Reflections from NBWA 2025: Our Momentum Continues and the AI Wave is Here and Accelerating!

Another NBWA has come and gone – It was a truly energizing few days in Las Vegas (although exhausting as always :). NBWA is a priceless opportunity to connect with so many of our valued customers and partners. The energy with our customers was fantastic – while there’s always work to do, we are all working together to advance the Encompass platform. I remain humbled by our amazing growth over the past year, even as headwinds persist in our industry. And you could feel the Encompass momentum continuing to build in Vegas as we spoke with so many exciting new prospective customers looking to modernize and take on today’s challenges.

We all know the headwinds, I do not need to amplify the words of all the industry experts. Growth is hard to find (we will take whatever we can get), but the continuing market conditions demand an acute focus on operational excellence, efficiency, and profitability. And technology is consistently being embraced as one of the primary levers on this journey.

I thought I would touch on a few of the questions I was most asked at the event and the trends I was seeing.

What is behind the Encompass momentum?

Hanging out in our booth, or at events around the venue, I was asked numerous times why so many wholesalers are moving to Encompass. What is driving our surge in growth? It’s a pretty straightforward question that I thought was worth sharing, it consistently comes down to these points:

• Our Wall-to-Wall Solution: Encompass provides a single platform that supports the operations of the modern wholesaler. One product from sales, to warehouse, to delivery, to back office.

• We Are Much More Than RAS: Our new products, e.g. MileageTracker which provides an alternative to Motus or Everlance, simplify your technology stack and consolidate your spend. Perfect timing in this environment and more product extensions are coming in 2026.

• Our Unified, Open Data Model: Data is the heart of our platform. It’s realtime, accessible and ready to integrate with your other solutions as needed.

• Cloud-Native from Inception: The Encompass platform has been in the cloud from day one, with all the security, scalability, and rapid new feature delivery that the cloud enables.

What big trends did I see at NBWA?

Although I still don’t fully qualify as a "beverage guy," I definitely still qualify as a "software guy." And obviously, the biggest trend in tech right now is AI - it was everywhere! Without dating myself :), I have been fortunate to live through most of the tectonic technology waves during my career: microprocessors, the internet and browsers (I remember the first time I used Mosaic), cloud computing (my first start-up was “grid computing”), and now AI. AI may truly be the biggest one, and we are all in on AI at Encompass!

When you see the "IQ" moniker in any of our product names – that is AI from Encompass. We have customers leveraging real AI today, like OrderIQ, which launched earlier this year and is doing predictive ordering at scale every day. And we just announced ReportingIQ, which brings natural language reporting and our mind-bending new podcast capability to every Encompass customer. And this is just the start, as we have a full pipeline of new IQ products coming in the next year!

Of course, with every new tech wave comes a tsunami of hype. New vendors show up everywhere, all touting their AI innovations. At the conference, there were little add-on solutions all over the show floor jumping on the AI bandwagon. And by the way, everyone is looking for a quick valuation windfall because they are doing AI (I have done a few start-ups)...

But beyond the hype, what truly drives AI? What is the engine of AI? Data is the engine that powers AI. If you don’t have data, you cannot be intelligent, not even smart. You have to have the data, ideally own the data, and borrowing other people's data is hard and simply not the same. ERP systems like Encompass, which go wall-to-wall, have the data. We have the breadth and depth of data to make AI real. And Encompass’ peerless data model is AI-ready. In fact, we didn't need to do anything to be AI-ready – we were AI-ready before we even knew we needed to be! This is allowing us to innovate at an incredible speed.

As an example, let me go back to that ReportingIQ product and the new podcast feature. You really have to listen to this! If you want to feel the impact of AI, take a listen. These are synthetic actors that are parsing the Encompass data model and providing a daily podcast to your team members on the state of your business. This is the future, and we were able to develop this capability in weeks because we have the data. Oh, and because our platform is integration-ready, you can complement these podcasts with data from other systems, RSS feeds, etc. – it’s amazing stuff.

 

As a career software product leader, I can tell you that the hardest thing to do is fix your data model, especially if it has been around for, say, 20+ years. You simply cannot do it, the plumbing is too deep. Encompass’ secret sauce is our unified, open data model. Our customers tell me this all the time – they get real-time data, they can integrate with ease, and because they see their business in real-time, they can measure and improve.

In the AI era, systems-of-record like Encompass will be the core of your AI strategy, and our data model is growing every day and built for high-velocity AI. We are frankly bringing out a juggernaut of new products, the majority of which will leverage AI. These aren't bolt-ons, they are built on our platform, leveraging and extending our data. They aren't standalone products from companies trying to build a business (and an exit). These new products will also leverage platform economics, being offered as modules that are easy to turn on with fast business impact, and pricing that is easy to swallow.

The year ahead is going to be incredibly exciting! We develop product at a pace I have rarely seen in my career, and we are going full speed ahead. Our platform and data are built for innovation, and now we have the power to unlock AI in incredibly exciting ways. It was a great NBWA, but the next twelve months are going to be even more exciting–see you in Orlando!

- Patrick Tickle, CEO of Encompass Technologies