Wednesday, October 28, 2026 / News Give Your AI Tool the First Week You Give a New Hire Photo: Adobe Stock A new inside sales rep starts on a Monday. By Friday she has sat next to your best quoter, learned which contractors want a quote by text and which want the PDF out of the system, and heard twice why nobody promises a ship date on a non-stock item before checking with purchasing. Nobody calls that training. It's just the first week. Then someone at the same company opens ChatGPT or Copilot, types "write a follow-up on this quote," and gets back a note that reads like it came from someone who has never worked a day in the trade. It hasn't. Nobody gave it the first week. That gap is where most of the disappointment with these tools comes from. In the conversations I've had this fall with people using AI at work, the people getting the most out of it aren't better at clever wording. They treat the tool like a sharp hire on day one. They tell it what a new rep would have picked up at the counter, and they do it before they ask for anything. A new hire shows up able to write and able to learn the ERP. What they don't have is your customers, your line card or your sense of what done looks like. An AI tool is in the same spot, except it will never raise its hand. A new rep who isn't sure whether an order can ship partial asks someone. The tool guesses, and hands you the guess in a confident paragraph. So the brief that works looks a lot like the first week. Who is this for, and what do they already know? A purchasing agent at a mechanical contractor reading on a phone between jobs needs something different from the sales manager at a vendor you've bought from for 20 years. What has to happen after they read it? Release the PO. Send back the approved submittals. Pick up at will-call before the order goes back to stock. And show it a finished letter you'd sign, the same way you'd hand a new rep last month's best quote follow-up instead of describing it. You wouldn't let a new hire quote a lead time from memory on day three, and the tool shouldn't either. Give it the source (the manufacturer's acknowledgment, the spec sheet, the PO) in the account your company has approved, not a personal one. Tell it to leave a blank where the source is silent. A wrong lead time in a confident sentence looks exactly like a right one, so check every date and number against the source before it goes out. The best new hires also ask before they start. You can get the tool to do the same by telling it to ask what it needs before it writes anything. On something bigger than an email, like a branch procedure or a line review summary, the questions it comes back with tend to show you what you forgot you knew. Answer them, then let it write. When the first try misses, mark it up the way you'd mark up a new rep's first quote letter. Say what works and what doesn't, specifically, and let it take another pass in the same conversation. In my experience the real improvement comes on the second or third round, not in the first request. Then keep it. A rep remembers Tuesday's correction on Wednesday. The tool won't reliably carry it forward unless you save what you worked out, which is what skills in ChatGPT and Claude, agents in Copilot and Gems in Gemini are for, depending on your plan and what your company has turned on. Next month's follow-up starts where this one finished. Teams that do this end up writing down what most companies never wrote down for their own people. The brief a branch manager saves for quote follow-ups is the same page you'd want to hand the next inside sales hire. The same goes for a manufacturer's customer service team that answers the same spec questions from rep agencies every week. That knowledge usually lives in a few heads and walks out the door with them. A written brief stays. So skip the hunt for a better tool or a list of prompt tricks. Pick one job your team does every week (a quote follow-up, a submittal cover note, a backorder notice to a contractor) and ask your best person to write its first week on one page: who it goes to, what they need to do next, one example you'd sign and where the facts come from. Give it to the tool. Then give it to your next hire. Ready to move from experimenting with AI to putting it to practical use? ASA's Applied AI initiative offers tools, real-world use cases and resources tailored to the distribution industry. Start by exploring where AI can make the biggest difference in your role and everyday work. By Nils Swenson, Director, Innovation & Technology Print