Calm the F&^% down, and Other Thoughts on Agentic Commerce, with Russ Dieringer, Founder and CEO of Stratably

Transcript

Our transcripts are generated by AI. Please excuse any typos and if you have any specific questions please email info@digitalshelfinstitute.org.

Link to article: https://stratably.com/the-agentic-commerce-reality-check/

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (00:00):

Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where industry leaders share insights, strategies, and stories to help brands win in the ever-changing world of commerce.

 

Peter Crosby (00:22):

Hey, everyone. Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. We really are trying desperately hard to be the no hype machine on all this AI and agentic stuff. And we have an incredible partner in that effort who brings outstanding research and analysis to the fight. Yes, listener, Russ Dehringer, founder and CEO of Stratably is back on the podcast following earnings season, Cagney meetings, and his own research on behalf of his clients to present the reality of the agentic opportunity versus the hype. It's a great deep breath moment for all of us working amidst the hucksters and the shiny object crowd. Russ Derringer, welcome back to the pod. It's been way too long. It's so great to see you.

 

Russ Dieringer (01:05):

Oh, wonderful to be back. Thanks for inviting me back.

 

Peter Crosby (01:08):

No, of course. And agentic commerce, that's what we're going to talk about. I'm just going to get that right away. Pull the bandaid off.

 

Russ Dieringer (01:16):

Of course. Why wouldn't we talk about it, right? It's top of mind. Top of mind.

 

Peter Crosby (01:19):

But why this is such a great conversation is we want everyone to calm the F down about it.

 

Russ Dieringer (01:25):

Your word, Peter's words, not mine.

 

Peter Crosby (01:27):

Exactly. Yeah. No, I'd love to make it an explicit podcast, but not today because I want to make sure everyone listens to this even with their children in the room. So there's just a lot going on. But the other day when OpenAI pulled back on instant checkout, because guess what? Commerce is hard. But all of this is going on. People are hearing from grifters all over the place that, oh my God, this is an urgent emergency. And so we wanted you to come because you've talked to so many people, so many ... You were at Cagney recently, so hearing from a lot of CEOs, earnings reports, all of those things. And you've got a point of view that I think is really cogent at this moment in time. So dive in, what's going on?

 

Russ Dieringer (02:14):

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, appreciate it. I think we've all collectively been in this space for, what, a decade plus now at this stage. And I'm not sure there's ever been a time where there's been as much FOMO on stuff as there is right now, mostly because of agentic commerce. And so really for the last, I don't know, 18 months or so, it has just been a wild world of announcements and investments on behalf of the tech companies, evolving business models, and frankly, I think a lot of hand wringing inside of our consumer brand clients. And it's tough to sort of understand where we're at today and where it's going when we have this backdrop of just announcement after announcement. And Meta's building a gentech commerce and it's going to fundamentally change everything.That's a lot of the headlines, not to pick on Meta.

 

Peter Crosby (03:15):

And which causes the C-suite to turn around and well, the board, and then the C-suite to turn around and go, "Where are we? What are we doing? What's

 

Russ Dieringer (03:23):

Happening?" Yeah. And what's interesting, I wrote on LinkedIn a few weeks back is that every C-suite is so hyper-focused and interested on agentic commerce and then only mildly interested on e-commerce.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (03:37):

Can you imagine if they were as interested about agent commerceces?

 

Russ Dieringer (03:41):

Yes. I know. I was like, this is what we've been trying to say for a while now. Where's

 

Peter Crosby (03:46):

The growth coming from, Russ?

 

Russ Dieringer (03:48):

Where's the growth? Yeah, right. We could have done that session again, which was, we've written recently about that just because it keeps being pertinent. So

 

(04:01):

To your point earlier, in the last couple of months, we looked at, hey, what's actually doing our best to suss out what's actually happening today? What are companies actually doing today? And what's realistic and what can they expect from taking action? And our purview for listeners is mostly through the large to mid-size consumer brand lens. So what can these types of brands do in response to all the craziness that is Agentic Commerce? I do think we should take a moment and try to arrive a little bit at a common language around what do we mean by Agentic commerce because that can mean a lot of different things. There's others in the space that have done, I think, a good job at laying out the different stages of Agentic Commerce. For my purposes, as I talk about it here today on the podcast, really and what the analysis that we wrote about focused on was shoppers using chatbots to help them discover research and purchase products.

