AI Tools for Promo Distributors: Which to Use and When | commonsku

Something is shifting in this industry.

When we delivered our AI + Promo session at PPAI Expo, the room filled past capacity. The fire marshal showed up. People were turned away. When we ran it back as a webinar, over 700 distributors registered. That kind of demand doesn't come from curiosity. It comes from urgency—people know AI matters to their business but aren't sure where to aim it.

In our last post, we showed the possibilities—11 real workflows across audio, video, writing, design, research, and presentations. But the number-one question afterward was simpler than any of that:

"Which tool should I actually be using for what?"

Fair question. We showed you what's possible. Now let's get specific about where to start.

Ethan Mollick, the Wharton professor whose AI guides have become required reading for anyone serious about this space, recently updated his recommendations. His core advice: pick one of three platforms—ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini—pay the $20(ish) per month, and always switch to the strongest "thinking" model for real work, rather than whatever runs by default. He also introduces a useful framework: Models, Apps, and Harnesses.

In short: Models are the AI brains (GPT-5.2/5.3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro). Apps are the products you use to talk to a model (like chatgpt.com, claude.ai, or desktop tools like Claude Cowork). Harnesses are what lets the model do real work (giving AI the ability to work on spreadsheets or presentations or writing code). 

Here's what it looks like when you're running a promo business.

First, Draw the Line

Before we map AI tools to workflows, let's name the obvious: a big chunk of your daily work—building presentations, sourcing products, managing orders, tracking merch projects—already has a home. That's what commonsku (your connected workflow platform) is for. And on the AI front, our AI Mockup Generator is entering beta this month, which allows you to generate photorealistic and decoration-aware product mockups designed to flow directly into presentation or shop's promo-picks. Plus, we have additional AI tools on the horizon from deeper decoration intelligence to smarter client insights and personalization tools that bring every project to life. So stay tuned!  

But what about all the activity that happens before you open that platform? Prospecting. Researching a vertical you've never sold into. Writing a pitch. Prepping for a client meeting. That's where these tools earn their $20 a month.

ChatGPT — Business Development and Prospect Research

Best for: prospect research, cold outreach by vertical, company profiling, and Deep Research for sales prep.

Our survey from Bobby's PPAI Expo presentation showed 93% of distributors already use ChatGPT. No surprise—it was everyone's first tool and habit is a powerful thing. But as we showed in the webinar, most are using it the way they'd use Google: one question, one answer, move on.

Use ChatGPT with GPT-5 Thinking Extended active—not the default auto mode, which quietly routes you to weaker models. For distributors, the highest leverage is at the front of your pipeline: researching a company before a sales call, writing cold outreach tailored to a specific vertical—healthcare, hospitality, financial services—brainstorming merch concepts for an industry you've never pitched, and drafting follow-up messaging that doesn't sound templated.

The feature most distributors are missing: Deep Research, the single most transformative capability for information-heavy work. Ask it to profile a vertical—what those buyers care about, their peak merch seasons, what their internal brand programs look like, what competitors are offering—and you've turned an hour of sales prep into ten minutes. In an industry where competition is tight, the distributor who walks into a meeting knowing the client's world wins the business.

Claude — Strategy, Writing, and Complex Thinking

Best for: proposal narratives, RFP analysis, pricing decisions, newsletter writing, and generating slide decks.

Only 8% of our PPAI respondents use Claude. If you watched the webinar, you know that's a miss—most of the 11 workflows we demonstrated were built in Claude. There's a reason for that.

When the work requires nuance—longer thinking, more careful writing, holding a complex thread across a long document—Claude is the pick. Mollick recommends Opus 4.6 with extended thinking for serious work. For distributors, that means: drafting a proposal narrative for an enterprise client, summarizing an RFP and surfacing the five things that actually matter, thinking through a pricing decision, or writing your newsletter content in your actual voice.

