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Welcome to the Json and Scott show this is episode 327 being recorded on Friday June 6th I’m your host Jason retail geek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scot Wingo.

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Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners Jason it’s been yet another month since we chatted.

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I don’t think it has been.

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Oh you’re right I I had a little momentary lapse there we are actually recording back-to-back episodes because we had so much content due to your gallivanting around the world,

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talking about strategic e-commerce retail payment media Network,

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Marketplace strategies that we are going to jump into part 2 so if you listen to episode 326 this is a continuation of that and and that 1

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Battle Royale between Carrie and Jason and in this 1 we have a bunch of AI topics we want to cover,

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so Jason let’s jump in first I wanted to get your take right after recorded this is how it works in podcasting like right the day after we we did our last pod

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big news broke that
Fiji SEMO who is the CEO of instacart was recruited by openai to run their consumer products what did you make of that.

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Yeah I I do think that’s huge news for folks that don’t know Fiji was the CEO of instacart and.

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Arguably 1 of the most successful female CEOs of a publicly traded company and so to me it’s it it says a lot about her belief in the future of AI and of open AI in particular that she’s

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stepping down as the CEO of a public company that’s in the middle of a pretty good run by the way and taking a

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a senior role but but less than CEO in a privately held company in openai so a I think it’s a it’s a pretty powerful uh

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the vote for her where where she sees the future and then if you look at it from from open AIS perspective and you say hey what what is open AI you know think is the future what skills are they going to want to be successful in that future it’s pretty interesting that they hired a a really experienced Commerce executive and I think that says a lot about where where open AI thinks AI is going to be really

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profound and 1 of the models that they’re likely to lean into for monetization of all their Cool Tech.

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Yeah the I think I met her briefly so eBay she was at eBay and then after that meta and then I think instacart,

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from Mada if I recall there may have been a company in the middle there and she led this really big it was way ahead of its time therefore I don’t think it worked out well but but eBay acquired this company this is,

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man this must be like 0506 that was called Milo and they would go out and they would do

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kind of like what instacart does today so she kind of went full circle they would send people to stores to actually count inventory and kind of say what was in stock or not so for example way back when I don’t know if you remember this but in episode 326 do you remember that 1

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I was talking about the switch to so you you could have these folks you know.

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There may be an economic model where it makes sense to have humans run through there on a daily basis and check for inventory and report back and and then that would be an interesting service that people would pay for

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so that was the idea of Milo and they integrated it in with eBay and you can have like a local inventory and then it all kind of fell apart
but you know it’s interesting to speculate.

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So they’re bringing someone that has deep e-commerce experience cpg and adds.

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Sam has said he really doesn’t want to have he was on strategy been Thompson’s show and said he really doesn’t see them having advertising any time in the future but he was more interested in maybe he called it an affiliate fee.

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But I think he’s kind of conflating that with the marketplace so so
I wonder,

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if she’s going to really and I’m obviously like really leaning in on this agentic shopping and they’ve rolled out some stuff chat gbt has a shopping.

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It’s early days it’s almost like in comparison shopping engine but I think it’s the first step of an agentic offering I wonder if she’s going to be really pushing that which would be,

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pretty amazing because what what

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what we discovered at Channel advisor is it takes someone that’s been at e-commerce for a while to understand the complexity and the vagaries of variations and things that we deal with on a day-to-day basis to really get

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these bigger companies kind of understand what’s going on in the world of e-commerce so I’m I’m pretty excited that it signals some pretty interesting things for the world of retail.

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Yeah I I’ll throw out 1 other fun fact that I don’t see mentioned as often it’s obviously publicly available information but in addition to being the the CEO of instacart I believe she is still a current board member at Shopify.

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Yeah so there’s some yeah
this could be the company that.

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Yeah so lots of Commerce intersections yeah and of course yeah open Ai and Shopify have their own existing relationships and Partnerships.

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Other thing that was interesting is did you watch the the Sam Altman Johnny Ives video that was kind of like a romcom is kind of a a weird
they were like walking to this coffee kind of a situation and.

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It it was a it was kind of overproduced but it’s interesting.

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Did basically Aqua higher Johnny I for 6 billion and they’re talking about some secretive device and I was wondering ah did you watch all that and B do you have any speculation on the device.

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Yeah I do I did watch it I I have some speculation it’s not based on on any.

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Like particularly it’s not based on any inside information or or any particular Insight but it it seems a little likely that he’s inventing some kind of what I presume will be a screenless device that.

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Enables people to access the openai llm.

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And so if that’s right I think that could also have a profound impact on on future Commerce experiences.

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Yeah I’m old enough to remember when the segue was kind of there’s all this hype on the segue and they’re like it’s going to change how cities are developed I I’m going to say this is going to be overhyped.

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Everyone thinks it’s going to be a pendant I don’t think it’s going to be a pendant I think it’s going to be next Generation Alexa so it’s going to be like a little Cube it’ll be a speaker with a microphone and maybe a camera and you’ll talk to it and I think that’s kind of basically going to be it.

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And maybe there’s a version with a screen like the what’s the Alexa with the screen or the show forget what they call.

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Yeah that goes to show yeah so I think it’s going to be an echo Alexa type thing but it’s going to be,

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there was also some some things that came out in a Google lawsuit where you know they they clearly are trying to build this your personal assistant that’s like.

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Omnipresent the computer on Star Trek kind of thing and I think this little cube is going to be the embodiment of that.

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Going to be able to do some really cool stuff to a gentic like you know get your car fixed and you know home repairs book travel and shop for you.

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Yeah that’s interesting my mind went right to some kind of wearable not necessarily A pendant but like I didn’t know if you you know like inventing

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third-party temples that you put on your own glasses or or you know.

