Kelly Wortham: All right, welcome everybody to the first ever crossover conversation with no hacks and the Test and Learn community. Thank you so much for agreeing to co moderate with me, Sonny. This is our special Halloween podcast and TLC conversation. We're talking agentic commerce, tricks, treats and the future of shopping. But before we do, we have to thank our sponsors. As always, let's start by thinking Conductrix who have been with us from the beginning. Thank you, Matt, Nate, Iz, thank you, Ashley and the entire team at Conductrix so much for sponsoring us. And we want to thank our other TLC newsletter sponsors, starting with Conductrix again, and also Growth Book and Ask why. Thank you for providing your thought leadership to the community and thank all three of you for also sponsoring Experimentation Island. Thank you, Convert, for sponsoring the Amazing Conversations channel on the tlc. Take a chance, everybody. Go answer some questions and get a chance to win some prizes. And last, thank you, Blazing Growth. Before I introduce the panel, we're all going to introduce each other. It should be interesting. Quick announcement and reminder before, for those of you who missed the exciting news about Dr. Kelly Hill of Khan Academy as our third speaker of the lineup being invited by Growth Book, we're really excited to have her. I feel really stupid in this wolf costume talking about this, but hey, I think Kelly would be okay with it because, you know, she's K12 educator, but still really excited to have her and y' all would really love to hear her story. So stay tuned. Next week we will be announcing our fourth speaker. He's very well known and loved in the TLC community. He's been there since the very beginning, so that's your hint. I'll also be announcing a special TLC member only ticket queue in your email, so watch your inboxes. All right, with that, time to meet your panel. Louisa.

Luiza de Lange: I love the photo. All right, hello.

Kelly Wortham: Your job to introduce the first person on the panel.

Carlos Trujillo: Go.

Luiza de Lange: Yes, I think I'm going to go for Carlos and tell you guys all about why he is here. So I think that he's on the panel because Kelly and him are on the same side of the pond obviously now. But other than that, I think Carlos has shown his interest in the topic. I mean, he had some pretty bold claims looking at some of his LinkedIn posts where he also said that soon half of what most people know as CRO will be relevant. So perhaps he will expand a little bit on that today. And I mean, he's been with one of the leading CRO agencies for almost five years, Spiro. So yeah, I Think that's a great zero thought leader. And we're very happy to have you, Carlos, on the panel.

Carlos Trujillo: Thank you, Louisa.

Slobodan Manić: He makes America's most dependable trust.

Kelly Wortham: Okay, next up.

Carlos Trujillo: That wasn't me.

Kelly Wortham: All right, Carlos, why don't you introduce number two?

Slobodan Manić: Sure.

Carlos Trujillo: I think in my case, I need to introduce our amazing host today, Kelly, which. And. And I think my task was to figure out why she wanted to commodore this panel with Sunny from nohacks. And I think. I mean, to me, the reason is kind of, like, obvious. This is like a very hot topic right now because some crazy people are making bold claims about this, making half of CRO irrelevant and things like that. So this is probably a good timing to start this discussion, to figure all this out together. And obviously Kelly's all in for navigating this conversation and keeping the community engaged. So. Yeah. Hope this pays off.

Kelly Wortham: Perfect. Yep. Well done.

Slobodan Manić: Next. Why is Louisa here? I need. I need to have my theory on why Louise is here. So I had the pleasure of finally meeting Louisa in person over the last few months. We talked several times. She's a healthy skeptic, and we need healthy skeptics for anything AI related. And that is all I'll say.

Luiza de Lange: I love that that's all the credentials you need.

Slobodan Manić: I'm not laughing. I'm serious. We do need more healthy skeptics when it comes to AI.

Kelly Wortham: Yep, 100%. All right, so my job is to explain why Sonny's here. And for those of you who don't know about the no Hacks podcast, I mean, that one's pretty obvious. But, like, number two, I've learned more about AI from Sonny than just about anyone. But, like, if you go look on Sonny's LinkedIn, he says making humans happier by making websites fast, semantic and accessible. AI seems to like it too. And I just. I love this. I love this description because it's like, do it because it's better for humans. And yeah, sure, AI prefers it too. It's like putting. Putting humans first. And I love that about. It's the perspective. Everything he does with AI puts humans first. And that's like how what we're supposed to be doing with experimentation, that's what we're supposed to be doing with usability, with, like, CRO, with everything, if you put the humans first. And that's what you do with everything. So here you are helping everybody build all these AI things, and you're doing all this AI research, but you're always putting humans first. So that's why I wanted to co moderate with you because I think you have the right perspective. Putting humans first.

Slobodan Manić: Felt good to hear that. But yes, I, I do feel that way. It's. AI is only about humans optimizing for AI is about optimizing for humans, hopefully.

Kelly Wortham: All right, so that's why we're all here. That's at least that's why we think we're all here. So Louisa, your role is skeptic.

