The labor section of this year's Counselor State of the Industry reads like every other year's, only more so. 75% of suppliers are concerned about hiring qualified workers and retaining employees. On the distributor side, half report concerns about finding qualified workers and half about retaining them. The hiring rate across the economy hovered around 3.5% in 2025, a level the report notes is typical of downturns.
The quotes are familiar too. Liqui-Mark's Josh Goodelman: "We would post an ad looking for a position and get people applying with no relevant experience." Compass Industries' Mike Levy: "A friend of a friend is the best employment agency you can have."
The one line that matters
Then, near the end, the report notes that suppliers are deploying AI for order processing, and that High Caliber Line has transitioned 97% of its order entry to AI, so its people can focus on live customer service and quality control.
That is the whole labor problem restated as a solution. The role that is hardest to hire for, easiest to lose, and least rewarding to do is the one that consists mostly of moving information from one system to another. Automating it does not shrink the team. It moves the team to the work that needs a person.
Why this generalizes to distributors
A supplier's order entry and a distributor's order entry are the same job wearing different logos. A PO arrives as a PDF, a webstore export or an email. Someone reads it, opens the system of record, finds the customer, keys the lines, adds decoration details, checks the in-hands date, and confirms. Twenty minutes if nothing is odd. Longer when something is.
The difference is scale. A supplier with a large order-entry team can justify a dedicated automation project. A twelve-person distributor cannot, which is why the report's own numbers show nearly 80% of suppliers using AI against 64% of distributors.
The supplier got to 97% because it treated order entry as a workflow to hand off, not a job to fill. A distributor can do the same thing without an engineering team.
How a distributor gets there
The approach AltOps takes is built for the twelve-person case. The CSR who does order entry today records it once, narrating the judgment calls: which customers send sizes across the top, what to do when the imprint colour is missing, when to flag a rush. The agent runs that workflow on its own computer against the same ERP, with approval points wherever the CSR set them. Exceptions go back to a person with the context attached.
What changes is not the headcount. It is what the headcount does. The CSR who was the integration layer becomes the person on the phone with the customer, which is the job they were hired for and the one that is hardest to replace.
Dan Frank of Silverscreen told Counselor: "If productivity goes up, we immediately increase pay." That is the right frame. The labor answer is not more applicants. It is fewer hours spent on work a person should not be doing.
Sources: ASI, "Counselor State of the Industry 2026: Addressing Labor Concerns," July 2026; ASI, "Counselor State of the Industry 2026: Adopting an AI Strategy," July 2026.
Written by Kavish Soningra, teaching agents to run the back office at AltOps.
