Beth Lovell
Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at FoBoH
Beth Lovell is co-founder and chief product officer of FoBoH, a Sydney startup building AI agents for food and beverage wholesale distribution. Its first agent, Alan, extracts orders from emails, texts and voicemails and pushes them straight into a distributor's ERP or accounting system, cutting manual entry and errors. Lovell and co-founder Kshitija Deshmukh spent over a decade together in digital and product roles at Woolworths Group and WooliesX before founding FoBoH to fix inefficiencies they saw first-hand in the food and beverage value chain. On Day One's In The Blink of AI, she discussed real wins and failures from putting AI agents into production.
Key moments
Jump straight to the part of The Truth About AI Agents: Real Wins, Real Failures you want.
- 1:05 Beth’s journey from Woolies X to FoBoH: COVID supply chains, failed portals why AI is different
- 4:07 Sam’s origin story: unsafe workplaces, no safe way to speak up, and building Hello Canopy
- 6:15 Sally’s investor lens: hundreds of agents tested, why she backs Relevance AI
- 7:32 Favourite hacks you can steal: Replit, sticky notes → tables, system preferences for style
- 12:26 First useful agents: outreach automation, policy-scraping, VC inbound triage
- 17:28 What we wish we knew before building: expect errors, keep it simple, chain tasks, onboard like a teammate
- 20:07 Designing for reality: data hygiene, human-in-the-loop, guardrails
- 22:27 Dream agents: life OS, product-copy deployer, Excel-beating modeller
- 25:10 Why women adopt AI less — and why that must change
- 30:32 Strengths non-engineers should lean into: empathy, domain expertise, communication
Connections
Spot something wrong? Suggest a correction Updated 25 September 2026
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