You are the Agent of Your Own Future, with David Goodtree, CEO and Founder at Foodgraph

Transcript

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

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. The leadership guru, James C. Maxwell said change is inevitable. Growth is optional. Feels apt to this moment, doesn't it? People are anxious about the impact AI will have on their lives and careers. The pace and intensity of the change around us is likely to continue so it is incumbent upon each individual to find their way through to be their own change agent. David Goodtree, CEO and founder at FoodGraph, joins the podcast to talk through some of the best approaches to assess the opportunity and imagine your growth path. Welcome to the podcast, David. We are so looking forward to diving in with you. This is a great conversation. Thanks so much for doing this.

 

David Goodtree (01:06):

Thank you. I really appreciate all the content that's created by the Digital Shelf Institute. I find it valuable.

 

Peter Crosby (01:13):

Oh, thank you. That's really kind of you. So we're going to be tackling a question that is on a lot of people's minds these days. Will AI take my job? I don't mean that me personally. Well,

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (01:28):

Maybe- You're irreplaceable. You're

 

Peter Crosby (01:30):

Irreplaceable. Oh, phew. Okay. Episode's over. But it really is the question of 2026 and perhaps even 2027. And if you look at the headlines, there's a lot of hype out there. It's easy to blow everything out of proportion. But today in our conversation, I think you're going to be very helpful moving us past the panic and look at what it really means to be an AI native leader, what the opportunities are rather than the harbingers of doom. So would love to just start, David, what your initial thoughts on that question are?

 

David Goodtree (02:06):

I think we have to acknowledge the reality of this concern. This concern is real. Lots and lots and lots of companies, public companies, private companies, technology companies like Meta, CPG companies are talking about it, Nestle, P&G, Colgate, Pomalv. We're going to let go of people. We have let go of people and they identify that AI is part of the reason because it's creating change in their business or opportunity for productivity and no less than the Pope last week issued an encyclical, particularly on the subject of the concern for workers and employment. Yeah,

 

Peter Crosby (02:48):

I think it was like 52,000 words or something like that. I'm like- 42,000 words. Yeah. 42,000. Is that what it was? You think you use AI to sort of trim that down a little

 

David Goodtree (02:58):

Bit. Right. Here's a perfect-

 

Peter Crosby (03:00):

Sorry. Lightning will come down

 

David Goodtree (03:02):

Straight. So let's acknowledge reality.

 

Peter Crosby (03:08):

Yes.

 

David Goodtree (03:09):

And anybody who's not, I don't know, fearful or thinking at least about how does this change work isn't paying attention to work. It's relevant and it could affect you personally. It certainly will affect your company and truly it will affect your life outside of work. So yes, real topic.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (03:33):

And David, whose roles do you think are most at risk in this error when it comes to AI taking jobs potentially?

 

David Goodtree (03:42):

So I want to reference one of the speakers at the Digital Shelf Summit, which I attended in Atlanta and was really an awesome event. And there was a guy there from WPP, Jason Karma. And I think he said it right. He said, "AI won't replace humans, but it will replace humans who don't learn AI." And I think he got it right. And I'd like to make analogy. If you were around when the web was invented 1994, people were like, "Wow, that's cool, but it's not going to replace books or it's not going to ... People aren't going to shop that way or whatever." And then there was Amazon three years later, the world's biggest bookstore. Did people predict that Amazon would not only be the world's biggest bookstore, but the world's biggest seller or that they would replace UPS for delivery of packages or that their systems, AWS would basically replace things that were Microsoft systems or IBM systems and put it in the cloud?

 

(04:59):

No, there's an enormous amount of change coming, but to capture Jason's idea, if you were making books, you might've lost your job because people weren't buying books as much. Barnes & Noble virtually almost went away. They're back now, but bookstores are gone and libraries are not frequently visited. And if you go through any technology revolution like the web or the introduction of spreadsheets, spreadsheets got rid of everybody who was using green ledger paper and pencils and created entire new industries around financial analysis and anything around manipulation of numbers and data. So if you wanted to stay with your pencil, you lose your job. If you go back all the way to the invention of the printing press, if you were a scribe with Pirus, you lost out, but this created an entire new industry, industries of bookselling and other things and libraries, K-12 education. One more reference, horse and buggy to car.

