Retailgentic | Consumer Behavior & Retail Trend

Scot Wingo | Retail Trends Analyst

Retailgentic explores consumer behavior and retail trends to help brands and retailers innovate. Join Scot Wingo for expert insights, actionable news, and ecommerce innovation strategies to navigate the future of retail and agentic commerce.

  1. Fewer Visitors, 3X the Conversion: Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Chuck Gahun Discusses 'The State of Agentic Commerce (Q2)'

    2d ago

    Fewer Visitors, 3X the Conversion: Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Chuck Gahun Discusses 'The State of Agentic Commerce (Q2)'

    This one's a research deep dive. Forrester just published "The State of Agentic Commerce" for Q2 2026, a client-only report built on a fresh consumer survey, and its headline read like a splash of cold water: the hype is running past reality.  We invited principal analyst Chuck Gahun on Retailgentic to defend that framing, walk through Forrester's (strict) definition of agentic commerce, and separate what consumers are actually doing from what the market keeps promising.  Highlights  Shopping vs. buying: Forrester defines agentic commerce as “shopping or buying experiences that include AI agents acting autonomously on behalf of consumers, buyers, or sellers”, and until buying is involved, they call it conversational commerce, not agentic commerce.The 38 / 17 gap: Among consumers familiar with answer engines, 38% use them for product discovery but only 17% complete purchases, a trust gap Chuck says is the single thing holding agentic commerce back.Who’s liable?: When something goes wrong on an answer-engine purchase, 44% of consumers said they’d hold the answer engine itself liable, a sign of how many guardrails, policies, and return paths still have to be built.The Amazon corollary: “On Amazon, I’d let my kids, my friends, my family have my credit card and go shopping.” That same trust does not yet transfer to ChatGPT or Gemini, closing that gap is the whole game.The merchant verdict: “We’re not telling anybody to wait. We’re telling them to go in strategically while the commerce trust angle is catching up.”Machine advantage: Forrester’s four-quadrant merchant framework (agentic fit, machine advantage, operations, and organizational adaptability) pushes brands to build content strategy for machines, not just humans.The SKU mountain: The hardest conversation in the field, “you need to upgrade 100,000 SKUs,” and the merchant answers that one SKU takes six months, so “this is gonna take infinite years.” Protocols like OpenAI’s ACP and Google’s UCP keep changing underneath them, on an exponential curve.Old B2B PDFs are gold mines: Those spec-heavy, JavaScript-free product pages everyone mocked turn out to be exactly what agents want, and Chuck says B2B (business & industrial) is actually taking off faster, with a report prediction that 20% of B2B moves to human-authorized, agent-executed transactions by year-end.Death of the retail website?: A companion Forrester paper argues the website isn’t dead, it’s becoming a repository of data for agents. By 2030, Chuck expects “dual optimization”: machines bring the shopper, and the site’s only job is to convert them.Less traffic, 3X conversion: Organic traffic is down, but answer engines filter the traffic so well that conversions are up.A sharp, honest look at where agentic commerce actually is right now: the trust gap, the merchant playbook, and a few 2030 predictions worth arguing about. Enjoy the conversation Timestamps: 03:47 Meet Chuck Gahun, Forrester principal analyst05:03 Chuck's background: two decades, Sapient, the services side07:57 How Forrester's commerce team is structured10:52 Defining agentic commerce: shopping vs. buying12:37 Conversational commerce vs. the strict definition13:49 Semi-autonomous vs. autonomous (the dog-treats test)14:38 Inside the answer-engine consumer survey15:47 The numbers: 38% discover, 17% buy, 62% research16:22 Beyond retail: healthcare, travel, government19:48 Figure 1: owned vs. not-owned, four levels21:47 The trust gap and who's liable (44%)24:37 Marketplaces, merchant of record, and returns27:52 What Forrester tells merchants: don't wait29:57 Product fit, profitability, and the ACP/UCP specs31:58 Figure 3: the four-quadrant framework & machine advantage35:53 The SKU problem and exponential change management38:35 The B2B surge prediction41:25 2030 predictions & death of the retail website46:32 Less traffic, higher conversion: the 3X surprise47:18 Where to find Chuck, events, and outro 👉 Connect with Chuck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckgahun/👉 Learn more about Forrester: https://www.forrester.com/👉 Get the report: https://www.forrester.com/report/the-state-of-agentic-commerce-q2-2026/RES195671 🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

