Podcast: Future Commerce

Snap, Inc.’s Sid Malhotra makes the case that the platform most brands wrote off as “babies and teens” has quietly grown up. Now, commerce is migrating into these private, conversational spaces where nearly one billion users actually spend their time. We dig into why the traditional funnel no longer holds consumers’ nuanced behaviors, how creators and chat shape decisions long before the last click, and what AI Sponsored Snaps mean for brands willing to be the answer rather than just another link.

Future Commerce

Future Commerce | Episode 466: Nearly 1B Strong: Snapchat Has Retail’s Most Overlooked Audience

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00:00 / 00:42:37

Get all After Dark releases by joining Future Commerce Plus: www.futurecommerce.com/plus. Future Commerce Plus members get 20% off STRATA: www.futurecommerce.com/strata.

An AI agent burns $12 building a fake Android phone nobody asked for. From there: Pope Leo’s encyclical, a tick crisis blamed on vanishing chickens, a website that’s cookied Phillip into Spanish forever, and The Devil Wears Prada 2, feat. why media was the visionary all along.

Future Commerce

Future Commerce | Episode After Dark: "You're Not A Visionary, You're A Vendor"

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00:00 / 01:06:41

Recorded live at Google Marketing Live 2026, Phillip and eCommerce reporter Nicole Silberstein sit down with Ashish Gupta, VP & GM of Merchant Shopping at Google, who is behind the foundational commerce infrastructure powering the Shopping Graph and Universal Commerce Protocol. Gupta breaks down the GML announcements: UCP’s expansion beyond shopping into hotels and food delivery, the multi-item Universal Cart that spans Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail, and why the future of agentic commerce still depends on merchants nailing the fundamentals.

Future Commerce

Future Commerce | Episode 465: LIVE @ Google Marketing Live: The Infrastructure Connecting Your Agent to 60 Billion Products

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Recorded live at Google Marketing Live 2026, Phillip sits down with Nick Fox, SVP of Knowledge & Information at Google — the executive overseeing Search, Ads, Commerce, and geographic mapping products. Building on the prior day’s I/O announcements, Fox unpacks how Gemini is reshaping Google’s consumer and advertising products, why the Universal Cart strikes a balance between human taste and agentic convenience, and how two-plus decades at Google inform his view of building technology that shapes the lives of billions.

Future Commerce

Future Commerce | Episode 464: LIVE @ Google Marketing Live: How Google is Taking the 'Drudgery' Out of Shopping

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At Google I/O 2026, Phillip sits down with Suresh Ganapathy, Senior Director of Product Management for Consumer Shopping at Google, to unpack the day’s announcements: Universal Commerce Protocol’s expansion into new verticals, agentic payments arriving in Gemini Spark, and the debut of Universal Cart. We trace what these foundational pieces mean for how a billion daily shoppers, and the merchants serving them, will operate in an agent-mediated economy.

Future Commerce

Future Commerce | Episode 463: LIVE @ Google I/O: Universal Cart, Agentic Payments, and the Protocols Powering the Agent-Mediated Economy

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00:00 / 00:14:31

The Swatch x AP “Royal Pop” arrived after a week of generative AI fan renders, watch-Twitter speculation, and a 24-hour emotional rollercoaster from disappointment to “actually, this might be iconic.” Phillip and Brian sit down with Michael Miraflor to unpack the speedrun spectacle, the high/low collab playbook, and why the purchase is just the tip of consumer participation.

Future Commerce

Future Commerce | Episode 462: AP x Swatch x Mass Brand Psychosis

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Matt Maher, founder of M7 Innovations and the thirty-fifth member of the MIT Media Lab Consortium, joins Phillip and Brian to interrogate what really happens when enterprises leap from “zero to one” to “one to a hundred” with AI. The conversation moves from the productivity paradox (studies showing AI can add 20% to completion time even as users swear it saves them work) to the human hand-off in commerce, the limits of agentic shopping, and the shrinking aperture of the internet. The big takeaway is that 2026 is the year of assessment, not aspiration.

Future Commerce

Future Commerce | Episode 461: The Internet’s Aperture Is Shrinking

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The funnel’s compressing, content volume is exploding, and everything is quickly descending into AI slop. But the Miami heat and chilled coconut water hit just right, so everything is juuuust fine.

We’re unpacking our hot takes fresh out of POSSIBLE, Hyve’s sprawling beachside conference at the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc resorts. Between Walmart’s “Who Knew” thesis, EMARKETER’s no-safe-channels reset, and Phillip’s case for what it would take for POSSIBLE to rival Cannes, the team weighs what makes a conference culturally relevant and what’s still missing from most experiences.

Future Commerce

Future Commerce | Episode 460: POSSIBLE’S Potential: The Hallway Track Leads to the Beach

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What happens when a cultural figure with 20 years in the limelight decides to become a brand operator? Adam Domian, SVP & Head of Commerce and Audience at 11:11 Media, joins Phillip and Brian to break it down. From Walmart shelves to TikTok lives, Adam shares how Paris Hilton’s portfolio balances licensing cash flow with equity-driven brands like Parive, and why “founder energy” is becoming a moat in an AI-saturated marketplace, especially with someone “sliving” such a dynamic and coveted life.

Future Commerce

Future Commerce | Episode 459: Paris Hilton's 11:11 Media is at the intersection of Celebrity, Social Commerce, and Culture

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00:00 / 00:35:05

People will let AI be their therapist but not their partner, their assistant but not their manager. Gillian Katz of Hannah Grey VC joins Phillip and Brian to unpack the firm’s newest Cultural Vibrations journal and the qualitative study behind it: a read on how people are actually negotiating AI’s role in their lives, domain by domain, role by role; from anthropology to sommelier frameworks to Goodhart’s Law.

Future Commerce

Future Commerce | Episode 458: AI Can Be Your Therapist, But Never Your Partner

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00:00 / 00:46:06