 

(06:17):

Think of metallurgy and petroleum and steel and teamsters. So change is fraught. You might lose your job if you don't embrace the change.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (06:29):

And David, you said something before where people lost their jobs, but more people gain their jobs when it comes to the assembly line and things like that. Do you think the same is going to be true with AI or do you think it's going to be slower or we just don't really know what jobs are going to come out yet? I'm just curious if you have any thoughts on that one.

 

David Goodtree (06:48):

Yes, I think it's faster because if you've used anything about AI and practically everybody has used something, you're like, "This is amazing. I can't even believe it. " It's like, "Wow." Whether you're just using it for travel or health, unrelated things to work, it's leapfrogging daily. So I think it's faster, faster than the web, faster than the introduction of PCs. And if you look at any of the growth metrics, it's faster. There was a second part to your question.

 

Peter Crosby (07:28):

Well, I think, Lauren, if I understood it's that the change may be faster, but what is the upside, the opportunity? You hinted at some of those things, which is there are better jobs ahead kind of thought. And I'm

 

David Goodtree (07:46):

Just

 

Peter Crosby (07:46):

Wondering if that's kind of where you're going with it.

 

David Goodtree (07:48):

Yes, a hundred percent. So really hammering on Jason's point, AI will replace humans who don't learn AI. If you think about your job, if your job has a significant component of grunt work, repetitive work, things that maybe you know how to do to move things from system A to system B, you do traffic. So then that seems highly automatable by the reasoning engine of AI. But if you have special domain knowledge and I would think that almost all knowledge workers, white collar workers do, then I think you have an opportunity, but it won't be given to you. You have to go get it. Can I offer a specific kind of example? Sure.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (08:43):

Please.

 

David Goodtree (08:45):

So if your job is, let's say, knowing how to manipulate systems, like how to make Adobe Commerce or Salesforce or Shopify work is expected, you're pulling data from the PIM, you're using the MDM and you understand how all these things work. Well, the movement of the data will probably be increasingly automated by your tools, but your knowledge of your company's brand guidelines and how they're changing over time and how you want to present data in downstream channels and what are the idiosyncrasies that aren't built into the tool, you understand the specifics of your company, those tools, the types of commerce which have proliferated from stores, e-commerce, and then different types of e-commerce with Facebook and Meta and Shopify and now agent commerce and then UGC commerce, UCP commerce. It's proliferating. You have the domain knowledge. So you actually have an expertise that AI doesn't understand.

 

(09:53):

You talk to ChatGPT and you say, "Do it my way. It's what's your way?" So that is your superpower that you can use to embed into tools that you create, which I'm hoping prompts your question. What do you mean by tools you create? What

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (10:14):

Do you mean by tools you create?

 

David Goodtree (10:15):

Thank you. Exactly. Thank you. So if you haven't come across skills, we believe that skills often known as Claude skills or custom GPTs or Google's Gems. These are productivity tools. They take natural language. In other words, you write in plain English, you describe your plan, you embed it with your domain knowledge and you say, "Go do this for me. " And it goes off and creates basically an agent and instructs an agent what to do. You are conversing in plain English, you are providing your domain knowledge You've now put yourself above the AI. The AI is now your worker, your slave. You don't need engineering to do it for you. This is your special knowledge. No one else or maybe only two other three people in your company have this knowledge and that knowledge is changing as commerce changes. So we believe that skills will be embraced as a productivity tool that will equips all prior productivity tools, spreadsheets, Microsoft Office, Google Workspace, because they are super powerful and they rely on your expertise.

