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Real business owners. Real bottlenecks. Fixed on camera.
Each week Paul sits down with a guest who's stuck — in manual work, disconnected tools, or processes their business has outgrown. They diagnose it live, map the fix, and start building. No theory, no fluff, no generic AI takes. Just the exact solution Paul would build for a paying client, handed over for free on camera.
Every episode is a case study your ICP can't stop watching — because it's their business on the screen.
[00:00:00] Jason Greenwood: AI was not a priority to this business at all six, eight months ago. Now, AI is the most important thing at the board level right now. It is all the entire board is talking about every day. 'Cause we know if we're not AI first, one of our competitors will be, and then we might get bought versus buying them, right?
[00:00:16] And so it's crazy how fast this is moving.
[00:00:19] Paul Kortman: Every business has inefficient processes, limited hours, and technology that really isn't pulling its weight. This is Connex the Dots, where real problems meet real solutions used by real businesses. So I'm Paul Kortman. Let's connect some dots. When a company starts believing you, what things change at that company?
[00:00:44] Jason Greenwood: Well, I think in the same way that I've always said, you know, D2C is not a business model, it's a sales channel. I think the exact same thing about B2B. Now, in some cases, a manufacturer or distributor is just that. You know, I'm working with a manufacturer, very rarely are they a pure play manufacturer.
[00:01:00] They usually have an element of distribution in their business as well. They might manufacture like 80% of what they sell, but they may have a pure play D2C operation. They may have a distribution operation, meaning that, you know, they don't wanna just sell some SKUs into the market. They wanna sell a solution into the market.
[00:01:18] And if they don't manufacture 100% of that solution, let's say they're a manufacturer of pumps. They may be a distributor of valves and piping equipment and, you know, sterile, you know, wherever their pumps may be going into. It may be going into food service. It may be going into beer making. It may be going into a million different s- situations where their product on its own is not a usable product.
[00:01:41] I was working with, uh, one of the largest commercial kitchen equipment distributors in the United States recently, and like only about 30% of their revenue comes from design and install services. And those additional services, whether it be field services, warranty services, installation services, design services, whatever it might be, the services the, that they wrap around the products that they sell, these businesses tend to be much more complex than people give them credit for, mainly because they are not household names.
[00:02:14] So if I, if I rattled off the last 10 manufacturing distribution names that I've worked with, most of the audience would never have heard of those brands. Whereas if I mentioned 10 top retail names, they probably would have heard of those brands. And you know, when we look at the B2B world, because it is, you know, 10 to 20X larger than the retail world, but they're just not household names because they're industrial names.
[00:02:38] But literally, if you look around your house, for example, or you look around your office, you look at literally every single thing that's within your view Every single one of those has a B2B supply chain sitting behind it. And oftentimes that supply chain is incredibly complex. From the raw materials to the manufacturing of the product, to the shipping of the product, to the warehousing of the product, to the distribution of the product, to through master distributors and sub-distributors.
[00:03:04] It is massive. But the reality is, I think in the same way that many D2C brands are realizing that without a strategic wholesale channel, it is a risky business model to have only a single direct consumer sales channel. I think most B2Bs are also realizing to only, you know, warehouse and ship stuff out is a very dangerous business model.
[00:03:25] And so it's not a business model, it is a channel, and I wanted to just kind of set the scene for how B2Bs see the world because many in your audience may not kind of know that that's the dynamics at play in the B2B world.
[00:03:38] Paul Kortman: And this is very fun because our audience is a mix of B2B and B2C, so there's a whole, a whole difference here that they just need to learn about.
[00:03:48] But you talk a lot about WhatsApp and email as kind of like your two main channels for B2B. Is that true today? For those of us in the B2C world, that's strange. But I mean, yes, email direct to consumer, but do all deals happen over WhatsApp and email today in the B2B world?
[00:04:10] Jason Greenwood: I think it's important to understand the baseline numbers when we start thinking about how much e-commerce is actually done in the B2B world today.
[00:04:18] The latest data from a number of different sources is that about 9% of all B2B revenue comes through a portalized e-commerce experience, like a self-service portalized experience. And we know from data that in, at least in the United States, the data's probably the cleanest coming out of the US because of the Department of Commerce and a number of other factors where the data is probably the most accurate.