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Who knows but in my mind I assumed it was some kind of device that went with you versus some something that’s embedded in the environment but but no reason why I thought that I just did.

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I think it’s going to be like a little tiny speaker Cube.

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Okay
regardless if really good llams are ubiquitously available when people need them that that is you know protection potentially enabling for a lot of interesting new experiences in Commerce.

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Yeah another another topic I wanted to chat about is you and I love big decks,

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big slide decks and we cannot lie and there was 2 out here in the like the last week so Ben Evans who’s over in the UK he had a brief in at a16z and he’s he’s been a pontificator about

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mobile and internet traffic for decades he had a really good deck around Ai and I thought it was it was good and pretty tight and then Mary maker has been kind of

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off

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she switched firms somewhere in there and I don’t think she did a deck last year or the year before but she’s back and man she dropped a mega deck what was it like 350 380 slides did you get a chance to look at those and any

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anything over the top of learnings for you out of this.

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I did I I looked at both so this is going to be the Big Deck energy deck energy podcast this this this week
the
Benedict,

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deck has actually been out for a couple months and I I feel like he’s done 1 update like this is the second deck he’s done with that title which is AI eats the world right um and I

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I think he’s super smart guy I like his Frameworks and that is definitely a deck I would Point people to to kind of get grounded in the AI space it’s not.

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Commerce specific but he does he does have some Commerce examples in that deck so I would totally check that out and I would say it’s a well-curated story which is I think part of the value of an analyst like like Benedict.

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Mary maker is a little different to me I I have,

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enormous affinity for Mary Maker’s big decks like she used to do this state of the internet deck and,

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they they used to be kind of simol works in our space like it used to have all these really interesting insights into how consumer behaviors were changing as a result of the internet and how fast,

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new technologies on the internet were being adopted and we used to use.

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Inferences and statistics from those decks like all the time when talking to clients so those used to be super important.

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The fifth or sixth year that they did the state of the internet it just things hadn’t changed enough right and so they weren’t as exciting because there wasn’t as much new thinking in it it was oh this is 10% more than it was last year,

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and then she stopped publishing that state of the internet deck which I was kind of okay with because they had kind of like been diminishingly useful for me so then she didn’t publish anything for a few years and then she I we heard she was going to be publishing.

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This state of AI deck and so I was super excited because I was thinking like oh man it’s so early in AI there’s so much to learn and think about this could be very similar to the first date of the internet decks and she did she published this huge I want to say 347 slide deck.

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I got to be honest though I was a little disappointed in reading it like to me it had it’s chalk full of Statistics all stuff that’s.

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Kind of been out there right so it to me it was a giant data puke and she didn’t really synthesize any of the trends or any of the,

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the things in a meaningful new way or aggregate you know several proof points together to make some macro Point like she a lot of the things that were really valuable to me about our state of the internet decks I didn’t find,

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in this state of the AI deck so I I got to be honest I had very high expectations and and for me that this deck fell a little short of that now,

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that could be because it doesn’t have as much Insight or it could be because I’m older and more cremen and I don’t know but what what did you think did you find it useful.

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Um I’m sorry I’m busy posting to LinkedIn uh let’s see Jason retail geek says Mary Meeker Mega deck mid all right okay what were you saying what was the question.

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Exactly do you think it’s.

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You’re just like Mr mid that’s Captain everything’s mid with you these days gosh Jason.

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Hey I gave AI eats the world it I I gave.

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Okay that was not meant and you’re potentially excited by a wearable that it’s going to record all your conversations
all right we’ll see what I guess.

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Are you sus about that.

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I think it’s going to be a I think everyone’s going to be let down because it’s basically gonna be an Alexa clone but it’ll probably be out before Alexa plus so we’ll see.

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That wouldn’t be hard.

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Yeah someone did you see someone asked me do they ask oh is the jasse and he’s like what do you they’re like why isn’t this wider he’s like well it’s at like 12,000 beta testers or 1,200 and I was like what.

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Calling that as a w.

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Yeah it’s a tiny amount and I’m pretty sure they’re all Amazon employees.

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Yeah
the it’s also interesting let’s see where do we want to go now okay these are kind of

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too tied together so I was excited to see and you didn’t you didn’t give me a heads up so you you you had a a surprise report

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where you dropped a really nice and very well done I could tell you you leveraged all the resources at your disposal there at pubis you dropped a report

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is this is that what it’s called report a white paper a thought piece.

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A point of view a POV.

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POV You Dropped a POV that you talked about the disruption of Commerce search so I was excited to see that you are does this mean you think AI search and commerce is not mid like what what’s going on there.

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Yeah so I I do think it’s super important to be following right now I’ll put a link to the report thanks very much for reading it Scott in the show notes
the.

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The gist of it is you know I I get to meet clients every single week and we have all these great conversations and increasingly 1 of the topics in this conversation is,

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hey man I’m you know,

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are people abandoning Amazon and Google and instead like you know is all the search traffic moving to chat gbt and perplexity

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and like you know should we be thinking about that from a marketing standpoint do we need to be optimizing our content to win on these

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these AI searches and if so how do we do that and are they going to be an important part of the future are they going to steal the traffic from the Legacy things you know all of these conversations are coming up which is interesting because

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a few months ago the conversation was hey did you know that there is Commerce on Chad gbt and that it’s possible to do Commerce searches and did you know there’s an even

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you know much more
Commerce Centric search engine called perplexity and you know.

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It used to be making clients aware of these things now it’s it’s you know the magic question is should we be pivoting our our SEO work to to um agent optimization work and so I decided to kind of just put some some initial thoughts out there,

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and in in general I I do think that.