 

(05:10):

So you can think about a shopper using ChatGPT to, I tried this, find a set of good cross-country skis in the depths and balls of winter here in Northeast Ohio a couple weeks back, or using Rufus to help find some new shampoo, which if there's video of this podcast, I don't really care that much about. But as an example, maybe I should have used toothpaste, which I do care about.

 

Peter Crosby (05:36):

No, I was going to say there's ... Not a lot of product needed

 

Russ Dieringer (05:44):

Up there. I'm coaching my oldest son's basketball as an assistant coach or whatever. And with a kid that we had the first practice the other day, and these kids are young, very young, seven years old. I don't know how old this kid, five, because he's like, "Hey, you're bald. That's what he told me. " I'm like, "Well, I'm not bald. It's just short haircut." Anyways, this podcast is getting off topic quickly. But anyway, so that's what I'm talking about for the discussion today is Agentic. I don't think we're really anywhere near the sci-fi version, although I know Amazon has the buy for me announcement and maybe hopefully that'll come up later, but we're really, in my opinion, we're not anywhere near autonomous agents going out buying us stuff and just shipping it to us.

 

(06:30):

That is maybe a possibility, but I'm not even going to address that. It's more like, how are consumers using these tools now and over the next 12 months or so? And so I guess to break it down, consumers using chatbots, although Lauren, you had that great chart in your Substack today that I saw, consumers are using chatbots and they're using it for a variety of purchases, including researching products and discovering products, however we want to separate those two things. But I think actual shopping, particularly in the horizontal agents, we've probably overhyped the industry collectively has what I would say is overhyped it. We're still extremely, extremely early in that space. And the companies that we covered in our recent research report, which would include large CPGs, Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, Shopify, I think their remarks and what they're doing would support that despite, again, every conference, every panel, everything really hyping up Agentic, the companies closest to it are really describing it as super, super early and maybe it pans out and we'll see and we're testing and learning.

 

(07:56):

And so we're not trying to be pessimistic about it, but more so trying to provide the industry sort of an honest assessment, which we can do because at Stratably, we're an independent research firm. We really don't care one way or the other which retailers gain share, lose share. We don't care if Agentic takes off or doesn't take off. We're just trying to understand and predict what's going to happen on behalf of our clients. And so that's what we try to do with the report.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (08:24):

And Russ, I would agree with you. I think when you really look at the data around the consumers that are using it to make a purchase, there's a level of trust that just isn't there for the consumer wanting the agent to actually take the action. They'll do the research. They love that because it narrows down the options, but all the research indicates that they jump off of the LLM, they go to the PDP on the website of the retailer and then they purchase from there. So that's the behavior that we've seen, I think, similarly in all of e-commerce. So that wasn't super surprising to us, but there's a huge element of that kind of trust factor.

 

Russ Dieringer (09:00):

Well, there was sort of a big leap that everyone was making and suddenly

 

(09:03):

Saying like, "Oh, ChatGPT is now the seventh largest retailer in the world if we looked at queries or whatever." And I get where the sentiment was coming from, and I'm not knocking that sort of view of things, and the growth is so explosive, so it's hard to model anything that's growing that explosive. But to your point, actually getting a shopper to check out inside of some non-retail platform is extremely hard. And we've learned that lesson, right? We learned that lesson with social commerce first and foremost. Now, TikTok shop might be the exception to that rule, and it already is in certain categories, but look at what Meta's experience was. And that's why, again, I'm not here to pick on Meta, but Meta suddenly saying, "Oh, now because of AI, we're now going to be able to get the consumer to check out and there's going to be a Gentic inside of Facebook and Instagram or however they're characterizing it.

 

(10:01):

" I don't know, maybe. I mean, I don't know why we would suddenly think that that's going to be a reality. And ChatGPT has certainly experienced that. They've walked back native checkout, but even with the current experience where they narrow down the results,

 

(10:19):

One, they're not including Amazon in those results, at least as far as we can tell, and I know there's been a very public Amazon saying that shall not scrape our site and everything else, but when you don't have them, the options that it's surfacing are often not delivered as fast as Amazon or maybe Walmart, the price competitiveness isn't necessarily there. And what do we mean by best? And maybe we'll talk about that later on Shopify and this concept of merit-based shopping and so on and so forth, but all to say, there's trust needed to check out, but there's also, they have to develop trust that they're actually delivering the best options for shoppers. And I'm not convinced that they are based on what we've found in our experimentation with it. Yeah.

