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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#832: Akeneo CEO Romain Fouache on building and maintaining trust while scaling up AI adoption
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The agile brand.
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Welcome to Season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. I'm Greg Kilstrom, your host and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or Follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world applications. For more information, go to teksystems.com now let's dive in. What if the biggest risk in the AI era isn't falling behind the technology, but getting ahead of your customers? Trust agility requires a constant feedback loop between technological innovation and customer sentiment. It demands that we not only deploy new tools, often incorporating AI, but also actively listen and adapt to how our customers are actually experiencing them. Today we're going to talk about the delicate balance brands must strike to keep up. It's not just about implementing the latest generative AI tools into the shopping experience. It's about doing so in a way that builds rather than erodes the customer trust and loyalty you've worked so hard to create. Tell me Discuss this topic I'd like to welcome Roman Fouch, CEO at Aquinyo. Roman, welcome to the show.
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Well, thanks a lot for having me, Greg. It's a pleasure to be on the show with you today and I'm excited about the conversations we're going to have.
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Yeah, definitely. I mean this is definitely a topic top of mind for for many here and definitely want to dive in. Before we do though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at a Kenya?
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Yeah, with pleasure. So as you said, I'm the Chief Executive Officer here at Ikeneo and I joined the company a little over a year ago. I actually have a background of more than 20 years working in the data and AI space. Not the retail space, not the E commerce space, but the data and AI space. Because I'm deeply convinced that at its heart, and I'm sure we'll have more opportunities to discuss about that. Akeneo actually is a data and AI company and I joined the company for two reasons. First, to actually help continue to nurture that transition during data and AI focus as well as help continue the scale and the improvement of the operations of the company.
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Great, great. And for those that are not as familiar with what Akeneo does. Can you explain a little bit, you know, what's the core problem that you solve for brands and who are your typical customers?
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So Akeneo is from a space that is historically called pim, Product Information Management. What we do and what we've been built for is to help companies manage brand the complexity of the data related to their product catalog. If you're a company, most likely you're selling something. If you're selling something, most likely people want to know what they're buying before they buy it. And so you need to be able to describe your products, whether it's the length of a table or the description of the service you're going to sell or the spare parts you're going to be able to use with the product that you're selling. You have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of pieces of data that, that you need to understand about your products. And you might have hundreds of thousands of products that you're selling on dozens or hundreds of markets. So the sheer combination of it is crazy. And to be able to make sure that you have the best data available for your customer in the best format possible, you need to find a way to manage that complexity. This is where ikeneu comes in to increase the discoverability, the conversion, reduce return rates and get you ready for AI.
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Great, great. All right, so let's dive in and I want to start by talking about this from the strategic standpoint and this concept of building trust in this AI powered world that we find ourselves in. So research from Aquinyo shows that once consumers try AI recommendations, the experience is overwhelmingly positive. The real challenge is earning that initial trust so using it the first time. Right. So from a strategic standpoint, what's the most crit element for a brand to get right before they even launch their first AI driven shopping feature?
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I'd be very on that. It's. Don't even try if your data is not in the right place. You know, we, we share a lot about AI trust, about hallucination, about all of these things. But to begin with, if you don't know what your products are, AI is not going to make it up for you. So make sure that you have strong data foundation. I mean, I've been hearing all my life something very simple, there is no good AI without good data. So make sure your data is in order before you actually start to try anything with AI because if you get it wrong once, you will kill the trust of your consumers.
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Yeah, yeah. And that needs surely a lot of leaders are feeling pressure to deploy AI. You know, there's pressure even at the board level and shareholders, all of that. How do leaders balance this pressure for speed to just get something out there with the more deliberate work of what you're saying? You know, ensuring that the data feeding the AI models is accurate, consistent and and truly reflects the brand's voice.
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That's for sure. That there's an AI mandates across all industries. I mean, I'm a CEO. My board is telling me I should use more AI. I tell the employees they should be using more AI. There's no question about that. The question is how do you actually leverage AI? What is the best way to do it for companies today on the e commerce space, there's a big question on AI, which is how do I make sure I'm present and visible on ChatGPT and Gemini? That's kind of geo. It is AI. It's AI as a new channel on which to be discovered. There is AI on how do you work your own E commerce experience on your website. There's also AI on how do you leverage AI to better operate yourself, attacking you? We cover all of these dimensions and I think it's important to have all of them in mind. The first one is managing your product. Data is itself an AI augmented task. You can use AI to actually better collect that information, better enrich it, better manage it. Have people who manage your catalog, not be just managers of catalog, but managers of agents that manage catalog so that you can go broader on your catalogs, you can onboard more product, you can have more trust in what you're doing, you can have more depth in the descriptions that you have. So, so that's as far as mandate of leveraging AI to be more efficient, something that can be directly addressed with software such as ours. And then they are getting ready for the new wave of E commerce, which I think is indeed going to be extremely AI impacted. You can already do things. We've got customers that are very happy with their ranking on ChatGPT because their product page is well structured and well done. They actually get ranked pretty high up. So I don't think that getting your data ready for the full potential of AI commerce is actually in contradiction with going fast. You can do it while leveraging AI and showing that you're actually making the most of the new technologies in your role as a leader, CEO or even at the board level.
