OX1 happened, and it was brilliant.
Thank you, Manchester
Right. Last week was a big one.
Wednesday. Hallé St Peters in Manchester. 50+ brand-side leaders in one room. CTOs, Heads of Ecom, COOs, Digital Directors, CFOs, Merchandisers, Ops Leads, IT managers. People who have actual jobs at actual brands and actually had to take a day out of their week to be there.
We didn’t sell tickets to vendors. We didn’t have a sponsor parade. We had brands.
And it worked.
Chris Perrins on AI and safety
The session that removed (perceived) barriers to getting started with AI and building the confidence through your org to make the impact last. Chris Perrins from Gymshark on AI and safety. The kind of talk you’d expect to be either preachy or a bit over-whelming. It was neither.
Honest. Practical. Grounded in what’s actually happening inside of brands at scale. Where the risk really sits. What the team are actually doing about it. Where the speed-versus-safety conversations land. The bits that look easy but aren’t, and the bits that look hard but are.
Half the room had their notebooks out. The other half had their phones out. Nobody was on email.
That’s the bar for a keynote. He cleared it.
6 Roundtables, 6 honest conversations
After the keynote, the room split into six tables. Here’s what landed at each.
Ecom and merch. The Inverted Trade Pack. AI surfaces the trade headlines Monday first thing. The team spends the day doing the actual work and building the actions. The Monday meeting stops being a recap and starts being a decision. The line that stuck: “Get AI to mark the homework before we walk in the room.” Not write the trade report. Check it.
Tech. Internal knowledge bases. Documentation that lives somewhere queryable, without a human in the loop of every interaction. Updates that share themselves. The easiest AI project most businesses have not built. Funniest line of the day came out of this table: “Copilot is what your nan uses. ChatGPT is what your teenagers use. Claude is what the workers use.”
Ops. Cross-functional landed cost and approval intelligence. The tool that turns a dozen Slack threads into one answer.
Commercial. AI-generated product mockups for customisations, driven off user input. Visualisation at the point of want, not six weeks later.
Ecom and digital product. Product creation and launch readiness. The bit nobody posts about. Everybody needs it.
Data integrity, governance and workflow. The table where someone said out loud, “AI is a dirty word in our office,” and the rest of the table immediately recognised the pattern.
Each table did the same exercise. Spot the opportunity. Make it viable. Handle the objections. Action plan. Share back. By the end of the day, every table had something concrete to take home.
The bit that surprised us
How honest people were.
“We’re a bit of a shitshow on this.” “We’re racing without thinking about the foundation.” “I don’t know if anyone in this room has it figured out.”
You don’t get that at a normal industry event. You get it at OX1 because the room was curated, the format was right, and the people who turned up trusted each other enough to say it out loud.
That trust is the thing we’re building.
The next one
OX2 is being planned. This time, London.
If you want to be in it: https://operatorexperience.ai/
Thank you, Manchester.