[00:04:41] It may not be 100% accurate, but it's probably more accurate than other places around the world. And what we know is, is that about 98% of retailers in the United States today offer some kind of an e-commerce experience We know that depending on the vertical and category, only about 40 to 60% of manufacturers and distributors and wholesalers in the United States offer a self-service e-commerce experience.
[00:05:06] So while it's true that, that first of all, not everyone in the B2B world offers an e-commerce experience to begin with, there is still two other major transactional channels outside of a self-service portal that are exceptionally common in the B2B world. That's EDI and punch-out, right? So punch-out is simply a supplier connecting their catalog through some form of integration to a buyer's e-procurement system.
[00:05:35] So you may have heard of platforms like Jaggaer or Coupa, Ariba, or, you know, modules within a B2B buyer's ERP system that do some form of automated procurement, right? So they connect to the supplier's catalog. They pull that into their procurement system. They can make requisitions and purchases directly within that procurement system, and then via integration, it flows directly back to the supplier to execute the purchase.
[00:05:59] Now, sometimes that punch-out connection, and, and probably in greater than 50% of cases this is true, that punch-out connector is connected to the supplier's digital catalog or their e-commerce or portal experience, and then that order flows back through the normal, the normal e-commerce experience once it comes out of the buyer's e-procurement system.
[00:06:18] But EDI is an interesting one. It's a 60-plus-year-old technology, electronic data interchange, and it is the backbone of B2B sales today. It's still the backbone. But the fastest-growing B2B channel, and has been for, like, the last three or four years according to DC360 data, the f- single fastest-growing channel in B2B is marketplace.
[00:06:40] So whether that be Amazon Business, whether that be Zoro, whether that be Grainger's marketplace, whether that be vertical or category-specific marketplaces, still as of today, B2B marketplaces, Fair, you know, et cetera, they are the fastest-growing channel in the B2B world, you know, EDI and punch-out notwithstanding But what I was trying to point out when I discussed these other communication, well, historically communication only channels in relation to B2B, is that there are four or five major, both transactional and customer support channels that just do not exist in the, in the retail e-commerce world.
[00:07:17] That, that being email, WhatsApp, Slack, and Teams, right? So in the B2B world, those four channels are exceptionally common for sales rep or account manager or account executive, whatever you wanna call them on the sell side, and the customer on the buy side, right? They'll attach a PO to an email. The buyer will send it off to their account manager and say, "Hey, Bob," "Hey, Jane, can you process this order for me?"
[00:07:41] Let's say they're a builder and they're on a job site, and they need some two-by-fours and they need some Gyprock. They'll write that on a, you know, on a scratch piece of paper. They'll take a photo of it with their phone, and they'll ping that off to their account manager and say, "Hey, Bob," "Hey, Jane, can you get this over to this address by tomorrow for us?
[00:07:55] We're running short." Right? Or, "Hey, this order that we placed with you, a 500 unit order of faucets for this track of houses that we're building, they never turned up. Where's my order?" Right? So these, you know, communication only channels in B2B are being turned into, through the use of multimodal and conversational AI, they're rapidly being turned into headless commerce channels.
[00:08:16] 'Cause there is absolutely no reason, as long as you've got a decent digital infrastructure in place, as a B2B supplier, there is no reason to be wasting your valuable sales rep's time, your valuable consultant's time on order processing, quote request processing, RMA processing, asking for an inventory count, asking for an MOQ count, asking for the status of my credit account.
[00:08:42] You know, "Okay, cool. I have $100,000 a month credit limit with you. Where am I today?" There's absolutely no reason for all those types of requests to be handled by a human being, whether it be through those comms channels or whether it be through a portalized experience. Either way, that should be handled in an automated, digitalized, at scale way, right?
[00:09:03] And so that was my main point when I, when I said those things.
[00:09:07] Paul Kortman: On that topic though, you kind of hinted at towards the end there of like it could be portalized Or you could put an AI agent on top of those communication channels. Which do you recommend and why?
[00:09:21] Jason Greenwood: I think they're not mutually exclusive. And the reason why I say that is because what we're finding is that those former comms only channels, they need to plug in somewhere, right?