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Yeah. And so to get a little more tactical then and talk about AI, that kind of. To your last point, AI that's enhancing, not necessarily disrupt. I mean, there's big and broad ways to use AI, but that can take a bit of not only thought but a lot of good data and other things you mentioned. But when we talk about AI and the customer journey, where are you seeing the most effective low risk, high reward applications today?
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So it's a very interesting question because I think there's a common misconception on that topic. Today we're seeing a lot of companies that are starting to use Genai to generate large volumes of content because it used to be complicated to generate content when you want to translate, when you want to do copywriting, when you want to do all of these things. Well, it's a difficult task, it's time consuming, it's effort intensive and the rest. So we are seeing companies leverage Geni to do that. I think that is one of the biggest risk potentially of the year or the next couple of years. It's to think that AI is going to be autonomously able to generate large amounts of contents that have added value. Because ultimately, yes, from the title of a product I can generate a 50 page description with OpenAI, but it's just going to be AI slop. And the products you're selling, you don't want them to be slop, but the only way they're understood is through the data you're sharing with your end customers. So I think one thing to be extremely mindful of and where I think huge amount of risk is, is to leverage AI to generate infinite number of content because in the end it will only dilute your sales performance and your brand image. Where I think AI can already play a huge role is indeed on the discovery side. You know, we're seeing more and more Traffic coming from ChatGPT or from Gemini. So making sure you're visible in these environments, I think AI by helping enrich products product data is actually a great way to convert better and to drive more discoverability. So that's also a big element. And then yes, at the tail end, doing translation of well curated and understood content or doing some slight alterations on the end copy can actually be something that is meaningful too.
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The way I like to describe it, you want agents to work with and for you. And ultimately I think any piece of software will evolve in a manner similar to having the users become kind of managers of users. When you manage a team, you need to be able to explain them clearly what you want. You hire a new team in your company, you need to say how the company operates, the type of tones that you want, the type of things that you're selling, how you want to be able to frame the information about that. Then you let them go about their work. We've got agents to modify your data schema, to adjust to that, to extract contents from value system, to map it to other systems, to write content, to translate, put all of that's where it should be. And then as a manager you come back and you need to check some things, some things you can be confident on because it was very clear rules, very easy to check if they're there. You can have automated check. That's going to be 80, 90% of the content, 5, 10% of the contents. The agent is not sure. Like someone in your team would say, you know, Roman, I just did that. I don't know, you know, maybe you should double check. So you're here as an editor to understand what has been done and make some adjustments and then there's probably going to be a last mile where you want to have actually people do the work because, you know, I know some companies, I know, I know some companies with very limited product portfolios. The CEO writes every product description because that's how much they care about the words that are chosen in what they do. So I think that's how it's going to evolve. People are going to become managers of agents that manage product information and as a consequence, some of the work they can describe perfectly, they can have confidence in the outcome. Some of the work needs to be double checked and some of the work still needs to be done manually because in the end you want to have someone you can trust on the most important element of your job.
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Yeah, yeah. So I want to talk about gauging the impact of AI as well and how we can measure this. And one of the core principles of agility is adapting based on feedback. And so when a brand rolls out new AI tools, what's the most important feedback loop that they need to create?
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I think when it comes to AI in the E commerce space, currently the highest impact feedback loop is understanding how you're ranking and being presented on ChatGPT and Gemini, it's kind of SEO but for the AI age. Generative AI engine optimization, that's one of the biggest success at Akeneo this year. It's being able to match for each of your product how they're positioned, which is non trivial because it's not just keyword based, it's intent based. So you need to map intent, understand where your products are and the rest. And I think that's the most important feedback group. It's is your product information actually driving higher performance on this type of media? And if it is great, if it's not, what do you need to adjust and optimize? That's the feedback loop you want to put in place because on top of that, that's actually a virtuous feedback loop. With AI, you can retrieve with AI what's good, what's bad about how your product is perceived. Adjust your product description so that you're able to enrich it, so that it better matches the potential intents and then push it back.