In the webinar, we showed how Claude Projects power our podcast prep—research, intro scripts, interview questions, all generated in one structured process. That's the "recursive prompting" move from babysitting prompts to building workflows we talked about. Claude is also the current leader for generating PowerPoint and Excel files directly—describe what you want and it builds it. That slide deck demo from the webinar? That was Claude.

Deep Research — Across All Three Platforms

Best for: vertical profiling before a pitch, competitive analysis, client news research, and supply chain disruption analysis.

This deserves its own callout. Deep Research is an AI mode available in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini that spends 10–15 minutes conducting extensive web research before generating a response. The results are dramatically more accurate than a standard prompt, and the citations tend to be real. All three major platforms offer versions of it, each with different strengths.

For promo distributors, this is the tool for: profiling a vertical before a pitch, competitive analysis on what other distributors are offering, researching a client's recent news and brand direction before a meeting, and understanding supply chain dynamics when tariffs or sourcing disruptions shift your math. Remember the trend-spotting demo from the webinar, where we loaded 25 issues of The Backpack and asked AI to find patterns? Deep Research does that for the entire public web.

NotebookLM — Your Private Research Vault

Best for: querying your own documents — supplier catalogs, trade show recaps, competitor websites, and industry reports.

NotebookLM is Google's free tool that lets you upload your own documents—PDFs, catalogs, reports, competitor websites—and query everything inside them like a private search engine. If you watched the webinar, you saw it in action during the interview prep demo—we loaded a guest's entire newsletter archive into NotebookLM and queried it like a search engine. Some distributors are even using it for their internal document resource hub. 

Try this: Drop in three competitor websites and ask it to compare their positioning against yours. Feed it a conference recap and pull the trends most relevant to your top verticals. For distributors who work across many industries and manage a flood of information, this is the research tool that finally keeps up.

Gemini — Visual Ideation and Creative Briefs

Best for: image generation, visual concept development, creative brief direction, and building custom AI assistants (Gems).

In our survey, 29% of distributors said they don't use any AI design tools at all—and yet design and mockups were the number-one thing they wanted more help with. That gap is where Gemini fits.

Gemini currently has the strongest image generation among the big three. For distributors, that translates to creative brief development. When a client gives you a vague direction—"premium but approachable," "something that feels like the brand is growing up"—Gemini can generate visual references and concept directions that get you both speaking the same language before you open a product search. Use Gemini 2.5 Pro for serious work. We've also found Gemini Gems useful for building custom assistants—like the newsletter workflow we demoed in the webinar, where AI scans alerts, identifies stories, and drafts blurbs in a defined brand voice.

The Broader Toolkit

We covered these random AI tools in the webinar demos, but they're worth considering as part of your toolkit:

Descript — Podcast and audio editing. Removes filler words, cleans recordings, and turns audio into clips in a few clicks.

ElevenLabs — Turns written content into voiced audio. That voice cloning demo from the webinar? ElevenLabs.

HeyGen — On-brand video avatars without a production crew. Record once, repurpose everywhere.

Perplexity — Fast, cited web research when you need current information quickly. Think of it as search with built-in footnotes.

What a Week Actually Looks Like

In the webinar we showed demos. Here's what the same tools look like woven into an actual work week:

(Want to see what Smart Presentations and Shops can do? Take the platform tour.)

The Bottom Line

Mollick's advice is solid: pay for the subscription, use the thinking models, treat these tools as collaborators, not search engines. But the takeaway from our webinar and from everything we're seeing through The AI Promo Brief is, that the real gap isn't between distributors who use AI and those who don't. It's between the ones who use it the same shallow way every day and the ones who've matched the right tool to the right job.

Your workflow already has a home in commonsku. Use AI to make everything that feeds into it faster, smarter, and sharper.

Next up: What we're building inside commonsku with AI—and what it means for how you work. Stay tuned! 

Frequently Asked Questions

Bobby Lehew is Chief Content Officer at commonsku, editor of The AI Promo Brief, and a 25-year veteran of the promotional products industry. His AI + Promo session at PPAI Expo 2026 was one of the most attended sessions at the event.