Episode 352 - Is Agentic Commerce a Mirage? Jason & Scot Debate It Live

0:00 Welcome to the Jason and scot Show, your source for the latest news and trends in the e-commerce industry. Featuring host Jason Retail Geek Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer of Publicis, and scot Wingo, co-founder and CEO of ReFiBuy. Here are Jason and scot. Before we start this episode, we have an important announcement for you. Hi, I'm Kiri Masters, and I'm excited to introduce AdGentic, a new show about advertising in the age of AI. I've spent the last decade analyzing retail media, and now I'm fascinated by what happens when more of the shopping journey moves into AI assistants and agents.

0:48 What happens to advertising when there's no search results page? What will ads in AI actually look like? And where should brands, retailers, and publishers be paying attention right now? Those are the kinds of questions that we'll be exploring on Adgentic through video essays, conversations, and perspectives from the people actually building this new ecosystem. Adgentic is live now as part of the ReFiBuy Media Network. Find the show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to the Adgentic newsletter on Substack.

1:40 All right. Let's introduce ourselves. Anyone not know who we are? If you don't, I'm Jason Retail Gig Goldberg. And I'm scot Wingo. I'm the CEO of RefiBuy. And Jason, what do you do? And I have 27 more words in my title than you. I'm the Chief Commerce Strategy Officer of Publisus Group. And payments. Sure. And agentic. And agentic. Yes. Throw it in there. Yeah. All right. Keyword stuffing. The reason you're probably here is you may have heard one of our podcasts any podcast listeners all right thanks for coming everybody if you're not a podcast listener jason and scot the only thing tricky is the scot has one t, it was the 60s my dad was kind of a hippie and he wanted to be different it makes me infinitely googleable which is a blessing and mostly a curse it's great for seo.

2:25 All right. So what we're going to do today is talk about what they asked us to do is like help people see kind of two sides of the debate of all the things going on on the front end of AI. And so what we wanted to do is frame it a little bit. And Jason's going to start us off. Yeah. And this is just to set the table. Some of you may have seen a session earlier with the EVP of marketing and e-commerce at Walmart. And we talked a little bit about how, despite the fact they're a Fortune 1 company, they've been remarkably agile and a fast mover in a janty. And so one of my favorite stories about and my hypothesis for why they've been so successful at that is they have this recently retired CEO, Doug McMillan, who's, to be frank, a personal nemesis of mine.

3:07 He's like nicer, smarter, vastly more successful than me. And that would have made me already better. But then he's now retired and he's younger than me. So I'm super, super pissed about that. But before he retired, I got an opportunity to go to a meeting with him. And this is about two and a half years ago. And we come to this meeting. He's the 38th most powerful man in the world, according to Fortune magazine. It's a big deal to get a meeting with Doug. And people super prepare for the meeting, right? And so we come to this meeting. Everybody's ready. They're super excited. And Doug stands up and says, hey, thank you guys very much for coming to the meeting. I know you worked really hard to get ready for this.

3:48 But before we start, I have a question for you. How did you all use AI to prepare for this meeting? And you could literally see people's faces just deflate. Like they were so bummed because nobody had used AI two and a half years ago to prepare for a meeting at Walmart. And there was this awkward silence. It felt like eight minutes. It was probably like eight seconds. And then some super brave soul chimes in. Gosh, Doug, I'm really sorry. We didn't use AI to prepare for this meeting, which, not shocking, right? And then he pauses, and then he drops the bomb. AI is illegal at Walmart. And everyone's like, what? What are you talking about? AI is not illegal at Walmart. And this guy explains to Doug McMillan, he's like, oh, I get an email from IT every week.

4:30 You're not licensed to use Claude, don't use Claude, and ChatGBT hallucinates, and don't you dare put any of our corporate data on there where it might leak. And it suddenly occurred to Doug McMillan, the CEO of Walmart, that like, oh my God, this is what's going to disrupt us, right? That this is what's going to knock us off of the top of the retailer list is that we have 1.8 million associates that are all doing their job today the way they did it yesterday. And they don't feel like they have permission to do it different. And so he went on this whole pilgrimage to make AI innate at Walmart, and they bought ChatGPT for 1.8 million associates, and then they bought everything.

