Salesforce's Nitin Mangtani on how AI is evolving on-site search

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®

Episode: Salesforce's Nitin Mangtani on How AI is Evolving On-Site Search
Date: June 24, 2026
Host: Greg Kihlström
Guest: Nitin Mangtani, GM and EVP of Agent Force Commerce at Salesforce

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Overview

This episode dives into the transformative role of AI in the evolution of on-site search, shifting from basic keyword-driven models to advanced, conversational, agentic experiences. Greg Kihlström and Salesforce’s Nitin Mangtani explore why this evolution is strategic for brands, how it impacts customer experience and operational processes, and what the future holds for commerce in an omnichannel, AI-first world.

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Guest Background & Expertise

• Nitin Mangtani joined Salesforce via the acquisition of PredictSpring, which powered point-of-sale systems for major retailers (Crate & Barrel, Under Armour, HOKA, Lovesac, etc.).
• Now GM and EVP of Agent Force Commerce at Salesforce.
• Handpicked to run Salesforce’s commerce products due to his track record in integrating physical and digital commerce.

Memorable Moment:
“It was first foray for Salesforce to get into real world Salesforce obviously being the leader in the digital world... This was like a great kind of extension of Salesforce to bring Salesforce in real world.” (03:39, Nitin)

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From Search to Discovery: Rethinking On-Site Search

Traditional Keyword Search Problems:

• Limits user expression; doesn’t mirror natural human conversation.
• “Fire and forget” interaction—no continuity.
• Heavily reliant on innumerable manual rules and tuning.

AI-Driven Search & Agentic Commerce:

• Inspired by the conversational explosion seen with tools like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude.
• Movement from keyword matching to intent understanding and ongoing dialogue.
• Brands can create experiences mimicking in-store associates—personalized recommendations based on holistic customer knowledge.

Quote:
“You can now say, ‘I’m looking for dressier sneakers that go along with my dark jeans.’ And that’s a much more expressive need. But that’s how humans behave, right?” (05:53, Nitin)

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Impact on Customer Experience & Brand Strategy

A Step-Change, Not Incremental:

• Comparable to the leap from basic search to ChatGPT-level interaction (“It’s not even like 2x, it’s 10x jump.” – 08:52, Nitin).
• Brands shift from matching typed words to creating ongoing digital conversations.

Personalization Example:

• Mimics a physical associate who knows returning customers, their tastes, and history—offering tailored options, not overwhelming racks of items.

Quote:
“In real life, there’s never fire and forget. You don’t restart the conversation all over again. You are in a conversation.” (10:19, Nitin)

Business Outcomes:

• Higher conversion rates and average order values.
• Reduced returns (returns in apparel are up to 18–20%—“one in five dollars are returned”—a problem AI-powered experiences help mitigate) (10:19, Nitin).
• Improved customer satisfaction and discovery.

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Merchandising, Operational Changes & Implementation

• With advanced AI, the old patchwork of endless merchandizing rules becomes obsolete:
  “If you have to write a rule for every single use case, it’s just not scalable. That means the search is broken.” (12:49, Nitin)

• LLMs (large language models) provide context, social media awareness, and nuanced semantics.

• Notable Example: If users type “Taylor Swift wine,” rather than returning zero results (no product named that), the AI recognizes cultural references (Instagram posts) and offers similar wines (Sauvignon Blanc, New Zealand, etc.).
  (14:49, Nitin)

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AI Search within the Salesforce Ecosystem

Enabling Broader Scenarios:

• Acquisition of Simulate accelerated innovation by three years.
• Integration with Commerce Cloud democratizes access to advanced, agentic AI search for all customers.
• Feedback across CIOs and retail execs: overwhelming positive.

Quote:
“Everybody I spoke to…knew Simulate, they knew John and Vivek, and everybody’s like, amazing move. I’m glad you guys acquired Simulate.” (18:56, Nitin)

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Proving ROI & New Measurement Possibilities

Standard Metrics Still Matter:

• Conversion rate, Average Order Value (AOV), search click rates, engagement times, etc.

What’s New/Possible:

• Reduction in return rates.
• “Long clicks” (engaged, meaningful interactions).
• Omnichannel analysis: understanding buying and return behaviors both online and in-store.
• Empowering associates with agentic AI for better, faster recommendations and “endless aisle” capabilities.

