Master B2B Friday 15

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.

Andy and Brian dig into a topic we haven't tackled in a while (and frankly, we haven't heard much about in a while): should companies own their own marketplaces?

And for the first time in a while, the guys disagree. (Hint: don't ask Brian to fund your marketplace).

Plus, what can we learn from Andy Jassy's shareholder letter?

This week we're joined by fellow Master B2B guy Jared Blank to talk about the most overhyped and underhyped ideas in B2B.  And because everything is AI nowadays, AI somehow shows up on both lists.  Because of course.  But we also talk about alternative payment methods, product data and GEO, all of which may be underhyped.

This week, Andy and Brian bring on Master B2B's Chris Germann to talk about how AI is impacting practitioners' relationships with their system integrators.  What were those companies providing that no longer need to be done by an outside firm?  Where should manufacturers and distributors lean on SIs now for help?  And Andy gives some advice to SIs: "If you haven't figured out how to make data a strategic weapon, you're going to fail."

Andy and Brian share some of their insights from a Master B2B Summit roundtable, where practitioners shared where they will spend the next dollar of their budget.  Yes, execs talked about measuring the ROI of their investments and customer experience, but they also offered some surprising thoughts on where they plan to invest this year.

Andy and Brian spent the week with their B2C peers in Las Vegas at the Shoptalk event, and they came back with some fascinating insights into how B2B and B2C differ in their approach to eCommerce and 5 ways that they're actually more similar than they thought.

This week, Andy & Brian discuss whether all of the AI tools we're using at work are actually making us more productive or whether they're just increasing the output of maybe-just-slightly-better-than-average deliverables.  And how can we avoid getting into the AI rabbit hole where we go to start one quick task and end up in a 2-hour conversation with an LLM?

This week, Andy and Brian share their key learnings from the 2026 Master B2B Mindshare Summit held this week in Chicago.  Whether you were there - or just wish that you were - you'll get a taste of what participants learned at the event.