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Insights Unlocked
From novelty to necessity: Smarter AI strategies for retail with Phillip Jackson
00:40:39
Explore how digital commerce, AI in retail, and culture intersect as Phillip Jackson shares insights on personalization, trust, and the future of customer experience.
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- [00:02]
A
Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. In this episode, we're joined by Philip Jackson, co founder of Future Commerce and a leading voice in retail. We dig into why commerce is really about culture, how AI is quietly shaping customer experiences, and why a little friction can actually be a good thing. Get ready for some bold takes and practical insights you can use right now. Enjoy the show.
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B
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
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A
Welcome to the Insights Unlock podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, principal content marketing manager at User Testing, and joining us today as Host is Mike McDowell, Principal Solution Marketing manager at User Testing. Welcome back to the show, Mike.
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C
Always happy to be here, Nathan. Thanks.
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A
And our guest today is Philip Jackson, co founder of Future Commerce and a leading voice in digital commerce. With deep roots in retail innovation and a sharp eye on the future of consumer behavior, Philip brings bold perspectives that challenge the status quo. Welcome to the show, Philip.
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D
Thank you so much for having me.
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C
So, Philip, let's just to get started, I guess not a lot of people are going to. Not a lot of people, but there's people that aren't familiar with Future Commerce. So can you talk a little bit about the background and what made you start the company and maybe what you're aiming to change or challenge in the world of digital commerce, which is going through a lot right now?
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D
Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, talk about going through a lot. Nine years ago, when we founded the company, the talk of the town was, you know, we were coming out of the omnichannel buzzword era, and then we were going to conversational commerce. Right. That was a big buzzword. Alexa just sort of wound up on everybody's nightstand. And yeah, the. The industry. You know, one thing that's constant in the industry is change. Future Commerce is really founded out of my 22 years of experience in E commerce and retail. I spent 10 years of my career in the very beginning of my career as a software engineer, right at the beginning in what we would call now direct to consumer brands. Mike, we didn't call it that back then. It was just we were doing E commerce. We didn't. But they were vertically integrated brands, and I was helping teams build, you know, software architecture teams, quality teams. And I was in house at brands. I helped to scale a number of brands, helped to, you know, get them to exit, and that was a real privilege. Along the way, decided, you know, the agencies that Were hiring along the way, didn't quite know what they were doing. I was teaching them how to do their jobs and then paying them for it. And so at some point I decided, you know, after, you know, my second round of going through an exit, it was time to maybe make the leap over to strategy. And I spent 10 years at an agency and, you know, I spent a lot of time in the boardroom, spent a lot of time in, you know, the executive suite. And it didn't matter whether I was in software development, engineer phase. It didn't matter whether I was in the boardroom for 20 years. What I heard really in its abstract at the, at the fundamental level were conversations about how people were trying to affect the culture. And that is really where we came down to. When you come down to brass tacks, I believe that commerce and culture are uniquely intertwined and that because our, our culture is so obsessed with what we buy and how we buy it, that it is part of our identity, it's our fundamental identity that commerce is worthy of unique examination. And how do we examine things today? Well, we are also obsessed with media. We're listening to podcasts constantly. We're tapping into social media constantly. We're on short form video. I'm subscribed to 200 newsletters, maybe 201 by the time this is over. And we also have a ton of primary research. And so that's what we set out to do about nine years ago was let's create an entire, you know, media business that has primary research at the core that focuses on not what's next in commerce, not the technology of commerce, but how commerce is culture. And that is our, our business. So. And we're doing that without following the hype cycle. We're doing it without following trends. We're, we're not trying to just talk about what, what people are doing. We're talking about, you know, the daily ritual of, of commerce and how that impacts people. So there you go.
- [04:47]
C
Yeah. Wow, you really covered a lot of stuff there. And one of the things that cracks me up is how nothing today is called the same thing as it was way back when. When I got my start in the late 90s, I was a webmaster, and boy, oh boy, did I work some agencies that I had to teach, pay them to teach them what to do for me. So, yeah, conversational commerce, my gosh, that didn't really take off as well as people had hoped. Certainly not where I was working. Yeah, but, you know, talking about trends, and you were with a lot of different companies and talking executives in a lot of boardrooms. You're gonna, you're, you're attending and speaking at nrf which is where everyone's coming together. The big show. Sorry I can't be there. Cause we have our, we have a company event that going on but obviously the latest trend know what you're not chasing. I know but AI and how AI shaping retail and you know we're all experiencing AI in different ways but you know some of the most forward thinking brands. Well one, who are they and you know, how are they making sure those experiences still feel human? That's really important to us, right. User testing and how are they making sure they resonate with the actual customers on the other end of those experiences?
