When the Numbers Look Fine and the Business Isn't

From Photo to Figurine: An Autonomous Retailer Run Entirely by Agents

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 coordinate agents by running something real instead of a toy demo. The biggest lesson? The breakthrough came when I stopped making my agents rebuild everything from scratch and started treating them as operators that drive existing tools, like having an agent run Meshy AI for the 3D models and Printfield for printing and shipping.

How startups gain access to the world of enterprise retail and consumer goods

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 into a lasting partnership.

When the Jeans You Sell Become a Liability: How Modern Retailers Are Getting Ahead of Supply Chain Risk

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 for Startups Pegasus portfolio that is building genuinely interesting solutions for Retail and CPG companies in this space.

Buynomics Brings Agent-Based Simulation to Revenue Growth Management

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 portfolio decisions before they reach the market.

Why the Future of Work Will Be Built on Internal Reinvention

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 judgment that take years to build. As AI takes over more routine execution, those human capabilities may become even more valuable. I wrote about why the future may belong to organizations that focus less on replacement and more on reinventing the talent they already have, along with the emerging platforms trying to make that possible.