In this episode of The Master B2B Friday 15, hosts Jared Blank and Andy Hoar welcome former Grainger executive Meeta Kratz for a candid discussion about leadership in the AI era.

Drawing on decades of experience leading commercial growth and digital transformation, Meeta shares how AI is reshaping executive roles, accelerating the rise of fractional leadership, and changing the skills organizations need most.

The conversation explores:

If you're leading digital commerce, sales, marketing, technology, or business transformation, this episode offers valuable perspective on preparing for what's next.

This week, Andy and Brian talk about the convergence of B2B and B2C eCommerce.  When they look at what customers of each type expect - and the way that B2B companies (and B2C) have responded to those needs, they wonder whether they're 2 different worlds anymore.

And they announce that Master B2B has partnered with Shoptalk Fall to bring B2B programming to the B2C-focused event.

For more information visit Shoptalk Fall's website.

This week...TWO special guest stars on the pod (well, one special guest star and one other Master B2B person stepping in for Andy while he's out).

Elastic Path CEO Bryan House joins Brian and Master B2B's Jared Blank to talk about getting a grip on your product data.  We chat about where to start, who needs to lead product data initiatives, and why homegrown systems may actually set you up for success (sometimes).

This week, Andy & Brian talk about the state of hiring in B2B.  We seem to be in a "no hire, no fire" environment where we aren't seeing massive headcount reductions (outside of some tech companies) and we aren't seeing people leave their jobs on their own.

So where does that leave companies that want to make sure their teams are optimized for the skills needed to use new AI technology?  Should their next "hires" be technology or people?  And how do you decide?

Andy and Brian talk about the anonymous company that allegedly spent - wait for it - $500 million in one month on Claude tokens, and wonder whether we've hit an inflection point where CFOs will put the breaks on token spending.

Then they discuss whether the expected drop in token costs in the coming years will be offset by massive increases in token usage. 

It's just a matter of time before your company is having this conversation internally.

Andy and Brian are joined by Dale Edman, Lipton Teas and Infusions' VP of eCommerce & Shopper Marketing for North America, to talk about why Gartner says that 53% of SaaS licenses held by large organizations go unused.

Dale talks about how his deep partnership with procurement has helped him keep tabs on his own tech spending, and how he learns about how other parts of his organization are using their own tools.

We're off for the Memorial Day holiday, but we're sharing our recent Webcast on The End of Channel Dependence.

For too long, manufacturers and distributors have handed the keys to their business over to Amazon, distributors, and retail partners and hoped for the best. The result? Margin erosion, lost customer relationships, and zero visibility into who’s actually buying your products.

It’s time to take back control.

In this webcast, Master B2B founders Brian Beck and Andy Hoar sit down with Graham Lubie of Cadent Commerce to tackle one of the most urgent challenges in B2B ecommerce: how manufacturers can break free from channel dependency and build a direct, durable sales strategy.

You’ll walk away with a clear view of:

This is a candid, practitioner-level conversation built for ecommerce leaders who are done leaving growth on the table.

This week Andy and Brian speak with Denise Foley, ULE Group's EVP of eCommerce, about what B2B companies can learn about merchandising from their B2C counterparts.  

Brian and Denise both have extensive B2C experience and this conversation dives into what merchandising best practices they learned in consumer businesses that they've brought over to the B2B side of the world.  And Andy questions whether any of this will matter when bots are doing all of the purchasing.

This week, Brian and Andy (and Jared) talk about the events they attended last week.  Brian and Andy joined B2B Online in Chicago, where they heard so much (maybe too much?) about AI.  Jared headed to IR B2B eComm Conference (mouthful) in Manchester England, where he noticed some cultural differences between European and American teams.

Brian and Andy share a preview of Andy's upcoming book, Bot 2 Bot: The New Future of B2B Commerce, a deep dive into how AI is transforming B2B buying and selling. Andy shares the book's central thesis: that AI adoption in B2B is already outpacing B2C by a rate of 3 to 1, and that AI agents are expanding outward from data-heavy "middle mile" functions like pricing, quoting, and order management toward fully customer-facing interactions.

Looking ahead, Andy offers predictions for the next two-to-five years, including the rise of "headless distributors" selling bot-to-bot with no human interaction, and AI-powered super apps that will manage professional buyers' entire workdays. The book will be available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle, with updated editions planned as the landscape continues to evolve.