Retailgentic | Consumer Behavior & Retail Trend

This one is a build deep dive. Daniel has spent eight years on the same problem, and the answer has changed shape three times along the way: a consumer app in 2018, a shoppable recipe platform in 2023, and now a conversational shopping assistant running inside grocers’ own sites. 
We go deep on the plumbing here: product catalogs, ontologies, eval systems, model selection, retail media, and what an agent does when a shopper types “taco night.” If you like knowing how these things actually work under the hood, this is your episode.
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Highlights:
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘀: Live in over 700 stores, reaching over 10 million shoppers, with the number of locations set to double before the end of the year. The consumer app has over a million users. 
𝟰𝟭 𝗱𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲: A one-line JavaScript install that reuses the retailer’s existing catalog, add-to-cart, analytics, and retail media. National scale in six weeks.
𝗦𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁 → 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁: Daniel’s framing for the whole shift. The old era: you search one thing, you select it. The new one: the agent assembles a solution and you approve it. 
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺: Thousands of test scenarios with grading criteria aligned to each retailer’s merchandising principles, run tens or hundreds of times to get a distribution of responses. 
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝘀𝗵 𝗿𝘂𝗹𝗲: Retailers write procedures the agent pulls when a scenario matches. One of Daniel’s favorites: if you’re cooking fish today or tomorrow, it recommends fresh. If it’s later in the week, frozen.
𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗱𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗲𝗲: Onboarding is essentially an interview with the business. What are your values? How do you respond? What are your merchandising principles? That becomes the agent’s identity and personality. 
𝟭,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘁𝗵 𝗼𝗳 𝗝𝘂𝗹𝘆 𝗯𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗹𝗲𝘀: Instead of one holiday carousel every shopper sees, merchant teams define ~20 axes — price, dietary needs, brand preference — and an agentic process generates permutations personalized against transaction history.
𝗔𝗜 𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗳𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝗸𝗧𝗼𝗸: Long before ChatGPT, Cooklist ran a TikTok series generating recipes with GPT-2 and early GPT-3. The models got good at basic recipes so fast that the fun moved to challenging them to be creative.
Daniel is one of those founders who has clearly built the thing himself, and it shows in the answers. We learned about a thousand things from this one. Enjoy the conversation.
Timestamps:
02:57 Welcome Daniel Vitiello, CEO & co-founder of Cooklist
03:10 Grocery, CPG, and retailer-hosted agents: the pod's favorite topics
04:46 The $1 check and the handwritten letter for loyalty data
05:46 Why 2017 was the moment
06:12 Inside the Cooklist app: home inventory and the AI chef
07:35 AI as the thread: Kurzweil, GPT-2, and the AI Chefs TikTok series
09:37 B2C to B2B, and the synergies of running both
12:05 The cat food problem
13:34 The core identity system: hummus, three ways
15:58 Search and select vs. review and accept
16:23 The spark for B2B: Target, Techstars, and saying no
18:45 Recipe commerce and meal-pairing merchandising
20:19 Funding: RevTech, Mercury Fund, and profitability
21:56 Freemium, pro, and advertising in the app
22:48 700 stores, 10 million shoppers
24:28 The flagship deployment: live in 41 days
25:56 Ontology, context engineering, and interviewing the retailer
27:03 Non-determinism and the eval system
29:06 Entry points: sparkles, suggested prompts, and PDP workflows
31:01 How the catalog and inventory get in
33:41 Procedures: the weekly flyer and the fish rule
35:55 Cost, speed, and the token-efficient stream
37:38 Model agnostic: scoring Opus against Sonnet
38:15 Instacart, Storefront Pro, and winning head-to-head
39:47 Retail media and Criteo
40:22 Agentic search and the "taco night" problem
42:02 Agentic merchandising: 1,000 Fourth of July bundles
42:55 Proactive carts, and the 50% who finish in the store
43:43 Smart fridges and forecasting demand
44:44 Where to find Daniel

👉 Connect with Daniel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkvitiello/
👉 Learn more about Cooklist: https://cooklist.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

