Ann was months away from selling her distributorship. She spent two decades building it but was burned out, mostly from carrying multiple roles alone (ops, HR, leadership, sales). By her own admission, she was doing all four roles poorly.
Then, something strange happened. At 60 years old, when many begin to taper their tech adoption, she started adopting AI and began to see how much of her ops work she could automate. Next, she let it shoulder some of her HR admin work. By focusing AI on aspects of the job she wasn’t proficient at, it freed her for the two roles she was exceptional at: leading her team and selling.
She told me, “This is the first time I’ve been excited about this business in years. I’m not thinking about selling anymore. The business is interesting again.”
“Ann” isn’t her real name. I’ve changed the name to protect the distributor who told me this story. Over the past few months, I’ve spent time with distributors one on one and in focus groups, hearing about their experience with AI. Ann’s not alone. I keep meeting people who are excited about what’s suddenly possible, excited in a way I haven’t seen in years.
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The headlines argue otherwise. Tech layoffs. Newsrooms shedding staff. Every quarter, another “AI-replaces-X” story. What I hear in one on ones is the opposite: People engaged, automating the tedious work they no longer have to touch. Or at the very least, excited by the possibilities.
If this continues to play out, what will our industry look like in the next 15 years?
‘What’s Killed Creativity In This Industry…’
This industry has been hard at work perfecting a supply chain. Nearly all our work, as distributors and suppliers, bends toward that one end: project management.
It’s not a perfect supply chain, but it’s something we rarely pause to celebrate: thousands of custom orders completed every day, at a speed and success rate that should astonish us.
But along the way, as we strengthened our ops muscle, our creative, proactive, strategic muscle atrophied.
And while we were perfecting ops, the medium – merch itself – outpaced us. Buyers now treat merch as a high-impact channel, one they know carries real creative weight, but too often we’re a step behind cultural trends. While we’re busy being production managers, clients and brands who get it are the ones driving innovation in merch (at least in terms of use).
What’s killed creativity in this industry isn’t a lack of imagination. It’s that for 20 years we’ve prized project management over creative work, because we had to.
Bobby Lehew
Chief AI Officer, commonsku
But now two things are happening at once. Automation is reaching the scale we spent years hoping for, stripping friction out of the process. And the creative work itself is collapsing in time: the mockups, the presentations, the renderings that used to take days can now take minutes, seconds in some instances.
What’s changing is how we work.
Merch pros have spent decades functioning as sourcing houses. The core skill was operational: knowing the supplier, pricing the project, getting the order placed, chasing the ship date, fixing problems when the deco came back wrong. We got very good at troubleshooting and moving orders through a sequence of processes. That was the job. That won’t be the job much longer.
As automation takes over the mechanical work (the sourcing legwork, the order entry, the order status chasing, the math), the distributor stops being the person who completes an order and becomes the person who helps the client figure out what to do in the first place.
Less time on how. More time on why.
Partnership Rather Than Competition
We’ve been chained to our own supply chain – reactive, order-driven, lost in logistics. AI and automation break this cycle. As you offload more work to AI, your human contribution moves up the value chain, toward the work that deepens relationships: strategy, creative direction and client expertise.
For some distributors, that future is already here. For the rest, it’s arriving much faster than they think.
Our kneejerk reaction to AI right now is wrong. It’s to frame AI and creativity as foes, as “AI generated” versus human generated, as if there’s a competition. There isn’t. It’s a partnership. AI can make people more creative. At the very least it makes the capacity to be more creative possible. Human judgment matters more now because the number of options multiplied. The future is not AI vs. human, but humans who value AI enough to know how to wield it well.
And that’s the part I keep coming back to because creativity (or rather, ingenuity) is the part of this business people love most.
Working with new clients on new projects. Developing an idea nobody’s seen. Taking an everyday item (a mug, a jacket, a notebook) and through an act of ingenuity turning it into something that matters to the person who receives it. The design-thinking. The marketing-thinking. The experience-thinking (the moment an end-user opens the box and loves it). Those are the reasons people got into this business.
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Which brings me back to Ann, months from selling her business. What lit her up wasn’t the tool. It was that by using the tool she rediscovered the reason she built her business in the first place. Ironically, AI cleared enough of the friction in her world that she could feel human again.
That’s what makes this moment rare.
Every other disruption this industry has lived through (the recession, COVID, the dot-com boom and bust) was a wave breaking against us. Demand dropped, budgets froze and we held on by our fingernails.
This wave is different. The market forces aren’t fighting merch. They’re pushing it forward. While the digital algorithm consumes our world, the tangible object (the thing a person can hold) gets rarer and more valuable. The tools to make it are smarter and faster than they’ve ever been.
Used badly, AI produces work with no soul: plausible, but forgettable. Harnessed right, AI does the opposite. It channels your thinking, clarifies your ideas and clears the busy work from your horizon so you can see beyond tomorrow’s order deadlines and puts more of yourself into work only you would have made.
The distributor who uses AI only to do the same job a little faster and never shifts their role toward higher value work gets a shinier version of the same old grind.
The distributor who uses it to become a creative strategist, who values both automation and human intuition, promotes themselves to a different job entirely. And a better one. And they finally get to spend their days on the parts of the business they love.
Lehew is chief AI officer at commonsku, a workflow platform built for the branded merchandise industry and powering over $1.8 billion in annual volume across 950+ distributors. A former 25-year distributor, he hosts the skucast podcast, edits the industry newsletter The AI Promo Brief and speaks nationally on the future of merch and AI.