 

Peter Crosby (11:15):

And in the IAB and talk shop survey and report in October, they found that 95% of consumers take additional steps online after using AI to feel certain before buying. That 95% that's essentially everyone is leaving the conversation that they had and going, "Okay, now let me check."

 

Russ Dieringer (11:42):

Yeah, let me just check. Yeah, let me check. So I guess within that though, okay, well, maybe there's clearly a role to help with research and discovering how do I think about some new category that I'm in? What are some decent options for me? Help me learn a little bit more so that I can make an informed decision. And those tools are playing some role today, some meaningful, I would say meaningful role based on the surveys and those types of things that we've seen, a meaningful role in that component of it. Now, so far we've talked mostly about the horizontal agents. The vertical agents will get to Rufus and Sparky. That's a little bit of a different sort of animal in terms of thinking about what consumer brands can do and how they should prioritize those things.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (12:30):

So we mentioned the board and the C-suite and how they're thinking about Agentic and how it's a popular topic in every meeting, but you recently went to CAGME. And so for those who don't know, it's the consumer analyst conference in New York and all the top CEOs present from the biggest CPG companies. So think like Pepsi, Canva, Unilever, P&G, you name it, they all present their strategy and their results and what they're focused on. So Russ, I am very interested to see, did they talk about Agentic? Did they talk about e-com? What came out of

 

Russ Dieringer (13:08):

That?

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (13:08):

Yeah.

 

Russ Dieringer (13:09):

And just to clarify, I wasn't actually at the show. I just looked at all the materials and it took me forever because there are 31 companies that present for an hour long and the transcripts and the slide decks, I've never seen so many consulting frameworks in one week time. I mean, it's just like there's frameworks within frameworks within frameworks and it's wild and it's a lot to wrap your head around. But anyways, we did all that work. We do it every year.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (13:36):

You were virtually

 

Russ Dieringer (13:37):

There. Yeah, podcast. Yeah. I have to do it asynchronously because it takes me so long. But anyways, I believe there were 31 of these large consumer brands that present their strategy. It's not just a digital focus conference, but it ends up digital themes and trends tend to be a big part of it. And frankly, I was surprised leaving that conference, virtually speaking, that Agentic commerce did not come up more frequently. I mean, by our tally, and maybe there'll be people out there that can correct me, we heard three companies out of the 31 mention Agentic, and really L'Oreal was the only one that we heard say any actual tactical action that they were making in response to Agenttic where they were talking about loading their structured data directly into ChatGPT so that it didn't have to scrape, I guess. But that's all it said. And it was like a couple sentence comment within a hour-long presentation for L'Oreal and no one else.

 

(14:46):

I mean, there were two other companies that said sort of very high level remarks, but Agenttic was almost completely absent from the whole week, which was pretty shocking. The flip side, like quote unquote AI was very much talked about, but it was all in how companies are using AI in a variety of ways for internal processes as an example, content creation, things of that nature. And so there was a ton of focus and emphasis on we're leveraging AI as an enterprise in a variety of ways, but as it pertains to agentic commerce, very little discussion, much more discussion on Amazon or TikTok shop or e-commerce broadly or how they're trying to activate inside of stores in a unique way, very little on Agentic.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (15:41):

But at least e-commerce came up this time. I feel like in previous years, right? It wasn't everybody talking about e-commerce. Would you say that has shifted?

 

Russ Dieringer (15:49):

I don't know. Oh,

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (15:50):

No.

 

Russ Dieringer (15:51):

I don't know if it's shifted. Honestly, I mean, no discussion about retail media. It's gotten better over the years, but it's still ... I don't know. I feel like the word omnichannel is coded for brick and mortar. They talk about our omnichannels, but it's mostly just stell brick and mortar. I don't know. I mean, there was a fair amount of discussion around e-commerce, and maybe a little more than the prior year, but it's not where I would like it or where I think it should be, but maybe that's a tough bar.

