Notes from inside the industry.
Thoughts on AI in chemical distribution: what's working, what to skip, and how operators are putting it to use.
Latest posts.
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May 16, 2026Most companies say they're not ready for AI. They're skipping the only step that matters.
Setting up an AI project with your own price list, sales report, and SDS files takes about 10 minutes, and that's the step most companies skip. The technology is ready, the real gap is imagination for how to use it.
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May 15, 2026Yesterday, I posted about what NotebookLM did with the Stepan brochure. Here's taking it one step further.
AI tools are starting to blur together. NotebookLM still stands out for turning a chemical brochure into a two-host podcast you can interrupt with questions, and the other tools haven't caught up.
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May 14, 2026I dropped Stepan's surfactant selector guide into NotebookLM.
I dropped Stepan's surfactant selector guide into NotebookLM and it turned the PDF your reps already ignore into a chat, a quiz, an infographic, and an audio overview I could play in the car. NotebookLM is free.
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May 13, 2026Big Tech is running several times the EBITDA of Big Chemical.
I asked Gemini to chart five years of EBITDA for the biggest software companies against the biggest chemical companies, and software margins keep widening while chemical margins compress. Software subscriptions, ERP, CRM, analytics, AI pilots, are a growing line item behind that gap.
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May 13, 2026It's really stressful being clay.
A reflection on what it feels like to be shaped by forces you don't control, told through the image of a lump of clay under a sculptor's hands. For me the sculptor is Jesus Christ, and the job each day is just to stay soft instead of hardening against it.
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May 12, 2026Your P&L looks normal. You feel EBITDA is too low. You're probably right.
When a distributor is tight on margin, I look past pricing to where the data lives, since manual rekeys and confirming stock by phone hide real costs inside line items that all look normal on the P&L. Cleaning up those workflows can move EBITDA 50 to 100 basis points.
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Dow Chemical cut 4,500 jobs and replaced them with AI. That cut might be too deep.
Dow cut 4,500 jobs and leaned on AI to cover the gap, and I think that cut goes too deep on technical depth. The formulation knowledge that technical sales reps carry moves to whoever is closest to the customer, so distributors who hire and train real chemistry depth will take accounts from the ones who don't.
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Your chatbot is one bad answer from a lawsuit. An airline learned that the hard way.
Air Canada's chatbot gave a customer wrong bereavement fare information, and a tribunal held the airline responsible for every word on its website, awarding an $812 refund. If you're using AI in sales, support, quoting, or scheduling, every output is a legal exposure to treat like one.
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May 8, 2026An AI-powered police report tool in Heber City, Utah, drafted an official report saying an officer transformed into a frog.
An AI police report tool in Heber City, Utah wrote an official report claiming an officer transformed into a frog, after picking up movie dialogue playing in the background. A reminder that every AI output has a frog hiding in it, so never publish one without a human checking it first.
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May 8, 2026Here's the old site vs. the new site.
A few people asked what the old site looked like, so I posted a before-and-after. The new site took three hours to build.
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May 7, 2026Claude rebuilt my website this weekend. Not a wireframe or a draft. The actual site, copy and code.
Claude rebuilt my entire website in about three hours of back and forth, copy and code, and saved me roughly $10,000 versus paying a developer. The cost of designing, writing, and deciding has collapsed, and that applies to every industry, chemical distribution included.
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May 7, 2026Nine Claude agents. One research task. Eight researched. One verified the rest.
For a client research task I ran eight Claude agents in parallel on market data, supplier trends, and pricing, with a ninth agent supervising to flag contradictions and cut anything it couldn't source. The output was clean enough to act on.
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