B2B Commerce UnCut Podcast: The Unvarnished Truth About B2B eCommerce

Jacobi Zakrzewski has seen B2B from the manufacturing, distribution, agency, and IT sides. Now Director of IT at A.Y. McDonald Mfg. Jacobi shares his approach to shadow AI, how he separates useful AI from experimentation that creates more noise, and why internal adoption matters as much as customer adoption.

Episode Highlights

05:42 – Why IT Leaders Need to Understand How the Business Makes Money
16:10 – Shadow IT, Shadow AI, and Why Blocking Experimentation Can Backfire
19:38 – The Gap Between AI Prototypes and Production Software
25:00 – The Boardroom “So What?” That Changed Jacobi’s Approach to IT
28:15 – What Counts as B2B eCommerce Beyond the Website
31:47 – Who Should Own B2B eCommerce
37:05 – Two Ways to Approach eCommerce Adoption
45:02 – AI Productivity at A.Y. McDonald

Resources Mentioned

A.Y. McDonald Mfg. Co. — The manufacturing company where Jacobi serves as Director of IT.
Luminos Labs — Digital services and systems integration firm where Jacobi previously served as VP of Strategy.
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman — The LitRPG book series Jacobi recommends at the end of the episode.

Kulmohan Makhija of Azilen joins Aaron Sheehan to talk about the unglamorous reality of implementing AI in B2B manufacturing and commerce. Kulmohan shares why buyers are shifting their focus from flashy interfaces to operational systems, explains how agentic AI and Model Context Protocol (MCP) are changing system integrations, and breaks down why clean data is the mandatory "step zero" before any AI rollout.

Episode Highlights:
00:07 – Introduction: Meet Kulmohan Makhija & Azilen's AI Practice
02:13 – Interfaces vs. Systems: What Buyers Are Actually Willing to Pay For
08:04 – Why No Manufacturer Wants AI Writing to Their ERP (Yet)
08:45 – MCP Explained: From API Guesswork to Governed Orchestration
12:58 – Low-Risk vs. High-Risk: Where the Human Stays in the Loop
17:14 – The High-Speed Garbage Cannon: Data Quality as Step Zero
19:14 – Digital Product Passport: When Compliance Forces a Data Reckoning
26:04 – How an SI Sells "We'll Do Less of What You Pay Us For"
28:43 – What Happens to My Team? Reading the Room on AI Adoption
31:20 – 12 Months From Now: What We'll Stop Arguing About

Resources Mentioned
Book: Everyday Creativity by Pavan Soni
Kulmohan Makhija’s email: kulmohan.makhija@azilen.com

Sam Russo, Director of Demand Gen & Strategic Alliances at Pivotree, joins Aaron Sheehan to talk about the messy, human side of automotive data. Sam shares her unconventional path into data, explains why ACES and PIES aren't magic bullets, and breaks down what happens when companies throw expensive tech at dirty data. She also reflects on the Rebelle Rally and what navigating the desert taught her about data dependency.

Episode Highlights:
01:08 – Introduction: Meet Sam Russo & Her Automotive Origin Story
07:44 – What ACES and PIES Actually Are (And What They're Not)
11:35 – The #1 Data Problem That Looks Like Tech But Is Actually Humans
13:48 – How Well Are Manufacturers Living Up to ACES & PIES Standards?
15:50 – Why Missing Data Makes You Invisible (Especially to AI)
18:13 – Pivotree as Pit Crew: F1, Foundations, and Why Data Isn't "Fixed" in 12 Months
23:29 – The Rebelle Rally: 2,500km, No GPS, Never Camped Before
29:57 – Finding Your Limits (Or Not Finding Them)
30:58 – Data Dependency vs. Human Instinct
33:45 – AI in Automotive: Data Normalization, Agentic Shopping & Fleet Management
42:33 – What the Aftermarket Needs to Attract the Next Generation
47:31 – Sam's media recommendation

Resources Mentioned:
SEMA Data Co-op — Industry data standards organization
The Diary of a CEO — Podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett
Rebelle Rally — The longest off-road navigation rally in the United States
Podcast with Chantal Schweizer from Pivotree https://youtu.be/btq8K279e_k

Ryan Cosby, FP&A Manager at Salon Service Group, joins Aaron Sheehan for a ground-level look at B2B beauty distribution. Ryan shares how SSG manages cost-to-serve across multiple channels, wrestles with pricing complexity and margin leakage, and navigates the messy realities of month-end close. He also breaks down what vendors need to bring to the table to earn a yes from finance.

Episode Highlights:
00:35 – Introduction: Meet Ryan Cosby & Salon Service Group
01:50 – How SSG's Distribution Model Works: Salons, Licenses & the Back Bar
03:25 – Cost-to-Serve: Is the Digital Channel Cheaper?
06:00 – Giving Reps Visibility Into eCommerce Behavior
07:34 – Commissioning Reps on eComm Sales and Why It Matters
08:50 – Pricing Complexity: Custom Agreements and Margin Leakage
12:40 – Sales Tax Complexity and Why SSG Uses Vertex
15:00 – The Tech Stack: System 2000, Qlik, and Excel
18:58 – Month-End Close: Reconciling Two Different Data Structures
22:07 – AI in FP&A: What SSG Is Piloting With Qlik
26:00 – What a Vendor Business Case Needs to Survive an FP&A Review
30:35 – Advice for Digital Champions Making the Case Up the Chain
34:45 – Payments Across Channels: Cards on File, Chargebacks & Debit Card Risk
39:16 – Ryan’s media recommendations

Resources Mentioned:
Qlik — BI and analytics tool used by SSG
Vertex — Sales tax automation platform
Imbibe Magazine — Ryan's go-to for drinks culture, recommending it as a great example of a media brand quietly and successfully reinventing itself.

What happens when you drop an LLM on top of five ERPs and a decade of M&A? Aaron Sheehan and analyst Heather Hershey map the practical path: B2B use cases that work, risks that don’t, and why chunk-by-chunk modernization beats “robot, take the wheel.”

Highlights

01:06 – Welcome back and introducing Heather Hershey
03:35 – Defining AI, LLMs, and RAG
09:30 – Why probabilistic AI makes ops teams nervous
11:58 – Is LLM an overkill compared to ‘boring’ machine learning and rule-based systems?
15:19 – The real blocker: fragmented data across ERPs and other systems
19:40 – The strangler pattern: modernize in chunks instead of ripping everything out
21:13 – Why commerce platforms become the orchestration layer for AI/NLP
24:37 – If you had $100K for AI: where to spend it
27:27 – Prisoner’s dilemma: agentic shopping and the disintermediation trap
34:53 – Agentic commerce predictions for B2B
40:30 – Are people replacing Google with LLMs?