    49 min
  2. OLLY Agentic Commerce Optimization: MarTech & Digital Compliance Director Jennifer Peters On Building an AI Foundation the Right Way

    Jun 30

    OLLY Agentic Commerce Optimization: MarTech & Digital Compliance Director Jennifer Peters On Building an AI Foundation the Right Way

    In this episode, we sit down with Jennifer Peters, Director of DTC, MarTech & Digital Compliance at OLLY, on building an AEO foundation the right way: FAQs and catalog attributes, measuring agentic visibility, and staying human-centered in a regulated CPG world. We start with a Shopify “side quest”, how a self-taught developer ended up in AI god mode with Claude and MCP, before getting into what OLLY actually is and why a brand that does most of its revenue in-store suddenly cares so much about its website. Jennifer has been quietly building one of the most grounded, real-world Agentic Commerce playbooks we've heard on the show. She shares the basics done tightly and gives a clear-eyed take on what's worth investing in while the ground shifts week to week. It’s a grounded, refreshingly un-hyped conversation about building for the agentic era without losing your head, or your customers. Hit play. Highlights:  The cold-resource, high-impact win: Jennifer on catalog feed enhancement.The FAQ slam dunk: OLLY added FAQs to its PDPs using content already on the page, just repackaged into bite-sized chunks. LLMs love the format, and so do humans.AEO is just good SEO: Clean up your schemas, clean up your data structure, and do the things that are good for your brand anyway.Attributes Google never asked for: A partner ingests OLLY’s public catalog and pushes back AI-ready attributes, none of them customer-facing.The website is now the point of entry: A site that was “7 or 8% of the business” is now the brand authority source agents go to first, for OLLY’s own site, Walmart’s Sparky, and Amazon’s Rufus.Trust but verify: OLLY triangulates recommendations across Profound, Contentsquare, and Envive. If all three flag the same thing, it’s probably worth acting on.Don’t “do AI to do AI”: “We’re not changing the goals because we have AI. We’re keeping the goals and just doing a better job getting to them.” Same OKRs, just faster.Fix the un-AI basics first: Connect your DAM, your creative stack, and your marketing stack before you try to sprinkle AI magic on top. Scot adds that AI can be the excuse to finally get it prioritized.The AI bubble in the bubble: From San Francisco, Jennifer on the coming counterculture: “No AI in our creative” as a selling point, growing data center backlash, and Ronny Chieng’s Harvard commencement speech.Jennifer is exactly the kind of hands-on practitioner this show exists to find: strategic, tactical, and refreshingly honest about what’s real and what’s noise. We’ll have to get her back in a year to see what other magical (and weird) things she’s figured out.  Enjoy the conversation. Timestamps:00:00 Cold open — lowest resource, highest impact00:21 Welcome to Retailgentic01:36 Scot's intro: a real practitioner doing the work04:13 Welcome, Jennifer Peters05:20 Jennifer's background: agency, Cokesbury, OLLY06:51 Becoming a self-taught Shopify developer07:56 Side quest: Claude, MCP, and AI "god mode"11:34 What is OLLY? The square-bottle homeland12:18 Inside the DTC + MarTech role13:15 Why the website is now the point of entry16:21 Jennifer's agentic commerce journey begins17:48 Start with the basics: AEO is just good SEO18:21 FAQs on PDPs — the easy slam dunk19:48 Catalog feed enhancement & digital attributes21:52 Profound and the AEO vendor landscape23:57 Panel data: "super sus"24:42 Trust but verify across tools25:45 The Reddit problem27:14 Bazaarvoice and review syndication28:44 Don't skip the un-AI basics30:20 Measuring impact without getting fooled31:31 Same OKRs, AI just gets there faster35:40 Does it leak into Walmart & Target?37:48 Sharing content across channels40:06 What's next: AI backlash and counterculture42:37 Where to find Jennifer & outro 👉 Connect with Jennifer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-peters-3bbb6220/👉 Learn more about Olly: https://www.olly.com/ 🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

