How to Build an AI-Enabled, High-Growth 
DISTRIBUTION COMPANY
by
‍TRENT GILLESPIE

FOR IBT INC. - JANUARY 29, 2026

‍

Thanks for attending my keynote talk! 

Here are the additional resources I promised:

  1. Key Slides
  2. GPT Links
    1. Automation Finder GPT
    2. IBT Sales Call Brief GPT

Below is the AI summary of the keynote talk.

Finally, here are some links to products I recommend, that include special sign-up discounts for my audiences.

  1. Lindy AI: Personal and Small Team Automation (1 month free)
  2. Read AI: Meeting Notetakers and Information Management
  3. Gumshoe AI: AI Discoverability of Your Products and Services
  4. Gamma AI: AI-Powered Presentations

Need help with AI? Contact Trent

Win With AI: How to build an AI-Enabled, High-Growth Distribution Company

Presenter: Trent Gillespie | IBT Annual Summit

The Conference Room Moment

On his third day at Amazon, Trent was called into the VP's office and asked to "fix Amazon's global growth"—a role he wasn't hired for and knew nothing about. That one decision to step up and lead changed his entire career, enabling him to drive Amazon's expansion from London to Dubai, reinvent last-mile delivery, and define global privacy standards for Alexa.

The parallel: Right now with AI, every leader is sitting in that same conference room moment. The opportunity is on your desk. The question is whether you'll lead before you feel ready.

The Two Big Mistakes Leaders Make

Mistake #1: Treating AI as a Tool, Not an Operating System

AI isn't another CRM upgrade or software rollout. It's a complete business rewiring that will change products, services, cost structures, required skills, and potentially who the customer is. Organizations that understand this shift will lead; those that don't will fall behind.

Mistake #2: Optimizing for a World That No Longer Exists

Many companies are layering AI onto processes designed 20 or 30 years ago. To extract real value, organizations must reinvent their processes with AI at the center—not retrofit AI into legacy workflows. This is the difference between incremental improvement and transformation.

Current AI Adoption Reality

Daily AI users report 20% productivity improvements and better quality work, but only if usage is consistent. Meanwhile, roughly 40% of employees are already using AI in their roles—often without authorization—because they're finding real value. This isn't hype; people are adopting it on their own.

The message: If your organization isn't getting ahead of this, you're losing control of how AI enters the business while leaving significant opportunity and risk on the table. Get AI out of the shadows and empower it.

The stakes extend beyond internal productivity. A recent study found that 90% of B2B buyers now use generative AI tools in their purchasing process. Business strategies are moving slower than customer expectations—very few organizations are currently set up to be visible to AI, let alone serve it well.

The Future Customer™ Method

At Amazon, the core strategic question wasn't "what do customers want today?" It was: What will our future customer want five years from now? The team would imagine that future state, then work backward to build it before competitors could. This mindset produced innovations like Kindle, Alexa, and fundamental reinventions of e-commerce.

This framework is critical now because customer expectations are changing faster than most business strategies. Organizations that build for the future customer today will define their industry tomorrow.

What Changes When Intelligence Becomes Cheap?

Throughout history, intelligence—creativity, judgment, decision-making—has been the most expensive resource an organization can acquire. Companies hire top leaders, build organizational structures around them, and still never have enough. Now, for roughly $30 a month, that same caliber of capability is available on demand to anyone. When intelligence is no longer your limit, everything changes.

Live Demonstration

Trent demonstrated this by building a complete dormant customer reactivation tool live on stage. Using ChatGPT to generate the application requirements and Replit to build it, the tool—including CRM data import, a customer dashboard, personalized email campaign generation, and send tracking—was completed in 10 minutes at a total cost of $1.45.

The point: A project that most organizations would spend months evaluating and budgeting was built in the time of a coffee break for less than one. When something this powerful costs less than a cup of Starbucks, it changes how you do your work—not just a productivity gain, but a fundamental shift in what's possible.

Reinventing Processes with AI at the Center

To get real value from AI, you can't just bolt it onto existing processes. You have to redesign with AI at the center—and the results can be dramatic.

Real example—Amazon Tokyo: When Amazon expanded into Tokyo, delivery drivers were plotting routes by hand on paper maps in one of the world's most complex cities. Trent's team replaced the entire process by building AI into every layer—package sorting, vehicle assignment, route optimization, timing, and even parking. Drivers arrived each morning to a fully optimized day on their phone. The result: drivers went home on time, costs dropped, and Amazon was able to add tens of thousands of new jobs in Japan—because the redesigned process could scale in ways the old one never could.

The Agent Economy

AI is evolving from a general-purpose assistant into a network of specialized agents, each trained for a specific function and managed like an employee. Workers will spend their days interacting with general-purpose agents like ChatGPT or Copilot as the primary interface to their workday—potentially replacing email and CRM systems entirely.

General-Purpose vs. Specialty Agents

General-purpose tools are broad and capable but aren't connected to your company's data or workflows. Specialty agents fill that gap—they have access to company-specific systems and are configured to operate within defined parameters. For distributors, this means dedicated agents for sales, pricing, forecasting, and replenishment, each automating a specific slice of the business.

Agent-Based Prospecting

Trent outlined an emerging sales workflow built entirely on agents: a prospecting agent identifies potential customers around the clock; a qualifier agent validates fit against your products and service areas; a research agent compiles everything available about the prospect and their organization; and the system assembles a hyper-personalized sales strategy. The salesperson arrives to a curated pipeline with deep research and a tailored approach already done.

