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Eric Suefert
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Michael Komasinski
The problem is that the distinction needs to be drawn between the competence of the economists and the correctness of their analysis.
Eric Suefert
Welcome to the Mobile Dev Memo podcast. I'm your host Eric Suefert and I'm joined today by Michael Komasinski. Michael, welcome to the podcast.
Michael Komasinski
Hey Eric, thanks for having me on.
Eric Suefert
Well, it's good timing because Ko has been in the news recently, so I'm happy to have you on during this period. Before we dive into our conversation which will unpack all things agentic commerce, can you please introduce yourself to the audience?
Michael Komasinski
Yeah, sure. So, Michael Kamisinski, CEO of Critio. Been in this role for just a little over a year and what a year it's been from sort of pulling back from cookie deprecation to, you know, changes in the retail media landscape, the emergence of agentic commerce, and now as of this week on Monday, ads in OpenAI or in ChatGPT. So it just keeps going faster and faster and it's awesome to be in this space right now.
Eric Suefert
And prior to kotera, you're the CEO of Dentsu.
Michael Komasinski
Yeah, so I've spent really kind of 10 years between Merkle and Dentsu and you might know Dentsu acquired Merkle, but yeah, was the CEO of Dentsu Americas and then also ran global data platforms for the group and before that was the global CEO of Merkel, where I'd spent eight years between Europe and the Americas and then eventually running the whole company. So it was a great run. A lot of great colleagues back there and now they are an important partner of ours. So everything goes round in this industry
Eric Suefert
and then kind of a couple hops before that. You'd expect quite a, quite a stint at Nielsen. Is that correct?
Michael Komasinski
Yeah, yeah, it was at Razorfish Nielsen back in the day, which was a great grounding in kind of data analytics. I always like to say Like Nielsen is kind of where I grew up as, as a, as an executive, just a very rigorous company, really great on sort of product development and just the way that they run the place year to year. I was there during the Take Private when Dave Calhoun took over. So it was really transformative time in the company.
Eric Suefert
Back then you've touched kind of a number of different, call it vantage points across the sort of digital advertising landscape and kind of the advertising landscape more broadly. Your perspective is fairly multifaceted, I would say.
Michael Komasinski
Yes, it is, it is. But you know, as you do, you kind of find your way to the right place in a career and I'm really happy with where I've ended up here. I believe in today's age, being platform side at a platform like Critio that has the data assets that we do sits in these kind of fast currents like performance and retail media, I think we can accomplish a lot here. And so yeah, I think I've yet again sort of found my way to the right place at the right time.
Eric Suefert
Well, the time is the era of what, what people are calling agentic commerce. And I'm really happy to have you on to talk us through your perspective on that. So, so Curtailo recently launched the Agentic Commerce recommendations service for AI shopping assistance. Can you kind of just talk me through that? What is that? You know, what's the kind of commercial model, how does it feature in this landscape?
Michael Komasinski
So you're right, we launched that a couple of weeks ago and you can think of it as like a commerce intelligence layer for AI assistance. And what it does is it powers product recommendations inside of conversational environments with high fidelity purchase oriented signals. And what's interesting is we brought it to market, we do side by side testing offline against LLM environments and we see on average a 60% uplift in product relevance and accuracy. The reason we launched it is we really wanted to demonstrate the value of our access to real time purchase data and our AI models to turn that into relevant recommendations. And I think it's something that you've written about as well in terms of the underlying models that power these different systems. Right. And so LLMs by definition are semantic models and they're great at language. But Rexis models need to be built on data loops and reward algorithms at high volume and scale. We very much believe in that. And the Critio backbone is really built on a Rexis platform. And so this service is really a way to sort of give a front end to that in a way that can be tested in a partner environment and allows us to, you know, sort of prove out the efficacy of that data set. So it's super interesting, right? We believe the future of great commerce recommendations in discovery platforms is going to be powered by a hybrid integration of Symantec platforms and Rexis platforms. And so again, this is our sort of way to push that agenda, put our capability out there, make it testable, accessible. It's early, so we've not focused as much on the monetization path yet, but eventually that could be SaaS, that could be pay per query, and more importantly, it could support both ad and non ad use cases. But right now it's just about proving effectiveness, validating use cases and driving partner engagement. So monetization will follow all that.
Eric Suefert
Got it. Because that was gonna be. My next question is how do you get paid for this? I guess the phrase agentic commerce I think is. It's almost like AI in a way because it can be so vague and it can mean so many different things that it can be unhelpful in some cases. So when some people talk about agentic commerce and this is kind of, I push, I've pushed back pretty forcefully on this idea taking shape. They're talking about I've got an agent and it's just buying stuff for me, like in the background. Some, some stuff's going to show up on my doorstep tomorrow and I'll be pleased that it did, but I will have no knowledge that that was purchased on my behalf. There's just some agent, you know, fulfilling what it. Anticipating my needs and fulfilling them with my credit card. Right. Then there's there. So that's kind of the call that like the, the robot buying stuff model. And then there's the, the model that OpenAI had had sort of implemented, which is the instant checkout model where they're going to allow retailers to slot into your, your chat. And just, you know, based on what you're discussing, it'll suggest products that are, that are relevant and then, you know, you'll, you'll check out right there that they, they sort of just, it was the information reported yesterday that they're probably walking that back. They're going to do that more in the underlying apps that they're onboarding onto their app platform. And I had pushed back on that idea too, just because I said that's not going to work as well as ads does. And it sounds like what you're, what you're, what you're. And let me know if I'm, you know, and I've read the press release and I understand, you know, how you're positioning this, but just kind of, you know, feel free to like, flesh it out more. This sounds like this is rexis for the, the chatbot environment. But, but it sounds like this really could be rexis in, in a number of different environments where there's some sort of agent being invoked. Is that, is that, am I kind of understanding that correctly? So there's, there's, there's advertisers, there's, there's, there's retailers who would like to have their stuff recommended where it's relevant and where it's like additive to, to some interaction. And that's what you're facilitating. Is that, is that the right interpretation?
Michael Komasinski
Yeah, no, I think you, I think you said it well. Yeah, it's basically where the fidelity of product recommendation is an important use case to the overall experience. Right. That's probably the simplest way to describe it. But look, I'd love to go back on a couple of the points that you started with there that I think are super interesting and a good way to like, sort of get foundational. I completely agree with you on the autonomous versus agentic nomenclature. We also are not big believers in the autonomous use cases at Critio. And that shapes then kind of our worldview of how we think the ecosystem evolves, right? Because we see agentic platforms really more as augmented or assisted. Right? Like the word agentic gets kind of used. It gets used in confusing ways. Sometimes people mean agentic as autonomous. Sometimes people make mean agentic as in augmented or assisted. We definitely subscribe to the latter definition. So like you, we are skeptical of the autonomy use cases. As a side note on that, you, you might like this. So it's become one of my favorite sort of dinner party questions. Like at work events, I'll go around the table and I'll ask people what they will or won't do when it comes to autonomous commerce. And I'll start very deliberately with that autonomy word. And two funny things kind of happen. One, everybody automatically defaults to the toilet paper reordering question, right? It's unbelievable how consistent this is. And then everybody always ignores the autonomous rule of the game and they immediately go to augmented and assisted and start talking about how they would use agentic to do these things as long as they get to approve the final purchase or the final step or whatever. Like, wait, you're not playing the game the way it was set up. But nonetheless, it is remarkably consistent. When you ask people their sort of personal, you know preferences around that. But I agree with you. I'm not a big believer in the autonomous workflow. And again, that shapes our roadmap, which is how do we surface great products so that people get a better experience because they're still going to have agency in that experience. And also that there will be customer journeys that will continue to touch on multiple formats. They'll land in E commerce, they'll land on publishers to do deeper research on sighted sources, and they'll ultimately do shopping and basket building in brand contextual environments. And so all those things kind of shape our roadmap and how we are moving the business forward.
Eric Suefert
I like that rhetorical trap there. I'm going to use that because, yeah, it's pretty easy to drift outside of the autonomous use case because I think in theory people love the idea of the Jetsons made robot just buying you a bunch of stuff. But yeah, there's sort of like a bright red line past toilet paper and paper towels and air freshener refills.
Michael Komasinski
It all sounds good until you're a small closet in your New York City apartment is overflowing with stuff that you haven't used yet.
Eric Suefert
Right. Or, you know, a new car shows up on your front porch or your, your, your driveway. And so I like that, I like that rhetorical trap, but I think also like the way this is positioned. You get to be friends with everybody. Right. Another kind of point I made in this piece that I wrote, agent commerce is a, is a mirage, was that, you know, if you don't get Amazon on board here, it's a non starter and I mean, people push back on that. But I, I still think it's true. I mean, it's 25% of U.S. ecom. But, but in, in that sense, if you're sort of like Rexis for everything and in these contexts where traditionally, you know, Rexis hadn't been applied like the contextual use case in a chatbot, well then Amazon could be your friend. Theoretically, anybody could be your friend because they want to have their stuff recommended, right? Is that right? Am I thinking about that?
Michael Komasinski
Right? Yeah, yeah, that is true. That is true. And as you think about where, where multiple people can be friends, you know, Amazon's obviously got a great commerce graph, but so does Critio, and they are distinct, actually. So our graph has intelligence about people's interactions with products in different environments in different contexts than what Amazon has in their graph. And so those two data sets are the two most powerful commerce data sets in the industry. And yeah, depending on sort of the surface that you're trying to uplevel, they absolutely could sit side by side.
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Eric Suefert
Talk to me about this kind of matchmaker role. If we would move into this agentic purchasing paradigm. How do you maintain the matchmaker role if. If there would be agents shopping versus versus the human doing the shop, does that change at all? Is that a meaningful difference or no?
Michael Komasinski
Well, I mean, I think it, I think, I think it depends on the level of autonomy, but in the, in the worldview that, that we prescribe. And I think you could see this in the change that ChatGPT made, like you said this week, to pulling back on the instant checkout platform. Humans want to remain in control of a lot of the purchasing decisions. And I think a lot of that's based on the fact that retailers continue to own fulfillment trust brand contextual shopping environments. And so with that, there are going to be multiple touch points in customer journeys. And so jumping ahead a little to ChatGPT's focus on ads and being the discovery surface ChatGPT scales discovery critio optimizes downstream cross channel conversion. I think it's kind of the simplest way I've been able to sort of describe the partnership there and just to maybe sort of go more broadly, even as AI assistants like narrow options, somebody still has to rank products by likelihood to convert. Somebody still has to measure outcomes across channels. Somebody still has to verify purchases and optimize towards roas. And that's our lane.
Eric Suefert
Right.
Michael Komasinski
We help determine what actually sells and we help drive and optimize and measure that cross channel.
Eric Suefert
You mentioned that I write about Rexis a lot and I think one thing that people don't really appreciate is that ads is applied Rexis. Right. I mean, it's just a very specific application of Rexis, really. Yeah. And that's where a lot of the AI research in the sort of cutting edge research that's that's happening now and, and being monetized. This is what drives me insane is, you know, you read these articles. AI is, it's, there's this bubble and it's not really, you know, driving any sort of material gains for these companies that are deploying all this money against research. And I'm, I'm just like, do you
Michael Komasinski
not,
Eric Suefert
do you not understand the ad space? I mean, this is ev. This is, everyone is, is pointing their, their, their research bazooka at this because this is where all of the frontier research is yielding these incredible gains.
Michael Komasinski
Yeah.
Eric Suefert
And it's just, it's so frustrating because it's like you just, just listen to these earnings calls. Where do you think these gains are coming from? They say it, it's really frustrating. But, but talk to me about. So this, this kind of idea is like, well, we've got, you know, some, some, some big set of candidate things that we could show to this person. Right. And then we've got to whittle that down. Talk to me about the. Where maybe the line blurs or where Rexis becomes ads targeting. Right. Because I think there's a specific moment where, where that distills into ads targeting. This is Ads target. We're targeting ads now. But fundamentally this is like a Rexis algorithm or you know, this, this, this system that we built does that at scale. Talk to me about where the baton gets handed off.