 

(11:44):

That's a pretty bold statement. I'll take a challenge if you want to give me one.

 

Peter Crosby (11:49):

Well, it's interesting. I was reading, it was an article from a woman at the Brookings Institution that was in the New York Times the other day and talking about a big study that they've done about how students use AI and the impact on that on their writing. And what they found is that there's the loss of creativity. Everything becomes homogeneous. And they found in the survey that reviewers of the copy actually enjoyed reading the AI stuff more, but the actual new ideas or new thoughts sort of had disappeared. And that sort of difference between, yes, you can ... Because remember, they're generative engines that are just putting one word after another at incredibly high rates of speed.

 

(12:44):

And for anyone that's used it, if you ask it the same question, it's not like you're going to get the same response or you get a completely different response every time. And so I think that to me, that human creativity, the benefit of experience, the ability to look around corners, I think those are the interesting things that anyone who feels that they are at risk is there must be a process for thinking about what do you suggest people do if they feel like your description of what AI is going to take over? Holy crap, that's 80% of my job right now. What should they be doing? What should their thought process be right now?

 

David Goodtree (13:29):

Yes. So look where your own grunt work is. Use, we recommend skills to get rid of the grunt work, create time for you to elevate the role of your work where you get to use more brain, less muscle. So if you've always wanted to do some things in your work, but you really didn't have the tools, you didn't have the time, now you have this super reasoning engine and it's a whole team of something in this little box. Take the grunt work, stuff it down, give it to the machine, and now you get to step up and ask better questions and make better plans. I'll give you an example.

 

(14:22):

So we're a data catalog business. We have the largest catalog of US PG products and attributes with 1.7 million products, our company name is Foodgraph and we ingest data from 50 different sources. And we find, as I imagine many people here deal with is attribute values are messed up when you give them or even internally when you manage them, wherever you may get them from or where you create them. And when you send them downstream, Stop & Shop doesn't display them correctly, but Walmart does or on a different Tuesday, maybe Stop & Shop does, but Walmart doesn't and you really care about this data quality, but you don't have the tools or the time. So employ the skill. If you employ the skill and you say, "Okay, I'd like you to go find here is my authoritative product attributes that we want to see distributed in channels.

 

(15:28):

We know that we're giving it correctly to our channels and our syndication or storing it correctly. Tell me how they appear." Wow, content accuracy. Who's measuring that? Well, you could pay us a good amount of money. We will. We'd be happy to do it for you, foodgraph.com. But to some degree, you could even do that for yourself.

 

(15:52):

Companies like to measure the return on spend. Well, the return on spend is based upon accuracy. Go find out if your data is being accurately managed across the entire chain. I don't work for Salsify, but one of the beauties of Salsify is its amazing customization. That's a distinguishing characteristic of that company. That customization gives you a lot of opportunity to make things the way you want them, but upstream and downstream from you, are they absorbing your customization? Use a skill to find out in plain English.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (16:35):

And you're mentioning skills a lot and I think there's a level of trust that also has to come with using a Clod or a Gem or a Custom GBT because it's getting into this more hybrid workforce where you

 

David Goodtree (16:48):

Have

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (16:48):

Humans and agents working together. So when you're thinking about working with agents and using skills, what are the guardrails or what is your suggestion for people to learn all these things to use them appropriately so it doesn't get out of hand or you don't lose trust or it doesn't

 

David Goodtree (17:07):

Illuminate?

 

(17:09):

Awesome question. So actually tomorrow we'll be publishing what we call our skills manifesto and it will be on our website by the time this thing podcast goes live. One of our skills manifestos things are the principles. I'm just going to read them to you. To be sure, we hold these core principles regarding the use of skills. One, skills are a tool, not an authority. Fill in the word AI for that if you want. Skills output is only as good as the instruction and supervision you give them. Three, skills have tendencies to flatter, make errors and employ incorrect assumptions. Four, it is our team members not the skills who determine what work is fit to ship.

