The terms behind AI for wholesale distribution.

Software that reads your operational systems, decides what to do, executes the action, and checkpoints a human where trust or money is at stake.

AI that runs autonomously for low-risk, recoverable actions, and proposes for a named human to approve wherever price, credit, or customer trust is involved.

AI built around a distributor's own operational shape: hundreds of suppliers, thousands of trade customers, and systems such as Bevica and Xero rather than a brand's ERP stack.

AI that takes actions towards a goal, reading inputs, deciding, executing across real systems, and checking its work, rather than only answering questions like a chatbot.

The end-to-end cycle from a customer placing an order to the payment landing in your account: capture, pricing, fulfilment, invoicing, and collection.

Completing a transaction end to end with no manual re-keying: an order read, matched, priced, checked, and written into the ERP automatically, with humans on the exceptions only.

The average number of days it takes to collect payment after a sale: a headline measure of how quickly a business turns invoices into cash.

How an automated process deals with the cases that fall outside the rules, routing an unmatched product, a price override, or a credit breach to the right person quickly.

Estimating future sales so you can hold the right stock. For a distributor, that means forecasting thousands of other people's SKUs across many suppliers and customers.

The buffer of extra inventory that absorbs demand spikes and late deliveries, the insurance that keeps you serving customers when reality differs from the forecast.

The share of customer demand met from stock on hand, without shortfall or delay. A core service measure, and the stricter cousin of OTIF (on time, in full).

The document a buyer sends a supplier to confirm what they want to buy, at what price and terms. In wholesale it appears on both sides of the desk.

A standard for exchanging orders and invoices between systems in a fixed, machine-readable format. It solves only the tidy slice of orders; most still arrive by email, PDF, or message.