Discover How AI is Transforming the Promo Industry

The commonsku AI Round Table is a small-group, application-based working session where promo distributors sit with commonsku's Chief AI Officer Bobby Lehew and tell him what's slowing them down, what AI tools they've tried, and what would change how their team operates. Bobby runs the session, distributors do most of the talking, and the working notes feed straight into product priorities — this is the room where the AI roadmap gets shaped.

Bobby Lehew is commonsku's Chief AI Officer and a 30-year promo veteran who ran Robyn Promotions, a three-time Inc. 5000 distributorship, before joining commonsku and now owns the intelligence loop between distributors, the product team, and the wider AI landscape. He also hosts skucast (360+ episodes, the #1 promo podcast) and writes the AI Promo Brief newsletter. The honest reason this matters: most AI tools fail distributors because they're built by people who've never quoted a job or chased a supplier ack.

commonsku has already shipped AI Product Recommendations (live on all plans, pulls from client order history), the skubot AI Mockup Generator (in beta for Advanced and Enterprise tiers, cuts mockup turnaround from hours to seconds), and the Opportunity Agent for cross-sell intelligence (entering beta in Q2). Description Rewriter, Auto-Art Configuration, and a Presentation Generator are next on the roadmap. All of it runs inside commonsku's SOC 2 environment — your client data does not leave the platform.

The AI Round Table sits at the front of the build cycle, before any feature exists — distributors describe what's putting out fires inside their shop and Bobby Lehew translates those problems into the roadmap, whereas focus groups and beta programs come later in the cycle and only ask you to react to something already built. Round Table attendees often graduate into the beta cohort once their idea ships. Different room, different stage of the work.

No, the AI Round Table is open to any promo distributor who fills out the request form, including prospects who aren't commonsku customers yet! Bobby Lehew wants a wide range of voices at the table: solo reps, ops leads at 5-person shops, and 50-person Enterprise teams have all participated, and the smaller the tier, the more useful the input often is, because solo reps see edges of the workflow that bigger teams don't.

An AI Round Table is a single, time-boxed working session — distributors spend one focused block sharing what's broken in their day, what AI tools they've tried, and what would actually change how their team operates, with no follow-on commitment unless they want one. Most of the prep is mental: come ready to talk about your specific friction points, not generic AI hype. If your team currently lacks organized central systems for AI experimentation, this session is exactly the forcing function for getting clarity.