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The AI based results are going to be a super important part of the future of Commerce and we all need to start thinking about them but I was but you know the the POV lays out the the point that at the moment they’re not economically meaningful like that the volumes.

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Well there’s a lot of hype and a lot of discussion and it’s growing super fast and I I just saw perplexity published some like new stats on their.

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On their search volume and they’re doing like 800 million searches a month now and you know Mary Meeker points out that that the.

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You know they got got to 100 million users faster than any other technology in the in the history of mankind.

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It’s there’s still tiny compared to Google right so so nobody should be,

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turning off their SEO to try to win agentic search because they think there’s a huge sales volume there right now but.

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There’s enough indications that there that this stuff is going to be super important in the future and that when consumers get good tools and get used to using them

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that they become part of the mix that every marketer ought to be starting to think about how they’re going to win on this new platform and they ought to be dog fooding these platforms and running pilots and you know at the very least

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being prepared to be fast followers if they don’t want to be a first mover in all these things so that’s kind of the the outlay of the.

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The the POV and so then we talk about like what the state of experiences are on some of these platforms so we we talked about the the.

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Text agents like perplexity and chat gbt I do think

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what’s also interesting is is the near future for some of these agents so so open AI in addition to chat gbt they have this thing called Advanced Vision where the

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the the llm gets access to the camera in your smartphone and I think that has the potential to have a profound impact on on Commerce and I I show some examples of you know what happens when you

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you know point the camera at the shelf of products in front of you and ask you questions about what you should buy I think is really an interesting question and if Johnny Ives invent something cool that we all have to have that suddenly makes the LM ubiquitously available when we’re when we’re solving problems like that

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has the potential and so we just kind of talk about what marketing looks like in a world in which we’ve gone from from.

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26 clicks when you and I started in e-commerce to to 1 Click being kind of the state-of-the-art today to potentially zero click with all these these new things.

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Cancer engines are the future
well on the heels of your point of view e-marketer has some data out I think this came out just like in the last.

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Day or so and they basically have a new forecasts and they’re showing the

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percent of AD spend that goes to AI search and you know they don’t they don’t break it down by vendor so this is not Google’s going to die because Google could be the beneficiary of this as well as as a participant

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and but what’s interesting is they show by this model and we’ll put a.

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Screenshot of it in the show notes it shows that you know we’re basically,

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you know sub 1% today but it shows that getting to about 14% which would be 26 billion dollars by 2029 and I thought that was an interesting flag to kind of plan out there and say hey

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this is gonna this is gonna happen and that doesn’t seem like it’s fast.

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Those are a lot of you know Google would say that’s way too fast for what we want to see and we better go capture all that so did you have any thoughts on that report.

00:18:33.656 –> 00:18:41.936
Yeah no I followed it it is interesting you know the question I keep getting asked and I I don’t think this exists and I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to know
is,

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what percentage of search is our agents getting or or even more specifically what percent of,

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Commerce search are are agents getting and you know for the last 2 years I’ve been getting all these questions like what percentage of Commerce search is Tik Tok getting right and you know I feel like the

00:19:01.171 –> 00:19:08.358
the definition of search is getting grayer and grayer and as you pointed out like talking about.

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Agent-based searches is almost pointless because there’s now ai summaries on you know Google searches right and so is every Google Search now in AI search like I I think this is all,

00:19:21.722 –> 00:19:29.594
super gray and complicated but so what what e-marketer did is said hey we’re not we’re not trying to project that which is

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was kind of hard to pin down but we we believe that a significant monetization model for all of this AI stuff is going to be ads and so we’re going to predict how fast the ad revenue for all of this stuff grows and

00:19:42.976 –> 00:19:46.341
that is uh it is interesting like again it’s a,

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you know it’s a forecast you know starting at at like 1 billion dollars today and scaling up to 25 billion dollars so you know it’s kind of,

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we’ll have to look in 2029 to see how how how accurate all of this is but,

00:20:00.841 –> 00:20:06.489
it is super interesting because you know the magic question if you think about ads on Google,

00:20:06.574 –> 00:20:15.899
like what happens to ads when you know people aren’t scrolling below that that that AI summary right that AI Overview at the top of the Google search like,

00:20:15.948 –> 00:20:28.621
like are there still adds like and are the ads more impactful are they less impactful when you’re you know getting this quick bite-sized summary of the the data and you’re not you’re not getting sent off site to any any organic links anymore.

00:20:28.675 –> 00:20:39.906
Yeah we’ll have to you know note note to listeners hold us accountable here on episode 526 we’re going or 27 we’re going to circle back on this 1 so keep us honest.

00:20:40.116 –> 00:20:43.673
Yeah I just hope AI is helping maintain my wheelchair for that episode.

00:20:43.842 –> 00:20:47.531
Yeah RR the Scott Bots and the Json bot will answer those questions for you.

00:20:47.285 –> 00:20:50.476
Exactly hopefully that Jason bot’s way funnier.

00:20:50.674 –> 00:20:58.991
It’s gonna be yeah it’s basically be programmed to call everything mid
e marketer report mid.

00:20:56.209 –> 00:21:06.039
Um I did have a question for you
yeah mood everything’s mid that’ll be the that’s the Jason bot it just calls in what you just given any topic and it says that topic is mid.

00:21:06.064 –> 00:21:11.303
I I could write this
1 I may just do that.

00:21:11.850 –> 00:21:19.121
Yeah you could do it code list for sure um so 1 thing that I’m running into a lot Scott I’m curious like.

