Artificial Intelligence (AI) is radically changing the way we do business, and 2025 is just the beginning. OpenAI is promising “PhD-level intelligence” in its upcoming ChatGPT release, and the technology will grow exponentially in the coming years. Many people find this both fascinating and terrifying at the same time.
Nobody knows what the world of wholesale distribution and manufacturing will look like in the next 10 years, but we do know this—disruption creates opportunity. Staying on top of technology can help you get ahead of your competitors, increase profits, create new jobs, and empower your business to thrive.
What do you need to do right now to stay ahead of the curve? This is your AI adoption playbook for 2025, designed to address your staff’s fears, overcome resistance, and adapt to a rapidly changing world.
The first thing to know about the AI revolution is that the threat of mass job loss is likely overblown, at least for now. During the Great Depression, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes (and many others) worried that technology would create a jobless world in the decades ahead, but that never happened.
In the MIT Technology Review, David Rotman highlights a 1938 article from MIT’s president countering that fear, arguing that technology would create more jobs than it destroyed. He was right, and Rotman believes the same is true for AI in 2025. Some jobs will disappear, and many will be transformed, but he believes that more work will be created than eliminated in the end.
It’s impossible to predict the distant future, but for now, we still need humans to strategize, understand the big picture, and analyze challenges in ways where machines fall short. That’s why an actual human being wrote the very article you’re reading now, along with everything else we publish on the Continuum website.
You can tell this wasn’t written by ChatGPT because the AI platform’s training data only goes back to September 2021. As far as ChatGPT knows, Joe Biden is still president and the FDA just recently approved the Pfizer COVID vaccine.
In other words, AI does not yet have the data, much less the sophistication, to write thoughtful reflections about its role in history.
Maybe AI will run everything someday, but for now, it’s supporting the work of human employees through things like AI automation, rather than replacing us. It does things like combing through big data and spotting patterns that a human could never spot. Thinking professionals still need to interpret those reports and figure out how to implement their discoveries.
AI can analyze data about customer buying patterns, gaps in the supply chain, and potentially inefficient processes for distributors like Grainger. Manufacturers can use AI to anticipate equipment failure, as Caterpillar did to save $360,000 in maintenance costs and keep their customers’ projects on track.
You can read about both examples in our recent article on digital transformation in 2025.
When it comes to B2B returns management (our area of expertise), we’ve integrated AI into the Continuum platform to streamline the returns process and improve the customer experience. You can read more about AI in B2B returns below.
How prepared are you for AI adoption? Take the AI Readiness Quiz we designed for distributors and manufacturers, and read more about AI readiness principles here.
Let’s address the elephant in the room. We can talk all we’d like about how AI, in its current state, will enhance our work rather than replace us, but you can’t expect your staff to take that on faith.
You can alleviate their fears through proper training, but let’s first consider the source of three common objections to adopting AI technology.
This fear arises from confusion about the tasks that AI currently can, and cannot, perform.
Human insight and oversight remain necessary because AI is highly fallible by its very nature. For example, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT will make stuff up in the papers they write. It’s an element called “temperature,” and as developers turn up the dial on temperature, answers become more creative (and often less accurate).
If ChatGPT had no room for creativity, it couldn’t weave fancy sentences together in the first place, so it aims for the right balance. Sometimes it gets it wrong, and right now it can’t create complex think pieces. In fact, it isn’t really thinking at all.
Similarly, when it comes to data analysis, AI has no idea which patterns are relevant. All it does is spot patterns in the data and let you know about them. Only a human being can review its output and build an action plan around the intel it delivers.
Will AI be able to run a company someday? Nobody can say right now, but in 2025, the human element remains essential. Anyone who uses the technology to greatly enhance their job will become an invaluable asset to their organization.
The Solution: Provide full transparency regarding your AI strategy, along with clear communication about the tasks AI can, and cannot, perform.
Most people don’t like it when their job changes, especially when they’ve been doing it for years and they’ve mastered it. For example, if you’ve been processing returns the same way for the past 10 years, with the same manual processes, learning a whole new system can be unsettling. Add AI to the mix, and it feels even more threatening.
