Episode 363: AI as Team, Not Tools with Bobby Lehew

It seems like that every several years a technological shift forces the industry to reset itself. The internet was one, e-commerce was yet another, and the cloud was yet another. Each one reshuffled how distributors work, what end clients expect, and where growth comes from. Now, I don't even know how to introduce this, but in today's episode, we're flipping the script. I'm the one in the guest chair. A few weeks ago, I stepped into a new role as Chief AI Officer at Commenscute, and Mark Graham, Commenscute co-founder and president, turns the mic around to interview me. Now, my first week in my new role I spent at the HumanX AI conference in San Francisco. So Mark and I talk about this new role, what it means for our customers, but also what I took away from HumanX and why AI as team, not merely AI as tools, is the shift that matters for all of us today. This episode is brought to you courtesy of all of us at CommonsCube. Over 900 distributors powering $1.8 billion in network volume rely on CommonsCube's connected workflow. Process more orders, connect your team, and dramatically grow your sales. To learn how, visit commonscube.com. Now here's my chat with Mark. Oh, and by the way, I'm not going anywhere for the SkuCast. You can expect more interviews with more customers and more AI. In the future. Here's Mark.

Bobby, a huge congratulations on this new and exciting role, and can't wait to ask you some questions to dig a little bit deeper into this.

You bet. Thank you, man.

Yeah, you bet, you bet. All right, so CommensQ just created its first Chief AI Officer role. Can you tell us what this role is all about and how you would explain to a customer what you do and how you'll be able to help them?

Sure. For me, it's like 4 pillars or 4 core keys to this role. First, there's AI intelligence. There's so much happening with AI. Just deciphering what's going on and finding the signal from the noise is a big part of the job. I mean, these big models are releasing news all the time, and what Anthropic has done year to date is just insane. Gemini and Google too. So listening— like we started with the AI promo brief, that was a big part of our listening journey just to tune in to what was going on in the market. And now the proliferation is crazy. So the market landscape, what's happening with AI. There's a second part, which is the platform, just sort of digging into looking at workflows. Like this morning, it's kind of funny, but a snapshot of what my role looks like is me doing some deep work that Delestin and I were talking about, trying to figure out ways— I can't exactly say what it is at the moment— figuring out ways to tease intelligence. Yeah, intelligence out of our own data, working with AI products to do that. I'm going to give away too much if I say it, but AI for the platform. So servicing opportunities with AI because we're listening. For one thing, we're tuning into what's going on in AI and having a few of us on the team that are really critical for that, like, like me and Eku, for example, are constantly listening for that, listening to customers. That's a huge part of this training and enable customers and feeding the roadmap, just sort of this little cycle. That's the second part. The third part, I mentioned the customers, but this is really about community. Mark, you and I have been around when these big moments like these step change moments have happened in the industry. These seismic changes— e-commerce was one, the internet, the cloud. We've been around for these massive changes. A big part of that was paying attention to what's going on at the frontier of technology, but also listening to our customers. So the way I see that is already when the news announcement went out to our customers Friday, there's a sign up for roundtables because I'll be hosting roundtables with people who want to dig in more and learn about how to operate— operationalize with AI. Will be having one-on-ones with customers, whether they are customers from our advanced tier or whether enterprise, just listening to what they're doing. And because you and I have not only distributor experience, but distributor and client experience, you and I can map that a little better. We can understand what's going on in distributors' world. We know how fast it is. We know it's both a creative and an operational business. So all that to say, listening to our customers and making sure we adopt a no user left behind kind of attitude with them, meaning we want to be lockstep beside the people who are at the very edge of playing with this new technology. But we also want to listen to folks that are sort of learning how to adopt it and learning how to live and work with it. So there's a lot of that weaving in and out of the community. And then the fourth pillar is really just AI for the industry. You and I have always felt this way about the industry. We're like, tried and true. We're proud that Kominsky's been built by promo for promo. And so we wear our industry hat all the time. What is the impact of AI on the industry? How does that look in the landscape going forward and sort of being eyes and ears and an editorial voice every now and then about what's happening when these new models drop. A great example right now is what's happening in the world of design. Friday, you know, yeah, Claude dropped this new Claude design package. What does that mean for Figma, Canva, presentations inside Commonsku? So things like that are happening in the landscape, and it's— you can see it's where these four pillars just sort of feed each other as we walk through it.

