In today's world where digital trends permeate every industry, how can distributors deeply integrate AI technology with their actual business operations, making the power of technology a new engine for business growth?
From March 17 to 19, the 10th China FMCG Innovation Conference, themed "New Order · Symbiosis," was held in Chengdu. During the conference, Pan Kun, General Manager of Zhoupudata's Digital Intelligence Division, attended as a guest and delivered a keynote speech titled "AI in Action: How Distributors Can Achieve 3x Growth" to over 2,000 industry professionals.
New Distribution is pleased to report on the highlights of his speech for our readers.
Digital Tools Empower Distributors' Transformation and Upgrading
In an era of channel fragmentation and instant demand, market competition intensifies, making distributors' businesses increasingly challenging.
The old, simplistic business models can no longer adapt to changes in the market environment. Distributors need both professional consulting services to guide their direction and diverse tool support to enhance operational efficiency.
In a complex and volatile market, distributors must respond quickly and adjust strategies flexibly.
Distributors of different categories and regions have varying needs for digital tools. Therefore, adaptability is crucial when selecting tools.
How should distributors choose digital tools? Based on experience serving 40,000 distributors, Zhoupudata has developed a model.
First, scenario-based adaptation.
Accurately identify the needs of distributors in different categories, design customized service plans for each, and continuously improve and iterate services to ensure they always align with distributors' evolving needs.
Second, one-stop service.
By combining warehousing and distribution tools with cloud steward services, we create a comprehensive, efficient one-stop software service platform, becoming an indispensable core tool for distributors' warehouse management and delivery fulfillment, and a key engine driving business growth.
For distributors with B2b needs, we offer "Store Steward" as an optional supporting solution to manage orders, inventory, and other critical processes more efficiently, achieving refined management and optimization of business processes.
Third, intelligent assistance.
Through the BI system—Zhoupudata's "Zhouyi"—we provide distributors with intelligent data support, enabling smart decision-making and multi-frequency interaction, allowing them to optimize and upgrade their businesses in an increasingly complex market environment.
As digital transformation deepens, distributors are gradually realizing that they cannot merely use digital tools to optimize business processes and management efficiency; they must also leverage intelligent data analysis to gain insights into market dynamics and accurately grasp consumer needs, thereby making wiser, more market-aligned decisions.
The 'Intelligent Anxiety' of Distributors in the AI Era
Recently, AI has become a hot topic. In our interactions with distributors, we frequently receive questions like: Can I use AI? How can I apply AI technology to my business?
In the FMCG industry chain, some brand owners and retailers, with their strong resources, have already enjoyed the dividends of AI technology. They not only possess rich business tool resources but also receive data and AI service support from top consulting firms like McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group, using various reports to aid data review and analysis.
However, when we turn our attention to distributors, we find they seem somewhat powerless in this AI revolution. Although distributors equally desire to use AI to improve operational efficiency and drive business development, there are few AI tools specifically designed for distributors' needs. This situation can be described as the unique "intelligent anxiety" of distributors.
This year, with the rise of AI tools like DeepSeek, many distributors have begun to try and use AI technology. Despite significant progress in the intelligence levels of major AI models like GPT-4.5 and DeepSeek, their application in specific scenarios still faces challenges because these models lack a deep understanding of distributors' specific business processes.
Against this backdrop, professional digital service providers are emerging. With their deep understanding of distributor businesses and proficiency in AI technology, they are beginning to offer tailored AI solutions to distributors, enabling the implementation of business strategies.
Therefore, for distributors, partnering with professional digital service providers is undoubtedly a wise choice in the current booming AI landscape. Through close collaboration with service providers, they can gradually alleviate their "intelligent anxiety" and inject new development momentum into their businesses with AI's assistance.
How Distributors Can Use AI to Drive Business Growth
Currently, for distributors, AI is no longer an unreachable concept but has transformed into a tool that can practically promote business growth. So, how exactly can distributors use AI technology to achieve profit growth?
Examining the traditional model of distributor business, we find the profit formula: Profit = Number of Stores Stocked × GMV per Store - Cost. This formula clearly indicates the key factors for profit growth. To truly increase profits, distributors must comprehensively review and focus on all aspects of their business. Only by deeply understanding and addressing the specific needs in these areas can they accurately identify growth points and formulate practical strategies.
