Sysco LABS Company Stability & Growth

What metric/milestone best captures strength this year?

Year after year, Sysco’s biggest milestones are focused on how we’re doing right by our customers, and how we’re connecting customers with the right products at the right place and getting them delivered right on time. 

Like most of the tech sector in 2025, AI is the bedrock of our innovation throughout the year. And we’re really proud of the ways Sysco LABS is exploring and executing on making these tools empower not just our customers but who they rely on — our Sysco representatives. 

It’s clear that the way customers order is evolving as we all get used to generative search results and learn to trust AI agents to help with purchase decisions and transactions, but we know the technology alone is not going to make growth happen. We have to change our mindsets and make it happen together. 

Our latest innovations, ultimately, ensure we’re better equipped to drive that connection toward a more helpful, equitable, beneficial, human-to-human experience — with AI-powered designs that deliver smarter, faster and more useful answers to customer questions and requests. This is the foundation for our customer experience at Sysco: creating B2C-like experiences for our B2B customers.

Where are you strongest competitively — and what proof backs that?

Sysco’s history, size and the experience of our colleagues. That breadth of knowledge and experience fuels our product and engineering creativity, which in turn provides the go-to-market speed and the quality of outcomes necessary to stay steps ahead of our competitors and amaze our customers with the solutions they need to grow their business.

We’ve been part of the rapid evolution of GenAI into agentic AI, working closely with AI industry leaders to try, test and adapt these technologies to create new experiences for our customers and sales consultants. Because of the speed of change in technology, it is very easy to get immersed and lost in the technical aspects of the work. There’s so many interesting advancements and different proofs of concept to try that it’s hard to stay focused and avoid distractions with the new greatest thing of the week.

Although we’ve been doing a great job navigating this sea of change and complexity that the agentic AI industry has become, our main challenge in engineering remains keeping focus where it belongs — on our customers — and to drive the passionate, customer-focused culture that keeps us the world’s largest foodservice distributor.

What expansion bet excites you — and what leading indicator will you watch?

That depth and breadth of data and insight fuels our newly launched AI360, an AI-powered tool for sales and customer engagement for Sysco representatives. With streamlined workflows, real-time insights and proactive recommendations, we’re given more time to understand our customers’ needs, deliver value, and build meaningful, reliable relationships. 

We’ve simplified our team’s experience into a user-friendly, mobile-optimized platform consolidating deals, programs, pertinent insights, suggested actions and programs to connect better across customer visits and face-to-face interactions to deliver the best available opportunities tailored to each customer. This exemplifies how technology can create meaningful change and positive disruption, driven by AI, to empower our business and achieve the growth we’re committed to delivering.

The true basis of success we’re aiming for is looking at local sales and customer longevity, and that second part comes from our relationships. Even with all these innovations, we don’t need an AI agent to tell us that the more a customer buys and the more they sell, the more we’re able to support their continued growth and success.