Yeah, that's amazing. And it's an interesting point you made about the AI sophistication of our customer base and the broader promotional products industry in that you certainly have some people who are at the very beginning stages of their journey. They are just learning about it. They may be a little bit nervous about it. And then you've got other folks that are power users that are using multiple LLMs to query multiple different databases and to help them run their business in interesting ways. And I think that you're such a unique set of experiences to be able to help people at both ends of that spectrum. So.

Yeah.

Exciting to have you jump in. Another question for you. So why did the leadership team at Commonsku feel like this was the right time to create this role? And how do you feel about this role personally?

I sort of could ask you about that. Yeah, I can tell you how I feel about it. I can sort of bounce the question back to you too. As I gather, I think the timing is right just because the proliferation of development happening in this area, the speed at which development is happening, and the fact that we need to marshal the attention required to pay attention to advancements going on in AI. And we have been. But this sort of doubles down on that a little bit. It's not just a role. For example, in our team, I represent one part of our AI leadership, Eku. And, but Deleshni and Charlie, they're all like our Slack channels that's going on with product development, intelligence, and AI.

Do you want to tell for the benefit of listeners who may not know some of the people you just mentioned, like who they are and what role they play at the company?

Yeah, go ahead. You go ahead, Mark. I'm going to let you do the structural thing.

Well, you mentioned a couple of names. So you've got Eku Malcolm, who is our head of AI operations and is effectively sort of your role, but internal to Commonsku. So he's running internal workshops and making sure that every employee at Commonsku is able to use all that AI has to offer in order to make them more productive and efficient and creative.

One more note on, one more note on Eku's role. Eku's role, like we have CEO Summit coming up and Eku is leading how he's been able to operationalize AI with our own team. With other distributors so they can sort of learn how to do that. But that's a comment on Eku's role. Keep going.

Yeah. And that was a really interesting hire for us the better part of about a year ago where we just knew that there was so much happening in AI and we could handle it off the side of our desk, but we just really wanted to have someone whose only job was that. And yeah, there's been a huge, huge impact internally. So I know that we're excited to introduce Eku to the distributors that are at CEO Summit. Yeah. Deleshni, she's our VP of engineering. And is responsible for the management and the vision of our technical product. So she's working at the frontier of AI with all these cutting-edge new features as it relates to how it is that we can stay right at the frontier. And then also managing our very complicated infrastructure and making sure as Commonsku's user base grows, that we have a rock-solid application that can scale with our use. Yeah.

Yeah.

And then of course, many people may have met Charlie. Charlie has been with us for several years now. He is our VP of product Management, and he's working very closely with Delechny on the execution of our features and making sure that we can spec features that are on point with our customers. And all of them touch AI and the work that you're doing.

Yeah. Mark, how do you feel about this? You're part of the leadership team.

I mean, I'm one, one part of that for sure. And I think at the end of the day, Bobby, a lot of this also had to do with our relationship with you. I mean, we've worked together for almost 10 years, which is, Unbelievable to think about. And you and I had been collaborators for many years prior to that.

Yeah.

Speaking about technology and social media and creativity and how the industry was gonna defend itself from Amazon. Remember those days?

Right.

And not to sort of pump your tires too much here, Bobby, I know you don't like this, but the role that you've played at Common Skew has been more than just someone who does content. And certainly that is one part of the output, but it's been content from the standpoint of how our industry elevates itself, how we can reach our potential as an industry, how the distributors and suppliers that are on the platform can think about their business at like 100,000 feet. And there, bias aside, there is literally no one better in this industry, no one more experienced than you to be able to tell those stories. And you've done that for the last 10 years. And what a wonderful way to pivot and build upon that storytelling industry expertise. How many customer interviews and stories have you done? I mean, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. And there is no one that we thought would be better than you. And you're very nerdy as well, Bobby. I will tell you that, right? Like, you're the guy who will get up on stage and talk about how you've used AI to catalog all of your clothing in your closet so you can—

Amazing. Yes.