5:13 And then they started building agents like Marty and Sparky and CodePuppy, if you heard about this morning. And they hired this guy, Dan Danker. And the sort of conclusion of this two and a half year journey, Dan Danker was the chief AI officer at Instacart. They hired him. In Doug's last year at Walmart, it's a public company, so it's public, Doug was paid $29 million, which is a great value. He doubled the revenue, quadrupled the market cap of the company. Dan Danker made $44 million. So Doug did everything to change the culture, including hiring a direct report that he paid more than himself to make AI the center of Walmart.

5:54 And when I look at all these other companies that are moving slower than Walmart, the thing that's most different is this leadership from the top and that you had permission from the very top of the organization. And so my my key advice to everyone here who's saying, how do I get a more more integrated in our in our own cultures is this can't be a side project that just one person in I.T. who's designated themselves. I.T. A.I.s are. It's got to be a from the top initiative to do things differently. Got it. So the first debate is another level setting is like, what are we talking about? So walk through how big is e-commerce? Yeah, yeah. So just super high level. scot and I have been doing this for a long time. For almost as long as we've been doing this, brick and mortar retail grows about 4% a year, between 3.9 and 4.1% a year.

6:42 And for most of the modern year, e-commerce has grown about 15% a year. And there was a time when it obviously grew faster, but more recently it's grown at about 15% a year. So e-commerce goes four times as fast as brick and mortar. It's wildly slowing down. Last year, retail grew at 4%, but e-commerce only grew at 5%. So we sort of have equilibrium as e-commerce has approached 25% of all sales. It's accelerating again this year. So we're halfway through the year. It's about 10% now. Is there any evidence it's agentic commerce? I would argue, and this will probably be the first argument, there's evidence that it's not. Yes. Before we get there, the argument I get in the most on LinkedIn, so I kind of, there's a reporter, Jason Del Rey, and he kind of branded me a agentic commerce maximalist.

7:31 So I embraced that and I put it on my LinkedIn profile. So now I draw everyone that wants to argue about it, just that commerce is now my friend, like comes at me hard. So it's kind of a fun, fun thing. So what I have found is we're endlessly arguing over the definition. So that tends to be, if I really pick into their argument, it's very definitional, which is fine because, as they would always say, they always start their argument, definitions matter. And I agree they do. So that's the first argument. So the three definitions, I think, are number one, fully autonomous commerce. Now, this comes from a statement. There's two guys, two brothers that run Stripe, Patrick and what's the other ones? Something Collison. I forget. I always know Patrick, but I can't remember.

8:14 Dan? Danny? Something? I don't know. The other Collison brother. And they're Irish. And back in like very early, this is like 2000 and like January of 25, one of them said, someday all payments will be fully autonomous, and that's what adjunct-to-commerce is. So they always latch onto that. Now, I've actually had executives at Stripe on the podcast to say that's not how they think about it anymore. That was just like an early thing. But that's one thing that people think about it on. And fully autonomous means you go and you say, all right, I'm looking for a shirt that's blue, and it just goes, it knows you so well, it goes and buys it. And that's it. So that's one argument of what is agentic commerce.

8:56 Another one is, Jason, what's another definition? Yeah. That agentic commerce is broader than no human in the loop, but it has to always end in a transaction, right? So this is this middle one, AI native transactions, that you may or may not have used the robot for discovery, but the robot led you directly to the checkout button. So either it had native checkout in it. I think depending on how you define it, it might include throwing someone to a PDP with a checkout. Yep. So an example would be you go into Chat2BT, you're planning a trip. It says, have you thought about your sunscreen? And then you say, well, I know I haven't. And then it says, this is what you should get. And then it walks you into Target and then drops you into the checkout. That's the second definition.

9:37 The people that believe the first thing would not call that autonomous because of the front part where you actually told the agent what you, you know, you helped, you said you had a say in what you were going to get. And you might have to actually physically click a buy button. Yes. Oh, my God. The horror. And then number three, and spoiler alert, this is kind of what I believe. I think any time an AI assists you in the journey, that that should be called agentic commerce. So I count when you're using Rufus, which is now called Alexa for shopping or AFS. When you're using that, when you're using Sparky, you may actually use it on the discovery part and not want to do the checkout. You may want it to go do, I use these new personal agents. I use them for the checkout a lot because I'll use it.