- Store Expansion Needs
During business expansion, when coverage extends to an entire city, distributors will face the challenge of managing up to 20-30 sales representatives. Ensuring these reps can effectively carry out market expansion activities and actively develop new stores becomes a pressing issue for distributors.
To effectively address this challenge, sales reps must have a clear and comprehensive understanding of the store situation in their assigned areas. Specifically, they need to know the total number of stores in their area, the number of stores already selling the company's products, and the number of potential stores not yet selling the company's products. With this information, reps can conduct store expansion in a targeted and directional manner, thereby improving efficiency.
The Intelligent Store Expansion Solution is designed to address the actual needs distributors encounter during business expansion, aiming to assist distributors in providing clear work guidance to their sales reps.
Additionally, by integrating multi-dimensional information such as their own data, map service provider data, and payment data, and considering factors like foot traffic around stores, store area, and the presence of large public facilities like schools or hospitals nearby, AI models analyze and process this information to score each store's sales potential, categorizing them into high-value, medium-high value, medium-value, medium-low value, and low-value stores. Through practical verification with distributors of many brands, we found that high-value stores can achieve single-store output up to 300% of the market average.
Furthermore, all this data can be presented to distributors through visual reports, enabling them to clearly grasp the control rate of their responsible areas. The data can also be integrated with Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools, allowing sales reps to know which stores to visit and their value during daily store visits, thereby helping distributors effectively expand more stores.
- Single-Store GMV Enhancement Needs
In the current fiercely competitive business environment, many distributor leaders, driven by strategic considerations to increase single-store GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume), generally have an urgent need to introduce new products. Distributors focus on whether stores in their responsible areas can smoothly sell new products and which stores may have more potential and adaptability for selling new products.
The New Product Distribution Plan uses a human-machine combined data analysis method to observe the characteristics of the population and infrastructure around stores. By comparing stores with good sales performance to those with poor performance, it assists distributors in making decisions on whether to introduce new products.
Finally, the distributor's existing products and newly introduced products are organized into a database or table, clearly indicating which types of stores are suitable for selling each product and the characteristics of the target consumer groups for those stores. With this data, distributors can clearly grasp the strategy and direction for new product distribution.
- Cost Control Needs
Nowadays, brand owners, based on comprehensive considerations of strategic planning and market flexibility, are increasingly inclined to delegate more decision-making power to the distributor level. This grants distributors greater operational autonomy, allowing them to independently allocate investment costs based on their own market insights and business judgment.
However, when faced with numerous potential store investment options, distributors must consider questions such as: Which stores have investment value? How can we achieve cost savings and maximize returns while ensuring investment efficiency?
The Store Investment Plan can provide distributors with comprehensive and in-depth analysis: assessing the sales capability and volume a specific store might achieve when selling a particular category, the approximate cost of investing in that store, and the potential risks of store operations. Based on these three core variables, it provides clients with the expected Return on Investment (ROI) for investing in that store.
Additionally, the Store Investment Plan categorizes clients' stores into four levels: entry-level stores, basic stores, premium stores, and flagship stores, helping distributors clearly identify the characteristics and investment potential of different store types. Based on the store type, distributors can adopt corresponding investment strategies and operational plans. According to the actual situation of the store, they can adjust investment strategies and operational plans in a timely manner to achieve scientific decision-making and continuous optimization of store investments.
Final Thoughts
In 2025, Zhoupudata will launch a series of innovative AI products aimed at providing strong momentum for distributors' business growth.
For example, Zhouyi, based on the DeepSeek engine, assists distributors in accurately analyzing business conditions; distributor community intelligent agent operations to enhance customer relationship management; distributor marketing design assistants that simplify operational processes through intelligent means; digital humans that improve the efficiency of new product promotion; and shelf intelligent recognition systems that use AI image recognition algorithms to detect potential problems early and avoid unnecessary cost losses.
We believe that in the future, these innovative products will help distributors achieve efficient operations, reduce operational costs, and promote business growth, thereby driving the entire industry toward a new stage of development.