← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#857: Tealium's Zack Wenthe on the hidden challenge of AI-driven commerce
00:27:17
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- [00:00]
A
Hi, I'm Greg Kilstrom, host of the Agile brand, and here's a question for you. As you race to adopt AI powered shopping experiences, are you creating a new data black box that will make your customer journey less understood, not more? Agility requires not just the speed to adopt new channels like AI based search and shopping, but the foresight to ensure these new touch points don't become blind spots in your customer journey. It demands that our data strategy evolves as quickly as our customer facing technology. Today we're going to talk about the hidden challenge of AI driven commerce. As major brands roll out compelling shopping experiences, they risk creating a new data black box. When customer interactions happen inside these AI environments, the insights from those conversations can become disconnected from the overall customer journey, making it difficult to measure impact and act on what you've learned. 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. Again, I'm your host Greg Kilstrom 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 adoption. For more information, go to techsystems.com now let's dive in. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Zach Wendthe, director of product marketing and customer data evangelist at Telium. Zach, welcome to the show.
- [01:39]
B
Thank you. I'm excited to be here and look forward to it.
- [01:44]
A
Yeah, looking forward to diving in as well. Before we do though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Telium?
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B
Sure. Yeah. So my role, I love the customer data evangelist title. It just means I get to come do fun things like be on this podcast and join webinars and talk to customers and get out. I've been in the space. I've been in the CDP and customer space for almost eight years now, which makes me an elder in the CDP category. But I was in Martech for over a decade before that in consulting. I was, you know, a marketing technologist before Scott Brinker made that cool.
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C
Right?
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B
You know, and obviously started my career in marketing. So, you know, I've been around, around the space and you know, I've never seen anything change faster than it is now. And so I love Getting on, you know, shows like this and kind of talking about what we're seeing and, you know, hopefully spur some ideas and thoughts for others who are kind of navigating all of this.
- [02:46]
A
Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, yeah, and we're going to, we're going to cover quite a bit today, so we'll want to, want to start like we always do, just kind of looking at this from the strategic level here and talking about, you know, certainly, as you said, and as we all experience every minute, almost of every day, AI getting integrated into something. In this case, we're going to talk about integrating AI into the customer journey. So from that strategic lens, what is the biggest risk for a brand that adopts agentic commerce or, you know, AI shopping assistance, things like that, without really having a plan to capture and unify that interaction data from the start?
- [03:28]
B
Yeah, I think, you know, with the, with let's maybe define agent E commerce quickly is the idea that, you know, your chat experience is actually going to also be your shopping experience where a consumer searches for a pair of shoes and then they can do an instant checkout without leaving the, that, you know, that chat window, whether it be, you know, Claude or OpenAI or Perplexity or whatever, wherever your favorite experience is. And so to your question though, of, you know, what is that risk or what is that challenge to strategy? It's your whole, you know, kind of checkout journey experience is shifting out of your environment, in your control in a lot of ways to a walled garden, to a third party who is handling the discovery, is passing on information to you. But obviously you don't know how that consumer browsed, what the decision criteria was, what they were comparing it against potentially. And so you miss out on a lot of that shopping experience, obviously. And as I think consumers are starting to use AI for discovery, brands are also starting to realize, hey, yeah, we want to be there, but is it worth giving up all of that data and all of that journey in order to be where the consumers are? And I think that's the question that people are really kind of wrestling with right now.
- [04:59]
A
Yeah, yeah, well, and I mean, that really does kind of shift the definition of a customer touchpoint. I mean, some of what you said, kind of thinking back to the advent of social commerce, there's some, you know, the walled garden thing can, can apply there. There are those some key differences here. So you know, how, how should marketing leaders reframe their definition of a customer touchpoint when now we're talking about conversations in a cloud or ChatGPT or whatever that the brand, to your point, doesn't. Not only they don't directly control, they're not really involved in that. Right?