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D
Yeah, well I think that's one of the most important things to point out there is like how does it resonate with people? Right. And that's what we're covering in our, in our session. You know, I don't think anyone does it better than Taco Bell because Taco Bell is actually applying AI on a human level every single day. Whether that's like a transparent experience that you don't know it's happening. But they're not just applying it in the consumer, you know, at the drive through experience, they're imply employing it on the partner level. They're doing it behind the register too. And so that's what we're speaking about at nrf. That's the conversation I'm having with Dane Matthews who is the chief digital and technology officer at Taco Bell sessions called Hungry for Innovation. Little pun there for you. And they, you know, the, the, there's so many things that they have done that have driven you know, this culture of innovation within Taco Bell. You'll, you'll probably see it, it's led through not just their like innovation in food, which is I think a thing to behold. You know, they lead with partnerships, they have a lot of innovation on that front. But from a technology perspective they just you know, put together this whole, you know, fan led co creative multiplayer product within the app called Fan Style. And you know, this is only something I think that you know, a Taco Bell could pull off where they're asking people, they're crowdsourcing recipes and, and they're rewarding their audience, their, their customers for you know, if you buy a recipe, your creation, you get rewarded in the app for other people to buy and purchase that creation. And this sort of multiplayer mode is something I think is permeating the culture writ large. You Know, my kids live in things like Google, you know, slides all day, they're multiplayer first in everything that they do. I just think that this is so innovative. More to hear about what Taco Bell is doing. And that's the conversation that we're having, I think tomorrow on stage at nrf. So it's going to be a fascinating sit down. Can't wait.
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C
You're blowing my mind. Because I had Taco Bell yesterday. I use the app all the time. I wasn't really giving any thought to there being AI in the app really. It just, I just use it and don't think about it. So I guess that means they're doing a really good job at it. But yeah, I actually used to have the Taco Bell Chihuahua on my desk. Someone gave it to me as a gift because I ate a lot of Taco Bell.
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D
But yeah, that's a lot to say. Sorry not to cut you off. There's so much to say around that too. I think it should be transparent. Right. And I think that's one of the things that we're seeing in backlash in the culture around AI being thrust as the thing. Right. It's in our face and people want to. Don't want technology for technology's sake. I think we've said this for 20, 25 years now. What they want is, is a wonderful experience. They don't care what the technology is that's behind it, that powers it. And so how delightful is it when you're getting rewarded for your birthday? How delightful is it when people, when you pull up to the drive thru and it remembers your last order, how easy is it when it has the payment, you know, that you, your preferred payment and the last payment that you use that's automatically queued up for you. These are all things that you are able to be easily powered and the customer experience could be made better with the technologies that we have at our fingertips today. And that's, that's how we should be thinking today. Yeah.
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C
And you, you know, I never even thought about this, but the fact that a lot of these food apps, you know, be Taco Bell or any other restaurant that you do customizations when you're building your orders.
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D
That's right.
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C
That they can, they can actually be aggregating that and seeing what are the most common customizations or is anyone doing something totally unique with a chalupa or, you know, a Crunchwrap Supreme. My go to. And you know, maybe we should turn that into a menu item so they actually do get great crowdsourced Data if they' it sounds like they're using it. So that's just giving me so much to think about on this. All right, so we've got our new AI and retail survey which, which is out, which thank you so much for assisting in developing that. We got a lot of good information not only about the way people are developing AI like, like Taco Bell, but also the way that shoppers, customers are reacting to it. And what we found was that the features that were sort of the most practical to shoppers was things like smarter search, better recommendations. I always remember CMJ Music Monthly, you know, if you like this recommended if you like, which is how I got new CDs, product compare, etc. Do you think that retailers are investing in the right use cases or is it still like hey, what's the shiny new novelty that we can go and build? Which is useless maybe to customers.