You know how to, and that's, that's a maybe a non-promo example, but I'm sure there's probably a promo application there. But at the end of the day, like just your curiosity with AI and the fact that you yourself are at the cutting edge of this and marrying that with our content background. So great to welcome you to this role.

You ask, thank you, Mark. You, you ask how I feel about this role and I feel about this role and feel about where we're at just in technology in general. Like you and I felt in the days of e-commerce, in the days of cloud computing and where we saw this, Tremendous opportunity. But you can magnify that times 10 with what's going on with AI. I myself, you're right, I've always sort of leaned a little nerdy in sort of these obsessions and things like that, but also the potential. So one of the things that happened in my own career as a distributor was that when e-commerce came along, we went through the dot-com boom and bust. E-commerce came along and suddenly this strange thing called e-commerce was something you could view as friend or foe, and you could view it as a threat, or you could be confused by it, or you could say, you know what, this is interesting, this is a new frontier. And I was a part of that first wave of distributors. Branfield was one of them that adopted e-commerce. And you were like, we can utilize this technology. But fast forward in my work interviewing distributors for the past several years, watching how Commscue has 10x their growth, their output, their workflow. And then seeing what AI can do with that on top of it. I mean, the gains we've made, no other platform has made the gains that CommerceHQ— there's the one CommerceHQ flag waving thing I'm going to say in this episode is that no other platform has made those gains in workflow. And now what we can do with AI is just kind of mind-boggling, really.

Yeah, it is exciting. And I love that throwback to the e-commerce days. And there's no question there were lots of people that were nervous about the impact of e-commerce. I mean, remember the presentations that you and I and certainly Danny Rosen were in them.

Yeah. Yeah.

Around how to survive in an Amazon world as though like Amazon coming in was going to completely disrupt the promotional products industry. Everything was gonna be done online. Everything was gonna be transactional. And the distributor, unless they adopted, were gonna be put outta business. And yeah, not that I would ever dismiss Amazon. They're continue to be a very successful company, but look at the promotional products industry. In the last 10 years and how we've evolved and how the distributors that embraced e-commerce and embraced their points of differentiation have continued to thrive. And I wonder, I mean, this is a bit of a question for you, but I wonder whether there are parallels to that in AI and whether in the next 10 years are we going to see no promotional products industry because it has been wiped out by Claude promotional products, or are we going to see a version where distributors that have adopted AI and have embraced this new technology are now going to come up with a different business model and a new way to grow their businesses. Like, what do you think about that? It may be too early to tell, but curious.

Yeah, I think you still see this big wave coming like we did with e-commerce. The thing with AI, what's different about this is that this is an unlock for growth for distributors. What we want to see at Comiskey, we want to see someone that's a $10 million distributorship get to $20 million. And in order for them to get to that jump, typically they would have to double or triple their payroll just to get there. With the solutions that are arriving with AI, we're hoping they would have to only increase by 20% or something like— it's a very oversimplification of what's going on, but I see this completely as an opportunity. And I want to say one thing, Mark, more about this role and the excitement about this role. You and I have been to these tech conferences. So I just got back, my first week in this role was going to HumanX in San Francisco, right? You're listening to like the founder of Cursor and Claude, folks from OpenAI, the folks who are at the front end of developing a lot of this. And you've been to these tech conferences too recently, and there's been a different kind of energy than there have been probably in the past, say, 5, 6, 7 years. I think you said it yourself, you're beginning to feel that buzz and that energy around the cool things that we can do and adopt and grow. So the creative side of me, it's kind of the two sides of me, the creative side, that understands the industry really well. And then there's this, the nerdy tech side. But I will say on our own bench, we have such a deep bench of technical engineers that know what they're doing. One of the big takeaways I took from Human Act's conference that fits with this role is that they said the missing piece of all of this is context. The more you understand your customer, the more you understand your customer's customer. That's why this role is important for me. I'm like, I know our customer, you know our customer. There are variations and there are things we can always learn from them. But you and I know this business. And we know our customer's customer fairly well, and we know that there's a lot more magic we can create from, from that knowledge.