10:20 I'll do the discovery myself and I'll say to it, we do a lot of tailgating. I'm in North Carolina and I found this really cool cooler. And I just said to the agent, hey, go see if you can find this for a better price and faster shipping. And it did. And I said, rip, rip, rip and roll like, you know, you do it. And it just gave me a stripe link. I clicked that and it bought it. So I use it as kind of like a GPS. I kind of put it in there whenever I feel like I want it to help me out a little bit and make sure I'm getting a great deal. Or I've got all the right parameters of the thing I'm doing. So that's my definition. So this is the audience participation part. Any questions on the definitions before we do a quick show of hands? Is that pretty clear? All right, how many of you believe argument number one, it has to be fully autonomous?

11:03 So this is called selection bias. We're at an AI show. So the naysayers don't come here. So they're not here right now. Most of them do tend to work at retail media network companies. So I see Deb back here. She's big into that world. But she talks about AI in ads. So she's on our side of the house. But so what they're worried about is if you work for a retail media network in some way, it's really bad when the discovery part passes the homepage and the search experience. because that's what rings the register. So they tend to, they tend like, and full disclosure, I believe in this so much I started a company in it. So I am full disclosure, I'm so biased on this that this is all I do all the time.

11:47 So I'm pretty aware of my biases, but their bias tends to be towards protecting that ad revenue. And I would say like the joke here is we're supposed to be adversarial and we probably don't totally disagree on this one. So my surrogate for disagreeing with scot, There's this very well-known guy in our industry, Andrew Lipson, who used to write all about retail media for eMarketer. And Andrew famously wrote this article, Agentic Commerce is One Giant Hallucination, which is clever. But when you double click with him and talk about it, the reason he says that is he he has that narrow definition and he thinks that's never happening or it's at least a very long way from happening.

12:27 Yeah, there's a guy that's even more famous than Andrew, and it's Eric Sofert. And he has this thing he writes all about mobile and he's he's well really well known on the Wall Street side of things. And he this is hallucination. He uses mirage. So he says agentic commerce is a mirage. But if you read his pieces, his definition is definition one. And he says that people are never going to do that. And instead, they're going to use what I call shopper agents. They're going to use Rufus slash AFS and Sparky and that kind of thing, which in my definition, I'm like, yes, that's not a hallucination or a mirage. That's part of agentic commerce. So it's kind of funny that it ends up being very definitional. Does anyone have a different definition or want to talk about a use case we haven't talked about that's interesting?

13:10 Hold your hand up. We have a mic runner. Anyone? One we're supposed to this is an audience participation part of breakthroughing is we have to you know we need audience participation if you don't ask questions about agentic commerce we're going to ask questions about math so just to warn you oh there that got one. James? All right. I don't know that I have a crisp way of articulating this question, but what I wonder is with incentives monetization models and like where the trust will need to live. So prerequisite, and I might tie this back to like maybe replenishment orders I put into Amazon, where I found I was taken advantage of because I was paying a premium for the permission of opting into like a subscription or something. So with incentives being in multiple places, As a consumer, I really want to know that that's much like your use case thought on the cooler, right? That I had somebody advocating for me.

14:02 Where are the, how will the monetization model support something that's consumer-centric? Yeah, and we're not, the other thing I'll point out is we're, I think we're at ending one of this whole thing, right? Because just in the last 60 days, we've had a plethora of new technologies that are, most of them are based on OpenClaw underneath inside of them. But OpenClaw is impossible for the average consumer to use. Only Jason has been able to figure it out in our partnership. And if you can get a Mac Mini even to run it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't run it on your local machine. It's dangerous. And so I'm talking about Meta's Muse, which sounds like Metamucil, but it's different. Not Metamucil. The company's Meta agent called Muse. And then another one is called Instinct.

