What we heard at the first EcomExpo Brunch

One table, no stage

A conference gives you dozens of talks in a day. What it rarely gives you is the time to ask the person next to you how they really close the month, or which tool they quietly stopped paying for. So we kept the format small on purpose: one table, no stage, no slides and no sales pitch. Everyone talks, and brunch is on us.

To get the conversation going, every guest picked one of five questions and answered it from their own business or their clients':

1. Where does data still have to be moved by hand?
2. How much work does it take to understand exactly what you are getting paid for?
3. Which process would break first if your orders doubled?
4. Which three exceptions eat the most time, and who is responsible for solving them?
5. Which one task, if you eliminated it, would save the most hours every month?

The questions did their job. It was an open, lively conversation, which is exactly what we hoped for.

Six things we heard

1. There are too many AI tools

Nobody at the table was short of AI tools to try. The problem is the opposite: there are so many that it is hard to tell which ones fit your business and what you actually get from them.

2. "Use AI and cut your price"

Service providers hear this more and more from their clients. Yet the same clients still need a real person when something goes wrong. AI changes how the work gets done, but it has not removed the need for someone who understands the client's business.

3. Collecting documents from clients

Chasing invoices, receipts and statements was the shared pain of the morning. As one guest put it, sometimes it feels like being a kindergarten teacher.

4. Simple solutions work

One of the best moments was a practical example of how much routine one team automated with Notion. A good reminder that a simple tool, set up well, can take a lot of routine off the table.

5. Excel and data security

Spreadsheets still run a lot of businesses, and that brings its own questions: who maintains the formulas, who has access, and who can see your data.

6. Perpetual or periodic inventory accounting?

Why should accountants recommend quantity-based (perpetual) or value-based (periodic) inventory accounting to their e-commerce clients? We only scratched the surface. This topic deserves a training session of its own.

An idea worth borrowing

Hold an internal hackathon: give the team time to automate their own routine.

This was the idea we liked most. The people who do a task every week know best where it wastes time, so give them a day to fix it themselves. A small win in the hackathon often pays back every month after.

What comes next

Thank you to everyone who spent their Friday morning with us. Many of you wanted to know more about using AI in practice, and we are happy to share what has worked for us at APG Media and EcomExpo. If that is useful to you, write to [email protected].

We will do this again. The EcomExpo community is more than one day a year, and a small table is often where the most honest conversations happen. Until the next one.