This week Retailgentic goes full Tron… in reverse. Instead of getting sucked into the digital world, Scot steps out of it and into into the analog one, bringing the AI angle with us. 
Ben Rodier is the first AI guest on the show who isn’t from e-commerce. He’s building physical AI for the sales floor: an AI sales coach for the people who sell to you face-to-face in furniture stores, apparel shops, bank branches, and beyond. It’s part founder-journey story (three companies, two exits, twenty years in retail) and part product deep dive into how you actually coach a human salesperson with AI without being creepy about it.
Highlights 
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝘂𝗹𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝟯𝟬: There’s an inflection point (around 30 AI coaching sessions) where practice turns measurable. Reps who cross it sell roughly $2,000 more per week, about $100,000 more per year, than those who don’t.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗿𝘁: Plot the reps who practiced 30+ times against those who practiced 10, and the two lines pull apart into a “crocodile-shaped separation”… the clearest picture of coaching ROI Ben’s ever had.
𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁-𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲: Data (find the goal) → AI role play (practice it) → privacy-compliant listening (coach the real conversation). Each step earns the right to the next.
𝗥𝗼𝗹𝗲 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘆 𝗶𝗻 𝘃𝗼𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲: The coach is a ChatGPT-style voice agent trained on your company’s own playbook. It throws curveballs, like someone walking into the room mid-pitch. “No one likes to do role play with their manager. It’s super awkward.”
𝗔 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗶𝘁 𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿: Unlike most training software, if you practice you sell more so the tool pays for itself. 
𝗕𝗼𝗿𝗻 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗿: Ben invented retail-media ads on Walmart’s website in 2009 before the term existed. Google execs opened a meeting with: “Who are you, and how did you figure out how to get these properties as advertising publishers?”
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗰𝘁: McDonald’s tried a humanless AI drive-through and it “failed miserably”. They pivoted right back to a human. Ben’s bet: five years out, most buying and selling is still face-to-face.
It’s not often we leave the digital surface behind on this show, but Ben’s take on physical AI, and what happens when the sales floor and the digital world finally connect, is one of the more grounded, human conversations we’ve had. Enjoy the conversation.
00:46 Welcome to Retailgentic
02:01 Scot's intro: a fun diversion into physical AI
03:47 Meet Ben Rodier, FrontlineIQ
04:33 From a TJ Maxx floor to third-time founder
06:07 Sales guy, not a technical founder
06:53 Corporate to startup: the TV advertising leap
07:37 Inventing retail media on Walmart's site in 2009
10:31 Salesfloor: the original idea
13:42 Bootstrapping, PE at the pandemic peak, the Tulip merger
17:19 The genesis of FrontlineIQ: Up Labs & Ashley
20:10 What "physical AI" actually means
21:24 Launching Jan 1, 2025 & hiring AI-native talent
24:41 30 customers in under 18 months
27:36 The oversubscribed seed round
28:46 How it works, part 1: data & trust
30:58 Part 2: AI role play in voice mode
32:43 Part 3: privacy-compliant listening
36:00 The Rule of 30 & the "up" system
37:33 Coach the coach, God view & the control center
39:48 ROI: the crocodile chart & turnover
45:14 The future: cameras, glasses & Plaud pins
49:23 Robots on the floor? The McDonald's test
51:44 Merchandising insight from what reps hear
52:36 Where to learn more & outro

👉 Connect with Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benrodier/
👉 Learn more about FrontlineIQ: https://www.frontlineiq.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

This week Scot goes on a markets deep dive with one of Wall Street's leading internet analysts. It’s a tour through the mega-cap playbook (Meta, Amazon, Google, eBay, Shopify) and how professional investors are actually pricing the agentic-commerce shift. Colin covers over $12 trillion of market cap across five names alone, so this is the view from the models, the channel checks, and the trading desk.

This is a wide-ranging, numbers-forward conversation about where the money moves as agents become the buyers and which companies Wall Street thinks come out ahead. 

Highlights:
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗣𝗘𝗘𝗗 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸: Baird’s formula for internet winners: Scale, Product, Engineering, Efficiency, and Data. Nail all five, and the competitive advantage compounds.
“𝗟𝗲𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗱𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝗹𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴”: Colin explains why skeptics are dramatically underestimating the size of the opportunity.
𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗮 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿’𝘀 𝘁𝗼𝗽 𝗽𝗶𝗰𝗸: Colin’s highest-conviction AI bet is Meta driven by WhatsApp business agents, Meta AI, and unmatched consumer reach. (Last year’s pick: Google.)
𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗶𝘁𝘆: The real value won’t live in foundation models, it accrues to the platforms, applications, and distribution layers built on top.
𝗔𝗺𝗮𝘇𝗼𝗻’𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗲-𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝗱𝗼𝗼𝗿: By opening its catalog to AI agents, Amazon may have crossed a line it can’t reverse and that could strengthen its ecosystem even further.
“𝗖𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗲𝘆𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗯𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘀”: If AI agents skip search results and category pages, they also skip the ads, putting pressure on retail media’s biggest revenue stream.
𝗪𝗵𝗼 𝗼𝘄𝗻𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝘄𝗶𝗻𝘀: The long-term winners will control identity, payments, checkout, and fulfillment, not just discovery.
𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗪𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗲𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗦𝗵𝗼𝗽𝗶𝗳𝘆: AI could bypass storefronts and even Shop Pay. That uncertainty alone is enough for investors to discount the stock.
“𝗪𝗲’𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝗲𝗲 𝗶𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘆”: Colin expects agentic commerce adoption to meaningfully accelerate after Q4, even a one- or two-point lift on today’s numbers would be significant.
Colin is one of the sharpest lenses out there on how the market is actually pricing all of this. Enjoy the conversation!

