Miron Washington, Chief Digital Officer, Parts Town Unlimited is responsible for the company’s e-commerce and digital capabilities.
AI has become a defining topic across industries, particularly as organizations consider its current and potential impact on the workforce. As a chief digital officer, a significant part of my role is understanding what AI can do and determining where, when and how it should be applied within our organization.
I suspect many digital leaders are navigating the same challenge. We’re working to harness a rapidly evolving technology responsibly while identifying applications that can improve the way we work, strengthen the way we partner and elevate the experiences we deliver to customers.
Over the past year, one lesson has become increasingly clear to me: The greatest value of AI is its ability to help people make better decisions.
That’s particularly important in e-commerce. Traditionally, digital commerce has been built around helping customers find and purchase what they already know they need. AI creates an opportunity to go further—helping customers understand the problem they’re trying to solve, determine what they need and take action with greater confidence.
In that sense, AI has the potential to transform e-commerce from a transactional channel into something much more valuable: a trusted advisor.
Turning Trade Labor Scarcity Into An AI Imperative
The skilled trades offer a compelling example of why this matters. Many industries continue to face persistent shortages of experienced technicians, even as demand for skilled-trade occupations is expected to remain strong in the years ahead.
For businesses that depend on technicians to keep critical equipment operating, the implication is straightforward: We need to help skilled professionals accomplish more with the time and expertise they have.
Technicians are essential to our business and to the customers we serve. That makes simplifying their work an important digital priority. However, the opportunity is to create smarter experiences that fit naturally into the way technicians diagnose problems and complete repairs.
When AI is thoughtfully embedded into that workflow, it can help technicians identify issues faster, reduce uncertainty and improve the likelihood of completing repairs correctly the first time. That increases the productivity of the technician while creating better outcomes for the customer.
Moving From Search To Intelligent Experiences
PartPredictor, a solution that Parts Town has developed and used, was designed to help service technicians identify the correct original equipment manufacturer (OEM) parts more quickly and improve first-time fix rates.
Initially, the solution provided a simplified search experience in which technicians could select equipment symptoms from a dropdown menu. Recent AI enhancements have expanded it into a more consultative resource.
A technician no longer needs to know the exact part number—or even the precise search term—to begin. With an equipment brand and model, the AI-enabled solution can surface common issues associated with that equipment along with information about potential repairs and the parts that may be required. As the technician provides additional details, the recommendations become more specific and relevant.
That change may sound incremental, but it represents an important shift in the role of the digital experience. Traditional search requires the customer to translate a problem into the right query. An intelligent experience can help interpret the problem itself. Instead of simply retrieving information, AI can help users evaluate likely causes, narrow their options and determine an appropriate course of action.
For technicians, that can mean spending less time searching and more time repairing. Identifying and securing the correct parts more quickly can accelerate repairs and return critical restaurant equipment to service sooner. For restaurant operators, that can translate into less downtime, fewer operational disruptions and a reduced risk of lost revenue.
We’ve also seen meaningful commercial results. Since the enhanced PartPredictor launched, conversion rates among users of the tool have increased by 54%, while transactions and revenue have each grown by more than 400% year over year.
While metrics such as these are important, the more significant signal is what they suggest about customer behavior: When a digital experience reduces uncertainty and provides useful guidance, customers are more likely to move from searching to acting.
Creating Value Before The Transaction
That lesson extends well beyond parts identification.
Historically, many e-commerce platforms have focused on optimizing the transaction: making products easier to search, carts easier to navigate and purchases easier to complete. Those capabilities remain important, but AI creates the potential to deliver value much earlier in the customer’s journey—before a customer necessarily knows what to buy or even fully understands the problem that needs to be solved.
That changes the role of the commerce platform. Instead of functioning primarily as a digital catalog or ordering channel, it can become a resource that helps customers diagnose challenges, evaluate options and make informed decisions. The value of the experience begins before the transaction and, ideally, continues after it.
That’s where the idea of becoming a trusted advisor becomes important. Trust isn’t created simply by adding an AI interface. It’s earned when the technology consistently helps users arrive at better outcomes.
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