Mike Le: Founder of CBI Digital and Conative AI

^{Joe Fox  (00:00.609)}
Hey everyone, thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Retain Grow Thrive, the Growave podcast. I'm your host, Joe Fox, president of Growave. Today I'm super, super excited. We have an absolute e-commerce industry veteran, someone who is very, very well-versed in high-end e-commerce, has been a part of this industry for a very, very long time, worked with some amazing brands like the LVMH Group.

knows a lot about AI, machine learning, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm really excited and I think there's gonna be a lot of value that the audience can derive from this episode. So Mike Lee, welcome. You've got some really cool products that you work with. You've got a really cool agency. So tell us a little bit more about you. Like you've got so much experience in this space. So I want to caveat for the audience that...

It's gonna be hard for me to keep this under 30 minutes, because there's so much I want to dive into. But Mike, can you just, you know, welcome first of all, and can you tell the audience a little bit about you and what you're up to?

_{Mike Le (01:04.842)}
Sure, thank you, Joe. I'm very happy to be here. So I'm Mike Lee. I'm the co-founder of the performance marketing agency, CBI Digital, and the inventory AI startup, Cognitive AI. So I'm an immigrant entrepreneur. I grew up in Vietnam, and I came to New York in 2005 to get my master's degree.

And I randomly met my co-founder, Jen Boy on the F train in New York and we talked and we become good friends and we decided to just start a company together. Let's chase the American dream. I didn't know how hard it would be. So that is CBI digital that we run together now for 18 years. Since the early days of SEO, the early days of Facebook ad, all the way now we are into the AI era. So we scale to over a hundred people.

^{Joe Fox  (01:33.408)}
Wow.

_{Mike Le (01:58.548)}
in our offices in New York and Vietnam, working with both enterprise clients and a lot of e-commerce brands. And in the last three years, we got about 15 industry award recognitions, including the US Agency Award, 2025. And three years ago, I started my second company, Cognitive AI.

We aim to reduce overstock and understock inventory for retail brands and optimize cash flow by using the latest deep learning AI technology to replace the traditional forecasting approach. So that's a join.

^{Joe Fox  (02:38.38)}
That's amazing. And I love this because I really like diving into this because as you know, Mike, like I owned an agency in Australia before I worked on the tech side. So there's some similarity there. And then my first kind of role moving into tech side was for a Scandinavian company very much based in AI and machine learning and using big data sets to be able to essentially optimize Google ads and

and make business intelligence decisions for companies like Toyota and stuff like that. So I feel like there's a lot of crossover here, which I love. And also like yourself, I'm an immigrant to the US more recently and trying to chase the American dream too. So I really love that. There's always a lot of similarities, but there's a lot with you, Mike. So thank you so much. And look, congratulations too. Let me first off by saying that.

on on the plethora of awards. I know that, you know, we're lucky enough to work with Ari on a regular basis. And obviously, I've congratulated him, but I want to, you know, extend that congratulations to you and the entire CBI digital team, because, you know, this is a very competitive space, right? Like the agency space is super competitive. There's a lot of amazing agencies, but to be recognized for that is really cool. So

_{Mike Le (03:33.834)}
Thank you.

^{Joe Fox  (03:59.136)}
Thank you again for joining us. Thank you for your accolades. I want to I want to kind of really like because we've got a short amount of time today. I want to unpack two main things. So the first thing I want to unpack is some stuff around that the CBI stuff and then I think we can move into cognitive and talk about why that's important and maybe at the end, you know, get your predictions on agency and AI. But in saying that Mike,

What's the main sort of, obviously, you've got some really good accolades there. You've got a lot of experience agency wise and CBI has been recognized for that. What are the main things that CBI are focusing on for merchants at the moment? And is there a particular use case that you'd like to talk about so the audience can understand that?

_{Mike Le (04:52.266)}
So I would say for 18 years we are a performance marketing agency so we have brand solved two things, right? We have solved the growth problem.

when you need to create high growth for the merchant and we turn around decline situations. So I don't know why, but most brands come to us with very major challenges at the time. Like they set up with us, I rarely get easy brands to work with in the first days. So, you know, in the good days, anybody can run your digital campaigns, but in the tough times, you need to really know what you're doing and what impact.

^{Joe Fox  (05:29.673)}
Yes.

