Interesting Agentic Shopping Reading this Week... (wk 25/52)
Barrons drops truth bomb, Perplexity news, ChatGPT news, Amazon's stance on agents and what happens to Google queries when someone subscribes to ChatGPT? 📉
This week started with a bang and ended with a 100+ slide mega deck that threw a Mag7 under the bus because of AI - yet another busy week in the world of Agentic Commerce.
Barron’s Article Lights 🔥 For Retail Leaders
As fate would have it, shortly after I hit the send button on last week’s update, Barrons dropped an article that, combined with the WSJ piece that came out days earlier really got the attention of executives in the retail and brand worlds. It’s paywalled, but my high-level summary is that informational (non-commercial) search terms were the first to plummet, starting in May, e-commerce, food+bev, fashion started to really feel the impact. All of this is downstream from ChatGPT’s surge (more on that later).
You know who reads WSJ and Barrons? Public company shareholders, board members and C-level execs. This pairing of articles has significantly elevated the importance of formulating and executing on an Agentic Shopping strategy with the top brands and retailers.
Perplexity CEO Piles On
Perplexity was the first company to make it it Level 3 in our 5 levels of Agentic Shopping Autonomy scale, and their CEO Aravind Srinivas, used the Barron’s piece to spike the agentic shopping football in the end zone on X (He’s a cricket fan, so insert whatever the right analogy is there - take off your fancy sweater?)
Sam Altman Makes News (ChatGPT v Meta)
Sam Altman’s brother, Jack, has a podcast called Uncapped. It’s a good watch (~40mins). The news that broke from this in the GenAI world:
Mark Zuckerburg/META is offering $100m signing bonus for top OpenAI researchers - that’s just the signing bonus 🤯
Sam casually says: “meta sees openai as it’s deepest competitor”**
This had some head scratching, keep reading** and we’ll connect this dot…
Top-ranked ecommerce podcast covers agentic commerce!
Ok, file this one under a bit self-serving, but some of you are new to my musings which have been going on for about a decade and we’re up to 327 episodes.
In episode 327, we cover agentic shopping. Available on all podcast players here.
AI is taking over Shopping, so what?
Brand marketer at The Estée Lauder Companies Inc, Melina Flabiano, shares her thoughts on a great substack called Curious Commerce that’s always a good read. In it, Melina thinks forward into many of the areas we anticipate as well (level 5) - 1:1 pricing, loyalty, agent-only SKUs, discovery inversion and more.
I also agree that retailers with a physical presence have an opportunity to elevate the experience because in an increasing agentic/GenAI world, a subset of consumers will crave human interaction.
Amazon’s Jassy: Agentic is the future, The Cat is on the Roof.
There’s a classic old joke that Andy Jassy’s note to all Amazon employees made me think about. It goes:
While here on Retailgentic, it’s great to see Jassy call out Agentic and Buy for me, I see this as telling a bunch of Amazon employees that their jobs are at risk. Shortly after it was reported that Amazon’s further tightening the ‘return-to-office’ policy - asking folks to move to the same location as their manager.
Head-turning slides from Coatue’s Mega-deck
Coatue Ventures ($30b+ AUM - private side only) for 10 years has done a show and in their keynote (full deck here) they talk about their view of public and private markets. The three slides that are generating a lot of buzz:
First, they call for an AI supercycle:
Then they have this chart that plots ChatGPT’s MAUs indexed from 0 months forward tracking the MAUs for ChatGPT, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and X/Twitter→
Ok, this is the connective tissue** to Sam’s quote: “meta sees openai as it’s deepest competitor”
THIS I’ve never seen before - by Coatue’s calcs, ChatGPT is chewing up ~30 mins/day from their users (I think I’m at 180 mins, so I’m skewing it higher). Look what it’s closing in at on this chart hanging out at about 50 mins? There’s only so many minutes in the day, at some point doom scrolling (Sam talks about why) will fall to our GenAI friends.
Finally, what lit up the hosts on CNBC was this seemingly innocuous chart: The Coatue Fantastic 40 -the Next Tech Order.
They have a formula/algorithm for this that’s explained in detail in the mega-deck. Regardless, do you see it?!? Squint really hard at this 🔎 and you’ll see a company that has a $2T marketcap is not on here - Google. 🧐
Why? Well they don’t tie it together, but I did 🤔 on this when earlier in the deck:
If you like that presentation, right after the two brothers hopped on the BG2 pod and you can watch that here→
Back to Amazon: Are they considering opening up up to ‘inbound’ shopping agents?
The Information (paywall) had an article out that suggested Amazon is loosening their stance on what I call ‘inbound’ Agentic shopping agents). Buy for me is ‘outbound’ and Rufus is ‘on-site’.
It’s not clear if the author has a source or is only referencing some changes made to amazon’s Ts and Cs that address agents on their site.