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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#722: Agentic AI in retail with Dan Russotto, Furniture.com
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- [00:01]
Greg Kilstrom
The Agile Brand.
- [00:10]
Podcast Announcer
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and martech platforms as we explore marketing, technology, AI, E commerce, and whatever's next for the omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show.
- [01:08]
Greg Kilstrom
Building on the talk of AI in these recent years, agentic AI is an exciting area for retailers. It's certainly something that's coming up a lot in conversations. But beyond talk, finding real world examples and best practices of agentic AI can be tricky. Today we're here at Etail Boston and I'm excited to talk about a company that is innovating in this space. Not a traditional retailer per se, but an innovative aggregator using AI to standardize product data across multiple retailers. To talk about furniture.com's approach to agentic AI and more, I'm joined by Dan Rosado, general manager@furniture.com Dan, welcome to the show.
- [01:47]
Dan Rosado
Thank you so much Greg. I appreciate that introduction.
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Greg Kilstrom
You. Yeah, yeah. Looking forward to this. And yeah, it was fun doing the Fireside chat yesterday.
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Dan Rosado
Absolutely, yes.
- [01:56]
Greg Kilstrom
Gonna do a little bit of a recap of our conversation here for the show. So glad to share that.
- [02:01]
Dan Rosado
Great.
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Greg Kilstrom
Before we dive in, for those that didn't catch our session yesterday, why don't you tell us about your role as well as what you're building and what makes the business model of furniture.com unique.
- [02:13]
Dan Rosado
Yeah, great. Thank you. As mentioned, as you mentioned, I'm the general manager of furniture.com I've been spending actually the last 15 plus years in marketplaces like furniture.com, i was formerly at homes.com and apartments.com and I also spent some time at Cvent in the travel space. And so@furniture.com, we're really trying to create that one place where shoppers can find everything that they're looking for that they love, brands that they know, give them the confidence Almost a confidence engine of furniture to know that everything's going to be there in one place. And so we set out three years ago to bring all the brands across the US in one place, as opposed to vendors that you don't know or don't have the confidence to know that they're reputable and good quality.
- [03:04]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about how and why you've used AI as a foundation for what you're building here. And what was the original problem or the pain point that caused you to rethink how retail operations should be run.
- [03:21]
Dan Rosado
Sure. So, you know, right now we're pushing about 65. We're right at about 65 retailers on the site. When you think about it in terms of 200 geographies, 200 categories, that's 40,000 distinct pages across 2 million SKUs. So there's close to actually 80 billion combinations of ways that we can show product on our site. And so the old ways of. Or traditional ways of manually merchandising product just don't work. You need some sort of scalable way to make it look and feel curated. And so that's why that's the use case for us and why we need different technologies, including AI, to help us really create an experience with a shopper that. That is, you know, personalized and unique. Yeah.
- [04:11]
Greg Kilstrom
And so it's not just built around AI. You've said your team is built around agentic tech. What do you mean by that? And how is that different from either, you know, some of the traditional automation that might be used, or if I can say traditional AI, yet, you know, some of the more traditional AI tools.
- [04:28]
Dan Rosado
Sure, sure. So as mentioned, with my marketplace experience, I'm used to building point integrations from. From point A to point B. And it means. So like in the furniture world, for example, when we first got started three years ago, before all the new AI technology took off, you had to one by one build feeds and integrations to each retailer to furniture.com and so you had to map everything, you know, very strictly, very structured, and if anything changed, you know, the feed or integration would break. What we mean by agentic AI in this scenario is instead of mapping it precisely, you can tell the agent what your intent is and what the context is. So instead of saying this field that I need, you know, I need reviews for this product, instead of saying exactly where it is on the page or within the context of a feed, you basically tell the agent, go, go find me reviews on this product. And then if things change and if the Website's dynamic or review, wherever the reviews are captured change, the agent can figure it out and understand the intent of what it is you're trying to do.
- [05:38]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. I mean that as someone who has integrated or been part of integrations with a lot of things over the years, that sounds amazing. First of all, so can you share, you know, how does this work in the real world? Like, can you share a real example of how an agent works inside the org?
- [05:54]
Dan Rosado
Sure, sure. So there's two really. We're doing agentic AI in lots of different areas. But the two examples I wanted to share with you today first has to do with product enrichment. And so the first example is we get basic product feeds from each of our retailers. But that's all it is. It's basic. You get name, title, some pictures, maybe some dimension information. What we're doing is we're using an agent to not only go back to the websites of our partners with their permission to validate that basic information, but also pull additional information. I gave the example of reviews, but you know, care instructions, videos, any additional, you know, rich data that websites are, that on the, these furniture websites have, we're able to then bring over to furniture.com and make the shopper experience way better. And then the second example is, which is something that, you know, when we first started we were more of an aggregator where we would create a great way for shoppers to compare products, furniture products, and then get sent over to our partners. Now with the way that agentic AI has taken off, we're actually able to take the transaction as well. And so what we're doing with agents in this regard is imagine you had a cart that you wanted to pick three or four different products across three or four different retailers. Maybe sofa from retailer X and a rug from retailer Y. We will take the information on furniture.com and then behind the scenes we'll actually use agents to go make those purchases on the shopper and furniture.com's behalf.
