Daniel Bobroff
Retail leadership teams are running two organisations at once: a legacy operation built around store footprint, seasonal buying and broadcast marketing, and an emerging one shaped by AI personalisation, gamified loyalty and immersive commerce. The capital is flowing into the second, the revenue still sits in the first, and most boards cannot tell which experiments are worth scaling and which are theatre. The question is not whether AI changes retail. It is which bets pay back inside the planning cycle.
Daniel Bobroff is the founder of Coded Futures and former co-founder of ASOS Ventures, helping retail leadership teams decide which AI, gamification and immersive technology bets actually convert into commercial advantage.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Daniel Bobroff
- He has invested retail’s money on retail’s behalf. As co-founder of ASOS Ventures he ran due diligence on the technologies retail boards are now being asked to buy, which is a different vantage point from the consultant or analyst.
- He built a category from scratch. Pioneering in-game advertising through Microtime gives him a working understanding of how a new commercial medium emerges, scales and is monetised, which transfers directly to current arguments about immersive commerce and gamified retail.
- He operates inside the engineering layer. His role at HTEC Group means his views on AI in retail are grounded in actual implementation work on customer experience, cloud and supply chain, not in keynote abstraction.
- He covers the full retail tech stack in one voice. Boards rarely find a speaker who can talk credibly about ad-tech, VR, visual search, ecommerce platforms and corporate venture in the same session, and link them to a single commercial argument.
Biography highlights
- Founder, Coded Futures, retail and consumer technology advisory firm.
- Special Advisor, HTEC Group, advising on retail digitalisation, AI and customer experience.
- Co-founder and former Investment Director, ASOS Ventures, the venture capital arm of ASOS.
- Founder of Microtime, the first digital agency dedicated to in-game advertising, credited with starting a now multi-billion-dollar category.
- Founder of Deibus Studios, video games developer with combined platform sales reported above 50 million units across PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo.
- Has delivered keynotes for Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Mastercard and the Retail Institute.
Biography
Retail has spent two decades arguing about whether technology is a channel, a function or a strategy. The argument is now closed by capital allocation. Personalisation engines, generative AI, gamified loyalty and immersive commerce are all sitting in the operating plan, often without a clear test for which of them pays back and which is a costly experiment in brand theatre.
Daniel Bobroff has worked on both sides of that question. At ASOS he co-founded the company’s venture capital arm and was directly responsible for identifying and backing the technologies the retail sector is now being sold. Before that he founded Microtime, the first digital agency dedicated to in-game advertising, and Deibus Studios, an independent games developer whose titles for PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo achieved combined platform sales above 50 million units.
Today he runs Coded Futures, a retail and consumer technology advisory firm, and sits as Special Advisor to HTEC Group, the global engineering business, where he advises on AI, cloud and customer experience programmes. The combination matters: he sees retail technology from the investor’s underwriting position, the founder’s product position and the engineering partner’s delivery position. That is an unusual sightline for a speaker on this subject.
His keynote work, including engagements for Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Mastercard and the Retail Institute, focuses on the same question a board is wrestling with after the third AI vendor presentation of the quarter: which of these bets is real, what does the customer experience actually look like once they land, and how does the commercial model hold up at scale.
Key speaking topics
- AI in retail and consumer-facing operations
- Gamification of loyalty, engagement and commerce
- Immersive commerce, VR and the metaverse in retail
- Hyper-personalisation and predictive analytics
- Corporate venture capital and retail innovation pipelines
- Customer experience redesign in fashion and consumer brands
- Supply chain optimisation through AI and emerging technologies
Ideal for
- Retail and consumer brand boards weighing major AI and digital investment decisions
- CMOs, Chief Digital Officers and Chief Customer Officers redesigning customer journeys around AI and personalisation
- Innovation, venture and corporate development teams inside large retailers and consumer goods groups
- Retail technology vendors and platform partners briefing their senior client audiences
Audience outcomes
- A working sense of which retail AI use cases have shown commercial returns and which are still in the demonstration phase
- A sharper read on where gamification, immersive commerce and generative AI fit inside an existing retail operating model
- A vocabulary for discussing personalisation, loyalty and experience investments with credibility at board level
- A reference set of named retailers, technologies and venture-backed companies to anchor internal strategy debates
Talks
A practical case for treating gamification as a commercial mechanic for loyalty, engagement and repeat purchase rather than a campaign device.
Key takeaways:
- Where gamified mechanics demonstrably move retail KPIs and where they remain marketing theatre
- The link between games industry design patterns and retail customer engagement
- How to evaluate gamification proposals from agencies and technology vendors
How AI is changing the front and back end of retail, from product discovery and personalisation to supply chain and assortment decisions.
Key takeaways:
- The current state of AI deployment across leading retailers and consumer brands
- The customer-facing use cases generating measurable commercial returns
- How leadership teams can sequence AI investment against existing operating priorities
An argument that the most durable retail technology bets are the ones that deepen the relationship between brand and customer rather than automate it away.
Key takeaways:
- Why community, participation and shared experience are becoming core retail capabilities
- How brands are using technology to bring customers into the product, marketing and merchandising loop
- The implications for organisational design, loyalty and customer data strategy
Videos
Testimonials
Fees
| EUR | GBP | USD | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Country | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Asia Pacific | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| Europe | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Middle East & Africa | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| South America | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| United Kingdom | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| US East Coast | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| US West Coast | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| Virtual | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |