The public conversation about artificial intelligence and work often jumps to a binary question: Will AI replace employees or not?

Wholesale distribution’s early experience points to a more useful answer. AI is changing the amount and type of work companies can handle before it materially changes the size of their workforce.

NAW’s inaugural 2026 AI Adoption Index, developed by NAW in partnership with Infor, found that 76.3% of respondents who addressed its workforce impact inquiry reported no changes on that front resulting from AI. Yet 47.4% of those who assessed business impact said AI is already having a moderate or significant effect on back-office efficiency.

• Download the research report here
• View NAW’s corresponding webinar analyzing the results here

Those findings are not contradictory. Together, they show how AI value is first appearing in distribution: as capacity.

Back-office functions are filled with the kind of work AI can address quickly. Purchase-order emails, PDF spec sheets, faxes, remittance documents, vendor confirmations, credit memos and other recurring inputs arrive in high volumes and often follow established rules. Employees can review the output before it reaches a customer, warehouse or truck.

That combination makes these workflows a relatively safe proving ground. The process already has a system of record, an approval path and a person positioned to catch an exception.

Steve Levy, Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at Infor — which sponsored the NAW research project — says the results reinforce a message the company has emphasized for years:

“It’s about doing more with less. This is not about slashing and burning.”

In practical terms, that can mean processing more orders without adding staff at the same rate, turning quotes around faster, absorbing growth without increasing overtime or allowing employees to spend less time on repetitive entry and more time on customers and exceptions.

Infor President and Chief Technology Officer Soma Somasundaram likewise notes that back-office processes tend to be more rules-based and less reasoning-intensive than forecasting, customer-facing decisions or physical operations. That makes them easier places to test automation, retain human oversight and measure improvement.

For executives, the implication is that AI’s workforce return should not be judged only by positions eliminated. That is often the wrong metric, especially at this stage of adoption.

More useful measures may include orders processed per employee, invoice cycle time, quote-response speed, error rates, overtime avoided, hiring deferred, service levels maintained during growth and the amount of employee time redirected to higher-value work.

The last measure may prove especially important. Saving an employee five hours a week creates potential value, but it does not guarantee that value will reach the income statement or customer. Leaders still must decide where that capacity goes.

A distributor can allow the saved time to disappear into the workday. Or it can deliberately redirect it toward proactive customer outreach, supplier collaboration, exception management, data stewardship and other activities that strengthen the business.

The first workforce dividend from AI is therefore not necessarily a smaller organization. It is an organization capable of doing more with the people it already has.

That is an encouraging signal for a labor-constrained industry, with U.S. wholesale trade employment just above flat year-over-year in July 2026 and up about 0.5% year-to-date. It is also a management challenge. Capturing the full return will require distributors to redesign work, define new performance measures and help employees understand how their roles become more valuable as routine tasks recede.

U.S. Wholesale Trade Year-to-Date Employment

Download NAW’s full 2026 AI Adoption Index for the complete findings and benchmarks by function, revenue band and product sector.

Are you an NAW member? If so, you have access to our AI Adoption Index web dashboard. It serves as a straightforward webpage that allows you to quickly view the results of this AI Adoption Index sorted by revenue band and/or product vertical. It’s an easy way to toggle between those views so that you can view the results in a way that’s most applicable to your business.