14:43 And what's interesting about them is they are very clearly, when you start those, they are your champion. And they're like, you're my customer and I will go to battle with retailers for you. And there's something like really awesome about that as a user. You're like this thing really, and they're aggressive about it. They're like, do you want me to look for coupon codes? Do you want me to find this somewhere cheaper? Do you want me to like, you know, see if I can get it faster? I see, you know, you have an Amex. Do you want me to see if I can get you 10 X points? And you're just like, well, well, yes. Do all the, I, you know, yes, yes. And yes, do all those things for me. I like having someone on my side. But, you know, they're free right now. So I would like to pay them a subscriber.

15:24 I want them, I'm happy as a consumer to pay for that to make sure it's always on my side. Because I, you know, the other, you know, a lot of us in the industry, many people at a show like this, the most frequently said thing I say when, have you tried Muse? They say, I remember when Facebook walls were free and they told us that would be great. And then, you know, Zuckerberg will screw us over. It's kind of like what everyone at this show tends to feel many times. So that's real though. Like he has a history of doing that. So it's going to be interesting. Today, the incentives are great on those two things, but they're giving it away free. It ain't cheap paying for all this inference they're running. So at some point, someone's going to have to pay. Once the, if the merchant is paying through an affiliate link or something, then suddenly it's no longer going to be incented to fight for me.

16:05 So it's going to be interesting to see, you know, these early days, I think there will be someone that decides I'm going to have a pay, the consumer pays for this a bit, but it's always on their side. And I think that will be a really pretty interesting winning combination on that one. And I think it's a wonderful question because I think those are two critical things are understanding the incentives and the monetization and how that impacts trust. We're going to talk about robots that the retailer owns, vertical robots versus horizontal robots that the LLMs own. And trust dynamics are very different there. Does anyone here trust Alexa for shopping to point you at the most successful product for you?

16:48 No, right? Because Jordan does. But he's very gullible. And Sam Altman, very famously said, like, we get it wrong all the time. The customer believes we're trying to get it right. Like when we get it wrong, it's not because we're trying to trick the consumer. It's because we just screwed up. And so at the moment, that's the play out. But the incentives are likely shifting because, you know, scot is a very successful man and he has no qualms about paying for a service that then works for him. The vast majority of consumers don't do that. Right. And Ben Thompson on Stratechery very famously talks about all the models that involve the consumer paying for the service don't work. And he uses Dropbox as the example.

17:33 And we're seeing this play out on OpenAI right now. Sam Altman started out very anti-ads and they thought, hey, we'll get consumers to pay for this. And already ads are a very robust monetization model on OpenAI. And they always say it's not going to influence the answer engine, but over time, You know, they go public, they're close to missing a quarter. Suddenly the ads are intermingled and, you know, the horses left the barn. So we'll have to see how this develops. But if anyone has a bridge to buy, Jordan is in the market for one. All right. Thanks, Jordan. Any other, you know, anyone want to chime in on this topic of what is agentic commerce? What are some of the things that are going to happen with the adoption of it?

18:14 Anyone? Anyone have a topic? Oh, go ahead, Jordan. We just picked on Jordan, so. Yeah, yeah, they're bringing you. You're allowed to defend yourself. That's fair. Jordan, who are you with? Jordan from tomorrow. Okay. Thank you. From the future. Why? I know. Here we go. This idea of trust and where monetization takes its role in agentic experiences. The reason that we're trusting Alexa for shopping right now, we being kind of some folks I work with, is because we do understand that at this moment, both Amazon and Walmart have over-indexed for trust in the development of their agents. You're calling them vertical bonds. Sparky and Alexa, those teams have been given very clear direction that it is all about trust building right now.

18:57 They are introducing sponsor prompts, and you can see them visibly, so we'll see over time. But as of now, I think you're getting the purest that you've ever gotten, at least in the last 10 years, from a Walmart and Amazon. In those experiences. So it's a very special time and that's going to change maybe, but as of now, I think it's pretty nice. No, I think you're 100% right. I don't know that, I'm not from the future like you, but if I look at the- The near future, it's just 24 hours. Yeah, but it's always a day away. True. Yeah. What I was going to say though is if we look at history, right, and history doesn't necessarily repeat, but it tends to rhyme. And some of us are old enough to remember when And Google used to return 10 blue links, right? And obviously the pixels diminished every year. And now that first organic pixel is about four pages deep, I think, in the thing. And it seems likely that we're going to see a similar progression play out here.

