What AI and online buying mean for the people running multi-site label converters, and what to do about it on Monday.
A few years ago, I sat with the owner of a print business who told me something that has stayed with me.
He said his best salesperson was not the one who knew the most about print. It was the one who knew which customer was about to need something, who to call, and how to get the job through the factory without anyone making a mistake.
That is still true across much of the label industry. Relationships matter. Knowledge matters. A good converter can save a brand from a packaging disaster because someone notices a problem before it becomes one.
The way labels are bought, though, is changing.
More work is being specified, priced, ordered, and tracked through software. Procurement teams use systems to qualify suppliers. Brand owners expect portals, APIs, and clean product data. Distributors want to reorder without sending an email. AI is beginning to sit in the middle of those conversations, helping buyers find options, compare specifications, and prepare orders.
Gartner’s research puts numbers on the shift. In a survey of 646 B2B buyers carried out in August and September 2025, 67% said they prefer a rep-free buying experience, and 45% had used AI during a recent purchase. In my experience, buyers still want people when the decision is complex or high risk. But they increasingly expect routine buying to happen without a phone call.
For label converters, especially larger groups built through acquisition, that raises an uncomfortable question. When a buyer, a procurement platform, or an AI-enabled sourcing tool looks for a supplier, can it understand your business well enough to buy from you?
For many, the honest answer is no.
The sale starts before the salesperson
In the traditional model, a buyer contacts a converter. They explain what they need. A salesperson asks questions. An estimator prices the job. Prepress checks the artwork. Production schedules it. Someone sends a proof. Eventually, the job runs.
Each of those steps involves judgement. That is why good people matter so much in this industry.
A growing share of the buying decision now happens before that conversation starts. A brand may already have approved its suppliers. A procurement platform may have filtered them by capability, location, certification, or lead time. An ERP may already hold the specification. A buying system may know the volume, delivery date, and format it needs the order in.
By the time a salesperson gets involved, the buyer may not be asking whether you can do the job. They may be asking whether your system can accept it.
Think about a brand manager launching 40 seasonal SKUs. She has suppliers. What she does not have is time. If she can upload artwork, see a price, approve a proof, and track the job at 10pm without emailing anybody, one converter has made her week easier. If another needs three emails and a call before it can quote, it has made her week harder.
She may still choose the second converter because of a relationship, a price, or a technical capability. But the first converter is easier to buy from. Across hundreds of orders, that difference compounds.
The problem with 15 sites
Label converting has consolidated. Groups have been assembled site by site, often because each acquisition brought something valuable: a strong customer base, a particular capability, a useful location, or a team that knew how to produce difficult work.
That approach can build scale quickly. It can also build complexity just as quickly.
I have seen this pattern in print businesses for years. A group acquires a company and inherits its systems. Then it acquires another, and inherits another set. One site may run Radius, another Label Traxx, a third CERM, and a European operation may sit on NetSuite. Each has its own estimating habits, product codes, artwork process, and idea of what a standard job looks like.
Inside the business, people adapt. They know who to ask. They know which spreadsheet to open. They know that a particular product is quoted differently at one site than another.
Outside the business, none of that is visible. A customer sees one supplier. A procurement system sees one supplier. An AI assistant looking for a capable converter sees one supplier.
If that supplier cannot present a consistent catalogue, clear specifications, reliable pricing rules, and a dependable way to receive and progress an order, the system cannot easily do business with it.
This is where relationship selling meets its limit.
Relationships protect the business you already have. They do not automatically make you selectable in a digital buying process. A salesperson can know an account intimately, but if the group behind them cannot turn a repeat order into a clean, production-ready job without a chain of emails and manual checks, the relationship is carrying more weight than it should.
The cost rarely shows up as a single number on a spreadsheet. It shows up in three places at once.
What this means for the business
If a group describes itself as a platform, a potential buyer will expect more than a shared logo. They will look for evidence that customers can use the group’s combined capabilities without navigating each site separately.