_{Mike Le (05:31.272)}
right? What truly creates the results. So I would say that brand and merchants usually we have budget, have ideas, but we're not always sure that which idea will work. So in order to allocate budget to the right place that can create new growth, you need to truly dig deeper into the data, see beneath the surface to find the root cause of what really slowing you down or what are the levels for growth.

So at CBI, we ensure that the brand only spend money and resources and time on the idea that give us high returns.

Now, I would say that as a marketer, we only have 20 ways to spend money. But there will be 3 ways that give us more returns than the rest 17 combined. The question is to know which 3. So our focus is always to know very deep into the analytical mindset, to know where we should really focus the resource, to create the leverage and to create and nurture the momentum for growth for brands.

To give an example, we worked with a brand called Melinda Maria, I think for four years now. And when we first signed on, the brand was in the decline. lost more than 50 % of revenue in less than a year after a very high growth period.

^{Joe Fox  (06:48.115)}
Wow.

_{Mike Le (06:50.108)}
It is because when the brand goes through a very high growth period, the structure and operation is not ready for that kind of scale. So, we create a lot of operational problems and we came in as an agency together with the brand, stabilizing the ship, optimizing the digital marketing funnel. And in the next three years, we go from less than 10 million to over 30 million dollars in three years in online sales. And we that kind of growth with various brands that we work with.

^{Joe Fox  (07:12.797)}
Wow.

_{Mike Le (07:20.665)}
So that's one of the use case for us to do as a growth agency on the agency side. Now there is another story I want to share is also on the transition from the SEO to AIO and AI searcher.

^{Joe Fox  (07:35.006)}
Yes, I'm super, I love this, because this is super topical and it's blending the both. So I love this. I love this.

_{Mike Le (07:42.218)}
So, we work with this client First Citizen Bank, not a merchant, but a bank for SEO for like five years. And we got like top ranking for keyword like open, like online checking account, like very competitive keyword in the financial space. The ranking is as competitive, higher than Chase or Warfago and other leading banks for First Citizen Bank. But in the last two years,

effort that we put in was optimizing the cost of retrieval and entity schemas so the AI engines can pull our information into the AI answers. So we do that for two years to the point that the bank appear on various AI engine answers when we question about the banking services. So this year, when the bank leadership start paying attention to winning on AI very early, we're already there.

^{Joe Fox  (08:41.447)}
Yes.

_{Mike Le (08:42.112)}
reading on the AI space. So that's the one thing that I think it is a must for us to stick a step ahead and care about the imminent trend that can drive a success. And so that's a few stories I share as an agency that we have our client, both merchant and enterprise client with on SEO and Engrow.

^{Joe Fox  (08:49.862)}
Yes, yes.

^{Joe Fox  (09:04.477)}
That's so incredible. I mean, you know, I have quite a lot of different agencies that come on board and a lot of them are focused on, you know, these LLM kind of optimization and everything like that. But to be doing it with a merchant of that scale and to be so far ahead of the curve is amazing. Mike, may I ask like, what is the, you know, if we're thinking about this from an audience perspective, you know, what are some of the things that

you know, a Shopify e commerce merchant should be thinking about to get ahead of the curve. I mean, obviously, you know, when it comes to a big bank, there or a big financial lender, their needs might be a little bit different. taking from all of your experience of CBI and everything that's, you know, super topical at the moment, what is one thing that you would recommend to smaller Shopify merchants at the moment that they focus on?

_{Mike Le (10:03.796)}
things I believe that AI is so broad and it actually touch every part of the merchant operations that we should really focus on but I will say it's critical for us to know that AI today is table-stake. Getting on AI is no longer to gain competitive advantage.

^{Joe Fox  (10:21.521)}
Hmm.

^{Joe Fox  (10:26.343)}
Yes.

_{Mike Le (10:27.4)}
you know, just get to the AI race just to stay in business because everybody are using LLM like ChatGPT Claude Gemini as well as NanoBran, Oveo to create copy, creative. Everybody using AI to focus on productivity and ideations and speed up the time to result. So the first thing that we all as a merchant at

as a team and the business in this time, we just need to get on AI. That's the first thing. AI, obviously, you can focus on all the creatives, all the copy, all the AI automations. We as an agency, every week we release two AI agents that specialize in certain part of the expertise we deliver for the clients, because that is something we just have to do. Our SEO team, RPPC today, can act

^{Joe Fox  (11:16.573)}
Yes.

