Sourcing City has published White Paper No. 04: The Intelligent Distributor, an argument-led field report on how data and AI are redrawing the competitive line in UK promotional merchandise. By Alistair Mylchreest, Strategy Director. Published August 2026.

This one is different to the three papers that preceded it. White Papers 01, 02 and 03 were data-led: workflow optimisation, global market sizing, and 675,000 buying decisions respectively. No. 04 is an argument. It makes the case that the most consequential competitive divide opening up in UK promotional distribution is not between businesses that use AI and those that do not. It is between those working from current information and those working from yesterday’s best guess.

“The gap is not between good distributors and bad ones. It is between those working with current information and those working with yesterday’s best guess.”

A field report from three countries

The paper draws on first-hand research from three major industry events attended by Alistair Mylchreest earlier in 2026: STAHLS’ Fulfil Engine in West Palm Beach, FESPA Global Print Expo in Barcelona, and the PPAI International Leadership Summit in Brussels, where Mylchreest sat on the technology transformation panel.

Different audiences. Different geographies. The same signal in every conversation: most technology problems in this industry are actually data problems. Businesses are investing in AI-driven workflows faster than they are fixing the data those tools depend on. Where the data is clean, the results are impressive. Where it is not, automation amplifies the errors at speed.

Fulfil Engine · West Palm Beach

Automation is the norm. The bottleneck is not the technology but the consistency and accuracy of the product data flowing through it.

Data quality is the constraint

FESPA · Barcelona

Print and promotional converging faster than anticipated. Businesses navigating this best have real-time visibility across product and production data simultaneously.

Convergence accelerating

ILS · Brussels

The panel’s honest finding: the sector is buying AI tools faster than it is fixing the data those tools depend on.

AI ahead of data readiness

What AI actually does — and does not do

The paper offers what it describes as “an honest assessment, without vendor breathlessness.” AI genuinely delivers faster and broader product discovery, surfacing relevant options from a large catalogue in seconds without requiring the distributor to know the exact product name or category in advance. It handles consistent application of product knowledge, compliance flags, decoration options, and specification summaries, at a speed no human process can match.

What it does not do is make good decisions on poor information. A price estimate built on data that is six months out of date is not a productivity gain. It is a liability with a convincing interface. The distributors using AI most effectively are treating it as an accelerant for their own judgment, not a replacement for it.

Technology enables. People deliver.

The paper is careful to frame technology as an enabler, not a replacement. The creativity that turns a brief into something a client loves, the supplier relationship built over years that delivers when a deadline moves, the instinct that knows when a product is right. None of that is touched by any of this. What better data and smarter search tools do is give distributors more time for those things, and make sure they show up to those conversations better prepared. This is still, the paper argues, fundamentally a people industry. The technology just lets those people be better at it.

The quiet differentiator

The paper’s fourth chapter makes the case for real-time data as the competitive advantage that rarely makes conference stages, precisely because it is operational rather than spectacular. Live pricing. Live stock. Lead times drawn from current supplier feeds rather than memory or out-of-date catalogues.

The practical consequences of getting these wrong are not abstract. Quoting a price the supplier has since revised means absorbing the difference or going back to the client. Promising stock that is not available means a conversation nobody wants to have. The distributor with current information simply makes fewer of those mistakes, and that compounds into margin, client confidence, and repeat business over time.

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Sourcing City White Paper Series

No. 01 — Every Second Counts | No. 02 — The Merch Ecosystem | No. 03 — 675,000 Buying Decisions | No. 04 — The Intelligent Distributor