going slower. So it'll be interesting to watch that. So anyways, let's not belabor this particular article. But they talk about trucking, they go on and talk about minerals. They just scroll through and talk about labor fully. They're talking about. And if you stop here real quick, Tom, let's scroll just up just a touch. And for those of you that are listening on the podcast, the recorded podcast, later in the day, we're looking at the newsletter that we publish every week. It's called around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution. Happy to get that out to you if you send us an email@helloadsmartech.com in this particular article, again from border states and their update on supply chain critical minerals and tariff policies. It talks a little bit, Tom, about what we were talking about last week. Right. About president or the week before, has several legal authorities to impose tariffs. So if that initial one gets struck down, we're going to. Do you remember, Tom, when did the Supreme Court say it would hear it? Was it end of October, November 4th?

It starts November 4th.

Okay. So we'll know. Right.

By the end of the year, very early in the next year.

Yeah, but I thought it was interesting too, is if you scroll down just a touch, is it 301? Is the next one down? Yeah. So that was the U.S. trade Representative investigate unfair foreign trade practices. They've already mentioned the administration has about using that trade representative to start investigations on a number of countries already. So they're already backstopping this. So I'm digressing off of that particular article but we're going to continue to discuss this. I think you. We could do a show off of border states up there.

I think that's great. In fact does it come out every month or.

It does and we've, we've put it in the show before but we've not talked about it like this as well.

So I'm going to run it. I'm going to run it through some. Yeah. What happens because I it. Because it is such a good cross section of things. It would be interesting.

Well the recap. The recap that it does is nice too. So let's move into our manufacturing distribution segment. I was intent on not spending 43 minutes today in our economy and supply chain but we did anyway so I was thinking 20 to 30. Okay, so you're. Is that just silly these days?

Well you had like 12 articles in there so it's like that's a lot to cover in that short period of time.

So for those of you that are maybe new to the show, I met quite a few people. I was. And I didn't even mention this last week I had this great opportunity to be with our friends at hardy, the Heating and Refrigeration Distributors International Group. They invited me down. I know you got a laugh out of this. I had an opportunity to speak at their focus conference that they do each year for, for H Vac and they've got quite a few plumbing and even some electrical distributors that were there. But I did two one hour sections on silo data as I've become the silo data crusader as you saw that AI image I sent you the other day. So I had an opportunity to speak at that event. So we have some new listeners coming from people that we met there and new subscribers. So we do these different segments where we move into manufacturing, distribution and. And so forth across the board here. So those of you that are new, we go section by section each week and I typically am the one who Tom will give me some articles regarded that he likes but I typically curate the articles from the collection of newsletters that I get. So anyways, that grid article from CFO Dive about business contracts with tariff clauses are proliferating now. So you know I think forward thinking companies have been probably doing that for a while. But if they haven't. Now we're having supply chain agreements and purchasing agreements now restructured in many ways to include different types of parameters to support clauses related to. I'm sure these are expectations of still having deliveries regarding, of tariffs and maximum amounts. And a big part of what they discuss in this article too I think is who is responsible for what percentage because there's more and more people that are saying hey you know what, we, we need to spread this across the supply chain.

I think that's again we talked about building it into the DNA of the business. Right. This is a part of you know, just like building CPI increases or, or force majeure or whatever different clauses you have in a, in a contract. You know there's, and I, and I do think it's as you said, it's more than just price or who handles the price. But what if there's a delivery impact or what if there's slow or whatever, right. Then how do we work together on those so we don't end up with a finger pointing situation. I think also that helps both sides of the equation whether it's a manufacturer and a distributor being used this and saying hey we're entering into agreements like this, let's use this to drive how we then operate and be more proactive on how we set things up from the, from the business side of things. So yeah, like I agree with you is that the uncertainty to hedge against uncertainty is what it says here are using tariff specifically. Well uncertainty is just part of the equation. So let's figure out how to incorporate that into what we're doing knowing we're going to have uncertainty and how do we continue to operate with that uncertainty.