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D
Oh wow. Oh shoot. Well, not to disparage, you know, retail as a whole, the category of retail, you know, the actual retail trade tends to lag as a whole. We'll buy point solutions and box tickers to say that we done the thing, we're doing AI now, right, which in many cases is a VP somewhere in an enterprise who rolled out, you know, Microsoft copilot to the organization with, you know, no training and enablement. We did AI great. But in reality the best investments are unsexy. And to your point, it's search, it's discovery comparison. In some, you know, in apparel it's maybe fit, it's definitely an inventory, it's like availability, it's post purchase support. And those are the places where shoppers feel the most pain. I think it's the place where AI can reliably help. And I think novelty is really fine for a demo. We see things that are really whiz. Bang, Google in its summer, you know, summer feature release, they did this really wild demo on stage where they show you that you right now can go into Google Shopping. You should go try this. You can take a picture of yourself, you can upload a picture of yourself to Google Shopping and do virtual try on. Right now literally nobody's using it. Not a single like nobody, I don't know a person that's using virtual try on. You can go shop with you as the model on Google Shopping. And AI powers that, right? But if it doesn't reduce effort, it's not innovation, it's decoration, right? So what we really want is we need more things that the people will actually use. And in reality I think that that has to power more search and discovery. What we're finding in our research at Future Commerce is that people are more likely to have higher intent to purchase when they come from an AI based recommendation. And so that path to purchase, just like it happens on TikTok, is like, it's a collapsed funnel. They are highly intent on purchasing. Once they leave the AI, they click through, they arrive on the brand site like they're not motivated to purchase in the AI, they're not motivated to purchase through an agent. They're really per, they're motivated by the recommendation. And so I've said a lot there, but I really think that the investment is going to look a lot more like it does today in our UI UX than it will with a lot of these sort of like features and a lot of these sort of like the dream state that I think is being sold to us now, you know, five years, I think maybe all bets are off.
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C
So yeah, it's, it's kind of like, you know, using AI to do these. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the term, but sustaining innovations versus disruptive innovation. So even though AI is the innovation, we're going to use that to grease some other processes that are already sort of commonplace. You actually mentioned one word in that answer that I want to. It's a great pivot, which was pain. When people are feeling pain. And how do brands address that pain? And I just did a whole series of research studies on Perplexity's new Comet browser, which is all AI based browser. And the thing that came up the most was trust. Like, do I trust this? And when we try to introduce AI into an area that's typically human, like customer support, where there's pain that's being dealt with, there can be a loss of trust pretty quickly when you realize it's not a human. And so leading retailers today, how are they thinking about the balance between the AI, automation and human assistance? Where are they getting it wrong? You could probably rattle off a list, but where do you think they're getting it wrong? Sort of primarily?
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D
Well, just to go back to the Comet browser, I use that, I'm a business owner operator and I, I use Comet on day one. Was like, what can I do with this? What, what could I possibly do with it? Tried to buy something on Walmart that failed miserably. So I was like, well okay, I want to do something. I used it to pay my Virginia, State of Virginia employment tax. So I don't know, check, check the box. Like I did Something in Commerce with, with AI. Congratulations. It took 25 minutes to convert complete. So there's that, but we got a long way to go. But to answer your question, I think a lot of friction, friction's become a sort of a curse word in our industry. There's been a lot of hand wringing over reduction of friction. And I think that pain and friction are two different things. Right. We, and you all would know this better than anybody because you do a lot more user testing and you see a lot more actual data. You're in the science of user interaction. Right. And I think that this is something that needs to be studied a little further. But I think some friction is good. Some friction causes people to think about what they're purchasing because you remove all the friction, you make it too slippery, then you have the deleterious effects of like higher return rate, you have poor reviews that you know then, and you have payment disputes. Like there's other things that happen when you remove all the friction, right? So it's like you, you need just like your tire needs a little bit of friction and you maybe like, you know, there's like you want your flip flop to have a little bit of friction. Like some things have to have friction. So I think the goal here is where is we have to have those little bits of trust in the system that are checkpoints that make us feel like we have trust. And all of those are friction points. Right. So I think somewhere along the way it's probably the thought leadership industrial complex, like we lost the plot and people that are real practitioners, that are running actual businesses aren't going around spreading, you know, that gospel of frictionless or painless. They're really just talking about what works in your context in your business and it's unique to you and your customers and your product. And I don't think that there is a one size fits all for that. So also I gave you a lot of aphorisms there too. So. But I think it just comes down to you have to test, you have to experiment and there's no way around that even in the AI age.