Timestamps:

3:28 Meet Colin Sebastian
5:04 20 years of history & the Wall Street event
7:00 From bartender to Baird
7:56 Baird's coverage universe & "TMT"
9:29 The GTA VI mega-launch call
11:12 Buy side vs. sell side, explained
13:52 The SPEED framework & top picks
16:16 What is agentic commerce?
20:05 Sizing it: trillions & consumer surveys
22:42 Meta's social-graph advantage
25:05 Amazon's walled garden & the one-way door
29:40 Google, UCP & why models get commoditized
32:36 eBay's used-goods moat
39:44 Retail media networks at risk?
44:33 OpenAI, ads & the closed-loop logic
48:36 Payments: PayPal, stablecoins & who wins
51:57 Protocols: UCP vs. ACP
52:23 Why Wall Street is nervous about Shopify
👉 Connect with Colin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cosebastian/
👉 Learn more about Baird: https://www.rwbaird.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

This epsiode is a platform-and-stats deep dive: Scot gets Mani to pin down what agentic commerce actually is (with a four-stage framework that’s the cleanest map we’ve heard), then pulls out a run of genuinely wild numbers on what Shopify is seeing across millions of merchants, before going deep on the catalog, the protocol soup, and everything that shipped in the Spring ‘26 Edition.

Highlights:
Crawl, walk, run, fly: The framework of the episode. Crawl is AI-driven discovery (the biggest, most impactful stage today); fly is fully discretionary, budget-based buying. Mani’s verdict on where the industry actually is: “somewhere between walk and run today.”
8X traffic, 13X orders: Shopify’s Q1 numbers… AI-driven traffic to merchants up 8X year over year, and orders through those channels up 13X.
AI buyers just hit harder: New buyers who discover a merchant through AI order at roughly twice the rate of organic search, are about 50% more likely to convert, and spend about 14% more per order because they show up deeper in the consideration funnel.
70% of AI orders are long tail: About 70–71% of AI-attributed orders last year fell outside the top 100 product categories. Models “don’t need to learn how to reach for the small merchant, they just need to learn the intent of the buyer.”
2X on fresh data: The Shopify catalog, over a billion products across millions of merchants, converts about 2X better than stale or scraped data, thanks to real-time pricing and availability straight from the merchant.
A “7 out of 10 at everything”: On how AI is reshaping product, design, and engineering roles.
The non-merchant-of-record era: Don’t become the marketplace reselling goods, just be the interface to the merchant. The merchant keeps the customer relationship and runs their own checkout.
UCP was a “labor of love”: Shopify was at the genesis of the Universal Commerce Protocol.
Sidekick, Pulse & Autopilot: Sidekick usage is up about 4X year over year; Pulse turns Shopify’s data into proactive recommendations right on your admin homepage; and the guiding principle stays “always put the control in the merchant’s hand.”
B2B may reach “fly” first: By 2030, Mani splits the world into DTC and wholesale/B2B and bets B2B, where both sides transact professionally and obsess over efficiency, may hit full automation before consumers do.
Mani’s four stages are the cleanest map of agentic commerce we’ve heard, and the numbers behind them are frankly staggering. And as he reminds us, we’re still in the early innings. Enjoy the conversation! 
Timestamps:
03:55 Welcome; watching Shopify's rise from ChannelAdvisor
04:38 Mani's path to VP of Product at Shopify
06:37 The Wish / ContextLogic founding story
08:18 Vibe coding and "AI makes everyone a 7 out of 10"
11:10 What Mani owns across the commerce loop
12:42 Non-merchant-of-record channels (ChatGPT, Gemini)
13:45 Defining agentic commerce
14:44 The crawl / walk / run / fly framework
17:50 The stats: 8X traffic, 13X orders, +50% conversion, +14% AOV
20:03 Out-of-the-box UCP compatibility and agentic storefronts
23:10 The Shopify catalog superpower (2x conversion)
26:40 WebMCP and the protocol stack (AP2, x402, Web Bot Auth)
29:15 UCP: Shopify's labor of love
32:24 Top things merchants should do to win
35:28 The escalation "escape hatch"
37:24 Word of mouth and the long tail, 70% of AI orders
42:41 Spring '26 Edition: Shop app, Ship & Pick Up, Pulse, Autopilot
48:10 Where it all goes by 2030: B2B vs DTC
52:29 Wrap-up

