Why Wait to Automate? A Wine Industry Mystery
Imagine your VP of Sales announcing they’ve ditched CRM for a Rolodex. Or your finance director saying Excel is too modern, so they’re switching to chalkboard.
And yet, here we are — 2025 — squinting at billbacks for hours on end and sending reps to visit every retail account like the entire industry is running for sheriff. Automation isn’t new, but for the wine & spirits world, it might as well be black magic.
We love to talk about efficiency, scaling, and modernizing — right up until someone proposes replacing busywork with bots. Suddenly, it’s “But our rep relationships!” or “This is how we’ve always done it.” As if nostalgia for manual labor is part of our brand identity.
Let’s get one thing straight: no one’s asking you to hand your label design to Midjourney or let ChatGPT pick your clones. We’re talking about automating the parts of your business that drain time, waste money, and offer zero competitive advantage.
You Wouldn’t Go Back to Washing Clothes by Hand
You’d think the realization would’ve dawned by now: humans are expensive. And using them to do repetitive, error-prone, low-leverage work is like hiring a Michelin-star chef to fold napkins.
AI-powered image recognition tools now exist that let field reps snap a photo of shelf space and instantly surface compliance issues, identify competitive SKUs, and recommend follow-up actions. Yet some teams still rely on anecdotal gut-checks and late-night email chains.
Invoice processing? Same story. AI Invoice Manager checks each distributor invoice against your deal terms in seconds — surfacing costly errors your spreadsheet wizard might miss entirely.
That’s not replacing your finance team — it’s liberating them to focus on pricing strategy, evaluate trade promotions for ROI, and make actual decisions. The stuff that grows your business long term.
Automation Isn’t the Enemy. Mindless Activity Is.
The real resistance to automation isn’t about jobs. It’s about ego.
Manual effort feels productive. It looks good in a “weekly activity report” meeting. That retail visit? You can see it. Log it. Count it. But did it move the needle?
The brands winning right now are doing less, on purpose. They’re filtering their account universe down to the few that matter, then using real-time data to align their activities with results.
They’re not chasing 100 new placements. They’re reinforcing the 10 that sell 80% of their volume. They’re not manually tracking promo performance in 40 Excel tabs; they’re using modern CRM dashboards that auto-sync with distributor depletions.
The Truth: Automation is Already Happening Under Your Competitor’s Roof.
If you’ve read this far, it’s likely we’re preaching to the choir. Pretend we’re not, though, and you’re someone who needs to hear the following:
Every week you delay automating a manual process, your competition gets faster, leaner, and more dangerous. They’re rerouting reps with AI-powered route planning. They’re answering customer surveys with image recognition. They’re sending automated nudges to distributor reps in underperforming accounts.
Yet here you are, overpaying for outdated data, wondering if it was “worth the investment. Meanwhile, nobody bats an eye at the hours of human labor you’re burning on work that should’ve been outsourced to silicon years ago.
Take a look at this bell curve from Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. Which industries do you think belong in the “innovators” and “early adopters” categories for AI adoption?
There’s still good (albeit, back-handed) news. If your winery, brewery, or distillery isn’t automating the drudgery of doing business in our 3 tier system yet, you may still have time to join the early adopters nested securely within a card-carrying “laggard” of an industry.
Final Pour
Look, wine & spirits is a people business. Always will be. But your people shouldn’t be stuck doing machine work. Not when automation can free them to think bigger, act faster, and — here’s a wild idea — raise a glass with other people. Touch grass.
Change is tough, but you don’t have to endure it alone. Make your sales and finance teams more efficient with cutting edge AI and explore use cases specific to Beverage Alcohol during our free webinar on Wednesday, August 27th at 1pm EDT.
Click here to register so you don’t miss it! We’ll send you the recording even if you can’t make it.
