The AI Promo Brief: Issue #19

Canva Goes Full AI

Canva just dropped AI 2.0, and this is not a minor update. The platform now lets you describe what you want in plain language and it builds the whole design -- layout, copy, images, brand colors, the works. It coordinates tools across Canva's design engine to execute complex briefs, and a new Memory Library retains your brand preferences across sessions. For promo distributors and suppliers who already use Canva for pitch decks, social posts, and product mockups, this is a game-changer. The company also recently acquired Simtheory and Ortto, bolting on agentic AI and marketing automation. At a $42 billion valuation with IPO talk swirling. If your team uses Canva even casually, this update is worth exploring this week.

AI Is Giving Salespeople 25 Hours Back Every Week

Salesforce's 2026 State of Sales Report just dropped and it is packed with actionable data for promo salespeople. The headline: sellers using AI agents save up to 25 hours per week -- time they redirect to building relationships and closing deals. 87% of sales organizations now use AI for prospecting, forecasting, lead scoring, or drafting emails. Top performers are 1.7 times more likely to use AI prospecting agents than underperformers. At Salesforce itself, agents contacted 130,000 leads and created 3,200 opportunities in four months. For promo distributors, the practical takeaway is clear: if you are still doing prospect research, email drafting, and CRM updates manually, you are losing a full day per week to work AI can handle. Start with one workflow -- prospect research or email personalization -- and let AI handle it for a month. Track the time you get back and what you do with it.

If You're Still Googling Your Prospects, You're Already Behind

Gartner is predicting that by 2027, 95% of seller research workflows will begin with AI -- up from less than 20% in 2024. That is a complete inversion in three years. For promo salespeople, this is not an abstract forecast. It means your competitors are already starting every sales call with AI-synthesized research on the prospect's company, recent news, hiring patterns, and pain points. The reps who show up knowing the prospect's latest product launch, recent office expansion, or marketing campaign shift are the ones getting meetings and closing deals. The State of AI Sales Prospecting data backs this up: sellers expect AI to cut prospect research time by 34% and email drafting by 36%. If you sell promo, try this today: before your next call, paste the prospect's company into Claude, Perplexity, or ChatGPT and ask for a briefing on their recent activity, industry challenges, and upcoming events. You will walk into that conversation better prepared than 80% of your competitors.

Meet Promo Industry's First Chief AI Officer

You know that feeling when a promotion gets announced and the industry's collective reaction is "wait, wasn't he already doing that?" Bobby Lehew is commonsku's new Chief AI Officer — and the promo industry's first. If you've read the AI Promo Brief, listened to skucast, or squeezed into his fire-marshal-packed AI session at PPAI Expo 2026, you saw this coming a mile out. Stack that on 30 years running distributorships (former Robyn Promotions CEO, three-time Inc. 5000 honoree) and you get the rare combo: someone fluent in both AI and promo. What changes for you? Every AI feature shipping inside commonsku now gets filtered through a distributor brain. Next up: small-group AI roundtables where distributors steer what ships. Request your seat.

Claude Just Got a Lot Smarter And Cheaper Than You'd Expect

Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.7, and the numbers are impressive: 64.3% on SWE-Bench Pro, nearly 10% higher than its predecessor on the industry's toughest coding benchmark. Beyond coding, Opus 4.7 processes images at higher resolution and can generate visual assets like UI designs -- a direct shot at traditional design tools. Pricing stays flat at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, which is a significant move given the performance jump. Claude Code also got new features: an "ultrareview" command that scans code for bugs and an "auto mode" for completing long-running tasks. For promo companies exploring AI for internal tool building, website customization, the improving capabilities at stable prices mean the ROI case keeps getting stronger. And the visual reasoning upgrades matter for anyone using AI to process image work. Case in point: We’re using Claude Code a lot for images and presentations these days for internal decks. And our design engineering team at commonsku is deep into Claude Code. Stay tuned for more on that!

Perplexity Now Lives on Your Desktop and Never Sleeps

Perplexity rolled out Personal Computer to all Max subscribers on April 16, and it is one of the more ambitious AI products this year. For $200/month, it runs 24/7 on a Mac mini with full access to your local files, Gmail, Slack, and GitHub. It hybridizes local and cloud environments, which means your data stays on your machine while tapping into Perplexity's AI infrastructure for processing. For enterprise users, the numbers are wild: Perplexity claims its Computer for Enterprise completed 3.25 years of work in four weeks. For promo business owners thinking about AI, this represents the direction everything is heading -- persistent AI agents that know your business context, run in the background, and handle tasks autonomously. At $200/month plus a $599 Mac mini, the total cost is cheaper than a part-time assistant. Perplexity also just hit $450 million in annual recurring revenue with 100+ million monthly users, so this is not a niche experiment.

🎨 Midjourney's V8.1 ships native 2K rendering, 3x faster HD, and a Style Creator that turns reference images into reusable brand styles. Client mockups just got faster.

📋 Outreach's new Meeting Prep Agent builds pre-call briefs with talking points, attendee overviews, and account context — reps walk in with every angle covered.

🎭 HeyGen can now clone your likeness in 15 seconds and generate studio-quality video in 175+ languages. Personalized sales outreach at scale just got easy.

🎬 Google Vids added free AI video generation powered by Veo 3.1, custom music via Lyria 3, and directable AI avatars.

👟 Allbirds sold its footwear business for $39M, rebranded as NewBird AI to rent GPUs to AI companies, and watched shares pop 582% in a day. 

📢 OpenAI told investors it expects $100B in ad revenue by 2030, up from $2.5B this year. Chatbot ads are the next search.

🔥 Bobby Lehew is commonsku's first Chief AI Officer, running the AI roadmap through a distributor lens.