[00:09:32] And they're usually not gonna plug directly into an ERP system. They're gonna plug into a, a system that's dedicated to commerce, right? So when a business invests, when a B2B enterprise invests in a portalized self-service e-commerce experience, a percentage of their customers will want to use that experience.
[00:09:48] They're gonna want to log in. They're gonna want, you know, go into their account. They're gonna want to see the status of their credit account. They're gonna want to search for products. They're gonna want to place orders. They're gonna want to do that through a self-service portal. But if we want to get the most value and return on investment possible out of those types of digital commerce investments like portals, the best way we can do that is to not require our customers to change their behavior with us to adopt those digital channels.
[00:10:19] And so oftentimes what we say is, look, if a order comes into an email box with a PO attached to it, we want to map that directly into the commerce system as if that customer logged into the portal to place that order. If they lodge a digital quote request via email or WhatsApp or Slack or Teams, we want to map that into our portalized experience as if they logged in and leveraged that portal.
[00:10:44] So we want commerce to happen in systems designed for it. And the reality is, is that ERPs and CRMs and PIM systems and all those other digital systems, none of them were designed to be actively transactional in a commerce way. That's not what they were designed for. They were designed, in the case of ERP, they were mostly designed to manage supply chain and accounting.
[00:11:05] That's what an ERP really does behind the scenes. I don't think most CFOs want an entire sales team living in an ERP. It is a dangerous thing to do. Because they can do price overrides. They can do all sorts of things in an ERP that you don't want them to be able to do.
[00:11:19] Paul Kortman: If an PO were emailed in or sent over WhatsApp, that would integrate, and I'm just gonna say magically, we'll come to that in just a minute, but that would magically integrate with the portal so that if that user later on logs into the portal, they can see the four POs that they submitted in the last quarter and be able to just adopt the, the portal as if they were using it the whole time.
[00:11:46] All their data would be there no matter which channel they sent it via.
[00:11:50] Jason Greenwood: That's I think really the key here is that we want, we want there to be, in the B2B world, we ideally want there to be adoption by stealth. Meaning that, sure, I think it's important still to have some form of an adoption plan in place before you launch a new portalized experience.
[00:12:06] I, I help my clients with that all the time to put into place a staggered adoption plan where customers start becoming part of your process even while you're still in build of your, of your portalized experience. They come along on that dir- journey of digital transformation alongside you as opposed to springing it on them once you're actually live with this half a million dollar investment.
[00:12:26] So I'm not suggesting a B2B should not have some form of an adoption plan in place for their portal. I'm just saying that there will always be a percentage of your customers that no matter how awesome your portal is, they're not gonna use it. And so it just does not matter. Their business model on the buy side does not make sense for them to use a portal.
[00:12:47] The reality is there's always going to be a cohort, and data shows that somewhere around 50%, and it depends on the industry you work in, but somewhere around 50% of your customers, at least as of today in 2026, are not gonna use your portal no matter how awesome it is. Now, that doesn't mean that that portal is a, is a wasted investment.
[00:13:05] It just means that the ways in which we should be leveraging it expand, right? So we wanna get much more tangible business value out of our portalized experience other than just the transaction, and I think that is a key metric that business owners in the B2B world still overlook to this day to their detriment, and they say, "Oh, you know, only 5% of revenue migrated to the portal in the first 12 months," or, "Only 10% of revenue migrated to the portal in the first 12 months.
[00:13:30] Well, we just spent $500,000. What a waste." Well, no. How about we look at the superpowers that it's given your sales reps and the 50% of their time that they got back 'cause they weren't an administrator? Like, they were doing actually stuff that added value to their customer experience and actually allowed them to sell more at scale with a bigger portfolio of customers.
[00:13:48] How about we look at the time that customer service got back because they weren't answering dumb questions that, that the customer could actually self-service themselves and get that information out of the portal? How about we look at customer satisfaction scores and NPS scores and all those other things?
[00:14:02] How about we look at how happy our customers are because of the portalized experience? You know, I, I was doing an adoption planning exercise. I was actually doing a pre-build research exercise on behalf of a customer recently, and what we found is, is when I interviewed their customers, this is a B2B supplier now, I was interviewing their buyer customers And when we talked about what whiz-bang new wow thing we were looking to potentially build in e-commerce, and when I asked them, you know, "Is this interesting to you?
