Midwest Wheel's Steve McEnany bets on agentic AI fix loop

Midwest Wheel is a century-old truck parts distributor, not a software company, and its IT team is lean. Moving to the cloud took server management and software updates off that team's hands, freeing it to build in-demand tools in just a few weeks. That same shift added AI features into daily operations.

McEnany's answer to governance is to stick with one foundation — the Infor system — even when third-party tools come in, so there is one point of reference. The ambition he describes is agents that carry the rules of how the company wants things done and then act on them. But he also recalls a second AI tool catching a companywide sales report card, itself built with AI, that didn't add up, which is why he stresses that data and prompts cannot be assumed correct.

The pace of this shift at Midwest Wheel is likely to hinge on whether one-system discipline holds as more agents are added, and on how clean the underlying data stays. That matters most to the people running operations and finance at distributors of similar size, who have to decide which tasks software agents can handle and which still need a human.