- [05:40]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously the shift is going to impact different brands in different ways. But I think if you think of the kind of traditional discovery process of buying something, I'm going to buy a couch and I want to go and I want to look for, okay, well I need a big enough to fit this size of the room and I want this kind of fabric and I want all of this information. All, all of that kind of research and discovery now can be done in a lot of ways in an LLM or AI based chat experience. And so from a touch point, you're not having a touch point because your brand is being represented, but it's almost being represented by a, I mean it's not almost, it is being represented by a third party. And you don't have a lot of control over what information gets presented, how you're shown against your competitors, or whether the recommendations you know it's making is right. It's almost as if, say a retail store, it's like a guy standing outside your front door telling you about couches before you, before you walk in the door and you're like, I don't have a lot of control over what he's saying. I'm just hoping they eventually walk through my door. And that's gonna be a shift for a lot of, a lot of organizations.
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A
Yeah. So then how do brands collect data in these instances? And what should they be thinking? What kinds of data should they be trying to capture from these interactions where they can.
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B
Yeah, so I think there's two tiers of data that are coming right now from a kind of an agentic experience. One is a more traditional kind of referral. People are doing search, they click on a link, they land on your website and then they make a purchase. They don't. They sign up for your credit card, whatever, whatever that action is. And in that scenario, what's happening is it's almost high intent but low directionality data that's coming in because somebody's landing cold on your website and then almost immediately going into, or hopefully immediately going into some sort of buying patterns, you know, and so you don't know really what led them there. And so that's where your brands are going to have to really start to think about first party data, zero party data, asking surveys, how did you find us? What was important? What were the drivers, you know, kind of asking those press, you know, those Kind of process questions, either post checkout or even, you know, kind of pepper in some of those, along the, along the checkout flow to kind of get some information because you're just going to be missing out on a lot of that, that context which we can talk about kind of what that affects. But I said there was two kinds of data. So then the other side is really where you have protocols like OpenAI came out with, you know, their commerce protocol, Google has theirs where literally the checkout exchange, actually they're not even coming to your website. There's a backend connection to your e commerce system, you add it to the cart, you do instant checkout right through that chat experience and you just get basically fulfillment information. You get the customer name, you get the information, you get the product. And that now you're missing out on a whole lot of experience. And as brands have started to figure out those who are testing it, you don't get to inject coupons or promotions to maybe influence basket and purchase size. You don't have loyalty information. There's a lot of things missing right now in those protocols and I think that's, that still has to be worked out. I think there's a lot of kind of back and forth negotiating going on in, you know, in that space.
- [09:35]
C
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A
So just given where things currently stand, and certainly this is a fast moving space, but where things currently stand, what architecture, what technical components, what needs to be in place to be able to pipe what AI interaction data is available back into a system like a CDP and to make it as usable as possible.
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B
Yeah, so I think you have to have at least a couple basic things. You want to have some level of tracking on your website. Obviously, you know, most retailers, most brands are already gonna have that. So when somebody does click through from a, you know, from a third party, they land, you've got some information going on. You just know that, you know, the anonymous to known path may be a lot different in this, in this kind of cycle. So you want to be able to obviously resolve those identities, connect them to a known profile a lot faster, you know, before the checkout process where, so that's where a CDP or something, you know, potentially comes in. The other, the other big thing I think that a lot of brands are starting to kind of figure out is, you know, if they are going to tie into a, an agentic commerce protocol now they have to have the data feed, they have to have their inventory feed, they have to have their consumer details, you know, structured in a way that the LLMs can use it. So now not only do you have to worry about it on the kind of incoming side, but you have to start to have an outgoing kind of set of data available for those agents to consume and to use and hopefully to drive whether that's personalization or checkout or that connectivity back to your underlying ERP or wherever you're managing all of the data. So it's not a small lift to just to say, hey, we're doing this now.
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A
Right?
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C
Right.
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A
Yeah, well, yeah. And I was talking with another CMO actually earlier today, similar enough to what you were saying before about, you know, the, the concept of a website and how we even just to talk about metrics here, you know, the traditional metrics for we want engagement on the site and we want maybe return visits or you know, some indications of interest or something. Now we're talking about, they're coming in, they've done their research already. They're it's websites alone, not to mention other, other touch points, but are very transactional at this point. Right. So what, what are the, what are the KPIs or what are the measurements that marketers should be looking at given, you know, there's, there's a paradigm shift here.