_{Mike Le (11:27.404)}
use Vite coding to build various AI apps to execute on certain tasks in digital marketing that we need to deliver and the beauty of that is that we don't need to

^{Joe Fox  (11:30.917)}
Wow.

_{Mike Le (11:42.11)}
to get the support from our developers at all. It's all non-tech people using Vibe coding, having ChatGPT write code for the Google AI studio to build an app and refining the app to execute on that. And that becomes a mandatory for us that we have to change not only the implementation but the mindset of letting go what drives a success in the past.

^{Joe Fox  (12:05.115)}
Yes.

^{Joe Fox  (12:09.659)}
Yes.

_{Mike Le (12:09.672)}
to embrace this AI journey to get us on this having a bunch of AI agents execute on the job, getting AI automation to do the job. So we, the people, can focus on strategy and thinking and to know what is going on. For example, AI can get us data. But analyzing the data to know the root cause.

and make the season and where to focus on to drive the growth is still us as a strategist to do. I don't think we can trust AI agent to do that yet. Maybe one day in the near future, but as of now, it is for all of us. So I tell our team that if your value is hard work, you're not ready for the future. AI is hard working, it's more hard working than you. It's less drama than you. You don't ask for the race.

^{Joe Fox  (12:38.107)}
Yes.

^{Joe Fox  (12:41.596)}
Yes.

^{Joe Fox  (12:54.695)}
Yeah, yes, yeah.

_{Mike Le (12:59.076)}
So the reality is that we have all need to become a thinker and force ourselves to deploy AI in the majority of the execution work we are doing now. So that's the first thing, like get on building an agent, get on automation to automate the majority of the work we do. And the moment you overcome the initial hurdle, it becomes a flow and deploying AI will begin.

^{Joe Fox  (13:24.805)}
Yes.

_{Mike Le (13:27.42)}
much easier and easier. So this way we see that getting AI, it is the race to survive, actually not the race to get ahead. Now the one thing also I want to share that most people use AI for marketing efficiency and productivity and ideation. I think for us at CBI, also like we want to use AI for operational efficiency, for inventory efficiency, which is a lot less people.

focusing on because they think that the key to optimizing the cash flow for a brand to win in the future, you not only need to have marketing superiority, you also need to have better cash flow, more efficient operation. So that's another thing when we do with quantitative AI, when we build out the technology is because we want to use AI to optimize the inventory efficiency, the same with the marketing side to drive the growth.

^{Joe Fox  (13:54.619)}
Yes.

_{Joe Fox  (14:04.762)}
Yes. Yep.

^{Joe Fox  (14:19.426)}
Absolutely. mean, there's so much to unpack there. And just to touch on what you're saying around the AI thing, I had to chuckle because, you know, particularly around, you know, marketers having to create all of this content and do all of these things. I remember when I had my agency and we were doing SEO, when it was just this consistent output of like consistently, you know, trying to, you know, get rankings and do all of these things and creating all this content and doing all of this link building.

And it was just so consuming, you know, the sheer amount of human input was just massive because there's only so much writing that a person can do. But to your point, AI is incredibly hardworking because it takes care of a lot of that. So that's really cool. I want to stay on this topic that you just kind of mentioned there around the inventory planning. And I couldn't agree with you more. think

you know, cash flow, inventory planning, you know, you can't just have the best marketing, you can't just have the highest amount of traffic, you can't just have the highest amount of conversion, you need to think operationally and how things are managed on the back end as an e commerce, you know, store owner or e commerce manager or e commerce person. So tell me a little bit more about the product like what like how was the product conceived? What are the main kind of you know,

core components of the product that make it so valuable for the customer.

_{Mike Le (15:50.495)}
So.

I first want to share why I created this product in the first place. As an agency owner doing business for so many years, I've this problem that becomes a very big problem, but very few people perceive that as a problem. It's the disconnect between marketing and inventory. I've seen many times a marketing campaign flopped because it promotes a product that is very low on stock and outstops very quickly. So all the advertising dollars are now fraudulent.

^{Joe Fox  (15:56.41)}
Yes.

