Simplify Your Operations, Consolidate Your Spend… And Ride the AI Wave

Simplify Your Operations, Consolidate Your Spend… And Ride the AI Wave 

For the past several months, I have been talking with customers and prospects, leaning into the idea of "simplifying your operations and consolidating your spend" with Encompass. The challenging business climate and sustained headwinds of our market are increasingly making these words resonate. There is no question that, as everyone across the industry seeks greater efficiency, simplification and budget optimization are top of mind.

At Encompass, we are incredibly fortunate to be a true strategic partner with our customers, and this gives us the opportunity to work together in unique ways. We can have highly transparent conversations about our mutual business challenges and opportunities, and explore ways to work together that can really move the needle. This level of partnership has led more and more of our customers to double down on our platform and its expanding capabilities, consolidating their technology spend with us. The most important aspect of this outcome is that this strategy is a complete win-win for everyone.

Historically, our Distribution and Production customers have been built on a core Encompass product, ERP/RAS in distribution, and Production ERP for our supplier customers. The partnership dialogue and the explosion of AI capabilities have enabled us to dramatically expand our vision from one Pillar (one product) to three and fundamentally change the value we deliver. It is an incredibly exciting time, let’s walk through these three pillars in Distribution and then Production.

Pillar One: Core ERP/RAS

In distribution, Encompass has been a one-pillar company for many years. Our core has been our cloud-native ERP/RAS platform, and it will always remain our core. We will continue to invest deeply in this platform to benefit every one of our customers. And our breakout growth this past year, which I have touched on in other recent blogs, has been driven by this core platform. But this past year we sensed there may be an opportunity to add to this core.

Pillar Two: Adjacent Solution Consolidation

Working with our most strategic customers over the past 12 months, we have partnered on Pillar Two: identifying unintegrated adjacent products to ERP/RAS that wholesalers are spending on, which could be migrated to the Encompass platform.

Why have this conversation? It goes back to the opening of this blog, the need to simplify operations and consolidate spend, given the current market environment. Migrating point products to a unified platform that leverages a single data model and user experience makes everyone’s life easier and more efficient than a bag full of one-off, unintegrated products. Frankly, we were shocked by how much budget our customers were spending on add-on solutions that are often outdated and overpriced.

In software, it is a fundamental truth that platforms can deliver compelling economics for both customers and providers compared with point products. As we began delivering and defining adjacent solutions in areas such as mileage tracking, financials, forecasting, pricing, and merchandising, we committed to our customers that we would provide these capabilities as add-on modules, not standalone businesses. We can make this commitment because we can leverage our platform and scale to commercialize them for significantly less, saving our customers real money across their total technology spend. It is a textbook platform-economics case study and a complete win-win for our customers and Encompass.

So that is Pillar Two, and it has really changed the way we work with customers at a time when efficiency is as much an imperative as growth. The combination of Pillars One and Two has also changed how people evaluate a transition to Encompass, fundamentally redefining the ROI beyond just ERP/RAS. That said, Pillar Three may be the biggest opportunity for our customers.

Pillar Three: The AI Wave

So, Pillar Three: AI. As I recently blogged, AI is likely the most transformational (and disruptive) technology wave that any of us has ever lived through - and it is still just the beginning. This past year, we committed to making AI a core driver of our product strategy, and you have seen early returns with the launch of our first AI-powered products. When you see the "IQ" moniker, it is AI from Encompass:

• OrderIQ™ — AI-driven predictive ordering.
• ReportingIQ™ — AI-enabled reporting and podcasting.

But again, this is only the beginning. In 2026, we will release multiple new IQ products across various solution areas. We are not ready to announce them yet, but stay tuned, it will be an exciting year.

But we aren't just building smarter, AI-enabled software products; we're building AI agents that will deliver new capabilities and efficiencies for our customers. The leading players in enterprise software, such as ServiceNow and Salesforce, are advertising their agent-centric vision on television every weekend. To be clear, we are doing exactly the same thing at Encompass for the beverage industry - we just don’t have the budget to advertise during the College Football Playoffs :).

AI and Agents are going to truly change the software landscape in ways we cannot predict, and they are coming from Encompass - faster than you might think. We are at the tip of this third Pillar, but in 2026 it is going to continue to rapidly come to life from Encompass. Data is the enabler of this wave. In my last Blog post I covered this important AI dynamic - https://www.encompasstech.com/blog/reflections-from-nbwa-2025/

So, in distribution, it is a super exciting time. I often point out that Encompass is more than just RAS, and I hope this three-pillar strategy and the solutions we have already delivered make it clearer than ever how compelling the Encompass platform can be for a beverage distributor.

Full Speed Ahead

We were very fortunate to have an amazing year at Encompass. We are blessed to be the clear enterprise software leader in the beverage industry at a time when the market is rightly looking to technology to take on the challenges at hand. We have amazing momentum as we wrap up the year and head into 2026.

But what is equally exciting is that across distribution and suppliers, we have broadened our vision from one Pillar to three in ways that can have a real impact on customers' and prospects' operations and P&L - at a time when we all need it.

As someone who has spent my career in enterprise software, the secret sauce of Encompass is our data-centricity and the velocity of our development engine. At a time when AI demands data and velocity to compete and exploit this massive new opportunity, I can assure you that I have never been so fortunate to have this combination at this level of horsepower.

It is full speed ahead, no let up, pedal to the floor at Encompass. We hope everyone has a great holiday season with friends and family, but we are ready and raring to go in 2026!