- [07:32]
Greg Kilstrom
Nice, nice. Yeah, that's, I mean that not only does that save time, but yeah, that would be very difficult without agentic. Right. If not impossible.
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Dan Rosado
Yeah, we looked into it. We looked into various e commerce platforms, EDI, Exchange and you know, with 60 something partners times maybe six months per partner to make, really make the integration work, it's just not, it's just not scalable.
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Greg Kilstrom
Well, and also with the ability to, you know, with their permission to, to get additional information that makes you more competitive than others, that they may share that information.
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Dan Rosado
Absolutely.
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Greg Kilstrom
You're actually getting full information, care and whatever that might be.
- [08:13]
Dan Rosado
Yeah, absolutely.
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Podcast Announcer
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Greg Kilstrom
So we talk about AI quite a bit on the show, of course, and I'm sure most listening have heard the term large language model or LLM. You've said that you're optimized for LLMs in your architecture. What does that mean and why does that matter now more than ever?
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Dan Rosado
So the best example for those listening as a comparison point, it's very similar to what happened with Google 2030 years ago where you had to set up your page to optimize for SEO so that Google could crawl. Well, some of those rules still apply. You know, speed is very important. You want all the LLMs to be able to read your site very quickly so they can get information quick. However, there's an additional layer now with the OpenAI's and perplexities of the world where they have specific things that they've recommended to websites to create in order to optimize the experience and make sure you have a chance of having your content end up in that LLM. The example with OpenAI is something called MCP Server Model context protocol Server. You put your information, we put our information, furniture.com within the context of this server and then it makes it easier for OpenAI to get that content and show it to the shopper. Yeah, yeah.
- [11:28]
Greg Kilstrom
And definitely, I mean I, we were talking about geo the other day and all that stuff. You know, definitely new, new frontier. A lot of companies are new industry. Right, right, I know, yeah, yeah, there'll be geo marketing firms or whatever.
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Dan Rosado
Right, so exactly.
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Greg Kilstrom
So you know, as you mentioned, furniture.com is operating at a massive scale. I mean, you know, 2 million SKUs, all the, all the different combinations and permutations. What would you say to a retailer that maybe has 2,000 products, not 2 million, you know, how can a model like this apply to them?
- [12:04]
Dan Rosado
Sure. So building on what we just spoke about, definitely you should optimize. Even whether it's 2000 or 2 million products, you should optimize your content for the LLMs. So that's one big area. So you want to make sure if you're a retailer x that anytime somebody has a question about a comfy leather sofa in my world that you're going to show up within the context of that LLM. So that's definitely one area the of focus. And then, you know, in the same way we work with retailers at scale, most of our retailers work with vendors at scale. And so you hear all the time that they have trouble getting product feeds from their vendors and some of their technology is, you know, archaic and it's hard to get all the information that the vendors actually have on products. Well, they could be, you know, as a retailer you could be doing the same thing as us. You could get that initial product data from the vendors, but then you can also augment it by using agents to go get additional information on those products either on the vendors websites or other places on the Internet.
- [13:09]
Greg Kilstrom
Nice, nice. And so, you know, to talk about agent tech. I mean again, there's a lot of talk about it, there's less real world case studies. So, you know, it's great to hear that furniture.com is using agentic AI as an example. Beyond the technology part and the data part, which critical components. But what about the mindset shift that's required? Because it is a different way of thinking beyond traditional ways of doing things. Where should an organization that's considering this start and what mindset shifts were required for furniture.com to really embrace it?
- [13:51]
Dan Rosado
Yeah, I think this is a really good question. I think when we were sort of first evaluating all of this, we were in somewhat in paralysis. You don't oftentimes companies don't know where to start. There's just, you know, new versions of all, all these AI tools coming out every week. But what we did was we said, you know what, let's take the latest and greatest version of OpenAI at the time. Let's give everybody in the whole company training. So we actually brought OpenAI, a couple people from OpenAI into, into furniture.com we did a half day session. After that session we did some hackathons which is, you know, a way to use the tools and, and build things, kind of take, take a day or two off from your normal day job and try to be creative and use things. That was step one. And then more recently we've gotten, we've gotten more and more technical over time. So we've gone from just regular ChatGPT training to more how do, how to use AI when you're coding. We're using a tool in this regard called Cursor AI or Cursor AI and we had everybody in the company, developers and non developers, get trained up on Cursor AI and then we did another hackathon and some of the ideas that came out of it were really amazing. And I think just giving access to the tools and training people up and then doing actual events where they're somewhat forced to use them to see what they can do has been really successful for us. And now it's just kind of part of our fabric of how we work.
