Data vs. Commerce

Every AI conversation in distribution right now assumes the data underneath is ready to be acted on. Most of the time, it isn't. Matt Johnson hosts this one solo, with Floyd Blaikie out of the studio, joined by Ryan Smith , an account executive at Pivotree , fresh off the Applied AI for Distributors event in Chicago run by Distribution Strategy Group. ㅤ Ryan took the data side. Before you buy the...

Field sales is the part of commerce that data never quite reaches. The rep has the relationship, the context, and forty years of counter knowledge, and most of it dies in a notebook nobody reads. This episode is about closing that gap. Matt Johnson calls in from the AI for Distributors event in Chicago while Floyd Blaikie hosts two guests from Pivotree 's automotive world: Lauren McCullough , co-f...

The catalog looks right, the website takes the order, and then the promise falls apart somewhere between the click and the dock. That gap between what a screen shows and what actually ships is where this episode lives. Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie sit down with Keith Gorney , OMS Practice Director at Pivotree , who took the commerce side of the table. ㅤ His argument: taking an order is the easy...

A customer asks ChatGPT how to fix his style, gets sent to three stores, and nobody on the retail side can explain why those three and not the other thirty. That gap is where this episode sits. Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie talk with Dan Ornstein , Retail Industry Leader at Pivotree , about how large language models decide which retailers to recommend and what that means for the people who own pr...

Every analyst call this quarter runs on the same promise about AI: fewer humans, same output. Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie don't buy it, and neither do this episode's guests. Floyd sits down with Pivotree CEO Bill Di Nardo and chief architect Joel Farquhar to make the case for what they call real intelligence plus artificial intelligence, with real intelligence first. This isn't a data-versus-co...

The storefront said overnight shipping. The part showed up three days later, and the dishwasher was still broken. ㅤ Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie open Episode 2 of Data vs. Commerce by tracing that delay past the product data they covered last time, into the place most teams forget to look: the integrations between systems. Matt walks through how an e-commerce system can confidently promise over...

Episode 1 of Data vs. Commerce starts with a broken dishwasher and a part that didn't fit. Floyd Blaikie ordered an overnight pump from a distributor's website. Three days later it showed up with three pins instead of four. Same model number, wrong part. Matt Johnson walks through what actually broke, and it wasn't the warehouse. ㅤ The hosts kick off the show by naming the friction the whole podc...

Every product moves twice. Once through the data layer, where it gets named, classified, attributed, priced, and made findable. Once through the physical layer, where it gets bought, picked, packed, shipped, and delivered. Most companies invest heavily in the second journey and treat the first as a pile of disconnected projects. ㅤ The gap between the two is where modern commerce actually fails. S...