AI
My top 6 highlights from the new 'Retailgentic' podcast
The agentic AI wave is coming at blistering speed. Waiting on the sidelines is no safer than it was when retail marketplaces first appeared.
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How These 4 Retail Media Leaders Are Using AI Right Now
These examples prove that real problems can be solved with the right tools.
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Why AI Search Advertising Could Reach $25 Billion By 2029
EMARKETER now projects U.S. advertisers will pour over $25 billion—about 14% of all search budgets—into AI-powered search results by 2029.
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Mary Meeker Is So Back: My Notes From Her 340-Page AI Futurecast
I spent 2 hours reading Mary Meeker’s 340-page AI trends report so you don’t have to... But you probably still should. Here are my 6 highlights for retailers, brands and agencies.
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Walmart's Sparky AI Assistant: A Late Mover with Early Promise
I remain convinced that shoppers will increasingly turn to their own personal AI assistants for help interacting with retailers, rather than relying on retailer AI assistants who always going to be limited by context from their own walled garden.
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AI in real life: how retailers and brands are leveraging AI (real numbers)
Most businesses struggle not with what AI can do, but with envisioning what it should do for their specific challenges. Today I'm sharing four real examples where companies figured out the "what" and can tell you exactly what they got back.
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55% of consumers say they don't trust AI shopping chatbots & recommendations
While 75% of consumers have encountered AI recommendations or chatbots online, only 44% actually engaged with them.
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Walmart is Betting on AI Agents, While Amazon Goes Proprietary
The brands and retailers that get this right won't be the ones with the flashiest AI features. They'll be the ones that make it seamless for both humans and bots to do business with them.
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"We're Not Dabbling Here" Amazon Q1 Earnings Highlight AI Progress
"We're not dabbling here" said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on the company's earnings call on Thursday. That's an understatement. Jassy pointed to a 'thousand plus AI applications' that are being baked at Amazon right now. As he put it: "
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The Back-Channel: Industry Insights From Behind the Scenes
Today, I'm sharing "The Back-Channel" - an anonymized grab-bag of snippets from conversations with industry insiders that I've had in the past week. The point is to identify updates on the big themes that are happening in the industry, just like if we were
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The Shopping Agent War Begins
In the classic board game Risk, players maneuver armies across continents, form strategic alliances, and attempt to control territory. Today, a similar high-stakes game is unfolding in the digital realm as tech giants position their AI shopping agents to capture the most valuable territory of all: consumer purchasing decisions. The
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I Tested Amazon's AI Shopping Agent That Buys From Other Websites — Here's Why It Matters
Amazon has quietly launched one of the most significant developments in agentic AI shopping: a feature called "Buy For Me" that allows its AI to purchase products directly from brand websites when those items aren't available on Amazon's platform. Though Amazon didn't