AI for B2B Commerce & Operations
AI that runs your business. Not just your website.
Manufacturers and distributors don't have a marketing problem or an operations problem — they have a leverage problem. We apply AI across the full stack: quote automation, demand forecasting, product data, and AI-powered discovery — so your team does more with less.
The shift in numbers
The numbers that change everything
Average agentic commerce readiness: 3-4 out of 10 — Chain Store Age. B2B is 2-3 years behind B2C in digital adoption — and AI is compressing that gap to months. But agentic commerce is only one front. Inside the business, AI is rewriting how quotes are written, how demand is forecasted, how product data is maintained, and how customer service operates. The companies that win the next 5 years will move on both fronts at once.
The pain
AI moves fast. Your business has to move with it.
The B2B companies falling behind in 2026 are not the ones without an AI strategy. They are the ones whose operations still run at pre-AI speed while their buyers, their competitors, and their procurement counterparts already operate with AI in the loop. We map where you are losing speed — function by function.
Quote-to-cash delays
How long from RFQ in your inbox to quote in the customer's hand? If the answer is more than 48 hours for standard configurations, you are losing deals to faster competitors. Your reps re-key information from email into the ERP, hunt for pricing across spreadsheets, and wait on approvals. Every hour of delay is a percentage point of close rate.
Product data that drifts
Your ERP says one thing. Your PIM says another. Your website says a third. The same SKU has three descriptions, two units of measure, and one missing spec that costs you the search. AI buyers — human or agent — cannot evaluate what they cannot parse. Drifted data is invisible data.
CSR teams drowning in repeat work
"Where is my order." "When will this ship." "What is the lead time on a custom config." If your CSR team handles dozens of these per day by manually checking three systems, that is hours of productive time burned on triage. The same questions, asked again and again, are the easiest AI win in the business — and the one most often overlooked.
Inventory that lies
Dead stock that should have been flagged six months ago. Stockouts that should have been predicted from buying patterns. Pricing that drifts off-target across customer tiers without anyone noticing. The data is in your ERP. The intelligence is not — yet. AI surfaces what manual reviews miss.
Invisible to AI buyers
57% of Google searches now include AI-generated answers (Xponent21, 2025). ChatGPT converts at more than 2x the rate of organic search (Similarweb / MasterB2B). If your catalog is not structured for machine-readable discovery, you are not in those answers. By the time you fix it, your competitors are already cited.
Stack that bleeds money
Legacy platform license. Three middleware tools doing overlapping work. Custom code no one understands anymore. Maintenance hours eating the budget that should fund growth. Most B2B companies are paying for systems built for a business that no longer exists. The first audit usually finds the savings that fund the rest of the transformation.
Recognize three or more of these? The AI Opportunity Sprint is the right starting point — we audit, prioritize by ROI, and deliver a roadmap your team can act on.
What we mean by AI for B2B
For manufacturers and distributors, AI is not one project. It is a layer that touches three parts of the business: how your team operates internally, how your products are discovered externally, and how transactions get completed — increasingly by AI agents on behalf of buyers. We work across all three. We integrate AI into your existing systems — ERP, PIM, Shopify Plus, Klaviyo, HubSpot — rather than adding tools you have to manage. Every engagement starts with what your team does manually today, and ends with that work running automatically.
How we use AI for B2B
We don't sell AI as a product. We apply it where it creates measurable leverage — across operations, commerce, and discovery.
Speed of operations
Where AI removes manual work from the inside of the business — what your team does today, running automatically tomorrow.
Operations Automation
Your team is doing work AI can do faster and at lower cost. Quote generation from RFQs. Order-status triage. Invoice matching. Sales rep and CSR copilots that pull from your ERP and PIM in real time. Internal search across product specs, contracts, and historical orders. We build these with the Claude API, deployed inside your stack — not as standalone tools your team has to learn.
Reference build — Derhy AI, an internal SaaS for a Montreal professional services firm that automates document generation, retrieval-augmented search over a domain-specific corpus, and structured output for downstream systems. Built on Claude API and AWS ca-central-1.
Demand & Data Intelligence
Forecast demand from historical ERP data. Detect dead stock before it ties up working capital. Flag pricing inconsistencies across customer tiers. Reconcile PIM and ERP data continuously instead of in quarterly cleanup cycles. The data already exists — most distributors just do not have the infrastructure to act on it. We build that infrastructure.
Product Data Enrichment
Deploy AI inside Akeneo PIM to generate descriptions, fill attribute gaps, and improve data quality at scale. On a recent enterprise implementation, AI-powered enrichment reduced time-to-market by 40%. Human review gates keep accuracy in check.
In an agentic ecosystem, product data is brand equity. Empty metafields, marketing fluff, inconsistent variants, and "request a quote" walls make you invisible to AI agents. Structured specs, JSON-LD schema, complete metafields, and real-time APIs make agents cite you, recommend you, and transact with you.
Speed of discovery & transaction
Where AI changes how buyers find you, evaluate you, and complete purchases — including when the buyer is itself an AI agent.
Agentic Commerce Readiness
Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) introduces 60+ new product attributes in Merchant Center. Shopify's Agentic Storefronts are live in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. Alibaba's Accio Work deploys enterprise-grade B2B agent fleets with 10M+ monthly users. AI agents are not just completing purchases — procurement agents are starting to negotiate with supplier agents (A2A commerce).