    42 min
  3. Announcing RetailPlaybook: New Channel (Newsletter+Pod) Focused on ACO for Amazon/Alexa, Walmart/Sparky and Target/TSA

    Jun 24

    Announcing RetailPlaybook: New Channel (Newsletter+Pod) Focused on ACO for Amazon/Alexa, Walmart/Sparky and Target/TSA

    Scot Wingo sits down with Andrew Bell, ReFiBuy's new VP of Research and host of the new RetailPlaybook channel, for a deep dive on Alexa for Shopping, Amazon's patent playbook, and what agentic commerce optimization looks like across Amazon, Walmart, and Target. This is a launch episode. We're announcing two things at once: Andrew Bell joining ReFiBuy as VP of Research, and the debut of RetailPlaybook. Going forward Andrew hosts Retail Playbook himself, but for episode one Scot jumped in to introduce the channel and interview Andrew in person. It's airing here on Retailgentic as a crossover.  Highlights:  • 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗔𝗖𝗢 𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸-𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰: "Good ACO on Amazon means optimizing for Alexa for Shopping, while also keeping the basic mechanics of SEO" — two distinct layers in symbiotic union, and a different playbook for every marketplace. • 𝟭𝟬𝟬 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀: Amazon just announced its shopping agent (the artist formerly known as Rufus, now Alexa for Shopping) is reaching roughly 100 million people. • 𝟲𝟬% 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗹𝗶𝗳𝘁: Andrew is seeing conversion rates climb ~60% on product pages in particular. • 𝗔𝗺𝗮𝘇𝗼𝗻'𝘀 𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲: ~$400B in counted revenue, with true GMV likely north of $600B once you account for third-party sales. • 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗡𝗼𝘃𝗮: Alexa for Shopping runs on Claude, Amazon's own Nova, and custom models — and the question that matters is "is your product being reasoned through?" • 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹: Andrew frames each marketplace like a different era of basketball, Jordan's two-pointer game vs. today's spread, zone-defense, three-point era. Different era, different playbook. • 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗔𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗸 𝘁𝗼 𝗔𝗦𝗜𝗡𝘀: Andrew studied Ancient Greek and preaching, then self-taught business by reading every book on the Barnes & Noble shelf over six months. • 𝗣𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗧𝘂𝗲𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆: Andrew reads Amazon's granted patents every Tuesday (and non-granted ones Thursday), scoring each on a levels 1–5 framework because "patents are Amazon's playbook of the future." • 𝗗𝘂𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗨𝗖𝗣 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀: Andrew thinks Amazon joined the universal commerce protocol to publish its data outward; Scot thinks they'll pull UCP inward. They agree to see who's right. A new channel, a new voice, and a host who reads Amazon patents for fun. If you sell on Amazon, Walmart, or Target, as a brand or a third-party seller, this is the playbook you'll want open. Enjoy the conversation. Timestamps: 01:02 Scot introduces the new podcast02:39 In studio — Retailgentic x Retail Playbook, first time meeting IRL03:06 Andrew joins ReFiBuy as VP of Research + channel launch04:13 The vision for Retail Playbook (and how it differs from Retailgentic)05:54 "ACO everywhere" — answer engines vs. retailer-hosted agents06:09 Amazon's scale: $400B+ and 100M Rufus users06:55 60% conversion lift; vertical + horizontal agents; built on Claude and Nova08:34 Why playbooks work — the Jordan-vs-LeBron era model11:48 "Christopher Nolan style" — rewinding to Andrew's story12:02 Andrew's background: Ancient Greek, Bible school, self-taught12:23 Touch of Class: $100K/mo to $4M, 1,500 pages by hand13:00 GPT store, tens of thousands of sellers, 1,000 ad campaigns15:08 NFPA: unauthorized resellers and 3x buy box16:25 "Amazon Science Made Simple" — patents as source of truth18:08 Patent Tuesday and the levels 1–5 framework19:07 Use-case language and predicting the Alexa–Rufus fusion20:51 How Alexa for Shopping ranks: 100 → 30 → the best 5–822:39 Full autonomy: price-trigger auto-buy23:18 Sparky goes live on the web — and where Walmart lags25:35 The Death Star flywheel and Amazon's selection obsession27:34 Shop Direct and the dueling UCP theories28:53 ChatGPT's 20% commerce intent and the horizontal flank30:49 Back to Retail Playbook: the first Substack and query-planning optimization32:13 Where to follow Andrew + outro 👉 Connect with Andrew Bell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-bell-540403275/👉 Learn more about RetailPlaybook: www.retailplaybook.ai 🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

