Marcos Brisson talks about...

Behind every fast-growing CPG brand is a back office held together by manual fixes and caffeine. Systems that don’t talk, data that gets lost, and someone (usually the founder) who ends up being the human API.

My name is Marcos. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Kaizntree. We're purely focused on automating the back office of consumer brand operations.

We help brands automate in two ways: First, by taking all those manual, repetitive workflows. Things like processing purchase orders, pulling data from Gmail, syncing it to an ERP or Google Sheet, and automating them end to end. Second, we have our own next-generation inventory platform, which is best in class for traceability. A lot of organic-certified brands use it to pass their audits.

Our mission is to come in and automate the entire back office so brands don’t have to spend their days moving data between systems. They can get back to what only people can do, which is building relationships, improving products, growing the business.

Usually that means taking purchase orders coming in by email or through SPS Commerce and syncing them with a system like Google Sheets or NetSuite.

We deploy AI agents that handle those data handoffs, checking that minimum order quantities are met and that the bill of lading matches what was actually ordered.

When we come in, it’s typically a one- to two-week turnaround. We sit down with the ops team, understand their tech stack, how data flows, and where the manual gaps are.

There’s usually an integration, like SPS Commerce to NetSuite, but there are always edge cases. Those edge cases are what quietly eat up 20 hours a week. We find the ones that cost the most time and automate them.

After the first couple of weeks of testing and calibration, it’s usually smooth sailing.

Tools like Zapier or N8n move data, but they don’t guarantee accuracy. If one PO is processed incorrectly, you might ship the wrong product or completely throw off your forecast.

With agentic AI, every workflow has a human in the loop. We can reconcile hundreds of PO formats and process more data faster and more reliably. We also take responsibility for the accuracy.

Always start with one workflow, say, processing one distributor’s report straight from email into Google Sheets. Once that’s accurate, scale up. Add more distributors, then POs, bills of lading, freight updates, shipment trackers… all the workflows that eat up your week.

Start simple, get it right, then layer on complexity.

Most brands are excited about AI but don’t know where to start. We help map out which processes can actually be automated and which shouldn’t be.

As a rule, anything taking less than 15 hours a month isn’t worth automating. The sweet spot is 20+ hours. Now that depends on the brand. Everyone has their own preferences. Some don't care how long it takes. They just want to get everything off their plate.

The value of AI in operations is really connecting the dots. If you know what kintsugi is, it's a Japanese philosophy where if you shatter a plate, you glue it back together with gold.

And so we kind of view ourselves as like we're the glue that's being put in to fill in the gaps in the operational tools brands are using.

For example, with Actual Veggies, we automated their entire PO process to ensure what ships matches what was ordered. That saved them over 30 hours a month.

It’s always that there's someone whose job is meant to be doing one particular thing, and then this workflow, this edge case, comes up and that has increasingly become what their job is. They don't want to do it, but you know, it just landed on their plate.

And as any brand scales, there's more and more admin that emerges. That's a big part of what we're coming in and automating.

The other thing is AI also eliminates human error. Even if there's only one mistake per a thousand purchase orders, it still can create an issue. There's a value in knowing that's completely eliminated.

There’s an initial setup cost and a monthly maintenance fee, tied to how complex the workflow is. For it to make sense, the time savings and value of eliminating human error have to be lined up.

Some things are not worth automating. There are some tasks that might be really annoying, but only happen once a month and it only takes you like three hours to do it. That might not be worth automating because of the cost of setting up that automation. But it depends on the brand size. Maybe they just want to get everything off their plate.

Rule of thumb, the brands that we're seeing adopt AI automation are doing over 10 million a year in sales. Simply because beforehand, or at least maybe this is the brands that we're working with, the priorities are not in workflow optimization but more in revenue growth. Once you hit a certain stage that we see brands start to care about process optimization.

One I hear often is that AI is replacing people's work. But across every single brand that we work with, it's actually unlocking people to do what they enjoy in their job. In every case, we're automating parts they don't enjoy.

The person whose role we're partially automating is the most excited because they're stoked they no longer have to be doing this work. They're the ones that really, really are our champions within the companies.

Another misconception is that tools like Zapier or no-code AI are built to a point where they can already automate CPG workflows. The reality is that's not the case. It's actually very risky to be using some of these no-code tools to automate your workflows because there's no human in the loop. The onus is still on you to check and validate there's no mistakes in the data.

You've seen a lot of errors come up from brands doing it that way, which often sours them where they're like, I've tried it and it just doesn't work.

The key thing is you want to be setting up these automations with someone who knows what they're doing. Just because there's a lot of potential for things to go wrong, you don't want to make any mistakes or screw up your internal platforms, right?

Make sure you're working with someone who does know what they're doing, and is setting up the checks and balances needed.

All the work of connecting systems is going to be completely automated away, where everyone that's currently working in ops will essentially have an army of AI agents they're orchestrating that are just doing stuff on their behalf.

A point where every person on their team can essentially at a capacity that is 3x what they're able to do right now. So they can spend a lot more time on growth and supply chain optimization than what was previously possible.

Go out there and try using ChatGPT. It's not an AI agent, so you won't be able to connect your different systems to it. But you can create your own GPT, where you can feed it some data, ask it questions, and generate reports.

The way that we're working with brands is always start with like one simple workflow, kind of the experiment they're running. It's like, okay, let's see if we automate this thing, first of all, does it work? And then second, how valuable is it?

Give it a go over a short, defined period of time and then compare that against them or someone else on the team doing this work and see what's the difference.

Marcos Brisson is the co-founder and CEO of Kaizntree, a platform built to automate the back office for modern consumer brands. With a background in engineering and supply-chain tech, he focuses on helping CPG founders replace manual workflows with connected, AI-driven operational systems.