Over the past year, I have spent a great deal of time with retailers and consumer brands across different markets. There is real progress being made with AI, data, and new ways of operating, but there is also a sense that these capabilities are still developing in separate layers.

What many teams are looking for is a way to connect how the business understands the market, how it responds to customers, and how it executes across stores and channels.

That is the context behind an invite-only Retail and CPG Startup Showcase and Networking Event we are hosting in Paris on April 23.

Au cours de l’année écoulée, j’ai passé beaucoup de temps avec des enseignes de retail et des marques de grande consommation sur différents marchés. Des avancées concrètes sont réalisées autour de l’IA, de la donnée et de nouvelles façons d’opérer, mais ces capacités continuent souvent d’évoluer de manière cloisonnée.De nombreuses équipes cherchent aujourd’hui à mieux relier la compréhension du marché, la manière dont elles répondent aux attentes des clients, et l’exécution en magasin comme sur l’ensemble des canaux. C’est dans ce contexte que nous organisons, le 23 avril à Paris, un événement sur invitation dédié au Retail et au CPG, réunissant un Startup Showcase et une session de networking.

Retail complexity is often described in terms of scale. In practice, it is about keeping pricing, inventory, and product data aligned across systems.

After a conversation with Maria J Marti (CEO & Founder of ZeroError.ai), I spent some time reflecting on how data consistency is becoming foundational, especially as we move toward agentic workflows.

A few weeks ago, I was in a conversation with a brand that has been investing steadily in digital transformation. Their question was simple and familiar: Which startups would you recommend for a company that still carries legacy systems but wants to move into Agentic AI?

It is a question that often gets framed as a tooling decision, though it tends to unfold differently in practice. The answer sits across three dimensions that need to move together. Architectural guidance reshapes the foundation, mature partner solutions provide stability and integration, and curated startups introduce new capabilities through innovative technologies while accelerating specific parts of the journey.

Retail operations break down at the moment you don’t know what’s happening at the store. Power status is one of the most fundamental signals, yet it has been one of the hardest to access in real time.

I’ve been looking at how Gisual is changing that.

From instant power visibility to triggering the right workflows and even accelerating insurance recovery, this is about turning a simple signal into operational action. Sharing a few thoughts on what this means for Retail Store IQ.

Marketing teams are not short on data. They are short on systems that act on it. I have been spending time thinking about how we move from insight to execution, and what it takes to compress that cycle from days to hours.

Sharing a perspective on how agentic ecosystems, enabled through Microsoft for Startups and Pegasus partners like A.Team, are starting to reshape how marketing actually operates.

Spent some time thinking about where agentic systems actually slow down in retail. It is not intelligence. It is trust.

Most teams are still in human-in-the-loop mode. That works until scale forces a shift to policy-driven execution.

This is where things get interesting. Sharing some thoughts on how blockchain, smartcontracts, and identity could play a role as a trust layer for autonomous systems.

NVIDIA GTC was a different kind of experience for me. Coming from Retail and CPG events, this was a chance to step into AI-first conversations. What stood out was not just what AI can do, but what it takes to make it work in real environments.

A few thoughts from the week, including conversations with startups and enterprise teams.

I kept hearing the same terms used interchangeably. Agent. Orchestrator. Claw. So, I spent some time digging in to better articulate what each one actually means and how they fit together in real systems (& in the retail world).

A big takeaway for me is that it is a shift from coordination to continuous operation.

Agents execute. Orchestrators coordinate. Claws run the system.

Sharing my take. Would value your perspective.

Annual reports contain far more than financial results. They reveal the strategic priorities and operational challenges enterprises are working to solve.In this article, I share the approach I use to analyze annual reports, break down those priorities into specific capabilities, and map them to innovative startups using the Business Model Canvas.It is a simple framework that helps connect enterprise strategy with startup innovation in a practical way.