[00:14:32] If we were to build all this cool stuff, would it be interesting to you?" And some of them were like, "Yeah, amazing." And then other ones were like, "Eh, you know, I kind of like dealing with Bob or Jane, my account managers. They've always treated me well. You know, they've been my account manager for 20 years. I love, I love doing business with them.
[00:14:46] They really l- look after me." But then when you give the question more nuance and you say, "Well, what are the one, two, three things that you love about doing business with the supplier versus the one, two, three things you hate about doing business with the supplier?" That's when you start getting to more nuance.
[00:15:00] And when I ask that question, "What are the one, two, three things that either you hate or that you don't really like about doing business with the supplier?" They said, "Well, you know, in the 20 years we've been doing business with the supplier, we've never known when an order's gonna arrive at our dock unless we call our account manager.
[00:15:12] We have no idea when our order's gonna arrive. Now, that's a problem for us because we order 20 and 40-foot containers worth of product We have limited slots on our dock for containers. And so what happens is, is if an order arrives when we don't know it's going to arrive, not only is that container sitting on our dock taking up docking space, but we don't have a receiving team assigned to that, and so it sits there until we have a receiving team available to receive that product, get it into our warehouse, and get it shipped out to our customers.
[00:15:39] So what would be amazing is, is if we could log into a portal and just track our order from the time it leaves either the manufacturing facility or their warehouse and then, and track it all the way with, with a target date of when it's actually due on our receiving dock without having to contact our account manager or customer service, that would be a game-changer.
[00:15:56] An absolute game-changer for us. And especially if we were to get automated updates via email to all of our receiving team, our warehouse team, our procurement team, like that would be game-changing. And so sometimes it's the things that we take for granted. It, like, it would be insanity in the retail world to ship an order without sending tracking details to your customer.
[00:16:15] Like, it, like, it just doesn't happen, right? Like, that's, that's a default expectation in the retail world. Because the supply chain is so damn complex in the B2B world, what sounds like it should be simple to just send a update email, "Well, here's your tracking number, and here's when we expect it to arrive," that is infinitely more difficult in the B2B world because of the way B2B supply chains work.
[00:16:36] In order to have the digital infrastructure to be able to provide that with accuracy in an automated way to the buyer, that's why so many B2Bs don't do it, because it's hard, right? It's not possible, but it's hard, and especially if they have no digital infrastructure. It's really hard. And so these are the types of situations where I think B2Bs can learn a lot from B2C and D2C, but I also think B2C and D2C can turn a ton, learn a ton from those per- pure-play B2B businesses, particularly in the one-to-one communication side of the business.
[00:17:07] That's very common in B2B. Almost all communication in the B2C and retail world is one-to-many. It's a text blast. It's an email blast. It's not customer service picking up a phone and calling customers. It's not a customer service rep picking up the phone and calling someone who's on the high risk of churn list.
[00:17:28] No, it's an email blast to run a stim campaign against a high risk of churn, a cohort of customers, right? And so there is this desire in the retail world, and particularly the retail e-commerce world, to make everything automated and to make everything scalable and to take as many humans out of that loop as possible.
[00:17:47] And what B2B shows us is that humans in the loop drive massive revenue and massive stickiness with customers, and I think that's something very important that the retail world can learn
[00:17:59] Paul Kortman: I'm gonna kind of reverse you just a little bit back to that magic, going back to, you know, a communication channel, information that goes across the communication channel, and then magically appears in the portal.
[00:18:10] And part of what we're talking about, and you just finished on, is, you know, having a human in the loop mixed with that automation. And so this is right in that sweet spot of where you have human interaction, human go-between, and automation kind of watching, looking over the shoulder and grabbing something it knows it can automate and implement that.
[00:18:33] Now, you and I in our businesses, I'm making a wild guess here, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but you come in at the strategic level and end up developing plans, et cetera, and fixing sometimes what Folks like myself who run automations, who do those actual technical setups of like we're watching that communication channel and we're gonna inject it into the order system.
[00:18:59] Where do you get upset with the automation agencies? Where do you wish they would do something better or different or have a better vision before going into this? Or where do you see your clients attempting automation in this and failing?
[00:19:16] Jason Greenwood: So you're right in that I'm a pure consultancy. I don't do any implementations.
