Accelerate26 Opening Session Recap

Ecommerce doesn't slow down. It doesn't wait for you to catch up, figure out your content strategy, or nail your attribution model. It just moves. And the brands that win are the ones building for what's next, not reacting to what already happened.

Pattern's CRO John LeBaron opened Accelerate 26 with a simple premise: the brands winning in ecommerce right now aren't reacting to change, they're building ahead of it. He walked through how the landscape is shifting and what it actually takes to compete in it.

Then Pattern co-founder and CEO, Dave Wright, took the stage to show exactly what Pattern is building to do that.

Here's what went down.

Tim Leatherman took the stage

One of the highlights of the opening session was a surprise appearance from Tim Leatherman himself. Pattern brought him out to talk product, brand, and what 40 years of innovation actually looks like.

Tim's origin story is one for the books. He spent eight years in his garage refining a prototype after coming back from a trip to Europe and realizing he needed a better tool. Eight years. That kind of obsession built one of the most recognizable multi-tool brands in the world, now selling across 28 marketplaces globally through Pattern.

He also gave a preview of his upcoming book, a 40-year business and creative story that he says will appeal to entrepreneurs, employees, and anyone who wants to understand how a real brand gets built.

The message was clear: great products still need great partners to reach the world. Pattern's job is to keep brands like Leatherman authentic while scaling them globally.

Inside The Portal Studio

Next up was one of the most talked-about pieces of Pattern technology: The Portal Studio.

The backstory is genuinely fun. Pattern manages 150,000 SKUs across hundreds of countries and languages. At that scale, content production hits walls fast. Missing reference data, incomplete photo shoots, products that just can't be done with standard AI generation. The team needed a better answer.

The solution started as a green screen experiment, went through a bike tent phase, involved students running cables under office desks, and eventually became a full dome-shaped capture system inspired by the LED volume stages used in Hollywood productions like The Mandalorian.

The output? Fully AI-generated product photography that holds up against any professional shoot. The Portal creates enough reference data in a single session to generate content across every marketplace, in any format, at scale.

For brands with complex products, reflective surfaces, or high-frequency visual details, this is a genuine breakthrough. As the session put it: if you can't create this kind of reference data, you simply can't do this right now.

The halo effect problem

Dave has never been shy about his skepticism of advertising. For years, the halo effect was the explanation he couldn't get behind: the idea that advertising on one channel lifts sales everywhere else. Not because it's wrong, but because no one could prove how much, when, or why. "People really buy on the 17th of July" is not an attribution model.

The question Pattern kept coming back to: how do you actually measure what advertising is doing if the tools measuring it are built by the people selling you the ads?

True ROAS gets a patent

That question is what led to True ROAS. Pattern just received a patent on the technology, years in the making.

True ROAS uses counterfactual click simulation and exponential decay modeling to get as close to a real answer as possible. It measures what would have happened if someone never saw the ad at all, and weights recent ad exposure more heavily than something seen 13 days ago, which is how most standard attribution windows actually work.

The reason Pattern could build this honestly? They don't charge for ad spend. Never have. That independence is what makes it possible to actually chase the right answer instead of the convenient one.

Pattern Intelligence: say hello to Pi

The session closed with the launch of Pattern Intelligence, or Pi. Pi is Pattern's AI-powered autonomous ecommerce execution engine, built on 13+ years of operational experience and 77 trillion proprietary data points that grow by 800 billion new points every week.

Pi runs active sensors across featured offers, advertising, content, pricing, and inventory. When it spots an opportunity, it acts. When a decision needs brand judgment, it surfaces a curated action item for approval instead of moving on its own. Since rolling out across Pattern's brand portfolio, Pi has already taken millions of automated actions, running 24/7.

What's available to brand partners today includes a daily brief and podcast, chat-to-data for on-demand performance questions, Pi Skills for pre-built ecommerce automations, a Knowledge Management System where brands load their own guidelines directly into Pi, GEO and Alexa for Shopping Scorecards, and a Chrome extension that brings Pi's intelligence into live Amazon review sessions. Pi is also available in the ChatGPT app directory today, with additional platforms coming soon.

Pi is available to Pattern brand partners now at pi.pattern.com.

Up next

This was just the opening. Accelerate 26 continues with deep dives on the Portal, Pi, and agentic commerce throughout the day. Stay tuned for more session recaps as the day unfolds.