Michael Komasinski
Right.
Eric Suefert
And when that becomes ad targeting.
Michael Komasinski
Yeah, well, to be clear, for us, there's like 80% overlap between these things because that's how Critio drives performance outcomes. So it's really a great big prediction engine that's looking for the optimal impressions to serve across whatever channels were pointed at to drive the campaign outcome that's in question. And so we've been sort of doing this for 20 years. It's a little known fact actually. The company was founded 20 years ago and believe it or not, when Critio first started, it was a Recommendation engine for DVDs, believe it or not. And they couldn't figure out a great revenue model for that 20 years ago and quickly pivoted towards the retargeting use case on the open web back in 2005, 2006. And that's where the company has its origins. So back then that was all machine learning. But you could imagine over 20 years like that prediction engine has just gotten bigger and more powerful. We learned how to normalize SKUs, learned how to build up shopper graph intelligence. And so again, the recommendation system or the commerce Recommendation service is just like a front end on the Rexis system that underlies the whole company. And you know, I mean I guess if you look at, if you really get specific and look at the similarities and differences, they, they both rely on intense signals, both use predictive models, they both aim to match demand with supply. But maybe the differences would be traditional ad targeting. Non critio would be like audience based agentic recommendations are more like product level decisioning inside of a live interaction. I think that's a really key difference. And you know, pretty has always been a lot less about placing an ad impression as it has been trying to drive to an outcome.
Eric Suefert
Got it. And, and so you know, these things converge kind of depending on the context. Right. And you know, obviously like there's tremendous amount of overlap and, and a lot of the original research like if you go to, you know, YouTube developed the two towers framework for instance and that was 2016. Right. So that was, that predates Transformers, but that was just for video recommendations. And then a lot of the ad stuff got, was built on that which is just the kind of dual encoder architecture which is, you know, become a lot more complex now. But so we've got kind of call it Rexis for. For all right. I mean is, is, is ACRS the, the acronym you're using? Agent E Commerce Recommendation Service or is that, is that a thing? Is that.
Michael Komasinski
You know, it's funny we haven't acronymed it. It. It actually still gets spoken to in its full glory. But I'm sure it'll find an acronym soon and maybe it will be ACRs.
Eric Suefert
I don't know, maybe that's the, that's the difference, that's the difference between Rexis and ADS targeting. If you articulate the whole phrase, the whole name, it's Rexis. And if you acronym it, it's Ad targeting. But so let's say that acrs, you call it like it's Rex's for anybody, Anybody can get the benefit of that in their own environment, right? In their own, in their own product, in their own product context and get these, these products recommended to them. Is that kind of how you're viewing this? Is that how you slot it into the landscape?
Michael Komasinski
Yeah, yeah. So like let's take a couple of examples, right? So like if you were to take travel like you could ask an assistant for a long weekend in Barcelona, like summarize options but like which flights get surfaced, right? Which hotel, which package is most likely to convert? How is any of that based off of actual price, availability or real demand signals. Like that's the same optimization problem that we solve in retail. Or take like restaurants. Right. If you ask for the best Italian place nearby, the assistant can list options just by retrieving things across the open web. But like ranking them based on likelihood to book, real time availability, historical behavior patterns, like that's decisioning and that's, that's rexis, not sort of semantic or you know, real augmented retrieval, augmented generation and so on and so forth. Right. And it all comes back to having high quality structured data, real performance signals and then being able to optimize against outcomes at a high scale so that you get data loop learning. And yeah, just to sum it up, like if there's a decision and structured behind and structured data behind it, like this model can apply to bring relevancy and personalization to any user experience.
Eric Suefert
Can you share examples of companies that, that you're working with already, like just to, just to give a sense of like where, where this is being applied.