 

(18:13):

Okay. So if those are our principles that we don't trust AI, don't trust AI. It's a reasoning engine. And to your point, Peter, it's not deterministic. It will not give you the same answers. So how do you use this skill, which is flattering, making errors, incorrect assumptions and not deterministic? You put in guardrails, as you said, Lauren. First of all, in any skill AI in general, or when you're talking to a human, forget AI, tell me your assumptions. So the skills output should always say, what are your assumptions? AI will completely reveal that information to you, but you have to ask. So that is a standard output for all our skills. Reveal assumptions. We also say, describe your input from the beginning and whether you're using AI knowledge or you actually went out and looked at the web if the web is the source. So treat it like an unknowing, flattering, error prone thing and demand its compliance with your guardrails.

 

Peter Crosby (19:32):

So good friend of the pod, Jared Zogby, who used to run the commerce practice at IPG and Accenture Song, he's now doing his own thing and he's got a great Substack for anyone who wants to be immersed in what's happening in the CPG industry. He's like a CEO whisperer. He just knows what's happening in the C-suite. And he was telling a story recently of the Barbarian Swarm as he calls them. Those are the third party marketplace sellers that are coming in and stealing together all put together significant share from CPG from larger CPG companies. And the week before he had published a story about a CEO that essentially got fired because his volume growth, the growth volume had dropped and sort of had no plan to how to improve that. And that's going to continue to happen not just in CPG but in other agencies because the platforms like Amazon, the marketplaces love the swarm.

 

(20:35):

They love someone that can come in and also use their services and so are paying them a lot to platform with them and then also create demand. And so thinking about that, and when I was working on our AI and Agentic white paper, one of the things that I was talking about was the chance for our audience to go from being sort of the drudgery of PXM or content management or product experience management to being the growth architect of the company, because growth is going to come from winning more at bats in digital channels largely. The percentage of growth will come from there. And so that shift in mindset of what would it mean to be a growth architect? If I didn't have to spend all this time in spreadsheets or frankly in my PXM system, but instead could be figuring out where can I gain the upper advantage?

 

(21:37):

Where can I gain the edge and how do I automate that at a higher speed than ever before by using technology appropriately? That to me is an exciting opportunity that then would probably also become the CEO that can actually figure out how to unlock growth over the next five to seven years. And I'm just wondering if A, that barbarian swarm makes sense to you

 

(22:02):

And does the opportunity that creates for our audience also resonate with you?

 

David Goodtree (22:07):

Yeah. So applying this barbarian swarm type, which is the idea of competition is multiplying and this is challenging your work and the goals of the company, but also to your point about growth architect opening up the job opportunity. So if you want to stay in the box where you are, you are at risk in your company or finding the new job potentially, I'm sorry to report history shows this as a truism. But if you want to say, "I know stuff and that stuff I can take to the next level and I can do that without actually spending more time, but using the tools to raise my job, you become indispensable because you have domain knowledge and you're surfing the new technology, you're going to be in high demand, you'll keep your job, you might get a raise. If you want a higher level job, that path will be open to you because you embraced the new world.

 

(23:25):

So I completely agree with you about the idea of the competition is intensifying at a faster rate than it never did before than it ever did 10 years ago and 10 years before that. It always seems like this moment is faster. It is. It just is.

 

(23:42):

And simultaneously, the tools are faster and better and smarter and simultaneously the part not to forget is you know stuff. Use the stuff and the tools to keep your job, raise your job, get another job.

 

Peter Crosby (24:04):

And I think part of that is also bringing the top level focus back to what business metrics do you want to be able to impact? And in the current state, before we've been able to automate a lot of this stuff, it had to be things like how many digital shelves can I bring up to snuff and it's only a certain amount and so it has to be the top 20, et cetera. And the metrics are around efficiency or score improvements and all those things will continue to be important, but a lot of that work can happen. And so being able to move your focus to those growth metrics, those raising conversion metrics, those applying yourself to more use cases for each of your products and doing product innovation with a lot more signals from the market. I think there's part of it is just figuring out what do you want to be measured on and maybe thinking about that.