So that Tom, well said with that and that that really ties into what we were talking about earlier is that you know, I think especially as we talk about interest rates and the Fed and so forth, I think that the idea of uncertainty with tariffs, certainly there is some uncertainty still there but people are have or have getting it figured out right. And there it's becoming part of the day to day. My guess is there's people that are either have hired new people to support this and expanded their supply chain team and I'm sure using more and more and more within using AI tools and so forth to help them with you know, procurement planning and so forth. But it does tie well into, into the fact that people are finding, I don't say the workarounds but they're, they're, they're finding the ways to live with it and work with it, it does tie in kind of the next article from Modern Distribution Management, our friends there at NAW and mdm. There's an article here about tied to tariffs and it's titled Electrical Product Suppliers proposed incentive program to offset tariffs. And this is what they're basically looking at. This particular discussion is from NEMA, which is National Electrical Manufacturers association again represents 300 electrical equipment manufacturers and they've released a proposal that characterize a way to accelerate the Trump administration's energy and domestic manufacturing priorities. So they're coming out and saying hey, you know what this is? These tariffs are greatly in threat of or existing tariffs are greatly impacting our members and we think there's some things that can accelerate. They call it a three pronged approach with incentives of capital investment in US Manufacturing. They're describing and they're looking for a tariff offset equal to any capital investments made to build or expand a domestic manufacturing facility. That one was interesting. Right. It's like okay, we'll do it, but offset not just don't just give us the tax break from the big beautiful bill, but give us an offset in tariffs.

It seems smart. Right. And I don't, I haven't seen what if there's what the feedback was from the Trump administration.

I don't know that they've given it yet.

Right. But I think it would be, it would align with the, I guess the environment that is trying to be created. Right. So why not reward? Right. You get what you reward. So if you reward, hey, investment in the US grid infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, that three pronged approach there and you help companies offset some of the. Right. To me it seems like a bit of a win. Win.

Yeah.

So it'll be interesting to see A what is the response to this and then B, if the response is positive, does this proliferate on a broader, broader scope?

Yep. So there's, there's three components of it. I'll hit these quick and then read a quote out of this I thought was beneficial or well said. So capital investment in US Manufacturing with a tariff offset, grid infrastructure and other tariff offset for goods or raw material used to build or operate power infrastructure essential to global competitiveness. So basically saying hey, the things that I need to bring in, that is a switch box, a plumbing fixture, a gauge or a valve or whatever help us with offsets of our tariffs on those items that going into the grid infrastructure. Because obviously with the power needs and power consumption that's increasing dramatically in this country, the grid needs to improve and then domestic manufacturing. They talked about a tariff offset for manufactured goods that meet federal domestic content requirement. So basically what they're saying is we want to do all of the stuff you want to do and as manufacturers we want to support it and get behind it, but we need your help. So it said from a quote from Deborah Phillips, the CEO of Nima said the Trump administration is right to prioritize domestic manufacturers roles in meeting our growing energy industrial protection and data center demands. It takes time for supply chains to move to the US and our tariff framework assures that national manufacturing, energy grid and AI objectives are pursued at a pace to strengthen domestic production, deliver reliable energy and build essential power infrastructure here at home. I think what they're basically saying here is we're behind you, we're going to do everything we can. We need a little more help on the tariff side.

Yep, yep, it's good.

All right, let's. Anything else from this section or can we. Do you want to jump ahead into.

Come on.

There we go. All right. E Commerce and marketing. We talk here. Marketing profs.com magazine or online magazine says where AI gets its facts. I'm going to let you run with this one at all.

So Bob, you should appreciate this one. So, so they did research, right, to determine where was the primary sources of information for the predominant consumer based LLMs, which are Google, Gemini Chat, OpenAI Chat, GPT Cloud is, is moving more towards a business objective. So these are more of the consumer LLMs. And so there was two questions, right? One is how are these models being trained? In other words, what data is being used to train these models? And then also when you need to, you know, do search or like perplexity when it searches or whatever, right? Getting this data from. So, and I know if you're not watching you can't see this, but there's a graphic here on the screen. 40.1% of the training data is coming from Reddit, 26% from Wikipedia, 23% from YouTube, 23% from Google, 21 from Yelp, 20 from Facebook, 18 from Amazon and it keeps driving down from there. Now, yeah, Reddit, I know, it's pretty pathetic. I asked, I did some research on this. Like why would they, why would they put so much waiting on Reddit? And what they, what was being, what I found was, is because Reddit is these conversational, you know, threads and there's a lot of back and forth and a lot of opposing opinions and so forth that they believe that the data is less biased and more accurate coming from a Reddit where there's all These different viewpoints and conversations coming together to provide that, that information that's there. I don't, again, I don't, I don't know enough to go do I believe that or. But they're, they're in. Reddit is making a lot of money by the way, off of this.

