Episodes
Start small before you sign a five-year, multi-agent deal | Anatolii Iakimets, Director of Product Marketing, Kibo | Ep. 8
Every pitch for agentic commerce opens with the model. Which frontier lab it runs on, how smart it is, how many PhDs sit behind it. This episode argues the model is the part that matters least. ã…¤ Hosts Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie of Pivotree 's Data vs. Commerce sit down with Anatolii Iakimets , ...
A prototype built with Claude Code still has to survive your ERP | Ryan Smith, Account Executive, Pivotree | Ep. 7
Every AI conversation in distribution right now assumes the data underneath is ready to be acted on. Most of the time, it isn't. Matt Johnson hosts this one solo, with Floyd Blaikie out of the studio, joined by Ryan Smith , an account executive at Pivotree , fresh off the Applied AI for Distributors...
Using AI in field sales without gutting the sales team | Lauren McCullough, Co-Founder & CEO, Tromml | Ep. 6
Field sales is the part of commerce that data never quite reaches. The rep has the relationship, the context, and forty years of counter knowledge, and most of it dies in a notebook nobody reads. This episode is about closing that gap. Matt Johnson calls in from the AI for Distributors event in Chic...
Taking the order is easy. Keeping the promise is where it breaks | Keith Gorney, OMS Practice Director, Pivotree | Ep. 5
The catalog looks right, the website takes the order, and then the promise falls apart somewhere between the click and the dock. That gap between what a screen shows and what actually ships is where this episode lives. Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie sit down with Keith Gorney , OMS Practice Director...
The robots.txt setting that hides your catalog from ChatGPT | Dan Ornstein, Retail Industry Leader, Pivotree | Ep. 4
A customer asks ChatGPT how to fix his style, gets sent to three stores, and nobody on the retail side can explain why those three and not the other thirty. That gap is where this episode sits. Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie talk with Dan Ornstein , Retail Industry Leader at Pivotree , about how lar...
Augmenting experts instead of replacing them with AI | Bill Di Nardo, CEO & Joel Farquhar, Chief Architect, Pivotree | Ep. 3
Every analyst call this quarter runs on the same promise about AI: fewer humans, same output. Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie don't buy it, and neither do this episode's guests. Floyd sits down with Pivotree CEO Bill Di Nardo and chief architect Joel Farquhar to make the case for what they call real ...
AI can connect systems fast, but only if the data is right | Ep. 2
The storefront said overnight shipping. The part showed up three days later, and the dishwasher was still broken. ã…¤ Matt Johnson and Floyd Blaikie open Episode 2 of Data vs. Commerce by tracing that delay past the product data they covered last time, into the place most teams forget to look: the int...
Why warehouses run at 99.9% and product data does not | Ep. 1
Episode 1 of Data vs. Commerce starts with a broken dishwasher and a part that didn't fit. Floyd Blaikie ordered an overnight pump from a distributor's website. Three days later it showed up with three pins instead of four. Same model number, wrong part. Matt Johnson walks through what actually brok...
Welcome to Data vs. Commerce
Every product moves twice. Once through the data layer, where it gets named, classified, attributed, priced, and made findable. Once through the physical layer, where it gets bought, picked, packed, shipped, and delivered. Most companies invest heavily in the second journey and treat the first as a ...

