It’s been a tough start to the year for Britain’s builders’ merchants. The war in the Middle East is seriously weakening the economy and interrupting global supply chains, and the Construction Products Association has downgraded its 2026 forecast to a -2.5% contraction in construction activity with private housebuilding and RMI most affected. After a difficult end to 2025, this is not the Q1 merchants were hoping for.

With margins under increasing pressure, merchants are searching for new ways to optimise operations and improve customer retention in very difficult market conditions. Like many other sectors and industries, AI is increasingly seen as the ‘go to’ business improvement. But without proper execution, results can be mixed.

That’s because there are several common misconceptions about AI. In our experience, many businesses think they’re using AI when they’re just using automation. For example, an automated invoicing system sends out customer invoice reminders using preset rules, while an AI-driven system learns from historical data and can predict which customers will pay late and adjusts the approach accordingly. That added layer of intelligence is where the magic happens, turning data into insight and real business improvement.

For builders’ merchants, AI can be a highly effective tool for customer retention. There are many applications, but one could be to help identify at risk accounts by using AI to look for pattens in order frequency, order size and category breadth. Is this customer buying more or less? Are they now getting certain products elsewhere?

These behavioural insights become the basis for a timely call or visit from the sales team. AI can’t replace the personal touch, the relationship and power of a conversation: it can support it. What can we do to win your business back? Using AI tools, shifts the focus from reactive to best practice proactive customer management and retention.

There has never been a more appropriate time to introduce AI to your operations. With it, merchants can drive efficiency and customer satisfaction in the short term and keep their foundations solid and build for future growth as the market recovers.

ECI Spruce eCommerce offers merchants AI assisted support across many aspects of the building supply chain from AI-generated bills of materials and the automated assessing and prioritising of warranty requests, to improving service levels through AI-powered service calls and AI-driven sentiment tagging to understand what your customers value.