Yeah, well, they've licensed, they've licensed their data, correct?

Yep, yep. So. But it does, there is, it does make sense to a degree because you do when you're training a model and you're looking at a model. Right. Ideally you want to get viewpoints and data from different sources and try and use that to quote, unquote, get to the truth. Now Wikipedia, I certainly wouldn't call that the truth or the source of the truth, but there is a lot of, a lot of data on there and I'm sure that they balance on those things that are there. But I, my guess is if you were going to ask people where data is coming from, the first word out of people's mouth wouldn't have been Reddit.

Yeah, no, absolutely not. And I think if you look at this as it goes down, I mean this is where, this is where it really throws me off is, you know, 20 Facebook, 21 Yelp and then Walmart.com 9% eBay, 7%.

Yep. Amazon for 20.

Yeah. You know, when you look at those numbers that that's what kind of. And I guess it just maybe this ties to you. What would be interesting would be to, to have another graphic. Can't believe you didn't do this, Tom. Another graphic that shows what are people searching for? Right. Or what are the questions being asked? Because this would suggest a lot of it ties to retail related. It's retail and travel. It's related almost.

Well now about 25% of ChatGPT is search related stuff. Right. Or research or related to those things that are there. But the what this really to me points out, we've had some discussions on this is these models are not designed predominantly for business or B2B models are designed for B2C. B2C interactions. Claude is in, is trying to move their models and position their models to be more business oriented, trained on more business data. But the fact is, is that models that are more, this is, you know, even industry specific models are going to become, in my opinion more important than ever because I don't want to be driving my business off of a model that's predominantly trained on consumer information or consumer interest information that is there.

Okay. Yeah, it's. Well and I guess that the other question is this interesting comment that is there is crowdsourcing will produce the most accepted answer, not the answer. Yeah, you know, and I think that's really interesting. And then you got to wonder about where, what were their hallucinations in this as well. But it just, it intrigues me across the board with. Let's just say this is 50% accurate. It's still throws off, you know, I mean, I, I would like to see maybe Library of Congress or, or you know, some other more, I would say more reputable sources, you know, but I mean, Google obviously, you know, is. I, I would have thought that Google would have been first, I guess, versus fourth.

Right, Yeah. I mean, but again, Google doesn't have that forum, if you will. Right. The back and forth and whether you call it crowdsourcing or, or network effect or whatever of the back and forth side of things. To which again, again, if you think about your training or your using even AI in your business. Right. I'll avoid going down a rabbit hole here. Think about like even this, we talk about this in CRM, having activity and information about the conversations that are taking place with your customers. Now you're getting again, two sides or multiple sides into that data that's coming in to the equation. Right. What is the customer saying? What are you doing back and forth? Right now you start to be able to get that balance of some of the information versus just having a sales playbook that is entirely aligned towards how you do sales. We're going to talk more about that in the, in a few minutes. But anyway, I just think it, it starts to tell you a little bit, give you a little bit of insight about how, how you should be thinking about priming the pump, if you will, as it relates to AI and the types of data that you use to, to drive the AI.

I think it ties, like you're saying, ties really strongly to prompts too.

Sure, of course. Right, yeah.

Because in theory you could. Well, let me ask you, you would know more about this. In theory you could write a prompt that eliminates a data source or you know, and I mean, I answer my own question because I have a couple of helper agents that I built in ChatGPT that only look to two sources that I've identified. It's the only place I want information from for that particular helper agent. Now I have to scan that and occasionally remind it of what its instructions are. And of course it gives me the complimentary, oh, Kevin, you're so smart to catch me on that. You know, let me Fix that drives me crazy. But anyways, remember that when you train.

A model, right the actual pre training and the original training, you don't really have the citations. The citations can come later. Later when you're using rag or other data sources on top of the trained model and then when you're doing search of course you have the citations that come from that. Yeah. So anyway it's, I just found it interesting to on a couple of fronts. Like I said, these models predominantly are aligned towards business to consumer or consumer interactions. And as you start thinking about data in your own organization for using models, think about not just the raw data but the data that has some form of a conversation or an interaction back and forth from different parties, different viewpoints.

Good. Why don't we jump ahead to Digital Commerce360 app based e commerce Surges as Website Traffic Stalls is the title there. I know you did a little extra research on that one as well.

Well, I guess it kind of relates to. So let's talk about what the, what the article says. It's basically saying that users and I assume that they're talking to a large degree B2B here given who the are using AI or AI apps or apps that are driven by AI to facilitate the shopping experience. So I went and did a quick search out here. If I go I'll bring up this now again I'm using chat GPT so I'm, I'm again this is what I just said is more consumer based but I went in and asked what are the best safety goggles. And so it came back with some answers as to what to be looking for and then actually gave me some, gave me a no Cry, a 3M a DeWalt. I think there's a couple more of them here.

I want us for cutting onions.

Pardon?

I think the no cry is for cutting onions. Okay, couldn't resist.

And maybe you're right. So then as you select them, right. Then it actually brings up over here on the right a place to purchase them and where they're getting them. So they're actually guiding you in this place to a retailer. Now in the future I believe that we're going to see open AI and the other models wanting to sell this directly from themselves. Right. And rather than directoring you to somewhere.

Else but they'll develop their own marketplace and they'll, they'll come to you Mr. You know, electrical distributor, industrial safety distributor in this case. Right. And say we have an order, right. If you would you like to fulfill it, you'll make 9% on it.

But. But now think about this conversation. Right now I can start having a conversation. Hey, I need safety goggles because I'm going to be chopping onions or whatever the case may be. Right. What are the ones that are, you know, design that are more industrial, who have the best reviews. Right. I could continue to have a conversation here. And that's what we mean by AI buying. Right. That's taking place. So this is very different than doing a Google search. Yep. Or even looking at a product catalog.

Yeah.

Because, you know, product catalog has the raw data, but it doesn't allow you to have the conversation. That may get you to the point. So which one of these should I buy? By the time I get through that conversation, I would assume it would. I would want it to be able to say, yep, you really need this Dewalt concealer safety that's best for what you're trying to accomplish.

Well, you can then ask it about, well, you know, what standards does it meet and. Right. What sizes does it come in and what are the reviews and what do they have sizes for women or children or whatever.

Right.

Yeah, that's good. Well, I think we're going to just see more and more of this and to the point. Part of the point of this article is it's tying to mobile as well.

Sure.

Right. So think about. We talk all the time. I talk about it in some of the talks I've been giving recently is. And we talk about it constantly on the show now. I think we're at 72% of B2B buyers are millennials. And guess what? Those are the same people that ordered DoorDash for lunch and took Uber to the movies last night and now they're doing these searches on their phone. I don't know about you, but you know, I have. Right on my main home screen on my phone is Perplexity Gemini and Chat GPT, they've put shout. And I go to those now more than I go to the Google Chrome icon. So. And, and I am far from a millennial, so good jump into our technology, cybersecurity and AI segment. Tom, here in the newsletter, either these two ransomware attacks or insider threats appeal to you at all, or I don't.

Know if there's really anything new that we haven't hit on before that's still happening. Right.