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C
I like that. I like aphorisms, they're good. But yeah, too little Friction equals a four year old that spent $5,000 on an iPad.
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D
That's right. Yeah, absolutely right, yeah.
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C
So you've talked about a little bit about strategy and changes and we talked about where there's investment and things like that. Especially this this week at nrf. I'm sure this is going to be a big topic, but how are customer Expectations changing right ahead of or perhaps surprises in surprising ways to brands that people aren't even thinking about. And how are brands actually trying to play catch up so that they can feel actually customer first when the customer sort of have the needs before they're delivered.
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D
Just like surprising or overlooked ways. Right? That's.
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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D
So yeah, I would say like one, well I could come up with a bunch. But you know, one overlooked shift is, you know, shoppers are really good at pattern recognition. And I think for all its power, this is something that we studied back in 2022 was the homogenization effect in E commerce. Right. So for all its power, we came up with what I called the lingua franca of E commerce. Right. And it's, you know, the pattern, it's the like top navigation or the filter bar on the left. Like we know how to shop online and we're also very scared of changing that because we don't want to create the F word that I said earlier. Right. So there's, there's a way of doing things and that pattern recognition also leads to thoughtless behavior. We did a study at Future Commerce in 2022. What we did was we took three different shops sites. I believe it was like Pottery Barn. We took a luxury site and I believe we took target.com and we took users across different. I want to say it was a study of a few thousand consumers in English speaking nations of household incomes of 50,000 and above. And so we we stripped off the header bar so they didn't see the logo. And that's the only change that we made. We hide the logo and we basically asked them a battery of questions and it was effectively this, like, which brand is more premium? And when you remove the logo or the color, every brand is reduced basically just to a function of price. Like you cannot tell one brand's more premium function from another because everything is reduced down to pattern recognition. And that to me signaled that we were in a mass homogenization state in the way that we design for experience in E commerce. So now users are great at pattern recognition. So what's it overlooked or a surprising way that a shopper is evolving? Well, they're really good at spotting things like dark patterns, inflated discount, fake urgency. But they love novelty. Like they're really, they really love novelty and they're starting to use things like chatgpt and perplexity, which is novel to find ways around the, you know, find coupon codes, find creators online that have coupon codes. Like they're like, how did that code get out? Well, it's, it's not on your affiliate deal site anymore. Like some creator somewhere said it in some video and it got indexed. Right. So all of these things are, you know, ways that shoppers are evolving and shoppers are using these tools to, you know, write. So what I've seen in speaking to merchants is like, they're not looking at the site anymore as this functional pattern that I'm easily shopping anymore. The shopping portion is kind of being, it's disintermediated now by the tool that they have with the, the chatgpt on their phone. Right. I can easily expedite getting that refund that I want because I can write a much more compelling email to the retailer and I don't have to be angry anymore. And all of these things sort of add up to like, it's, it's, it's a shift for like a demand for proof from the retailer, a proof of quality, proof of fit, proof of social credibility, delivery, confidence. Like what we want, like we want our cake and eat it too as consumers. We want it all. And then we want the brand to be like, incredibly novel. We want like a boatload of value. We want to pay very little for it. And I don't think we can have it all. And at the same time, I think what brands really can do, we're faced in my very long winded answer with a time where brand has never been more important, where we need to stick out and stand out in the sea of homogeneity. But also brand has never been less important because the only thing that the consumer cares about is a white screen with a text input box. And that is the way that is surprising to me as the shopper has evolved. So those two things are coexisting. It's a very interesting time to be in this industry. And I think that that's, it's exciting actually, because we're rewriting a bunch of rules in real time.
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C
Yeah, you're, you're like inside my head. I, I did those exact two things that you said during the holiday shopping. One, I said, hey, what's a discount code? Because we're trained that as soon as you go through a purchase process and you see a box that says promo code, go to a, somewhere else and find one. And then I also had AI help me write an email to get a refund on something that I needed. So. And it, it was, it worked. It was very helpful. I mean, I'm good at that.
