Adoption was never the finish line

Ten years ago, a conversation with a new customer often started with, "Why should we be doing this? Why should we change the way we trade?" They also worried about trusting a SaaS platform with something so critical to their business. Today, that conversation has moved on along with the pace of digital adoption in business and daily life; now customers are focused on the how. How will this platform fit into the way our company already trades, how will it give us the advantage and improvements we are looking for, and how can I get the internal buy-in across my company to make it work effectively? Digital trade isn't seen as revolutionary anymore. Ten years ago it was, enough to make it onto our own tagline.

What digital adoption actually looks like today

That shift in mindset and motivation is clearest among our longest-standing customers, and it doesn't look the way people might think. Deeper use of a platform can mean different things depending on the customer: more volume for one, a sharper product spec for another, wider market reach for a third. What they have in common is a habit of drilling down into the specific trade mechanisms and strategies that have delivered results over years of doing this. You don't pick up that kind of judgement in a demo. It's built trade by trade, and it shows in how these customers act on the data they get and evolve to use the platform more effectively than when they first started.

What AI actually changes

At the same time our adoption deepens, a new layer of competition has turned up in the shape of AI trading bots, and if anything, that's the clearest sign yet that digital trade isn't a phase. It's infrastructure now.

This is where being a first mover in this space still counts for something. Digital trade in agriproducts isn't plug and play. It's an intricate market, and most of what we know about making it work has come from ten years of learning alongside our customers, one trading landscape at a time. That experience carries straight across to our own platform AI. Larger organisations at times find themselves held back by policy, legacy systems, and layers of approval that slow every decision down. We're not hamstrung in the same way. Being small enough to move fast means we can take on the AI exploration in a nimble yet controlled environment and hand our customers the result once it's actually proven. The pace at which we are working in the MCP space is exciting and something I am incredibly excited to bring to our customers shortly.

The ones still finding their feet

But what about the other side of the digital coin,  where does that leave the businesses that haven't gone digital yet? Less far behind than you'd think. The same principle that got our first customers started ten years ago still holds: put a toe in the water, test it, build from there. AI also helps you leapfrog, making it easier to catch up on where the status quo has moved to. We're seeing companies that wouldn't take a meeting two years ago now setting aside real time to work out how digital trade fits their business. That's genuinely where it begins, not with a full rollout, but with a business taking the time to think through the specific approach that will work for them, and what digital adoption means for them, because that's the only way to actually get the insight and the results that come from doing this well.

Progress against the odds

What genuinely blows me away is that when I look back, I am reminded of how much digital adoption has already happened. Agri product trade carries a lot of moving pieces: long-standing relationships, established pricing habits, and real regulatory differences between markets, all good reasons for a business to stick with what's worked for decades. On top of that, weather, pricing, and policy shocks now arrive more often and land harder than they used to, which makes changing how you trade an even bigger ask. Evolving in that kind of environment is genuinely hard, yet it has evolved. The businesses reaping the rewards today are the ones that felt the heat for flexibility and faster trading pivots, and leaned into it despite the challenges.  It hasn't been smooth sailing getting there, but it's paying off now, in how quickly they can reprice, redirect, and reallocate when conditions shift. The fact that so many companies have already put real time into building that kind of flexibility, despite every reason not to, says something about where this is heading.

Market differences

Given the complexity of digital trade, it is not surprising that digital progress doesn't look identical everywhere we operate. We started in Europe, around the EU's phased removal of milk production quotas, right as the ground was shifting under the industry's feet. That may have catalysed our initial growth in digital trade with customers, but today Europe still trades through a deep, established network of brokers, which naturally slows their pace of digital adoption. So despite our strong start in this market, we see faster adoption in the US because it has fewer intermediaries between seller and buyer. We're not choosing one market over the other; we still do business across both, and our customers know that. They're simply two markets on two different curves, facing different paths to digital adoption.

The next ten years

It should be abundantly clear that increasing market complexity and volatility in agri-product trade is not going away. Flexibility and adaptability are turning into the baseline for how this industry operates. Governments are now more attuned to the need for risk management systems to secure ongoing trade and supply of agricultural commodities, and meeting that need will require digital solutions built by the ones already working in this space. Nothing about the way things are unfolding is revolutionary; on-farm technology and agronomic insight have moved fast for years. Physical agri-commodity trade has simply taken longer to catch up. But the more intricate this market becomes, the more it matters to have systems carrying that weight, so the people at either end of a trade can spend their time on the relationship behind it, not the administration.

Ten years ago we were the "should we." Now we're the "how we," and before long, the industry will simply call it trade. Some of what that frees up is time: less spent on administration, more on the relationships that still move product around the world. But the next phase isn't just about efficiency. We're building the infrastructure that lets AI talk across our platform and our customers' existing systems, as well as market insights and indexes built around their own parameters, giving sharper visibility into their own data, as well as developing practical new tools like load building. None of this is a finished job; we will keep evolving. The market our customers operate in never stops moving, and our role is to keep giving them the edge to move with it.

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