For the better part of a decade, the chemical industry has been operating in a holding pattern. Demand has softened, margins have tightened, and quarter after quarter the story has been largely the same. Growth has been elusive, cost pressure is constant, and many companies are focused more on protecting EBITDA than expanding the business.
When an industry stops growing, behavior changes.
Companies look for efficiency. Buyers look for leverage. And new players look for ways to insert themselves between supply and demand.
That is the environment chemical distributors are operating in as we head toward 2026.
Flat Markets Create Openings for Outsiders
In periods of strong growth, inefficiency can hide. Relationships carry more weight. Friction is tolerated.
In flat or declining markets, inefficiency becomes a target.
This is where technology companies, marketplaces, and AI-driven platforms start to pay closer attention. Not because chemicals suddenly became interesting, but because complexity and fragmentation signal opportunity.
As you know, the chemical industry is complex by nature. Products vary by grade, specification, application, regulatory status, and availability. Historically, distributors have managed this complexity through people, experience, and trust.
What is changing is not the complexity itself, but how that complexity is being captured, structured, and reused.
The Quiet Shift Happening
Beneath the Surface
Most distributors still think of disruption as something visible. A new competitor. A new marketplace. A new pricing model.
The more meaningful shift is quieter.
It is happening in how product information is being collected, structured, and reused.
Every time a specification is shared externally.
Every time an application explanation lives only in email.
Every time a product exists as a PDF instead of structured data.
That knowledge leaves the building.
Over time, it does not just sit idle. It becomes training material for systems designed to understand products, match buyers to alternatives, and guide purchasing decisions without human involvement.
This is where AI enters the picture, not as a headline technology, but as an amplifier of whoever controls the underlying information.
AI Doesn’t Replace Distributors…
Platforms Do
AI by itself does not replace distributors.
What replaces distributors is losing control of discovery.
Once a buyer’s first interaction is no longer with your website, your sales team, or your product catalog, but instead with a third-party platform that understands your products as well as you do, leverage shifts.
That platform does not need to stock inventory.
It does not need to offer credit.
It does not need decades of relationships.
It needs accurate, normalized, comparable product data at scale.
At that point, the distributor risks becoming interchangeable.
Why the “Amazon of Chemicals”
Narrative Matters
Stories about large-scale chemical trading companies and marketplaces are often framed as impressive growth narratives. And they are.
But for traditional distributors, they also reveal something else. Scale wins when differentiation is weak. Platforms win when suppliers fail to modernize how they present and protect their expertise.
The goal of these platforms is not to support distributors indefinitely. It is to own the interface where buyers search, compare, and decide.
Once that interface is owned, everything behind it becomes a commodity.
The Role of Trust, NDAs, and Ownership
This is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable, especially for smaller and mid-sized distributors.
Marketplaces and software companies promising to organize your product data absolutely deliver value to manufacturers. The same is true for massive global distributors who will never be displaced by a marketplace.
But if you are a smaller distributor, the kind private equity looks to acquire or the kind global distributors look to absorb, the calculus is very different.
Allowing a third party to learn your product catalog, your applications, your customer patterns, and how your business actually works is not a neutral decision. You are effectively training a system that may one day compete with you, or worse, make you unnecessary.
This is not hypothetical. Platforms do not forget what they learn. AI systems improve by absorbing patterns. And once your data is no longer exclusively yours, control is gone.
This is why trust and ownership matter more than ever.
At HEXNET, we sign NDAs with every client. We have spent more than 20 years working with chemical distributors, and not once has a client questioned our ethics or how we protect what we learn.
We treat every distributor’s data as 100 percent proprietary.
Our role is not to aggregate, resell, or reuse that intelligence. Our role is consultative. We work as an extension of each client’s team, building technology and organizing product data specifically for that distributor, on systems they own and control.
Ethics are not a talking point for us. They are the foundation of our business.
The Path Forward Is Control, Not Resistance
The answer is not to fight AI or marketplaces.
The answer is to stop feeding them unintentionally.
Distributors that will remain relevant in 2026 and beyond
will treat product data as a core asset, not a marketing artifact.
They will invest in organizing it internally, optimizing it for search and machine consumption, and deploying it through systems they own and control.
They will look less like sales organizations supported by technology,
and more like technology-enabled distribution businesses
built on trust, expertise, and ownership.
Because the biggest threat to chemical distributors in 2026 is not another distributor.
It is losing control of how your products, and your knowledge, are discovered.
Are you preparing for 2026 and Beyond?
If you want to talk about how to modernize your platform without putting your data, your relationships, or your future at risk, that conversation starts with trust. That is the work HEXNET has been doing for over two decades.
Schedule a Strategy Session Today!
