Young consumers have always been a sought-after demographic for retailers — but what they value is always changing. Over the past several decades, Pacsun has sought to maintain a strong pulse on the evolving tastes of teenagers. From viral jeans to strategic partnerships with creators, the mall-based retailer is once again winning over young people….
Enterprise AI agents are stalling — not because of model performance, but because of permissioning. Every agentic workflow eventually hits the same wall: what is this agent allowed to touch, on whose behalf, and how does the system know? Workday’s answer is to make its existing system of record the governance layer for agents. Gerrit…
Enabling LLMs to acquire new knowledge after training remains a major hurdle for enterprise AI — current solutions are either too expensive, too slow, or constrained by context window limits. MeMo, a framework from researchers at multiple universities, encodes new knowledge into a dedicated smaller memory model that operates separately from the main LLM. The…
At 620 million monthly users, calling a frontier model for every image recommendation isn’t a strategy — it’s a bill. Pinterest CTO Matt Madrigal solved it by gutting Qwen3-VL’s vision layer and rebuilding it with proprietary embeddings, cutting costs 90% and boosting accuracy 30%. Madrigal’s team has been heavily investing in customizing open-source models “foundationally…
As enterprise AI agents move into production, organizations are confronting a growing reliability problem. Many teams are discovering that LLM performance alone does not determine whether agents succeed in production. Long-running AI workflows must survive crashes, preserve state, recover from failures, manage inference costs, and coordinate across APIs, tools, and enterprise systems. After a first…
Subscribe to DTC Newsletter – https://dtcnews.link/signup The consideration phase is collapsing thanks to LLM shopping. Awareness still happens on Meta. Conversion still happens on a PDP. But the comparison and research middle, the part brands have spent a decade optimizing, is increasingly happening inside an LLM the customer already trusts. 20% of holiday shoppers used…
On today’s episode, Kara welcomes Ryan Alovis, CEO of LensDirect — the family business he bought back and transformed into a leading, customer-first vision care brand.
Ryan shares how he took a struggling company and rebuilt it from the ground up — without outside capital — turning it into a trusted destination for contact lenses, eyewear, and innovative services like lens replacement and subscriptions. This episode dives into the discipline, resilience, and customer obsession required to scale the right way.
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Check out our website to view this episode’s show notes: https://karagoldin.com/podcast/845
For four years Eric Steckling has run two direct-to-consumer brands. Brio, the company he founded in 2014, sells beard trimmers and related goods. In 2022, he acquired Ollie, then a seller of teeth-whitening strips and now an expanded oral care provider. Eric first appeared on the podcast in 2023. In this latest conversation, he addresses…
Sarah Davis is the Founder, President and Chief Creative Officer at Fashionphile. Follow and connect with her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahclarkdavis/ and on X at https://x.com/Sarahdavis. FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREW X: https://x.com/andrewjfaris Email: podcast@ajfgrowth.com Work With AJF Growth: https://ajfgrowth.com MOVE SUPPLY CHAIN Reduce your OpEx and create more leverage in your company with financial forecasting,…
Test-time scaling (TTS) has emerged as a proven method to improve the performance of large language models in real-world applications by giving them extra compute cycles at inference time. However, TTS strategies have historically been handcrafted, relying heavily on human intuition to dictate the rules of the model’s reasoning. To address this bottleneck, researchers from…