^{Joe Fox  (16:17.189)}
Mmm.

_{Mike Le (16:21.67)}
to sell on the rest of the portfolio that are not that high performing. It is another thing that many times the inventory team buy a lot of stocks on certain SKU that they cannot sell, moves very slow and they ask marketing team to spend add dollars to move those stock and the reason those stock is out is overstocked because people don't want it that much and you cannot

^{Joe Fox  (16:26.478)}
Yes.

^{Joe Fox  (16:39.182)}
Yes.

^{Joe Fox  (16:43.204)}
Yep.

_{Mike Le (16:45.032)}
spend the dollars to move them out, right? So I realized that the disconnect between marketing and inventory create a lot of inefficiency and hurt the profit of the brands. that's why the first thing, and I want to talk more with the brand. I realized that a lot of brands, especially growing brand with 10, $50 million, we all use spreadsheets somehow to do inventory buying decisions. You can have ERP, you can have a lot of tools, but then you export it to spreadsheet and then you murder

^{Joe Fox  (17:07.109)}
Yes. Yes.

_{Mike Le (17:14.958)}
together and then you use the spreadsheet to make the season. So I realized that it's a very cumbersome problem. It could be lot of pressure both on inventory team and also it could be lot of inefficiency problem for the marketing team. So I created Cognitive AI. First, we had the

the first inventory AI agents to optimize the inventory planning and buying process. Now, the first we have a data engine that pull data from all the Shopify marketing channel like Google or Meta analytics, also ERP sources on inventory and on data and purchase all the stocks. We have all of that information planned in. And we use deep learning technologies to do demand forecasting that way more like

^{Joe Fox  (17:55.277)}
Wow.

_{Mike Le (18:04.208)}
accurate and lower risk than the traditional approach like ruin-based approach like most people use or some early version of math-based or early version of machine learning approach for demand forecasting. Now the beauty of deep learning is that it can do forecasting better with time series data and this really good for e-commerce and for amazon sellers because these channels have real-time data coming in that can be used to train the deep learning models right and the second

^{Joe Fox  (18:05.601)}
Yes.

^{Joe Fox  (18:30.925)}
Yes.

_{Mike Le (18:34.044)}
is that deep learning can take a lot more factors to forecast than the traditional way, which only can take a few key factors into the planning. And because of that, we can solve various outlier cases that make the forecast possibly inaccurate in the past. Now, give an example. If last year you sell a thousand units on SKU, but you actually out of stock 15 days of the month,

^{Joe Fox  (18:53.325)}
Yes.

^{Joe Fox  (19:02.371)}
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

_{Mike Le (19:03.422)}
This year you have stock for the whole month. You cannot rely on last year's to do planning for this year. But there is no place in the tool to get that information in. You have to rely on your memory to do the planning in the traditional way. But with deep learning, we have historical stock update feed as a part of the model that we train the model. So we deal with those outlier cases that give us much closer to the truth.

^{Joe Fox  (19:22.915)}
Amazing.

_{Mike Le (19:31.674)}
in the forecasting. So that's Cardiff is about. And also, we connect marketing signals into the forecasting process. So if you triple the aspect, your demand should be higher. Right? So all of those things in the traditional inventory approach on

^{Joe Fox  (19:44.865)}
Yes, yep.

_{Mike Le (19:51.69)}
current inventory tools, they don't have marketing signals. They don't have, you know, way to deal with that kind of situation. But with Congitive we aim to provide a better forecasting and better inventory optimization by solving the problem at deeper level.

^{Joe Fox  (20:08.321)}
I love that. mean, I was I've got to start by saying this, Mike, I feel like spreadsheets do not like you. And buyers, buying planners definitely do like you because I mean, that's that's such an incredible gap in the market that you filled. mean, I can only imagine the the 10s of millions, probably hundreds of millions that this has helped save brands and I think

Not only is it saving brands, it's saving wastage, which I think is great on an environmental kind of perspective, because, as you said, a lot of the time that you know, when these products aren't moved, if there's, you know, one particular skew that no one's interested in, well, I'm sure that goes to wastage. So that's an amazing feat. But I think being able to save everyone so much time and utilize AI and deep learning to be able to provide these insights is just absolutely amazing. And I have

no doubt that you know, lot of our audience will be very interested in in talking to you about this. And I just want to unpack this just a little bit more because I think that it's it's fascinating to me how you know, one tool can do so many things. What do you see on the roadmap in terms of product development? Do you will you lean kind of further into what this can do from a from a marketing insight perspective?

further into things from a logistical shipping perspective. What are your thoughts there, Mike?