A consistent ordering experience gives substance to that story. It also reduces reliance on individual relationships and helps demonstrate how the business can grow. For leadership, the priority is turning acquisition-led scale into something customers value and a future owner can build on.
Quoting, artwork chasing, proof loops and order rekeying all take time before production begins. Across several sites, different processes can make a familiar repeat order harder to handle than it should be.
Start by identifying where experienced people repeatedly correct or transfer information. Standardising those handoffs can reduce delays and avoidable rework, while giving operations a clearer view of incoming demand. The aim is to release work to production with the information needed to get it right.
A small order can carry a substantial processing cost once estimating, customer service and prepress time are included. Without that visibility, an apparently healthy margin may conceal work that costs too much to handle.
Track those costs alongside the time from order approval to invoice, and examine how much revenue depends on a few individual relationships. Connected ordering can make that information easier to capture, giving finance a firmer basis for pricing decisions, investment priorities and future due diligence.
The counter-argument
Some people will say label buying is technical. Customers want expertise. The rep is not going away.
They are right.
Gartner also predicts that, by 2030, 75% of B2B buyers will prefer sales experiences that prioritise human interaction over AI. Read that alongside its finding on rep-free buying and the message becomes clearer. Buyers want routine transactions without friction. They want a person when the work is complex, the risk is high, or the decision needs judgement.
This is not a choice between digital and people. It is a decision about where people spend their time.
Converters that get it wrong will either automate the relationship away or bury their experts in administration. Both lose.
Built for Monday: a 90-day list
TLMI has framed this year’s Annual Meeting around “Built for Monday: Ideas You Can Put to Work Immediately.” It is a good test for any industry event. If an idea cannot survive contact with Monday morning, it is probably not worth carrying home.
Here are five.
- Measure one thing. Pick a plant. Time a quote from request to sent, and an order from PO to press. You cannot manage what you have never measured.
- Find your reorder share. Pull 12 months of orders and count how many were repeats with no change. That is your first digital channel, already validated by the customer.
- Map your front doors. List every ERP and every way a customer can place an order, plant by plant. Then pick your top five national accounts and ask: how many systems hold their orders? If the answer is more than one, they already feel your fragmentation.
- Make yourself machine-readable. Capabilities, substrates, lead times and certifications, in structured form. If an AI agent cannot find it, a buyer increasingly will not either.
- Give one key account a self-serve pilot. Reorders, proof approval and order status online. Measure the hours saved and ask the customer what they think.
None of these actions requires a big-bang IT programme. Together, they will tell you within a quarter how exposed you are and where the margin is hiding.
The question worth asking
The label industry has always been good at solving difficult production problems. Converters know how to manage complex materials, tight tolerances, variable data, compliance requirements, and unforgiving deadlines.
There is another challenge now, and it is less visible.
When a customer, a procurement platform, or an AI-enabled buying tool looks for a supplier, how easily can it find you, understand what you make, and place an order?
For many converters, the answer is not yet clear. Relationships will continue to bring in work. Good customers will keep calling. The presses will keep running.
But buying behaviour is changing. More of the straightforward, repeatable, high-volume work will go to converters that are easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to transact with. The work left behind will tend to be more complex, more bespoke, and more expensive to win.
That does not mean the industry is disappearing. It means the basis of competition is widening.
A converter can have excellent presses, strong technical capability, and long-standing customer relationships. If a buyer cannot see what it makes, understand its lead times, submit a specification, or place an order without creating work for somebody else, it will be harder to choose.
The next customer may not pick up the phone. It may start with a search box, a procurement platform, or a question asked of a system.
The converters that make themselves easy to understand will be the ones still in the conversation.
If you run or invest in a multi-site converter, come find me. Bring the integration problem you’ve been meaning to fix since the last acquisition.
Not going to Fort Lauderdale?