Quote:
“If you can give more accurate answers...the chances of you returning a product will be reduced because you are kind of hitting the mark on what the customer wants.” (10:19, Nitin)

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Omnichannel, AI Across Touchpoints

• AI powers unified experiences online and offline (physical stores, mobile apps, web, etc.).
• Associates use AI tools to help in-store customers, increasing their own efficiency and potentially commissions (24:10–25:01).
• Salesforce’s June release (Storefront Next, agentic experiences) touted as “the biggest release in the last five years.” (25:01, Nitin)

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The Future: Integrated, Contextual, Conversational Commerce

Product catalog integrations with external AI channels (ChatGPT, Gemini):

• Commerce is happening on both brand-owned and syndicated channels.
• Partnerships with OpenAI and Gemini; part of the Tech Council for UCP protocol.
• Traffic and discovery increasingly influenced by conversational agents.

Quote:
“I had a review yesterday with my team and we are looking at how much traffic is referral traffic coming from OpenAI and Gemini.” (26:24, Nitin)

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Vision Five Years Out

• The line between discovery, personalization, supply chain, and experience will blur—customers can fluidly converse with AI to design, select, and order products, even for highly specific or aspirational needs.
• Ultimate vision: “Wouldn’t it be great if...we can dress up everybody like you’re on a red carpet at Oscars every weekend at a cost that’s feasible...you get this dress delivered or a blazer or entire outfit delivered to you by Thursday evening. That would be my dream.” (28:10, Nitin)

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Looking Ahead: One Year from Now

• Core commerce tenants remain (search, mobile, unified commerce); tech sophistication and mainstream adoption accelerate.
• Devices may evolve (e.g., shopping via AR glasses in real-world contexts).

Quote:
“In a year, the core tenants won’t change...but adoption is going to go from early adopters to mainstream. Second is the technology is going to get much more sophisticated.” (29:00, Nitin)

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Staying Agile: Nitin’s Advice

• Be a customer first—experience your own products and competitors’ as a shopper.
• Embrace constant iteration—don’t get trapped striving for perfect vision upfront, but refine the vision continually:
  “The perfection of a vision is a fallacy…how do you iterate every two weeks?...That’s really the mantra to building amazing consumer oriented products.” (31:06, Nitin)

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• “It’s a bigger change than just, hey, it’s a step change improvement...It’s a step function jump...order of magnitude as we went from search to ChatGPT.”
  – Nitin (08:40–08:51)
• “You don’t want like 100 or 1,000 or 5,000 rules. That means the search is not doing its job...That means the search is broken. It’s fundamentally broken.”
  – Nitin (12:49)
• “If 25 years ago somebody told us that we are going to see 20% return rate, we would have not even started on E-commerce.”
  – Nitin (22:30)
• “Can the AI really reduce the cost barriers and delivery barriers?...Adoption is going to go from early adopters to mainstream and you’re going to see a lot more advancements to the core technology behind this stuff.”
  – Nitin (29:00)
• “The perfection of a vision is a fallacy...how do you iterate every two weeks? So you should have the North Star, but iterating your vision...that’s really the mantra.”
  – Nitin (31:06)

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Key Timestamps for Segments

• [03:21] – Nitin’s background and role at Salesforce
• [05:30] – Shift from keyword search to agentic, conversational AI
• [08:40] – Customer experience transformation and “step-change”
• [10:18] – Mimicking associate behaviors, impact on returns
• [12:49] – Decline of manual merchandising rules
• [14:49] – “Taylor Swift wine” example, semantic search in action
• [18:56] – Acquisition of Simulate and Salesforce’s strategy
• [20:52] – Proving ROI, reducing returns, advanced metrics
• [24:10] – Omnichannel implications and empowering store associates
• [25:01] – Launch of Storefront Next and future-facing moves
• [26:24] – Integration with external AI channels (ChatGPT, Gemini)
• [27:55] – Five-year vision for agentic commerce
• [29:00] – What will change in the next year
• [31:06] – How Nitin stays agile in his leadership role

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Conclusion

This episode provides an in-depth look at how AI and conversational interfaces are radically evolving on-site search and commerce at large. The insights from Nitin Mangtani illuminate not only the technical shifts but also the strategic, operational, and customer-centric imperatives for brands seeking to remain competitive—and agile—in a world of agentic experiences.