    33 min
  4. Ads in the Answer Engine: Roger Dunn, CCO, Thrad on Agentic Commerce, ChatGPT Ads & the Snowflake Economy

    Jun 16

    Ads in the Answer Engine: Roger Dunn, CCO, Thrad on Agentic Commerce, ChatGPT Ads & the Snowflake Economy

    Roger Dunn has watched retail media grow up from the agency side (Mediacom, GroupM, WPP), the tech side (he launched Criteo's retail media business in Australia), and the brand side (a global retail media role at Diageo, home of Johnnie Walker, Guinness, and Baileys). Now he's Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) at Thrad, a Silicon Valley startup building the ad infrastructure for LLMs, "ChatGPT ads, but for everyone else." In this episode, Roger and Scot get into where advertising actually lives inside answer engines, what's working today, and how brands should think about showing up when shopping stops looking like a search box. Highlights:  What Thrad is building: both the supply side (helping retailers and chatbots monetize conversational surfaces) and a self-serve buy side where brands can run ads across existing AI inventory globally, not just in the four countries where ChatGPT ads have launched.The new ad formats: sponsored messages, sponsored prompts, polling ads, and product carousels, plus the steady stream of formats Google unveiled at Google Marketing Live.AI-native campaigns: how Thrad turns a URL, a brief, or a prompt into keyword, prompt, and dynamically generated persona targeting, and why creative (human faces beat a bare logo) is where the human edge still lives.What ChatGPT ads look like right now: CPCs roughly in the $1–$5 range, and why the early “hot mess vs. holy grail” takes are both missing the point.Roger’s definition of agentic commerce: not a robot doing the final click, but AI shaping every stage of the journey: discovery, comparison, price, review synthesis.The state of the field: Gemini’s full-court press, Perplexity’s Comet browser, Meta routing UCP checkout into Instagram, the Shopify question Wall Street keeps asking, and where Anthropic/Claude might (or might not) play.Down Under as a test lab: Woolworths’ Olive, Bunnings’ Buddy, a duopoly retail market, and why Australia keeps getting the pilots.The advice brands actually need: start small (think $10–20K in a market) but start; get out of “keyword jail”; and the analogy that lands it: keywords are ice cubes, prompts are snowflakes. A few uniform ice cubes everyone fights over, versus infinite unique prompts where a challenger brand can finally own its wedge.This is a genuinely useful tour of the side of agentic commerce most of us squint at, ads, from someone who has built the playbook three times over. Enjoy the conversation. Timestamps:02:00 Scot's intro — who is Roger Dunn?05:17 Conversation begins — live from Sydney06:47 Roger's backstory — UK to Australia, the agency years08:00 Criteo, Epsilon, and a global retail media role at Diageo09:05 What Thrad is — ads inside LLMs09:38 Why retail media is "the nirvana of marketing"11:13 SSP, DSP, self-serve — and ChatGPT ads in just 4 countries17:58 The new ad formats: sponsored prompts, polling ads, product carousels19:53 AI-native campaigns — URLs, briefs, and dynamic personas22:30 Real ChatGPT ad numbers — CPCs and why human faces win24:30 Roger's definition of agentic commerce27:05 OpenAI's $100B ad target27:55 Answer engines, product cards, and checkout in Australia29:13 The state of the arena — ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta, Perplexity, Apple30:57 The UCP checkout in Instagram and the Shopify squeeze32:50 Inside the Australian market — duopolies, Temu, and Shein35:52 Will Anthropic/Claude ever do commerce?38:55 Retailer-hosted agents — Alexa, Woolworths' Olive, Bunnings' Buddy42:17 The top questions brands are asking Roger48:44 Escaping "keyword jail"50:40 Ice cubes vs. snowflakes52:00 How challenger brands find their wedge54:30 Where to find Roger 👉 Connect with Roger Dunn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rogerdunn/👉 Learn more about Thrad: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thrads/ 🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

