Sparks & Signals: An AI-Powered Audio TLDR

Had a great conversation with Shameel Abdulla, CEO of Clootrack, this morning, and came away energized about what his team is building. Most brands have gotten very good at measuring customer experience but not at driving outcomes from it. Clootrack closes that gap. It's an AI Super Agent for Voice of the Customer that doesn't just tell retailers and CPG brands what happened, but why it ha...

Most frontierAI research isn't built with retail in mind, but a handful of models in Microsoft Foundry Labs map onto real retail problems remarkably well. I went through the catalog and picked out the ones with a genuine use case, from product imagery and conversational commerce to search, optimization, and 3D shopping. I also dig into why in-house retail teams can treat these as building bloc...

I spent the last month building autonomous projects: a hashtag#retail operation that designs and sells t-shirts off trending phrases, a pipeline that turns photos into 3D-printed figurines, and a newsletter that translates retail news into insights and actions rather than just headlines. I learned a lot along the way. That you no longer need coding skills to build real things, and that you can bui...

What if your news feed answered "𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒅𝒐𝒆𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒎𝒆𝒂𝒏 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒎𝒆" instead of "what happened"? I wrote a job description for an #AI agent using #MicrosoftScout , that reads 30+ #retail news sources every week and delivers trends and takeaways rather than headlines. New post on how I built it, the exact instructions that power it, and a link to the first live issue.

Earlier today I had a great conversation with Georges F. Mirza, creator of the ARS² Framework and founder of ComTask, and it prompted me to write down something I keep seeing with the #retailers and #brands I work with. Around 70,000 B2B Tech #startups launch every year and most fail within two years. Yet the capabilities retailers need most right now, especially in agentic AI, live inside those y...

In this issue I dig into the trend I find most significant right now, an agentic layer that overlays existing mature systems instead of replacing them, with great examples from Auger, Intelo.ai, Buynomics, and SimpliContract. I also explain MCP servers in plain terms (think USB ports for AI) and highlight Microsoft for Startups Pegasus portfolio #startups like Nimble, Omnistream, YDISTRI, Tembi -...

Merchandise planning is one of those domains where deep vertical focus wins. Toolio built their platform around the actual vocabulary of #retail planners, things like open-to-buy, size curves, and weeks of supply, with apparel brands like Bombas, Knix, and AKA Brands on the customer roster. The results speak for themselves: AKA Brands cut SKU count by 50 to 75 percent while holding sales steady. W...

What happens when you let AI agents run an entire retail store? I just published my second experiment in autonomous retail. The first was a store that scanned trending news and auto-designed viral t-shirts. This one is Mini Me: upload a photo, and a pipeline of agents turns it into a 3D-printed figurine of you, a loved one, or your pet. Both were really experiments to teach myself how to build and...

If you're building a B2B tech startup in retail or CPG, getting in front of the right enterprise teams is often harder than building the product itself. This piece looks at the corporate innovation programs and CVCs that are genuinely set up to work with external tech providers: from PepsiCo Labs and LVMH to General Mills 301 INC and Tesco Labs, and what it actually takes to convert a pilot in...

Most supplychain compliance failures are not caused by careless companies. They are caused by a visibility problem that most brands do not realize they have until a shipment gets detained at the border. This article is about how that plays out in practice and what a new generation of trade intelligence tools is doing about it. Trademo is one of the startups we are working with through Microsoft fo...

Excited to welcome Buynomics to the Microsoft for Startups Pegasus portfolio. After a fantastic conversation with Ingo Reinhardt and Tim Schneider, it's clear they've built something genuinely differentiated in the 𝑹𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒏𝒖𝒆 𝑮𝒓𝒐𝒘𝒕𝒉 𝑴𝒂𝒏𝒂𝒈𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕 space. Their agent-based simulation approach gives commercial teams a digital twin of their customer ecosystem to stress-test pricing, promotions, and...

