Mountains of data and the five percent that’s broken

Event report

By Alistair Mylchreest, Strategy Director, Sourcing City | 8 October 2026

The fifth GXN Annual Conference, run by the Global Executive Network, brought executives from across the promotional products industry to the Grand Tirolia Hotel in Kitzbühel from 7 to 9 October 2026. I had the pleasure of moderating a session titled Drowning in Data, Starved of Insights, in front of around 100 people from both sides of the Atlantic.

With the Austrian Alps on the screens behind us, mountains of data felt the more honest description. Feeds, portals, spreadsheets: the industry has never had more information moving around it, and has rarely been less sure what to do with it.

Joining me were Maarten Boone, founder and CEO of Brikl, the platform for bulk orders and online stores produced on demand, and Caleb Gilbertson, founder and CEO of Imprint Engine, the global brand experience platform that builds its own software. Maarten opened with a short keynote before we turned to questions from the stage and then from the room.

The other half of the order

Maarten started with a simple observation. In merchandise, decoration is what drives the value, yet decoration is exactly what supplier feeds leave out. Today a distributor typically receives a style, a colour, a size, a material specification and a price. What is still missing is the decoration technique, the logo placement and size, the artwork and colours, and the production detail.

Someone has to fill that in. In practice it is the customer service rep, the account manager and the art department, working one order and one email at a time. That is where automation breaks down. Caleb, speaking from the distributor side, put it plainly: the gap is filled by people, the salesperson and the sales support team, and the cost varies wildly from supplier to supplier.

Maarten made one more point worth repeating. A perfect product record earns nothing sitting in a database. Data only turns into money when it turns into an order, which means the work has to carry through to something production can actually run.

One record for every partner

Maarten’s proposal was deliberately basic. One colour name, one size, one material specification. Print areas with a named location and dimensions. Decoration techniques chosen from a defined list rather than typed into a free text field, because free text cannot be kept consistent. None of it is new to a decorator. The problem is that the industry collects this information after the order is placed, when it should be collected before.

His answer is a single supplier owned record that every partner can reach through whatever connection they already use. Maintain it once, and every distributor sees the change. Distributors could onboard a supplier the same day, and suppliers could onboard distributors at close to no cost. Judging by the nods in the room, nobody would miss the integration projects.

On ownership, Maarten argued that nobody should own the standard itself. It should be protected by an association, the data should belong to the supplier, and platforms and service providers should charge for the value they add on top. Caleb went further and suggested associations such as PPAI and ASI invest in open source work that helps everyone standardise. Maarten’s first step for bringing the US and Europe together was a shared vocabulary: agreeing what a print position is, and what a decoration location is, before anything else.

Good data first, then good AI

It would not be a 2026 conference without AI, and Maarten confirmed within the first minute that he would be talking about it. His point was a sobering one. AI cannot fill in data that is not there. “It will try. It will guess. It will hallucinate, as we like to call it nowadays, but it will be wrong.”

Caleb’s experience with artwork made the same case. Generating an attractive mockup is now easy. Generating a proof of a real product, with the right decoration method, size and placement, and no extra zip or seam that the supplier’s garment does not have, is much harder. “It’s actually easier to generate a nice-looking image than it is to generate a nice-looking proof that’s pixel perfect.” Customers are already sending distributors AI generated designs that cannot be produced, because the model had no idea what the supplier could actually do.

Caleb also sees where this leads. Distributors are starting to use AI for sourcing, and that AI will grade suppliers on the quality of their data. Today, he said, around ten per cent of Imprint Engine’s suppliers have good data flowing in and out. “The suppliers that actually take the time to make their data usable and actionable are going to be the ones that win.” He was also optimistic that AI could become a translation layer, meeting suppliers where they are and standardising their data for them, without every supplier funding a costly integration project first.

Europe’s catch up moment

One question from the floor asked how the US and Europe compare. My own view is that the position has reversed. A decade ago, the UK and Europe were ahead on technology. Coming back into the industry, the US is now miles ahead, helped by having a standard at all in PromoStandards. Both panellists noted its limits: it standardises the connection rather than the content inside it, so one supplier’s “Navy” is still another supplier’s “NAV”.

In Europe, the big wholesalers offer good data and actively encourage online ordering, yet take up remains low and much of the process is still manual and driven by PDFs. Caleb, who has recently opened in Dublin, described the European supply chain as more fragmented and less mature than the US.

There are signs of change. One American supplier working on both sides of the Atlantic told the room that European distributors asking about integration had gone from a trickle to a queue: two visitors to his stand one year, twenty the next. Caleb added that AI is shrinking the time and cost of moving off old ERP systems, which should make it far more realistic for suppliers running 20 or 30 year old software to become easy to integrate with.

Three things to do on Monday morning

I closed by asking each of us for one practical action the room could take on getting back to the office.

Why it matters

At Custom Gateway, in the print on demand world, we processed around 25 million orders a year averaging 2.2 pieces each. At that scale, every order had to pass through untouched and uninterpreted. The bulk promotional trade does not need that level of automation tomorrow, though the direction is the same: the less time our people spend chasing missing data, the more time they spend selling. Caleb hopes his salespeople can win back half of their time well within five years. That is a prize worth working together for.

My thanks to GXN for the invitation and a superbly run conference, to Maarten and Caleb for their candour, and to everyone in the room for questions that kept the conversation going well into lunch.

Main image: GXN. From left, Alistair Mylchreest (Sourcing City), Caleb Gilbertson (Imprint Engine) and Maarten Boone (Brikl) at the GXN Annual Conference 2026, Kitzbühel.