60 • JUNE 2026 • PPAI Must Read | Distributors most organizations of any size have in their sights, if they haven’t already accomplished it. “Now it’s just a matter of how do we keep configuring it to understand the use cases of our sellers?” DeCesare says. It’s one of the things up for discussion with HALO’s sales growth council here in wine country. More complicated work will define whether HALO can bring the human touch to the e-commerce experience. DeCesare spent years at VistaPrint, which gives her a useful industry frame of reference. “I better appreciate now, having been at HALO, why there was a certain part of the market that VistaPrint and the other consumer players can’t touch,” she says. “It’s at a certain point of complexity – the orders are actually just that big or that unique – where there isn’t an obvious manufacturer, and somebody needs to get on the phone and search and figure this out. It’s very difficult to just code a solution for this, and there’s so much human intelligence involved in the process. “Now that AI is so much more mature, translating that human thinking and reasoning into a set of agentic workflows like this is sort of the magical project ahead of us. And even if we can solve this at all, this is where HALO will step out ahead and compete in a way that really nobody else is trying to do at the moment.” AI is not being introduced to eliminate that human judgment. It is being used to capture and repeat it. This is the real bridge between HALO’s past and future in client service. “You want the feeling that someone is an expert talking to you and guiding you through this purchase,” DeCesare says. “We have sellers that are doing that today. … So, we can start to turn that into a set of conversational prompts: “‘OK, I have this event where I have to order a bunch of merchandising products.’ That’s all I know as a consumer. ‘OK, talk to me. Is it a summer event, a winter event?’ And then you can prompt them through the series of meaningful questions to get down to the assortment of products that make sense.” In this brave new future, clients get some of the self-service ease they expect from e-commerce while preserving the expertise that makes an agency experience feel premium. That is how the company gets closer to Hilt’s goal of no more heroes. But, in an era when every professional in the world is wondering on some level whether AI will replace them, is hero just a euphemism for human? The People Business 2.0 Along with the new leadership – and the dot-connecting on private equity horizons and the universal threat of AI replacing people – one might think the rank and file behind the scenes of HALO are personally concerned. But conversations with back-office employees reveal this isn’t so much the case. If anything, people are energized, they say. Certain positions have been eliminated, including departing executives. But the result has been greater corporate agility. One employee said projects have gotten done in six months that not long ago would’ve taken two and a half years. For a new leadership regime, the wins are crucial to establishing trust. “We try to instill in people to think positively,” says Chief Human Resources Officer Kimberly Sandifer. “Give it an opportunity and step outside your comfort zone a bit.” These kinds of transitions are not unique to one organization, of course. “This is not just a HALO thing, you know,” Sandifer says. “It’s a world thing.” But change is change, and executives recognize it’s happening quickly. HALO Forward With a rapid transition like HALO’s, there is much to do. For Hilt, the comfort with high stakes and immediate goals was ingrained early. He grew up with it. “I sat around a dinner table that had a lot of work,” he says. His father was a banker and entrepreneur, someone who approached business with “You want the feeling that someone is an expert talking to you and guiding you through this purchase.” – ERIN DECESARE
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