From AI Kickstart to AI Deployment Strategists.
“We were running the future. From Excel.”
tm:rw is a retail experience built on innovation. Behind the scenes, the team that ran it was still relying on a patchwork of Excel sheets to see what was actually selling. An AI Kickstart with Deployed AI changed that within weeks. A real-time sales-intelligence system replaced the spreadsheets. And what began as a workshop has become an ongoing partnership.
A retail experience from the future. A back office from the past.
tm:rw is a retail experience unlike any other. The company began as Smartech, a tech-focused concept that earned its credibility inside Europe’s most demanding department stores: Selfridges in London, where it grew over a decade to become one of the store’s largest concessions, alongside sister locations at KaDeWe in Berlin and Rinascente in Rome. In July 2025, the team made the leap to a standalone format with the opening of the tm:rw flagship in New York’s Times Square, a 20,000-square-foot, three-story destination housing more than 140 brands and experiential elements that have made it one of the most talked-about retail openings of the year. In April 2026, Shaquille O’Neal joined as investor and global ambassador, the kind of partnership that confirmed tm:rw’s position at the front of its category.
But running a business across four locations, and now an entirely new freestanding format, depended on a back-office reality that didn’t match the front-of-house ambition. Sales data lived in scattered Excel sheets, pulled together manually from a patchwork of source systems, one stack per location, each one slightly different. By the time the management team had a clear weekly picture of what was actually selling across all of it, the data was already old news. The New York opening raised the stakes further: a freestanding flagship of that scale, in that city, demanded operating visibility the old model could not deliver. Ad-hoc questions, what’s the trend on this brand in New York versus London? how did the weekend compare to last month?, required hours of manual reconciliation each time they were asked.
The team knew it. The team also knew, by early 2026, that the problem couldn’t be solved by hiring another analyst. It needed a different model.
An AI Kickstart. Priorities surfaced.
The engagement began with an AI Kickstart workshop. Nathalie and the tm:rw management team in one room with Poyan Karimi.
The session followed Deployed AI’s AI Native framework: ground every conversation in the company’s actual workflows, and move the team’s mindset, not just their toolkit. Poyan walked the management group through the actual operating rhythm of the business, every recurring decision, every report, every place where a question waited days for an answer.
By the afternoon, one priority had surfaced above all others. Not marketing. Not customer experience. The single biggest leverage point for tm:rw’s management team was visibility: a live view of what was selling, where, and how, that would replace the Excel patchwork with infrastructure.
“We came in expecting a workshop about AI. We left with a clear, ranked answer to a problem we’d been carrying for two years.”
Real-time sales intelligence. Replacing the spreadsheets.
In the weeks following the workshop, Deployed AI designed and built tm:rw’s real-time sales-intelligence layer, a live operational dashboard that consolidates data from every source system across all locations into a single view, refreshed continuously.
Single source of truth. Every sales-relevant data stream from New York, London, Berlin, and Rome, brand performance, category trends, time-of-day patterns, comparison periods, flows into one dashboard. The management team no longer asks anyone to pull the numbers. The numbers are there.
From days to seconds. Where weekly reporting used to lag the actual selling week by several days, the team now sees what is happening as it happens. A trend that would have surfaced next Tuesday now surfaces by lunch.
Self-serve for the management team. Questions that used to require an analyst’s afternoon, like how did this brand do compared to last month? what categories are over-indexing on weekends?, are now answered by anyone on the leadership team in seconds.
Built on Deployed AI’s AI Native principles. The dashboard is not a BI tool dropped into the business. It is a system designed around how the tm:rw team actually makes decisions, with every workflow ground-truthed during the Kickstart.
The visible result. And the one underneath it.
The Excel sheets are gone. That is the visible result. The numbers behind it tell the rest of the story.
Before the dashboard, consolidating sales data for weekly management reporting consumed between one and two days a week of one team member’s time. Another four to eight hours a week went to ad-hoc questions from the leadership team. After the dashboard, both numbers are effectively zero. The reporting work the team used to do for the management group is now done by the system, on a continuous basis.
But the deeper change happened above the analytics layer. The management group came out of the Kickstart with a different posture toward AI. Not what tools should we use, but what should run without us, and where do we want to spend the time we get back.
That posture is why what came next, came next.
“The dashboard was the answer to one question. The Kickstart gave us a way to ask the next ten.”
AI Deployment Strategists. A partnership that keeps walking.
After the dashboard shipped, tm:rw asked Deployed AI a question Deployed had not been asked before in quite the same way: would you keep walking with us?
The answer became a new kind of engagement. Deployed AI now serves tm:rw as AI Deployment Strategists, on-call advisors who work alongside the management team on every meaningful AI decision the company makes. A continuing partner whose job is to keep tm:rw on the path to becoming a fully AI-native business.
It is the model many ambitious companies want but few find: someone who knows the business, knows the field, and stays in the room as the strategy evolves.
Most AI engagements are transactional. A workshop. A build. A handover. The strongest ones turn into something else: a relationship that scales as the business does. tm:rw came to Deployed AI looking for a workshop. They got one. They also got a dashboard, a sharper management posture, and a strategic partner for the long arc.
“We didn’t want another vendor. We wanted someone who keeps walking with us. That’s what Deployed became.”
That is what Deployed AI delivers. Not a single engagement. A guided shift from AI-curious to AI-native, anchored in a real product, supported by a partnership that lasts.