_{Mike Le (21:38.558)}
So for Cognitive AI, it took me about over two years to build out the model and testing the reliability and accuracy to the point that the brand can trust it. We also have a risk control layer to make sure that even if the brand like blind trusts AI, we will not.

^{Joe Fox  (21:51.06)}
Yes.

^{Joe Fox  (21:58.784)}
Yes. Yeah.

_{Mike Le (21:59.678)}
You it will not put the brand into any major risk at all, right? So the algorithm is very, very strong. I'm confident about that. Now, what is ahead for us, which makes me very excited about is that we now launch the full AI agents model for the tool. So we're moving from the data UI.

to the visual UI, to the agent experience now. So you can have a agent handling your inventory almost in an autonomous way so that the agent can factor you any risk you need to pay attention to. It can create a PO for you. It can show you what changed in your sales for each specific portfolio. So you can really focus on and it can do the planning for you.

^{Joe Fox  (22:27.724)}
Yes.

^{Joe Fox  (22:40.097)}
Wow.

^{Joe Fox  (22:47.895)}
Wow.

_{Mike Le (22:52.828)}
for you. So that's what I'm excited about. Now, just where the AI model we create is proprietary, but we leverage LLM for the AI agent building. So we can put all this forecasting data and the actual data into the AI agent so it can learn and execute the task.

for the brands and for the inventory team as well as the marketing team. And that focus for me right now is on the work map. That's what I'm the most excited about.

^{Joe Fox  (23:24.927)}
That's amazing. My goodness. I'm so impressed. This is awesome. mean, I get to talk to a lot of, you know, founders who are launching various products and who are really AI focused. But this conversation is amazing. I'm absolutely blown away. I have a lead in mind actually. So that's a really good sign. On that note, look, as I said, at the start of this, I think

you know, it's difficult for me to stay under 30 minutes because I could talk forever with you. This is fascinating and I really enjoy this conversation. I just want to focus on a couple of last little things because otherwise I know we're go much over time, Mike. But I definitely would love to do a part two of this. this kind of feeds into my next question. With your experience across

product, agency, e commerce in general, you're working with some amazing brands, you're obviously working with, you know, big banks and all sorts of things. What when we narrow down and focus on e commerce for 2026? What do you what are your predictions for 2026? What do you think we're going to see in e commerce? And I'm open to discussing a few because I think I'd love to get your insights on this and I'm sure the audience would too.

_{Mike Le (24:47.678)}
So it all comes down to how effective we are with acquiring new customers.

I've seen that the landscape is no longer as easy as it used to be a few years ago. Now it's getting more competitive. The consumer demand is kind of like lower than before. So we know that on average, I see brands often plateau and have to work really hard to acquire new customers. But I also see that great brands keep growing. That's the thing. It's all come down to how effective we are in acquiring

^{Joe Fox  (24:59.136)}
Yes.

^{Joe Fox  (25:18.486)}
Yes.

_{Mike Le (25:22.246)}
new customers. Now there are a few directions that brands take, Brands can be more efficient with acquiring customers, with marketing makes with paid channels, affiliate, with advertising. You can move from DTC brand, move to selling on Amazon as well, or sell on TikTok shop as well, right? So we're expanding the marketplace just to find more users and hopefully in a more cost-effective way.

^{Joe Fox  (25:41.588)}
Yes. Yep.

_{Mike Le (25:51.548)}
In my view, across all the choices that brand can choose to grow and acquire users, still, Meta and Google are still the best performing channels of all. I tried AppLoving, I tried TikTok, I tried all other channels. As of now, I still think that the Meta and Google ad channels still consume the biggest budget efficiently. But one...

^{Joe Fox  (26:15.658)}
Yep. Yep.

_{Mike Le (26:17.397)}
things to remember, we should not let the algorithm run our entire campaign. We should not trust the algorithm as the algorithm says we should. Because what I learned is that algorithm not always fair, it can be biased at times. So from the way we structure the campaign, we control the budget, we need to take back control a little bit to really focus the budget on the...

