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Its the story as old as (industrial) time. In the design/innovation world, not every great result will carry its makers name. There are some notable exceptions. Corning is the widely known supplier of ultradurable glass (Gorilla Glass) used in iPhones, for example. And GORE-TEX is known for premium outdoor gears breathable waterproof membrane, a material of choice. But behind most every iconic solution there are scores of silent partners like our own, Chang Robotics, whose involvement may never be known. Herein lies the problem: How can you gain recognition, build authority, and attract new business while honoring strict NDAs or white-label relationships? I know this challenge keenly. We provide scores of organizations with game-changing automation. But how will the next set of Fortune 500 CEOs considering new automation or reshoring know they should talk to us? We are far from alone. In 2022, there were some 239,000 U.S. manufacturing organizations engineering firms, product designers, and R&D labs. All but 4,177 have fewer than 500 employees. We comprise the legions whose design and production touches most products we experience, but whose names are seldom part of the story.Here are five ways to share the news about our achievements to allow us to scale: 1. Tell the story without naming names One of the most effective strategies is to frame your achievements by category, not by client. Rather than revealing client names we describe the following: The type of client: e.g., a Fortune 100 healthcare device manufacturer or a leading North American foods and packaging provider. The challenge solved: e.g., We accelerated time-to-market by 42% for a new diagnostic platform. The impact achieved: e.g., We are eliminating the use of PFAs (forever chemicals) in food packaging. We can maintain confidentiality while still showcasing credible and impactful stories. In some cases, we can show the world a physical product in final development before any branding is attached. Sometimes after time passes and development cycles are complete, customers may be willing to officially or unofficially acknowledge a partners role. Or they may allow the client to use them as a confidential reference, or name them as client if you dont disclose confidential details of your work. Any of these moves, especially in aggregate, can speed your ability to gain the authority you deserve. 2. Own your domain expertise through thought leadership Even when you cant name who youre working with, you can be very clear about what you do and why it matters. Take every possible opportunity to publish thought leadership reports that explore: Emerging trends in your field Lessons learned from anonymous project work Predictions about where your segment is headed Provide this information in as specific and meaningful detail as possible. We do this frequently through white papers and research reports about the industries and development categories we touch. This strategy positions your brand as a go-to expert without violating confidential ground. Some of your clients or prospective clients may even be willing to participate in the white paper projects as sources. 3. Create your own use cases When you can’t speak about the solutions you’ve built for others, consider building your own. Create demo products, concept videos, or “hypothetical” use cases that mirror real-world applications aligned with industries you’re targeting. Ortaken to full fruitionunderwrite and support portfolio firms of your own. Weve stepped into this arena, creating the Chang Robotics Fund, which has already invested in eight companies. It is allowing us to scale in several significant ways: 1) We can be fully visible for our roles in each portfolio company. 2) We can display the results of our technical prowess. 3) Perhaps most valuable for us, some results are based on IP from our core employees. This provides them the opportunity to participate as equity owners in their projects while also enjoying the security of their employee positions. To a large degree, this is a model where everyone wins. 4. Gain visibility through the right channels In your effort to gain authority in your sector, focus on information channels that reward expertise over promotional content such as: Contribute to leading business and trade publications or speak at industry events. My participation in the Fast Company Innovation Council is an example of this. Use platforms like LinkedIn, X, and even TikTok to share expertise and insights (not sales pitches) aligned with the vertical markets you serve. I cannot emphasize the value of these efforts enough, as they comprise some of our most successful achievements in driving new business in 2025-2026. These environments elevate your voice among peers and prospects without needing to self-promote or name-drop. 5. Partner with clients for joint wins When your clients can publicly acknowledge your role, even as a footnote, be ready to draft joint case studies, share in award applications, and coauthor technical papers or conference presentations. This is more difficult when clients are publicly traded organizations. But many clients (and particularly major university clients and partners) are open to win-win mutual visibility. This is especially true in technical fields where peer credibility counts, and the academic research can be helpful for your own organization as well. Final words Invisibility is not inevitable. For ingredient brands, strategic storytelling, anonymized case studies, and consistent thought leadership can earn you deserved attention and credibilityeven if your logo never appears on the box. Matthew Chang is founder and principal engineer of Chang Robotics.