Something I ran, which is sharing and talking with a couple of people this week is statistics I ran across. But the two articles that we have here are really tying to. The second article is from Inside Industry Today. Talks about avoiding insider threats in manufacturing. That. That might sound like, hey, you know, covert espionage of people internally, but it's the threats that come from things that are going on within the business, and they recap a series of those that can open you up for different types of ransomware threats and so forth. But then the other article talks about a tool company. I won't name them just out of courtesy. This is from Industrial Distribution magazine. But they talked about a cyber attack that they had that compromised, reportedly Social Security numbers, tax documents, all kinds of stuff that came out of that. And this one, I believe, was a second attack for this company. And the statistics in this is in the 70s, I can't remember. Let's just assume it's 70% of companies that underwent a cyber attack are likely to undergo another one within, I think, the next three years. Which astounds me that in your. You're the computer scientist and technology whiz here, but do you have any take on that? I know I'm kind of putting you on the spot. To me, it seems like. And I was just thinking about this, you know, a company that we see in the. In the wholesale distribution and manufacturing space that makes software for distributors. Adam, major attack earlier in the year, you know, we. We met. Have met people that had, what, two, almost three months where they didn't, one, have access to that their data, didn't have any answers from the vendor and didn't know where their data was. Would they ever see it again? And was it out on the dark Web or what? What was the case? In my mind, it just seems like if that were to happen to you, wouldn't you have just doubled down so much on security that you would be so much more protected? Or is it the fact that now the attackers previously and potentially other attackers have seen that you're vulnerable and want to come after you again in more, in different ways?

I believe it's the latter, and I think it's the. The vulnerability is not just a technological vulnerability, but how did you handle whatever the ransom process was or the right. Did you pay? Did you pay quickly? Did. How did you handle it? You know, all of those things, right? I mean, you tend to go back to the same thing, go back to your same customers, right? Who are your good customers, Quote, unquote. And so, yeah, I mean, that makes sense to me. I'm sure not everybody. I'm sure some people are not repeat customers, so to speak, but I'm sure there's certain characteristics that these types of, you know, hackers and people look for to say, okay, let's, you know, revisit them in a year.

Yeah, they probably use a CRM.

Probably.

All right, let's roll into our sales and M and a segment. There was a couple here that I thought you were. You were interested in. You want to talk about that? Was it the sales playbook one that you mentioned?

Yeah. How arpire accelerates, you know, sales. Sales enablement is a star. Historically relied on static, one size fits all content and tools to support sales teams. However, this approach often leads sellers to manually gather and tailor generic guidance, slowing and weakening their outreach. And so what this is, what the article is talking about is can you use AI Right. To create more of a dynamic playbook versus a document, but says, okay, now again, you talked about a helper agent. Right. A helper agent that can be used by a sales organization to, hey, I have this scenario, I have this customer, I have this situation, I have this negotiation, whatever. What do I do in those situations versus just having some static documentation?

Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry.

No, I, I would. I. One of the things, though, that I'm. I've been doing a little bit of research in this, just because I'm interested in this, is I think the mistake that is being made. Just think about it. We just talked about this. Right. Your buyer is technologically ahead of where you generally are as the seller.

Yes. Right.

They're using more tools, they're using more technology. They're taking advantage of tools and technology more so than you are as the seller. So what's happening is, is that we're falling. We keep wanting as sellers, we keep wanting to do what we did 10 years ago.

Mm.

Yet we have buyers that are maturing much faster and how they're going about the buying process that's there.

So meeting the buyer where they are, we're meeting the buyer where we want them to be.

Right. And that gap is getting larger because the buyer is. Is taking advantage of technology faster than we are as the seller on the other side of things. So the gap is increasing, not closing.

Yep.

So I think the mistake that, and I've seen this a few times recently, is if we're going to build AI seller Playbooks and we're going to build new Playbooks from a sales perspective, we have to start with the buyer, not with the seller. How are we going to, as you said, meet the buyer where they're at, at the right stage along the way and how they're doing things. Right. And how they're going about doing Things. So I, so I agree. I think, you know, AI powered sales playbooks are great, but they're only as good as they accomplish what you're trying to accomplish, which is to build stronger relationships, make more sales, you know, get new customers. All the things that we're trying to do in that area.

