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In 2017, I helped a Brazilian founder take his company into Europe. Romania was the first real test — three weeks to launch publicly, no sales team, no brand recognition, just a local consultant willing to put his own name behind us. About 90 to 100 people showed up, including Romania's third-largest marketplace. It became the founder's fifth-largest market within two years.

What happened next is the part worth telling. He wanted to move faster, so he split the model — I kept Romania and took Poland, a business partner took Spain and Italy. Same playbook, same access, same mandate. Only one side of that split performed the way Romania had

That gap is close to something Sander Ardinois raised in our recent session on enterprise AI. His comparison was Excel: give everyone access, let them use it for daily work, but the moment a process needs to run reliably, it needs an engineer and real governance around it, not just a willing user. Peter Birkholm-Buch, who runs the OpenAI platform inside Carlsberg's research lab, described business teams bypassing data scientists entirely — building models in Excel with AI, discarding them, building new ones, burning tokens on work that never becomes anything durable. He called it anti-ESG behavior. Strange phrase, accurate diagnosis. Access without literacy doesn't just fail to create value — it wastes resources while looking like productivity.

Multiple studies on enterprise AI adoption have found a version of this pattern at scale: most companies report deploying AI tools, a much smaller share report it moving the bottom line. I'd want the exact figures confirmed before quoting them precisely, but the shape holds across the research — the gap isn't access, it's the judgment layer sitting on top of the tool.

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We're facing our own version of this at EVOLVE. We have local experts and influencers in every market, people doing, on paper, the job I did in Romania. It works, mostly, because we built something underneath them — a community that vets and vouches, so trust doesn't rest on one person's charisma alone. But something still doesn't fully transfer: the instinct for which relationship is worth three weeks and which isn't. We can build a system around a person. We haven't built the system that replaces the person.

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For founders and operators, the point isn't to distrust delegation. It's to be honest about what's actually being delegated. A process can be handed off. Judgment has to be grown, or borrowed carefully from someone who already has it. That's as true rolling out a new market with a junior hire as it is rolling out a co-pilot across a merchandising team. The tool travels. The judgment usually doesn't.

Romania didn't work because of the playbook. It worked because of what the playbook couldn't write down.

EVOLVE x CustomerX 2026 🇬🇧

On October 14–15, EVOLVE becomes the Official Innovation Partner for the Innovation Pavilion at CustomerX, at the new Olympia London — the event built by the team behind InternetRetailing and Ian Jindal, who has shaped the UK ecommerce conversation for over two decades.

CustomerX pulls 5,000+ senior decision-makers. 73% are Senior Management, Director, VP or C-Suite. 52% come directly from Retail & DTC brands — Amazon, Tesco, M&S, Nike, Adidas, Coca-Cola, P&G, Unilever, Netflix, Disney, eBay, IKEA, Hilton, H&M, ASOS, Boots, Decathlon, L'Oréal, Uber, easyJet, and more.

We're not renting a booth. We're building a room.

Inside the Pavilion, EVOLVE will run our own space — a meeting area, a podcast desk recording live interviews through both days, and three speaking slots reserved for EVOLVE members. Six partner positions. That's it. We curate who's in the room, which means every conversation you have there is with someone worth having it with.

For our technology partners, this isn't a logo on a wall. It's:

EVOLVE is a global private network and operating layer connecting senior commerce leaders, founders, operators, advisors, investors and board members across markets.

We help companies accelerate international growth by orchestrating trusted expertise, strategic relationships and commercial execution.

Every week, experienced operators, founders, investors and advisors come together to exchange operating experience, challenge conventional thinking and identify opportunities across commerce, technology, retail, marketplaces, payments and adjacent industries. The conversations are designed to surface operational realities, market shifts and strategic patterns before they become obvious.

This is not a marketplace.

It is a managed operating layer that turns market access into structured commercial execution.

That is EVOLVE.

If you’d like to learn more how to partner with, please email us at
[email protected] or [email protected]