ADI Global Distribution is a $4.2 billion leader in security, AV, and smart living products, serving over 110,000 customers worldwide across 20+ countries. ADI operates at a massive scale, offering access to 400,000+ products from top-tier brands and exclusive ADI brands. When you walk into a conference room with premium screens and sound systems, or rely on a building’s security infrastructure, chances are ADI supplied the products behind it.
But as B2B buyers began expecting the same digital ease they experience as consumers, ADI saw a new kind of competition emerging and search quickly became the fault line between frustration and growth. After winning Enterprise Distributor of the Year at the 2025 B2B eCommerce Association World Conference, the company continues to push boundaries in digital commerce. Leading this transformation are Stu Tisdale, Senior Vice President and Chief Experience Officer, and Hunter Brady, Global Digital Experience Product Manager. Together, they’ve orchestrated an ambitious B2B search implementation, deploying AI-powered search across a global footprint that would challenge any enterprise.
Turning Up the Volume on Search
When Stu joined as ecommerce leader in May 2023, ADI was in the midst of a digital transformation. The company identified three pillars essential to their ecommerce experience: speed and performance, robust search aided by AI, and clear presentation of inventory availability and order management, all critical for professional buyers. The team had built strong growth momentum since 2020, but as they matured, critical gaps emerged, none more pressing than search.
The data painted a stark picture: ADI’s null search rate stood at 16.7%. Meaning one in six searches returned “nothing found”. That’s a notable error rate for professional buyers who know exactly what they need. This problem affected not just external customers, but also ADI’s internal sales teams who rely on the site daily to help customers find products quickly.
“It became very apparent that our current search technology and experience was not adequate to support our continued growth,” Stu explains.
Customer feedback confirmed the issue: Through systematic importance-versus-performance surveys, ADI tracked what buying factors mattered most to customers and how well ADI performed. “Easily finding products on the website” consistently ranked as critically important, and ADI knew it had to make improvements.
The B2B complexity multiplier: ADI’s search challenges were further amplified by the unique demands of their B2B commerce business:
- Part number searches including partial numbers across hundreds of thousands of SKUs
- Unconventional search patterns like Amazon-specific product codes and UPC numbers
- Complex pricing structures with customer-specific entitlements and real-time availability
- High-intent professional buyers who need speed and precision, not a discovery journey
Hunter explains: “B2B customers shop very differently. They often arrive with a clear intent and search by part numbers, which can be challenging. At the same time, it’s essential to offer flexibility to search in other ways as well.”
The operational burden: Beyond customer impact, ADI’s legacy search created significant operational overhead. Digital merchants spent hours weekly creating manual pages and setting pinning/boosting rules. Every attempted fix risked downstream negative impacts. Ownership of search functionality was unclear, making continuous improvement nearly impossible.
The team recognized that solving search went beyond a technical upgrade; it required full digital transformation, pairing modern technology with an empowered team and strong governance to deliver an intelligent system designed for B2B complexity.
Deploying Search at Enterprise Scale
ADI launched implementation in March 2024, partnering with Perficient to deploy Coveo across their global footprint. Success in the U.S. was followed by expansion across the Americas and EMEA:
- 15 sites are now live across the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, France, Poland, Belgium, and the Netherlands
- Multiple languages and catalogs are easily managed by different regional teams
- Reusable components and learnings are allowing each new site to leverage previous work
The strategic approach to reusability paid dividends. “In the same time that we built the first implementation, we built the second through 15th implementations,” notes Eric Immermann, Practice Director for Search and Retrieval at Perficient. “The reusability of components across sites made scaling globally much faster than a traditional one-off approach.”
ADI is leveraging a targeted set of Coveo’s AI-powered capabilities to deliver a consistent, scalable discovery experience across regions. AI-driven Product Listing Pages and Query Suggestions are deployed across all global properties, providing a strong foundation for product findability. In the U.S., ADI is also using the Dynamic Navigation Experience to improve faceting and has begun early experimentation with Intent-Aware Product Ranking to create a personalized discovery experience for professional buyers. Product and content recommendations will be introduced as ADI advances to the next stage of its AI roadmap.
During the global rollout, ADI’s acquisition of Snap One – a leader in commercial and residential AV manufacturing – added new layers of complexity. By leveraging insights from earlier deployments, both in implementation and machine learning optimization, the team successfully launched Coveo on SnapAV.com – built on a completely different tech stack (HCL Commerce) – while still delivering full support for custom pricing, availability, and entitlements.
