AHR Expo 2026 Recap: What We Learned in Las Vegas

Our First AHR Expo

We brought Peregrin to the 2026 AHR Expo at the Las Vegas Convention Center (February 2–4) and spent three days talking to HVAC controls contractors, distributors, and manufacturers about what’s broken in procurement — and what they want fixed.

Here’s what we took away.

The Same Problems, Everywhere

Every contractor we spoke with described some version of the same workflow: jump between 5–50 supplier portals, manually re-key part numbers into purchase orders, chase down order confirmations via email, and hope nothing falls through the cracks.

The specifics varied — some teams leaned on spreadsheets, others on tribal knowledge — but the core pain was universal: too many manual steps, too many systems, too much room for error.

What Contractors Asked Us About

Three topics came up in almost every booth conversation:

1. “Can I keep my existing suppliers?”

This was the number one question. Contractors have spent years building relationships and negotiating pricing with their distributors. They don’t want a platform that forces them onto a new supplier network. We built Peregrin specifically to work with your existing suppliers — not replace them.

2. “How does it handle BOMs?”

The BOM-to-PO workflow is where most teams lose the most time. Estimators and engineers create bills of materials, then someone has to manually break those down into purchase orders split across the right suppliers. Peregrin automates this: upload a BOM, and the platform matches parts to suppliers, applies your negotiated pricing, and generates POs ready for submission.

3. “What about pricing — do I see my actual rates?”

List prices are useless when you’ve negotiated volume discounts. Contractors wanted to know that the platform would show their tenant-specific pricing, not manufacturer MSRP. This is a core feature of Peregrin — every user sees their own negotiated rates.

The Takeaway

AHR confirmed what we’ve been hearing in every sales conversation: HVAC controls contractors know their procurement process is costing them money, but they haven’t had a purpose-built tool to fix it. General procurement platforms don’t understand controls part numbering, multi-supplier quoting, or the submittal-to-PO workflow.

That’s exactly the gap Peregrin fills.

What’s Next

We’re taking everything we heard at AHR and folding it into our product roadmap. If you stopped by our booth — thank you. If we missed you, book a demo and we’ll give you the full walkthrough.

See you at AHR 2027 in Chicago.