 

Peter Crosby (16:28):

So Russ, you were talking about horizontal versus vertical, and I would love to dive into Rufus, who I always think is a dog. So Amazon is clearly investing in Rufus, and they say that it's being used by close to 300 million users. But to talk to your thing about hype versus reality, is there an actual sales impact?

 

Russ Dieringer (16:53):

So Amazon disclosed that Rufus generated around 12 billion in incremental GMV, gross merchandise value. So it's one piece sales plus the value of the three piece sales for merchants. So 12 billion in incremental GMV in 2025. They don't disclose how they arrived at that number or what the methodology is. They, from our perspective, are incented to put as big of a defensible number out there as they can because their investor base is worried that they're going to be disrupted as a result of agentic commerce. So they have some incentive to put out a big number. And 12 billion, I mean, it depends on how you think about it. I mean, on the one hand, it is a big number. That's a lot of GMV. But when you think about Amazon scale, it's relatively small, one to one and a half percent or so of its total GMV.

 

(18:03):

So a very, very small, minor amount of direct incremental sales are flowing from Roofus today. If you think about that number, if that doubles, we're getting into 3% of its GMV.

 

Peter Crosby (18:19):

So the incremental, the incremental word is interesting to me because how do they determine that? It could be because really it's just a different shopping channel with the same intent, which is to find a product. Yeah.

 

Russ Dieringer (18:38):

I don't know how they get at it. I mean, again, I guess we have to take them at their word and get broad strokes, that's how much it is. They don't disclose it. They don't disclose it. And it keeps getting more and more integrated throughout the site. And it's probably a year from now where it's going to be sort of almost silly to even break up. That would be my thought is we won't even really be able to talk about siloing off Rufus from just quote unquote regular search. But anyways, that's what they said, and it's kind of a rounding error for them. And we've done separately benchmarking

 

(19:19):

Of the consumer brand community. And we've asked them, "Have you taken steps to optimize your PDPs for Rufus?" And only a small percentage when we last asked those questions, which was around six months ago, a very, very small percentage said that yes, they've taken meaningful action as opposed to testing it out on a ASIN or two. A very small percentage said, "Yeah, we've taken meaningful action to try to do that. " And there's great resources out there on understanding what are those actions. Lauren, I know DSI in partnership with some third parties have published work on that. So a small percentage have taken those actions, but a very small percentage of the small percentage feel like those actions have done anything for their business on Amazon. And I think part of the reason why is twofold. One is there's just not a lot of sales going through it.

 

(20:17):

So if you don't have much on the numerator coming in, it's tough to find the signal in whatever data you have. And then secondly, as you both know in the spot of the industry that you're in, making content changes and seeing the impact on the business has always been sort of challenging for brands. And that was even in a world of search term driven sort of optimization. And so we've said, we've tried to make the analogy of search was sort of a black box, and so it oftentimes got underfunded content, organic content responding to search algorithms was a black box. Agentech commerce is like a black hole because it's looking at the PDP content, but then it's looking at a bunch of other stuff. It's looking at ratings and reviews, which are more or less out of a control of a consumer brand, but it's also looking at Good Housekeeping Magazine from 2018 and where you've featured in that or not.

 

(21:22):

It's looking at maybe Reddit. Reddit, where you're out of control. It's looking across the internet. It's looking at the press releases you've put out. All of these things that brands may or may not have really ... I mean, they largely haven't, concentrated a ton of effort on because it kind of didn't matter before, but it does matter today. So even if you're really incorporating FAQs into your copy and writing in natural language and so on and so forth, all those things you can do on the PDP, it doesn't guarantee that that's going to result in you showing up in these chats more and driving incremental sales, which is ultimately what everyone wants and the third party tools to measure share of voice and market share, as far as I know, they're really not there yet. So there's really, I mean, it is a black hole that brands are finding themselves in with this.

 

(22:18):

And I think the only saving grace of that is there's just not a lot of direct incremental sales going through it. So I don't know, take that for what it is. Is that positive or negative? I don't know. Well,

 

Peter Crosby (22:31):

I think it's just this moment in time. And so one thing that made me wake up and take notice and thinking about where is Amazon putting their efforts? And they just announced, this is when we record this, it's today, March 11th, they've just announced the ability for merchants, brands to be able to sign up to participate in ShopDirect using a third-party feed. So wherever their best authoritative product content is, now essentially any merchant can use that source. In their announcement, they mentioned Feedonomics and CED Commerce and a little company, Salsify, I don't know what that is, but anyway, those were the three companies mentioned. Yeah. Salsafi. No, that's the root vegetables.