Well, it's interesting, right? And it's a lot more than just saying, you know, asking Chachi PT how you can help, you know, simply I'll just say how you can help, write an email or doing very, very basic things. Right. This talks about, you know, breaking high frequency sales assets into reusable components, enabling teams or should say enablement. Sales enablement teams can create libraries of modules that are recombined for different buyers industries and deal scenarios. Then it goes on to talk about signals and so forth as well. I think we're in a place where you can look at having triggers based. We were talking about this just a few weeks ago, right. About triggers that come from website activity or maybe you've sent a electronic proposal to somebody and they've opened it. You know, a certain amount of times that there's signals and signals versus noise is pretty critical on the sales side of things to be able to identify. So I think we're at this place that you can do that. You know, it's interesting. I've done some things recently with some of the big bigger projects that I'm working on for our company. Even in contractual related things where I've really, I don't want to say digital twin, but I've been kind of mapping different outcomes in different scenarios and different responses to things to looking one, what is the potential outcome and then two, how should we manage through these different stages? I think getting to a place where that becomes more of a conversation versus needing to put something prompt related and will be really powerful as well. Yep. So it's good, good. Let's kind of move ahead here.

Well, and this last article here kind of aligns with.

Before you jump past that time, I just wanted to kind of plug here. We have a link to an article in. It's called Sales Enablement Straight Talk. It's. I. The link that I put in there is to finding it on LinkedIn. Mike Kunkel who does some really, really good articles. I haven't posted enough of his stuff. It's. He just put an article in about motivation for salespeople and working to motivate themselves versus waiting on leadership to do so. So nice, nice little article there. Good plug for Mike. If you don't follow Mike on LinkedIn. LinkedIn. It's well worth doing so. So anyways, now jump ahead to that next one. Tom.

No, this last article in the section is despite surge in AI adoption, sales teams say the tech is failing them.

Yep.

And I think a lot of the reason for that failure is what we just talked about is again trying to look at the world through the seller's lens, not through the work lens of the buyer. And, and meanwhile the buyer is off to the races and you're over here trying to figure out, well, how we've done this for 25 years. How do we somehow shoehorn that into this new world and it's just becoming less and less relevant.

Well, I think, you know, as it makes me think about we were talking with this, we a couple weeks ago with Nick Per Perel from Profit Optics and Nick was saying that I was asking Nick about, you know, the number of wholesale distributors talking about that, you know, whether depends on whose number you use. Somewhere between 2 and 350,000 in the US and we were kind of trying to narrow down what percentage of them are really doing anything meaningful with AI. And it was, you know, we can't, we came up with a low single digit percentage and sometimes I think it's a fraction of a percent. There's a lot of talk, there's a lot of events, there's a lot of things that go on. This research said that although workplace adoption, I'm just going to read a quote here. All the workplace adoption of artificial intelligence tools is accelerating. Insert buying lots of software. Only 28% of sales and revenue leaders say it improves revenue driving sales performance. And this study and report came out on September 9th and today's the 19th. So it's really interesting, right? There's a lot out there, but there's not necessarily. And it ties back to what we talk about regularly, right? About having plans, goals, what do we wanted guardrails with how we're going to use AI in the workplace. Because I think where we're seeing people is not really having a strategic plan. We have a lot of customers that do. We've worked with them, with some of them on that. But just buying, you know, I go back to this all the time. You told me years and years ago when we were first starting this company, was that at Lead Smart was that, you know, buying software is actually easy, getting outcomes is difficult. Right. And so I think that we're seeing this crossing over to just buying more tech does not mean that in this case sales adoption of AI and sales success is going to come from it. Sure. Good. Well, Tom, let's kind of start to wind down. We'll look in our leadership and people segment here. There's an article there about LinkedIn and OpenAI muscling their way into the recruiting fray. So you're going to see more and more AI tools specifically within LinkedIn. Right now we've got some jobs or a job there now and another job there in the next couple of days that we have posted there. So a lot more tools coming with that. Another article from HR Dive talk to talking about top talent quitting due to stalled career growth. Right. Opportunities. And I think this is going to be an interesting thing. Right. This is, this is just how well, how well do you lead in managing a business showing people where their opportunities are. But I think we're going to see even more of that related to aic too.

Yeah. I have seen in the interviews I've been doing recently with people were considering, I'm seeing that. I won't say frequently, but regularly where, you know, I ask because they're in a job and I'll ask them, why are you looking at leaving that job? And just like we've hit a wall. All I'm doing is, you know, busy work or what I feel is busy work. I'm not creating, you know, new opportunities, new things. I'm triage all the time, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I think there's, you know, I think that's always something to be conscientious of.