00:21:19.314 –> 00:21:33.320
I I don’t care about definitions particularly but I do feel like semantics are are it’s the wild west right now and everyone’s using these different terms and so it’s easy to conflate things and so for example the POV I wrote was really just about.

00:21:33.651 –> 00:21:44.768
AI search which to me is a a smaller subset of this whole ecosystem like I’m actually more interested and I think a bigger deal is this idea of AI agents but I’m finding.

00:21:45.002 –> 00:21:47.165
People are conflating

00:21:47.148 –> 00:21:55.043
you know AI agents with AI search and then you know they can play it all and call it all generative AI which is not really what any of this is

00:21:55.002 –> 00:22:04.405
and then I noticed in the the retail genetic podcast you kind of put a flag in the ground about what your definition of AI agents was and I was

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interested in that because for example,

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I’m not sure like Rufus or Sparky or any of the the retailer owned agents that use llms,

00:22:14.531 –> 00:22:18.040
our AI agents in your definition do I do I have that right.

00:22:18.521 –> 00:22:20.636
Yeah and I’m I’m you know.

00:22:20.841 –> 00:22:40.159
I’m flexible on this and I think we need to add a modifier so so when I’m talking about agentic shopping or AI shopping agents in my mind they’re looking at Cross websites so so these agents are going to go out and on your behalf and they’re not going to be encumbered by 1 set of inventory or 1 retail they’re not

00:22:39.997 –> 00:22:46.541
captive so I would say Sparky and Rufus are either,

00:22:46.667 –> 00:22:53.992
I would use the word captive that’s probably not what people are going to like so I would say they’re they’re on-site or retailer specific.

00:22:54.293 –> 00:22:57.189
What if I said they’re single Source versus multi-sourced.

00:22:56.889 –> 00:23:01.948
Sure that’s fine and yeah the.

00:23:02.712 –> 00:23:12.308
And I’m not really sure they’re a gentic either because I think they’re just another flavor of filtered nav you know they’re they’re basically they take the database of products,

00:23:12.326 –> 00:23:20.456
they put it in a retrieval login generation and they put a rag they put a g in front of it so so I don’t think there’s an agent involved in those so.

00:23:20.685 –> 00:23:34.505
Because there’s no need to have an agent to go to multiple sites to
the the agent basically is replacing what a human would do and this is different it’s just another search engine to me so I think there’s a little bit of line in there but if they want to call it agentic that’s fine.

00:23:35.341 –> 00:23:48.494
I I do think this is all the super interesting stuff about the future here right because if if you like in my mind if you think about big picture shopping I mean there’s probably more but there’s at least 2 to me dramatically different use cases,

00:23:48.543 –> 00:23:57.724
there’s like needs fulfillment where you you know you need something and you’re just trying to Source it right and you know a way to Source it today and

00:23:57.677 –> 00:24:04.166
you know technology keeps inventing more efficient ways to Source it right so you you might have sourced it by going to Kmart in the old days,

00:24:04.245 –> 00:24:12.326
and then you know today you go to Amazon in both cases you knew you needed toilet paper and you’re you’re just going to KMart or Amazon because,

00:24:12.483 –> 00:24:15.878
at that moment in time they’re the most convenient way to get that toilet paper.

00:24:16.257 –> 00:24:23.768
And all of this AI technology has the potential to be an even more convenient way to get your toilet paper right um.

00:24:23.990 –> 00:24:35.221
And if you have particular criteria for whatever your product is you know maybe the single Source retailer wasn’t great at helping you find the product that best met your criteria but now these AI agents can.

00:24:35.468 –> 00:24:44.601
You know applying more complex criteria and make better decisions for you across multiple places that could provide that that product so I think there’s this interesting.

00:24:45.863 –> 00:24:52.743
Agent takeover the the work and do it for you to to just make your needs fulfillment more efficient.

00:24:52.960 –> 00:24:55.982
But there’s a whole another genre of shopping that.

00:24:56.505 –> 00:25:11.359
People enjoy doing right like either Discovery I go to the mall I’m not even looking for something particular but I hope to discover something that makes me feel better or it makes me look better or maybe I’m going for a gift and I don’t know what that gift should be but I want to go look at some things and I,

00:25:11.438 –> 00:25:19.952
I want to personally curate a a gift for someone or you know there are all these shopping Discovery experiences in their wildly imperfect.

00:25:20.398 –> 00:25:29.801
In the real world today but I would argue on the internet there are even worse so like I would say Amazon has done a really good job of being a more efficient way to Source stuff than Kmart was,

00:25:29.970 –> 00:25:39.211
but I’m not sure there’s a website that’s way better at Discovery than going to a FAO Schwarz toy store was and uh.

00:25:38.911 –> 00:25:41.531
Pinterest is kind of like maybe the only thing that kind of.

00:25:41.610 –> 00:25:43.802
Yeah and and all the social network.

00:25:43.821 –> 00:25:46.513
Instagram is kind of getting there yeah Tik Tok shops.

00:25:46.231 –> 00:25:55.905
Tik Tok not even Tik Tok shops but Tik Tok I would say is is kind of the you know the the best examples or YouTube are the best examples of like discovery.

00:25:56.368 –> 00:25:59.757
On on the internet like the mmm perfectly applied to shopping yet.

00:26:00.166 –> 00:26:10.242
But I do think there’s going to be a role an interesting role for agents in in those Discovery experiences that’s going to be very different,

00:26:10.417 –> 00:26:18.631
then ai’s role in the needs of fulfillment experiences right and so you can imagine the agent being a co-pilot that makes it,

00:26:18.812 –> 00:26:22.958
way better to discover stuff but you still are going to play an active role.