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For More:

• Learn about Salesforce’s commerce innovations at salesforce.com
• Connect with Greg Kihlström at GregKihlstrom.com

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End of Summary

Transcript

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[Greg Kilstrom]

hi, I'm Greg Kilstrom, host of the Agile brand, and here's a question for you. What if the most common point of failure in your digital customer experience, the no results found page could become your greatest opportunity for conversion and discovery. Agility requires not just adopting new technologies, but fundamentally rethinking core customer interactions like Search that have remained fairly static for far too long. It demands a shift from rigid rules to responsive, intelligent systems that learn from and adapt to customer intent in real time. Today we're going to talk about the evolution of on site search. For years, it's been a functional yet often frustrating utility for customers. But with advancements in AI, it's transforming from a simple keyword matching tool into a conversational discovery engine that can anticipate intent and drive a more intelligent customer experience. 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 Nitin Mengtani, GM and EVP of Agent Force Commerce at Salesforce. Nitin, welcome to the show.

[Nitin Mengtani]

Thanks Craig, good talking to you. Happy Friday to you and our listeners.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to talking about this. This is definitely a topic top of mind for myself and I know many others. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Salesforce.

[Nitin Mengtani]

Yeah, I joined Salesforce two years ago with the acquisition of PredictSpring. I was founder and CEO of PredictSpring which was a modern point of sale company. So Craig, over the weekend if you want to go to a Crate and Barrel store or an Under Armour store or a HOKA store or a Lovesec store, they all are powered by what was Predict Spring POS and now Salesforce point of sale and then six months in this role. So I was trying to make sure the POS product is well integrated into Salesforce. It was first foray for Salesforce to get into real world Salesforce obviously being the leader in the digital world. Our founders Mark and Parker invented SaaS computing and then now being leading with Agent Force and data cloud. And so this was like a great kind of extension of Salesforce to bring Salesforce in real world. And then Mark asked me six months into this role, why don't I run the entire commerce for Salesforce. And that's obviously a huge honor when Mark calls you and offers you this role. So obviously I took on this role with all the excitement and then the passion for it and yeah, here we are.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Nice, nice. Love it. Well, yeah, let's dive in here and we're going to talk about a few things today but want to start as we always do from the strategic standpoint here. And I want to start with what I teed up in the intro. Just this, this strategic shift from search to discovery. And so the concept of on site search has been around for decades. Certainly you know, those listening have been, have been working with it and around it and so on and so forth for four years now. What's the fundamental business problem with traditional keyword based search that prompted this strategic shift towards what you would call agentic AI?

[Nitin Mengtani]

Yeah, you know it's, it follows the consumer behavior. Right. If you, you know See what's happening in the consumer web, whether it's the Google's AI mode, obviously Gemini and ChatGPT and Claude. So we all are kind of moving away from the behavior that we hear. Like, can I just type in two keywords to. Well, I can have a full conversation now.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah.

[Nitin Mengtani]

And I can express myself much more in a more detailed way versus trying to just limit my expression. Jeans or sneakers. I can now say, well, I'm looking for dressier sneakers that go along with my dark jeans. And that's a much more expressive need. But that's how humans behave, right? I mean the clicks are new to human behavior. Languages and conversations are not new to human behavior. So humans have been conversing for thousands of years and it's in fact computers were like a little bit of anonymity in that behavior for the last 50 years or so. And so now we are back to how we should all have the most natural way to interact. And same applies to if you own a website or a mobile app, right. So if you have Michael Kors or Ralph Lauren or, or Birkenstock or Hugo Boss or suitsupply, you all need a interface which is much more robust than a simple keyword based interface. And so then I started looking around and these decisions are complex. It's always a build versus buy question, do we build this in house? We had amazing talent. And then I also looked outside and a lot of times you're like, okay, if I could reach that step, step B in six months versus three years, well that's a, you know, material kind of, you know, speed and innovation. And so we spoke to a few companies in this space and I was lucky enough to meet the similar team and the founders, Vivek and John, and just a phenomenal, phenomenal talent with their background from MIT and Stanford. And we're just lucky to cross paths and here we are. They're part of the salesforce family.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah. Yeah, great. So, you know, in you describing that, I mean, there seems to be, you know, companies have been working with the, let's call it the old way, the keyword based way of doing things for years. And certainly there's infrastructure set up for that and everything. So this seems like less of an, let's call it incremental improvement and more about really fundamentally changing the way that a brand interacts with their customers. Instead of just accepting keywords typed in and matching. This is conversational. It's a bigger change than just, hey, it's a step change improvement. How does, how does something like this change the brand's overall customer experience and the, the way that they treat things even like first party data.