^{Joe Fox  (26:28.67)}
Yes, yep.

_{Mike Le (26:45.0)}
the products and the channels that work and for CBI, we're very big believer in the connection between product inventory and marketing. We always want to allocate the spend, the majority of the spend on the SK user can move fast because that's how you can use it to acquire new customers effectively.

^{Joe Fox  (27:02.186)}
Yes.

_{Mike Le (27:06.002)}
Right. So, so that's the one thing with marketing channels like why we trust that we want we need to leverage the platform algorithm to find users. We need to take control of that to make sure our budget is spent on the right SKUs, on the right audience, on the right creatives.

because algorithms do always do that for us automatically. By moving to other marketplaces like TikTok shops or Amazon, one thing we want to pay attention to is that those platforms require a different mindset than the D2C mindset. Completely different. The consumers on Amazon are not D2C consumers. So what makes us successful on D2C will not make us successful on other platforms. We have to learn that platform from scratch and apply the new set

^{Joe Fox  (27:41.279)}
Yep. Yes.

_{Mike Le (27:54.173)}
of best practice. So that is the trap that even not careful is very easy to fall under to use the way we think it is to see to apply to other platform which would

make us like underperform on those platform. So those are the few things I think on the trend is all come down to like better, like, you know, user customers, customer acquisition, like new customer acquisition is all about the cat, the prospecting cat and we really good at that.

^{Joe Fox  (28:25.363)}
love that. That's so cool. And I think, you know, to your point, as a marketer, we, you know, or as marketers, or as e commerce owners, we need to evolve our thinking to match where the potential new audiences are. So that's, that's fascinating. I love that. That's a very, very good point. And then the other sort of question that I think everyone, you know, who's watching right now is like, how do we find out more, you know, like, what's the best way, Mike, for

for the audience to connect with you to hear more about everything that you're up to, to hear your insights. it LinkedIn? Would you like people to visit the CBI website? What's the best way for people to keep up to date with what you're up to and what you're doing? And ultimately, I have no doubt that there are a lot of people watching the podcast right now who are saying, I need the inventory planning ASAP. And as I said, I've got that lead for you too. So where is the best place for people to connect with you?

_{Mike Le (29:24.714)}
So I'd love to connect to everyone via my email, mikele@cbidigital.com. I'm happy to reach out just to have a conversation and share some ideas that could hopefully be helpful to people. So that's the best. And also reach out to me via LinkedIn. My LinkedIn handle is mikelecbi. So it's linkedin.com/mikelecbi

And I love to stay in touch with people.

^{Joe Fox  (29:55.101)}
Amazing, amazing, Mike. Thank you so much. And I'll make sure all of those links are in the show notes. I'm absolutely blown away by this conversation, Mike. I very much look forward to doing a part two of this conversation. I think it'll be really cool if we aim to do a part two and really dig into the predictions and sort of what people are doing and figuring out what people are doing to acquire more customers. I think that's it.

We could almost do an entire episode just on that. So I'm really excited for that, Mike. And look, thank you so much for everything you do for the industry. Thank you so much for coming on today. I cannot express enough gratitude for the value that you've delivered to the audience and the value you've delivered to me. So Mike, it's a pleasure. Thank you for the partnership we have with CBI Digital as well. And I look forward to continuing that partnership and thank you for your time.

_{Mike Le (30:51.038)}
Thank you so much, Joe. It had been so much fun.

^{Joe Fox  (30:54.118)}
I really appreciate it. Thank you, Mike. Audience, thank you so much for tuning into this episode. As you saw, there were so many great amazing points that Mike and I unpacked in a very short period of time. As I said, I could have spoken to Mike forever. I mean, the amount of experience and the wealth of knowledge that he has crossed both of his amazing companies and you know, his award winning agency and his background. So audience, I really encourage you to take Mike up on that. Please connect with him on LinkedIn.

shoot him through an email, check out CBI digital, see what is going on with the product and the inventory planning front. All of those links are in the show notes. But thank you for tuning into this episode of Retain Grow Thrive I look forward to seeing you at the next episode. And if there's a particular guest that you'd like to see us have a conversation with, please, please, please mention them in the comments and we'll do our best to get them on. You've been great. Thank you. And I'll talk to you soon.