00:26:23.445 –> 00:26:32.842
On the Discovery side but on the needs fulfillment you could imagine delegating the needs fulfillment to an agent and never have to think about it again right so you might tell the agent.

00:26:33.161 –> 00:26:40.318
I just never want to be out of toilet paper right and you may never make another decision about toilet paper in your life you might just trust the agent.

00:26:40.601 –> 00:26:50.341
To do everything itself but when you buy a new car you may want to be an active participant in the selection of that car but you may use an AI agent to,

00:26:50.467 –> 00:27:04.618
do a lot of things that used to be hard and make it easy for you to figure out what the right price is to pay for that card to figure out how reliable that car is going to be to figure out what car you know best meets your your commuting needs and all of these sorts of things so.

00:27:04.318 –> 00:27:14.804
To find the dumb smoke alarm replacement that fits the 10 year old 1 you have that’s beeping because it’s that its end of life
random random example.

00:27:14.960 –> 00:27:27.970
Sounds like an example that maybe maybe timely to you
every 10 years you should listeners most of the stuff we say in the show is very dubious and isn’t of high value but you need to change the batteries and replace your smoke alarms every 10 years.

00:27:28.078 –> 00:27:30.107
Oh it’ll let you know don’t you worry.

00:27:31.451 –> 00:27:40.046
If you’re changing your smoke alarm battery endlessly and you’re like God what’s wrong with all my batteries and then you realize
you know how I found that out
through perplexity.

00:27:39.820 –> 00:27:43.251
Yeah I’m a huge fan of perplexity again I think,

00:27:43.263 –> 00:27:57.102
I think it’s penetration in the world is is very tiny and insignificant right now but it’s penetration in my world is very high in significant so again if you wanted to reach me you’d be much monitored by an ad on perplexity than you would Google but

00:27:56.988 –> 00:28:03.063
you know any Advertiser that fires Google and puts all their money into perplexities probably not going to be very successful.

00:28:02.913 –> 00:28:07.095
Yeah so you you raised some really valid points
I think.

00:28:05.280 –> 00:28:11.962
Carey says that Jason’s mid but Scott says I raise valid points that’s going to be my article.

00:28:11.662 –> 00:28:22.117
Jason raises valid points when he’s not calling stuff mid
the I think it’s even you know having kind of been out of the industry a bit and back.

00:28:22.965 –> 00:28:31.401
My my 30,000 foot level view is I was so excited about marketplaces because I felt like they were going to really accelerate e-commerce and.

00:28:31.967 –> 00:28:33.763
It surprises me where it like.

00:28:33.980 –> 00:28:45.433
1617 percent and slowing to the point where we’re basically when I say we I’m talking about e-commerce versus online versus offline the the numbers are coming together,

00:28:45.583 –> 00:28:52.583
the and there’s a law of large numbers and stuff but just if we look look at that and we say we’re at 17%.

00:28:52.848 –> 00:29:01.369
Lots of Europe is at 30% aipac is at like 80 90% what what’s wrong with ours like maybe you know.

00:29:01.621 –> 00:29:10.244
You may argue Well Physical retail is actually pretty good in the US and those other places it’s not you go to the UK and the stores close at 4 pm and they’re not open on weekends that that’s kind of a problem,

00:29:10.401 –> 00:29:22.388
so on and so forth but I just think structurally we should be more in like the 25% and I think a lot of the fun and it it’s gotten hard and there’s data that indicates that consumers are not happy with what we have to.

00:29:23.014 –> 00:29:29.792
That is ensure the toilet paper thing absolutely Amazon’s made that perfect and they’re they’re they’re almost isn’t a better,

00:29:29.948 –> 00:29:34.268
way to do it other than hit the reorder button or say Alexa order me more TP,

00:29:34.407 –> 00:29:41.119
I do think it’s like that seared up it is fun part of things it’s very hard to research products now and

00:29:41.077 –> 00:29:52.830
and you know buy gifts and all that stuff because we’re just inundated with the ads I think marketplaces actually detract on this now because there’s like so much noise in the technology hasn’t kept up to to

00:29:52.723 –> 00:30:02.715
provide a better search experience on top of all that explosion of inventory so so 1 of the reasons I’m so excited about this is I think
I can see,

00:30:02.824 –> 00:30:10.906
when I when I played with the use these engines both for
non-commercial and Commercial search

00:30:10.732 –> 00:30:28.704
they’re so good at this that I think it could spark a re regrowth of e-commerce and that’s what gets me excited about it so that’s why I don’t really care about the nomenclature and stuff and if Rufus is a better search experience that’s awesome let’s have that like it it should sprinkle into everything because it’s going to make it better and drive more adoption.

00:30:28.939 –> 00:30:36.973
Yeah so I think at the highest level I totally agree with that I like I don’t want to have a name for all these things because it’s all Commerce right like it was,

00:30:37.130 –> 00:30:39.491
like wirz was Commerce.

00:30:39.744 –> 00:30:51.323
Target was Commerce Walmart was Commerce Amazon was Commerce and some cool llm based search Commerce experience that’s way easier than all these things is still going to be Commerce right and,

00:30:51.413 –> 00:30:59.898
and that’s really the focus so I guess how good are we at Commerce with whatever the the the tools are so I I totally agree with that I do want to just acknowledge

00:30:59.820 –> 00:31:01.448
because I know there’s some

00:31:01.334 –> 00:31:15.503
some very statistical listeners listening there’s some controversy in the penetration numbers that Scott just threw out they’re not the numbers I personally would use but we don’t have to go down that rabbit hole part of the fun is there there is no correct answer right and

00:31:15.377 –> 00:31:17.264
and there’s a lot of new ones in those things.