- [15:25]
Greg Kilstrom
Nice, nice. Yeah, I definitely, I think getting your hands on the tools I think is really, is a critical part. So zooming out a little bit, where do you see this all going? I mean, obviously there's been tons of change over the last couple of years, but you know, where do you see all this going in the next five to ten years? From the, from the consumer level. Like, you know, what is a truly AI native retail org look like from the consumer's perspective?
- [15:51]
Dan Rosado
Sure. So there's, you know, there's a lot of opinions on this particular question and nobody really has the perfect crystal ball, but based on everything I'm seeing and reading, there's one school of thought that says, oh, you know, agents are going to do everything on your behalf and you're not going to have to do anything. And while I do agree that agents could do everything on your behalf. I still think that there's that sense of discovery that shoppers and users want to participate in. It's part of the fun of buying a piece of furniture or a car or a house or what have you. And so from this regard, while I do believe websites will speak to other websites via agents, what I believe will happen is that shoppers will create their own user experience through the LLM. So for example, instead of chatting back and forth with ChatGPT, you might tell ChatGPT, create a user interface that looks like apple.com and has a cart like Best Buy and then fill it up with furniture from furniture.com and that's how I want to shop. And so I believe that there's going to be some explosion of shoppers telling, telling these LLMs how they want to shop. Because you know, up until now they, you sort of are beholden to the physical store you walk into or the website that you're using. And this, I think maybe where it's all headed is the shopper will tell and describe how they want to shop. And then as long as we're all we, meaning retailers, marketplaces, anybody that has content is optimized for these LLMs with our data, then that might, you know, create the experience that the shopper, shopper wants.
- [17:27]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, that sounds, yeah. I mean having navigated many an E commerce platform where the UX was less than optimal, like it would be nice to, to have some, some agency over that as well. And yeah, I don't, I don't think that, I mean, maybe at some point we'll have AI furnished houses or whatever. But I agree with you. Like, I think people are going to want some agency over what they buy and as well as how they buy it. That, that sounds amazing. Yeah.
- [17:53]
Dan Rosado
Right, Right.
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Greg Kilstrom
So, you know, we're here at ETEL Boston and obviously we had our session yesterday. What's been a highlight for you so far or maybe something you're looking forward to?
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Dan Rosado
For me, the highlight so far has been connecting with other people that are going through the exact same issues and problems that we're going through. You know, it feels when you're, when you're operating on a daily basis within your own company, you, it feels like you're the only one that's faced with the challenges. And I actually, you know, from this show I feel like we're not alone and I actually feel pretty good about where we are on the, on the spectrum of, of, of the knowledge we're gaining, et cetera. It's still scary times and who knows what'll happen in the next couple years. But I feel, it feels good that we're sort of all kind of going through this technology revolution together.
- [18:45]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Yeah, I love it. Well, Dan, thanks so much for joining and for sharing your insights. One last question for you before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [18:58]
Dan Rosado
That's a good question. I'm a little bit. The average age at my company is about half of my age and so I'm constantly faced with what you just asked and I read a lot, I speak a lot to other people. I engage with everybody in the company on a regular basis. I try to have one on ones with we have as close to 75 employees. I try to speak to every single one of them over the course of, over the course of the year and I just try to stay engaged with younger people and it keeps me sharp. Love it.
- [19:34]
Greg Kilstrom
Love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank Dan Rosado, general manager@furniture.com for joining the show. You can learn more about dan and furniture.com as well as Etail by following.
- [19:43]
Podcast Announcer
The links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.greggkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
- [20:40]
Greg Kilstrom
The Agile Brand.
- [20:45]
Podcast Announcer
Before we continue, I wanted to share a key strategic resource that a majority of the Fortune 500 are already aware of. Finding the best technology, business and talent solutions is not easy. With business demands and competitive pressures mounting, you need to be able to design, deploy and optimize your technology to provide leading customer experiences while driving business growth. Those of you that have been listening to this show for a while know that this podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, a global provider of technology, business and talent solutions for more than 80% of the Fortune 500. TechSystems accelerates business transformation for their customers. Whether you're looking to maximize your technology roi, drive business growth, or elevate customer experiences, Tech Systems enables enterprises to capitalize on changes. Learn more@techsystems.com that's T E K systems. Com. Now let's get back to the show.