Michael Komasinski
So we've kept a couple of them confidential just, just because that's the way that partners have asked us to do that right now. But we are in testing with two large platforms. Those tests keep getting progressively more sophisticated and I think continue to prove the uplift that we've shown in our own offline testing. And I think that that partner list will expand. You know, it could be commerce platforms that are starting to get into, you know, targeted product recommendations and ads like in the say, like the post purchase space, like checkout. It needs a service to like create the right recommendation out of a product catalog or a feed. So we've got I think a few different paths. But right now it's the two large partners that we're testing with and we've kept those unnamed for now.
Eric Suefert
Got it.
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Eric Suefert
Where does this scale to in terms of like product categories beyond? I mean E. Comm is kind of the obvious. I mean it's obvious one. Right. But where else does it scale to? Like, what are the product categories where the verticals.
Michael Komasinski
Yeah. So I think, I think it could go in a lot of directions. Right. Like think about like financial services if somebody is looking for say like best rewards credit card for travel. Right. That's a, that's a structured comparison problem. You could optimize based on profile intent, probability of approval or activation and that engine could play a part in that. So yeah, I think there's a couple different examples, but right now it's probably more directed at partners that own sort of high volume use cases where product is essential.
Eric Suefert
Got it. But I mean are you, what about the modality? I mean are you thinking like web kind of is the starting point or it could be in, in consumer apps? Because I mean, I guess it's, it's,
Michael Komasinski
yeah, it would be, we wouldn't be tied into any specific format.
Eric Suefert
There is the commonality here because I mean consumer adoption of your chat bots has obviously been, you know, really rapid. Right. And I think that has become kind of a new functional norm in terms of doing research. Right. I mean that's just, that's kind of what you do now. You're probably, your first stop is a. Whereas before it would have been just a query based search. Now it's probably more of like a conversational based chat bot experience. And I think you'll see a lot of those, those use cases proliferate to be vertical specific. Right. So like I, you can imagine when you're buying a car going forward it's going to be through some sort of like conversational interface because like here are my requirements and you know, give me, give me some options. Right. Is that kind of the, the interface that you're looking to target? I mean it really is meant to be this sort of semantic chat based interface that this best accommodates.
Michael Komasinski
Yeah, exactly. And, and the starting point clearly is anything more tied to our current catalog and, and shopper graph. Right. Which is going to be more in the kind of fast moving consumer goods categories. It could scale to automotive and things like that architecturally. But that's obviously not where we've got a lot of our IP currently just based off of the legacy of the business and where we have those sort of high volume of advertising situations.
Eric Suefert
Right. So, but, but the idea being that kind of broader idea is that like the way I do shopping discovery will be conversational going forward essentially across any category. Autos is an example.
Michael Komasinski
But you're going to keep, and you're going to keep coming back to interfaces that give you high quality recommendations that are complete, accurate and have intelligence around likelihood and suitability. When you don't get that, you'll move on to some other experience or service. And so that's, you know, we're designing this to up level those types of platforms and where they're competing for sort of best in class user experience. That's really what makes it win.
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Eric Suefert
All right, so kind of shifting gears. Talk to me about Commerce Go. What is that? Can you walk me through that?
Michael Komasinski
Commerce Go is our new self service platform that launches at the end of the quarter, so just in a couple of weeks. And what's different about this is it's our first true self service product for full funnel cross channel performance. And really what we've done is we've made the application like really, really simple to focus on the SMB marketplace and so it's self registration super simple and then it's actually like five clicks to campaign is sort of the tagline that we help to position it with. You know a small medium advertiser can be up and running like literally within 15 minutes. Once they get registered they can pull in creative direct from their domain, will auto tag or check for their tagging situation and we can actually do that automatically for them. They put in a budget, a campaign objective and they can be off and running like that fast. So I think it takes advantage of a couple of different trends in the marketplace. One, the kind of democratization of SMB advertising. It also takes advantage of the sort of compression or convergence between performance and brand and we think there's a real need out there for that SMB segment to get access to cross channel performance which this enables. So it's open web, social and eventually we'll have other channels included in it as well. It's been great. We've actually been transitioning our small clients to this for the last six months and what's new here in a couple weeks is like a full launch for net new and self regulated. But in the conversions that we've been doing the last six months we've had great results and we've got three or four thousand clients live on that platform now and they get like 20% higher ROAS well over a third of them are taking advantage of the cross channel setup to include social. They churn less, spend more, they get better performance. It's a really great product. So we're excited to get to the full net new launch here pretty soon and then continue to build on that with additional channel expansion over the course of the year.
