AltOps
Most software news in promo arrives as a press release about the future. This is the month's news read the other way round: what can you use today, what is only promised, and who is now in charge.
ASI: a new product chief over ESP+
ESP+ is ASI's product search and quoting tool, used by tens of thousands of distributors. On September 14, ASI hired Matt Gilliland as chief product officer. He was head of product at Zillow, the real-estate website, and before that worked at Blizzard, Microsoft and ADP. ASI's announcement.
The change that matters is structural. ASI split "product" from "technology". The existing technology chief now handles only infrastructure. Gilliland owns what ESP+ becomes, including AI tools for distributors and suppliers. ASI says ESP+ lists more than 1.2 million products from more than 3,000 suppliers, and that it launched an AI image tool called Inspire Design Studio in July. It has not said how many people use that tool, or what is coming next or when.
What to expect: if your team quotes out of ESP+ every day, the screens and features will change over the next few quarters. Ask for dates before you build a process around any AI feature.
commonsku: a roadmap that separates shipped from promised
commonsku published its plan for the rest of 2026, and to its credit, the plan has a status column. Read that column, not the headline.
Live now. The Automation Engine and Client Catalog both shipped in August, but only on the Advanced and Enterprise plans. The Automation Engine creates a follow-up task when an order sits too long in one stage. The AI Mockup Generator and the AI Description Re-writer went out in June as a test on those same plans, and commonsku says each has been used more than 10,000 times. Automatic billing, pushing products to Shopify and one-click upgrades to electronic purchase orders are on all plans.
In testing. Print on demand through the Fulfill Engine, more automations starting with invoice reminders, and custom web addresses for client stores, which still show a "Powered by commonsku" line at the bottom.
Promised for Q4. Two AI "agents". One would spot reorder and cross-sell chances for a rep. The other would help build presentations. Also promised: a way for an outside online store to create orders in commonsku, on the Enterprise plan only. None of this exists yet.
commonsku also says its supplier network is now 16 suppliers, that it sees about 38 million clicks a month, half of them people configuring products, and that it wants to remove most of that work. All of these figures are commonsku's own.
The practical point: the features that actually save typing are on the more expensive plans. If you are on a lower plan, this roadmap is a sales pitch for an upgrade.
commonsku's automation, two weeks in
On September 17 commonsku reported that 95 distributors have turned on the Automation Engine and that it has created more than 3,000 follow-up tasks, about half already done. It is a modest feature with a real number attached, which is rarer than it should be.
commonsku also launched Ask skucast, a free tool that answers promo business questions by searching the transcripts of more than 350 podcast episodes and pointing you to the episode. It was built with Claude, an AI model, and Descript, a transcription tool. The team says most of the work was cleaning up names and industry terms in the transcripts. That is the honest lesson for anyone building a tool on their own company's knowledge.
Syncore: three real features, and the AI is 2027
Syncore is the software behind Facilisgroup. On September 1 and 2 it released three features: a dashboard showing a client's departments, sales and receivables in one place; a product search with live inventory that puts higher-margin preferred-supplier items first; and a step-by-step tool for capturing colours, decoration methods and locations. All three are live. The AI tools Facilisgroup announced in July are still planned for 2027.
The smaller platforms
- MPower, a smaller promo ERP, says five AI features are live on its site: a chat box that runs commands like "create a reorder for Acme", search across 725,000 products in plain language, artwork clean-up, instant mockups, and accounting that matches supplier and shipping invoices. No customers or results are named, and three more features are "coming soon" with no dates.
- Chipply, a team-store platform, plans to add dealer inventory in October and invoicing later this year, per its roadmap post. It is asking dealers to clean up their customer records now, because the new features depend on them.
- Brikl, an online store platform, published an idea piece on letting reps type what they want in plain language. Nothing in it is built.
- PromoStandards, the group that sets data standards between suppliers and distributors, says its work on AI guidelines is still exploratory, with no dates. Its trade-show recap has the payoff quotes: distributor PromoShop says tasks that used to need several steps now finish in minutes because supplier data arrives in a standard format.
Decoration machines, before the big show
PRINTING United, the big printing trade show, runs September 23 to 25 in Las Vegas, and the equipment announcements arrived in the two weeks before it. The theme: fewer manual steps in transfer printing, and one-at-a-time decoration of hard goods.
- Sawgrass will preview VersiFlex MAX, which prints full colour on dark shirts without white ink, powder or trimming. The basic system already sells for under $1,000.
- DuPont is demonstrating transfer printing without adhesive powder, the messiest step in the process. No release date yet.
- Mimaki launched a wider, faster transfer printer it says is about 1.5 times as productive as the previous model.
- Epson branded a robot-arm printer for curved objects CONTOURJET, and Norwalt's Tesseract decorates items one at a time with no changeover. Both point at hard goods with a minimum order of one.
- Hotronix's Carousel is a multi-station heat press, because pressing becomes the slow step once transfers are cheap.
For a distributor: small decorated orders keep getting cheaper to make, and the number of small decorators you can subcontract to keeps growing.
Gifting platforms are bundling
Stadium, the company behind SnackMagic and SwagMagic, bought Confetti, a platform for booking virtual team events. The only source is Stadium's own press release, so its numbers (11,000 organisations on Confetti, a 30,000-item catalog at Stadium) are the company's claims. The point for a distributor: a competitor can now sell an employee gift and the team event on one invoice. Your answer is service and product knowledge, not a bigger catalog.
Suppliers building their own tools
HIRSCH launched Gratigy, a free tool for distributors to set up gift-redemption stores, via PPAI. iPROMOTEu says its purchase of Flywheel Brands brings an AI platform called MerchButler.ai to its network, though the announcement does not say what it does.
The pattern
Three things are true at once. The big platforms are reorganising around product and AI leadership. Roadmaps are promising AI agents for Q4 that do not exist yet. And the tools that reduce real work today mostly sit on the higher-priced plans. Plan around what is live, and write a date next to everything else.
