Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay, and HVACR wholesalers who adapt it to their purposes, while not forgetting that it can’t replace the human factor in business transactions, will fare best as it comes into broader use.

That was the major takeaway of two well-attended presentations on AI made during the recent Heating, Air-conditioning & Refrigeration Distributors International (HARDI) conference in Phoenix, Arizona.

AI can be a writing prompt, a sales coach, or a tool that scans data to find sales opportunities, gleans useful information from an electronic chat, or scans a written document and summarizes it, said James Gerdes, president and CEO of WebPresented, a software company specializing in customer relationship management (CRM) products.

“It would take something monumental for this not to be a mainstay of our lives” for many years, said Gerdes, whose talk focused on Open AI and ChatGPT.

“Technology’s not going to solve everything, but you need to know how to use it,” said Nelson Valderrama, CEO of Intuilize, which offers AI-based pricing and inventory optimization tools. Valderrama, like Gerdes, spoke about the different uses of AI — delivery route planner, inventory manager, chatbot assistant, and more — but also stressed, “AI’s not for everything.”

Here are some of the other points made during the presentations:

• It’s not going away. “There is no turning back,” Valderrama said.
  As an analogy, Valderrama noted that digital map formats, like Google Maps, have become commonplace in a relatively short span. “I tried to teach my kids how to use a regular map and they laughed at me,” he said. Like Google Maps, AI will become adopted by the culture, he suggested.
• AI is impersonal by nature and cannot, Gerdes said, supplant the importance of relationships in business. “By no means do we believe that AI is going to replace that,” he said.
• It can boost sales. In a study involving wholesaling, Gerdes said, sales data were tracked for five months after AI was introduced into the process and compared to the data from the 24 prior months. The study noted an average sales increase of $92,000 per sales representative, per month, following the introduction of AI, he said.
• As AI becomes more prevalent — in writing text, for example — people are going to better learn how to recognize it. “Humans are going to get extremely sensitive to something that was AI-generated,” Gerdes said.
• Among distributors who haven’t employed AI, Valderrama said, there are some common reasons for not doing so. Oftentimes, either: 1) They don’t know about it, 2) They are averse to it, or 3) They don’t see a clear return on investment.
• Companies must protect proprietary and sensitive information when using AI. Generally speaking, Gerdes said, any information that’s entered into an AI program, adding to its knowledge base, could potentially be repeated back to other users of that system.
• As adept as AI has become in tackling certain functions, it still requires human oversight.
  “We have to be cautious about how we use it and always make sure there’s a human element as well,” Gerdes said. “Humans are always going to be smarter than AI, in my opinion.”