Everything your customers wish they could tell you but usually do not.

Pencil is an AI powered customer feedback platform that helps businesses understand what their customers truly think, without the noise, pressure, and distortion of public reviews.

The platform is designed for any kind of business, from independent shops to large franchise networks. Through short, anonymous surveys, Pencil collects customer feedback on products, locations, staff, service quality, the in store experience, and every other touchpoint that shapes how people perceive a business.

The feedback is private by design. It is not published online, it is not exposed to other customers, and it does not become another public review. Instead, it is processed by an artificial intelligence system that turns individual opinions into clear, structured, and actionable insights.

For business owners, franchisors, and franchisees, Pencil provides a dashboard that makes customer sentiment easy to read and act on. It highlights recurring issues, operational weaknesses, strong points, sentiment trends, and priority areas for improvement. The goal is simple. Help businesses understand what is working, what is not working, and what their customers have been trying to say but rarely say openly.

A huge amount of data at your disposal.

The idea for Pencil came from a reflection on how artificial intelligence could be used to understand customer behavior inside physical spaces. Prada had approached me to work on an AI based retail analysis system using in store cameras to study customer movements, preferences, and employee behavior. The project made me think about the value of this kind of intelligence, but also about its limitations. Camera based systems can be powerful, but they are complex, expensive, difficult to scale, and not accessible to most businesses.

Pencil was born from a different question. What if the same strategic value could be delivered in a simpler, more affordable, and more respectful way?

Instead of building a costly infrastructure around observation, Pencil gives customers a safe and frictionless way to express what they already know. It replaces surveillance driven complexity with direct, anonymous feedback. The result is a system that can work for restaurants, hotels, retail stores, mechanics, local shops, and large commercial networks alike.

During the research phase, I spoke with business owners across different sectors and found a clear pattern. Public reviews are useful in theory, but many businesses experience them as unfair, stressful, or emotionally charged. Positive reviews are often taken for granted, while negative ones are frequently perceived as attacks, even when they contain valuable truth. In many cases, the actual insight gets buried under tone, frustration, exaggeration, or the public nature of the complaint.

Pencil removes that friction. It separates the useful signal from the public noise. Customers can speak honestly without feeling exposed, and business owners can receive criticism as structured information rather than as public judgment.

The first tests were extremely encouraging. Business owners started discovering weaknesses they had underestimated or considered normal. Customers, on the other hand, said they felt more comfortable sharing honest opinions because the process was private, anonymous, and clearly focused on improvement.

My contribution to Pencil covered concept design, interface design, and product execution. I helped shape the original idea into a practical commercial product, defining how feedback should be collected, analyzed, and presented so that it could become immediately useful for both individual businesses and franchise networks.

Today, Pencil is evolving as a commercial product for companies that want a smarter, more respectful, and more actionable way to listen to their customers.

Already used by a multitude of franchises and businesses.