Awards October 26, 2026
Counselor Power 50 2026: No. 36 Randy Carr, World Emblem
Welcome to the 2026 Counselor Power 50 list, which ranks the most influential people in the promo products industry.
#36 Randy Carr
World Emblem (asi/98264) – CEO
2025 Rank: #43
Industry Experience: 36 years
Previous Appearances on Counselor Power 50: 1
Randy Carr, the 2026 Counselor Person of the Year, ascends seven spots on this year’s Counselor Power 50 list thanks to growing industry influence. Carr attributes the current success of Counselor Top 40 supplier World Emblem (asi/98264) to three areas: aggressive expansion in the face of tariffs, deep investment into AI tools and a relentless pursuit of productivity gains. The Hollywood, FL-headquartered firm recently opened a roughly 100,000-square-foot facility in a free trade zone in the Dominican Republic. Plus, the supplier’s 72,000-square-foot Houston facility is also operational, reshoring over 100 jobs, according to Carr. “When the tariffs hit, we didn’t write a letter to Washington,” Carr adds. “We built factories.”
On the technology side, more than 70% of the company uses World Emblem’s custom-built, in-house AI program every week, and it’s bringing tangible results: The development team has increased its throughput by 30%, and test plans that used to take five hours can be executed in about 15 minutes, Carr says.
Finally, he adds, line productivity went from 97 pieces an hour to 141, a 45% increase with the same number of workers on the same machines. Carr credits the boost to “Toyota principles,” standardized work and “a team that stopped accepting, ‘That’s how we’ve always done it.’”
Carr’s belief in technology goes beyond simply streamlining operations. He’s building AI to replace himself as CEO, going so far as to publicly set a deadline of Dec. 31, 2028. “Twenty-nine months from now,” he posted in July on LinkedIn, “I plan to be unemployed.”
Going forward, Carr says he’s focused on World Emblem reaching $250 million in annual revenue. (Last year, the company had an estimated $168.2 million in North American promotional products revenue.) Says Carr: “I’m not interested in coasting.”
AI Perspective
“In the business, it’s everywhere now. Sprint planning cut in half. Support tickets resolved by an agent reading our internal wiki instead of a person searching for 20 minutes. Digitizing work that used to take 28 weeks of manual labor now done in two months. Marketing mapped 156 candidate agents and is building command center dashboards so a human approves or pauses every one of them. We learned that last part the hard way. An automation got write access to our CRM without guardrails and did things nobody asked it to. Now we have a governance document. Every company is going to write that document. Most will write it after the mistake.
“Personally, I run my own life through it. My calendar, my commitments, my meeting transcripts, my daily scorecard. I have an AI that reads everything I said yesterday and asks me five hard questions every morning. It’s the most demanding coach I’ve ever had and it doesn't care about my feelings.
“Next year is when the gap opens for businesses. The companies that treated AI as a productivity tool will get a little faster. The companies that rebuilt how they operate around it will be a different species. In our industry, I’ve said it out loud at conferences and people didn’t like hearing it: if you’re a supplier or distributor running on 2019 processes, you have about 24 months. The economics won’t wait for you. I’d rather be blunt now than polite at your going-away party.”