If you had a dime for every time AI was mentioned during at the 2026 E-Business Conference, held Sept. 29-Oct. 1 in Denver, CO, during the general sessions’ panel discussions, keynote address, breakout seminars and informal conversations during happy hours and informal chats, you probably would have enough money to buy some shares of OpenAI or Anthropic whenever they go public.
Any time IDEA E-Biz attendees invested in assessing how AI may affect their businesses will prove will be worthwhile, because there’s little doubt now that AI is radically changing how customers search for electrical products online.
IDEA would appear to be perfectly positioned to help the electrical market harness the potential of AI. Since its launch 28 years ago in 1998, IDEA’s core mission has been to help the industry develop, maintain and transact business clean electrical product data, initially through the Industry Data Warehouse (IDW) and now through the IDEA Connector and related tools such as Project Nexus, Where’s My Stuff, Data Whispers, the Nudge AI sales assistant and EDI tools.
And just as IDEA’s mission has been all about clean product data, the next step as in the e-commerce journey for the electrical market will be ensuring that this clean electrical data will be visible online to the agentic AI agents that your customers are starting to use to search for it.
In what’s called “agentic AI,” these agents may manage tasks such as requests for proposals, ordering electrical products and monitoring deliveries. In contrast, generative AI basically answers questions posed by humans through queries. While the growth of agentic AI has been underway for some time, it gained real prominence last month when Meta’s AI agent Muse launched just three weeks before the IDEA E-Biz conference. Interestingly, Muse for Small Business hit the market on the first day of the conference. An iPad Muse app was released on Oct. 7. According to a post at www.forbes.com, Meta’s use reached 5 million downloads in just 22 days.
Using AI to Source Electrical Products
AI adoption is moving fast in the electrical industry, too. During the “A Connected Electrical Industry - How People, Data and AI will Reshape the Market” panel discussion, Lucy Edosomwan, digital integrity specialist, Siemens, said electrical distributors’ customers are now “pre-informed and pre-educated” because of the product research they do using AI, and that 60% of customers now have the technical product information they need before contacting a distributor. She urged IDEA attendees to make sure their product data is discoverable by AI because if can’t find your product data, it won’t include you in the answers to sourcing queries. This technical information is sometimes trapped inside PDFs and brochures, which AI currently cannot read.
Jeanette Abrahamsen, VP of Marketing, Trade Hounds, cited a similar trend in how customers now use AI to research products. In her breakout session, “From Product Data to Purchase: Designing AI‑Ready Buying Paths for the Next Generation,” she said her company’s research shows 51% of buyers are starting their product research on a chat bot.
While the trend toward agentic searches for electrical products is not showing any signs of slowing down, several speakers on the E-Biz program agreed it’s still important to connect with customers on whichever level of contact and service they prefer. Sean Grasby, WESCOs’ senior vice president, Construction and Energy Solutions, emphasized the importance of representing your company’ online with product data that’s clean, complete and easy to find. “If the data is weak, AI will think the offering is weak,” he said during the “A Connected Electrical Industry - How People, Data and AI will Reshape the Market” panel discussion.
Here’s three other key takeaways from this year’s IDEA E-Biz:
#1. IDEA has a renewed focus on listening to customers to tweak its portfolio of digital products
In their efforts to reduce the number of data-entry clicks in the IDEA Connector, Patrick Knight, IDEA's president and CEO and his team spent much of their time working on a three-tier mantra: “You asked. We listened. We delivered.” They are using their in-house technical talent to develop much of their new product work, whereas in the past the organization relied more heavily on outside contractors.
#2. ProjectNexus is generating excitement throughout the distributor, manufacturer and rep communities, as well as with end users
ProjectNexus is a middleware software solution developed by NAED, IDEA and Pull Logic that will help supply chain partners share and access order and shipment data. Jay Andrews, IDEA’s platform director for ProjectNexus, told attendees that five manufacturers, five distributors and three reps are currently involved with the ProjectNexus pilot program and that the program’s beta phase will kick off in November with possibly up to 30 participants.
#3. IDEA is reaching the next generation of digital business talent.
A new generation of talent has discovered the career opportunities that the electrical wholesaling industry offers, and many of these young and digitally oriented executives were at this year’s E-Bix event. IDEA said half the attendees at the E-Biz meeting were first-time attendees. That’s a great sign for the future.
Next year’s IDEA E-Biz event will be held in Chicago, IL, from Sept. 29-Oct. 1, 2027.
About the Author
Jim LucyJim Lucy
Editor-in-Chief
Over the past 40-plus years, hundreds of Jim’s articles have been published in Electrical Wholesaling and Electrical Marketing newsletter on topics such as the impact of new competitors on the electrical market’s channels of distribution, energy-efficient lighting and renewables, and local market economics. In addition to his published work, Jim regularly gives presentations on these topics to C-suite executives, industry groups and investment analysts.
He recently launched a new subscription-based data product for Electrical Marketing that offers electrical sales potential estimates and related market data for more than 300 metropolitan areas, and in 1999 he published his first book, “The Electrical Marketer’s Survival Guide” for electrical industry executives looking for an overview of key market trends.
While managing Electrical Wholesaling’s editorial operations, Jim and the publication’s staff won several Jesse H. Neal awards for editorial excellence, the highest honor in the business press, and numerous national and regional awards from the American Society of Business Press Editors. He has a master’s degree in Communications and a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, N.J. (now Rowan University).