Interesting Agentic Shopping reading this week...
Four reads on agentic shopping and a lot to ponder around up-stream from retail: GenAI's huge growth and changing consumer behavior. Plus watch the new Keynote Master work his magic.
There were many interesting developments this week in agentic shopping+payments and the tangential world of GenAI and overall agentic trends.
Walmart launches Sparky - on-site chat agent
Note: This is not me, but it could be Jason Goldberg
This week Walmart launched Sparky, their on-site chat that can recommend products, talk about reviews and help you shop faster. Walmart has been sharing a good bit about the underlying infrastructure and it looks like it’s more than just GenAI, but there’s an agentic piece as well. A great write up is here.
The biggest question I have:
Sparky vs. Rufus who wins?
AI is Taking over Shopping….so what?
Melina Falabiano is Executive Director, Growth Product Marketing at Estee Lauder. She writes an excellent substack called Curious Commerce that I highly recommend (it’s a free sub).
This week she had an article that predicted what Agentic Shopping is going to mean for brands. Here are 6 thought provoking predictions she made that I thought were very interesting.
🧵 Product development will happen in real-time
👠 Brands will list "shadow SKUs" available to AI agents only
👱 "Human-made" will be the new "Made in the USA"
🤑 Pricing will be personalized - and prompt engineers will hack the system
🔍 Discovery will be inverted - instead of searching for products, products will seek consumers
🥾 Offline activities and related product categories will explode
Want to learn more - the entire post is here:
What bots should you let into your site and how do you figure it out?
On a payments oriented site, there’s an interesting post that predicts one of the toughest future problems for commercial sites is going to be sorting out bots vs. agents. Even then, what if the bot you are blocking is building a site index for an agent? Things are about to get complicated.
Details here:
B2A revolution: Brands prepare to talk to Agents vs. DTC
This article is targeted to Brands (manufacturers) and talks about how we’ve spent the last 10+ yrs building out DTC strategies, but now it’s time for B2A - Brand to Agentic. There are some interesting recommendtations at the end.
OpenAI Announces they have reached $10B annualized revenue run-rate 🤯
In early 2024, a chart leaked from OpenAI’s pitch deck that showed insane revenue growth. Turns out, they are on track. This week OpenAI announced they have reached $10B annualized revenue run-rate. Details here.
GaryVee agrees with me - Google’s not going to make it out of the Innovator’s Dilemma
This isn’t agentic commerce, but obviously since Google has had a monopoly on search which has given them the ability to collect the ‘Google tax’ on every digital retail transaction, it’s important to see what happens here.
What’s curious is nothing has shown up in Google’s results yet, but in this clip GaryVee shares an anecdote and what he thinks that means for Google (note this is PG-13 as all GaryVee is)
More on GenAI’s Impact on Consumer Behavior and Downstream Traffic Changes
WSJ is out with a very big piece titled: “News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools. In the article is this graphic with Similarweb data that shows just how dramatic a drop this has been.
Here’s how this relates to retail:
Today, Google has AI Overviews showing for 75% of terms - if you’re google, you show these for non-commercial terms (news terms are in this bucket) because they aren’t highly monetized terms.
As ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude’s LLM+web search continue to grow rapidly, Google is going to have to start turning off traffic to those commercial terms
When they do, brands and retailers will see their organic and paid google trends (SEO and SEM) look like these news sites - down 50%+
Marc Andreessen: “Agentic has us investing that all incumbents are going to get nuked…”
Marc’s very good at predicting the future and not saying things that are too hyperboli. Clearly GenAI and agentic has caused Marc and his venture firm, A16Z, to focus on Agentic. This whole pod is great and worth your time, but here’s a 2min clip that’s definitely worth watching if you don’t have 2hrs to spend with Marc this weekend.
Entire pod→
Jensen Huang at Vivatech 2025 NVIDIA Keynote
I’m a keynote junkie and it’s been pretty slim picking since covid when Apple went all recorded and hasn’t turned back since. Out of the darkness a new awesome keynoter has risen - Jensen Haung the CEO of NVIDIA. Here’s his keynote this week from Paris GTC →
Why do I love them? For context, at ChannelAdvisor we had some flashy keynotes and I know what not only goes into creating these, but as the person on stage, it is very hard to put something together that’s engaging for thousands of people.
First, there’s the staging, Jensen is always there in a signature leather jacket, in front of a giant super high res screen that has the coolest graphics and animations ever. For example, this could be a boring static chart, but instead it has these cool animations that ‘spark’ down the trend line as Jensen’s talking.
Look at the size of that screen - if Jensen is 5-6 feet tall, this screen is at least 10 Jensens - so at least 50 ft tall?
Next is the presentation - I’m 90% sure that Jensen is doing most of this from memory. Rarely do you see him look at a teleprompter or a presenter notes monitor facing him. How does he do this?
IDK. The content here is awesome and the extra bonus is enjoying Jensen’s ability to put on this show - enjoy!
Melina’s take on “products finding consumers” is already happening and I’m all for it. Secondly, the “made by humans” is the new “made in the USA” - that one hit hard. 😳