00:31:17.793 –> 00:31:20.917
Whichever 1 you use it’s not big enough and it’s slowing down to.

00:31:20.617 –> 00:31:29.426
Yeah which I yes I directionally agree with that premise but to me like I I I’ve been when I talk about this with clients I’ve

00:31:29.421 –> 00:31:38.782
I try to find these like examples or metaphors that are easier to understand and so an example I’ve been doing lately is the example of music right so

00:31:38.771 –> 00:31:48.000
for for all of our our younger listeners you used to be able to buy your Spotify playlist on this plastic Circle that was called the CD you remember those Scott.

00:31:48.313 –> 00:31:55.872
Where is the there is this little square thing that had the metallic ribbon in it too
and then there was like the black ones.

00:31:53.595 –> 00:32:04.074
Yeah
the cassettes the mini I thought you were you seem like a kind of mini disc laser disc kind of guy but yeah.

00:32:00.031 –> 00:32:08.677
I’m an 8 track guy
no other format is as good as the 8 track we could just like randomly it’s like pressing a magic skip Through Time button to jump into the middle of another.

00:32:08.702 –> 00:32:23.616
So I think so we get the idea like you used to have to buy music right and and there used to be all these tools available it was hard to discover new music and to decide what music you wanted to buy especially if you had a constrained budget like as as we all did as teenagers.

00:32:23.983 –> 00:32:31.422
And so there used to be all these tools that were very big deals at the time right they’re the there were CD clubs so you.

00:32:31.765 –> 00:32:38.056
You know 1 of the biggest advertisers in the world where all these like Columbia CD clubs that you would buy and they would send you,

00:32:38.086 –> 00:32:45.904
samples of CDs like 6 CDs for 6 cents and then you know they get you to buy their catalog there was,

00:32:45.970 –> 00:32:53.319
you know chains of these things called the record stores right where you could go and buy the CDs and there there were listening stations,

00:32:53.451 –> 00:32:59.947
in in all those record stores that let you listen to CDs in the record stores I I actually like,

00:33:00.097 –> 00:33:13.455
a whole bunch of patents and started a company that made those listening stations and sold them to all those record stores there were giant Yellow phone books and all these stores that had a list of every song so that you could find out what albums your song was on and they were,

00:33:13.600 –> 00:33:20.546
they were hideous and there’s a huge Company in San Diego that sold those things called the phono log there was a magazine that still exists.

00:33:20.757 –> 00:33:26.122
That everyone read that wanted to find out what cool music was called billboard and then most importantly,

00:33:26.135 –> 00:33:39.498
there are these things called radio stations and there were tens of thousands of marketers whose whole job it was to get the radio station to play the song they were trying to sell so that customers would hear it and want to buy it and they’d go buy 1 of those,

00:33:39.565 –> 00:33:45.652
plastic circles or squares or or whatever format you want to buy it in so there are all these tools.

00:33:46.163 –> 00:33:51.024
We’re hard for customers to use that customers had to use to try to discover music.

00:33:51.319 –> 00:34:00.476
And there was an army of marketers behind every 1 of those tools trying to make sure that their product won in that tool my CD is the 1 in the listening station my

00:34:00.404 –> 00:34:07.867
album is the 1 That’s rated on Billboard my song is the 1 that gets played the most on the radio station all of these things and then,

00:34:07.898 –> 00:34:10.962
1 day all that went away and Spotify just,

00:34:11.022 –> 00:34:18.131
magically has good music whenever you want to hear music and you just open the app and it plays music and it you discover stuff that,

00:34:18.221 –> 00:34:29.824
you you like more than you did the old CDs that you bought and all of those tools went away all of that research went away and all of that burden on consumers to discover music except for,

00:34:29.891 –> 00:34:39.799
in extremely small Niche audience just went away because it just what what Spotify or Amazon music or whatever you know platform you chose.

00:34:40.124 –> 00:34:49.462
Just fed you was good enough that you didn’t need any of those tools anymore and you didn’t need to do that research anymore and so to me the magic of all this AI is.

00:34:49.655 –> 00:34:59.016
What other products is AI going to be able to do what Spotify did to the music industry
right like yeah.

00:34:58.716 –> 00:35:03.728
Yeah it’s going to be a new discovery engine there’s going to be
its it does a great job at that already.

00:35:03.788 –> 00:35:13.108
Yeah but so to me it’s not even just a matter of like it helps you do the research better than the old research tools it’s that it may make you not even want to bother doing research anymore.

00:35:14.568 –> 00:35:25.222
And and for a bunch of products that’s that’s game-changing right and so again in the same way there are all these guys trying to get their songs on the radio there are all these SEO experts trying to get their links ranked on Google,

00:35:25.319 –> 00:35:26.887
and for your point like.

00:35:27.344 –> 00:35:41.849
That may not matter in the future and then you know you might not have a website you might not need or want or have in a web page in the future that you want on Google and so that to me is why this is so profound like how exactly how it plays out how fast it plays out.

00:35:42.054 –> 00:35:48.002
You know is it going to affect every product category at the same rate no right in the same way that.

00:35:48.363 –> 00:35:58.260
You know e-commerce penetration in in music is much higher than e-commerce penetration and clothes which is much higher than e-commerce penetration in produce right.

00:35:59.330 –> 00:36:00.483
For sure,

00:36:00.592 –> 00:36:14.298
the the future with all these AI Tools in it is going to make Commerce look feel and work much different than Commerce has has worked over the last 6 thousand years and so to me that’s what’s exciting about all this stuff.

00:36:14.882 –> 00:36:20.205
So you’re excited that’s awesome
we’re both excited.