    56 min
  5. Who Buys, Not Just How: Inside ShopAgentic's €1.9M Bet with Co-Founders Alexander Ringsdorff (CEO) & Kai-Thomas Krause (CPAO)

    Jun 11

    Who Buys, Not Just How: Inside ShopAgentic's €1.9M Bet with Co-Founders Alexander Ringsdorff (CEO) & Kai-Thomas Krause (CPAO)

    This is an exclusive first look at ShopAgentic, and we cover a lot of ground with both co-founders. First we go over the big company news, then rewind through two decades of e-commerce history that brought Alex and Kai to this moment, and why they think the ground is shifting under the entire industry. From there it’s a wide-ranging conversation about what changes when agents, not humans, become the buyers: how a commerce platform built for this era might actually work, how merchants would use it, and where payments, protocols, and front ends are all heading.  It’s part founder story, part state-of-the-union on agentic commerce, and part early peek at what they’re building. Hit play. 👇 Highlights: The €1.9M pre-seed: Led by Mayventures and Greenfield Capital, with around nine entrepreneur and business-angel tickets, a “US-feeling” round raised in Europe.Who buys, not just how: Kai’s framing for the whole thesis, agentic commerce is the first shift that changes the buyer itself, not just the channel.Built for humans, not agents: Why the founders believe legacy platforms, even the ones they helped build, aren’t architected for what’s coming.The ACP moment: The OpenAI release that made the duo sit down and say “this is gonna change potentially everything.”The weekend prototype: Asked for screenshots for the pitch deck, Kai vibe-coded a working demo instead, and it’s part of why investors leaned in.A squad of agents, not a platform: The product reimagined from the outcome backward, sold into innovation budgets rather than million-dollar replatforming.Ephemeral UIs: “The fast fashion of front ends” interfaces generated on the flyThe protocol soup: Why UCP is “the one to go for” right now, and how ShopAgentic wants to absorb that complexity so merchants don’t have to.A wake-up call for brands: “You’re not even part of that conversation. That’s why you’re not seeing the traffic.”Debut at K5 Berlin (June 22–24): Their first time on the trade-show circuit, including a business-user AI hackathon.Two founders who've lived through every era of e-commerce software, now betting the next one gets rebuilt for agents. Whether you run a brand wondering where your traffic went or you're just curious what a platform "born agentic" looks like, this one's a glimpse into the future. Enjoy the conversation. Timestamps:  04:21 The big news: a €1.9M pre-seed 06:07 How the round came together (the inbound snowball) 07:54 Alex's background: age 14, Magento, CouchCommerce 10:09 Meeting Stephan Schambach and building NewStore 11:35 The German e-commerce family tree 13:27 Kai's background: Metro, robotics, commercetools 16:19 From SaaS to open source to composable 17:30 Why agentic needs a new platform — the ACP moment 20:28 The founding story (and a little Guinness) 22:07 The weekend prototype that sold investors 25:43 How agentic commerce is actually different 26:04 The "squad of agents" vision 27:59 Dashboard, chatbox, and voice for merchants 30:30 Vibe coding, Lovable, Visa, and ephemeral UIs 32:30 Stablecoins and cross-border payments 34:48 x402, MPP, micropayments, and the local-agent explosion 37:07 Debut at K5 Berlin (and a hackathon) 38:17 The agent OS and guardrails 39:09 Navigating the protocol soup: UCP, ACP, AP2 42:00 Who should be an early merchant 44:14 Launching agentic-first 44:48 LinkedIn, shopagentic.com, and wrap-up 👉 Connect with Alex: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderringsdorff/👉 Connect with Kai: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaithomaskrause/👉 Learn more about ShopAgentic: https://www.shopagentic.com/ 🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