Well, and you think about context and you think about like, this is just one straightforward example, but you think about marrying AI and the power of an LLM with context, as you say. Yeah. All of the data that a distributor has about their, all their end clients, all the data that's in CommonSKU for their particular instance. And being able to marry that with an LLM to be able to query all sorts of exciting insights that allows them to see their customers and unearth different opportunities in a way they haven't been able to do before. So that's a very straightforward example, but what makes these LLMs and AI products so much more powerful is when you've got a massive data source and we're so excited to be able to expose that with customer data to allow them, obviously with their permission, But it's a game changer in terms of how people see their customers, see their data, and see additional opportunities.

Yeah. I'll also say it's funny, this whole change is coming at a time when I think the industry has such creative potential ahead of itself and what's happened in the past. So to back up a little bit, you referenced earlier how my own role has transformed over the past year or two, and we adopted AI pretty early, especially in the content side of things. And we saw many gains like this Qcast alone, you would create an episode like this. It would take you 6 to 8 hours to produce an episode like this. But because of AI, that has turned to like a 2-hour production window. It's like the same kind of thing that I can see happening with distributors and their workflow moving forward, because one of the key takeaways from Human X was AI as team, not AI as tools. We can use them as tools. We're all using them as tools all the time. But that step further is How do we advance this with AI as a team?

Bobby, what does the first 90 days look like for you in this role? What are you most excited about?

First 90 days for me is reimagining workflow. So working with my colleagues to think through, okay, so CommensQ has 10x workflow production over the past several years. How do we do that again? So it's really reimagining where distributors are at now, looking at even just the org charts. The workflows that are going on between those employees and colleagues within distributorship and seeing how we can maximize that. It's also sort of reimagining the way we can do things. I remember someone at the HumanX conference mentioned this, that system was looking at improving the loan process. What they needed to do was break it apart entirely and just reimagine it with the tools that we have today. So that's part of it is just breaking it apart and reimagine it. And I've already been doing that a little bit. And then with customers, just listening Hearing what they're doing with AI, because one thing that you and I are very passionate about is distributors look the same on the outside, but they're very different on the inside. They serve different verticals, they serve different markets. They might be a distributor who is focused on the tech community. They might be a distributor who is focused on the collegiate market. And the way they operate internally shifts a little bit, right? It's the same kind of business, but it's a little different. And listening to those nuances are very important. AI sort of gives you adaptability within those lanes. Again, we may have a client, the distributor that's working in the sports market. Well, their needs are going to be slightly different. But then also just sort of leadership, staying on the cusp of what's going on with AI, returning that info back to the community and back to our industry like we've always done, and just leaning forward and leading with AI in the future.

One of the pillars that you mentioned is AI intelligence. You mentioned that you were at the HumanX conference in your first week on the job. So that was last week. Can you talk to me about what the biggest takeaway was as it relates to AI intelligence and how does it apply to the role?

It goes back to understanding the context. And you've seen this with folks that are trying to use AI. There's a little bit of a frustrating workflow you go through working with AI, and that is that you're educating it all the time. Like Claude is amazing. Like if you're working on 4 projects in Claude right now, 3 of them you will be like, this is genius. And one of them you'll be like, this is like, Cloud's my idiot savant. Why can't he figure this out? Context is a big part of it. So that was the biggest takeaway is context is a big deal without getting too nerdy about it, but understanding your customer's details. Data is very important. You can only really do so much with generic data in an LLM and with AI, you really need context. And so that's a big part of it.

Let's talk about another pillar that's important, customers and community. What do you mean by that and what do you have planned?

Again, just listening, hearing customers, hearing what they're adapting to, what they're learning, what they are doing. Because here's the most interesting thing about this technology, Mark. In almost any other case, technology required this huge educational component for you to just even begin to learn how to use the technology. AI now can train you to use its own technology. So what we're finding is distributors that are doubling down on it are becoming very advanced. They're wanting to do some pretty sophisticated things. So when I talk about working with the community, it's understanding specifically what they want to do each within their own market and in their own lane.