[Nitin Mengtani]

Yeah. I mean, you know, if you think about three different things, I guess. Right. One is, yeah, it's, it's a, it is a step function jump. It's a similar order of magnitude as we went from search to ChatGPT.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Right, right, right.

[Nitin Mengtani]

We all saw that, you know, order of magnitude jump. Right. So it's not even like 2x, it's 10x jump. And so it's clearly that order of magnitude jump when it comes to e commerce experience. And I feel really proud that our commerce cloud customers now have access to this technology. Right. So it's a, it's a huge jump in the last 20 years. Right. Like, I mean, keyword search has been around for 20 years in E commerce world. So from keyword search, which is, you know, 20 years to now, this big jump now, how does it impact the consumer behavior or the brand experience? Again, my perspective is the best e commerce experience is you're in a physical store. Equivalent to that would be you're in a physical store. You are with an associate. He or she knows you very well. You're like, oh, Greg, welcome back. What are you looking for? And you're like, oh, I'm looking for a blazer. And the associate is not pointing you to a wall with 200 blazers or a section with 200 blazers. They are bringing you three blazers that will look great on you because they know you, they know your taste, they know your past purchases. They're like, yeah, Greg likes these colors. And I know what Greg bought in the past and I know what the new arrivals are for summer this year. So I'm going to bring the three, which I think will look great on Greg. Right. And you can kind of continue the conversation. Right. The problem with keyword search was it was fire and forget.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah.

[Nitin Mengtani]

There was no follow on versus. In real life, there's never fire and forget. You don't restart the conversation all over again. You are in a conversation. Think about that shopping session. You are in the store for an hour and you continue to converse. You're like, yeah, actually I like that blazer, by the way. Do you have anything in blue? I want to try that. Do you have something a little bit more casual? So you're kind of constantly giving the additional prompts to the associate as you are refining what you want. And so you want to mimic that same behavior in the digital world where the conversation continues. It's not just you type in a Query blazers. And then the session ends. The session doesn't end, it just continues. And so that's really the delightful aspect for a brand experience and the consumer experience, because now it's 24,7, it's accessible to you on your mobile phone. And the last thing is. Yeah, conversion rates. Right. Can you improve the conversion rates both when you're selling? Right. Because that's the ultimate metric conversion rate, average order value, but also can you reduce the returns? The biggest problem in apparel at least is the returns are 18% these days. Almost one in five dollars are returned. And that's bad for many reasons. It's bad for environment, it's bad for your bottom and top line both. And so if you can give better, more relevant answers and more accurate answers, which are products, in this case, the chances of you returning a product will be also reduced because you are kind of hitting the mark on what the customer wants. So it's a threefold kind of answer to your question on how big of a shift is this?

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, yeah, well, and I think maybe to go back to your point about the fire and forget a part of this, you know, when talking about making this operational and implementing it to your, to what you were saying about this is instead of. This is a set or a series of searches and keyword matches and things like that, it's a conversation. Right. So what does that mean when marketers and commerce leaders are used to essentially having a lot of manual rules that, that kind of guide how things go? You know, what is that? How does that world change when. When it actually comes to implementing this, when things seem a lot more fluid in a, in a conversational atmosphere?

[Nitin Mengtani]

Yeah. I always thought the merchandising rules in a lot of ways were almost like a patchwork to limitation of a good search engine. It doesn't mean you don't need it. Merchandising is the most complex art, like being a buyer. I just appreciate the taste of a buyer. A good merchandiser. A good buyer knows what they want to buy. The curation is a very hard science, whether it's digital world or real world. And then how do you put that assortment both in the physical and the real world? Those are really hard sciences. I have tremendous respect. But you don't want like 100 or thousand or 5,000 rules. That means the search is not doing their job. If you have to write a rule for every single use case, it's just not scalable. That means the search is broken. It's fundamentally broken. And unfortunately that's been the state of the art in the last 20 years. It's just been a lot of tuning, a lot of this thing, micro optimization. And this is where when we looked at simulate, they kind of took the broader knowledge base they had about everything that's going on in the web and LLMs and Genai. Right. Which is the semantics are much more sophisticated than simply the synonym. So the concept of having synonyms and merchandising or boost rules and what the IR folks will call query rewrite. You're rewriting a query as types in. It's not even when I was at Google, this is 2006, literally 20 years ago. You know, I had built an E commerce search engine, Google Commerce Search and I had launched it, right. And then you can read about it. And so that tech stack was available even 20 years ago. But what's new is really leveraging the power of LLMs. And I'll give you a concrete example. So let's say you are Bemo or what's the liquor store or chain near you, Greg?