Crystal Clear Results
The results exceeded expectations from day one, with continuous improvement in the weeks and months that followed.
Search performance transformation:
- Null search rate: Dramatically decreased from 15% → 1.4% (a 91% reduction!)
- Conversion rate with search: ↑ 9.04%
- Revenue tied to on-site search: ↑28%
- Average order value: ↑16%
- On launch day alone, Coveo-powered search generated meaningful attributable revenue
Hunter recalls the launch with enthusiasm:
“The out-of-the-box results exceeded our expectations. We were bracing ourselves during the first week of go-live, but instead we saw almost immediate improvements over our current state. The fact that performance continued trending upward across almost all KPIs proved the strength of the platform.”
Hunter Brady, Global Digital Experience Product Manager
On the null search rate improvement specifically he adds: “Being able to move from a double-digit null search rate to less than two percent, is fantastic. It demonstrates the efficacy of the configuration and the tuning, as well as the AI model’s ability to learn and refine.”
Operational efficiency:
The benefits extend well beyond customer-facing metrics. Thanks to the Coveo Merchandising Hub, digital merchants save hours weekly previously spent on manual merchandising tasks, while in-store sales teams gain faster, more accurate search results to better serve customers. They have eliminated constant reactive tuning and ranking adjustments, freeing teams across the organization to focus on strategy over firefighting.
Machine learning delivers continuous improvement:
One of the most powerful aspects of the automatic relevance tuning model is its ability to learn from user behavior patterns. When customers search using unfamiliar product codes or identifiers that don’t exist in ADI’s system, the model observes how they refine their searches and which products they ultimately purchase. Within days, the system automatically creates these connections, eliminating future null results for similar searches.
Advanced analytics drive informed decision-making:
ADI synchronizes all Coveo data to their Snowflake environment for deep analysis. Using machine learning models, they automatically categorize every query to understand user intent: Are they searching by ERP number, SKU, category, brand, product description, or use case? These insights help optimize content teams and merchandising strategies.
Playback: Lessons from the Field
Rolling out Coveo across multiple countries, tech stacks, and business units taught ADI valuable lessons applicable to any enterprise B2B implementation:
1. Trust the AI
“Go in with a clean slate,” Hunter advises.”If you have a thousand search redirect rules or synonyms that you think are absolutely critical, go in and trust that you can make adjustments after. It’s more often important to try and go in with a clear vision, clear starting point, rather than muddying it up with a bunch of self-imposed business logic and bias at the beginning.”
Stu emphasizes the importance of resisting the urge to over-manage.
“We were coached not to over-control the tuning, and that was the right advice. Watching the relevancy improve day by day, week by week, proves Coveo’s say-do ratio. The AI works, it learns, and it improves.”
Stu Tisdale, Senior Vice President and Chief Experience Officer
2. Establish clear product ownership
One of ADI’s first priorities was assigning clear ownership for different areas of the digital experience. This included dedicated ownership of search functionality from both a features and technology standpoint—critical for driving continuous improvement.
3. Understand your customer behavior
Put yourself in the customer’s shoes to understand how they interact with your site. Are they primarily navigating or searching? This customer-centric perspective should inform your implementation priorities.
4. Plan holistically for change
Address URL structure changes, linking strategies, and stakeholder communication early — especially with marketing and merchandising teams.
5. Embrace continuous learning
Coveo’s extensive documentation and in-admin help made self-learning possible across 14+ implementations.
6. Be data-driven power users
ADI’s success has been driven by the combination of deep analytics and the team’s expertise as true power users – making them not only high-impact adopters of the platform but also highly valuable feedback partners for Coveo.
7. Think beyond commerce
Far beyond a point solution, the search platform serves as the foundational layer for transformation and for creating a consistently exceptional customer experience.
What’s Next: Expanding AI Across the Business
ADI’s success with AI-powered search has opened the door to broader applications of Coveo’s technology across the organization. As conversational AI experiences reshape customer expectations across industries, ADI recognizes the opportunity to leverage these capabilities beyond commerce.
As ADI looks to expand its capabilities, Coveo is ready to serve as a collaborative partner to help the business reach their goals and further elevate the customer experience.