19:52 All right, any topic that you guys want to chat about around Agents of Commerce before we move on to the things we prepared? Another Jordan. Are you from tomorrow? I wish. Can you just talk broadly about the puts and takes on the durability of retail advertising inside these aggregation platforms like Amazon, etc.? How do you see that revenue model potential under attack by agents that are brought into discovery or the intent that's shifting to them? So specific to Amazon ads or the whole retail media network? The whole retail media network. So the question is, what's this mean? I said earlier, and we talked about Andrew, the retail media network folks are rightfully, I think, very worried about this. Because in a little brief history of that, Jason will correct me.

20:40 Amazon launched Amazon ads in 2016, I think it was. Yeah, about 10 years ago. And it was a sponsored, it was just like one lowly little sponsored listing for third-party sellers. And it ended up being wildly successful. And then they realized, you know what? We have a lot of traffic. We can monetize that and our sales don't go down. It's basically free margin. Fast forward 10 years, it's now a $80 billion run rate line item for Amazon. They had to break it out. It got so big. We believe it's pure margin. So it just sits there on the P&L and 100% goes down to gross because it costs nothing to serve. It doesn't hurt any other part of the business. The website's already being served to sell stuff, so it has no inherent cost.

21:23 Now, I'm sure internally they give it some huge allocation of a P&L or something, but that's it. Every other retailer saw that and copied it and said, that's a great idea. We need that. And then now, now they even want to call it, they've gotten out of calling it retail media network and they call it just commerce networks or commerce. I forget what they call it. Do you guys, what's the new thing they're trying to call it? Commerce media, because now Instacart has it and Expedia. And now everywhere you go, there's a fricking ad like through the whole, like, you know, top of the funnel, middle of the funnel. Amazon, one time I was looking for a dog treat and I swear to God, Amazon was hiding it. So I'd have to see 8,000 ads on my way to find the dog treat. It's gotten that kind of, because the incentives have gotten so kind of misaligned.

22:07 One time we did a calculation and like something like 67% of the pixels on the Amazon page were ads, not for every product, but for a lot of the CPG stuff I was looking for. So, so, you know, I actually think this is a reaction to that. I think they've gone too far. This is my personal opinion in this debate. Jason works for an ad agency, so he'll take the other side. All ads are good at all times. There you go. Spend more. So here it comes. Get ready. Here it comes. In fact, if anyone has their checkbook, I'm accepting them right now. Yes. So here's what I'll say. Hey, like everything in this space, it's complicated. Like retail media or commerce media isn't just one thing, right? And so I think it's very clear at Amazon, there's a huge fountain of incremental revenue that Amazon's getting from ads that like change. Mark profit.

22:55 Yeah. earned income that sorry I forgot you said puts and takes so I know you're a finance guy. There's nothing wrong with that it's cool we like everyone here let's throw some basis points in 50 basis points all right there you go Bips yeah talking Bips Jordan it's all about the Bips. And Walmart is a very robust incremental revenue stream. Instacart probably is. Once you start moving down market, it is debatable that it's incremental. Like every retailer gets money from their wholesale partners every year since the beginning of time. Right. And we used to call it merchandising, accrual fees or shopper marketing or trade marketing.

23:37 Co-op. Yeah, absolutely. And so some of those dollars in a retail media network are new dollars to buy new eyeballs. Some of those are something that you used to buy in a meeting with a handshake. You now get to buy on a website and it's more efficient and it's better measured and it's more optimized. And so I would argue as Ajantic becomes a more important discovery engine, it doesn't derogatorily affect all that trade dollars moving from analog to digital. I think that still happens. But I do think it disrupts the incremental traffic dollars that Amazon's getting. And not necessarily eliminates, but if you think about it, per scot's point, he went for a dog treat and it showed him 20 ads before he could get to his dog treat.

24:25 All of those 20 ads had to pay for that visibility, even though... For clarity, it's for my dog. Yeah. scot, thank you. Yeah. And your dog, thank you. Yeah. Is your dog name Old Roy or Rufus? No, none of the both. Okay. The he had to see all those ads and all those ads paid, even though the likelihood that scot noticed any of those ads is slim. Right. And maybe he saw one or two of them. If if all of that discovery switches to a robot, the the analogy, the analogous ad format to the sponsor product listings that scot's talking about are sponsor prompts. And there's less of them. Like you can't have 20 effective sponsored prompts for each prompt. So you're only going to have two or three.

