Notes from inside the industry.
Thoughts on AI in chemical distribution: what's working, what to skip, and how operators are putting it to use.
Latest posts.
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May 3, 2026Your next sales rep is already in your building, wearing safety glasses.
Distributors keep hunting for a mythical sales hire who knows chemistry, can close, and loves to travel, while the bench chemist and QC tech already on staff speak that language with customers. Chemistry takes years to learn; sales and CRM can be taught, so hand them a territory instead of posting another job.
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May 2, 2026Chemical distribution has the lowest AI exposure of any sector at 14%.
Chemical distribution has the lowest AI exposure of any sector, just 14%, even though the tools already work. Every company I talk to is stuck in the same standoff, the CEO waiting on the team, the team waiting on permission, and nobody actually owning the first project.
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May 1, 2026Claude wins on writing. But, the tool most people use is ChatGPT.
I compared GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.7 on what each is actually good at, ChatGPT is the most complete out of the box, Gemini wins on ecosystem and multimodal work, and Claude wins on writing, reasoning, and coding. Pick the tool based on what the work actually requires, not brand loyalty.
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May 1, 2026In one week, Anthropic (Claude) raised more money than most chemical distributors make in a lifetime: $65 billion.
Anthropic raised $65 billion in one week, on top of Google's $40 billion and Amazon's $25 billion announced the same week. Distributors with clean data and a clear problem to solve will move faster than the ones waiting to make a move.
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April 30, 2026A lot of people in this industry are quietly nervous about AI. I get it. The concern is understandable.
After 25 years in chemical distribution, I've seen this fear before. New technology frees people up to work at a higher level, and the reps using AI to prep for calls are becoming the most valuable people in the room.
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April 29, 2026AI is not your next project. Organizing your data is.
Chemical distributors want to adopt AI, but their data is scattered across the ERP, Outlook, a spreadsheet, and a shared drive nobody's opened in a year. Organizing that data is the real first step, before picking any AI tool.
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April 28, 2026Most of your reps wing their sales calls. It is not laziness. It is math.
Proper call prep takes 45 minutes and nobody has time for eight of those a day, so I built a Claude agent that checks my calendar, pulls HubSpot history, and emails a full precall brief by 7am. When prep takes zero effort, every rep actually prepares.
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April 27, 2026Ask any executive where their day goes. The honest answer is usually email. Not meetings. Not strategy. Email.
Executives spend their day in email, not meetings or strategy, and Outlook can't keep up with that pace. I switched to Superhuman for keyboard shortcuts, AI drafted replies in my voice, and a split inbox that separates signal from noise.
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April 26, 2026Sadara in Jubail is still offline. No restart date. 3 million tons of annual plastic and chemical supply, off the market.
Sadara's plant in Jubail is still offline with no restart date, and the 3 million tons of annual supply it took off the market is rerouting demand to US Gulf producers, pushing resin and petrochemical prices to records. Even distributors who don't sell resins will feel it downstream.
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April 25, 2026ACD members: You voted. Regulation is our number one fight.
ACD members voted regulation the industry's top challenge, and the list backing that up is long, OSHA HCS 2024, new state PFAS bans, and 39 new Superfund substances. A case for a simple compliance script that flags issues weekly, with a human still reviewing what it catches.
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April 24, 2026Going to the American Coatings Show? Take a look at the exhibitor list on their website. It's nearly 450 exhibitors listed across 180 pages.
The American Coatings Show exhibitor list has almost 450 exhibitors across 180 pages with no export option, so I used an AI browser tool to scrape and structure it into a spreadsheet in about three minutes instead of three days. Everyone has access to the same public data now, the edge is who turns it into something usable the fastest.
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April 24, 2026Meta cut 8,000 jobs this week to fund AI. Microsoft ran its first employee buyout EVER. Same reason.
Meta cut 8,000 jobs and Microsoft ran its first employee buyout ever, both to fund AI spending. It's a capital allocation story, and every distributor has the same decision on the table, stop funding AI out of petty cash and start budgeting for it like the real tool it is.
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