Be it at the EUEW General Convention in Brussels or at some of the proprietary conferences of wholesale buying groups (e.g., in Nice, Dubrovnik or Rome) last year – the European electrical wholesale industry has started to actively debate its future potential against intensifying competition via digitization, automation and artificial intelligence (AI).

As a diverse group of researchers*), we want to shed more light on the digital transformation in B2B – analyzing the European market for electrical wholesale as a typical mid-tier industry group in B2B. Our survey was conducted in February and March 2020 with 160 answers across 22 countries.

Our study shows:
 

• what companies in electrical wholesale see as business challenges today and in the future
• how many of these companies use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and which factors drive the usage of AI for these companies
• which expectations and hopes these companies have regarding the use of AI and what managers can do in order to support a positive implementation of AI
• which role (AI based) dynamic and automated price management plays today and in near future for companies with complex pricing situations, like electrical wholesale
• if price automation solutions today are in line with strategic business challenges or if they are rather isolated “pioneer projects”
• for which specific pricing challenges electrical wholesale companies plan to develop automated pricing solutions and what are preferred approaches.

You can find the short version of our study for download here.

For more details and expert discussions, please feel free to reach out to us!

_{*) Two of the authors have also published the 2016 whitepaper on “how to build a customer-centric wholesale brand”.
Download Electrical Wholesale Study 2016 here.}