 

(25:11):

I know, Lauren, when you sat in the seat, if you were going through this yourself and all the conversations you've had, how do you think about that shift? What would you be doing if you were trying to figure, which you are, you're figuring it out and writing entire white papers about it. So where do you want this?

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (25:27):

I agree with you have to anchor on the ROI and anchor on how it connects into what you're doing today. I think that's the big challenge here. A lot of people are looking at AI and how it's changing jobs and AEO and Agentech as this new additional thing that's separate from the work that's getting done today. So the way I've been thinking about it is like, how am I taking my current strategy and tweaking the knobs to make content machine readable, to think about how AI can optimize things, to add new metrics to my digital shelf metrics that talk about measuring LLM search or whatever it is that we can measure right now, which is a whole nother conversation. But I think it's about infusing those pieces that are actually going to move the needle instead of just creating a totally separate strategy that's not connected to your existing digital shelf strategy that you've been doing for the past 10 to 15 years.

 

(26:19):

I think that's the big gap.

 

David Goodtree (26:22):

Can I add to that idea?

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (26:23):

Please.

 

David Goodtree (26:24):

So when people talk about measurements such as ROI, they're often thinking about the top line revenue. There's an enormous opportunity in addition to top line is cost and time. So how long does it take to get your product into the channel? Can you take time out of that? How do you use skills, for example, AI, new knowledge that skills can give you because you have the questions to ask, you may not know the answer ask the skill to make a plan to get you the answer. "Here's our workflow. It takes days to do this and days to do that and days to do this. If we could re-engineer our workflow, where are the opportunities to do that so I can get my product into market faster, a limited edition or anything related to the supply chain behind you or the supply chain in front of you.

 

(27:33):

So time and right now, enormous cost pressure on brands and retailers for supply issues. So what are optimizations to take cost out of the domain of the business that you are familiar with? This is all part of ROI. ROI includes not just the top line, but all the things that feed into the ultimate metric. So I'd say it's really hard to step back from what you've been doing every day for months and for years and it's the way we've done it and you've made this well-worn path. The cool thing with LLMs and AI and skills is that think afresh, look at it-

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (28:23):

Clean sheet of paper is what I like to call it. Start over.

 

David Goodtree (28:25):

Clean sheet of paper. Clean sheet of paper. It is a low lift to ask questions. If you provide your input to the model, it'll blow your mind and I would argue you'll keep this job or you'll get a better one.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (28:44):

And

 

David Goodtree (28:45):

One

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (28:45):

Thing I want to just focus on in terms of the time piece is you talked about sharing the workflow with an LLM to help. I think the number one thing that I see is that most organizations don't have their processes documented. So if you're listening to this and you're a brand who's trying to figure out how to optimize for AI, actually get every single human being in the room who touches your new product development process and map it out because you can't fix a process that you don't know end to end. And so whenever I work with brands, I'm always saying," Hey, number one, figure out what your process is. If you don't know that you can't fix it, you can't make it more efficient. "So I really encourage brands to start there because a lot of it's not documented to even figure out how to fix it.

 

Peter Crosby (29:30):

That makes complete sense, Lauren.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (29:34):

Just a quick PSA,

 

Peter Crosby (29:37):

Particularly the cross-functional nature of that and outside even of commerce, I loved you going all the way back to supply chain, that's where often it's the handoffs and the loop that you just often don't have your arms around and figuring out that entirety of that And then really finding the points of friction. It's an exciting opportunity, I think, to figure those things out when you know that now you can actually do something about them. We haven't been able to before. Yes. The technology has not existed and now when it does, part of it is figuring out where's the biggest bang that I can get for that investment.

