How AI Can Assist in the Sales Process
One area that apparel decorators should use AI is in the sales process, where it can create better customer communication
In December 2025, Apparelist launched a free resource for the apparel decorating community that’s all about artificial intelligence (AI): “AI for Apparel Decorators: From Overwhelmed to Operational.” While it can feel daunting (not to mention the rapid pace it’s evolving at makes it hard to keep up), decorators must enlist it in their shops to stay relevant in today’s business landscape.
It can help to break the discussion into segments, focusing on different buckets and platforms that will assist in a specific area of your shop. This article outlines how AI can assist in the sales side of your business.
Some AI Sales Tools
Credit: Getty Images by BlackJack3D
Let’s look at how you can provide your sales team (and yourself) better support using AI tools. Marshall Atkinson, business coach at Atkinson Consulting and co-founder of Shirt Lab, takes the fear out of this thought process to kick off the conversation.
“It’s about raising the quality of decisions at every level,” he explains. “It’s not robots replacing people. People are simply using better tools.” That being said, Atkinson suggests that implementing AI tools helps sales people build a pitch deck in minutes or create talking points to close a deal.
It’s all about reducing friction and eliminating bottlenecks in the sales process, believes Davis Slagle, vice president of BeeGraphix. “Once AI starts removing bottlenecks in every department, everything gets lighter,” he says. This is particularly true in customer-facing interactions during the sales process.
Slagle notes that their sales team utilizes HighLevel. “HighLevel handles customer communication and automated reminders,” he says. “HighLevel automations and custom GPT tools handle all the repeatable questions: artwork approvals, order status, sizing help, store deadlines. It doesn’t replace people. It frees them up so the human conversations are better.”
And that leads to less frustration on the customer’s side. “Anything that gives robotic answers or traps customers in loops — if it frustrates the customer, it hurts the brand,” Slagle adds.
“AI can be a chatbot on your website or a voice agent on the phone,” Atkinson says. “It knows everything about your business, your customers, and your schedule and can patiently answer any questions, in any language, 24/7, 365 days a year. Plus, it always remembers to upsell.”
One way sales people can specifically utilize AI is to record and transcribe meetings and calls, suggests Michelle Moxley, co-host of the FahrenheitAI vlog. “I use Otter AI for meeting recording,” she says. “It seems to transcribe well, and it does slide pictures every few seconds to correlate to the text. It can also send summaries to participants like meeting notes.” Those notes can be used to design follow-up emails, send notes to your internal team about a specific order, and more.
Internal Communication
Beyond the initial sales cycle that involves working with the customer, AI tools can also be implemented to communicate any of those order details internally. “AI can scan a purchase order or email and automatically enter the information into any shop system,” Atkinson notes. “AI tools can prevent rework, keep teams aligned, and reduce uncertainty.”
He specifically recommends Questiom.ai for apparel decorators. “I’m a big fan of Questom.ai, a Y-Combinator-backed start-up building AI agents specifically for the print industry. What is amazing here is that the AI can know everything about your business and instantly generate a quote, send a follow-up email, and place the order in your system.”
Regardless of which platform you opt to test and implement, Slagle notes that the tools simply provide a way to keep your entire team on the same page. “It keeps everything visible,” he says. “If Shelfmark (an AI platform BeeGraphix uses) sees a misprint, Teams pings the right person. If sales needs something, they drop it in the right channel. If we’re launching a store, updates go to everyone at once.”
Ultimately, using AI in the sales process is just one small part of the entire puzzle that keeps your business running at top level. “Having both AI and talent levels up the entire workflow,” Moxley believes. “Shops that don’t adopt AI will hemorrhage talent to those that do. AI is replacing the pain points that keep shops constantly on the edge of overwhelm.”
