Every software vendor in the distribution space is selling AI. The word appears in product descriptions for tools that have not meaningfully changed in five years and in capabilities that are genuinely transformative. Here is a clear-eyed assessment of what is working today at what scale.
What Is Real and Working Today
Reorder Prediction: Analyzes order history to identify when an account is likely to need to reorder before they place the order. Research on proactive outreach consistently shows 20–35% improvement in reorder capture rate when accounts are contacted before the reorder window closes. Account Health Scoring: RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) scoring with behavioral signals identifies at-risk accounts 30–60 days before they would otherwise surface. For a distributor with 80 accounts and 15% annual churn, a health scoring system that enables successful intervention on half of at-risk accounts could recover $160,000–$200,000 in retained annual revenue. SMS Order Parsing: Converts unstructured order text into structured order data — product names matched against the catalog, quantities confirmed, edge cases flagged for human review. For a distributor receiving 40–60 text orders per day, that is 2–4 hours of rep time returned.
What Is Still Hype
Fully autonomous ordering without buyer approval is not where the market is — the liability structure of B2B relationships makes it premature. AI-negotiated pricing in real time is not practical at the $1M–$20M distributor scale. Route optimization AI is genuinely useful at 8+ routes; for a distributor with 2 routes and 25 fixed stops, a $400/month route optimization platform producing a 5% efficiency improvement saves less than the platform costs.