[Greg Kilstrom]

Well, here in Virginia it's state owned stuff. So the abc.

[Nitin Mengtani]

Yeah, okay, abc. Yeah. So actually I didn't know Virginia has state owned. I know Canada, we have some customers, which is a lot of state owned thing. But yeah. So you know, if you are a, you know, a liquor store or you sell wine, right. And you have your website and a mobile app, right. And let's say you type in Taylor Swift wine, what would you get? Zero search results, right? Because there's no Taylor Swift branded wine out there in the market. So you're just going to get zero results. Now if you really take a step back and you understand what's going on in the social media and everything, you would see that Taylor Swift had posted some Instagram posts where she's drinking white wine, right? And people found out what that wine is, they're like, oh, that looks like Sauron and black and is it from New Zealand? And they did all this research and kind of zeroed down to actually that particular brand. Wow. Right. So there's been a lot of chatter around like what kind of wine that Taylor Swift likes. Based on her Instagram post, we are able to take that knowledge and apply this very advanced semantics instead of giving zero search results because you're like, well, I don't carry Taylor Swift wine because there's no such thing as Taylor Swift, right? You say, oh, I understand what you mean. Oh, you mean you're looking for a white wine or you like Sauvignon Blanc or you like the growers from New Zealand, let me show you some search results that will come closest to you. So that level of advanced semantics coupled with this full conversation, it's not fire and forget. You can then further refine say like oh, can you show me wines in the 100 to $200 range? Can I, can I get a little bit more dry side? So that kind of, you know, conversation in the same interface without leaving it allows you to shopping kind of, you know, the whole funnel which we haven't seen so far because as I said, you just keep typing in two keywords on that search box.

[Greg Kilstrom]

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[Nitin Mengtani]

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[Greg Kilstrom]

Let's maybe take it one step further. And so certainly you've already mentioned the acquisition of Simulate by by Salesforce. How does taking that into, you know, a Salesforce ecosystem, what does that enable and you know, how does that enable maybe broader scenarios and you know what? I guess. Yeah. What does it enable?

[Nitin Mengtani]

Yeah, I mean, you know, as I said, we kind of went through and we go through this. Right. For other acquisitions too. I mean we acquired some phenomenal companies like the history of Salesforce, including my own company, PredictSpring. Right. So commerce is very important to Salesforce. Mark absolutely loves retail. He's very tuned in into all the products, not just Commerce, obviously. And he's in his founder mode. It's still same energy, so it's kind of fun to think about it. So from Salesforce perspective, this was like build versus buy decision. We came to the conclusion that buy will help us accelerate our roadmap by three years. And that's a great value to our joint customers that we can offer it morning than in 2030. And that's kind of if you look at many of the E commerce platforms out there. And I respect my competition tremendously. And competition is beautiful because it brings the best out of you. They don't have this level of sophistication. It's a very advanced next generation search that we are able to offer to our customers. And the feedback has been extremely positive, like across the board. Everybody has spoke to all the CIOs. They either knew Simulate, they knew John and Vivek, and everybody's like, amazing move. I'm glad you guys acquired Simulate.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Nice, nice. So let's talk about. I know you touched on this a little bit earlier, but I want to talk about how we prove ROI on this. Certainly from a, from a customer experience perspective, it's definitely an improvement when you move beyond that simpler keyword search and into something conversational. But the standard metrics are still going to apply in an E Commerce setting. But what else becomes important or what else becomes possible to measure that should be focused on in this kind of conversational experience?

