T57 · Chief Sales and Strategy Officer
Building the commercial foundations for an AI-native food ecosystem
System 03 in the atlas · Markets, trade & partnerships
T57 is a pre-launch AI-native food ecosystem — intended to connect the people, commerce, trade, logistics, finance and data of food and agriculture rather than a single app. I joined during the pre-launch stage as Chief Sales and Strategy Officer, to shape its commercial direction: market priorities, pricing, partnerships, sales operations and the strategic planning behind them.
The market-access problem
Global food and agricultural trade is fragmented and opaque, and it is hardest on the people with the least leverage: emerging-market producers and smaller enterprises. Pricing is difficult to discover, traceability is unreliable, and reaching serious buyers across borders requires infrastructure most producers do not have.
Building a platform for that world is as much a commercial problem as a technical one. Which markets first? At what price, in economies with very different purchasing power? Through which partners? Those questions needed answers before launch, not after.
My involvement
I lead sales and strategy. In practice that has meant designing the commercial architecture ahead of the platform itself: the market-entry sequence, a pricing model calibrated to local purchasing power rather than a single global rate, the partnership strategy, and the sales-operations infrastructure — research, workflows, follow-up and pipeline discipline.
I also work day to day with the AI/ML engineers. My rule there is that business questions come first: what we need to know about a market, to what standard, decided before any model is built. It keeps the research honest and the engineering pointed at something real.
One ecosystem, built in modules
T57 is a system of parts, not a single product. The wider ecosystem is the ambition; the work proves itself one module at a time. The first substantial build is the T57 Digital Agriculture Module — a completed Phase 1 that connects farm operations, a produce marketplace and financial workflows.
Keeping that distinction honest matters commercially as much as editorially: the ecosystem is pre-launch, and one module has reached a working MVP. Conflating the two would misrepresent both.
Gulfood and the first relationships
At Gulfood 2026 in Dubai, I led an eight-person team through a deliberately structured activation — a digital signing workflow and a daily performance cadence rather than a stack of business cards. The team came back with more than 150 signed letters of intent and memoranda of understanding: early relationships to develop, not revenue, but a genuine test of whether the proposition lands with real traders. It does.
Current stage
T57 remains in its pre-launch phase. Commercial planning is progressing alongside product development, fundraising and partnership discussions.
- 01
Research
Understand each market before committing to it
- 02
Prioritise
Sequence markets by opportunity and readiness
- 03
Price
Calibrate to local purchasing power
- 04
Partner
Find channels that already have trust
- 05
Prepare
Build the sales operations to execute
- 06
Enter
Activate, measure, and adjust
Explore the portfolio
What the work taught me
Pre-launch commercial work is an exercise in intellectual honesty. Plans and projections are necessary, but they are hypotheses, and the discipline is keeping a clear line between what has been validated and what is still belief. Defining the business question before the research starts — especially with AI in the loop — is the cheapest quality control there is.
Turning market ambition into a governed operating plan is the same instinct that shapes how I build enterprise software.