I'm currently consulting for a logistics/wholesale company that uses AI to massively cut down on product catalog management and vendor/customer support costs. Their services are now affordable to much more vendors. It's been a month or so in production and they have already onboarded many new SMB vendors who previously didn't have the means to pay for their services - and thus couldn't sell nor ship through my client. The cost of onboarding a vendor has decreased 100x thanks to using AI instead of doing it manually and it's not limited by headcount and personal schedules.
The products of these new vendors are now available to many big customers in a major city (a single one where we are doing a pilot), and the vendors are reporting they are already getting 2 times the volume of orders they used to get. They didn't even have the means to deliver that much product before - now they are able to do it because their logistics are handled for them by my client (economy-of-scale advantages) instead of them DIYing it, and they use the freed time to do more of their main business.
The customers are super happy because now they're getting fresh food produce from local farmers just days after it's been actually produced, which increases the quality of their products (food in restaurants/catering, usually) and they are already getting significantly more positive reviews thanks to that, which brings them even more new business of higher value. And funnily enough, the products they are getting are cheaper than what they got before, even though the quality is incomparable.
AI is a huge win for everybody involved:
- My client is no longer forced to deal only with the biggest vendors.
- The employees who used to do sales/onboarding, vendor/customer support and product catalog management are still doing it, only now they're handling 10 times more products from 3 times more vendors, and focus on special and more interesting cases instead of doing grunt work.
- The vendors have gained more customers than they ever dreamed of, make more money per unit and have much cheaper logistics that they don't need to think about nor spend their time on (we're talking about guys who used to hop in a truck themselves to deliver their stuff).
- The customers are getting much better quality for lower price per unit. There's also much more product categories they can choose from now.
- It's more environmentally friendly and supports the local economy.
Except more of your users will have jobs because the AI multiplier means new opportunities to provide cheaper services available to more businesses, new companies that weren't economical before will be founded, entire new markets and whole new professions will be created. So your addressable market will exponentially grow. So another bull run?