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At a Shop Talk Press breakfast on Wednesday last week, event organizer Zia Danielle Widger shared a small detail that said something a lot bigger that just one session about AEO was so oversubscribed that attendees were sitting on the floor. Zia also noted that Shop Talk has been adding professional development content, things like building your personal brand on social media, developing retail popups, selecting influencers. Those sessions were packed too, and that really tells you something about where retail leaders are at right now. That the main stage Inspiration still draws crowds, but the real demand is for practical content that helps people solve immediate problems and and roll up their sleeves because people are under pressure to solve urgent operating problems around AI Discovery and measurement here's some more of what I heard in the corridor track at Shop Talk last week and in interviews that I conducted for upcoming content in the Drum. Let's go Number one Discovery is the New battleground Doug Straton, who is the CMO at Bazaar Voice, shared a conversation that he'd had recently with PepsiCo's CMO, which surfaced that the new battleground is discovery. In a world where AI summaries recommend fewer results, where the digital shelf is being compressed by answer engines, how do brands make sure they're one of the products being surfaced? Doug's angle on this is organic visibility. Not just paying for placement, but making sure your product data is rich enough that AI engines pull you into the conversation. Naturally, he pointed to the Edelman Trust Barometer and noted that trust in media institutions and companies keeps eroding. But two things still hold sway brands and other people. And that is where UGC creator content and authentic reviews come in. They're the raw material that AI engines are drawing from when they make recommendations. Scott Wingo, who I know well from his work at Refi Buy, where I am a advisor to that company, and his excellent blog Retail Gentic. Scott got much more specific about the operational side of this during a live interview with e commerce consultant Rick Watson, and Scott described what he calls a multi level PDP a product detail page with three layers. The top layer is for humans, the visual editorial product page that shoppers see. Below that is an SEO layer and below that is an AEO layer metadata designed to be picked up by LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT. So what goes into that AEO layer? Scott's team pulls from on site reviews, customer service logs, and this one was interesting. Whatever brands used to train their store associates. Hmm. The reasoning here is that a great store associate knows the product inside out. They know what occasions it's used for where it fits into the product line, what differentiates it from similar items. The knowledge has lived in training manuals and has usually never made it to the pdp. But now it needs to, because essentially the LLM is your new store associate Number two the Next Best Dollar Isn't a Media Question Anymore Drew Cashmore, who is the chief strategy officer at adtech company Vantage, made an observation that I suspect will resonate with anyone managing brand budgets. He says that brands aren't just thinking about media holistically anymore. They're thinking about their total investment holistically, media, packaging, supply chain, how they get incremental shelf space in the store. And this next best dollar decision has moved well beyond a marketing conversation. This is at a time where brands are evaluating media spend against things like investing in packaging or supply chain efficiencies. And it means that the measurement conversation has to stretch further than what we have right now with basic metrics like roas and attributed sales. And that leads into a quick interview I had with Michael Kranz, who leads Macy's Media Network, and he reinforced that from the retailer side. When I asked for his advice to CMOs, he said, Build a whole picture measurement framework at the beginning of the year and commit to it. Don't knee jerk after a month or two of soft results. Allow time for those strategies to have an impact, he said, Because I think there's sometimes a reaction to retract and go back to the tried and true, but that may not be the best thing for long term growth. In other words, once the next best dollar becomes a business wide decision, measurement has to become more patient and more strategic too. Did you know that leading retail media networks drive 85% of their ads through mid and long tail advertisers? Miracle Ads provides full funnel ad formats tailored to both 1P and 3P advertisers, leveraging unique AI capabilities that provide unprecedented levels of relevance and engagement. Retailers who want to capture ad spend from the long tail of 3PMarketplace sellers use Miracle ads in their tech stack. Learn more@miracle.com that's M I R A K L.com and number three, the real bottleneck is change management. E commerce consultant and commentator Rick Watson described brands forming AI councils and immediately killing innovation. He said, look what the council did to the Jedi. The first person to join is the compliance officer. The last person who wants to attend is the CMO and in the meantime nothing ships. Scott Wingo from Refi Buy echoed this. He's seen examples where brands are updating a PDP and it takes six to nine months once you factor in translation workflows, legal review, brand verification In a world where you need to update product metadata to stay visible in AI engines and the best practices are changing so quickly, that kind of cycle time is a competitive disadvantage. Both of these guys landed in the same place that the brands who are moving fastest in agentic readiness have CEO level buy in that this is a priority. Without CEO level buy in, every other team leans away. As Scott put it, the companies that are cracking on have figured out how to separate the things that genuinely need compliance review things like personally identifiable information, regulated claims. Those are essential things to get the compliance team involved in, but separate those from the things where the risk is minimal and speed matters more. Meanwhile, back at that press breakfast, Zia flags something that cuts across all of this. The creator economy and social commerce are exploding in the background while everyone is fixated on AI. At that event, I learned about a new partnership between Glance and directv which showed what commerce embedded in media environments looks like in practice. Shopping agents on television screens. Very, very interesting. It's a reminder that discovery isn't just moving in one direction. Brands are dealing with a more splintered discovery environment than ever before. Those packed workshop sessions were a real signal. Retail leaders are less interested in hearing that AI will change everything than in figuring out what they need to change on Monday morning. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you tomor.