Agentic Commerce News for the Week of 10/5-10/11 (week 41/52)
What a crazy week: We had ChatGPT Apps, Sam's Interview with Ben Thompson on Instant Checkout, plus Google Agentic Checkout 'Buy for Me' is coming soon. But there's more....
The Week in Review (Deep Breaths!)
Monday started this week started off with bang. Just one week after ChatGPT Checkout, ChatGPT did another huge drop introducing the world to ChatGPT Apps. Our retail-oriented coverage is here.
Wednesday the Sam Altman interview with Ben Thompson dropped giving us some more color on some nuances about Checkout that we covered here.
Then Thursday we discovered that Google has rolled out a piece of their Buy for Me Agentic Commerce functionality, so we’re keeping an eye on that.
Those were so news-worthy that we dropped work on Part III of our III part series on Checkout, so hopefully we’ll be able to pick that up next week 🤞
Aside from those big news items, the most interesting news this week was from our friends at the Agentic payment company Nekuda:
Nekuda Open Sources ACP Merchant Gateway and Validation Tool
They cover it in the TL;DR, but I’ll re-state it. If you are a retailer or brand with a developer/engineering team that is researching/implementing/planning around ACP, check out Nekuda’s two tools they just open-sourced. One of them is a ACP reference implementation. The other one is a validation tool.
Modern Retail: How do Etsy Sellers Feel About ChatGPT Checkout?
ModernRetail had an interesting piece here where the interviewed a handful of Etsy sellers to get their thoughts on the ChatGPT checkout.
I’ll summarize by saying that it’s super early and unsurprisingly there’s a lot of questions on all sides such as:
Not all Etsy products are showing up - what’s the SKU selection criteria and does the seller have any control over it?
Apparently on the Etsy marketplace side, there’s no way for the seller to know if the order came through the ChatGPT relationship or if it was a guest checkout type scenario directly on Etsy. (Making it hard for Etsy sellers to measure the impact of ChatGPT Checkout).
None of these concern me as they are either easily fixable, or a characteristic unique to a marketplace facilitating thousands of sellers bulk that won’t impact the traditional retailer/brand leveraging ChatGPT Checkout.
BCG: Agentic Commerce is Redefining Retail - how to respond
BCG published a high-level piece that has some good graphics summarizing. It’s a good read. My only criticism is that it stops short of giving any tactics on how to implement the strategies, but that’s why you read Retailgentic 🤪.
If you don’t have time to read the whole thing, here’s some interesting tidbits.
This is a good chart that summarizes the impact of the rise of Agentic Commerce:
Once they tee-up that Agentic Commerce is big and going to have some pretty big negative impacts if you don’t do something, BCG introduces a classic three pillar diagram:
Finally not to be outdone in the battle between the folks that are fighting for GEO vs. AEO, they take the high road and throw a third option in the mix: GXO - Generative Experience Optimization. GXO basically wraps up all the optimization strategies into one three-letter-acronym to rule them all.
Final Thought… A Sample of B2B Agentic Commerce Thinking
In my World of startups, two of the most hyped fintech companies have innovated in a space previously owned by Amex: corporate employee cards. They are Ramp and Brex. The Brex founder,Pedro Franceschi, is insanely smart and in this video, we learn that he’s 100% in on Agentic Commerce, but the twist is two-fold:
He’s focused on the B2B side whereas we spend the bulk of our time thinking B2C
He sees an opportunity for Agentic Commerce to further disrupt the $3.5T/yr that flows through employee cards.
If someone was new to this space I’d think it was interesting, but probably wouldn’t share it, but Pedro already disrupted this space with the Brex card and now is already ‘2.0ing’ his thinking. What’s interesting is he already has the Brex platform to ‘dive off of’ into this next idea so I think it’s going to be an interesting one to watch and perhaps we’ll learn some lessons over in B2Bland we can pull back to our side of the World.
(Thanks to my friend Brendan Coen for sending this over!!)
Wrap and This week on Retailgentic
Coming up this week we’re working hard to get the final Part 3 of the Instant Checkout Deep Dive and we have a great pod coming your way after a bit of a break to make room for the insane pace of breaking news.
Stay tuned and Happy Agentic Commercing!