 

Russ Dieringer (23:34):

Stratablistably,

 

Peter Crosby (23:36):

I guess. Exactly. The Emphasis is on the wrong syllable. So they launched this capability. They launched ShomDirect last year, and about a year ago, they also had the buy for me purchase capability. And what this is doing is making sure that Amazon and its shoppers can shop essentially anywhere from Amazon and will have the best authoritative content from brands to be able to do it. So they clearly are, and I think this is so important for the brands who are listening, that the LLMs and the retailers will always want to be able to offer the agent, in addition to the shopper, the best possible authoritative content and earn that authority label from the agents so that they are making this the source where they start and then they go check.

 

(24:35):

And that's what shoppers do. And so I think this announcement says to me, this is Amazon investing for the long term and knowing what foundational content is required to make this work on the digital shelf, the agentic shelf, the physical shelf. It almost doesn't matter. So that to me says sales are coming, all that in some ways, like it did in e-commerce will work itself out, but if you want to be ready for it, then this is ... And getting your product in front of millions more shoppers through this program, I think is pretty exciting. But I was wondering, Russ, if you had a thought on that.

 

Russ Dieringer (25:15):

Yeah. I mean, I think even separate from a gentech commerce, it illustrates another example where Amazon is ahead of its retail peers. So a lot of its retail peers are trying to build a marketplace here in 2026. So we're trying to add selection to the marketplace. We're trying to get consumers to buy this additional selection from the marketplace. Amazon's done that and now they're trying to say, "That's not enough. Let's go outside our marketplace and let's bring on other retailers or brands assortment, and let's not constrain ourselves to our marketplace. Let's offer anything wherever it's sold and we'll help facilitate it in some way." So I think it's one, just another indication that Amazon is very much and remains at the leading edge of things. And then on the Agentic side, part of ShopDirect is buy for me where you can

 

(26:11):

Click into that and then have the agent purchase on your behalf. And I think that's interesting. It's almost like, I don't want to call it a party trick because it's not what I mean by it, but it's an element of Agentic, but it's not ... I think the first point is really the meaningful point on that. And so now brands can get their products shown to however many millions of shoppers, and that's great. And then this test of, buy it for me, let's see if consumers respond to it, or maybe that's going to be confusing to them. If you see if you're on a search page and you're seeing this selection, it's like, "Do you want us to buy it for you and have our agent do that? " I imagine that adoption that's going to be slow going or has been supported. Very early

 

Peter Crosby (26:56):

Adopter.

 

Russ Dieringer (26:57):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we'll see.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (27:00):

So that's where Rufus is and that's where Amazon is focusing. Let's pivot to Walmart and Sparky, which by the way, Peter, also to me, sounds like a dog. So I don't know-

 

Russ Dieringer (27:11):

I love the competition, just the fierce competitions. Yeah.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (27:18):

So Walmart's taking a bit of a different approach with AI and they're partnering with ChatGPT, unlike Amazon who's put up that wall. So tell us, Russ, how are you seeing Sparky fit into this whole agent to commerce world?

 

Russ Dieringer (27:33):

Yeah, I would say so. I think Walmart's just hedging. I think their sort of dual hedged approach illustrates that they're not sure necessarily what the shopper's ultimately going to prefer. So let's certainly do a vertical agent, i.e. Sparky, to match what Amazon is offering with Rufus. And then let's also partner with ChatGPT as an example and more directly integrate information into their chats and see if shoppers see if that ultimately has an impact on the business. So I think it just speaks to that they don't really know. On their most recent earnings call, and frankly, in some of my conversations with people across retail, again, the results are so ... They're not sharing anything about the partnership with ChatGPT and whether that's frankly really doing anything for their business. Even Sparky, they stopped short of disclosing a GMV number. They had other metrics like 50% of their app users have tried or used Sparky.