A recent conversation with my old friend Audrey Piquemal got me thinking about how enterprises are approaching workforce transformation in the #AI era. Merci, Audrey! Too often, companies respond to change by replacing experienced employees with newer and cheaper talent. It may improve short-term financials, but it also strips away institutional knowledge, customer context, and operational judgmen...

Every July, Microsoft's fiscal year turns over and I sit down to think seriously about where to focus my energy for the year ahead. For FY27, one of my five priority areas is 𝑨𝒈𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒄 𝑹𝒆𝒊𝒏𝒗𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏, and I have written up my thinking on what it means specifically for Retail and CPG enterprise software. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧: the first wave of enterprise software remembered. The second wave explained....

For years, my passion has been in the world of IoT and building connected systems that can sense, interpret, and respond to the world around them. As I’ve spent more time building AI agents, I kept noticing something familiar: The architectural DNA behind agentic AI looks remarkably similar to the systems many of us built in IoT.

Most retail analytics platforms are built around queries. You form a hypothesis, build a report, get an answer. The limitation is that the most valuable insights are often hiding in questions nobody thought to ask. This is a spotlight on Microsoft partner DataGenie, and how their approach to proactive, continuous analytics changes that equation for retail and CPG teams, and why the difference betw...

After publishing my piece on letting AI agents run a retail store, the most common question I received: how does it actually work? This post answers that in full technical detail. Three agents, three different foundation models selected for task fit rather than convenience, one sequential pipeline orchestrated through 𝑮𝒊𝒕𝑯𝒖𝒃 𝑪𝒐𝒑𝒊𝒍𝒐𝒕 𝑪𝑳𝑰, and a live storefront on RedBubble that sources, designs, an...

I spent some time recently building something I have been curious about for a while: a retail store run almost entirely by AI agents. No manual design work, no product research, no uploading listings by hand. Just a three-agent pipeline that scouts trending content, generates original artwork, and publishes finished products to a live storefront. The store is real & running. Read about how it...

Supplychain software has a workflow problem, not a capability problem. Planners spend their days navigating dashboards, reconciling signals across systems, and manually triaging exceptions. The tools work. The work just never stops feeling like tool management. Enmovil, the newest member of the Microsoft for Startups Pegasus portfolio, is taking a different approach. Their CADDIE platform sits as...

Enterprise AI is moving beyond copilots and dashboards toward systems that participate directly in how work gets done. In operationally intensive industries such as distribution, manufacturing, and field services, this move is particularly visible. These environments rely on complex workflows, fragmented systems, and deep domain expertise. Traditional automation has struggled to keep up with that...

Retailmerchandising is one of the most mature areas in enterprise software, yet much of the work still relies on disconnected systems and manual coordination. I explore how Intelo.ai approaches merchandising as a continuous, agent-driven system that connects planning, allocation, and in-season optimization. If you are exploring how AI can reshape retail planning and execution, this is a space wort...

Agentic AI is starting to show up in places we often overlook. Contract management is one of them. In this piece, I explore how SimpliContract is turning contracts into a continuous layer of intelligence across the enterprise. This came out of a great conversation with Guru Venkatesan, CEO and Founder of SimpliContract, on financial efficiency, execution, and the untapped value sitting inside agre...

I have been spending time looking at startups that rethink how work gets done using AI agents. Auger clearly stands out. Instead of adding another layer of dashboards, it connects data directly to action. The result is a supplychain that can sense changes, evaluate tradeoffs, and execute in real time. Here is my perspective on what this means and why it matters.

My experiment setting up Openclaw on a Raspberry Pi

A recent conversation with Paula Macaggi | OFFBounds stayed with me. She pointed me to an article from Block on the idea of moving from hierarchy to intelligence . We had been discussing Openclaw and what persistent, always-on systems might mean for how organizations operate. The article introduced a set of concepts that added depth to something I had been thinking about for a while.

Retail Stores are moving toward real-time awareness. A look at how movement, shelf interaction, and operations come together to drive action, featuring Ariadne, ShopperAI, and Worlds