What happens when AI moves beyond the digital world and starts transforming the companies that manufacture the things around us?
In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Robin Van Aeken, Co-Founder & CEO of Magentic, the AI company building digital workers for some of the world's largest manufacturers.
Magentic's AI agents, or "mages", work alongside procurement and supply chain teams at companies including Siemens and Coca-Cola Europacific Partners. They connect with existing systems, analyse huge volumes of procurement data and identify opportunities to make supply chains cheaper, faster and more resilient.
The economics can be significant. A manufacturer spending $10 billion a year on procurement might save $50 million by making its team 50% more efficient. But improving procurement costs by just 1-2% could generate $100-200 million in savings. Robin explains why this makes procurement one of the most compelling applications for enterprise AI.
The conversation also explores how Magentic deploys AI agents inside complex enterprises. Rather than expecting autonomy from day one, its digital workers effectively begin as "interns", learning the organisation, its systems and its data before gradually earning the trust to take actions and eventually run significant parts of procurement and supply chain workflows.
Topics Covered
• Why the next major AI opportunity could be in the physical economy
• Building AI digital workers for procurement and supply chains
• Why AI can create more value by reducing procurement spend than headcount
• How human-in-the-loop feedback helps agents develop domain expertise
• Using AI across complex ERP systems like SAP and Oracle
• Building trust with some of the world's largest manufacturers
• Data privacy, sovereignty and deploying AI inside sensitive organisations
• How Magentic's "mages" progress from interns to autonomous digital workers
• Why AI agents increasingly interact with software like humans
• Robin's journey from McKinsey to founding Magentic
• What his co-founder's experience at OpenAI taught them about the physical economy
• Building an enterprise AI company backed by Sequoia Capital
• How to construct the right investor syndicate beyond simply raising capital
• Why faster, cheaper supply chains could ultimately reduce the cost of physical goods
Robin also explains why the explosion in AI infrastructure is creating a huge new challenge for the physical economy. Data centres, chips, power infrastructure, cooling and other components all depend on manufacturing and supply chains that weren't designed for today's speed of demand.
This is a conversation about bringing AI into the physical economy: deploying agents inside complex enterprises, making global supply chains more efficient and using software to unlock potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in savings.