[00:19:19] I'm not an agency. I don't go in and I don't go do custom development for them. I don't do custom system integration. I'm not an implementer. I used to run and build agencies, but I don't do that anymore. I'm a pure consultancy. So I'm usually brought in for a few different things with manufacturers and distributors and wholesalers.
[00:19:36] The first thing is the art of the possible. A lot of these businesses just don't even know what's possible with modern technology. I'm working with a company right now who the last time that they were in market for an e-commerce platform, for example, was a decade ago. They've been on their current e-commerce solution for a decade.
[00:19:51] And so they brought me in because they're like, "You've got your finger on the pulse of what's possible today. You know what the major systems and, that are available out there are. You kind of know what they can do. You can help us shortlist. You can help us create a selection rubric. You can help us do solution architecture once we've made a decision on that platform.
[00:20:06] You can help us decide on what ancillary and supporting platforms need to be wrapped around a core e-commerce platform to create this experience we're trying to create for our customers. So can you come in and help us with all, all of that? Because we just, we haven't been in market in so long, we don't really know what's out there.
[00:20:21] We don't really know how it works, and we really didn't, don't know what's possible," right? And what's interesting is when I first started working with them, you know, six, eight months ago, AI, for example, was at the bottom of their priority list. Like, "Hey, we've got all this amazing functionality that we built out over the last decade.
[00:20:36] We kind of want that to be the minimum viable product of any new solution, and then it has to be even better than that," right? But because they've been doing e-commerce for 25 years and on their current platform for the last 10, their minimum viable product is up here in comparison, 'cause no customer of mine and no customers of theirs want to go backward.
[00:20:52] They don't ever want to have less functionality in a new solution than they did on the old solution, right? That baseline is what they do today, and then a whole bunch of extra stuff on top of that, typically is the way it works. Now, what's interesting is AI was not a priority to this business at all six, eight months ago.
[00:21:09] It said, it said, "Look, you don't need to... You can talk tangentially around AI and the BRD, the business requirements document, and, like, when we're shortlisting the new commerce solution vendors that we're looking at and all the stuff wrapped around that. AI's just not, not a big priority for us." Well, one month before we, the, the board signed off on the BRD, the team internally that was interfacing with me s- came back to me and said, "Okay-" Now, from the board level down, this is a third-generation family-owned distribution business run by the grandson of the founders, okay?
[00:21:40] They're doing massive M&A activity in the market. They're acquiring competitors all the time and rolling those businesses into their core business. Now, AI is the most important thing at the board level right now. It is all the entire board is talking about every day. And so now we need to elevate AI from being a, almost a footnote to this is a strategic imperative in our business because we know if we're not AI first, one of our competitors will be, and then we might get bought versus buying them, right?
[00:22:10] We don't want to be caught flat-footed. We were a little bit late to the e-commerce game. We don't want to be late... We cannot afford to be late to the AI game because our competitors won't be. And so they said, "Look, now we need you to help revisit and re-look at our business and everything about it through the lens of AI.
[00:22:27] And we need to look at commerce through the lens of AI enablement. We need to look potentially at agentic procurement because we know a lot of our customers are moving to an agentic procurement model, but we don't have anything on the supply side for their agentic procurement systems to even connect to.
[00:22:42] We don't have an MCP server, for example, for their agentic procurement systems to connect to. So we've got nothing to support them in their agentic procurement workflows, and we're going to potentially miss out on that business if we don't pretty quickly remedy that, right? But we don't even know the questions to ask around AI.
[00:22:58] We don't really know what's out there around AI for businesses like ours. We need you to help us with that e-exploratory process, right?" And also a lot of these businesses, including these guys, they are starting to deploy LLMs right across their entire business. So they, they might deploy Claude business-wide, or they might deploy Copilot business-wide, or they might deploy ChatGPT company-wide or something like that.
[00:23:19] And they, they are looking at a future where they don't want to have to log into the admin panel of any of the systems they run. They ideally want to be able to administer, control, and update those systems through their agent of choice connected via, for example, an MCP server. On the commerce side, they don't want to have to log into a admin panel on the commerce side and say, "Okay, navigate to this thing," or even have a chatbot inside that control panel of that platform.
[00:23:45] They don't want to interact with that. They want to be able to interact through their LLM of choice that's deployed business-wide, right? And so they're looking at a future world where almost every single piece of technology in their business they can administer headlessly and universally. This was not a priority for them a few months ago, but it is now.
[00:24:00] And so it's crazy how fast this is moving.
[00:24:02] Paul Kortman: And it's fun to hear that, but give us some real-world examples because I know it's moving fast, and a lot of times we talk in demos and just like, "Oh, AI is going to change everything." But I want to know, give us some real world examples of clients who have already adopted AI in the actual B2B flow.
[00:24:24] Not just that it connects via MCP and can do business analysis or predictive ordering, but like, and it just does, you know, it answers the person's question of like, "Hey, I need a report for last quarter," and, you know, "How much widgets did we generate?" Okay, that's kind of like your basic start of like, yes, you, you can now prompt and you have data and it can analyze it.
[00:24:49] What's the, what's the real world AI use that's happening in B2B today in a, in one of your clients that's beyond that?
[00:24:58] Jason Greenwood: Yeah, so still as of today, most of my clients don't have meaningful AI, standalone AI deployments in their business outside of the enterprise applications they already use But what they are doing is they are looking for when they are doing their selection criteria for new software vendors, now that vendor's AI roadmap is of utmost importance to them.
[00:25:27] Whereas even six months ago, uh, we didn't even need to know if they had an AI roadmap. We didn't even necessarily care if they had an AI roadmap. But now that selection criteria for their enterprise software, you know, things like, does this piece of software have an end-to-end MCP server already built into it, or is it on your roadmap somewhere?
[00:25:44] Does it already have an AI sales agent built into it, or an AI CRM agent built into it, or doesn't it? Does it already have AI customer service agentic capability built into it or doesn't it? Does it have the ability to receive an email with a PO attached to it directly into the commerce system? Does it already have that ability built in so that we don't have to build custom middleware to make that happen, that it can ingest at a custom email box for that platform?
[00:26:10] Can it strip that PO out and can it map it directly into the commerce system automatically? And then where, where either there are fields missing in that PO or where they are uninterpretable or unmappable, then can we just put that in a processing state, automatically flag and email the, the, the account rep on that account to go in and complete any missing information so that that email can flow through the automated system?
[00:26:33] These are the types of questions that my customers are starting to really ask in earnest now with my help in many cases, 'cause they, they oftentimes they come to me and they said, "What are the questions we should be asking given this is our roadmap, this is our plan, this is what we want to achieve? What are the types of AI questions we should be asking of vendors today to be able to execute on that vision tomorrow?"
[00:26:55] And oftentimes that has been prompted because their buyers have come to them and said, "Unless you can service us agentically, we're gonna go elsewhere. Or, or we may not go elsewhere, but you're gonna give us a one, two, 3% greater discount because we cannot automate our, our procurement process with you and therefore our cost to procure with you versus a competitor is higher."
[00:27:16] And I had another client that was-- wanted to supply to Zoro, which is a major industrial marketplace buyer, and they, they said, "Look, yes, we will buy from you." My customer is one of the largest industrial belt manufacturers in the world. Zoro said, "Yes, we want you to supply to us, but here's our 21-page..." Zoro emailed them a 21-page EDI integration document and said, "This is the only way we will buy from you.
[00:27:42] So if you can service us this way, great. If you cannot, then we cannot buy from you." They dictate. The buyer dictates how you will sell to them. And it's the same with government tenders, for example. In many cases, customers want to go in, say, for a government procurement tender. They want to supply the government with certain products that they sell, but the government tender says, "Okay, if you want to supply us, here's the way that you can supply to us.
[00:28:07] Would you make a bid for this contract? Here's the way that we will accept being able to procure through you, and if you can't meet that requirement, then you can't even bid for this tender." So oftentimes they'll come to me when they have an immediate market opportunity that they cannot serve digitally the way that the customer expects them to serve it digitally, and that puts the fire of, you know, God underneath them, and they go, "Oh my God, we, we will miss out on this opportunity if we cannot enable ourselves digitally to service these customers.