Luiza de Lange: Got it. Do this the best I can.

Kelly Wortham: And Sonny's here because he's putting humans first. He's our co moderator. Carlos is here because he thinks CRO might be dead. Oh my gosh. You're our Dr. Doom in this. All right, great. All right. And let's kick it off, shall we? Where do we want to start? Sunny?

Slobodan Manić: Let's unpack the CRO is that thing. Let's. Let's make it spicy from the get. Go. Go.

Kelly Wortham: I'm going to stop sharing my screen so that we can see our faces.

Luiza de Lange: Yay.

Kelly Wortham: Okay, go.

Slobodan Manić: Okay.

Carlos Trujillo: I guess that's me, right? I don't think I explicitly said it that way, but I think connecting the dots and I think to bring some context, I've been talking about the importance of optimizing for financial metrics for a while now through my course at cxl and pretty much every stage I have been at I've been repeating, you should no longer be optimizing just for like, I mean, obviously this dependent on the context, but just for more clicks when we know as a fact that just even the idea of just optimizing for more conversions doesn't necessarily translate into a healthy business or like the best possible decisions for a business. So I think this whole kind of like agentic commerce topic is just a good reminder of that because the point I've been trying to make for, well, I think a few weeks at this point is that as CRO professionals, we should use that as an excuse to remind ourselves to focus on what really matters. Which in my opinion and in my experience is not just shuffling things around on a, on a website or for like any commerce commonly like a product page. So yeah, the kind of like the, the reason behind my bold claims is that like CRO might become irrelevant as known for most people, probably not for this audience here. But if you ask the rest of the world outside of this kind of echo chamber in a good way what CRO is, normally their answers will be related to just kind of like how you can maybe manipulate people into buying more by creating scarcity tactics and sometimes some kind of Fake mechanisms to influence people into moving in the direction you wanted. I think despite the fact that agent E commerce because become a mainstream thing or not, which frankly I doubt will be a thing short term. This should just remind all of us here of the fundamentals, which is why we do this in the first place and what we're after. And yeah, that's kind of like some of the reasoning behind my previous claims.

Slobodan Manić: You disarmed me. Like I can't argue that. It's Halloween, so let's talk about Frankenstein. There's a big movie coming out next week. So if Zero is dead and we take the brain out and get an arm of SEO, a leg of an email marketing or whatever, we assemble the entire body and we make it alive. We have that new iteration of Zero. I know it's spooky, it's green, it's scary, but it needs to be all those things if it's going to stay alive.

Kelly Wortham: That's why I've been doing the writing on geo, because I'm trying to learn all the stuff I never learned on SEO.

Slobodan Manić: Yep. So maybe it's that. But is it going to stay that? I doubt it.

Carlos Trujillo: I mean I think if there's a tldr from what I'm, I've been trying to say is just sticks and trips and just like short sighted tactics will just keep becoming irrelevant and more irrelevant every day. I think some of us, I mean the ones that have been on this for sure for long enough have even noticed this pattern. Like even like leading voices in the space are no longer just talking about individual experiments or at least not most of the time. Where normally when we talk about experimentation we talk about programs and like the bigger picture and how this affects like the overarching business goals. So this idea of just thinking of like those silver bullets that will just transform your business, it's just getting outdated every day. So to me, partly as a practitioner, because I do client work, but also as an educator, the whole agent E commerce topic is just a great excuse to keep reiterating on this point. Let's optimize for what matters. Let's experiment with what matters.

Slobodan Manić: You know, I love that, I love that. Luis, do you have want to add something to that?

Luiza de Lange: I think, I mean because we jump right into the topic, me being the skeptic, I would like to pull it a little bit a step back and talk a little bit about the topic. And maybe not everyone stayed up with all the news and mentioned what actually happened and why are we discussing this. So I think Starting with the topic of this panel. I really love that it's kind of the was it, is it a trick or treat? And I think it can be with everything generative AI these days because so much about what we will need to do going forward will be distinguishing what is actually adding value, what is an actual use case versus what's an over promise and starting with the concrete. So OpenAI announced this instant checkout experience, right. And we will talk about the details of that geographies, partners and so on. So instant checkout and the agentic commerce protocol, I think that's important to start and mention, you know, what, what caused this, this topic and this conversation. And then within that we can start talking about the different elements of that which part is actually working like we started talkie. Kelly, perhaps you have some experience that would like to share with us in a second since you're the only one us based. But maybe we can break down a little bit of these elements, right? So geographies and partners and maybe we can discuss a little bit why the partners that were chosen by OpenAI were the ones chosen. I think those would be like good basics to cover before we jump into the further philosophical debate.

Kelly Wortham: That's a great point, Kelly.

Slobodan Manić: Since you failed to buy, can you share your experience in more detail?