The good news is that AI adoption isn’t all that different from adopting any other technology. There are tried-and-true methods for change management that will help ensure full adoption.
The Solution: It all begins with a solid training strategy, which we’ll cover in the next section.
It sounds superficial, but there’s a deep-seated discomfort humans feel when dealing with machines that seem almost human, but not quite. It’s called the uncanny valley, and it’s a real hurdle to embracing this technology.
A great example of this is Notebook LM’s podcast feature. Google’s AI can create a podcast about any topic. It sounds a lot like a chat between two human beings, but it’s always a bit off. Amazing as it is, it hasn’t yet bridged that uncanny valley.
Here’s a podcast we created using Notebook LM, with two AI hosts talking about the article you’re reading right now:
See what we mean? Uncanny, right? Combining cool and creepy while compromising neither.
If you listen to the first 90 seconds, you’ll spot something the AI hosts get factually wrong about the COVID vaccines. That’s AI’s “creativity” at work, once again reinforcing the vital role humans play in evaluating AI outputs.
Also, 5 minutes into the podcast, the AI hosts start discussing the uncanny valley concept and pondering their very own creepiness. You really can’t get more meta than that.
The Solution: Once you’ve clearly communicated the role, benefits, and limitations of AI, offer your staff hands-on training so they can familiarize themselves with the technology.
While some resistance to AI tech is instinctual, training and transparency go a long way toward calming people’s nerves. Knowledge is power, dissolving fear and resistance over time.
Now that you understand the most common fears and objections to AI adoption, let’s talk about solutions. Regardless of which AI tech you choose to embrace, the following three steps will help ensure a smooth adoption and a strong return on your investment.
It’s essential to take an organized approach to your training strategy, identifying unique goals for each department and specific roles. Warehouse employees will likely need different training than customer support staff or finance teams, for example.
Based on your budget and resources, you can either outsource your training or handle it internally. Of course, when evaluating new technology, ask each software provider about their onboarding approach and training options.
You can opt for online courses or in-person workshops, and you can create knowledge-sharing platforms to pool information within your organization. You may also want to designate certain employees as internal resources who can coach others, providing them with extra education (train-the-trainer style).
The latest AI technology is new for everyone, including the people creating and selling it. As distributors and manufacturers like you begin to implement AI solutions, they’ll discover new use cases regularly, along with unique workarounds based on their business needs.
That makes it essential to foster a company-wide mindset that embraces innovation, continual learning, and strategic experimentation. You’ll also want to document everything you learn in your knowledge-sharing platforms, communicating challenges and successes in regular meetings and updates.
Curious to see how other distributors went about implementing AI? This recent MDM article features two distributors, Endries and Turtle, as case studies for successful AI adoption.
Measuring AI use and adoption is key, as is measuring the results you experience from your efforts. This will help you evaluate the ROI tied to your AI strategy, and it will inform future initiatives as you explore new technologies.
One of the amazing (and useful) things about AI is that it becomes smarter over time, learning from its errors and becoming more powerful based on its training data. In fact, it’s that process of trial and error, repeated a mind-boggling number of times, that makes AI appear so smart.
LLMs like ChatGPT, for example, aren’t actually “smart” in the way we think of intelligence. They’re simply using statistical models to guess which letter should come next in any given sentence, with no conscious core and no understanding of the big picture.
By repeating that process over and over again, failing and learning, they get better and better over time. In a way, you could say AI takes that Silicon Valley maxim of “failing fast and failing forward” to an extreme.
All this underscores the need for constant measurement and evaluation to ensure your AI solutions are getting better over time, which is exactly what they’re designed to do.
Continuum is a B2B returns management platform that simplifies the process of handling returns, warranties, and repairs for wholesale distributors and manufacturers.
We’re currently working on integrating advanced AI technology into Continuum with Return Buddy, our proprietary AI bot. This clever robo-dog, inspired by our mascot, makes filing, tracking, and processing returns easy through a variety of features—improving your staff’s efficiency and your customer experience.
Users can snap product photos, scan documents, pre-fill forms, and much more. All this helps to expedite the returns process, reducing errors, internal costs, and customer churn.
Want to learn more about our upcoming features?