[Nitin Mengtani]

Yeah, I mean, you're right. Like, you know, conversion rate is still conversion rate. Right. You're driving traffic to your website and you want conversions to be high. AOV matters, you know, the units, the overall average, the order value matters tremendously. Right. So you can have a high conversion, but you'd also prefer that if the order value was instead of 100 bucks, $250. Right. So you kind of lift in this thing so those metrics don't go away. Search click rates, you know, like long clicks versus short clicks, engagement time, response to like, you know, in like how many prompts you get the answer so you're not in the prompt Doom loop also. Right? So you want to also make sure the technology is smart enough that it's there's one thing to have conversation, then the other thing is to have too much of conversation. So you want to make sure the technology is giving you the most highly relevant search results. The example I gave you, it's instead of pointing you to an entire rack of 300 blazers, you want to bring the three that will most likely appeal to you. Returns I mentioned to you we don't talk about returns a lot. I mean 20%, 18 to 20% returns is crazy. If 20 years ago when we started on this journey or 25 years ago if somebody told us that we are going to see 20% return rate, we would have not even started on E commerce. Like the board would have shut down the E commerce projects. They're like, wait a second on slide number three, did you say that the returns are going to be 20%?

[Greg Kilstrom]

You're right. Yeah.

[Nitin Mengtani]

So I think it's important. And this is where our omnichannel also plays in. Right? Like part of having point of sale is you can now buy online and return in store. And the beauty of returning in store is we are able to analyze the data. Why? Because we can talk to a customer and saying what happened? The size was not right. And more important we are like oh it's just a size issue, then let me give you the different size that might fit in you or if you didn't like the color, I actually have a different color. So going back to the store or taking the customer back to the store allows you to do an exchange instead of a straight return. So the foundationals of unified commerce don't go away. Like connecting online and offline, which is also something we've been talking about for a long time. Those foundations don't go away. But more importantly we are also bringing similar to store associates. So if you are in a store and you're looking for something and you don't have it because the stores these days are not 300,000 square feet, they are like 3,000 square feet brand owned stores. So we are seeing a transformation. And so you can't by design you cannot carry every single assortment and every single product line that you have. And so endless aisle becomes important because then you can see what's everything in your warehouse, not just in the store or stores nearby. So the iPad that we have and the devices tablets we have to the associates, they can also use similar interface to look for products on behalf of the customer in the real physical world which is also new, which most people haven't talked about. How do you bring AI in this physical stores but not trying to take away the human. The human is important. It's making humans life easy.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, yeah. Well and I mean I think that's the. In all the conversations about E commerce I think it sometimes overshadows the fact that just how important brick and mortar stores still are as well. And so and also just how consumers have different behaviors when they go in a store versus when they shop online. And yet they want a seamless experience across the board wherever they are on whatever device or in person or whatever. So being able to tie those things seamlessly, it also, I mean I would imagine augmenting how an in store employee is able to help a customer, that's going to save them time and if, if there's commission, greater commission, all that kind of stuff too. So it seems like a win. Win across the board.

[Nitin Mengtani]

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean and then bringing this whole agentic experiences in real world that's definitely net new because we only think about consumer but here associate plays an equal role. So we are making some of the biggest moves I would say in commerce here at Salesforce in the last five years from the acquisition of PredictSpring. To simulate we launched Storefront Next, which is our new front end experience that complements the agentic experience. This is by far, we are calling it the June release that is coming up in less than two weeks. It's our biggest release in the last five years.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Wow. Wow. Exciting. That's great. Well, and I want to talk a little bit more about some of the future stuff and so, and maybe this touches on what you just mentioned, but you're piloting product catalog integration with external AI channels like ChatGPT and Gemini. Certainly there's a lot of talk about brand discovery and visibility and all those things in agenta commerce. What does this mean for the future of discovery and how do you see kind of the line blurring between owned properties and some of these third party conversational platforms?

[Nitin Mengtani]

Yeah, I mean commerce will happen what I call it on owned and operated properties, Agent ecommerce, the properties you own, your mobile web, your app, your website, your stores. But it will also happen on agentic channels like Gemini. OpenAI Definitely the referral traffic is going to come from OpenAI and Gemini. We are already seeing it right in our stats and I had a review yesterday with my team and we are looking at how much traffic is referral traffic is coming from OpenAI and Gemini. So what we have done is we have signed a partnership with both OpenAI and Gemini and we are also part of the Tech Council for UCP protocol to enable commerce on Gemini and other revenues. So on our side, we are basically leading both sides of the movie. Agentic on owned and operated properties and Agentic on what I call it syndicated channels such as OpenAI in general.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, great, great. And so then looking a few years out, five years, maybe too far out to see, what would you say is the, the ultimate vision for agentic AI and commerce? You know, and again, keeping in mind that there's still going to be some of the more, let's say, traditional methods, but you know what? Will, will every customer interaction be mediated by, mediated by an AI agent or you know, how, what's, what's the what, what's the vision here?