Eric Suefert
How do you manage the measurement for that?
Michael Komasinski
So that can be through whatever tag management system they're using today. So we can detect like Google Analytics tags as an example and it can just integrate right into that. And so we've got sort of an auto tagging capability and ability to detect that. So what it does is it takes sort of that technical friction away from a non technical buyer or whatever extra cycle times that that would typically introduce into coming onto a new platform. So a lot of that's automated behind the scenes.
Eric Suefert
And then like how, how do you see that? Like so, so for like an SMB, like how do you see that sliding into the kind of existing suite of like automation tools that they already might be using? Right. So you think about like kind of Advantage plus and you think about pmax is this just kind of sits alongside those and covers just the programmatic inventory. Is that kind of how they would approach this?
Michael Komasinski
Well, I think what's different about this and yeah, admittedly there are other products out in the market, but they're almost all dedicated to whatever walled garden they came from. And so what's unique about GO is the cross channel setup and the ability to hold constant performance across. So we think that for marketers that are coming on to platforms for the first time or some that are looking for maybe a simpler cross channel setup, we think that GO will be attractive to them. So I think the segment is still expanding and although we're certainly not first to market with this, it is unique in the cross channel nature of it.
Eric Suefert
All right, can you give me like a picture of the upcoming roadmap? Like what, what are you working on? I mean this obviously is coming end of quarter. So this is sort of the self serve is on, on the roadmap. But what, what else? Like what do you have in store for 2026?
Michael Komasinski
Yeah, sure, there's a lot. I always break it down into three buckets. Talk about agentic, talk a little bit about performance media and then retail media. So in agentic and we've not talked about this yet, maybe we'll come on to it again. But would be scaling our OpenAI integration that we announced on Monday, continue to expand the partner use cases for the reco service. And we are in pretty advanced testing with a few of our retailers on conversational shopping experiences, shopping bots, conversational ads, things like that. And then we have been deprecating user interfaces across our whole product portfolio in favor of MCP enabled front ends, whether that's audience, campaign management, et cetera. So the MCP ification, if you will of our whole suite is a big agenda item. And then in performance media we're going to be moving up funnel and launching a discovery ad product in the second half of the year, hopefully a beta in the first half and continuing to look at new supply paths that we need stronger access to like ctv. And then in retail media it's really about scaling like auction based display, shoppable video ads we just launched conquesting and continuing to bring our retailers new monetization paths and scaling the demand side. So a great new package rolling out for Commerce Max, the demand side tool for retail media. New insights package, better cross retailer support, better measurement. So it's busy. Like there's a lot going on in the company right now and yeah, we're excited about where it's headed.
Eric Suefert
I do want to get to the OpenAI topic. I mean I know it's, it's kind of, it's news, right? I know maybe there's not a ton you can share, but maybe before that, can you talk to me about just like the MCP ification? Like what, what, what motivates that?
Michael Komasinski
It's to make the company more scalable and to, to reduce the reliance on the managed service component. It's as simple as that. Right. Like I think managed service just doesn't allow you to scale a platform as quickly as you would otherwise. And so we think, you know, automating those things or in some just making them easier to access and not getting hung up in a lot of front end UI and workflow. The trend in sort of how all that in like workflow in media planning and activation is towards essentially agent based or prompt based instruction and interaction. So I would say we're just in some ways modernizing the front end of all these tools, but what we'll get is a lower cost to serve and certainly make them more scalable and that's the direction that the markets move in.
Eric Suefert
Got it.
Michael Komasinski
Yeah.