    46 min
  6. Enterprise or Easy? Salesforce Says Both: DOUBLE Pod with Nitin Mangtani and Lennart Stevens from Salesforce

    Jun 4

    Enterprise or Easy? Salesforce Says Both: DOUBLE Pod with Nitin Mangtani and Lennart Stevens from Salesforce

    This week we have a rare double header. Scheduling conflicts meant no three-way interview, so we sat down with two Salesforce leaders back to back, both there to unpack the company’s big June release, headlined by the launch of its newest platform, Storefront Next. First up is Nitin, who walks through the full sweep of the June release and makes the case for why, taken together, it's Salesforce's biggest commerce release in five years. Then Lennart takes us deeper into the agentic guts, one of our favorite parts. The two interviews rhyme in one important way: both leaders insist that agentic commerce on your owned-and-operated channels matters just as much as showing up in ChatGPT and Gemini. As Nitin puts it, skipping your own shopper agent is like the old days of saying "I participate on Google Shopping, but I don't have search on my website."  Highlights  Biggest release in five years: Nitin frames the June release as Salesforce Commerce’s biggest swing since he arrived.“It’s 2026, let’s combine the two together”: The forced choice between enterprise-grade and easy-to-launch is a false distinction that can be engineered away.The acquisition cheat code: Rather than spend five years building modern AI search in-house, Salesforce bought Cimulate. It now powers every shopper agent prompt, and it’s available even to non-Commerce Cloud customers.“This code should be written by Claude prompting and not by you”: Storefront Next ships you to the 90% point out of the box; the last 10% is vibe-coded. Migration utilities plus Claude Code shrink what used to be a capital-T front-end project.Live in under 30 minutes: Lennart’s demo path: name the storefront, connect a code repo, click go, and you’re previewing a high-performance site in under half an hour.You need your own Rufus AND to play off-site: Both guests hammer the distinction between agentic commerce on owned-and-operated channels and syndicated commerce via UCP on Gemini, OpenAI, and beyond. One without the other is like being on Google Shopping with no search box on your own site.Focus is magic: Nitin consolidated 20 initiatives down to 4–5, runs two-week iteration cycles instead of two-year PRDs, and credits that discipline (plus AI-native development) for the release’s scope.Advisor and confidant: Lennart’s favorite anecdote… a jewelry brand found customers were more comfortable asking an agent “how big should the ring be, how much should it cost?” than asking a friend.Checkout wisdom from Nitin: Stop offering eight payment options. “Just put Apple Pay on your PDP” four options max, on a good day.The era of choosing between enterprise and easy looks like it's ending and the agents are coming either way. Enjoy the conversation. Timestamps: 01:43 Scot's intro: a rare Salesforce double header 04:17 Part 1: Nitin Mangtani, EVP & GM of Salesforce Commerce 05:40 The Cimulate acquisition story 06:50 Inside the June release: search, Storefront Next, merchandising, POS, OMS 10:00 Four kinds of customers, one platform 11:50 Migration, Claude Code, and the 90/10 rule 14:10 Shopper agents: owned & operated vs. syndicated 17:05 How Cimulate is baked in search and agentic collapse into one 19:05 "Enterprise or easy" is a false choice 20:15 Focus, two-week iterations, and acquisitions as a cheat code 23:10 ChatGPT leaving checkout and the state of agentic commerce 26:10 Part 2: Lennart Stevens, VP of Product, Agentforce Commerce 27:15 Lennart's background: two decades on the partner side 29:15 Where Storefront Next fits in the Salesforce lineup 32:45 The unlock: a storefront live in under 30 minutes 35:20 React, Tailwind, shadcn + MCP server and 40+ skills 38:05 Design partners and the adoption curve 40:55 AI readiness: e-commerce leaders' #1 concern 43:50 The shopper agent as advisor and confidant 44:45 Agentic merchandising and the Figma unlock 👉 Connect with Nitin Mangtani: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nitinmangtani/👉 Connect with Nitin Mangtani: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennart-stevens/👉 Learn more about Storefront Next: https://www.salesforce.com/blog/storefront-next/ 🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