[Nitin Mengtani]

Yeah, what's your favorite awards ceremony? Like music awards, Golden Globe, Oscars? Like which red carpet? You kind of picture yourself being there?

[Greg Kilstrom]

Oh, I don't know, maybe Oscars.

[Nitin Mengtani]

Okay, so Greg at Oscars. Well, wouldn't it be great if between the discovery experience, the optimization and the cost reduction in supply chain and the curation, what if we can dress up everybody like you're on a red carpet at Oscars every weekend at a cost that's feasible, that's affordable and you can just customize it by just having this whole conversation and you get the stress delivered or a blazer or entire output delivered to you by Thursday evening. That would be my dream. In five years, that's where we would know AI really accomplished its job.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, yeah, Love that, Love that. Well, Nitin, thanks so much for joining today. Couple last questions as we wrap up here. First one is, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?

[Nitin Mengtani]

Yeah, so I think the core tenants don't go away. Right. So for example, we started talking about mobile commerce in 2007 when iPhone launched. Mobile commerce is still important, right. It doesn't mean like, so it's been 19 years since iPhone launched. It doesn't mean mobile commerce is no longer relevant. Right. We talk about search. Search has been there for 25, 30 years. Right. It's still. So I think the core tenants don't go away right now. The devices will evolve, right. So maybe glasses will have a bigger prominence. Right. And you might be able to, you know, interact in real world with your glasses and do shopping like that. You're like, you know, you're at your friend's place and you're like, oh, I really like this coffee table or you're in a real world at a restaurant, you're like, oh, I love this cutlery. And your glasses will be able to recognize it and you can just talk to it. And you're like, yeah, let's buy it. So I think the core tenants in a year won't change. It's going to be the same core tenants, but there's going to be. Adoption is going to go up. A lot of these things we are product is launching. The adoption takes whatever, sometimes two weeks, sometimes few weeks. So adoption will be more mainstream. Like every brand that you interact with today will have a agentic experience instead of just the early adopters. So it's going to go from early adopters to mainstream. Second is the technology is going to get much more sophisticated. Maybe the Oscar one won't be ready in a year that I'm asking for five years or maybe three years because the cost is also important. Can the AI really reduce the cost barriers and delivery barriers? Yeah. So I think it'll be in those kind of dimensions. The core tenants of Unified Commerce Mobility don't go away. Adoption is going to go from early adopters to mainstream and then you're going to see a lot more advancements to the core technology behind this stuff. Love it.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Love it. Well, 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?

[Nitin Mengtani]

Yeah, there's kind of two parts to that puzzle, Craig. One is I'm a shopper. Before I'm a technologist, I literally every time I meet a customer and the folks, those who know me, I would shop something whether I'm in their store or on my mobile device. I would literally go through an entire buying experience, discovery and buying, because that kind of helps me understand the consumer mindset and what's going on. Because if you start from a consumer experience and then bring the technology, it's the right sequencing versus the other way around. Second is I'm a huge believer in iteration. The perfection of a vision is a fallacy. Everybody should have a strong vision, don't get me wrong. But this thing of like, oh, I'm going to just write a PRD for next 18 months is the most flawed way of thinking. Totally. It's like, how do you iterate every two weeks? So you should have the North Star, no doubt. You should know your North Star, you should know your strategy, should know your vision. But iterating your vision and really fine tuning it and optimizing it every two weeks or every week or every day. That's really the mantra to building amazing consumer oriented products.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, I love that. Well again, I'd like to thank Nitin Mengtani, GM and EVP of Agent Force Commerce at Salesforce for joining the show. You can learn more about Nitin and Salesforce 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 [e-mail] that's 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 and advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKilstrom.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.

[Nitin Mengtani]

The Agile Brand

[Greg Kilstrom]

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