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D
Means you're a smart consumer. Right. Yeah. It's like, you're, you're, you're, you're. It's. It's good, right? It's probably good for us all as a whole. Yeah. So I. Good on you, Mike.
- [23:07]
C
Well, yeah. So you talked about pattern recognition, and I certainly, when I do website breakdowns, first impressions, like, oh, yeah, that's Shopify. That's this. I know this is. I know this template. I've seen this template before. But let's talk about personalization. Let's go the exact opposite direction. And, you know, personalization is one of these things that as a business, you think, well, there's infinite possibilities. How do I ever. How could I ever program this to be effective? And then AI comes along and we think, oh, well, this could do it for me. Can I identify all the markers and make this. Make this unique for the. For the consumer, for the shopper? But then, you know, it starts to. You know, I've had. I've seen things. Videos where someone goes, oh, that's creepy. Like, that's creepy. What's up with that? And people feel like it's not under their control. It's not transparent. It's not like, we were just talking about the Taco Bell app. I don't know what they're doing in there to personalize for me, but they must be doing something. How do we get the balance right between, you know, good, helpful personalization and invasiveness? And are, you know, how close are retailers to getting it right?
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D
Okay, how close are we? Let's answer that first. Not close at all. So there's that. I wish there was a silver bullet here. Let me. Let me tell you where I think we're headed. All right? Just like I said that we had the mass homogeneity effect. I think that that happened with a very specific set of tools that gave us one form of a website. Right. And maybe, like, I mean, you're dropping, like, webmaster is. I'll talk about in deca for a second. A lot of our patterns and like, the patterns that exist in our world, like, are 20, 25 years old that were created by, like, these systems that, you know, are no longer around. I remember them. And so, like, the. This. The way that the world works right now is also a function of friction, too, because we buy off the shelf products because it's hard to create things from scratch. Right. So the next level of that is we have. We are now sort of untethered from that because we have. I keep hearing. I've heard a lot of retailers Tell me Mike, that there's like, we're bringing technology back in house. We're hiring a cto. Like that stuff was all outsourced agencies a long time ago or they like hollowed out their tech teams because they're just giving it all over Shopify. And I think, you know, good on them. Like probably made it made a lot of sense. But now there's a lot of folks who are like, we can use AI to differentiate. I think that there's a horizon in the future where, well, what happens when AI which is trained on the same data set as the next brand that's also prompting is generating the same like generating content and generating ui. Like we're probably heading toward the same outcome, but it's on a different level. So I'm getting to the personalization question, but I want you to understand the context in which I'm getting to. You can kind of spot. Well, okay, maybe not you. I know I can spot. I know my, my mother in law can't spot an AI image.
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A
Right.
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D
I know it when I see it. You kind of feel it emotionally. Oh yeah. And I can, I definitely can spot AI writing now. It has a cadence to it. It has like tropes. And there's something, I bet you were a couple years away from also being able to recognize AI generated site experiences. And that's where I think we're heading. We, there's, you know, this level of personalization where we, the site experiences will be generated in mass as like a custom site or a custom site experience. One to one, just for you. I believe that that's not personal. That's probably going to be impersonal. Now that being said, we are in a moment where a lot of brands depend on distribution from things like Meta and they spend a tremendous amount of money on platforms like Meta to drive traffic to ill performing pages and ill performing sites and landing pages that do not reflect the promise that was made in the ad creative that brought them there. So I do think that there is a period of time where we can drive more personalization. I'm using air quotes, but we can drive more personalization that's more personal to what the intent was and not necessarily the first name of the person that lazy personalization. Now the long term here is people feel very personal and feel like they have a personal relationship with the brand when the product helps them. And so I think we always forget that like building a better product is also extremely personal. But I digress. I feel like I'm being very long winded on your show. So I'll, I'll take my.