 

(28:48):

Again, are they using it all the time or sometime or they've used it one time? I don't know. They don't really disclose that. They talked about basket sizes being bigger when someone uses Sparky. Is that because Sparky's helping them build a basket? Is it because these are the most ingrained app users that are building basket? I mean, again, we got to take these retailers at their word and just say, oh, I guess Sparky's helping build bigger baskets through its recommendations that it's making. But long story short, you just didn't get a lot. We haven't gotten a lot of information from Walmart consumer brands. We've been telling them, "Hey, ask your merchant, ask your Walmart connect rep like, Hey, how's this impacting the business? What can we do besides just try to make our PDP content talk to the agent better? Is there anything else we can do?

 

(29:44):

What beta programs can we participate in? " All of those things, brands are kind of in the dark and they're very interested in Walmart sharing more information with them, but as far as we're aware, they haven't yet.

 

Peter Crosby (29:59):

Let's take a Let's take a look over at Instacart because for them, it seems like this is really important. This happening is really important for them. And so I'm wondering where they're at.

 

Russ Dieringer (30:16):

They've certainly positioned it that way publicly in their remarks and they claim to be the first grocer to have partnerships with OpenAI as an example. And that makes sense with their former CEO, Fiji Simo, going over to OpenAI. And so they were kind of seemingly pretty bullish on it. But then in their earnings call, like Walmart, they didn't really talk about any real impact. I mean, they used the terms very, very early to describe Agentic commerce and that type of characterization of it. And then I think especially with ChatGPT or OpenAI walking back their native checkout ambitions as of last week, as last time I checked, I don't think Instacart has said anything publicly about that. They're sort of, and Walmart will probably talk about the in- app sort of model that they're working with OpenAI. The average consumer here has no idea what an app is inside of ChatGPT.

 

(31:34):

They just don't. And so how much commerce is actually transacting in that way? I don't know. So I think that was a ... I'd imagine inside of Instacart's four walls, they're pretty disappointed about OpenAI changing course here away from-

 

Peter Crosby (31:51):

OpenAI changing course? That never happens.

 

Russ Dieringer (31:55):

But even before that announcement, what Instacart talked about was, "Oh, well, we're going to win that consumer. We think we can win incremental consumers and then we'll figure out how to get them over, in my words, we'll figure out how to get them over into our app or our site in the future and be able to make money from it. " So it was still sort of an open question mark around what is the real ... Can this work from a financial business model standpoint for all parties involved? At the end of the day, ChatGPT is a new layer and OpenAI desperately needs to make money. So there's commissions and there's going to be ads. And then what does this do to retail media? All of these downstream effects of putting a new layer between the shopper and ultimately the in- store grocer business. Instacart was already a layer that was challenging from a business model perspective.

 

(32:50):

Now we have another layer in there. So it just presents a lot of questions about these business models. And I think we have to just keep this in mind that it is very early innings. We don't exactly know what business models are going to emerge around this, and partly because we don't even know if the shopper's using these tools to any substantial degree.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (33:12):

Yeah. The measurement thing I think is so important for anyone listening. I get questions all the time like, "Who's measuring this? Who should I pay for to measure this? " We don't know yet. We're all just trying to figure out what this looks like because if a hundred people use the same exact prompt, they're all going to get different responses. So right now it's just very early on that I think it's important to just understand and test and learn. But that leads me to the next question, Russ. If you're a brand manager, if you're on the brand side, you're listening to this podcast, what's the one thing that they should do today, tomorrow, next week to prepare for a future where agentic commerce might be more prevalent or whatever that future looks like with AI?

 

Russ Dieringer (34:00):

So I think the core takeaway is we've moved past the old world of keyword centricity, and that was the paradigm that we were in for a long time before LLMs came to be and before these chatbots, that we're not going back to that world. We're now in a contextual semantic world of word calculators, which is kind of what I think of these LLMs are and these chatbots are. And so in terms of what you can control comes back to the PDP. So is it machine readable? And that's, I think, the one foundational action that will pay off regardless of these evolving business models and regardless of who emerges on top as Agente commerce plays out. I mentioned before, you all published a great report illustrating the things that you can do on the PDP. That's a great place to start. I think in addition to that, if the comms teams inside of these consumer brands aren't aware, I think at this point they're aware, but their role is bigger now than it was before.