And then the fourth priority and pillar is AI for the industry. What's your focus there?

If I was just sharing the things that are going on, this is a great time for us to talk about the AI promo brief if you're not a subscriber. So we publish the AI promo brief twice a month and what it is There's lots of AI newsletters out there. This is the only AI newsletter that says, okay, here's the news that has happened in the past 2 weeks, but here's what's important for promo. And Mark, you and I know that with our promo glasses on, we can see through that lens. We can see that design news is important. We can see that working with clients, verticals, we just process all that AI news and say, okay, what's important if you're a promotional products distributor leader, manager, salesperson, and then we process that through the newsletter. That whole muscle reflex that we developed is so important going forward for the industry because we've been seen as this voice in the industry that looks forward on behalf of our customers. So that's a big part of it. A great example— this is nerdy, but, you know, a lot of breaking news happens in the tech community on X. And regardless of how you feel about it, that's where most of the breaking news hits first. And so in things like Rock, you can set up automated tasks to yield the news that's happening by the moment. We always want to sort of stay up on what's happening. And it used to be stay up on what's happening every week with AI. Now it's what's happening kind of every day. So you have automated tasks I do that produce every morning and every afternoon with news that breaks. It can seem a little noisy, but you can do things to control it. My whole point is this is what I think of when I think of AI for the industry. We've done it with the AI promo brief. We've said, okay, let's figure out what the most important breakthroughs are for promo. And then also as a platform, as Commsky, figure out how we can work with that.

Yeah, absolutely. I maybe just wanted to say in closing, this is something I've been thinking about during the course of this interview, is that you've been in this industry for 30 years. I've been in it for about 25 years, so around the same time. And you would've thought that people like you and I might be bored. Of this industry by now, right? And what's fascinating about it, and I think that technology has a big part to do with it, is that the industry almost resets itself and there's a whole set of new opportunities. I feel every handful of years, right? Every couple of years. And you know, as you mentioned, mobile, social, cloud, e-commerce, the list goes on and on. And sure, we've had economic boom and bust cycles as well. My observation is that this is a very dynamic industry. I think that we as an industry do a pretty good job of embracing new technology, or at least being curious about it. And I love the fact that the role that you're in right now continues that tradition that you started as Chief Content Officer, and the fact that you're here to help translate some of this for our customer base and for the industry at large. That's something to be really proud of, and I just, I love the fact that it feels like we're just getting started, even though we have been in the industry for some time and the future feels really, really bright. So I wanted to say that maybe in closing, but any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I'm glad we're closing on this note because that is so important what you just said. This is a reset. And so if you're a distributor, owner, CEO, if you don't feel this already, you'll be feeling this soon. But most people probably do feel this, that this is one of those moments. This is one of those moments where I reimagine my business, where I reimagine how we work, where I reimagine what's possible. Because this year alone, what we're going to see is we're going to see these leap forwards in terms of automation with AI. So we're going to leave just the babysitting the chat windows and we're going to see far more advancement in automating tasks. But the other thing we're going to see, and it's already happened only in the past, I don't know, 3 to 4 weeks, the leaps forward in creativity are going to be phenomenal. Now, we don't have time to unpack all the baggage with that, but we can see that the platforms are already doing an incredible job in creativity. I think, Mark, you know this, I build all my presentations typing in a prompt window with Claude and HTML, right? It's crazy. I use Claude Code to build presentations, and you're talking about a non-technical person that's using Claude Code to build presentations. That's the kind of leap forward that we're seeing in creativity and this really interesting meld between technology and creativity and how they're becoming a much tighter organic structure than they used to be in the past.

Yep, yep, absolutely. Well, Bobby, I, I wanted to thank you for your time. It's hard to get some time in your calendar. You're so busy now with this new role, but a heartfelt congratulations. It's been incredible to be colleagues with you over the last 10 years and can't wait to see what this new role brings. And I know that the community and customers and certainly partners in the industry are really excited for you. So congrats.

Thank you, my friend.