Lead photo: Kevin Reid-Morris speaks on-stage at MDM’s 2024 SHIFT Conference. (MDM Photo)

With MDM’s SHIFT Conference coming up on May 13-15th in Denver, we’re rolling out a series of podcasts that feature speakers who will be at the event. 

These shorter episodes look to help familiarize our audience with those speakers, preview what they plan to share at SHIFT and why it’s important and provide some meaningful nuance into their areas of expertise.

You can find all the SHIFT details — including the agenda, registration and hotel info — at MDM.com/SHIFT. 

First up in this series is our morning keynoter for the first full day of SHIFT, Kevin Reid-Morris and his conversation with MDM’s Tom Gale.

Reid-Morris has led much of MDM’s research into AI applications and use cases among distributors, constantly interviewing companies that have integrated and scaled their use of the technology. He was the author of MDM’s AI Playbook that we published in late 2023, and is set to release the results of a two-year project conducted with Epicor.

That project was centered around collecting more than 50 use cases of AI in distribution, then analyzing the qualitative and quantitative results to find common threads between them.

Reid-Morris will dive into those results when he delivers a keynote to kick off the first full day of our 2025 SHIFT conference on May 14 in Denver.

As a primer, Reid-Morris shared some of that research during MDM’s virtual AI For Distributors Summit that we held on March 12 and is now available on-demand.

At SHIFT, he’ll provide a more extensive look not just that AI research, but also his other business model studies that have shown what separates top-performing innovators from the pack. Reid-Morris previously presented his AI research findings at our 2023 SHIFT event, and the past two years of investigation have only deepened the takeaways for our audience of distribution leaders.

Our latest MDM Podcast features Reid-Morris’ recent conversation with Tom Gale about this topic — which has plenty of rabbit holes to go down — but keeps a focus here on real-world innovation examples that distributors can learn from.

Listen to the episode via the audio player above, and you can find all of our past MDM Podcasts here.