Hamish Gunasekara, CEO of Catalog, on Why Agentic Commerce Starts With Product Data
The former Afterpay and Cash App Commerce Data Scientist on discovery, reasoning, trust, and the real AI shopping stack
Hamish Gunasekara is the Co-Founder and CEO of Catalog, a company building the data infrastructure that powers discovery and reasoning in agentic commerce.
Before founding Catalog, Hamish was an early data scientist at Afterpay, where he helped build core machine learning systems across the business, and later joined Square following the acquisition, working on the founding team of Cash App Commerce. Across fintech, payments, and consumer apps, he developed a deep understanding of how people shop, pay, and build trust in digital experiences.
Today, Hamish is focused on solving one of the hardest unsolved problems in commerce: creating real-time, structured product data that allows AI agents and next-generation shopping experiences to work at scale.
Listen/Watch Our Interview:
Consumer behavior doesn’t change overnight, even when the technology is obvious.
In this episode of Retailgentic, Scot sits down with Hamish to unpack why agentic commerce is inevitable, why it’s moving slower than the hype suggests, and why product data infrastructure, not checkout, is the real unlock.
We cover:
Why “fully autonomous shopping” is the wrong definition of agentic commerce
Why consumer habits change slower than technology
Why global mega-catalogs don’t work (and never really have)
How vertical AI shopping experiences can thrive alongside ChatGPT
The hidden trust and governance problem no one is talking about
Why product catalogs are the hardest unsolved problem in commerce
If you’re a retailer, brand, agent builder, or investor trying to understand what actually matters in the agentic commerce stack, this episode is foundational.
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