25:10 They're going to work better. So the magic question for Amazon is to protect that $60 billion in revenue. Can they transition from 20 ads to three more expensive ads? Right. And we actually know the answer to this because Google has successfully done that with Gemini. So in Google, this is super confusing, but you have AI overviews, AI mode and Gemini. Gemini is kind of off to the side. Rarely do people use Gemini in its pure context. Google is increasingly sending people into AI mode and making it the default because what they found is, yes, it's fewer ads, but they monetize so much better. So they're actually net positive. And you've seen this in the Google earnings where they were, you know, search was slowing down revenue, but now it's picked back up because they have figured out the calculus that, yes, in fact, less ads that convert much higher, the retailer is actually willing to pay more and that more is actually net positive for them as a company.

26:09 So I believe they will get to the other side of that because Google kind of shown them the path. All right. So the format here, we had a lot of people walk up, is put a topic out there in the family of agentic commerce, and Jason and I will debate either side of it. Any other topics that folks want to talk about? Good, sir. Mike, coming in hot. I'd love to hear more about, I buy everything you're saying around like CPG and in general overall in retail. But I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about fashion apparel specifically. Because I think that that's like a little bit different of a use case. Brand plays a huge part within why people shop different apparel categories and different things like that. And I'd love to hear more about your guys' thoughts on that. Yeah, last year I was here solo. Jason, you know, foolishly chose to go to the, grocery shop. We chose him.

26:53 I said, but it's outside in the sun. and this year he was back. So we picked him out of the grocery shop for this reason. And a lady sat on the front row and she was very aggressive that I will never, I love fashion and I will never use an agent. And that's fine. You know, I think in my definition, that's if you love shopping for dresses and you want to go pick it out, touch it, make sure it fits, go do that. But I have two daughters and they do that. They go to the store, they find the perfect dress, they love it. And then my 19-year-old, she gets great enjoyment from battling it out on Depop, Posh, and then there's a whole, what's the Vinted? I don't know what Vinted's all about. Everyone talks about Vinted now. So she has an agent go do that. She says, this is the dress I want in this size.

27:37 Go hammer them. The retail price is $150. Mom and dad aren't paying that. Go find it for $75. And they just like sits there. So I count that as a joint of commerce. So that's one use case. I bet I can make it fit almost any argument because you can use it for that. And you still got all the enjoyment of finding it. But now you're even more happy because you saved half off. What's not to love about that? So that's one way I could see the fashion thing work. Do you want to argue opposite? Kind of. So I don't think you're wrong. There's a spectrum in every category, right? And there's some consumers in every category that are going to have strong brand affinity and strong prestige influence and they're going to seek out a particular thing.

28:21 And those people are probably not going to be that swayed by agentic experiences because they don't help lead you to that prestige, right? Although sometimes the most prestige has a scarcity problem and you may use the robots to discover the scarce thing. If you want to get on a list to buy a Patek Philippe watch, you might use the robot to help you win a slot on that list. Here's the thing, though. If you're in the apparel business at all, and I admit style and brand are very influential attributes in apparel. But if you are any business at this show in the apparel business, I can guarantee you one thing is true. Shein grew more than you did over the last five years.

29:02 They absolutely did. That's what everyone else calls shine. Yeah. Well, only country gentleman from North Carolina. I call it Shein, but it's Shein's an insider's amalgamation of that. So Shein is like essentially an agentic apparel company, right? And if you're not familiar, their model is essentially they don't tell people what's cool to wear. They don't create a new style and send it to the Paris fashion show. They create TikTok to find out what scot's daughter is already talking about, right? And she's this week talking about vintage crop top Argyle sweaters. So Sheehan makes a vintage crop top Ardol sweater in a week and they sell it like 18 months before the Gap can get one on market. Right.

