I have been in eCommerce for most of my career at 3M. I started in customer service, moved onto the Amazon account working with consumer brands, and eventually made the shift to the industrial side of the business. I had never sold abrasives or industrial tapes in my life. I was not entirely sure what I was walking into.
What I found was a sector in the middle of something significant. Industrial distribution has operated for decades on a model built around field sales, deep technical expertise delivered in person, and relationships forged over time between sales reps and the engineers or procurement professionals they served. That model worked. It still works, in many ways. But it is no longer enough on its own, and the companies that understand that are the ones I find most interesting to work with.
What Digital Transformation Actually Looks Like From the Inside
Digital transformation is not a project with a launch date. It is an ongoing process of helping people across the organization understand why digital matters, what it requires of them, and how their work fits into a larger picture that most of them have not had to think about before.
A large part of my role is internal education. That means building process maps that show teams how product data moves from one system to another, and where it gets stuck. It means explaining to people who have spent their careers in field sales why the way a product is described online determines whether a distributor’s customer can find it, and whether they trust it enough to add it to a cart. It means having the same conversation in different ways depending on who is in the room, because the needs of a division marketing team are different from the needs of a sales team, which are different again from the needs of a channel partner trying to grow their digital business.
I have found AI genuinely useful for that last part, specifically the translation work. “Speaking digital, speaking eCommerce, speaking technology, they don’t always understand that where systems, the names of systems and the processes in the digital sense, you sometimes have to explain that differently. Then AI can totally help with that as far as just putting it in layman’s terms for a different team.” That is something I use in practice, not in theory. Feeding a complex process description into an AI tool and asking it to restate the same thing for a content team or a sales team has saved me hours and, more importantly, improved the conversations I am able to have.
Ask 3M: What AI Looks Like When It Solves a Real Problem
The project I am most excited about right now is Ask 3M. It is an AI-powered digital assistant that 3M is rolling out to engineers and channel partners, starting with bonding design challenges across our adhesives and tapes portfolio. The idea is straightforward: a customer can describe a design challenge in plain language, specify their materials, temperature range, and performance requirements, and receive product recommendations along with the technical education to evaluate them.
“You can enter into it any question you have or a solution you may need. ‘I want to bond metal to a certain type of wood, in this temperature with this humidity.’ You can enter that in. It might give you a few different solutions to consider with adhesives versus tapes, which might be better. And then it’ll suggest some 3M products.”
Before this tool existed, the answer to that question lived primarily with sales representatives, both ours and those at our distributor partners. The depth of knowledge required to navigate 3M’s bonding and assembly portfolio is real. I have been on the industrial side for less than a year and I am still learning. To expect every distributor sales rep, and every engineer they serve, to carry that knowledge in their head is not realistic. What Ask 3M does is make that knowledge available at the moment someone needs it, on whatever platform they are using, without requiring them to find the right person first.
The tool was presented at CES 2026 and received very well, and it is currently in pilot with engineers. What I find most interesting is how the feedback from that pilot is already shaping where it goes next. “It’ll be exciting to see what more they do with it once it is available,” because the initial scope, strong as it is, is almost certainly not the ceiling. People are already suggesting other ways to use it, other product lines to include, other problems it could help solve. That is how good digital tools grow: not from a complete roadmap at launch, but from what users discover once they actually have access.
For more on the technical capabilities Ask 3M is built on and what it can do for engineering teams, 3M’s announcement is a useful starting point: 3M to debut AI-powered assistant Ask 3M at CES 2026.
What I Look For in People Entering This Field
We are currently looking for interns to join the eCommerce team at 3M for the summer, and the process of reviewing candidates has clarified for me what actually matters in this work. It is not a specific technical skill set.
What I am looking for is a thirst for learning, a genuine curiosity about how business works across all its functions, and the willingness to ask questions. Not just many questions, but questions that make me think differently.
I have been at 3M for twelve years. I have worked in customer service, on the Amazon account, in consumer eCommerce, and now in industrial eCommerce. None of those moves required me to arrive fully formed. They required me to show up curious and willing to work. 3M is very good at creating the conditions for that kind of growth: mentorship programs, internal mobility, and leaders who genuinely believe that continuous learning is part of the job rather than something you do on top of it.
Where This Is All Going
The most honest summary I can give is this: industrial B2B eCommerce is in motion. The sector is not simply adopting digital tools that other industries figured out years ago. It is figuring out, in real time, what digital looks like when the product is technically complex, when the buying relationship is long-term and multi-layered, and when the channel runs multiple levels deep before reaching an end user.
That is genuinely interesting work, and tools like Ask 3M are not the end of that story. They are the beginning of what happens when manufacturers put their institutional knowledge into a form that their channel partners and end users can access at the moment they need it. The shift toward digital-first selling in B2B does not eliminate the value of deep technical expertise. It distributes it.
“Anytime I can talk about eCommerce and help people grow in their digital maturity is so exciting to me. I get very passionate about it on calls. And I think people realize that because then they get excited about it and follow up. And then it leads to a lot of to-do’s afterwards, but that can be good.”
I am looking forward to the to-do’s.