Offcuts Live: The AI & Commerce Breakfast That Sold Out in Stockholm. Next Up, London

What Offcuts Live is

Offcuts is our own media brand: a newsletter, a podcast and a growing library of writing about what AI is actually doing to commerce. Offcuts Live takes that same conversation and puts it in a room. Breakfast, a live podcast recording in front of the audience, then open networking. No stage separating speakers from everyone else drinking the same coffee.

The format is deliberately small. Stockholm ran to around fifty attendees, on an approval basis rather than open registration, because the value of the morning depends on who else is in it. Sixty-two per cent of our LinkedIn followers sit at senior, director, owner or C-Suite level, and that's the room we're built to fill again in person, smaller than most brand conferences and deliberately so. Attendees get to ask someone a question by name over breakfast.

What the room actually got out of it

Stockholm ran over breakfast at Centra's HQ on Torsgatan, co-hosted with DEMA, on the morning of 28 May. Tim Richardson, our CEO and the founder of Offcuts, sat down with Erik Arnewing, CTO at Stellar EQ, and Ola Ekerhov, formerly Ecom Director at Acne Studios: two ecommerce professionals with the kind of hands-on track record that's hard to fake in a room that size. The conversation, the food and the half hour of open networking afterwards carried the morning.

Ola Ekerhov's began with "The next 18 months will show who's done the work and who hasn't." Henrik Hoffman Kraft, DEMA's co-founder, put the substance of the discussion this way on LinkedIn afterwards: "You can't index vibes. Good discussions about what value AI is providing today for the best vs the rest, and where we are going."

It's also why there's a London edition at all. A third of everyone who looked at the Stockholm event page never got as far as registering, and our single largest audience is already in London. The people who wanted a seat the first time round couldn't all get one. London fixes that with a bigger room, three speakers instead of two, and a venue that's just opened rather than borrowed HQ space.

London, 1st October: who it's for

The second Offcuts Live runs the same format, this time at Forza Wine's new Soho site. Breakfast and networking from 8:30am, a live podcast recording at 9am, then an hour of open networking from 10am until 10.30am.

The room is built for people who own brand and customer experience decisions inside consumer and retail businesses: heads of ecommerce, marketing directors, founders, the people who sign off an AI programme rather than just pilot one. It isn't aimed at AI specialists after a technical deep dive, and it isn't a sales pitch dressed as a breakfast. The guest list caps somewhere between forty and fifty-five, in line with how Stockholm was run, not the low hundreds a bigger venue could hold. It's free to attend, but spaces are limited and registration is approval-based for the same reason: a room that size works precisely because everyone in it is a peer.

What the morning covers

Every brand now has access to broadly the same AI tools. The question the morning is built around is what separates a brand that's done real work with those tools from one that's run a demo and called it strategy. Tim has made a version of this argument in Offcuts before: Goldman Sachs research found 76% of businesses now using AI in some form, but only 14% have it fully embedded into core operations. Wide adoption, shallow depth.

Anthropic's own labour-market research backs the same pattern from a different angle. Across roughly 800 occupations, theoretical AI capability regularly outstrips observed usage by fifty to sixty-five percentage points. The tools can already do more than most teams are asking them to do, in commerce as much as anywhere else. That gap between using a tool and rebuilding a workflow around it is the one the London conversation sits inside.

Natalie Varma, Max Ottignon and Eleanor Warnock each answer a different piece of that question rather than repeating the same one from a different angle. Attendees leave with a clearer read on where the adoption-versus-embedding line sits inside their own organisation, and which side of it their current AI programme falls on.

Why attend

The content is one reason. The room is the other. Breakfast is a bespoke breakfast prepared by Forza's chefs, and the networking afterwards tends to run long because nobody's in a hurry to leave a room with three people whose work you don't usually get direct access to. Stockholm proved that our audience is senior, engaged and willing to give up a weekday morning for the right three hours, and London draws on that same network at its home base, our single largest audience city.

There's no recording of this one to catch up on afterwards in the same way. The value is being the person asking Natalie a follow-up question over coffee. Attendees at Stockholm who spoke up afterwards kept coming back to the same point, that a curated room of forty-five people produces sharper conversation than a stage in front of four hundred ever does.

The room: Forza Wine, Soho

Forza Wine opened its Soho site in March, its first restaurant in central London and the biggest venue the group has opened to date, following the original Forza Wine at the National Theatre on the South Bank. The Soho site occupies a prominent corner and pairs an Italian-leaning small-plates menu with a natural wine list, the same combination that built the brand's reputation on the South Bank, now on a bigger footprint. Evenings there run on that wine list and cocktails built around vermouth; mornings, before service starts, is when we borrow the room, with a bespoke menu made just for us.

Speakers and partners

Alongside Tim Richardson, the London line-up brings three perspectives that don't usually share a table.

Natalie Varma built the AI behind fashion and fragrance discovery at Farfetch and DeepMind, and speaks to what AI-led discovery actually looks like once it's shipped at scale rather than demoed.
Max Ottignon, co-founder of the branding studio Ragged Edge, speaks to what a brand is protecting once every competitor has the same tools available to them.
Eleanor Warnock, ex-Managing Editor at Every, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal and Sifted, speaks to how the story gets told once the work behind it is real.

Centra, Nolo and Harper Concierge are our partners for the morning. Centra also hosted Stockholm at its HQ and is the composable commerce platform behind a large share of our fashion and lifestyle client base. Nolo Apps builds custom Airtable systems for DTC fashion, beauty and wellness brands, replacing the spreadsheets and legacy PLMs most operations teams are still stitching together by hand. Harper Concierge runs an at-home fitting-room and styling service for retail brands.

Watch Stockholm, attend London

You can catch up on Stockholm's event here: 

Sign up to London, before we sell out.