Contractual terms, pricing, and availability must be real-time and machine-readable. We structure your product feeds, schema markup, and catalog data so your products exist in every agentic commerce layer.
Generative Engine Optimization
Structure your product data, website content, and technical infrastructure so AI engines — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini — surface your products in their generated answers. The companies that own this today own the next decade of B2B discovery.
Lifecycle Automation
Klaviyo flows triggered by real purchasing behavior — reorder reminders timed to each customer's buying cycle, win-back sequences for dormant accounts, post-purchase engagement. CRM-driven retention with HubSpot churn detection and lifecycle segmentation.
Where to start
The AI Opportunity Sprint
A paid 2-4 week engagement that maps the highest-ROI AI use cases across your operation. We audit, we interview, we prioritize — you walk away with a roadmap your team can act on.
Fixed-fee productized engagement.
Scoped on the discovery call. No hourly billing.
We map your tech stack, interview your operations and commerce leads, and identify where manual work is concentrated. Output: a documented inventory of AI-addressable workflows.
We score each opportunity on three axes: technical feasibility, estimated ROI, and implementation timeline. We prioritize the top 3-5 use cases.
We deliver a prioritized roadmap with budget estimates and a recommended proof-of-concept. You decide whether to proceed with us, with another partner, or in-house.
How we implement AI for B2B
Every AI engagement follows the same operator-tested process. We don't start with tools — we start with your data and your buyers.
- 01 Discovery & audit For new engagements, this is the AI Opportunity Sprint — a structured intake that maps your tech stack, your data, and the workflows where manual effort is concentrated. For existing clients, this is a targeted audit of the systems involved in the specific AI project. Either way, no implementation starts without this step.
- 02 GEO & visibility baseline We measure where you appear today in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews for your target queries. This baseline tells us exactly where AI engines can find you, where they can't, and what competitors show up instead.
- 03 Implementation & enrichment We deploy AI-powered enrichment inside your Akeneo PIM, structure schema markup for machine discovery, optimize content for AI extraction, and configure IndexNow for real-time crawl notification. On a recent enterprise implementation, this phase reduced time-to-market by 40%.
- 04 Agentic commerce readiness We prepare your catalog for AI agent purchasing — structured product feeds compatible with Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), Shopify Agentic Storefronts, and Microsoft Copilot. If you run a hybrid B2B/D2C store on Shopify Plus, your D2C catalog gets automatic visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot today.
- 05 Monitoring & optimization AI visibility is not set-and-forget. We track citations across AI platforms, monitor ranking changes in generative answers, and continuously optimize content structure and schema markup. Monthly reporting shows exactly which AI engines cite your brand and for which queries.
SEO and GEO are not the same metric
SEO ranks you in search results. GEO gets you cited in AI-generated answers. The signals overlap but the measurement is fundamentally different — and you need both, tracked separately.
We track and optimize both channels for every client. See how we measure SEO and GEO side-by-side on the Measure & Optimize page, or run your free GEO audit to see where you stand today.
March 2026 Update
Shopify Agentic Storefronts are live
On March 24, 2026, Shopify launched Agentic Storefronts — millions of merchants can now sell directly inside ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. Products show up when a buyer asks an AI assistant what to buy, and checkout completes through the merchant's own store.
The B2B catch: Agentic Storefronts support D2C sales only. B2B-only catalogs are excluded. But hybrid B2B/D2C stores on Shopify Plus get automatic AI visibility through their consumer catalog — while B2B pricing stays private. This is exactly the architecture we build for our clients.
Shopify has a 6-12 month execution lead over Adobe Commerce and SAP Commerce Cloud. For distributors evaluating platforms right now, this gap determines whether your products show up in AI shopping conversations this year — or sometime in 2027.
Full analysis: What Agentic Storefronts mean for B2B distributors →AI results from real projects
Source: B2B eCommerce Benchmarks — original implementation data from 50+ projects.
Why us for AI
Most agencies discovered AI in 2023. Our founder has been writing about AI in commerce since 2018 — publishing on Forbes, sharing industry insights, and deploying it in production at manufacturers and distributors. We have implemented AI-powered enrichment at enterprise scale (Goodyear, Akeneo PIM), and we are currently building Claude API-based operations tools for clients across legal, retail, and B2B distribution.
We don't sell AI workshops or strategy decks. We implement it — inside Akeneo for product enrichment, inside Klaviyo for lifecycle automation, inside Shopify Plus for intelligent pricing logic, inside ERP and CSR workflows for operational automation, and across your catalog for Generative Engine Optimization. Every AI capability we offer is something we have built and shipped for real B2B operations.
Our AI commerce and operations practice is built by Rudy Abitbol, who speaks on GEO, agentic commerce, and AI in B2B at B2B Online Chicago, Brands2Buyers Paris, Master B2B, and B2BNext.ai Portsmouth (June 2026).
Proof
AI in action
GOODYEAR
AI Product Enrichment
Enterprise Akeneo PIM with AI-powered catalog enrichment — product descriptions, attribute completion, and data quality at scale for thousands of tire SKUs across North America.
HUSKY BOUTIQUE
Operations Automation
40+ API endpoints, automated order routing to ServiceCentre ERP, split invoicing, and self-service B2B portals — replacing manual email-based processes with automated workflows.
LUMEN
Data-Driven Adoption
KPI frameworks and analytics infrastructure that drove 4 consecutive years of double-digit growth — translating data into actionable growth strategies for Quebec's largest electrical distributor.