[00:28:34] So how fast can we get, for example, an EDI solution in place so that we can win this contract," right? So sometimes it's literally an active market opportunity that they cannot service, that they go, "Jason, we just don't, we don't know how to service these customers. Can you help us? Can you help us engineer a solution that will allow us to h- service these customers so that we can win this deal, so that we can win this opportunity?"
[00:28:56] So that's the genesis of a lot of this. It's not necessarily that they're advanced today in AI, it's that their customers are increasingly expecting them to be AI-enabled to service them. It's a chicken and egg scenario, right? Do we build it first and then hope that, that the buy side adopts this? Or is it that the buy side wants this level of service and we can't yet do it, so then we're gonna build it for them?
[00:29:20] I think it's probably falls somewhere in the middle. You want to be a leader and you want to be on the bleeding edge as much as you can, but many of these B2B businesses, they don't even have the foundations in place. They don't have a PIM system. They're not doing e-commerce at all today. Like I said, only about 40 to 60% of B2Bs in the US today offer any kind of portalized experience at all.
[00:29:38] So we still have like 40 to 60% of the market that need to get some sort of digital commerce foundation established in their business, and they need to exercise that digital commerce muscle at all in their business before they get out on the fringe of AI, so to speak.
[00:29:52] Paul Kortman: So does AI actually shrink, like, the systems in a greater business?
[00:29:57] And that perhaps is a little bit of a personal question, and I know you're at the strategy level instead of the implementation level, but When that EDI document comes over, like you can throw an AI at that and say, "All right, what do we need to do to be able to accomplish this, to do this integration," etc.
[00:30:17] Do you see that from your perspective shrinking the actual system implementer process, or is the client not yet doing that?
[00:30:27] Jason Greenwood: Okay. First thing is I'll just say that I assumed that EDI would disappear Probably 15 years ago. Like regular old vanilla EDI, right? I thought it was gonna go away. It hasn't. If anything, it's more entrenched than ever before.
[00:30:43] However, what I think is going to happen, I don't think EDI as we know it is gonna go to way-- go away anytime soon and be replaced wholesale by MCP integration. But what I do see is I think that slowly and inexorably, agentic commerce will become effectively the equivalent of EDI 2.0, right? Agents talking to agents.
[00:31:04] And whether it's ultimately mediated by MCP or some other new protocol that comes down the pipe, that may be the case. Do I think that that entire system integrator business is gonna go away and be replaced by AI tomorrow? No, I do not. Do I think that those, those agencies or those middleware vendors are gonna go away tomorrow?
[00:31:20] No, I don't. But what I think is going to be increasingly important is that all of the people that play in the pure system integration space, that connect one system to another and help them share data with each other, that they become AI first, that they become AI-led, that they have an elite level of AI expertise.
[00:31:38] Because I think ultimately, like in my own business, I don't use an iPaaS platform, okay? I, I do everything through Manus. So, so when I need to connect to Read AI's MCP server, okay? To pull down data and grab information and write a BRD system or do a gap analysis or anything like that, I don't, I don't use Zapier, I don't use Make, I don't use a middleware platform.
[00:32:02] My action agent, which I use both Perplexity Computer and Manus AI, but these are two very, very good action agents, they speak the language of MCP. And so I don't need to use a custom middleware tool to connect Manus to Read AI. Manus connects directly to Read AI via MCP, and I can interact with Read AI using natural language in Manus because Read AI has an MCP server sitting in front of their API layer.
[00:32:27] And so do I think that, you know, like I said, that whole iPaaS middleware expert layer is gonna go away tomorrow? No. But I think increasingly, AI itself, and particularly action agents, they will be the middleware layer. They are going to be the system that can pull down data directly from enterprise systems, right?
[00:32:47] You can write loops, you can write cron jobs from within your action agent. You can write tasks, you know, recurring tasks that happen directly within your action agent that go and fetch data and bring it down, modify it, and then push it into another system. So, so I think action agents, AI action agents are increasingly going to become the middleware of choice for, for large enterprises.
[00:33:08] Because they're already paying for Claude, they're already paying for, you know, Copilot. They're already paying for all these systems. And so I, I think that that is increasingly going to be the the design pattern that gets deployed as an integration tool within these businesses.
[00:33:22] Paul Kortman: So along those lines, just kind of in wrap here a little bit to maybe switch gears, but also really directly apply that to you.
