One workflow at a time
Freespan partners with the most ambitious retailers to design and operationalize their AI transformation journeys. We bring a retail-specific semantic layer, a library of retail-specific agents, and a team of forward deployed engineers who make these work in your environment and own the business outcome.
We are retail experts with deep knowledge of merchandising, operations, finance and e-commerce, and of the connecting thread between them. We are AI experts who have built products, platforms and data products, and led forward deployed engineering motions.
Former C-suite executives, through to where the work actually gets done.
Copilots from platform vendors are limited by the data their vendors own. Most of your team's work cuts across different platforms, and cannot be automated in silos.
Custom AI dev-shops can create long-term governance and interpretability challenges, with differing semantic and ontological layers.
Consultants do not bring a pre-built, retail-specific platform.
An ontology and semantic layer built for the industry, running on world-class model abstraction. End-to-end agentic workflows on top of it. And senior retail leaders who handle the integration, execution, transformation and value capture.
Canonical model, ontology, relationships and metrics. What a SKU is. How a planogram relates to a store cluster. How a labor hour maps to a task. Encoded once, reused everywhere.
Custom agents built on a pre-existing, retail-specific agent library spanning merchandising, store operations, finance, pricing and supply chain.
Former retail operators, not generalist consultants, who define the value creation program and stay until the finance organization confirms the number.
We start with the problem, not the product. A real and quantifiable business problem, chosen with you, that you can hold us accountable for. The business outcome, not the technology outcome.
We install, and then we run. Our people work inside your building, alongside your teams, through the change. Technology does not book the savings.
Deployment two costs a fraction of deployment one. Because it inherits the semantic layer built for the first, and every one after it compounds.
One workload, with a number attached.
Every vendor agreement audited against what was billed, earned and collected: co-op, markdown money, slotting, chargebacks, cost-file mismatch.
You already outsource this. Test us against your current third-party vendor on accuracy and on price.
Performance and margin reporting, competitive read, assortment gaps, promo and markdown recommendations, vendor scorecard and category review pack, generated overnight and sourced.
Monthly review of every major vendor agreement and every lease, audited against contract terms and current business, to determine the exact payment or refund owed.
The Narayan Enterprise AI Brief. Ten essays, published since March, archived here in full.
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Read →We are a team of business, technology, digital, AI and transformation leaders who are passionate about bringing the benefits of generative AI and agentic AI workflows to the retail industry.
25+ years across retail, consumer operations and technology. Senior operating roles at Albertsons, Disney and DISH, spanning digital, merchandising, e-commerce, digital marketing and operations. Ex McKinsey; serves on the board of an NYSE-listed retailer.
Whether you are a retailer, invest in this space, or are an operating / AI leader, we would love to hear from you.