00:36:18.331 –> 00:36:22.793
Yeah so the trick isn’t I I I.

00:36:22.543 –> 00:36:24.574
Who’s more excited I’m more excited than you.

00:36:24.528 –> 00:36:27.312
I I don’t know not everything has to be a contest man.

00:36:28.242 –> 00:36:32.758
I can appreciate your excitement and without diminishing my own excitement.

00:36:32.464 –> 00:36:36.412
A it’s not a zero sum game we’re all winners here we all get trophies.

00:36:36.767 –> 00:36:39.957
I that’s I just want the participation trophy Scott.

00:36:43.280 –> 00:36:49.950
That’s why they should listen to the Regent the retail gentic podcast and And subscribe to the substack.

00:36:49.716 –> 00:37:03.398
Thank you appreciate it and we’re obviously you know we’re kind of bumping into it here too the when you’re out talking to you know you go see more retailers than I do but I am having conversations now and it it’s coming up all the time.

00:37:03.771 –> 00:37:08.296
You know you wrote your point of view how much is this in the.

00:37:08.603 –> 00:37:19.947
And I’m I’m sure retail media networks and of the topics that come up is this 1 kind of like number 1 now or is it kind of like number 3 but it’s rising quickly where where is this in the spectrum of things people are thinking about out there.

00:37:20.044 –> 00:37:28.714
Yeah so to me it’s in the top like overall I would say it’s in the top 3
the
I almost would say there’s like,

00:37:28.823 –> 00:37:35.931
there’s kind of urgent medium-term and long-term tops right and so like urgent everyone wants to talk about all the

00:37:35.890 –> 00:37:45.342
the macroeconomic uncertainty that’s going on right now right and so you know obviously today’s problem you know likely has to do with tariffs and imports and things like that,

00:37:45.366 –> 00:37:46.261
I’ll be honest.

00:37:46.592 –> 00:37:55.371
The clients in my world that care the most about that are the smaller Regional clients like the
the big giant clients like they care about all that stuff but they like,

00:37:55.485 –> 00:38:05.406
they’re they’re spending less of their bandwidth agonizing about it relative to the other buckets in the medium-term the thing that everyone wants to talk about the comes up the most is,

00:38:05.569 –> 00:38:09.119
like how social has disrupted Commerce that like you know my,

00:38:09.240 –> 00:38:16.985
my poor decals and store circulars are used to be super important but now how my product shows up on Tik Tok is way more important and,

00:38:16.986 –> 00:38:24.953
and what kind of relationship I should have with content creators and micro influencers and how I had to do that and how I had to measure it and is it incremental.

00:38:25.152 –> 00:38:33.757
That’s the topic this disruption of Discovery by social and you know the fact that that you know consumers are spending 4 hours a day on Tik Tok.

00:38:34.154 –> 00:38:44.825
That’s kind of the medium-term thing that everyone’s saying like I got to get this figured out and I’m not sure that my allocation of resources and my metrics are right that I’m using right now.

00:38:45.277 –> 00:38:46.165
And then,

00:38:46.268 –> 00:38:56.994
5 years from now the thing that’s going to disrupt my business the most is all this stuff that Jason and Scott are talking about in Ai and so and so you know you you talked to the smartest CEOs I talked to,

00:38:57.096 –> 00:39:02.997
and they probably think AI is the most important of those 3 convers but they they think it’s.

00:39:03.190 –> 00:39:17.256
Impact is the farthest away and then they you know probably think the social is the second most important and I think the impacts more immediate and they they probably think the the macroeconomic stuff is the most urgent but least important of the 3.

00:39:17.665 –> 00:39:31.426
Gotcha it’s under some suture said the same thing that this AI stuff was fun to talk about but her her clients are are really you know interested in the social stuff happening and she called out the Tik Tok stuff as well.

00:39:31.775 –> 00:39:38.655
Yeah yeah I mean I think those those are the Big 3 now you go into any 1 retailer and they have some unique problem where there’s some you know other

00:39:38.535 –> 00:39:48.846
curveball right and so if you’re if you’re not making any margins right now you might care about all these operational things a lot more or you might care a lot about retail media networks to augment

00:39:48.804 –> 00:39:54.639
profitability or something like that but but those across all my clients those 3 are the Big 3 for sure.

00:39:54.795 –> 00:40:01.093
Yeah and this is 1 we didn’t I’m going to throw a curveball at you but 1 last 1 here before we wrap up the show.

00:40:01.363 –> 00:40:10.503
The the information was out with the report that Amazon is working on humanoid robots that will deliver packages to you and they,

00:40:10.539 –> 00:40:21.469
you have to have like a top tippy top tier subscription and I happen to have 1 and you know in there they talked about how Amazon has built this they called it a a humanoid robot playground within a large

00:40:21.422 –> 00:40:29.834
you know undisclosed location and I was picturing you know kind of like them building a little suburban area Street where

00:40:29.594 –> 00:40:47.170
you’ve got 1 house you know the I also pictured being a Star Wars fan these things are like the Droid ships from episode 1 where they’re like strapped to the outside and they kind of hop off so imagine a prime van where these things hop off and they run up and they’re carrying a package and think of all that they’re going to have to figure out they’re going to have to navigate

00:40:46.978 –> 00:40:56.202
you know white picket fences and Gates they’re going to have to figure out dogs they’re going to have to figure out you know City environments where maybe there’s a

00:40:56.010 –> 00:41:01.345
a doorman type situation and I I pictured them kind of building out a giant,

00:41:01.514 –> 00:41:08.394
Truman Show like landscape for these humanoid robots to be doing this do do you think this is just

00:41:08.364 –> 00:41:15.569
kind of distraction PR kind of like the Amazon Prime air that never seems to have done anything or do you think this is,

00:41:15.623 –> 00:41:19.072
gonna be something we see in the and you know the next 5 years.