- [13:26]
B
Yeah. I think there's two levels or two kind of KPIs that are starting to kind of bubble up. One is those deep page kind of first hits. So like I'm landing on a product page or I'M landing on a detail page, you know, starting to measure the incoming because you may know what's coming from Agentic, you know, from a referral tracking perspective. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. You know, it's still kind of a black box in a lot of, you know, a lot of scenarios. But looking at that volume because ultimately Gen 2 commerce is much more like a, a Google Ad kind of purchase where it's higher intent, lower volume traffic than maybe organic or kind of like research based top of funnel kind of traffic. So looking at that volume of people coming in at that, at that kind of lower level and seeing how, you know, are they purchasing, where are they dropping off using the tools, you may not know the consumer. So you may have to use things like, you know, heat maps and kind of browsing, you know, browsing replay to understand, okay, well they were on the page, they scrolled down, they got to shipping, they abandoned. So you know, you're, you can start to look at some of the traditional kind of friction points there. But the other side of that then obviously is going to be looking at how does this traffic or how does this purchase convert compared to my traditional traffic? Because you know, news recently from some of the major players, obviously Walmart talked about how their agentic traffic was converting significantly less than regular traffic on their site. So they're pulling back on agentic commerce. One of the big reasons is instant checkout from OpenAI. You know, from, from OpenAI was a single item. Well, people buying at Walmart wanted three, four, five things and how, how do we, you know, so basket size, average order value, all of those things start to get affected and it's like, well is, is that growing audience worth the, the handoff? And I think that's the, that's the other thing that CMOs and kind of brands are, are really going to start to understand is yeah, we may be taking a hit on the organic side, we may be taking a hit on the, on the, you know, the research and the search side. But you know, is investing in trying to capture that audience worth the revenue that we may or may not get, you know, from Agentic. And I think that's still a TBD on a lot of people's, you know, plans.
- [16:07]
A
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's like, you know, they don't, they don't take anything away, they just keep adding more things. Right. So it's, it's, this is another one of those things. And, and to, to your other point, the other traffic is not going away. I mean it, at some point it may go, go away completely. But they, you know, they said print advertising was going to go away to, you know, a few, you know, a couple decades ago. So, but I, I guess this also sets up a challenge for marketers because now you've got this high intent transactional visitor to your site and you've got the traditional, you know, I'm going to browse, I'm going to look around and maybe, maybe I'll buy, maybe I'll come back or, or whatever. You know, how do marketers deal with kind of that, those two very different mindsets? I mean you can certainly, you can track source, but to your other point, it's not 100, you know, it's not 100% accurate in all cases. So are marketers just going to be kind of living in these two worlds for, for a while now?
- [17:13]
B
Yeah, I think they are and I think that's, you know, I, I mean, honestly, they learned to do that obviously in, in from a social perspective, from a search perspective. I think, I think we've, we've kind of learned that pattern to, to adjust to kind of these new channels. But I do think from a, from a learning perspective, you know, a lot of retail marketers or a lot of, you know, kind of brands can definitely look to CPG companies who, you know, have kind of figured out the whole, hey, we don't own the checkout experience. So we have to really figure out how to, you know, how to get that right data, how to, how to be top of mind at time to buy when, you know, we don't maybe control the flow. And so I think there's going to be, you know, best practices and kind of like, you know, learning kind of stolen from that space. Honestly, this is stuff that B2B marketers have been dealing with for a long time where we know 70% of the buying cycle is probably done by the time they talk to, you know, you know, sales. So I think there are, there are going to be kind of a roadmap for navigating a lot of this, at least strategically stealing from other places. But you know, I think the other part of it is, is be open to the changes, be willing to test, try things. Don't get too hung up in the X is dead. You know, I mean, there's so much clickbait, you know, email is dead. Everything, everything is dead, right? And yet everything is alive. And you know, I think the only thing that's dead is like the amount of resources we have to do all of it. And Maybe energy. Yeah, just don't get hung up on, on the hype. Just test and try and learn and, you know, keep moving.
