October 22, 2026
Electrical Distribution Embraces Its A.I. Spending Era
Sonepar, Rexel and Wesco are moving beyond experiments toward operational transformation
Every five years or so, Sonepar invites its most important suppliers to Paris and tells them where the world’s largest electrical distributor is headed. On Oct. 21, about 300 executives gathered at the Palais Brongniart to hear this year’s answer.
CEO Philippe Delpech announced €500 million ($560 million) in future investments to “industrialize” artificial intelligence across the group, which Sonepar calls one of the most ambitious AI commitments in its sector. For a company with €33.6 billion ($37.6 billion) in 2025 sales and more than 571 U.S. locations, it is the largest AI number any electrical distributor has put on the record this year. It also caps a year in which the big distributors began moving some AI tools out of pilots and into quoting, order entry and forecasting.
What the Money Is Supposed to Buy
Sonepar’s release lists the targets: forecasting demand and optimizing inventory, recommending products, automating quotes and paperwork, freeing salespeople for advisory work, and calculating product carbon footprints from group-wide data. “The real challenge of electrifying the world lies in our collective ability to deliver at scale,” Delpech said.
The groundwork is already poured. Sonepar says it has committed nearly €3.5 billion ($3.9 billion) to transformation since 2021, including more than €2.5 billion for supply chain modernization and €1 billion for digital work such as Spark, its omnichannel platform. In September it launched a global Data & AI platform built with consulting firm Onepoint on Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI Foundry.
What Sonepar has not said is when the new money gets spent, how it divides by region or project, or whether the September platform sits inside the €500 million. At roughly 1.5% of a year’s sales, the pace matters, as does the North American share.
Rexel and Wesco Show Their Work
Rexel has offered the clearest evidence so far. North American digital sales rose more than 380 basis points to 27% of sales in the first half, a gain the company ties to fast adoption of its digital and AI quoting and order-entry tools. That 27% measures digital ordering, not AI-generated sales. CEO Guillaume Texier said salaries and benefits run about 10% of sales and AI could unlock double-digit productivity gains there. Then came the candid part: because every competitor is chasing the same tools, some of those gains may go back to customers through price.
Wesco is working both sides of the trade. CEO John Engel describes a data lake at the core of a single global IT system, with AI aimed at cross-selling and pricing, and CFO Indraneel Dev expects it to shorten the inventory cycle. Externally, Wesco now supplies power, cooling and communications infrastructure for AI data centers, the part of the boom that runs through switchgear and wire.
Quieter Rooms, Same Conversation
Employee-owned Border States hired Charlie Hoertz in January as vice president of digital transformation and already uses AI for lead-time prediction and warehouse labor management. Graybar named its first VP of AI and Digital Transformation, Edward Fenton, in July 2025. CED and Crescent have not announced AI plans publicly this year.
It is still early. A MDM survey of more than 400 distribution leaders, presented in April, found most expect results from AI and far fewer have achieved them.
Stock Orders Are Easy. Projects Are Not.
Electrical distribution spans two very different kinds of transactions. One is stock: wire, conduit, breakers, lamps, the repeat orders a contractor places from the truck. The other is projects: switchgear packages, specified luminaires, controls and bid jobs full of substitutions. Nearly every application on Sonepar’s list fits the first more comfortably than the second.
A forecasting model can learn how quickly a branch burns through 12-gauge THHN. A lighting package with fixture schedules, controls sequences, three approved equals and a substitution fight is a different problem. We reported in December 2023 that four of the five largest electrical distributors were using Parspec’s AI quoting software. The tools are advancing, but complex, specification-driven lighting projects may be among the last categories they handle reliably.
For manufacturers and reps, recommendation engines, automated quotes and carbon-footprint math all run on product data, so expect distributors to ask for more of it, and cleaner. And if Texier is right about price, the savings will ripple through the supply chain. The next signals arrive when Sonepar attaches a timeline and a North American figure to its €500 million, and when 2027 margins reveal how much of the productivity distributors kept.
