Is AI the modern-day Industrial Revolution?
Is the advancement of AI the 21st century equivalent of the Industrial Revolution? For better or worse, there’s no escaping the grip this technology now has on the world. We look at how AI is reshaping spirits distribution.
“When you have a value chain with five, six, seven stakeholders that all want and need to earn money from a moving product, that is super interesting to look at with an AI mindset because moving the bottle physically is obviously a physical job, but everything around that is basically something you can potentially automate, digitalise, and with AI that just becomes much easier, much faster, much more efficient,” says Morten Stengaard, CEO of Bemakers.
“Then when you look at the same chain but from the other end, then it’s about insights, knowing who actually sells what and at what prices in this chain.
“But the reality is that data almost never ends back with the brand, so the brand doesn’t know what this restaurant in London paid for its product because there’s five or six stakeholders in between. So that’s another place where if you automate and digitalise all of this, which just becomes 10 times easier with AI compared to normal digital technologies, then you can move that insight back in the chain so that there’s much more transparency, and that ultimately leads to control for the brand.”
The ability to harness the power of AI to collect more data is where this rapidly evolving technology can “make the biggest impact”, Morten believes.
However, he equally supports the need for people to be at the heart of the industry.
He explains: “The spirits industry is still very much a relationship-driven industry, and that will continue – and should continue – because that’s where if you have a brand, then it’s interesting for, say, a bartender because there is this relationship with the brand.
“If the value chain uses, let’s say 80% of their time on managing everything around the relationship, and maybe 20% on the actual relationship, then I think AI can basically help swap that around, so that you start spending 80% of your time on relationships and only 20% of time on all the stuff to back that up because you can automate. You can make faster, better decisions.”
Bemakers was built to offer an alternative route to market for beverage brands from the more traditional distribution channels. Bemakers looks after excise duties and VAT rates, much like a traditional distributor/importer, and also offers warehouse storage for products. For a subscription fee, brands can ship a pallet to a Bemakers warehouse, which still belongs to the brand, who can then go out into the market to sell, or employ the skills of Bemakers’ sales consultants. As Stengaard has previously mentioned to The Spirits Business: “You also have full control. You can do e-commerce or Amazon, but you can also sell directly to restaurants and bars.
“The main difference here is brands have much more control with Bemakers, but it also means they have to invest more upfront; in that sense, they share some of the risk.”
Across the spirits industry, the rate at which brands are embracing AI differs, Stengaard says. Smaller brands are “going all in” with AI, and many larger companies are also “pretty intent on also using AI”. However, a number of bigger firms are more hesitant to adopt AI, Stengaard says, advising: “You should go all in because at the speed that AI is coming now, if you don’t go now, then six or 12 months down the road you’ll be toast.”
He reflects on the past 12 to 18 months and the speed at which AI tech has developed and gone mainstream. In 2026 alone, he notes how “insanely efficient” platforms like ChatGPT and Claude are compared with this time last year.
Bemakers is building its own specific AI platform, Bemakers AI, which incorporates technology to essentially manage end-to-end relationships for brands, with pricing data, product data, customer data, etc. “What we’re building with Bemakers AI is basically the interface for our brand partners to engage with the data,” he says. Bemakers will use the “standard AI model”, and is currently experimenting with ChatGPT’s model, Claude, Gemini and others. The Bemakers AI platform will use these larger models, but tweak them to specifically work in the context of Bemakers and its alcohol beverage clients.
“If we work with a big brand partner that’s all in Claude, for example, they should be able to basically connect Bemakers with their own Claude,” Stengaard says. “Any data they have outside of the Bemakers platform can still impact their decisions, and so forth.
“That’s where I think the world will go; there’ll be someone like us that’s specialised in certain industries and really, really making the industry efficient, but that stands on the foundation of some of the big guys. That’s where we see ourselves and how we can change the beverage industry from an AI point of view with Bemakers AI because we can make it much more efficient because we have all of this data.”
Jobs at risk
As AI continues to evolve, the impact on jobs has already been felt in certain industries. Just last week, US distributor Southern Glazer’s confirmed it would be cutting around 1% of its workforce in the US as it moves to a ‘hybrid’ customer service system, which will utilise AI to help the company adapt to market changes.
Stengaard says it is inevitable that jobs will be lost due to AI – but stresses the need for human interaction to work alongside AI technology.
“We will see with AI, many more tasks are basically being made redundant or automated,” Stengaard adds. “But the bottles still need to be moved from A to B. The drinks still need to be created. There’s still someone that needs to do these things, these jobs. But everything around it and how it gets done can change.
“Think about it – bartenders are creating drinks, but the whole RTD [ready-to-drink] space is basically an alternative to bartenders creating drinks, right? The job still needs to be created.
“It’s not directly related to AI, but it’s just to say we will see much more of that. And if you want to still have a job tomorrow, then you have to think hard about what you can do that AI doesn’t do.
“And as I continue to tell my team, the relationship part, it will not go away. You still need to have a good relationship with a bartender to sell to them. But when he texts you at night and says, ‘Hey, I need another six bottles of this gin’, then AI can consume that order, create the order, answer him and say, ‘Hey, great, I’ll get that ready for you and we’ll ship it tomorrow’. That can all happen automatically. It saves time and creates value.”
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