That’s the headline from DSG’s inaugural AI Top 25, and it’s a useful gut check for anyone who’s heard “AI” in every distributor earnings call and vendor pitch over the last two years. DSG found that 93% of distributors call AI a strategic priority. Only 16% have gotten past pilots into production. The rest sit somewhere in between, running proofs of concept that may or may not survive next year’s budget cycle.
That gap is worth more attention than the ranking itself.
The List Won’t Look Like Your Business
Look at who made DSG’s Platinum tier: ADI Global Distribution, Fastenal, Ingram Micro, Sonepar, W.W. Grainger, Wesco International. These are multibillion-dollar organizations with dedicated technology teams, years of enterprise system modernization behind them, and the budget to treat AI as a multiyear strategy rather than a single-year initiative.
That’s not the world most distributors operate in.
The more useful finding sits underneath the six companies at the top: a 93% to 16% gap between ambition and execution, and a stated barrier that has little to do with the technology itself. “The number one barrier is people, not technology,” DSG co-founder and managing partner Jonathan Bein told the research team. Most distributors are stuck because nobody owns the initiative, the systems underneath it aren’t connected enough to support it, or last year’s pilot was never measured against anything real.
What Separated the Leaders
Strip away the specific technologies, and DSG’s Platinum companies share a pattern worth stealing. Each one put a single person in charge with real budget authority, so the initiative never stalled waiting on a committee. A deployment only counted if it was live in production, not a pilot with a good pitch deck behind it. And rather than treating each use case as its own project, they built them to connect, so one deployment fed the next instead of sitting in its own silo. That took years of sustained investment, and every initiative had to answer to a specific business number, not just a technology milestone.
That’s a structural discipline, not a budget line: single ownership, production over pilots, connected use cases, and outcomes you can measure. A 40-person distributor can hold that same discipline even without the years of enterprise-system modernization behind a Fastenal or a Grainger.
Why This Matters Right Now
The timing adds weight. NAW, the industry’s own trade association, released an AI Governance Architecture this year with the AI Applied Consortium, and its Institute publishes the field’s first AI Adoption Index in September. The industry is formalizing what responsible AI adoption looks like on a timeline moving faster than most distributors’ internal roadmaps.
The distributors who wait for a multiyear strategy to make sense before starting will be explaining the gap to their board next year. The ones worth watching are asking a narrower question: what’s the fastest path from talking about AI to running it inside day-to-day operations? For most of the market DSG measured, that path has less to do with hiring an AI team and more to do with how connected the platform underneath the business already is. That’s the same discipline Unilog HyperScale is built around: embedding AI into the product content and eCommerce workflows distributors already run, rather than standing up a separate initiative to manage.
Where Does Your Business Fall in That Gap?
DSG’s benchmark isn’t asking distributors to match Fastenal’s balance sheet or Grainger’s headcount. It’s asking three narrower questions: who owns AI at your company, whether what’s running today would count as production or still a pilot, and whether your systems are connected enough for one deployment to build on the next. Those are worth answering honestly before NAW’s AI Adoption Index publishes in September and gives the industry, and your board, a number to measure you against.
Sources
- The AI Divide: DSG’s AI Top 25 Identifies the Distributors Rewriting the Rules of Competition — Distribution Strategy Group, July 14, 2026
- NAW Releases AI Governance Framework for Wholesale Distribution — Modern Distribution Management
- Supply Chain Industry Launches Human-Centered AI Initiative — NAW