👉 Connect with Mani Fazeli: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcfazeli/
👉 Learn more about Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/
👉 And check out the Shopify newsroom blog here
🧠 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

Kartik Hosanagar wears a lot of hats: Wharton professor, serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and now co-founder of an applied AI lab building simulation tools for AI search. Scot and Kartik land in almost exactly the same place on where agentic commerce is heading, but they get there from opposite directions: Scot on gut and operator instinct, Kartik on research. The result is a wide-ranging conversation about treating AI as a customer, the levels of agentic commerce, and what brands should actually be doing this week, this quarter, and this year.

Highlights:
AI is a new customer category: Once shopping goes agentic, Kartik argues you have to ask of AI what you ask of any customer: how do we inform it, persuade it, and what biases does it have? 
The driverless-car model: Agentic commerce has levels 0–5, just like autonomous vehicles. Level 5 is “buy the shoe and make sure it arrives in a week” hands-off; Instacart-style automation and AI-enabled discovery are lower levels and we’re already in the era.
The funnel got outsourced: Top-of-funnel work customers used to do themselves like discovering brands and building a consideration set is now done by AI, so shoppers arrive far later in the funnel. Discovery is “fundamentally transformed.”
4 words → 60 words: From his CommerceNext keynote, average search went from about four words on Google to about 60 words on the first ChatGPT turn, then multi-turn. Nobody types “men’s running shoes” anymore; shoes show up on conversation turn seven.
UCP, ACP and the protocol wars: Kartik explains Google’s UCP (product feeds today, transactions later), why OpenAI backed off ACP instant checkout, and reads Amazon joining UCP as “testing the waters,” not a strategy reversal
Counterfactual simulations: Bodhium builds “digital twins” of ChatGPT and Gemini and spins up virtual worlds where your site looks different, testing a thousand hypotheses in minutes to find what makes AI answers more accurate and favorable. Market research, but for AI.
The today / this quarter / this year roadmap: Now: audit conversations, visibility, and which bots read your site. This quarter: build simulators and a UCP/MCP workstream. This year: scale it with agentic workflows. 
Two front doors: Kartik doesn’t think websites disappear, but “a website is not the right front door for an agent.” Expect a human web door and an MCP door for agents, plus omnichannel behavior where each feeds the other.
Kartik calls himself an "agentic commerce maximalist," and after this conversation you'll see why... the research and the gut instinct point the same direction. Enjoy the conversation.

Timestamps:
03:04 Welcome: the "renaissance man" background problem
03:49 Kartik's cocktail-party version: academic + entrepreneur, Yodle
04:36 The Yodle / Milo mobile-social-local era (and Fidji at OpenAI)
06:05 Wharton AI Center and what Kartik researches
07:37 The thesis: AI search is more than another channel
10:08 Defining agentic commerce: the driverless-car levels
12:34 UCP, Gemini, and why Amazon joined
15:55 Amazon vs. Walmart strategies (Rufus vs. Sparky)
16:29 Bodhium Labs: what it is
17:00 The AEO/GEO problem: guesswork and the Reddit trap
18:56 Research-led counterfactual simulations
21:02 The long tail: multi-turn conversations replace keywords
22:49 CommerceNext keynote: 4 words to 60 words
24:57 The "AI is just another channel" misconception
26:48 Shopper trust: high for discovery, not for checkout
28:15 You can't fully control what AI thinks about you
30:51 The roadmap: today, this quarter, this year
34:41 Rufus, Sparky, UCP, and MCP endpoints
36:37 Does agentic commerce grow the pie or shift it?
38:32 Do we still need websites? Two front doors
40:39 Where to find Kartik: LinkedIn and Substack
👉 Connect with Kartik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kartik-hosanagar-22272115/
👉 Learn more about A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0525560882?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback
👉 Visit his substack: https://hosanagar.substack.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