NAW Innovators Summit

Bill Brown
Chairman and CEO, 3M Company

Join us for a fireside chat offering an inside look at how a global manufacturer is navigating change and strengthening partnerships across the distribution channel. Brown will discuss evolving manufacturer–distributor relationships, leadership in a shifting market, and how 3M is preparing for the future alongside its channel partners.

Augment, NAW’s Premier AI Insights Partner, is the AI productivity platform for supply chain. Its flagship product, Augie, is an industry-native AI teammate that works across phone, email, portals, and enterprise systems to automate complex operational workflows — supporting brokers, shippers, carriers, and distributors from quote to cash. Augment has raised $110M from Redpoint Ventures, 8VC, Applico Capital and has over 110 engineers all based in North America. Learn more and explore career opportunities at www.goaugment.com.

Band automates special pricing agreements (SPAs) and rebate programs for distributors —the largest source of margin leakage in the industry. Today, teams copy-paste updates into ERPs, reconcile claims in spreadsheets, and fight through 10%+ dispute rates. Agreements go unnoticed, payments delayed, and millions in rebates slip away. With Band, every SPA, rebate, and market development fund is managed automatically. Our AI ingests vendor contracts in any format, syncs pricing updates directly into ERP, generates and submits claims, and flags opportunities to expand coverage to more customers and products. Agreements that took 30–45 days to load now publish under 24 hours.

Canals is the operating AI that automates Sales, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and Purchasing & Receiving workflows end-to-end, from order creation and customer service through fulfillment and payment, so teams can move faster, reduce errors, and focus on relationships instead of data entry. By automating order entry, inquiry handling, and downstream workflows across sales and accounting, Canals reduces manual work, improves accuracy, and enables teams to deliver faster, more reliable service at scale—ultimately deepening relationships, retention, and revenue.

Curri is the AI-powered logistics hub for the industrial supply chain, combining a nationwide driver network with smart technology to help you move faster and deliver without limits.

Didero is the AI workforce that puts physical supply chains on autopilot. For mid-market distributors, the “admin tax” of managing procurement – chasing suppliers, updating ERPs, and answering customer status checks – consumes over 70% of their team’s time. Didero eliminates this burden by deploying pre-trained AI agents that manage the entire Source-to-AP lifecycle. With our new omni-channel voice and texting capabilities, our AI engages suppliers autonomously across any channel in natural language, extracts critical updates, and writes them back to your ERP in real-time. We deliver a truly touchless order experience that requires zero behavior change or portal adoption from your vendors.

Instalily combines InstaBrain, InstaWorkers, and InstaControl into a unified AI architecture built entirely for distribution. InstaBrain is the owned intelligence layer that powers every InstaWorker by capturing how your best people make decisions and distilling it into small, specialized models trained on your company’s data, catalog, and workflows. InstaWorkers are vertically specialized AI agents built for distribution sales and service operations, already in production across 32 active distribution customers with models outperforming GPT-5 on parts relevance and core workflows live within days to weeks. InstaControl closes the loop as the observability layer, giving leadership full visibility into how AI is performing, where intelligence is being applied, and how decisions are being made across the operation.

Proton.ai is an AI-powered industry cloud built for distributors, combining CRM, product information management (PIM), eCommerce AI, and order automation into a single connected platform. Proton helps distributors streamline operations, enrich product data at scale, automate order and quote entry, and improve online customer experiences — delivering measurable gains in sales productivity, revenue growth, and operational efficiency.