- [28:13]
C
Yeah, this is great, Philip. I mean, I. Look, I'm no one to complain about someone else being long winded. That's me. But, yeah, I totally, I totally see what you're saying. Like, I always think about this experience from my past when I worked at Hertz, the carnival company. And I always, you know, people always said, oh, Hertz is the most expensive. It's the fancy car rental company, whatever. And then, you know, at some point, somewhere, somebody typed cheap car rental and they saw. In Google, they saw Hertz and they clicked on it and then saw Mercedes. You know, it's like just, let's, let's, let's accomplish that level of personalization and, and matching the landing page with what the ad promised that you were clicking on. But what's that?
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D
We can't do that yet. So that's the, that's the present opportunity.
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C
Yeah, exactly. And that's the, you know, the intent, what you're trying to do. It doesn't have to be your name necessarily, but how many sites do you go to? They all say, hey, Philip, you know, they just really want to feel like they're doing something that's right. Okay, you kind of touched on a little bit in your last answer. But as we're rounding, you know, third here, just the things you're seeing in the industry, both the good and the bad, what is differentiating besides just being able to do it? What's differentiating the retailers who are really gaining a competitive advantage? A competitive advantage, like different from just, you know, all generating the same content versus people who truly are. All right, we're going to adopt the tools. We're going to use it to build content, make our images, etc. Sometimes a person has seven fingers. Oh, well, you know, that kind of thing. Who, what's, what's really the differentiators there.
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D
Okay, this is super easy. It's clean data. Because I don't think that you can power AI initiatives within the business with data that isn't holistic and clean. I can give you a very specific example, but we can keep moving. So clean data, and I think beyond that, really strong change management and strong organizational memory, like being able to pilot your organization through long periods of change. This is not going to happen quickly. This is probably the most titanic shift that we'll have had in any of our lifetimes, both yours and mine. Like, this is going to be a fundamental shift in, in the culture, and it's going to take a lot of Time for us to adapt to it. So we need to be able to leave behind for probably another generation of leaders to pilot through the next wave of change too. So there's beyond clean data, organizational memory and change management. I think you also need to have an extraordinary feedback loop with customers. And I don't know that I've seen a brand that can do all of those and do them all well without, you know, having. Without falling into the trap of trying to rely on tools to do it. Tool adoption is easy. I think actually system and operational design is the moat. And, you know, there's sort of this, you know, we fall into the trap of like, the tool is going to drive the organization because if we invest in the tool, then, you know, then surely, you know, that will motivate us to do all the things that we need to do. But I can tell you from if only years of experience, that doesn't work. So AI advantage, you know, sometimes, look, it's seems like it's going to help. It's a feature, it's not a feature. It's like a capability. And now everybody has it. Right. So I, I don't think it's a hire. It's not going to be a key hire. It's not going to be a particular strategy. I think it just starts with the basics and that's unsexy and nobody wants to hear that. So.
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C
Yeah, but the basics are, you know, if you can't get those right, you're not going to get anything right. We've got time. I'd love to hear the I love garbage and garbage out stories. I'd love to hear the clean data story, if you wouldn't mind telling it.
- [32:02]
D
Yeah, absolutely. There's a brand that I admire greatly called Kith. They're based out of New York and they sort of like a luxury brand that came up through the former creative director at New Balance. His name's Ronnie Feig, and sort of a fashion designer brand. And you would know them from, like, their partnerships with like the New York Knick and a different sort of a luxury brand. They have stores all over the world now. They're verging on or venturing into hospitality. They rolled out last year a loyalty program for all of their customers that went back and credited people in arrears for the lifetime of all of their purchases. And you can only do something like that and launch something like that on a day one program if you have 100% clean data for the lifetime of all of your purchases. Wow. And it's all reconciled for like 15 years of customer history. And I don't know that I've ever seen a brand A, be that generous, but B, launch with something so audacious on day one. And they have monetized and capitalized on it now over and over and over again. And the things that allow them to then get more insight is beginning with that as the basis is then they build their loyalty tiers and all of the incentive that they build into trying to make you a better customer is powered by the AI capability. But long story short, if we're building on that solid foundation, if we're building on clean data as the basics, I think that when you're building those incentives in and you're trying to get your customers to encourage your customers to be the kind of customer you want them to be, that's where the AI kicks in. It's not that the AI helps you to go clean up your old data. You have to start with the right data so that you can encourage and focus on the right customer segments in the first place. So that's, that's one example that, I.