    48 min
  7. “We Have Definitely Been Cooking”: Ashish Gupta, Google’s VP of Merchant Shopping, on Everything Google Just Shipped at GML

    May 28

    “We Have Definitely Been Cooking”: Ashish Gupta, Google’s VP of Merchant Shopping, on Everything Google Just Shipped at GML

    May 20th at Google Marketing Live, right before my high-level strategic chat with Nick Fox, SVP of Knowledge and Information at Google (you can read/listen to that one here), I got to sit down with Ashish Gupta, VP & GM of Merchant Shopping at Google. If the Nick Fox conversation was the 30,000-ft strategic view of where Google is taking AI Mode, AIO, and the answer engine, this one with Ashish is the exact opposite. It’s the on-the-ground tactical roadmap for merchants. Ashish is literally one of the people building the thing, and he’s telling you what to do about it before holiday. This interview was recorded right after his fireside chat with Augustina Sartori at Google HQ. On that panel, he laid out the 4 things merchants should do right now:  Product feedsData strengthAI campaigns, Agentic infrastructure (i.e., UCP). We get into all four. In this interview we discuss: The 6 new conversational attributes — just launched, live now in the supplemental feed (FAQs, related items, popularity rank, document links, additional variants, item group). Why they exist, how to use them, and the “best sales associate in your store” analogy for how AI surfaces are now expected to behaveUCP’s expansion into new verticals — food delivery and travel. Why now, and why the “U” in Universal Commerce Protocol is doing real workLoyalty in UCP via Google account linking — your Ulta $10 reward shows up at checkout. Critical for merchants who don’t allow guest checkoutData strength — bringing first-party loyalty data into Gemini / AI Mode surfaces so loyal customers see more of the brands they loveAI Max & P-Max and the new ad formats showing up across AI surfaces (and YouTube)AI Performance Insights coming to Merchant Center — the new Share of Voice metric, why the funnel doesn’t behave like a normal funnel (it can actually widen deeper in), and how Google is moving from a “click/keyword” company to an “answer engine” companyThe keyword vs. long-tail question — in an answer engine world, is there even such a thing as a “popular search term” anymore? (Ashish’s answer is interesting)What’s neat about doing these back-to-back is you get both layers in one day. Nick’s interview is about framing: how Google thinks about AI Mode vs. traditional Search, the Innovator’s Dilemma, the ~5 prior attempts at “transactions on Google” and why this one is different, and trust at the intersection of answer engines and AI ads. Ashish’s interview is the merchant-facing manifestation of all of that: here’s exactly what’s shipping, here’s what to put in your feed, here’s how we’ll measure you. Read both together and you get a pretty complete picture of what Google is doing with agentic commerce in 2026. Timestamps: 01:41 — Episode intro: Ashish Gupta returns, context on GML, the merchant vs. consumer org structure at Google 04:39 — Interview begins (on-site at Building 100 Bayview) 05:18 — Breaking news: the 6 new conversational attributes are live 06:32 — The "best sales associate" analogy for AI surfaces 08:09 — Popularity rank: how merchants can signal without giving away proprietary data 09:37 — Related items, additional variants, and item group attributes 11:01 — UCP expansion into new verticals (food delivery, travel) — why now 12:32 — The 4 things merchants should do: feeds, data strength, AI campaigns, agentic infrastructure 13:02 — Data strength explained: first-party loyalty data in AI surfaces 14:08 — Loyalty in UCP via Google account linking (the Ulta $10 example) 16:01 — AI campaigns: AI Max, P-Max, and showing up across AI surfaces 17:46 — New ad formats and YouTube shopping 18:04 — UCP on YouTube and what's next (Gmail?) 19:19 — AI Performance Insights & the Share of Voice metric 20:17 — Discover / Explore / Purchase: Google crosses from search engine to answer engine 21:34 — Why the AI funnel doesn't behave like a traditional funnel 23:20 — Long-tail vs. keyword: do "popular search terms" still exist in an answer-engine world? 25:05 — What Ashish is most excited about 26:06 — Outro 👉 Connect with Ashish: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishgupta98/ 🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