Very good. All right. And the last article in this segment that we'll mention here today is our friend David Gordon at Electrical Trends. David wrote an article, do you hate your HR department? And he talked about, you know, the frustrations that can happen. But talk about the upsides of a, of a good HR department and the downsides and how people can get better. So if you're trying to, and you're in the leadership role in your company and you're trying to make HR be not two letters, not become four letters, then good article there as well. So anyways, last thing we'll mention today is in our goodreads segment, which is the very bottom of our newsletter, is a nice article that was published. I liked it. It was published in Inc. Magazine. It's entitled want to be a better Leader Master 4 rarely talked about skills. They talk about humility being a strength. We talk about it talks about great leaders, learn from others. And I, I'm a believer you can learn from the janitor every day. He's got things he can share. You and everybody in your organization. Talking about patience, giving an edge, having really a focused on, you know, the empathetic piece of the leadership and patience that goes with that. And then being self aware of yourself. Right. Says Harvard Business Review study said that teams with less self aware team members made worse decisions, coordinated poorly and struggled with conflict compared to team leaders that were self aware. It says self awareness is a foundation of emotional intelligence as well. So I thought that was just really nice those four key points. So I think as something as a leader of an organization I can do a good job of looking at too.

HR human remains. Yeah.

Don't let angel, our HR gal see that we have anything like that here, we might find ourselves in the penalty box. Very, very good. Well, thank you Bob for that. It's appreciated that it's kind of ending on a keynote. So anything else to add as we wind down the show for the day? Tom?

No, anything. Any big news coming up this week that we got to be ready for next week? I don't know that there's any big stuff coming this week.

Well, we'll see what I know. I don't know you're talking about. Do we see your jobs report or anything? I don't think so. No. No. The big news is you. You've got a phenomenal Monday, Tuesday and part of Wednesdays you get to be with me in person.

Yeah.

Yeah. We'll just.

Headquarters.

I've let Mrs. Brown know that you'll be joining us for some meals and and us your. Your lodging will be here for that trip. So we're looking forward to having you here with us and, and being for those of you that don't know, I mention all the time that Tom and I are lifelong friends and we started our company together a while back and but we live about two and a half hours away from each other depending on the time of day that you leave. And the challenge is is that there's no way to. I was on the phone yesterday with one of the new hires on your team getting to to know him a little bit and I was describing it that he lives on the east coast right now and was describing the fact that there's no way to get to where where we live but that to get to me to get to your location or you here to our office without going through la unless you go by air or by seat. So AI or LA can be pretty ugly some days. So we'll wish you well on your drive. Any exciting weekend plans?

Nope, just get ready for next week.

I will be working on some of the furnishings of that office you were describing. So. All right, we have.

Well, let's wrap up and let everyone get on with their day.

Yeah, let's do that. Well, again, thanks. For those of you that were with us, one last little thing that we always ask and we appreciate is if you like what we do here on the show, we appreciate that. We appreciate you coming. You're joining us. The greatest thing you can do to help us is that you could hit the subscribe button at Lead Smart Technologies or the Follow button on our on our LinkedIn page. There's a Lead Smart Technologies page for the podcast on YouTube. Hit the subscribe and the little bell there so you'll get alerts. If you're listening in on any of the podcast formats. Apple, Spotify, Odyssey, wherever it may be, hit the hit the subscribe button as well as leave a review. The reviews do the absolute most benefit for us in those platforms and we would greatly appreciate it. The content continues to grow as well as the audience, so we appreciate you being with us. Today is number 159. I just, I can't even imagine. In late next year we're going to be celebrating our 200th episode, which just astounds me. So thanks for the folks that come on a regular basis and share with us. Lastly is we couldn't do this without the sponsorship of Lead Smart Technologies, the company that Tom and I work for. And if your company is digitally transforming, trying to grow with both AI and smart intelligent tools to understand your customers better, your team is better and your overall business better, we would love to talk to you and so engage in that discussion with you. So we'll go from there. Tom, I wish you a great weekend, my friend, and everybody else that's been with us, Brian, that just mentioned as well, having a great weekend on the live show we're doing here again. We'll see. Look forward to seeing you next time. Be kind, be safe, do good things.

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