 

David Goodtree (30:21):

Yes. And if I leave one message in today's session is the technology is approachable for the non-technology worker. So we believe skills are a productivity tool that will eclipse the reach of prior productivity tools. It's free or make a $20 subscription per month, even if your company doesn't reimburse it, whatever, you don't want to do that. It's an investment in you. You have domain knowledge. You can teach the agent to do what you want in plain English. Start thinking out of the box. You'll have a better job or just enjoy your job better because you got rid of the grunt work.

 

Peter Crosby (31:13):

Just don't take company privileged information into your personal AI. That's the only thing I want to say. So if you're going to

 

David Goodtree (31:21):

Use personally- And vice versa.

 

Peter Crosby (31:23):

Yes. Yeah.

 

David Goodtree (31:24):

Yeah. Keep

 

Peter Crosby (31:25):

Those lives separate.

 

David Goodtree (31:27):

Yes, completely separate lives. And to the earlier part of the conversation, express explicitly the guardrails. So this is not unlimited and unfree. You have to be careful as you would with anything else. Just because it's easy and flattering, don't trust it. Install guardrails. Trust but verify, or I would say don't trust require. Yeah.

 

Peter Crosby (31:58):

So just to close out a couple of things that I want to say. One is, and I've been saying this at the summit, we had some great conversations about it. I think this is an opportunity. If there's anything about the growth architect thinking or whatever you envision, wow, if I could stop doing that stuff, what might I want to do or focus on? AI is a great partner to just rethink your job description. What would your job description look like in the future? If you're able to be relieved of that, where would you want to focus? What would your first job review from the CEO say about what you've been able to do for the company in your new role? Play around with that because we can help you do that.

 

David Goodtree (32:46):

That's a great construct, Peter, which is- Thank you. Envision yourself in a better future. You get to define the future.

 

Peter Crosby (32:56):

And presume that there's more opportunity here than loss and what you've been talking about here. If we really take advantage of and really try to lean in and I think sometimes it's just you feel sort of frozen because a lot of this is out of your control.

 

David Goodtree (33:14):

Frozen and encumbered by the past.

 

Peter Crosby (33:17):

Yeah,

 

David Goodtree (33:18):

Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's a great idea. Just the self-visioning exercise. Go to the park, let your brain go, write it down, come back, think about it again in a week. And this stuff is here for you, but you have to take it.

 

Peter Crosby (33:36):

It's also potentially a fun thing to do with your team.

 

David Goodtree (33:39):

Your

 

Peter Crosby (33:39):

Team. As your team and you are trying to figure out where are we going to focus? What are we going to do? What a great conversation to think like what could we achieve together if this happened?

 

David Goodtree (33:53):

Yes, the team. And I would say also personally, if you have significant others who you care about and our topic is, who is your job? A yes or no, is this going to happen? This is a personal topic. So use your team whether they are employed by your company or they are related to you or something else. Use your team and say, "We are on the cusp of an amazingly better future as if the printing pres was just invented or the card was just invented or PCs were just invented or the web or e-commerce was just invented. It's my future. I'd like to write it.

 

Peter Crosby (34:30):

" And now we have gummies that can help you.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (34:34):

And that's another podcast.

 

Peter Crosby (34:35):

Exactly. Oh, David, and what I wanted to make sure we closed out with, you were mentioning that your skills manifesto is about to come out. If they just go once they hear this podcast to foodgraph.com, they can find

 

David Goodtree (34:50):

It easily. It'll be on the blog page, Tamar.

 

Peter Crosby (34:54):

Perfect. On the blog page at foodcraft.com. David, thank you so much for taking the time to have this thought exercise in a really exciting and thought time. So really appreciate your point of view. Thanks for being here.

 

David Goodtree (35:08):

Thank you. I enjoyed it. It was fun.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (35:11):

Thanks so much, David.

 

Peter Crosby (35:13):

Thanks again to David for sharing his perspective with us. Always more to be learned when you become a member at digitalshelfinstitute.org. Thanks for being part of our community.