AI Training for Wholesale and Distribution Businesses

Monday brings forty emailed purchase orders, a rep asking what’s available in size 10, and a sell-through report due by lunch. That’s the work we train on.

Distribution runs on purchase orders, allocations, price lists, container bookings, back orders and freight claims, so the workshop does too.

It’s built on an AI rollout across every department of a multi-brand distributor, on live data, after more than twenty years in supply chain.

We run sessions by team, or mixed where the work crosses teams.

• Customer service and internal sales. Order status, stock availability, delivery timing and invoice copies.
• Purchasing and planning. Supplier chasing, ETA confirmations, reconciling what was ordered against what landed, and keeping the plan current when it moves.
• Warehouse and despatch supervisors. The paperwork half of the role: exception reports, carrier queries, stock counts that do not agree.
• Sales and account managers. Account reviews, sell-through summaries, and the preparation that usually gets done in the car park before the meeting.
• Finance and admin. Freight invoice checking, supplier statement reconciliation, and the month-end pack.

We agree the tasks with you first, then work through them on your own files. A typical day covers:

• Reading an emailed purchase order and turning it into something your ERP can accept, including the bit where product codes do not match.
• Answering a stock availability question, including the difference between what’s on hand and what’s free to sell.
• Building the weekly sell-through and aged stock summary, and the exceptions worth a phone call.
• Checking a carrier invoice line by line against what was quoted and what shipped.
• Preparing new-season product data, barcodes and channel listings from supplier files.
• Writing the awkward emails: a price increase, a short shipment, a delayed container.

We cover what’s safe to share with AI, what needs de-identifying first and what stays in your systems, for the tool and plan you’re on. Your team leaves with a one-page rule they can remember.

Enthusiasm can fade once a busy week arrives and doing it by hand feels faster.

Three things help it hold: training on your team’s own tasks, a go‑to person in each team, and a follow-up once your team has used it under pressure. All three are part of every workshop.

Training helps where a person still makes the call. Work that’s high volume and rules based, like re-keying two hundred order lines a week, is better automated.

Most distribution businesses need some of both, and the AI Ops Audit can help you work out the split.

In Sydney we run this as an in-house AI workshop.

• Where AI fits in a wholesale distribution business
• The cost of keying the same data twice
• Your team has AI licences. Why is the work still manual?