Agent-to-Agent Commerce

Looking further ahead, agents are beginning to interact with each other autonomously—hiring other agents when needed, and flagging when a human needs to step back in. Every professional will eventually manage not just one AI agent, but potentially dozens. Agents are able to hire other AI agents, and there are startups making it possible for AIs to hire humans when human judgment is needed.

What's Left for Humans? Vision.

As AI absorbs more operational tasks, the human role shifts from execution to vision. The people who will thrive aren't necessarily those with the deepest technical knowledge—they're the ones closest to the work, closest to the customer's problems, who can see what's possible and build toward it.

The key insight: This applies at every level of the organization, not just leadership. When AI applies to every process, your edge comes from people who can spot opportunities and have the vision to act on them. The smartest people in the room won't be those who know the most—they'll be those who know how to think and innovate with AI.

Four Ways to Start Using AI in Your Role Today

Trent walked through four practical applications, all available now within ChatGPT:

  1. Personalized product descriptions. Rather than leading with technical specs, AI can rewrite product information tailored to a specific buyer role and pain point. Trent demonstrated reframing a hydraulic pump description for an industrial maintenance manager focused on minimizing downtime—turning technical specs into a compelling value story.
  2. Deep research. An autonomous agent conducts competitor pricing analysis, market research, or any investigative task while you work on other things, then delivers a polished report. Trent demonstrated pulling competitor pricing across multiple suppliers for a single product—done automatically while he continued working.
  3. Document summarization and quality checks. A 55-page RFP can be summarized into decision-ready highlights in seconds. The real power comes in the next step: attach your own bid and have AI compare it against the original RFP to catch omissions or errors before submission.
  4. Pre-call sales briefs (GPTs). A custom GPT researches the prospect's company, identifies relevant pain points, suggests leading questions, recommends solutions, and generates a tailored sales script—all before the call begins. Trent created an IBT-specific version and made it available to attendees via QR code.

The AI SPRINT™ Framework

The best companies moving forward with AI aren't doing one big project. They're running a monthly rhythm: at the start of each month, ask "What's our best opportunity to get value from AI right now?" Try it. At the end of the month, reflect on what was learned. Share it across the organization. Then do it again. This creates continuous acceleration through learning and experimentation.

Critical caveat: Speed without direction is a treadmill to nowhere. The monthly sprint works best when it's guided by a clear vision of your future customer.

The Six-Step SPRINT Framework

S — Spark Action with Leader Education

AI transformation stalls without aligned leadership. Trent has yet to meet a leadership team that's on the same page about AI—from impact to investment to vision to ownership. Before anything else, leaders at every level need to understand the opportunity, agree on a direction, and identify who owns it. Educate leaders hands-on together, assign a transformation owner, and start the monthly sprint rhythm.

P — Position Your Company to Win

Design the organization for future AI-enabled customers. Answer five key questions about what your future customer looks like: What do customers value most? Which values still matter when know-how is free? Which can you no longer charge for? Where will customers desire human touch? What new value can you create because intelligence is cheap? Plant that flag in the future and build toward it.

R — Rally Employees to Use AI Daily

69% of employees hesitate to share that they're using AI at work—they're worried about being judged. Leaders must make AI use normal, supported, and expected. Create safety through clear policies and job security messaging. Reinvest productivity gains into growth, not cuts. You can't force innovation through fear, but you can create the conditions where it thrives.

I — Integrate into Sales and Marketing First

Start with sales and marketing because it's low risk, low cost, and creates immediate revenue. Once that's running well, shift focus to operational bottlenecks—your organization can only move at the speed of its smallest part. Fix the bottlenecks next, and the whole company accelerates.

N — Nurture a Culture of Innovation

When you give people AI tools, studies show they become significantly more effective and more open to change. Combined with the monthly AI Sprint rhythm of learning, experimenting, and sharing, a living culture of innovation emerges—something most organizations have wanted for years but never achieved.

T — Trailblaze with New Offerings

At this stage, leadership is aligned, vision is set, employees are using AI daily, processes are integrated, and an innovation culture is established. Now the organization is ready to invent entirely new products, services, and markets—redefining the industry and creating opportunities that weren't possible before AI.

Action Items

  1. Start using AI daily yourself—commit to making it part of your everyday workflow
  2. Try the four techniques shared tonight: personalized product descriptions, deep research, document summarization with quality checks, and pre-call sales briefs
  3. Align your leadership team on AI's impact, ownership, and vision
  4. Identify your transformation owner—this is business transformation, not an IT project
  5. Launch your first AI SPRINT: pick one opportunity this month, try it, reflect, and share what you learned
  6. Scan the QR code shared at the end of the presentation to access the IBT Sales Call GPT, these notes, and additional resources

Closing

When Trent thinks back to his third day at Amazon, he had no business leading what he did. He wasn't qualified. He had never done anything like it before. But he said yes anyway—he tried, he learned, and it changed his entire career.

Right now, each person in the room is in that same conference room moment. You might feel you're not qualified to lead with AI. You might not feel like it applies to your role or your industry. But that's not the question. The question is simply: will you lead your organization into this future?

Amazon's "Day One" concept: If you start every single day as if it were your first—with the same hunger to make a difference, the same passion to solve customer problems, and the same courage to take a little risk—then you can change the future. And I believe you can change the world.

Today can be your Day One. Not just to write an email—but to spark a new idea, reinvent a process, create a brand new product or service, and lead your industry forward.

Thank you to IBT for hosting this event!