Graybar's VP of AI and Digital Transformation Ed Fenton has set an internal target: give every sales, customer service and administrative employee one full workday back each week through AI. He laid out the plan on Episode 10 of the NAW podcast Distributors Deliver, recorded at the 2026 Innovators Summit in Nashville.

Fenton talked with NAW CEO Eric Hoplin. He came up through distribution himself, starting as a forklift driver in a warehouse. He still frames every technology choice around the frontline worker loading a truck at 4:30 Friday afternoon. That grounding shapes his approach to AI deployment at Graybar.

What does the one-day-per-week goal change?

For Graybar's North American workforce, the target is concrete. Fenton wants AI to handle the small repetitive tasks that consume hours: order entry lookups, product substitutions, status checks, invoice questions. Multiply one day across a sales floor, and the math turns AI from a pilot curiosity into a margin lever.

He told Hoplin he measures AI wins the way a branch manager measures inventory turns. If the tool doesn't free a person for higher-value work, it doesn't ship.

Why does he say data doesn't need to be perfect?

Distributors often stall AI projects waiting for clean, unified data lakes. Fenton calls that the trap. His argument: the distribution business runs on approximations that a precision manufacturer would never accept.

His pitch to peers: stop waiting for perfect data. He pointed to pilots that ran on messy ERP extracts and still surfaced quoting errors fast enough to recover margin. The lesson: ship the tool, then refine. Perfection is the enemy of the ship date.

How does he tell real AI from a chatbot wrapper?

The market is crowded with vendors re-labeling legacy search and rules engines as AI. Fenton drew a sharp line: a real AI solution changes the workflow. An older product with a chatbot bolted on just adds a screen.

His test is simple. Ask the vendor to show a task the old product couldn't do. If the demo relies on phrased questions and prebuilt answers, it's not AI. If the system suggests something a human rep wouldn't have caught, it might be.

What is Claw Coliseum?

Fenton runs a YouTube channel called The Final 10%, where he stress-tests AI agents. One experiment, Claw Coliseum, set AI agents loose on classic Atari games. The agents found creative exploits to game the scoring systems, scoring points in ways the original designers never intended.

The point isn't novelty. It's a public demo of how AI finds paths no human writes down. That's the behavior Fenton wants inside Graybar's order desk.

What does it mean for other distributors?

Graybar's bet is that AI moves from 2026's pilot phase into daily operations by year-end. Fenton's role, reporting alongside CEO and NAW Board Chair Kathy Mazzarella, signals how seriously the company takes the rollout. Other electrical and industrial distributors will watch Graybar's playbook closely. Those still debating vendor shortlists risk falling a generation behind on the speed-to-quote curve that now decides contract wins.