Watsco's ecommerce hit 37% of sales — and Wesco is running AI on its own data lake

Wesco is doing two things at once: selling into the AI build-out and using AI to run its own business. On the demand side, data-center sales rose about 55% to $1.8 billion in Q3 — roughly 23% of trailing-twelve-month sales — while sales outside data centers grew 7%. On the digital side, management says Wesco is expanding a digital platform designed to connect its businesses and make better use of transaction, customer, and supplier data. Its CEO says generative and agentic AI applications are now running on the company's new tech stack, against the large data set in its data lake. The scale of the build is visible in the numbers: Wesco booked $65.5 million of digital transformation costs in the first nine months of 2026, up from $24.1 million in the same period a year earlier.

Watsco's digital business is the story inside its Q3 results. Ecommerce sales reached $2.75 billion over the trailing twelve months — 37% of sales — and grew 12% over the first nine months of 2026 (10% in the third quarter alone), outpacing overall revenue growth. Adoption varies widely by market: in some markets, ecommerce penetration reaches 60–70%. Contractors are also selling through Watsco's OnCallAir platform, which let them present about 351,000 proposals to homeowners over the last year, representing roughly $2 billion in gross merchandise value, up 14%. Watsco says its digitally enabled customers continue to outperform broader industry and customer metrics.