How LAB Midwest’s agentic platform uses Ren’s API to accelerate the next industrial revolution

AI is breathing new life into America’s heartland, and Ren’s AI-powered signals are transforming how key players like LAB Midwest uncover critical dealmaking opportunities. As the largest distributor of STEM and technical education learning systems in the region, LAB Midwest plays an instrumental role in preparing students and workforces to deploy AI in physical and digital environments.

“We’re securing the American Dream for the next generation,” says Matt Kirchner, President of the mission-driven organization. “Everything we do comes back to that.”

Never missing the moments that matter

Education as an industry can move slowly, but there are disruptive, progressive educators that want to be ahead of the curve. LAB Midwest’s business depends on building long-term relationships with them.

Traditionally, identifying signals related to grant requests, school board minutes, and executive moves was a tedious endeavor and frequently led to discovering news once it was too late to act on. LAB Midwest relied on attending more than 50 tradeshows annually and leveraging personal networks to stay informed.

“I’m a news junkie and people are always amazed that I read six publications every day, but there’s like 350,000 of them out there,” says Kirchner. “What’s going on in the other 349,994? That’s where Ren helps us.”

Under Kirchner’s leadership, the organization has implemented more than 40 AI platforms, from chatbots to intelligent OCR to productivity applications. They were an early adopter of Ren, which they have deployed across the organization. Today, LAB Midwest is tracking nearly 60,000 relationships on Ren, with each user receiving an average of 54 daily signals about clients and prospects. They’re actively collaborating with Ren’s Agent to conduct research and convert touchpoints into actionable next steps.

Every Friday morning, there is a standing agenda item where team members share actionable intelligence they surfaced on Ren during the week, which is then immediately used to inform their client outreach.

“Just this morning, one of our team members saw an alert about a school district that created a consortium to meet on a regular basis to talk about artificial intelligence and how it's affecting and transforming education,” explains Kirchner. “We've got products that are perfectly tied to that, so we can go in and talk to that district and show how we can support an emerging topic for them.”

Supercharging the human touch with agents

While the standalone Ren app remains a daily driver for the team's ongoing success, LAB Midwest is now leveraging Ren’s API to develop a “top secret” internal engine powered by agentic AI. Ren’s API unifies their firm’s network of relationships and provides real-time alerts which LAB Midwest is combining with other proprietary data sources to identify deep, non-obvious market connections that human analysis alone would miss.

Kirchner views this next-generation platform as an existential competitive advantage. While he keeps the exact mechanics confidential, its primary function is to synthesize vast relationship networks and real-time market signals into highly targeted business development pipelines.

Yet, even as this agentic engine becomes critical to their growth strategy, the organization unabashedly rejects the trend of using AI to automate customer interactions. 

“Our agent is engineered to provide intelligence to our business development team to help them reach out to the right person, at the right time, with exactly the right message,” says Andy DeHart, Vice President of Business Development. “It doesn’t replace the human element; it actually enhances our relationship with our customers.”

AI's true power lies in making human relationships more essential, not less, Kirchner adds.

“The whole reason our business exists is personal relationships. As soon as they aren’t important, nobody needs a distributor,” he explains. “It’s so easy to tell if something was written by ChatGPT. If you're putting AI between you and your customer, you’re going to let that relationship atrophy.”

By using agentic AI to gather and analyze data, LAB Midwest's sales team is freed up to do what they do best: build relationships to modernize education and workforces with cutting-edge training, ultimately accelerating the next industrial revolution.