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 12, 2026Your P&L looks normal. You feel EBITDA is too low. You're probably right.
When a distributor is tight on margin, I look past pricing to where the data lives, since manual rekeys and confirming stock by phone hide real costs inside line items that all look normal on the P&L. Cleaning up those workflows can move EBITDA 50 to 100 basis points.
→ - May 11, 2026
Dow Chemical cut 4,500 jobs and replaced them with AI. That cut might be too deep.
Dow cut 4,500 jobs and leaned on AI to cover the gap, and I think that cut goes too deep on technical depth. The formulation knowledge that technical sales reps carry moves to whoever is closest to the customer, so distributors who hire and train real chemistry depth will take accounts from the ones who don't.
→ - May 9, 2026
Your chatbot is one bad answer from a lawsuit. An airline learned that the hard way.
Air Canada's chatbot gave a customer wrong bereavement fare information, and a tribunal held the airline responsible for every word on its website, awarding an $812 refund. If you're using AI in sales, support, quoting, or scheduling, every output is a legal exposure to treat like one.
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May 8, 2026An AI-powered police report tool in Heber City, Utah, drafted an official report saying an officer transformed into a frog.
An AI police report tool in Heber City, Utah wrote an official report claiming an officer transformed into a frog, after picking up movie dialogue playing in the background. A reminder that every AI output has a frog hiding in it, so never publish one without a human checking it first.
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May 8, 2026Here's the old site vs. the new site.
A few people asked what the old site looked like, so I posted a before-and-after. The new site took three hours to build.
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May 7, 2026Claude rebuilt my website this weekend. Not a wireframe or a draft. The actual site, copy and code.
Claude rebuilt my entire website in about three hours of back and forth, copy and code, and saved me roughly $10,000 versus paying a developer. The cost of designing, writing, and deciding has collapsed, and that applies to every industry, chemical distribution included.
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May 7, 2026Nine Claude agents. One research task. Eight researched. One verified the rest.
For a client research task I ran eight Claude agents in parallel on market data, supplier trends, and pricing, with a ninth agent supervising to flag contradictions and cut anything it couldn't source. The output was clean enough to act on.
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May 7, 2026One down, nine to go.
A Lincoln quote about spending most of your time sharpening the axe before you swing it, and a quick progress update, one down, nine to go.
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May 6, 2026It took me a long time to see this clearly. Your best supplier is usually your worst margin.
The suppliers with the best brand recognition are often the ones giving you the worst margin because they already sold the customer before you did. I pull gross margin by line to see which suppliers actually need me, and which ones are just counting my money.
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May 5, 202674 years ago today, my dad arrived in the United States, as a little boy with his family, from Sicily.
My dad arrived in the United States from Sicily as a little boy, 74 years ago today. A look back at the bet my grandparents made on a country they had never seen, and everything my family built because of it.
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May 5, 2026The average chemical distribution sales rep manages hundreds of products across 10 chemistries and 3 dozen customers.
Surfactants may be the hardest product category for a chemical distribution rep to sell, with HLB values and cloud point behavior that don't fit into a quick pitch. Distributors building searchable, structured product knowledge for their reps are turning that complexity into a real advantage.
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May 4, 2026Distributor margins are up. The operational problems underneath them are still there.
Inflation pushed distributor prices up and covered for what wasn't working underneath, manual order entry, bad ERP data, non-strategic SKUs. When the pricing cycle turns, and it always does, those problems show up on the P&L again, so the winners are using today's profits to fix operations before margins compress.
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