- [18:57]
A
Yeah, yeah, well, and to, to your point about the B2B, I think there's been so much talk about B2B looking more like B2C lately that now, you know, it's interesting and I totally agree with what you're saying. It's, it's, it's a little bit, you know, flipped. Flipped now as well. And I guess along those lines, you know, I just, I do wonder, you know, as agentic, again, it's not going to 100% replace other methods, but as it continues to grow, that role of brand marketing, I think it kind of, to your other point, kind of looks more like the CPG space or where there is an intermediary in between. And so how does this, you know, how does brand marketing change for those that are, should they follow the CPG playbook or the B2B playbook? Does it? And also, you know, are we marketing as much to agents as we are to humans? And what does that mean? What does that even mean to market to agents?
- [19:58]
B
Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, obviously marketing to agents means you want your content to be discoverable, you want it to be well formed and structured. It's all the things we, we know to do from an SEO perspective and from a, from a searchability, from, from an accessibility screen reader, alt text. You know, all of the best practices we've been told to do all along now become, maybe there's a forcing function to really make sure that we're doing it. Because obviously humans may be a little bit more forgiving when they land on your site than an agent is, because they just don't, they won't have the knowledge or the context. And if they hit a roadblock, they'll go, okay, well, find a new source. Because obviously an agent is very outcome driven, so they're gonna look for a way solve the ask that the consumer did. But to the other side of that is. Yeah, is brand marketing important in this space? I think it's going to be way more important than it, than it maybe has been in other performance marketing channels. Because the, the way a consumer prompts the LLM is going to have a dramatic impact on the results you get, the products that get served. So if I start with a search for, you know, hey, I'm looking for a couch, kind of like X, Y and Z, that's going to be a very, very different kind of like criteria. And you know, how you're getting compared against, hey, I'm just looking for a leather couch. And so, you know, yeah, getting the consumers to kind of think of, you know, in your category or think of you in your space, build those relationships outside so that when they are searching, they've talked about you. I think that's the other thing that people haven't talked about and I talked about this actually at a conference is memory with inside the LLMs is going to be this forcing function for brands that I don't think anybody's figured out quite how to tap. But the more you talk to your LLM about a brand or about a type of thing, the more likely it is obviously to use that in the future. And my job, I create a lot of content. I use Sony cameras. So I talk about like, oh, hey, I'm trying to, I'm trying to pack, I'm doing this da, da, da. And I mention it. And now it knows what kind of cameras I have. It has the three. So now anytime I bring up, oh, hey, I'd kind of like, well, for your Sony camera, you should have, you know that, that memory drives a lot of that recommendation experience. So again, getting people to talk to their LLMs and talk to their chat experiences about your brand is going to potentially have a big impact.
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A
Yeah. Yeah. Well, Zach, thanks so much for joining today and thanks for sharing everything. A couple of last questions as 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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B
How different one year ago was and how we had all these grand ideas and how none of it's going to, none of it'll be anywhere what we thought it was going to be. You know, nobody thought gentic a year ago was, was what it is today. And so I think, yeah, just how, how fast it's changed and how fascinating it is that, that the innovation curve is so rapid.
- [23:27]
A
Yeah, yeah. Love it. 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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B
That's a good question. I think, you know, I have two things. One is I, you know, I, I test and I try. I spend, you know, at least a couple hours every week randomly trying something out. So in the AI space, you know, vibe coding, I'm a marketer. I don't know code. I mean, I know code. I'm a nerd, so. But like, I'm not. You don't want me writing any production code. But I've tried vibe coding. I've done it, you know, So I think just experimentation. But I'm also a fan of the classics. Go back and read old books, go back and anchor yourself in older thoughts to get away from it clears your mind. It gives you some perspective. Lately I've been rereading Don Quixote. I don't know why. I just thought I'd do it. And to me it's just that shut off that I think allows me then when I come back to not consistently think about today, but also like, hey, there's a lot of world that existed before and there's a lot of world that'll exist after today.
- [24:38]
A
Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Well, again, I'd like to thank Zach Wentthe, Director of Product Marketing and Customer Data Evangelist at Telium for joining the show. You can learn more about Zach and Telium 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 and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@techsystems.com that's teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you liked 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 greggkillstrom.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.
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B
The Agile Brand.