- [34:11]
C
Mean, I can't even, I can't even imagine my purchase data being correct for six months at most.
- [34:17]
D
That's so true. It's so true.
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C
Fifteen years is mind blowing to me. That really is fascinating. So, well, let's go from clean data to more clean environment kind of stuff. Let's make a nice subtle transition there. You know, nrf, right? Sustainability is a big thing on the radar for a lot of brands and shoppers. How are you also talking about box checking earlier? How are the companies, how brands making sure their efforts aren't just box checking and really that there's something that actually does again align with what customers value. How are they doing that?
- [34:52]
D
Yeah, well, there's, I think it's still, it's still, you know, the four P's. I mean, we still have to do the job. There's a job to be done. Like, we still have to do the product price, place promotion. Like, so we, like, we have to do the right thing again, right? So let's, let's, let's remember the job. And we chase bells and whistles. Like, I'm going to go to NRF and I'm going to see all the cool stuff. I'm going to, it's like there was an Nvidia booth last year. I'm like, ooh, look at all the cool stuff that's happening. I think when we start seeing the vertical, you know, when, when we see the AI companies launching the verticals, like when they specifically go after retail as a vertical, if like AI launches a retail vertical, like we're probably going to have a whole wave of people that are like specifically trying to integrate a retail specific solution for AI. So like there's a lot of that that I think like the box checking moments are happening in platforms right now where it can really only be box checking because they are at most integrating with one of two major players in AI, maybe three if you're really generous. So in reality the, the, the feature capability for most brands is dependent on your adoption of a platform. And so therefore your customers interaction with your brand and their exposure to what AI can do for them is limited necessarily by that. So what I think is happening is this is why more brands are looking to bring more technology in house. So one of my predictions for 2026 is the world is becoming more autonomous and customers are becoming more sovereign. And so customers are trying to gain more sovereignty over lots of things including like their own health. But that's a whole other story. But like there's like they are trying to just become more independent, right? Not dependent on large institutions to trying to become more independent. So if we allow them to self serve and like just look at what's happening in the culture with like self checkout, like we want them to be able to self serve in a lot of different ways. We just need better technology on sites that I don't think platforms which aim for the like best fit average are going to be able to serve for your customer who's a very specific person who has a very specific relationship with your brand. And that's why I think this wave of technology and building technology in house is coming back to a brand coming back to retail. It's the question is are we willing to make those investments and are we able to make those investments before a lot of the challenges in the industry are catching up to us. So those are, those are those things. And on the other side, on the customer side, customers value outcomes. Right? They, they, that's all they care about.
- [37:46]
C
Yeah. So Philip, this has been great. I'm so interested in this space. I was so excited to get to talk to you today. Ever since I read why We Buy by Paco Underhill. I've, I've just loved the retail space and, and figuring out how things are changing, evolving from just you know, placement on shelves and to digital to E commerce to you know, doordashing and Covid and how everything's changed with personalization and like I said Amazon used to say, hey, people who bought this also bought this. So you're just buying new things and you okay, well you know, FOMO or people like me. And, and so it's just been such a great conversation if people want, aside from attending your talk or watching it online if they're listening to this later. How can someone learn more about you and the thought leadership things that you're doing or just future commerce in general?
- [38:31]
D
Thank you. Yeah, well again, our perspective on the world is that culture and commerce are intertwined. Right. So commerce is culture and so you can find us@FutureCommerce.com and we have, we're future commerce everywhere, every social channel. And we do have our own research. Yeah, I know that we've talked a good deal about research here today and data backed insights and so we do have a good deal of that. We'd love for you to subscribe to, you know our, our newsletter. It comes out three times a week and we are always publishing some insights there. So thank you so much for having me.
- [39:08]
C
Thank you. And I'll tell people, subscribe to his YouTube channel. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. There's great interviews, great content on the YouTube YouTube channel as well. So don't miss out on that. If you're listening to this, you like good media, so go there. But thank you so much, Philip. This has been fantastic.
- [39:23]
D
Thank you. Appreciate it.
- [39:25]
B
Want to keep the conversation going? You can find the show notes@usertesting.com podcast if you haven't already. Don't forget to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast or Google Play. So you know, never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed today's show, please share it with a friend or leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcast. And until next time, this is Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing.