How AI Is Permeating the Promo Industry

AI is everywhere. Here’s where the promo industry is using it, plus where it will be used next.

If a promotional products supplier from 10 years ago traveled through time to today’s promo operation, what would catch their eye the most is a neat little thing known as artificial intelligence (AI).

“If you walk into any promo supplier shop in 2026, you're liable to find AI somewhere. There's no question,” says Amy Servi-Bonner, vice president of PRINTING AI.

In the couple of years since ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and countless other tools have hit the market, AI has largely been used as an efficiency booster and time-saver. For the average person, this may be enough, but businesses also need to reap financial benefits from anything they invest resources in.

“We're all talking about how we're using AI; who's talking about ROI yet?” asks Amy Rabideau, chair of PromoStandards and a longtime leader in promotional products technology. “That return on investment is so important.”

For her part, Servi-Bonner isn’t seeing AI hit the P&L for the promo industry — yet.

“The promo industry is very much at the same crossroads as commercial print was about five years ago, where there's a gap between ‘We're using AI’ and ‘AI is challenging how we run the business,’” she says. “That gap is wider than most companies in promo want to admit. The good news is there's a path through that isn't a mystery or isn't something that's going to cost an arm and a leg. It just requires a different type of conversation than most of these promo guys are really ready to have.”

Where Promo Suppliers Are Using AI

While many may not be seeing ROI right now, promo suppliers are no strangers to AI. External communications — from answering FAQs from distributors to generating copy for marketing materials — is one of the most common applications, according to Servi-Bonner. She’s also seeing suppliers use AI across back-office responsibilities.

“In the back office, AI is doing what it does everywhere else,” she says. “So it's extracting data for purchase orders, doing that three-way match between invoices, purchase orders from customers, and the job ticket — making sure that all that lines up. If there's something that's on the invoice that was never on the purchase order, like a rush charge or a change in substrate or something like that, we have to flag those things. AI is put in place to flag those types of things so that customers don't dispute, you don't sacrifice relationships, you don't compromise your cash flow.”

Moving into production, AI is increasingly being used to prepare artwork and ensure files are in the proper format.

“We used to laugh at the people that would FedEx a napkin with hand-drawn art and say ‘Hey, put this on 500 bags,’ right?” Rabideau says. “Now, you get a digital file, and someone took a picture on their phone and [they say], ‘Oh, make this an eight-color vectorized file.’”

The days of napkin art are long gone; AI can now help suppliers get files up to spec.

Where AI Makes the Biggest Difference

Where AI is being used and where it actually has a huge impact on the P&L are not always the same places. In the eyes of Servi-Bonner, some of the biggest room for ROI growth is in quoting and estimating.

“First-pass estimates that usually take hours for people to put together can take minutes,” she says. “When the system can pull from historical pricing, flag anomalies, surface that comparable job, that saves the supplier estimating time, it lets the quote become more workable, which translates into topline revenue. That's a P&L benefit you can see.”

Other big AI wins include evaluating the completeness of RFQs, as well as scheduling maintenance — something Servi-Bonner is seeing more suppliers dabble with.

Credit: OpenAI / ChatGPT

“On the production side, AI is creeping into scheduling a little bit, especially around areas where there's seasonal spikes or event-driven rush orders, because in promo, most of this stuff is rushed,” she says. “There are a few suppliers that are experimenting with some of this predictive maintenance on decoration equipment — so embroidery machines, screen presses, pad printers, laser engravers, that sort of thing — but most companies are not.”

These implementations can make operations more efficient, but efficiency is just the key to unlock opportunities for employees to do higher-value work.

“If you have someone that's just checking on order status and all those things that can be automated through machine learning and through AI,” Rabideau says, that is a missed opportunity.

Instead, she says, “You can have that person say, ‘Hey, what are you working on next?’ ‘Hey, did you think about this?’ ‘What do you have coming up in the next six months?'”

The other crucial place AI can make an impact is in retaining institutional knowledge. As Servi-Bonner explains, some employees know things that aren’t documented anywhere — things like which distributors tend to place more rush orders, which machines work best for which jobs, and what decoration techniques have the best margins on small orders.

“When they retire, leave, or step away from their jobs, those operations are going to lose that range of knowledge overnight,” Servi-Bonner says. “Most suppliers haven't yet even recognized that that institutional information, that judgment, those decisions, that decision logic in those people's heads is the most valuable thing in the building — and that AI's biggest contribution might be capturing it before it walks out the door.”

What’s Next in AI?

To Servi-Bonner, the biggest opportunity yet to be realized in promo is a cohesive AI plan.

“The pattern across all of this is that the adoption has become very tactical in promo, not strategic, which is interesting,” she says. “So, individual people picking up tools to solve individual problems — that's fine, great in the short term, glad you're experimenting, but it's not transformational yet in promo. Productivity is scattered across all things [and] the org chart, and it doesn't necessarily yet show up in promo where it really matters.”

Credit: OpenAI / ChatGPT

Looking down the road, AI agents — which can run more continuously and autonomously than back-and-forth AI tools like chatbots — will become mainstays. Servi-Bonner predicts agents will replace tools within the next 12 to 18 months across all industries.

For suppliers who are hesitating on AI, Rabideau warns that the wait-and-see approach will make them fall behind their competitors.

“I was having a conversation with a client the other day, and they had mentioned: ‘Everything’s changing so fast with AI. If I just take a break and come back in a month, everything's going to change anyway, so why don’t I just wait?’” Rabideau recalls. “... You have to go through this phase so you can get to the next phase, and so it's learning upon learning upon learning.”