Every year the Applied AI for Distributors conference fills a hotel outside O’Hare with people who run wholesale distribution businesses and want a straight answer about AI. This year I brought a camera and asked the question back at them: what is actually working?
The full recap is above. Here is what stuck.
The calls people will take from a machine
The first real conversation of the show was with a distributor I had met the year before. He had tried AI on outbound calls and got mixed reviews. His customers were not thrilled.
We have seen the same thing, and we build the technology. There is a narrow set of outbound calls a customer is fine with, like an order reminder. The moment a person realizes the voice on the line is an AI, there is friction. So we do not recommend running a high volume of those.
The calls that work are the ones where the customer wants something. Pricing. Order status. A question about a product. People have no problem at all talking to a capable agent that can answer those, because the agent is doing them a favor.
The number I can’t stop thinking about
Here is the statistic that reframed the show for me. Your team is on the phone because they are on the phone. While they are, as many as four in five inbound calls either wait on hold or drop into voicemail.
A blind voicemail is a dead end. An agent that knows the customer’s account and can actually answer is a different thing entirely. That gap, between the calls you answer and the calls you could, is where most of the value sits for anyone with a counter or a customer service desk.
”Does any of this work in the field?”
The other question that came up constantly: does it help the outside team?
Think about the day an outside rep has. Five visits, eight, twelve. If they write a quote or place an order, you will find out, because those have to go through the system. The genuinely good notes, the stuff that decides whether the next visit goes well, stay in their head.
What we have found is that those same reps have no problem pulling out their phone and telling an agent what just happened. Put it in the cradle in the truck and talk. That is Workd Voice for the field, and it is the part of our product line that got the most attention in Chicago.
The feature we almost didn’t build
One of the things I kept hearing was how unreliable people’s phone setups are. Two cell phones per person. A work line and a personal line, with nothing tying either of them back to the office.
When we first shipped our voice agents we assumed the phone system underneath was a solved problem. It is not. Adding a real phone system into Workd turned out to be a major epiphany for us, and what people wanted from it was simple: calls transcribed, put on file, and logged against the customer automatically. The note taking done for them.
The distributor with our name circled
I drove from Detroit to Chicago and met a large distributor from about an hour outside our office. He had our name circled on a piece of paper from two years earlier. People still carry a lot of paper.
We talked about his outside team and the problem every sales leader knows: you buy the system, you hand it to the field, and they do not use it. We gave a demo. It held up under a hard look, which is the part I was most proud of. A year ago the voice product could do a handful of things. Every customer conversation since has added another use case, and now it handles the long list of small things you expect a person to be able to do.
The frustration nobody says out loud
Driving home, one theme kept coming back. People are tired of how many pieces of software they own.
It works like a candy store. You see one thing, then another, and each one is just one more tool. Three or four years later you have a stack that does not talk to itself and a team that is frustrated by all of it.
That is a big part of why we build Workd the way we do, with the voice agents, the phone system, routing, delivery, and the CRM in one place. It is also the clearest signal I took home from the show: the winners in the next few years will be the distributors who connect what they have before they buy what they do not.
Thanks to everyone who stopped to talk. If you were there and want to pick up the conversation, call our AI and it will book you a demo, or come see us at the next one.