    26 min
  8. Nick Fox, Google's SVP of Knowledge and Information, Live Google Marketing Live Interview

    May 21

    Nick Fox, Google's SVP of Knowledge and Information, Live Google Marketing Live Interview

    May 20th at Google Marketing Live, I was very fortunate to be able to sit down for ~20 minutes with Nick Fox, SVP of Knowledge and Information at Google. Earlier in the day he had a fireside chat with Ben Smith, Editor-in-Chief Semafor. Later that afternoon after I had time to reflect on this conversation, I had a ~20min interview with Nick. It’s not often you get to sit down with one of the top execs at a ~$5T company so I worked a lot of topics into a short time. As always, I try and approach this with you, the audience in mind. What would YOU ask? I had just completed a super tactical Agentic Commerce / UCP/Universal Checkout chat with Ashish, so for this one flipped into high-level strategic mode. In this interview we discuss: How does Nick ‘frame’ AIO/AI Mode/GeminiWill AI Mode/AIO and traditional search transition from traditional to AI Mode or will they merge, or ‘other’ down the road?Google’s had ~5 previous attempts from the Froogle era to today for ‘transactions on Google’ - why is this the moment they are getting super serious about it?Navigating the Innovator’s DilemmaFinally, managing trust at the intersection of ‘Answer engines’ and ‘AI Ads’Timestamps: 01:45 — Scot introduces Nick Fox, Google SVP of Knowledge & Information02:31 — “Search in the AI Era” and Google’s AI strategy03:21 — What this interview covers: AI Mode, Gemini, ads, and commerce04:00 — Why Google believes transactions will work this time 04:33 — The innovator’s dilemma and defending Search 05:16 — Ads, trust, and AI-generated answers 05:52 — Interview begins live from Google Marketing Live 06:23 — How Gemini is “supercharging” Google’s advertising products 06:50 — Ads inside AI Mode and agentic commerce tools 07:11 — Universal Commerce Protocol + Universal Cart 07:26 — Nick Fox on 23 years at Google and the AI era 08:07 — Why Google sees tech shifts as growth accelerators, not disruptions 08:53 — Search vs AI Overviews vs AI Mode vs Gemini explained 09:12 — Google’s “two main products”: Search and Gemini 10:16 — Reinventing the Search box for the AI era 11:01 — Will AI Mode eventually become the default? 12:10 — Google’s philosophy: combining AI + the web 13:00 — Why Google believes users still want the web 13:03 — Gemini “Spark” and agentic capabilities 13:43 — AI agents running 24/7 in the background 14:14 — Using Spark to manage complex tasks like event planning 14:50 — The future of Gemini in the agentic era 14:59 — Google as an economic engine and ad marketplace 15:42 — The innovator’s dilemma and Search resilience 16:04 — “Lean into the technology shifts” philosophy 16:52 — Why Google didn’t see AI as a business-model threat 17:17 — Google’s ad model as a marketplace between users and marketers 18:18 — Why Google Shopping is different this time 19:02 — Why AI enables better shopping confidence and discovery 19:43 — AI helping users get further down the purchase journey 20:24 — Trust, ads, and AI-generated answers 21:04 — Google’s principles for ads in AI experiences 21:31 — “Ads are clearly labeled, separate, and relevant” 21:58 — Closing thoughts and wrap-up 👉 Connect with Nick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickthefox/👉 Learn more about Google Marketing Live: https://www.googlemarketinglive.com/digital 🧠 Want to stay ahead in AI commerce? Subscribe and follow along:📰 Subscribe to the free Substack: retailgentic.ai📺 Watch episodes on YouTube & Subscribe for updates: https://www.youtube.com/@Retailgentic

    22 min
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Retailgentic explores consumer behavior and retail trends to help brands and retailers innovate. Join Scot Wingo for expert insights, actionable news, and ecommerce innovation strategies to navigate the future of retail and agentic commerce.

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