Why Distribution Technology Projects Keep Hitting the Same Roadblocks

Ask a distributor what technology work is underway this year and you usually get a list. An AI pilot somewhere in customer service or quoting. A CRM evaluation that has been on and off the table since last year. Phishing training, because the insurance carrier started asking about it at renewal. Product data cleanup ahead of an ecommerce refresh. And if growth is pressing against the walls of the building, somebody is studying warehouse automation.

Each item has its own owner, its own budget line, and its own meeting. The AI pilot belongs to whoever volunteered first. CRM sits with sales leadership. Cybersecurity landed in IT. Product data is split between purchasing and the ecommerce team, which in practice usually means nobody owns it outright.

On paper, these are five separate projects. In the field, they keep stalling in the same place.

ASA has had an unusual vantage point on this over the past year. Two Applied AI surveys. CRM readiness assessments reviewed by the Digitization & Customer Intelligence Task Group. A business email compromise tabletop exercise built for distributors and manufacturers. Podcast conversations with operators running robotics in live warehouses. Different programs, different topics, different members. The same findings keep coming back.

The AI pilot starts with a forecasting or customer-visibility goal and ends up reconciling product data, because the records it depends on are structured differently in every system it touches. The CRM evaluation gets stuck on a question no software can answer: who owns the customer record, and what is required to be logged? The tabletop exercise runs a vendor payment scam and surfaces that finance, IT, and leadership each assumed someone else would take control. The robotics conversation turns to data readiness within minutes, because an automated system cannot absorb a missing weight or dimension the way a person walking the aisle can.

Five initiatives. Nearly interchangeable blockers: data nobody fully owns, workflows nobody has written down, decisions nobody has assigned.

The structural reason is worth sitting with. Most distribution businesses are set up to run these as separate efforts, because that is how technology projects have always been scoped. Each one gets a sponsor, a budget, and a timeline, and the team works its slice. Nobody is at fault for this. The org chart predates the moment the industry is in. But the friction now lives in the connections between the initiatives, not inside any one of them, and connections do not have sponsors.

The cost shows up in small, expensive ways. The CRM team cleans customer records in a system the AI pilot never touches. IT writes an incident response plan finance has never read. The product data work scoped for ecommerce stops one attribute short of what the warehouse automation study needs. Each team finishes its project, and the shared foundation underneath all of them stays exactly where it was.

The companies making real progress are not launching a sixth initiative to coordinate the other five. They are getting the same people in one room and asking which constraint shows up across the most projects, then fixing that one first. Data ownership settled once serves the CRM rollout, the AI pilot, and the automation study at the same time. A decision-rights conversation held for cybersecurity turns out to be most of the work CRM governance needed anyway.

That overlap is the reason ASA's Innovation Summit is built the way it is. Many industry events sort content into tracks so attendees can pick a lane. This one runs applied AI, customer intelligence, and robotics in front of the same audience over two days, in sequence, because the people making these decisions keep finding that the topics are load-bearing for each other. The data discipline raised in the customer intelligence session is the prerequisite the AI session assumes. The readiness signals the robotics panel surfaces are the same ones the CRM assessments keep flagging.

The Summit runs November 9 and 10 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, right before NETWORK2026 opens in the same hotel. Chad Foster opens it. “Distribution is going through a lot of change right now, and I want to talk about what it actually takes to lead through it: staying accountable, keeping your footing, and getting your team to perform when nothing feels certain,” he said. Steve Lerch, formerly of Google, has the applied AI session. “I'll show you where AI is actually paying off inside distribution, and how to move from running pilots to putting it to work, without betting the business on it,” he said. Spencer X. Smith has digitization and customer intelligence, and Tuesday morning brings a panel of operators who have deployed automation in live distribution environments.

It closes with facilitated roundtables organized by topic, where attendees work through their own next steps alongside people facing the same decisions.

If your business has a list like the one at the top of this article, separate owners, separate budgets, same recurring blockers, that is the situation the Summit is built around. Send two people, and make one of them the person who owns the data question and one the person who signs for it. The constraint they share is the one worth solving first, and neither can settle it alone. If you are already coming to NETWORK, the Summit is a $250 add-on to a trip you have booked. Same flight, same room, one extra day. On its own it is $500.

November 9 and 10, 2026. Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, immediately ahead of NETWORK2026. Registration $250 with NETWORK2026 registration, $500 without, with a full refund for cancellations through October 9. Room rate $255 plus tax per night plus a $39 plus tax nightly resort fee, held through October 12. Register at asa.net/Innovation-Summit.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9

12 p.m.  REGISTRATION OPEN

1:30 to 1:45 p.m.  WELCOME & OPEN REMARKS

1:45 to 2:45 p.m.  GENERAL SESSION 1

Speaker: Chad Foster

Opening Keynote

3 to 4 p.m.  GENERAL SESSION 2

Speaker: Spencer X. Smith

Digitization & Customer Intelligence

Building Customer Intelligence as a Core Distribution Capability

4:15 to 5:15 p.m.  GENERAL SESSION 3

Speaker: Steve Lerch

Applied AI for Distributors: From Experimentation to Execution

Where AI is Delivering Value and How to Approach Adoption Realistically

5:30 to 6:30 p.m.  RECEPTION

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10

7 to 7:30 a.m.  NETWORKING BREAKFAST

7:30 to 8:30 a.m.  GENERAL SESSION 4

Panel Discussion

Robotics and Automation in Distribution: Real Use Cases and Lessons Learned

8:45 to 9:45 a.m.  ROUNDTABLE SESSIONS

Innovation in Practice: Best Practices and Shared Challenges

Facilitated, peer-driven discussions by topic

9:45 to 10 a.m.  CLOSING REMARKS

By Nils Swenson