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Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, looking out a bit, you know, a few, a few years, I know it's hard to, hard to see, but so far out. But you know, looking out, how do you see the role of AI evolving from a feature in the shopping experience to something more foundational? You know, will every product interaction eventually be AI mediated? And you know, what does that mean for brand identity?
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So there's A big question around agent E commerce. I mean at NRF this year everybody was talking about agent E commerce which can represent many things but in its full blown form it's full disintermediation. You don't even have E commerce websites anymore. You go, you say I want to look dashing tonight and it will ship a tuxedo to your place that's aligned with your preferences, your size and we are not there just yet. My feeling is first and foremost there is no doubt that AI will have a profound impact on commerce. That's a certainty. Now what will be the impact? But if you look at the impact of E commerce, E commerce redefined a large part of commerce but it didn't kill brick and mortar. It did two things. First, part of what was bought, Brick and mortar actually happened to be sold online. But even what is sold in brink and mortar was influenced by online and E commerce. Now the vast majority of whatever you're going to buy, actually part of the journey has been online. I think agent E commerce is going to be the same. Yes, there is going to be parts of the market where it will just be agentic transaction. You won't even think about it anymore. It will go, it will buy, it will ship to you, you won't go on another website and the rest but that's going to be a part of still going to be a significant part that's going to be on the brand or the distributor website and a part that's going to be brick and mortar. But I'm deeply convinced that even if these two still exist they are going to be influenced by what happens at AgentIQ the same way that Brick and mortar is influenced by what happens online. And so I think it's a new dimension of distribution channels that is coming through AgentIQ that is going to take a bit but it's going to influence everything. And so you need, you cannot afford not to be ready. And it's not just B2C, it's also B2B. We are seeing vast majority of B2B buyers now start discovery on ChatGPT, Gemini perplexity and this type of solutions.
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Yeah, yeah, for better or worse they're not removing any channels, they just keep adding new ones. Right. So yeah, yes indeed.
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It's not making anybody's job simpler but it's a great moment to rethink the connection to your customers. I do think that the ability to focus on intents and not just keywords first gives huge opportunities for brands to actually better attract the consumers that are relevant for their products. But second just turns completely on its head the full of the current E commerce funnel. Because will there still be SEO? Will there still be search ads? Will there still be. I don't know and probably they will be there but maybe you know, the same way that the display ads still are here. You know it's a small part of a small part of a small part of the business. I think the way we're going to be driving discovery and ranking whether paid or organic in a year or in two years going to be radically different from what we do today today. And to be honest, at the core of it is going to be one simple thing. Your product data.
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Yeah, yeah. And so looking at this from the consumer perspective as consumers already, you know there's, there's a lot of, there's been a lot of focus on consumer data privacy but you know, as consumers become more aware of how their data is used to train AI models. What's the, what's your advice for executives today to you know, future proof their brands to data privacy and transparency do
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Yeah, I think there's going to be a lot. I'm not sure brands will have that much more to collect on users than what they do today. Today there's already vast amounts of information that are known on the users. I think significant part of the added information is going to be more on the, on the gen discovery channels. So I don't think there's going to be a huge impact on that. No. I think on the privacy elements the big things were that is going to be developing in the next few maybe even weeks. That is interesting is how this system actually integrates ads. You've seen the announcement that ChatGPT started to say they were going to have ads in ChatGPT. I don't know if you've seen the super bowl ads from Entropic on the inclusion of ads in Genesis. I think that's the heart of the debate that's going to happen and that will define what the future commerce funnel looks like. If there are ads and you can pay to be on top, it will go in one direction. If there are no ads then it means the business model will need to be different, probably transaction based. You know, getting a fiance transaction which by the way and if it's transaction based it means the core currency that you're going to be fighting for is not giving money to be on top but making sure you're the product that converts the best. And the only way you're going to be to you're going to have to influence conversion is actually the product data. It's comprehensiveness and its freshness that you're pushing to the systems. So there is a world in which there is no higher impact on your performance than your product data because ads might not be there anymore and your website might actually be a secondary or tertiary channel because many of it is going to go through perplexity and tropic. OpenAI Gemini.
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Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Well Roman, thanks so much for joining today. Really enjoyed talking about this with you. A couple last questions before we wrap up here. First one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
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Well, I think that admodel and how do you get on top organically or paid of the gen engines is going to be something that's going to be moving a lot over the next 12 months.
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Yeah. And last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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I listen to Kulu podcasts. You know that's the best way to go.
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Love it. Awesome.
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Thank you very much, Greg.
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All right, thank you. Well again I'd like to thank Roman Fouch, CEO at Aquino for joining the show. You can learn more about Roman and Aquinyo by following the links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack, tech services, talent solutions, solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode, hit subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKillstrom.com that's G R 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. The Agile Brand.