29:50 And so, well, a bunch of people are in apparel are like, oh, I see why people would buy toilet paper with that, but they're never going to buy our category. But while they're saying that they're massively losing share to someone that's already using a Jantic to disrupt them. Did that answer your question, Jordan? Is there only Jordans here? Yeah. How many Jordans do we have here? Next year, there's going to be a session. There's one there. There's literally 12 Jordans here. Was this in the session thing? Did it say Jordan Welcome or something? I'm changing my name for next year. They like to ask questions, too. And we have future Jordan. So Jordan is going to be here tomorrow. Yeah. Weirdly, Jordan spoke on stage yesterday, which seems totally counterintuitive.

30:31 All right. Oh, your name's not Jordan. You just raised your hand. Okay. I can go by Jordan if we prefer. Yeah. Use your given name. I figured everyone was going to raise their hand. When you asked for Jordan. I didn't realize I'd be the only one. Wait, you lied to us? So that would make you a vertical agent. Okay. Yeah. One of the things that I've been seeing with consumer satisfaction for the big marketplaces, mentioned Xi'an, we've been talking a lot about Amazon, is that it's kind of coalesced to this massive, like what started as like different brands selling on these platforms has kind of become just what Xi'an and Timu are, which is lots of Chinese factories that have and run ads on these platforms. Like what is the case for agentic commerce not eventually just becoming, you know, flooded with these low, high margin, super cheap products and overshadowing any of the other brands?

31:19 The case for or against? Yeah, I mean, I don't... Argue for it. Yeah, yeah. I think there's a swath of consumerism that goes to the more efficient thing, right? And I do think it's changing. I think it's a mistake to think of these as like, cheap knockoffs that are stealing other people's things. That's very often how they started. But most of those platforms, Timu and Shein in particular have... I'm not saying they're Louis Vuitton yet, but they've evolved beyond that, right? Just so you know, like Timu is like increasingly selling branded goods like and in many cases it's brands that they invented but nevertheless it's branded goods and consumer there's a lot of evidence that consumers are more willing to buy dupes which they're not they're not trying to convince people are some famous brand they're just they have the same positive attributes at a more economical price point.

32:09 I would argue the agents help for everything. They help for that value shopper that's looking for that dupe. And they help solve that very specific problem. You could be an organic food chef, and you're still going to use an agent to do meal planning for you, even though you're going to end up buying a bunch of ingredients from Whole Foods for that meal. And you could be using an agent to pick the most effective sunscreen, which turns out to come from some super expensive prestige house in Paris. But it best meets your criteria for sunscreen. And so I don't think agentic is necessarily like tied to the high end or the low end of the market. I think there may be more early use cases that tend to lean lower in.

32:56 Yeah, I think as these things grow, they tend to reflect the consumer behavior, that there's a set of consumers that use these tools that are fine getting cheap Chinese stuff and that's what they're looking for. There's another set that want branded items and they want to stay in that world. So I don't think it's, I think it's just, you're right, it will end up looking like that, but it's not the tool's fault, it's the consumer behavior that's causing it at the end of the day. So it's really up to the brand to continue to tell your brand message of why you're different than that Chinese knockoff. This is where stores, there's a whole argument that this is where the retail media network people are going is into the store. So the store adds this authenticity and an experience you can't get through these things.

33:40 And in fact, kind of going back, we're right out of time, but tying it back to that very first slide, one of the things that's always frustrated me as an e-commerce person is we're stuck at what, Jason, like 18% adoption of e-commerce across? Depending on how you count, 18, 22, somewhere in there. Yeah, which is wild, because in my household, we're at like, you know, 99%. But there's a set of people that they just love going to the store. And, you know, that's fine. That's their thing. They're crazy. No, I'm just kidding. But... But that's, you know, so they're not buying cheap Chinese stuff, right? So there you go. So consumer behavior will drive the outcomes of a lot of these things. All right. Unfortunately, we're out of time. We are doing a debate.

34:22 I think that's tomorrow. And that's going to be down at the podcast studio down that way. It's called Battle of the Podcasters. So look for podcasters in your app and come to that tomorrow. We'll be talking about a lot of these topics if you enjoyed it with a couple of opponents that we're just going to roll through. What's fun about that is instead of debating each other, which are confident, we're going to be crushing those poor newbie podcasters. All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for coming. You've been listening to The Jason and scot Show. For all the latest news and trends on e-commerce and shopper marketing.