Seven Things (About A.I.) I Heard This Week

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🔮It’s Friday, futurists. 

This week the Future Commerce team made the annual pilgrimage to Boston to join forces with the team from eTail for their annual eTail Boston event.

We came, we saw, we led thoughts; and Brian drank very (very) old wine. I learned a lot while at the show—both in the sessions and in the hallway conversations—and I came away with seven crucial points of view about A.I. from brand leaders and operators that you need to know. Keep scrolling to learn what those are. 

🍷We also spent a glorious evening at Asta for our twenty-second Future Commerce Salon, our executive dining and wine pairing event. This exclusive benefit is for executives and leaders who have joined our Membership.

Join Future Commerce Plus to get priority access to our next salon, heading to New York City and Los Angeles later this fall!

Speaking of which, our VISIONS Summit: Los Angeles registration is opening soon. Plus members get priority access and a 20% discount on tickets.

📆Keep an eye on upcoming events: futurecommerce.com/events 

Seven Things I Learned About A.I. at eTail Boston

Like most of the technologically-minded in my generation, I grew up with WIRED magazine.

One particular cover lives rent-free in my mind, a photo of an Indian woman, her face masked by an outturned palm. The palm, adorned with a henna tattoo of a block of Java code, is at once a symbol that American workers are being pushed away and also that an unseen workforce is now doing your “cubicle” job. 

Twenty-one years later, I am reminded that we’re experiencing the same culture of fear around a new workforce taking our jobs: AI.

Walking the show floor this week at eTail Boston, I was struck by how often the same dynamic came up in my conversations.

Here’s a recap of the seven things I learned in speaking with directors, brand partnerships leaders, and eCommerce managers about how A.I. is changing the nature of their work: 

1. A.I. is a remote workforce. “Instead of speaking to a team in Ukraine on Slack, we’re chatting with the AI now to fix code that it created,” said one leader of a technology agency that builds mid-market solutions for online brands. “The code is better… and it reads the documentation,” he said chuckling.
   
   
2. Engineering teams led the shift to A.I. workflows. Whether or not those teams had permission to use the tools is another story. In our first-of-its-kind report, The State of GenAI in Commerce, we found that 91% of respondents were already using ChatGPT in their organizations, with or without a corporate permission or governance policy. One year later, teams have bought in. 

3. Code > Content. Claude > ChatGPT. Generating “content” with A.I. is “old school,” said a younger conference attendee. The cool kids are writing code with the machine now. In our GenAI report last year we saw from OpenAI’s toolkit. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, has built a collaborative platform with Claude 3.5 Sonnet that live-updates code in a dockable sidecar window, mimicking the feeling of ‘pair programming’—a term developers use when collaborating on a project.
4. Algorithmic Feeds Are The Future. The Wednesday panel talks at eTail repeatedly highlighted how algorithmic feeds allow brands to become multiplayer.
   
   “We post three pieces of [brand] content per day,” said Krysta Lewis, the Director of Marketing at CAKES Body. The mechanism of TikTok Shops allows creators on the platform to request products and post it for a flat fee from the brand, with an auto-renewing contract if the content performs. “[TikTok] automatically pays them if they meet the requirements.” This is the often-overlooked “algorithmic” automation that hinders every other channel of marketing—sourcing creators, orchestrating content, and paying them results in tremendous overhead.

5. The Decline of Google as a “Front Door” Will Lead to Algorithmic Websites. “What happens when we don’t have to build websites that please Google and instead please customers?” I asked of the Wednesday panel featuring leaders from Simon, Hydrow, and Unveild. “Everywhere else consumers spend time is highly personalized, algorithmic content,” responded one of the panelists. The implication: the ability to tune and give feedback to algorithmic experiences is something consumers expect, but websites lack.
   
   
6. “Where’s the Next New Channel?” On a panel discussing TikTok content creation, Melissa Yeung, the Global Social Media Strategist at Duolingo, said that she’s not losing sleep over Congressional legislation that might sunset TikTok in the U.S. “We’ve started growing our YouTube following,” said Yeung. Duolingo has 12.7M followers on TikTok and 4.1M on YouTube.
   
   
7. “The Cost of Content is Trending Towards Zero,” says Max Satter, the founder of Unveild. “A.I. allows anyone—not just a brand—to generate whatever content they want for cheap or free,” he explained. The implication: content is no longer a moat for a brand, but it’s also no longer a barrier to getting your house of data in order. “I was able to launch a new LLC that focuses on creating habituation around movement in just six weeks,” said Hydrow CEO, Bruce Smith. “If you aren’t playing with [the tools] right now, you’re missing out.” 

The fears of being ‘replaced’ by an unseen force may have resurfaced, but this time, it's not just our jobs that are at stake; it’s also our channels, our digital front doors, our creative output, and our processes.

Just as we adapted then, we're adapting now. The conversations at eTail Boston made it clear: while A.I. might be a new "worker," it's still up to us to direct the code, craft the content, and define the future of commerce. As we look ahead to events like eTail Palm Springs in 2025, one thing is certain: the tools may change, but our drive to innovate remains the same.

Especially as the industry shrugs off worries about the economy. 

You know what doesn’t hurt? A stellar CPI print.

— Phillip

‍P.S. “Fiction immortalizes our fears.” From Sherlock Holmes to Bruce Wayne, the greatest fiction stories eventually become reality. From a novel to a real-world immersive shopping experience, fiction is now blurring with reality. Our newest episode of the After Dark podcast is now available on the private member feed, or listen to the teaser on Apple or Spotify.