AI is changing the face of B2B operations, and digital expectations are changing. Industrial manufacturers need to evolve their product information management (PIM) processes to keep pace.
AI Is No Longer a Luxury for B2B Manufacturers
AI’s impact on business processes and expectations can’t be understated. It’s already transforming how B2B manufacturers operate and determining who will win the AI-powered future of tomorrow.
Understanding and leveraging AI solutions is a key way for you to get — and stay — ahead of the competition.
At the heart of a successful AI strategy and implementation lies one critical element: clean data. Without a robust foundation of accurate and well-organized product data, the transformative potential of AI remains untapped.
Your Internal Transformation
Your strategy is built for growth — new channels, new buyers, and new products — unlike the legacy data and manual processes that are holding your business together.
If you aren’t using AI to improve product data quality and drive operational efficiencies, you’re paying a tangible opportunity cost today in wasted time and resources.
Key initiatives like channel expansion, new product introductions, and post-merger integrations are slowed to a crawl by manual data work. Your teams waste countless hours in spreadsheets, creating bottlenecks that throttle your speed-to-market.
Clean, structured, accessible data empowers AI solutions to:
- Automate work: Automate manual processes, reducing the significant time and effort traditionally spent on data entry, validation, and maintenance.
- Surface insights: AI uses your data and performance metrics to provide visibility into your business performance.
- Accelerate time to market: AI-powered workflows keep your teams aligned around a source of truth for data, breaking down silos and enhancing collaboration so you can get your products in front of buyers faster.
Your External Transformation
You’re at the beginning of a new era of commerce; agentic shopping is here and already disrupting how people buy.
According to Forrester research, “OK, Boomers And Digital Natives, Let’s Talk B2B Buyer Behavior Changes,” 95% of younger B2B buyers prefer to research a company using generative AI (GenAI) conversational search tools.
Why should this matter to you? These AI tools must be able to access complete and accurate product information to surface it to buyers.
AI-powered discovery engines are pulling information from an expanding universe of sources, including:
- Google
- Marketplaces
- Model context protocols
- Brand.coms
- Retailer sites
- Retrieval-augmented generation pipelines
- Etc.
As the manufacturer, you’re the most credible source of product information and must show up like it. If you’re not providing the best-in-class product information, AI agents will move on to different sources to answer buyers’ queries.
To regain their attention, you must ensure that your distributors also have clean and accurate product information and are sending great content to retailer sites as well. Otherwise, agents won’t find your information or will find it and skip over it, instead recommending competitors’ products to the buyer.
The faster you can surface, adapt, and optimize product information across channels, the more likely you are to be featured, recommended, and purchased by humans and agents alike.
Your Buyers, Employees, and Channel Partners Are Digital-First — Are You Ready?
The B2B industrial landscape is undergoing an accelerated shift toward digital channels, a transformation driven by the need for greater operational efficiency, an enhanced customer experience, and the critical challenge of managing vast and complex product data.
Your Buyers Are Changing
Forrester also says that digital natives (millennials and Gen Z) have “distinct preferences shaped by their consumer behaviors and expectations, which often lead to dissatisfaction with outdated marketing and sales practices.”
Modern B2B customers, accustomed to the seamless experiences of consumer ecommerce, now expect the same level of accessibility, transparency, and efficiency in their professional interactions.
Meeting these heightened demands requires accurate, complete, and easily accessible product information. These buyers complete 69% of the buying journey before interacting with a seller, according to Forrester.
Self-service capabilities, powered by comprehensive product data, are crucial for empowering them to research, compare, and make purchasing decisions independently and at their own pace.
Your Workforce Is Changing
A new generation is entering the workforce, bringing with them inherent digital-first expectations.
Forrester’s research says, “Digital natives have overtaken their baby boomer and Gen X colleagues at every level of the marketing organization, except in the VP and above roles, and it won’t be long before that changes too.”
Concurrently, legacy knowledge from retiring employees is walking out the door, creating a “brain drain” of knowledge.
These changes make modernizing and digitizing product information management processes even more urgent to capitalize on today’s opportunities while future-proofing your business.
Your Channel Partners Are Changing
As the market becomes increasingly digital-first, distributors will choose to work with partners who are, well, easy to work with.
“Many organizations struggle with manual, time-consuming processes [including] managing data through spreadsheets and dealing with messy data and processes … Suppliers see human-driven workflows slow down critical processes … Activities like performance reporting end up requiring manual effort to stitch data together and still result in gaps and inconsistencies,” according to Forrester’s report, B2B Partner Ecosystem Management Solutions: Trends, Challenges, And Strategic Benefits.
Distributors are feeling intense pressure to modernize their operations and meet digital buyers’ demands for complete, utility-rich information. A manufacturer’s ability to provide accurate, complete, and easily accessible product information directly impacts its standing with distributors.
For example, if transactional data is received through a direct connection and processed quickly, an item can be purchasable on Grainger.com within five days instead of weeks, Grainger says. Affiliated Distributors’ investments in digital content onboarding have resulted in a 300% decrease in time to market, according to Grainger.
Industrial manufacturers must demonstrate a commitment to innovation, efficiency, and treating product data as a strategic asset if they want to remain a preferred partner — or to become one.
This means investing in solutions that enhance operational effectiveness, improve customer experience, and ultimately drive business growth.
Turn Mergers and Acquisitions Chaos Into a Strategic Advantage
In today's industrial landscape, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) for inorganic growth are a core B2B strategy (e.g., Baker Hughes acquiring Chart Industries or Armstrong acquiring 3form), especially in mature sectors.
These moves have multiplied chaos in the market while also presenting a key growth opportunity for B2B manufacturers looking to increase their assortments for commercial customers or specifiers, or provide products to additional segments of the market that present better margins.
While the strategic upside is clear, the operational reality of merging two companies is messy. Product catalogs clash. Data is inconsistent. The chaos that follows an acquisition can delay, or even destroy, the very value you sought to create.
Erica Medfield, senior marketing manager at IPG, shares how IPG — “a company of acquisitions” — leveraged technology to streamline its processes and organize its data.
With M&A showing no signs of slowing, having complete and clean product data is increasingly critical for realizing growth ambitions and synergies from acquisitions.
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