Kelly Wortham: Yeah, yeah. So to Louise's point right now, the way it works is there's supposed to be an ability, at least in the US market, if you're using chat GPT, OpenAI, you're supposed to be able to have a conversation within ChatGPT about say you're what you're trying to purchase. And if you are trying to make a purchase with one of the approved vendors and we can go through the list of those approved vendors, then there's supposed to be the ability to purchase something directly within Chat GPT. So since, you know, we have the knowledge behind the scenes of what is available. For example, Etsy is one of those vendors I went through and I happen to know that some of you have met my husband. He likes to wear vests and he often buys those vests through Etsy. So I, you know, went through and I explained the design to the vest that my husband is looking for. He wants a corduroy vest, but he doesn't want it to look cowboy. He wants it to look librarian chic, you know, and I did the whole like description and you know, described what we were looking for and his measurements, his height, his weight, you know, I put it all in there. Hopefully that doesn't get leaked we could talk about that later anyway. And then asked if we could buy it. And I got sent to a UK vendor in instead of Etsy and I was like, hm, is this available in Etsy? And then they gave me a couple of Etsy options, but they said, really what you're looking for is this Walker Slater is. Is the best category. And they sent me several options in Etsy, several options in others that were very expensive, custom made. And the reason I ended up actually making the purchase with Walker Slater is because it was actually exactly what we had describ described. So it was a very interesting experience because they went by the. The chat interface, went by what I had described and actually gave me what we were looking for instead of encouraging me to buy in window.

Luiza de Lange: Interesting. So it swayed you away from the Etsy options.

Kelly Wortham: It did.

Luiza de Lange: Interesting. But when you got prompted with the Etsy options, did you have the buy button in chat? No or done?

Kelly Wortham: No, it had me go shop and look not in.

Carlos Trujillo: Not yet, I guess.

Kelly Wortham: I don't know.

Slobodan Manić: I don't know about the yet part. Yeah, yeah.

Kelly Wortham: I don't know if it would have been there if there had been something I liked, but it was like, go look at this. Is this what you want? And if I had wanted it, maybe, but if I'd already been off the.

Carlos Trujillo: Chat, why they announced it to like, like very recently still, like, there's a good chance it's still not like fully rolled out or something like that.

Slobodan Manić: They announced AGI a few years ago for 2025. Still not rolled out. So what I'm trying to say is everything they announce, if we're not the skeptical ones, the world is screwed. It's really that important. No, I'm serious. David had a good question. So I want to do like a poll, if you can raise your hand. But we need to talk about two elements of Gent E commerce. So David mentioned something like, why would you even buy through. Who's excited about shopping through a chatbot? Like genuinely excited about the ability to do that. Is anyone really thinking about doing that and wants to do it in the future? Only thumbs up, David.

Kelly Wortham: I will. I will say, Melissa, I was not. I thought it was stupid, but I was incredibly impressed with the outcome for my husband's best.

Slobodan Manić: Which part. Because there are two parts of that buying journey. Were you impressed by the discovering the product or actual transaction and buying the product?

Kelly Wortham: My husband is very particular. You've. You've seen how he dresses.

Slobodan Manić: Very cool. Yeah, I have.

Kelly Wortham: He's. He's very particular. He's very fancy. That's a good description. He's very difficult to find clothing that he would choose for himself. He looks like he's dressed in the, you know, 19, early 1900s or even 18. And because of that it is. Since it's so difficult, I was very impressed that I was able to describe to a chatbot what I was looking for. And the chatbot understood and was able to send me not one, but three recommendations. Now, two of them, I didn't tell them my price range. Two of them were custom made and way out of our price range. But what I would like is the ability to do that on a vendor of my choice, not on, you know, Chat GPT.

Slobodan Manić: So we're still talking about discovery. We're not talking about the actual purchase. What they announced was the ability to do the purchase. You could find those products earlier. They just announced a protocol called ACP that allows you to buy something directly through chat GPT.com conversation. Those are two different things. I think Agent E commerce is not discovering the product. It's kind of part of it leading to the. We're talking about. Sam Altman wants to control your purchases and, and see what you're buying and.

Carlos Trujillo: Describing a use case where you knew what you wanted, like at least to some extent. So it was like a kind of like a filter on asteroid situation, but not like. Yeah, to Sandy's point. Not discovery. I would say.

Kelly Wortham: Yeah, actually buying through.

Slobodan Manić: No, yeah, exactly. Discovery is fine. I mean, Google was fine for discovery. AI might be better. That's debatable and we should not get into that debate. Is regular search or AI search better? Because we don't know, nobody knows. But discovering a product and finding a product versus buying the product, those are completely different things. Also, what ChatGPT has in its favor for a few more weeks, I think, or months. There's no ads that experience for long. A lot shittier. Yep.