00:41:19.127 –> 00:41:28.711
Yeah so to me I I think there it’s super cool but not very important
in the same way that the Drone thing is right so you’re you’re referencing like,

00:41:28.747 –> 00:41:36.336
like the 60 Minutes article the episode where Jeff bases appear and he revealed that we had this new thing in the world called drones and

00:41:36.229 –> 00:41:46.666
they’re going to deliver packages right and and you know side note that was 8 or 9 years ago and and they’re way better at delivering packages than they you know they were it was vaporware

00:41:46.534 –> 00:41:51.756
when it was on 60 Minutes but now there actually are places where they can legitimately do it and it

00:41:51.612 –> 00:41:59.045
still isn’t very important and it hasn’t changed anything right and side note drones have dramatically changed other things in the world like

00:41:58.955 –> 00:42:07.782
I don’t know Warfare and the military you know in a way more profound way than they’ve they’ve changed Commerce but they are cool to talk about right and and

00:42:07.674 –> 00:42:15.846
for years after Amazon announced it we’re all talking about it and I know what like I’ve been talking about this forever and I never really liked,

00:42:15.864 –> 00:42:22.552
cared about it that much but it’s it’s intellectually interesting I got to go to a Walmart store that was,

00:42:22.558 –> 00:42:29.985
like in production delivering packages using these these winged drones Wings the name of the company and.

00:42:30.202 –> 00:42:42.280
It is cool Scott like it’s we’ve been talking about it for a long time but when you’re standing out in a parking lot and a bunch of like Pharmacy packages are like flying in planes over your head and going to people’s houses like it is cool to see,

00:42:42.364 –> 00:42:49.641
it really can work and it’s legit and side note I did just notice like um Walmart’s rolling those out to,

00:42:49.744 –> 00:42:58.498
10 more cities so so it’s a real thing and it I’m sure in some circumstances it makes delivery more efficient and more economical and

00:42:58.355 –> 00:43:08.786
and that’s exactly how I think about these humanoid robots like there probably are some real problems that the robot saw like they probably are really cool but I don’t think the drones

00:43:08.648 –> 00:43:11.953
or the robots fundamentally,

00:43:12.091 –> 00:43:24.674
chain shopping like I don’t think they fundamentally change how people discover stuff or buy stuff they just you know make it a little more efficient and make it a little more affordable I think you know Amazon’s.

00:43:24.987 –> 00:43:33.772
Fulfillment Network had way more profound effect on the customer experience of Commerce than drones ever will or robots and so to me,

00:43:33.880 –> 00:43:45.357
I’m more excited about this AI stuff because I do think it has the potential to fundamentally change how we all discover and buy stuff I think the the robots are cool and I want 1 but I don’t think it.

00:43:45.682 –> 00:43:54.863
I think it’s more an efficiency if it ever becomes a thing it’s at best just an efficiency play it’s not a game-changing enabler
how do you think about it.

00:43:55.441 –> 00:44:05.632
I think I think you’re right but think of how weird it would be to have a robot kind of like running towards your house and putting giving you a package it’s going to be kind of a very I Robot kind of a moment.

00:44:05.758 –> 00:44:14.657
The the first time that it’ll be crazy just like I’m like I can’t tell you after like having drone deliveries in decks for like 5 years the.

00:44:14.844 –> 00:44:21.934
How weird it felt to stand in a parking lot and see drones actually delivering things was pretty cool and I’m sure that.

00:44:22.265 –> 00:44:30.425
The first package I get from the this the scary robot Overlord will will have that same kind of profound like feeling but yeah.

00:44:30.137 –> 00:44:32.456
You and I gave a talk.

00:44:32.667 –> 00:44:46.103
NRF Big Show I think it was and I think it I saw this deck the other day I was going through some old decks it was like 2017 and we were talking about drones and 3D printing and Ai and stuff it’s pretty wild we were right give us enough time we’ll be right.

00:44:46.542 –> 00:44:59.046
The fun fact in 2016 I got almost got kicked out of in a Big Show because I tried to use a drone to deliver a package like during my presentation on stage and
and the firearm.

00:44:59.648 –> 00:45:02.886
The fire marshal did not think the indoor drone was a cool idea back then.

00:45:02.965 –> 00:45:10.764
That’s funny there’s another 1 where we bought our VR headsets we were wearing them remember those.

00:45:10.897 –> 00:45:18.444
Oh my gosh uh if there’s a way to not look cool and have it documented in digitally forever I think you and I have figured them all out.

00:45:18.192 –> 00:45:21.827
Sign us up yeah.

00:45:20.024 –> 00:45:28.058
Exactly well Scott is that a good place to leave our our state of the AI for today or is there anything else we should discuss.

00:45:28.119 –> 00:45:34.656
I think that’s it it’s been a marathon on the recording side but it’s thanks for being so generous with your time enjoyed the conversation

00:45:34.554 –> 00:45:44.096
and listeners if you did this is a great time to leave us a review open up that podcast player hit that little 5-star button and save and we would be very appreciative.

00:45:44.217 –> 00:45:58.993
Absolutely and I just want to point out you know on the rare occasions when I’m sitting on an airplane and it arrives early the pilot always gets on and goes we’re here early please credit our account in the same way I’d like to point out to all of you that want a more frequent podcast you’re welcome.

00:45:58.891 –> 00:46:00.411
He asked for it you got it.

00:46:00.429 –> 00:46:05.062
Exactly and until next time happy Commerce saying.