[00:33:31] You've done over 600 episodes of podcasting. There's got to be some automations that you've put in place there. Are they all driven by your AI action agents, or do you have some automations there that aren't driven by those agents?
[00:33:48] Jason Greenwood: Not yet. And the only reason why not yet is because my primary recording tool, which is Riverside, does not have an MCP server yet.
[00:33:59] So I automate using AI lots of functions inside Riverside. Obviously, you know, word gaps, the ums and ahs. I can automate a lot of stuff using its internal AI tooling, but Riverside doesn't have an MCP server yet. Once it does have an MCP server, then I can automate most of the post-production directly from within my action agents.
[00:34:24] I'll be able to, to pretty much automate probably something like 90% of my workflow. So I use Opus Clip to create short clips and everything else. Even they don't have an MCP server yet. So until these enterprise software platforms universally have a way to connect to them other than just raw API endpoints, and, and in, in some cases, even the raw API endpoints don't span the entirety of the platform.
[00:34:47] You can do certain functions via API, but there's some things you just, uh, they won't let you do via API yet. So until these enterprise softwares are fully API-enabled and fully MCP-enabled, it is going to be difficult to automate every single piece of all of my workflows. But it's interesting 'cause I didn't, I didn't think Read AI would be one of the first platforms that I use every single day to be MCP-enabled, and it's out of beta.
[00:35:13] Like, this is a fully production-ready MCP server sitting in front of all the transcripts that come out of their platform that's queryable by any AI agent. And so, you know, I think we're gonna see some interesting things start to develop. I think initially a lot of enterprise software was very concerned.
[00:35:30] If we put an MCP server in front of our software, then will that make us irrelevant to our customers? And if they're not logging into our UI, if they're not logging into our admin panel, if they're not seeing our brand in everything that they interact with, does that mean that we're less valuable to them and that they can just swap, h- hot swap us out for the next new software that comes along?
[00:35:50] And I think they're realizing, no. If we have a unique value proposition, is someone who is a massive Salesforce user gonna rip out Salesforce and replace them with another CRM or ERP platform just because they have an MCP server? No. Is someone that's invested a million or 10 million or 50 million or $100 million in SAP, are they gonna go rip and replace SAP if SAP gives them an MCP server to administer their software with and interact with their software with?
[00:36:17] I think that most enterprise software vendors that are good realize, "Hey, we want you to be able to interact with our platform however you want. API, flat file integration, admin UI. We want you to be able to interact with our software any way that you want to interact with us. We're gonna make it easy to do that," right?
[00:36:35] And it's just like the B2B supplier. We want our buyers to be able to buy from us any way that they want as easy as possible, right? Whether that's through punch out, EDI, portal, API, agentic, you know. And so I think these software vendors are finally starting to get religion about the interfaces that they provide, and that's good for all of us.
[00:36:56] Paul Kortman: Jason, it has been a lot of fun to talk to you. And on that note of, like, prognosticating and future forecasting of, like, what is the future gonna be if these software companies were to adopt MCP, or I'm not even gonna put an if. When they do, 'cause either they will or my prediction is they won't survive.
[00:37:15] We're gonna have a lot of fun six months, a year down the road when all of our data is available to our agent of choice. So Jason, thanks for waxing with us and for showing us the way. Tell our audience where they can find you if they want to learn more about you and the services you provide.
[00:37:32] Jason Greenwood: Just go to greenwoodconsulting.net and all of my information is there.
[00:37:37] But I, I regularly publish to Substack. I regularly publish to LinkedIn. I regularly publish to Reddit. I'm over, over 700 podcast episodes now, and I'm everywhere you consume podcasts, including YouTube. I'm already there. The Ecommerce Edge Podcast, as you can see on the wall behind me here. So look, you can ChatGPT me, you can Google me, you can Claude me, just Jason Greenwood and, and you can find me literally everywhere.
[00:38:00] Paul Kortman: It's no longer Google me, you can Claude me. Hmm. These verbs are getting interesting. So Jason, once again, thank you. Have a great day. So if you're listening to this and you want to understand more about how to practically improve the efficiencies inside your business, check out our other episodes. That's what they're here for.
[00:38:19] But if you're ready to start, reach out. We offer a no-cost consultation, and I'd be happy to help you.