Our CEO Bharat Sharma wrote for Business Age on why so many B2B businesses are stuck in neutral on automation, and how to actually move forward.
With 80% of B2B sales now happening online and 79% of businesses planning to invest in better purchasing technology, the direction of travel is clear. Yet for many organisations, transformation still sits on the roadmap, untouched, month after month. In a recent piece for Business Age, our CEO Bharat Sharma digs into why that is, and what it actually costs to keep waiting.
79% of B2B businesses plan to invest in technology that improves purchasing experiences, and 80% of all B2B sales now happen online
Bharat has a name for the gap between knowing and doing: automation anxiety. It shows up most in businesses that were not built tech-first, organisations with strong relationships, solid operational discipline, and ways of working that have served them well for years. The processes might be manual, the systems might be fragmented, but they work. And when something works, the motivation to change it is low, especially when disruption feels risky.
The concerns he hears most often are predictable: Will we lose control? Will jobs disappear? What if we get it wrong? And because the fear of getting it wrong feels bigger than the benefit of getting it right, decisions get delayed.
In most B2B businesses, critical knowledge lives with people. Pricing, customer relationships, and order management rely on experience and instinct rather than documented systems. So it is understandable that automation can feel like handing that expertise over to a platform.
“The real risk is relying on processes that are difficult to scale, hard to track, and dependent on individuals.”
But Bharat argues that automation does the opposite, embedding that knowledge into the business, making it more consistent, more visible, and far less fragile. Instead of knowing how things work, living in someone’s head or buried in an email chain, it becomes part of how the business actually operates.
The job question is one Bharat takes seriously. In wholesale and distribution, especially, teams worry that digital tools will shrink their role. His view, backed by what he sees with clients, is that the real problem is not too many people; it is talented people spending their days on work that should not need them.
He shares the example of a large wholesale and manufacturing client in which Apex B2B introduced a fully integrated self-service capability connected to their ERP, logistics, and accounting systems. A team of over a dozen people moved away from manual order processing and customer support. No one left. That capacity went into parts of the business that had been under-resourced for years, improving both productivity and profitability in the process.
A lot of the hesitation around digital transformation comes from memories of large, expensive projects that took years and delivered uncertain results. Bharat acknowledges that reputation and argues it no longer reflects reality. Modern platforms are built for practitioners, not IT departments. Subscription models have significantly reduced the cost of entry. The real investment today is not financial, it is the organisational willingness to start, experiment, and keep going.
Alongside automation anxiety, Bharat points to a quieter challenge: businesses experimenting with AI tools without embedding them into how work actually gets done. The tools get trialled, the core workflows stay the same, and the potential value never quite materialises.
“The goal is not to make everyone an AI expert. It is to make the technology practical, accessible, and useful.”
There are already practical applications delivering real results, processing unstructured orders, enriching product data, and generating digital assets at scale. The gap is not access to AI. It is knowing where it fits and actually putting it there.
Bharat’s advice is straightforward: start with what is already frustrating your team. Find where things slow down, where errors creep in, and where manual workarounds have quietly become the norm. Fix one thing at a time. Bring your team along. The businesses getting the most out of automation are not the ones moving fastest; they are the ones moving with intention.
Read the full article in Business Age
