That’s a wrap on NBWA’s 89th Annual Convention & Product Showcase. Nearly 1,800 distributors, suppliers and industry partners spent October 11 to 14 at the Hyatt Regency Orlando, and the Motus team was right there with them. We caught up with a lot of our beverage distribution customers, met plenty of new faces and had some of the best conversations we’ve had at a show all year.
Beverage distribution has always been a strong industry for us, and this year’s agenda made it easy to see why. Across 19 education seminars covering everything from agentic AI to rising fuel costs, one thread kept showing up: distributors are under pressure to get more out of what they already have, and they want better data to decide where to invest next.
Here’s what stood out.
What’s on distributors’ minds
AI is moving from hype to “show me the ROI”
AI was all over the agenda, but the tone was practical. Sessions like “Beyond the AI Hype: Real Deployments in Beverage Distribution” and “The Agentic Future of Beverage Distribution” focused on where AI is paying off today in ordering, forecasting and reporting, and where the hype still runs ahead of reality. Another session made the case for AI agents that watch operations around the clock and flag problems before anyone has to pull a report.
The common thread: AI is only as useful as the data underneath it. And one of our favorite session titles, “What AI Can’t Do? Lead People,” was a good reminder that better tools work best in the hands of better leaders.
Every mile and every minute costs more
Margins came up again and again. One session looked at how distributors are managing rising fuel costs by taking miles out of their delivery networks without hurting service. Others dug into order accuracy and cost-to-serve, automation as consolidation reshapes the industry, and even onsite healthcare as a way to bring down workers’ comp spend. Distributors are looking hard at every line item, and they want data that shows exactly where the waste is.
Selling time is the scarcest resource
A big share of the lineup focused on field sales performance: coaching that builds real selling habits, the behaviors that separate good reps from great ones, and how to deploy people and routes so teams spend less time on low-value work and more time in front of retailers. One leadership session even had attendees run a time audit on their own week.
The takeaway for sales leaders: growth doesn’t always mean more reps. Often it means getting more out of the time your reps already have.
Distributors are rethinking the foundation
With portfolios expanding into spirits, non-alcoholic options, energy drinks and more, several sessions stepped back to ask bigger questions about structure, benchmarking and where to invest next. If the week had an unofficial motto, it was something like: evaluate honestly, then act intentionally.
What we took away
Distributors are taking a closer look at delivery routes, warehouse operations and sales coverage to find opportunities to control costs and improve performance. But one area that may deserve more attention is how they manage employees who drive to customer accounts every day.
Employee driving programs have a direct impact on vehicle spend, field productivity and corporate risk exposure—making them another opportunity for distributors to put better data to work.
- Selling time: Every hour a rep spends on mileage reports is an hour they’re not spending with retailers. Motus GPS mileage capture reduces time spent on manual mileage logging by 92%. Motus also gives sales leaders visibility into business driving patterns and time spent at customer locations, helping them identify opportunities to improve field productivity
- Rising costs: Fuel prices don’t just hit delivery trucks – they show up in every vehicle including the field team. A reimbursement program aligned to actual driving and local costs helps keep that spend fair and under control as conditions change.
- Smarter decisions: Employee driving data is business data. When reimbursement, productivity and risk data live in one platform, leaders can spot outliers, compare against benchmarks and adjust the program as the business evolves, instead of setting it and forgetting it.
Those were the conversations we kept having at the booth, and they’re the ones we’re excited to keep having with distributors heading into 2027.
Thanks, Orlando
A huge thank you to NBWA for another great convention, and to every customer and new connection who stopped by to talk shop. We left with a full notebook and a lot of follow-ups.
If we didn’t get a chance to connect, or you want to pick the conversation back up, let’s talk about what a smarter employee driving program could look like for your team.
