AI and automation · for distribution and trade

Your operations, run by systems. Your customers, still by people.

I did it to my own business first. A distribution company that used to take five people now runs in under 40 hours a month, and the customer conversations are still mine. Fifteen years as an operator in duty-free distribution; automation is how I got there.

Book a 30-minute call See the track record

Anton Yurchenko, Founder · Vienna · Lynstone is a brand of Pure Synergy OÜ, since 2016

Anton Yurchenko · Founder

15+

years running and automating trade businesses

people it takes to run one distribution company, before and after automation

< 40 h

a month to run that entire company today

30–80%

less manual work across five projects

Track record

Fifteen years of running businesses, and taking the manual work out of them.

I am an operator first. These are the projects with the clearest numbers, each one I can talk about for five minutes. Work done before 2022 was automation and IT; the AI came later, on top of the same discipline.

Distribution · BalticsOwn company · 2011–today

51person, under 40 hours a month for the whole business

A duty-free distributor, rebuilt around automation

Website, warehouse and purchasing connected into one system. Invoicing scripted, always consistent with stock and web data: 5–6 hours a month back. Partner emails generated. Marketing and accountant reporting each two working days a month lighter. Financial analytics that did not exist before. When I rebuilt the company from zero, I never needed to rehire the five roles it used to take.

Still human, on purpose: every customer conversation.

Energy trading · UkraineClient · 2025–2026

30–40%less labour on forecasts and recurring processes

AI forecasting and process automation

An electricity trading company produced its forecasts and recurring reports by hand. We built Claude-based forecast writing and automated the processes around it, inside the tools the team already used. Labour input on that work fell by 30–40%.

Reviewed by a person before anything goes out. That is the design, not a caveat.

Services marketplace · EstoniaOwn startup · 2019–2023

~3×faster than traditional providers, end to end

End-to-end workflow automation

A fragmented phone-and-paper market for grave care, headstones and renovation. We aggregated the digitised records of about 70% of Estonian cemeteries, then automated search, ordering and fulfilment across the whole pipeline.

The pipeline is still the fastest way anyone has processed that kind of order in Estonia.

Archives · Latvia and academic researchClient · 2013–2018

40%less field work time

Large-scale archive digitisation with multilingual OCR

Burial books digitised, every grave photographed, a field workflow system for the photographers, OCR of headstone inscriptions in four languages, verified by native readers of each. Then, for a research centre, the data architecture and foundations of a database unifying many cemeteries and hundreds of expedition interviews.

Architecture I laid down in 2017 is still in daily use.

One process, before and after

Invoicing in a distribution company

Step	By hand	Automated
Find the order, check stock and prices against the warehouse	by hand	by the system
Type the invoice, line by line	by hand	by the system
Cross-check totals, VAT and customer details	by hand	by the system
Send, file, and update stock and the website	by hand	by the system
A person reads it before it goes out	—	still a person
Time per invoice	20–30 min	minutes

About 37 hours of admin a month removed from invoicing, marketing and reporting alone, before counting partner emails.

The principle

You can't outsource your expertise.
Build around it.

The OCR was 90% accurate. That number told us nothing. Was it nine stones in ten read perfectly, or one wrong letter in every tenth character across half the records? Until a person who understood the language looked at the output, nobody knew where the 10% was.

I have built every system since on that lesson: automate the work, never the understanding. It is why, in my own company, the customer conversations are still mine.

What you've probably heard

Five things people say about AI in the back office, and what I've seen.

The AI talk in travel retail is all shopfront: agents shopping on the traveller's behalf, conversational stores, personalisation. The AI that pays this year is behind the counter.

AI agents will run the back office soon.
Not unsupervised, and not this year. The projects that work are narrow: one process, inside the tools you already use, with a person who signs off. That is exactly how my own company went from five people to one.
Our data will end up in ChatGPT.
It will, if staff use free personal accounts. It does not have to. Business API access keeps your data out of model training, the contracts say so, and GDPR applies to it like to anything else. A company using AI internally for orders and invoicing has almost no new obligations under the EU AI Act in 2026; the one rule to know is that if a customer talks to a bot, they must be told.
It makes things up.
It does, so do not ask it to be trusted. Ask it to be checked. Every figure my invoicing system produces is reconciled against the warehouse and the website before it goes out; an email draft goes to a person before it goes to a partner. You can't outsource your expertise. Build around it.
Klarna replaced 700 people with AI, then hired them back.
Yes, in customer service, and the customers were right. I automated invoicing, stock, partner emails, marketing and reporting in my own company; the customer conversations are still mine, on purpose. Automate the paperwork behind the relationship, not the relationship.
That is for the big players. Our systems are too old.
Order entry is the most automated process in distribution today, and the return is the easiest to measure. It does not need a new ERP: the work goes in as a layer on top of what you have, one process at a time, live in weeks. Small companies have an advantage here: one decision-maker, and no committee between the audit and the first result.

What we automate

The paperwork behind the relationship.

Five areas where a regional distributor loses its hours. Each one goes live on its own, inside the systems you already run.

Orders and stock
Order entry, stock control, planning and purchasing connected, so nobody re-types what the system already knows.
Invoicing
Generated from the order and the warehouse, reconciled before it goes out, filed where the accountant expects it.
Partner and supplier communication
Price lists, confirmations, status updates and routine correspondence drafted automatically, sent by a person.
Reporting and analytics
Monthly accountant packs, management reporting and the financial analytics you never had time to build.
Marketing
Campaigns, product content and customer segments produced from your own data, two working days a month lighter.

How it works

One process at a time. Live in weeks.

No packages, no platform to buy. We start with the hours, pick the process with the clearest payback, and build that one first.

Step 1

Audit

We map where the hours go and pick the processes worth automating, with a payback estimate for each.

Step 2

Build

One process at a time, live in weeks, inside the tools you already use. A person signs off before anything reaches a customer or a partner.

Step 3

Run

We maintain it, adapt it as the business changes, and move on to the next process.

About

Anton Yurchenko, Founder

For fifteen years I have run a duty-free distribution business across the Baltic states, built a startup, and taken on IT and automation projects alongside. I automated my own company until it needed only me, long before ChatGPT made that a fashionable thing to say.

INSEAD Global Executive MBA '23. Based in Vienna. I work in English, Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian and Spanish.

I am not an agency. The engineers on each project are senior and assembled for that project; you deal with me from the first call to the last handover.

Based in: Vienna, Austria
Working languages: English, Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian, Spanish
Education: INSEAD Global Executive MBA, 2023
Focus: Duty free, travel retail, tobacco, spirits and distribution; operations-heavy SMEs in trade and logistics
Background: Founder and operator, 15 years; automation and IT projects since 2013
Company: Pure Synergy OÜ, Tallinn, since 2016

Contact

Thirty minutes. Bring the process that costs you the most hours.

We will find where the time goes and whether it is worth automating. If it is not, I will say so.

Book a call with Anton

Emailanton@lynst.one
Callscal.com/anton-yurchenko/30min
LinkedInAnton Yurchenko