Category:
E-Commerce
The fastest-growing group of real estate investors? Theyre not hedge funds or institutional investors. Theyre nurses, teachers, NASA engineers, and first-time landlords with a smartphone. In recent years, 85% percent of investor-owned residential properties were purchased by small scale mom and pop landlords, rather than institutional players. Thanks to property technology, investors no longer need deep pockets, a finance degree, or a ton of spare time to start building a real estate business. Real estate has long been one of the most capital-intensive, time-consuming, and difficult asset classes to break into. But proptech is dismantling many of the long-standing barriers that once kept many people out, redefining who gets to invest, who gets to earn, and who gets to build wealth from real estate. Just as fintech became essential infrastructure for financial inclusion, proptech is democratizing real estate investing through smart, values-aligned innovation. Time is no longer the gatekeeper In the past, investing in real estate meant navigating a maze of manual taskscollecting paper checks, coordinating maintenance by phone (often in the middle of the night), and tracking expenses with pen, paper, and shoeboxes. The time commitment required wasnt feasible for most people. Today, modern software platforms automate and centralize nearly every step of the process. Automated five-pronged tenant screening tools deliver instant background and credit checks. Lease agreements can be generated digitally and signed online. Rent is collected automatically via mobile apps. And maintenance requests flow through clean, trackable dashboards that dispatch vetted local pros without bothering the owner at odd hours. That kind of automation has opened the doors to investors who once felt priced outnot financially, but in terms of time and attention. Ive seen it firsthand. One landlord and long-time RentRedi user, a NASA engineer named Dawid, manages his real estate business in the evenings and on weekends while continuing to work in aerospace. Proptech makes it possible to treat real estate like a side hustle, rather than a full-time obligation. Financial barriers are no longer the dealbreaker Theres no denying it: The financial hurdles to buying property have grown steeper. Home prices are high. Interest rates have increased. For many aspiring investors, the traditional path to ownership feels out of reach. But while the barrier itself has risen, proptech is helping people find strategic ways to overcome it. Digital tools are making creative income strategieslike renting out space or co-owning propertiesmore accessible and easier to manage than ever before. By generating income from day one, many of these strategies reduce the amount of personal capital needed to cover costs. That means investors can start smaller, take on less risk, and enter the market more affordably. The result? A new wave of homeowners and investors who are building wealth one step at a time. Creative property monetization: Turn space into income Even without renting to long-term tenants, homeowners can generate meaningful income from underutilized parts of their property. Proptech platforms make it easy to list, manage, and monetize these spaces, turning idle square footage into opportunity. One of the most rapidly growing real estate trends is accessory dwelling units (ADUs). These are separate, self-contained structures on a residential lot (often detached in backyards or converted from existing garages) that can be rented out for short- or long-term stays. Creative models can lower the financial strain of ownership and allow people to begin investing in real estate incrementally, without the need for multiple properties or large upfront capital. Scale without the traditional infrastructure For investors who start smallwhether through co-ownership, or a single rental unitscaling is traditionally the next big hurdle. Growing a real estate portfolio used to require hiring property managers, assembling in-house teams, or outsourcing to expensive service providers. The overhead alone made it difficult to expand without deep pockets or significant infrastructure. Thats no longer the case. Today, an individual with the right property management software can manage 1, 10, 50, even 100 units independently. Operations that once required a staff can now be handled from a mobile dashboard in minutes. Investors can grow their portfolios incrementally without sacrificing their full-time careers or quality of life. Another customer, Katherine, is a pediatric ICU nurse who wanted to create passive income for retirement. She started with three units and has since expanded her portfolio to eight units in just three years, managing it alongside her demanding healthcare schedule. These arent isolated success storiestheyre part of a growing trend. Proptech means real estate investing can become something people can build around their lives. The tools once reserved for big players are now in the hands of everyday investors. This shift lowers structural barriers for underrepresented groups. Young, minority, and female investors who have historically faced the steepest entry points are now scaling businesses with little more than a smartphone and a solid strategy. A new era of inclusive real estate investing What fintech did for Wall Street, proptech is doing for Main Street real estate. Its unlocking ownership, income, and long-term financial opportunity for more people in more places, with fewer of the barriers that once made real estate the domain of the already-wealthy. As more people access real estate as a means to build wealth, proptech helps reshape who owns housing in Americaand how that ownership affects communities, families, and futures. This is more than convenience. It’s a structural change and the beginning of a more inclusive, more entrepreneurial economy. Ryan Barone is cofounder and CEO of RentRedi.