 

(35:20):

Positive press, press releases, so on matter more to the direct visibility inside of chat than it ever has before. So there's a heightened value to that function and that capability, and that warrants more investment. L'Oreal's data point at Cagney, per what we were talking about earlier around proactively structuring and feeding your data into ChatGPT, that's very tactical thing. If that's an opportunity for you as a brand, that's something that you need to examine. But again, you're not really going to be able to truly have a great sense of like, we did X and we got Y in any precise way out of it. So have realistic expectations around the business case, the payback of these things. Beyond that, I think we can all take a deep breath. We can just set aside the FOMO. We can set aside the hand wringing that everything in the world is changing with shopping and Amazon's going away and we're all going to have these agents just buying us stuff and we're never visiting stores.

 

(36:22):

I mean, that is some of the hyperbole that's out there. It is changing things, but it's maybe not as dramatic as what we think right now. And as we sit here in 2026, brands are not operating in a vacuum. Magenta commerce doesn't enter their potential projects to invest in a vacuum. There's a lot of projects to invest in a vacuum, and you've got to be careful that you don't let the FOMO crowd out other things that are important, as important, more important, that can deliver financial returns over the next one to two years, and you'll have greater control over determining those returns. So that, at least at a high level, is the advice that I give brands based on what we've learned at this point.

 

Peter Crosby (37:15):

And I think if one of the things that our listeners always need to do is be the canary in the coal mine, whether it's getting people like, "We got to move on this thing," or calm down. So this podcast and certainly what you've written, I think is great ammunition for a lot of the fear and wonder that's coming down from the C-suite to sort of push back and refocus on the brilliant basics, on the fundamentals, on the things that no matter what happens with this, no matter which direction the way we know what we need to do to succeed. And a lot of it, by the way, most of it, maybe all of it, will also enhance our results today in our digital channels. And that's really where the focus should be and just take care of the basics that I think is as always probably the best answer.

 

(38:16):

Yeah.

 

Russ Dieringer (38:17):

Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think that it's unclear if you're a first mover today into Agentic, that you're going to have some long-term competitive advantage. I mean, I just think we don't want to be slow. We want to make sure that Agentic is at least towards the top of our test and learn priorities, but maybe not at the top of our overall priorities, but let's stay close to it. Let's do some of the things that we are able to do now that are widely considered best practice, and then let's see how it evolves. But in the meantime, let's try to do some basic stuff right too, and it's hard to do the basic stuff just for good old-fashioned e-commerce.

 

Peter Crosby (39:02):

Yeah, go ahead, Lauren. Sorry.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (39:04):

I was just going to say the only double-click I'll say to that about the first mover advantage is I think the hardest part for brands is going to be the internal work they need to do to get ready for an Agentic commerce world. So what I would encourage brands to do is think about how are you operating internally? How can you move quicker? How can you remove silos? How can you have faster processes? Because we're waiting to see what's going to happen with agentic commerce, but regardless, you're going to have to move faster, be more connected and be more adaptive. So if you can fix that, that work will not be wasted. So I really encourage brands to focus on internal org ways of working because that will help you in the long run for agent commerce.

 

Russ Dieringer (39:50):

Yeah. And to the point earlier about the CAGNY presentations, how can we leverage AI in a variety of different capabilities irrespective of Agentic, but just how can we take advantage of these tools to make us move faster and be able to do more? And if we can do that, then we'll be able to move quickly as Agentik unfolds down the line.

 

Peter Crosby (40:12):

And a final reminder, take your gosh darn vacations. It's going to be

 

Russ Dieringer (40:22):

Okay. It's

 

Peter Crosby (40:23):

Going to be okay. It's going to be okay. Yeah. Stop putting it off. Go, guess what's going

 

Russ Dieringer (40:27):

On? Just go. Just go back. Take a deep breath.

 

Peter Crosby (40:30):

Exactly. Russ, oh my gosh. Thank you as always for allowing us to amplify your incredible industry and intelligence work that you do for your clients to a broader audience. It's so valuable and so grateful. And you are a forever member of the Digital Shelf Institute, whether you like it or not.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (40:52):

Whether you like it or not, it's exactly what I was going to say. You're stuck with us.

 

Russ Dieringer (40:56):

Well, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on again and great topic, great discussion. So thank you for having me.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (41:02):

Thanks so much, Russ.

 

Peter Crosby (41:04):

Thanks again to Russ for his brain and everything. Avoid the hype and lean into the reality at the DSI Summit in May, digitalshelfsummit.com. Thanks for being part of our community.