The headline number in this year's Counselor State of the Industry is easy to read as good news: 64% of distributors report using AI. Read the next two clauses and it gets more interesting. That is behind suppliers, at 78%, and behind small businesses in general, which a Goldman Sachs survey puts at 76%.
Promo distributors, the most relationship-driven and most administratively loaded businesses in the channel, are adopting AI more slowly than the plumbers and dentists in the general small-business sample.
What the 64% are actually doing
The same report answers that. Among distributors who have adopted AI, the most common use cases are still one-off tasks: creative copy, art and video. PPAI's own research says the same thing from a different angle: 88% of distributor AI use is in marketing, 36% in sales processes and 21% in customer service support.
commonsku's CEO summit this year made it sharper still. Of the fourteen distributor CEOs who answered, thirteen were already using AI for design. One was using it for forecasting or operations.
So the picture is not "distributors are behind on AI." It is "distributors have adopted AI for the part of the business that takes the least time."
Where the week actually goes
Nobody in a distributorship spends their week writing headlines. They spend it re-keying purchase orders into the ERP, checking three supplier portals for a status, chasing a proof approval, matching a supplier invoice to a job, and answering "any update on this?" emails. That is the work that scales with order count, and order counts are rising while average order sizes shrink.
A mockup generator does not touch any of that. Neither does a copy assistant.
The AI that most distributors have bought makes the sales conversation prettier. The AI that would change the P&L takes the order that conversation produced and gets it entered, tracked, invoiced and reconciled without a person carrying it between systems.
Why the operational side lags
The report's own advice is that distributors do not need a sweeping AI strategy to see results; the key is simply starting somewhere. That is right, and it explains the pattern. Copy and art are the easiest place to start because the output lives in one window and nobody has to integrate anything.
Operational work is harder for exactly the reasons the industry keeps naming: system integration issues are the top structural barrier for distributors, cited by 35%. The ERP has no clean API. The supplier portal has none at all. The rules for which orders need a second look live in a CSR's head.
How AltOps closes the gap
AltOps is built for the part of the week the 64% have not reached. An agent learns a workflow from a screen recording of the person who does it, with their narration carrying the judgment. It then runs that workflow on its own computer across the same ERP, portals and inbox the team already uses, with no integration project in front of it.
Order entry, status replies, proof chasing, invoice matching and reorder handling all fit that pattern. The distributors that move from "we use AI for art" to "we use AI for the order lifecycle" are the ones whose adoption number will show up in margin, not just in the survey.
Sources: ASI, "Counselor State of the Industry 2026: Adopting an AI Strategy," July 2026; PPAI Research, "Promo's AI Challenges and Opportunities"; commonsku, "How Distributors Are Using AI: 4 Patterns from commonsku's CEO Summit," 2026.
Written by Kavish Soningra, teaching agents to run the back office at AltOps.
