About Dr. Lee Allison
Dr. Lee Allison spent more than twenty years in wholesale distribution before earning her Ph.D. in Marketing from Oklahoma State University. A sales researcher by training and temperament, she has spent her career chasing one question: how do people show up, pay attention, and perform when the world around them keeps changing?
That question carried her from sales floors across the Southwest to social science research, and from building the Berman Center for Professional Sales at Eastern Kentucky University to leaving that tenured position, in August 2023, for Texas A&M's Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution program — a homecoming for a native Texan, and a chance to build something that matters. She came because it sits where her question matters most: an industry in the middle of technological transformation, students preparing to lead it, and a research mission connecting the two.
As an associate professor at Texas A&M, Dr. Allison founded the AI in Distribution Consortium (AI4ID) — the industry-funded research effort behind these books — and has co-founded and helped build others. Across that work, roughly fifty industry partners have collaborated to develop practical tools for real distribution problems, including a diagnostic instrument she created to guide organizations through the human side of AI adoption. She has taught more than six hundred Aggies in courses built to develop professional skill and the capacity to think clearly in a distracted world, and her research appears in journals including the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, and Industrial Marketing Management.
AI4ID: The Distributor's Strategic Playbook and its companion Workbook are something different: the rigor of that research, translated into the hands-on guides she wishes every distributor had.