Category:
E-Commerce
In the next 24 months, your most valuable customer may never visit your site, click your ad, or read your email. Imagine this scenario: You have a lake holiday coming up in two weeks. Instead of manually researching a new set of water skis, scrolling through reviews, and comparing prices, your AI agent handles this task. It scans your calendar to confirm the trip dates, checks the destination and expected conditions, then pulls data from your smartwatch to understand your height, weight, and skill level. It knows your brand affinities, your budget, your shipping constraints, and your preferred colors. Within seconds, it selects the perfect skis, ensures theyll arrive in time, and purchases themno endless open tabs, no second-guessing, no friction. This isnt sci-fi. Its the next wave in digital commerce, and brands that dont adopt now will fall off the digital shelf. If your brand isnt optimized for AI agents, its already losing. Think of AI agents as hyper-loyal personal shoppers but with perfect recall and zero patience for friction. Agents dont care how beloved a brand is. They just care about the data. The primary shopper your brand must persuade into purchasing will no longer be a person, but an AI agent acting on that persons behalf. The traditional marketing funnel is irrelevant in a world where agents compress it into a single millisecond. These autonomous agentic AI systems ingest a customers preferences, constraints, and history, then compress the entire marketing funnel, from awareness to consideration to checkout, into a single, split-second decision. If AI agents are the future of digital commerce, then the checkout process becomes even more critical. Its one of the last, and sometimes only, moments where brands have permission to show up. That means relevance is what keeps you in the consideration set. Most brands market to people. Those days will soon be gone as reasoning-capable agents are beginning to transact, not just inform. A vacation that once required hours of research can now be booked end-to-end in moments, with flights, hotels, and dinner reservations stitched together by code, not clicks. To thrive in this agent-first landscape, brands must reengineer how they surface, price, and prove value, because the algorithms will do the selecting long before a human ever sees the options. AI agents are a new distribution channel SEO alone wont cut it in the agentic world. AI agents arent browsing like humans; theyre retrieving, evaluating, and transacting based on clean, structured data. With 42% of U.S. businesses already paying for AI tools, the infrastructure to support agentic interaction is rapidly being normalized across enterprise stacks. On top of that, the consumer mindset is catching up with the infrastructure as ChatGPT is one of the fastest growing platforms of all time, reaching 100 million users in just two months. To remain in the consideration set, brands must optimize not just for discoverability but for the entire purchasing journey. That means building for machine experience the same way brands once built for user experience. Agents will become distribution endpoints, not unlike marketplaces or search engines, except theyll be personalized and always-on. Product information, pricing, and availability must be structured and accessible via APIs or structured feeds, not buried in formats or siloed systems that cant be read by AI. Brands that view agent-friendly infrastructure as a key growth lever are poised to grab an outsize share of voice and revenue on whats quickly becoming the new algorithmic shelf. Loyalty from both humans and agents Loyalty must be earned on two fronts: emotional and algorithmic. In a world where AI agents can ruthlessly parse thousands of SKUs in mere milliseconds, emotional storytelling may no longer get the job done. Agents will weigh product attributes against shipping timelines, historical pricing data, and ratings volatility with surgical precision. Subpar signals can cause a product option to be filtered out, no questions asked. What does this mean for brands? More than anything, they must operationalize loyalty across two separate but equal fronts: one emotional, and one algorithmic. For human shoppers, loyalty is still earned through rich brand experiences and tailored-to-you storytelling. Agents, on the other hand, demand a very different kind of digital courtship: high-quality, structured data, consistently reliable fulfillment, competitive pricing, seamless checkout with relevant upsells, and gold-star customer satisfaction signals. Brands that win both the hearts and algorithms wont just lead; theyll lock out the competition. For shoppers with only a tenuous connection to your brand, AI agents are your best shot at winning them over, if your data can back it up. Advertising to agents Marketing to machines doesnt require charm, it demands cold structured truth. Unlike people, agents cant be charmed or cajoled by creativity, only swayed by real-time relevance and quantifiable value. That forces a rethink of how brands allocate their media dollars. Traditional ad strategies that have been optimized for human psychology will need a parallel track for performance-driven, machine-readable messaging. In this new paradigm, advertising becomes less about storytelling and more about signaling. These agents wont merely browse, theyll retrieve, rank, and decide. Thats why advertising must evolve to speak their language: real-time product availability, structured metadata, and machine-readable signals. The agent economy is no longer speculative, its investable. To stay in the consideration set, brands must act now to build a data-first infrastructure, prove performance integrity, and become fluent in the language of machines. Agent-based advertising isnt a futuristic niche; its the next frontier of performance marketing. It demands precision, agility, and real-time truth. Because in an agentic world, every brand is constantly reevaluated. Relevance isnt a campaign. Its a living negotiation with algorithms in the drivers seat. Elizabeth Buchanan is chief commercial officer of Rokt.
Category:
E-Commerce
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