As a marketer, you know that the branded promotional merchandise industry is large and growing.

The business world is full of David vs. Goliath scenarios.

Sensing an opportunity, large companies will frequently enter a market to compete with smaller established vendors, relying on large budgets and even larger volumes to make lower prices their main selling point.

Short-sighted consumers are easily persuaded by the lower-cost argument and will cast their lot with the big companies without understanding the larger ramifications of their decision. More discerning customers, however, look at the big picture before deciding how to spend their hard-earned budgets. More often than not, they realize that saving money now on a single purchase will result in higher costs down the road.

That’s because, perhaps counter-intuitively, smaller companies actually have a number of advantages over larger organizations in areas other than price—services that ultimately matter more to clients.

Last week, we described how artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally changing the way organizations find the right vendors to help them solve their business problems. If you haven’t already read it, you can do so here:

In this blog post we’ll walk through some real-world scenarios, providing end-to-end examples of how a company might actually use AI to find and vet a qualified partner, using the example of “marketing fulfillment vendor.” By following these best practices, you can use your preferred search engine to find exactly what you’re looking for without having to scroll through pages and pages of links.

We’ve said it many times before in this blog forum: for a vendor/client relationship to be truly successful, it must be managed as a partnership where both parties are equally vested in the results. Unless everyone is committed to achieving a common goal, the relationship is nothing more than a business arrangement where one side pays an agreed-upon amount of money and the other side delivers a set of agreed-upon services, day in, day out.

In the marketing fulfillment vendor/customer dynamic, a critical part of this partnership is regular business reviews.  Whether conducted annually, quarterly, or somewhere in between, these reviews provide critical insight into whether goals are being met, if those goals need to be adjusted based on observed metrics, and what kinds of tweaks are required to make the necessary changes.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is ubiquitous.

It’s understandable.  AI can perform in seconds a task that might take a person hours to complete.  AI is fast, impartial, and tireless.  It doesn’t require breaks, praise, or even a salary.  The appeal is intoxicating.

In response, companies around the world are moving quickly to incorporate AI into their operations—some might say too quickly.  In their haste to adopt the technology and increase revenues, these companies are losing sight of the human cost in terms of displacement and lost jobs.