Why Dema is the headline sponsor of Operator Experience
52% told us the thing they most wanted to automate was trade reporting.
When we surveyed people coming to OX1, 52% told us the thing they most wanted to automate was trade reporting.
Not creative. Not customer service. Not some glamorous corner of the AI conversation. Trade reporting. The most thankless, finicky, week-eating job in commerce. The thing nobody puts on the OKR doc but everyone does on a Sunday night.
That number is the reason Dema is our headline sponsor.
Trade reporting is where AI actually lands
You can tell a lot about an industry by what it pretends to care about versus what people actually do all day.
Operators publicly care about omnichannel strategy, brand world, customer obsession, the future of retail media. Privately they spend three hours every Monday morning stitching together a sales pack from six different tools, fighting over whether “revenue” means gross or net, and arguing about which definition of margin is the right one.
The trade meeting is the cathedral. The prep is the panic.
Henrik Hoffman, Dema’s co-founder, put it well in a post a few weeks ago. The problem was never the meeting. It was the prep that destroyed the meeting. Different reports. Different logic. Different definitions. Different levels of analysis. Five people walk in with five versions of the truth, and the first forty minutes get burned reconciling them before anyone makes a decision.
This is the part of the job AI is genuinely good at. Not because it’s clever. Because it’s tireless and consistent. The same query, the same definitions, every Monday, forever. No “I think Sarah pulled it differently last week.” No fighting over whether the returns are in or out.
Dema’s whole thing is plugging into the connected commercial picture, the bit that’s actually a mess, and turning it into something a team can argue about productively rather than argue about pointlessly. Marketing, inventory, products, margins, customers, all in the same place. Same definitions. Same logic. So the meeting is about what to do, not what happened.
If your weekly trade meeting starts with someone saying “wait, why is your number different to mine,” this is the category we’re talking about.
The AI conversation people aren’t having
There’s a version of the AI conversation in commerce that’s all vibes. Will it replace creative? Will the agents take our jobs? Should we let it write our product descriptions?
Then there’s the conversation operators are actually having, which is much less sexy and much more useful. Where in my week is the highest-leverage thing AI can take off my plate. The answer is almost always something boring. Reporting. Pulling. Reconciling. Pasting into a deck.
Henrik’s been beating this drum for a while. His take is essentially that the brands getting in late aren’t behind on the headline AI stuff. They’re behind on the unglamorous foundation. Clean, connected, AI-ready data. Without that, AI just helps you make bad decisions faster.
We agree. And it’s why we wanted a headline sponsor whose product points squarely at the work, not at the hype.
Brands you’ll already know
Dema isn’t a name being parachuted in for the event. They already work with a chunk of brands you’d recognise from the OX cohort and the wider community. Tatti Lashes. Represent. The Couture Club. The kind of operators who don’t have time for theory and need the report to land before the meeting starts.
That’s the bit we cared about. We didn’t want a sponsor whose pitch was a slide. We wanted one with customers in the room.
What this means for OX
Headline sponsorship for us isn’t a logo placement. It’s a content commitment.
Dema will be running sessions and conversations through the year that go after the trade reporting problem properly. What does the weekly trade meeting look like when prep is fifteen minutes instead of three hours. What changes when everyone walks in with the same numbers. Where AI helps and where it absolutely doesn’t, like brand, strategy, the human moments, the bits that don’t survive automation and shouldn’t.
We picked them because they’re operators talking to operators. Henrik scaled Babyshop before he built Dema. He talks like someone who’s done the job, because he has. There’s a noticeable absence of the AI-flavoured corporate stage voice that’s started to creep into the category, which we appreciated.
If 52% of you want to automate trade reporting
Then 52% of you should probably come and meet the people building exactly that.
OX is built around the idea that the operator job is harder than it looks, and most of the conversation around it is louder than it is useful. Dema fits that brief. They’re shipping product against the actual problem, not the conference-stage version of it.
We’re glad they’re headlining.
Want to chat to the Dema team at OX? They’ll be everywhere. You won’t miss them.