Lead photo: SRS Distribution Building Products President Kent Gardner (left) and InstaLILY Founder and CEO Amit Shah (right) address attendees of InstaLILY’s AI Innovation Summit held at SRS’ McKinney, TX headquarters on Sept. 4. (MDM photo)

When The Home Depot announced its $18 billion acquisition of SRS Distribution in June 2024, much of the market focused on scale: the expansion of The Home Depot’s professional customer base and SRS’s 760-location footprint. But behind the headlines, a quieter transformation has been taking place — one that reveals how the future of distribution is being reshaped by artificial intelligence.

At the center of that shift is a partnership between SRS Distribution and InstaLILY, a young but fast-rising technology provider whose “agentic AI” platform is designed to enhance human capabilities across sales, service and operations. What began as an exploratory engagement in late 2022 has since become a cornerstone of SRS’s growth playbook, and, increasingly, a bridge into The Home Depot enterprise.

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This was on full display at the SRS Distribution Inc. x InstaLILY AI Innovation Summit, held Sep. 4 at SRS’ headquarters in McKinney, TX. The one-day event brought together C-suite executives from SRS customers to suppliers and technologists to discuss the next phase of AI integration within the enterprise.

Executive attendees learned from a full day of sessions led by expert speakers from SRS, InstaLILY and several other industry leaders. For those in technical roles, a “Hackathon Track” provided a practical platform to develop AI-driven solutions, with prizes awarded for exceptional innovations.

MDM was invited to the event, where we were able to sit down with InstaLILY’s Founder and CEO Amit Shah and SRS Distribution’s Building Products President Kent Gardner to ask them about the why behind the partnership, what both sides are getting from it, and what they plan to pursue together in the near future.

The Challenge: Finding New Engines of Growth

SRS’ Gardner recalls the backdrop clearly: It was late 2022/early 2023, and the building products sector — and wholesale distribution in general — was emerging from an unusual period of high demand and constrained supply. That dynamic had temporarily masked the underlying challenge that every distributor eventually confronts — how to consistently spark organic growth.

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“We knew we needed to highly energize and charge both our sales folks and our customer base,” Gardner explains. “But we didn’t want an off-the-shelf system. We wanted a partner who would listen, iterate with us and help us build the right solution.”

That search led SRS’s private equity sponsors at the time, Berkshire Partners, to make the introduction to InstaLILY, which had already been working with other portfolio companies on similar challenges. One of them is foodservice parts distributor Parts Town — a longtime industry tech innovator — which was also well-represented at the AI Innovation Summit. 

From the beginning, Gardner says, the conversation was not about software demos or prepackaged features. “It wasn’t a sales call. It was a listening, exploratory opportunity,” he said. InstaLILY’s team asked probing questions — about growth bottlenecks, unintended consequences and untapped opportunities — before shaping potential use cases.

InstaLILY’s Approach: From Systems of Record to Systems of Action

For InstaLILY Founder and CEO Amit Shah, SRS was exactly the kind of partner his team had envisioned when they launched just two years earlier.

“When we started out, there wasn’t yet the buzz around agentic AI,” Shah notes. “Our founding principle was to help companies move from systems of record to systems of action — deploying AI agents we call ‘InstaWorkers™’ that don’t just store data, but actively help people do their jobs better.”

The appeal for SRS was immediate. In Shah’s words, the company was already an industry leader, but it wanted to set the tone for customer experience, delivering a state-of-the-art service for the thousands of contractors it supports.

“They had worked with other teams before us, but when they saw our platform and the pace at which we co-deploy, they got very excited,” he says.

A small pilot quickly expanded into full implementation. Today, InstaLILY’s AI agents are embedded across SRS’s sales organization — supporting outside sales reps with insights that translate directly into customer solutions.

What Each Side Gains

The partnership has been a two-way exchange. For SRS, the benefits are tangible: faster speed-to-market with customer tools, stronger sales enablement and a repeatable way to identify and act on growth opportunities. Gardner calls the approach “positively discontent”: grateful for today’s results, but always pushing for the next improvement.

For InstaLILY, the collaboration provides not only a proving ground but also a marquee reference in distribution. The SRS case study serves as a practical exercise it can take to other industries and verticals.

The Home Depot’s purchase of SRS — completed in June 2024 — didn’t complicate things for InstaLILY, but rather provided fuel for expansion. 

“When Home Depot saw the quality of what we were doing, they saw an opportunity to scale these capabilities across the enterprise,” Shah says.

Looking Ahead: Scaling Across Functions and Business Units

The next 12 to 18 months promise a rapid scaling of the platform. On the SRS side, outside sales reps are already fully onboarded. SRS Chief Technology Officer Cory Gundberg told MDM that SRS management has tested and learned from its building products sales leaders and is in the process of expanding those insights to branch managers and then onward to the company’s subsidiaries, Heritage Pool and Landscape Supply, and beyond. 

“InstaLILY came in asking the right questions: Where are your bottlenecks? What’s not working for your sales reps? And how can we fix it together? That mindset made it possible to scale from a pilot to 1,000 reps across 760 branches,” Gundberg says. “This partnership has shifted the focus to enablement by giving our teams insights that drive actions and measurable business outcomes. What excites me most is what’s next: bringing that same capability to Heritage and beyond, because now we’re not just reacting to what has happened, we are shaping the future.”

Gardner adds: “Imagine every rep calling customers with actual solutions to real problems. That’s where we see another level of explosive growth, regardless of what the economy puts in front of us.”

SRS formed Heritage in 2019 as a subsidiary to acquire additional independent irrigation and landscape supply businesses.

For InstaLILY, Shah sees the trajectory in similar terms, but across multiple business lines.

“We started in roofing, and we’re rolling out to Heritage and beyond,” he says. “The idea is to keep building value-creation engines that continuously unlock growth. Unlike incumbent players who deploy agents locked into their own software, our approach is cross-functional and technology-agnostic. It rewires companies to operate faster in every dimension, fundamentally changing their competitive position.”

Beyond Partnership: An Industry Platform

Both leaders are quick to point out that this collaboration extends beyond bilateral benefit. The recent AI Innovation Summit was designed as an industry-wide platform for learning. Executives heard from peers and experts about real-world AI adoption, while technologists joined a hackathon to prototype new solutions.

“We go back to our mission statement: Make Money, Have Fun and Give Back,” Gardner says of SRS. “The Give Back part here is sharing what we’ve learned so others can share back with us. Collectively, the whole industry gets better.”

Shah echoes that sentiment: “This isn’t just a vendor-led outcome. It’s outcome-driven by people in the industry who want the industry to get to a better place. Distribution is complex, but that complexity makes it the perfect arena for agentic AI.”

Kent acknowledged that the AI Innovation Summit isn’t meant to be a one-time event, but something SRS holds annually with InstaLILY, spurred by the industry’s continued appetite for AI thought leadership and practical application examples amid the technology’s rapid evolution.

The Bigger Picture

The SRS-InstaLILY story is about more than one distributor or one technology platform. It’s a case study in how distribution leaders can engage with emerging technology not as passive buyers of software, but as co-creators of new growth engines. It’s also a glimpse of how AI partnerships are reshaping industry boundaries, as solutions proven in one vertical migrate to adjacent businesses under shared ownership structures.

In an era where competitive advantage is increasingly measured in speed of execution, the SRS-InstaLILY partnership illustrates the new playbook: listen first, build iteratively, scale fast and share learnings widely. As both companies put it, the future of distribution will belong to those who are not just willing to adopt AI, but eager to rewire their organizations around it.