Eric Suefert
And I think it'd be a great place to end just to talk about your recently announced partnership with OpenAI. Maybe you could just kind of, you know, it was, it was big news on Monday, we're recording this on Friday, so a couple days to digest. But like for people who haven't heard about it, maybe you could just kind of provide some, some sort of like broad strokes outline of the partnership and what you'll be doing together.
Michael Komasinski
Yeah, sure. So Monday was great. Really excited to be OpenAI's first advertising technology partner and repeating a few things I guess, but the integration's live and what it enables is brands can come through Critio's, you know, ad platform and, and get access to this new contextual AD unit that ChatGPT is opening up for their free and go versions and the inbound from clients this week has been incredible, like just level of interest, like nothing I've ever seen. And I think it stems from, you know, people know that this is a powerful surface. You know, our, our studies show that the traffic that comes from LLM platforms like ChatGPT, like they convert at one and a half times the rate of other referral channels. And so it's a, it's a no brainer to get into now a scaled access program through a pretty broad based platform like Criteo and start to test how that impacts, you know, traffic levels. But we're really excited. We think it really starts to scale this sort of new discovery layer and we share ChatGPT's values and principles around like it's got to be grounded in experiences that are additive, relevant, built on user trust. And I think this first unit that they've rolled out is very true to those principles but there's like a lot of learning to do and certainly the product is going to scale and evolve pretty rapidly over the course of the year.
Eric Suefert
Yeah, and I just, I just checked and as opposed to pretty much the entire market crater's up today. Today was a kind of a down day broadly, but you know, it's, that's obviously been warmly received a partnership among, you know, other things.
Michael Komasinski
It has. I mean, yeah, it was a good week in what is kind of an odd market, but it also speaks to like broader dynamics. I mean the sort of TAM or the market for discoverability is expanding and because of how OpenAI is approaching this, you know, companies like Critio now have access to that TAM that we didn't have before. So it's purely incremental to play in the discovery layer in a way that we couldn't, you know, even two weeks ago. So, you know, if market participants are considering that factor when they evaluate us, then you know, they've got at least part of it right.
Eric Suefert
Michael, this was fantastic. I really appreciate you taking time on a Friday going almost kind of weekend here coming up on 4 o'.
Michael Komasinski
Clock.
Eric Suefert
So I appreciate your time and I appreciate you sharing your roadmap with the mobile dev memo community.
Michael Komasinski
Thank you, Eric. We're big fans of mobile dev and the podcast, so really honored to be here with you today. Thanks again.
Eric Suefert
Yeah, cheers. And I appreciate you making this happen. Thanks so much.
Michael Komasinski
Thanks. It.
Date: March 11, 2026
Host: Eric Suefert
Guest: Michael Komasinski (CEO, Critio)
In this episode, Eric Suefert interviews Michael Komasinski, CEO of Critio, about the evolving landscape of recommendation systems (RecSys), agentic commerce, and the integration of AI-driven shopping assistants in internet commerce. They discuss Critio's new product launches, how RecSys bridges ads and commerce recommendations, the difference between agentic and autonomous commerce, Critio's partnership with OpenAI, and industry trends affecting advertisers, platforms, and consumers.
Agentic Commerce RecSys for AI Shopping Assistants
Agentic vs. Autonomous Commerce
Compatibility and “Friends with Everyone” Model
Ad Targeting Is Applied RecSys
Difference Between Generic Ad Targeting and Agentic Recommendations
Use Cases
Live Testing and Confidential Partners
Overview: Simplifies campaign launch for small businesses—self-registration, auto-tagging, cross-channel (open web, social) in "five clicks to campaign."
Differentiation
Measurement
Announced: The week of this episode (Monday)
Scope: Critio becomes OpenAI's first ad tech partner; integration allows brands to access a contextual ad unit in ChatGPT (free and Go versions) via Critio.
On the semantics of “agentic” vs. “autonomous”:
On RecSys being everywhere:
On future of shopping:
On scaling with MCP:
This summary delivers a comprehensive walkthrough for anyone wishing to understand Critio’s approach to next-generation commerce recommendations, the true meaning of agentic commerce, and the evolving intersections of AI, advertising, and discovery.