Beyond the Widgets: What AI Really Means for Lumberyards and Building Materials Companies

What Exactly Is AI?

For lumberyards and building materials companies, AI offers a very real, practical assist to shoring up weaknesses, identifying strengths, and positioning for growth. 

What we call AI today is simply machine learning algorithms (a set of instructions) digging into data to spot patterns and convert them into actions or output. This takes various forms. 

For example, generative AI creates new content, such as text, images, or audio, by learning patterns from existing data when given a prompt. Most of us know this as the AI behind chatGPT. Another form, agentic AI, emphasizes independent decision-making and action to perform a task. Unlike generative AI, which primarily focuses on creating new content, agentic AI emphasizes independent decision-making to turn data into actions. 

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What you Need to Know

Both generative and agentic AI, along with other AI applications, are disrupting the way work gets done in many industries. For example, generative AI can create realistic renderings of projects using various materials, aiding in customer visualization and design processes. It can also generate marketing content, product descriptions, images, and training materials, saving time and resources. Agentic AI can automate supply chain management, optimizing inventory levels and predicting demand fluctuations. It can also handle administrative tasks, such as order processing and customer inquiries, allowing staff to focus on more strategic activities. Agents can advise on detailed regulatory requirements, or pull in new data hitting the web to stay up to date on important developments in the market. Businesses can add other AI-powered layers to identify trends, forecast market changes, and optimize pricing strategies, leading to more informed decision-making and improved profitability.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the chatter and the contradictory hot takes. The reality is that AI as we know it today is a catalyst for operational transformation in jobs, C-suites, and organizations across the industry. As Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia has said, “AI won’t take your job, but someone using AI will.”

In a business like a lumberyard, a distributor, a supplier, or a building products manufacturer, the promise of AI is not theoretical. It’s operational. This is not about "digitization." It's about instrumentation: building an intelligence layer that works quietly, predictively, and on your behalf to make your current operations work more effectively.

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The Industry Isn’t Broken, But It Is Blind

You don't need to be sold on the fundamentals of your business. You move products. You meet demand. You know your market better than any outsider ever will.

But you probably feel what many others do: your data is fragmented. Your tech stack is stitched together. Your forecasting is half math-half muscle memory, and your team, no matter how talented, spends too much time chasing reports and gut feel and not enough time acting on actual proven insight.

AI can help when properly harnessed to your business processes and infrastructure. Instead of looking backward through spreadsheets, your team can start looking forward through forecasts. Instead of pulling data from five systems and merging them into a half-reliable report, you can build workflows that surface trends, seasonality, and sales signals before they’re obvious. 

The reason to explore AI is not because it’s trending. It’s because the complexity of your business has outpaced your visibility. There are too many variables, too many SKUs, too many regional nuances, too many pricing rules. And in a world where cost pressures are rising and margins are unforgiving, the competitive edge won’t go to the biggest—it will go to the best-informed.

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Moving AI to the Frontlines

Let’s examine a practical example.

Imagine your retail store wants to optimize its composite decking inventory. An AI system could evaluate the last five years of local sales data, combine it with home improvement permit data in a city or county, add historical weather trends, and surface a prediction (such as): the third week of April typically sees a surge in demand for 12-foot composite decking among mid-size contractors. Inventory should shift accordingly, marketing should begin three weeks prior, and sales reps should target known high-frequency buyers in February and March.

Or imagine your marketing team wonders when to push fencing bundles. Instead of relying solely on the intuition of your sales team (while they may be exceptionally smart and talented, they are to a degree, guessing), AI with the right APIs can gather, synthesize and analyze regional climate data, contractor buying patterns, and project permit filings to highlight a particular subset of high-margin SKU combinations for a zip code or region and customer demographic. This insight is produced in seconds. 

These aren’t reports. These are synchronized operational decisions being made ahead of when action is needed most. That’s the power of a well-structured intelligence layer.

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Don’t Sleep on It

We are in a transition from generalized AI to industry-specific, fine-tuned intelligence. ChatGPT and Gemini are impressive but blunt instruments. They are like talking to a very smart person who knows very little about a lot.

What’s emerging now are models built for specific tasks, missions and industries. Think AI engines trained on building material sales cycles, or tuned to understand mill certifications, freight volatility, rebate structures, and seasonal labor shifts, to name a few.

Over the next 1-2 years, the gap will widen between companies who adapt and those who delay. This is no longer about experimentation—it’s about execution. We will see smaller dealers outmaneuver larger competitors not by hiring more people, but by making faster, smarter moves with the people and technologies they have.

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People Still Matter

AI will not replace your best people, but it will multiply their output. The rep who knows their accounts inside and out? Give them AI-driven insights, and they become unstoppable. The manager who reviews pricing once a week? With AI, they can instead coach the team and troubleshoot far better, because pricing insights are delivered automatically, freeing the manager from hours and hours of report preparation and review. It’s not about removing the human—it’s about empowering them to make sharper decisions, sooner.

The competitors who win won’t be those who spend the most—but those who know the most, and act quickly. The barriers to entry are dropping, and its creating opportunities. A decade ago, this kind of capability required a large team of engineers and technologists. Today, it starts with one person, data, and small investments in the right tech stack.

We’re standing at a crossroads. One path is familiar—run the same reports, trust your gut, react as best you can. The other comes with risk, but rewards fast movers, and will produce tomorrow’s market leaders.

At Coffey & Co., we operationalize AI—embedding it into the core of how our clients run, think, and grow. Whether you’re a 25-year-old sales rep looking for an edge, or a 65-year-old founder deciding what comes next, we can help.