How CDW is reimagining B2B customer experience with Sierra.

CDW is one of the largest IT solutions providers in North America, serving more than 250,000 organizations across industries including business, education, healthcare, government, and others with hardware, software, and services. While CDW has long operated in the B2B world, its digital leaders set out to bring the ease and personalization of B2C commerce to the enterprise.

"We all carry expectations from our B2C lives into our B2B experiences," said Max Brown, VP of Product Design. "And yet we’re often disappointed when the tools we use at work feel clunky or hard to navigate. We saw an opportunity to raise the bar, bringing the same high-quality experiences we enjoy as consumers into the enterprise space."

“For us, great customer experience isn't just about solving a problem quickly. It's about reducing effort and making complex processes feel intuitive," said Ben Weiss, VP of Product Management.

Together, Max and Ben lead the digital experience across CDW’s website, e-commerce platform, and Rubi—the company’s logged-in portal for self-service IT procurement. To elevate the customer experience, they partnered with Sierra to launch a conversational AI agent built specifically for their B2B workflows.

From complexity to clarity

Unlike typical B2C buyers, CDW’s customers are often managing procurement at scale with contracts, budgets, approvals, and preferences that span teams and departments. Their needs are diverse, technical, and fast-moving. And many rely on direct relationships with account managers for guidance and support.

"Our ideal was never to replace the account manager," Max said. "It was to create an AI agent that feels like an extension of that team. Someone who knows your business, understands what you need, and can help the moment you reach out."

CDW launched their agent with Sierra to handle a range of high-volume use cases, including FAQs, order tracking, and document requests—like W-9s, which can spike seasonally and create unnecessary load on support teams. These interactions are frequent and often arrive in bulk, making them ideal for automation. By addressing these needs through the agent, the account managers are able to redirect focus to more strategic, consultative support. Looking ahead, the roadmap includes authenticated experiences like account insights, contract visibility, and subscription management.

"We’re starting with foundational cases that matter," said Ben. "But the goal is to evolve toward truly personalized interactions where a customer can ask about their IT estate, get procurement insights, and manage renewals directly through the agent. That’s the kind of experience we’re building toward."

What makes this especially meaningful is the nature of CDW’s user base. IT procurement professionals operate under time pressure and within complex organizational structures. They don’t just need answers—they need intelligent, context-aware support that helps them get work done. That’s where Sierra’s ability to reason, act, and adapt in real time becomes a strategic advantage.

A partnership built on visibility and control

For CDW, Sierra’s value extended beyond the AI agent to the tools and infrastructure that support it. One standout example is Sierra’s Agent Studio, which gives the team deeper visibility into how the agent is being used and where it can improve.

"Agent Studio gives us visibility into what customers are asking and how the agent is performing," said Ben. "That helps us define the roadmap and refine the experience over time. We don’t have to guess what’s working or what to build next. The data tells us."

That feedback loop is an essential part of how the teams work together to iterate, improve, and define their roadmap.

"There’s a relatively thick layer that Sierra builds on top of the LLMs, and that makes a huge difference," said Max. "Sierra’s platform handles a deep layer of complexity—from routing and regression testing to audit traces and compliance—that allows us to focus on delivering business value and exceptional user experience. And the way Sierra has structured their teams to support our success has been impressive."

Sierra’s platform also plays a role in scalability. With tools for content management, performance insights, and rapid iteration, CDW’s product team can shape the agent over time, adapting to evolving business needs without rebuilding from scratch. It’s a system designed to learn, improve, and keep pace with both customer expectations and internal priorities.

Laying the groundwork for scalable growth

Sierra’s agent plays a role in helping serve all 250,000 of CDWs customers across industries. Unlike B2C environments where volume is concentrated through a single channel, CDW’s customers engage in many ways—through account managers, online tools, and now, a conversational agent that adds scale and intelligence to every touchpoint. As new use cases go live and the agent is surfaced more prominently in Rubi, the team expects volume to grow meaningfully.

More than just volume, Max and Ben are focused on quality. They want their agent to feel like a real part of the CDW experience: helpful, informed, and aligned with the relationships their customers already value. "This isn’t a one-and-done tool," said Max. "It’s a new channel for customer experience. We’re just getting started, but it already feels like we’re building something foundational together."

Looking ahead, Max and Ben are excited about deepening the agent’s capabilities with more contextual understanding, predictive logic, and tighter integration into CDW’s broader systems. As Ben put it, "The real opportunity is in how AI can surface patterns across customer interactions, help us proactively solve problems, and make our digital ecosystem smarter over time."

They also see potential for Sierra to help unify disparate workflows. In a landscape where IT procurement spans multiple departments, tools, and contract timelines, the agent could serve as a connective layer—guiding users to the right resources, surfacing critical information, and automating repeatable tasks.

As Max noted, "This is about creating a digital teammate that actually contributes to the way our customers work. That’s a future we’re excited to help shape."