The most repeated advice in this year's industry coverage is also the least glamorous. Counselor's verdict: distributors do not need a sweeping AI strategy to begin seeing results; the key is simply starting somewhere. commonsku's CEO summit, whose participants averaged 42% growth, landed on the same thing with more structure: pick one workflow, not the ocean, and hold weekly AI office hours.
Here is that program, written down so a distributor can run it next Monday.
The program
One workflow. Not "customer service." One thing that happens every day, has a clear beginning and end, and annoys everyone: proof follow-ups, order status replies, supplier invoice checks, company-store order entry. Write down what it costs now in minutes per run and runs per week.
One owner. The person who does that workflow today, not the most technical person in the office. The summit's teams assigned an AI champion and gave them time to teach peers. The champion's qualification is knowing the work.
One hour a week, open door. Office hours are optional, and they exist to share failures as much as wins. The summit found that this normalizes experimentation and surfaces real applications peer to peer faster than any top-down rollout. Kaeser & Blair's Scott Baker frames the stakes for staff bluntly: "We can either choose to be Netflix or Blockbuster," and reminds them the tool is not there to take their job.
Corrections go somewhere. When the tool gets it wrong, the fix is written down as a rule, not left in a Slack thread. This is the part most programs skip and the part that compounds.
Measure, then add the next workflow. After a month, compare minutes per run and exceptions per run with the baseline. Then pick the adjacent workflow, so the second automation builds on the first.
The cost of this program is one hour a week and one person's attention. The return is a team that knows what AI is for in their business, which no vendor deck can provide.
Why it fits promo teams
Promo distributors run on tacit knowledge: which customer's part numbers map to which items, which supplier's lead time is not to be trusted, what a rush really means for this account. A strategy document cannot capture that. A weekly room where the CSR shows what the tool did with a real order can.
It also respects the barrier PPAI found: 65% of distributors cite lack of internal expertise. Office hours are how expertise gets built without hiring for it.
Where AltOps plugs in
AltOps is designed to be the tool in the room. The champion records the workflow once, narrating the judgment, and the agent runs it on its own computer across the existing systems. When it stops for approval or gets something wrong, the correction becomes a rule the agent follows next time, with a note on why. That turns office hours from a discussion into a feedback loop: each session makes the agent better at the workflow the team chose.
Start with one workflow. Meet weekly. Write the corrections down. The distributors growing fastest are doing exactly that.
Sources: ASI, "Counselor State of the Industry 2026: Adopting an AI Strategy," July 2026; commonsku, "How Distributors Are Using AI: 4 Patterns from commonsku's CEO Summit," 2026; PPAI Research, "Promo's AI Challenges and Opportunities."
Written by Kavish Soningra, teaching agents to run the back office at AltOps.