Luiza de Lange: But should we talk about the partners? Why did they choose the partners they chose? So the announcement talked about Etsy, which should have been enabled already now, and Shopify, which is not yet live. Why do you guys think that those were the partners that they chose? Because if you think about E Commerce for me, naturally, the very first company we'd look into would be Amazon. And obviously all these three players, Amazon, Etsy and Shopify, they were fueled by Stripe, which we know there's a connection between OpenAI and Stripe. So yeah, I just, you know, I would love to know whether that conversation ever happened. Was it even on the table? What do you guys think why? Why these?

Carlos Trujillo: I think there's a lot of hype on this whole thing, a lot of buzz and kind of free press, if you will. So I think it was just interested for both parties or, well, the three parties here. Like, you know, Shopify powers like Most of the d2c e. Com, not only in the US but around the world. So it's just kind of like, in my perspective, a nice thing to brag about. You know, like, it's, it's. In my opinion, it's clear or common or expected that if they initially partner with Shopify for this, they will not with Amazon. Because that's like the kind of like the nemesis of that situation. Because, like, Amazon already offers kind of some version of agentic commerce, like shopping through Alexa speakers and that kind of stuff. And, and Shopify slogan is like, they are arming the rebels. So I think it just, they just benefit each other. I don't know how much it really benefits the actual merchants, but to me, it wasn't surprising to see they. To see them kind of like announcing this together, like very excitedly. It's just. Yeah.

Luiza de Lange: You don't think it's as altruistic that. Supporting the small merchants that obviously both Etsy and. And Shopify stand for?

Carlos Trujillo: No, not.

Slobodan Manić: There are two reasons. One reason is that, like, if you want to make even more hype, what's the biggest platform anyone knows about? Two biggest platforms, it's Shopify and Etsy. Why not Amazon? Because Amazon is an AI player as well. Amazon is blocking ChatGPT completely, by the way, I think, since August this year. So they're more at war. There's no cooperation and partnerships there. They're both too big to partner, so they're. That, that. That's completely off the table. From what I've seen. Shopify, every store has the same API. It's kind of easy to connect and pull product information. Like, it's dead easy to do that. I think Etsy probably is the same way. So it's easy. And they don't have their own AI products, Shopify, and at least not real.

Kelly Wortham: AI products, like if they want to use them.

Slobodan Manić: I mean, it's useful for them. So they can show we can push you into AI. It's, it's. It's the biggest splash possible they could make with this announcement. And I think that's why they chose to announce it with the president of Shopify recording a video for open AI.

Kelly Wortham: What do you all think about what Daniel said? Stock market games.

Slobodan Manić: It's all stock Market games. I think.

Kelly Wortham: I was like, oh, wow. Thanks, Daniel.

Carlos Trujillo: Totally.

Kelly Wortham: That's the trick part of the tricks and trees. Yeah, yeah, exactly. David. They're gonna IPO at a trillion. Yeah, that's what they. That's the latest Sam tweet.

Luiza de Lange: But what, what do we think about the geography topic? I mean, obviously it's been announced that it's now open in the U.S. what do you guys think the next geographies would be? Are we thinking, you know, Canada and South America or are we thinking Europe? Do we even think it's possible in Europe? Would they allow it in Europe?

Kelly Wortham: It's going to say, I don't think they'll allow it in Europe. The privacy.

Carlos Trujillo: Yeah, I think Canada might be it. But otherwise, like there's a big component of. I think we haven't talk about the Stripe as a player here who's like kind of like supporting all of the technology behind the scenes. And there's a big component of like bank cards tokenization that you can probably scale in a place like the US but maybe not that easy in some other places in the world where paying by a bank card is not necessarily the rule. So I think, I mean, if we take the example of South America or even some countries in Europe, a lot of people will still get some kind of barcode and go pay at a convenience store or things like that. That will completely break the idealistic model that they are selling. So I think that's, that's probably the main reason why. I mean, other than market cap, of course, why the US is the obvious choice because I think it's pretty standard for most of the population. Kelly, feel free to contradict me here. Just to use a bank card. So that's. It kind of makes sense from a technical standpoint.

Kelly Wortham: But won't it work in Asia?

Carlos Trujillo: It. I mean, it might be, but I think none of these players are necessarily that powerful there as of now. So not sure how the applications are. Totally.

Slobodan Manić: Can we talk about the protocol they are using for this, the ACP agentic commerce protocol, which is developed by OpenAI and I don't know, Stripe, I think together, OpenAI and Stripe together. So what that protocol allows you to do is while you're in the agent, While you'[email protected] or wherever you're talking to ChatGPT, you can say, go and buy this. You have to be present. Like what's the point of an assistant if you have to be there and hold its hand all the time? This protocol, this entire protocol is designed In a way that you have to be there. Like there's no delegating tasks while you're sleeping. It's going to buy something expensive. That's what Google has. That's. That's the trick, the treat trick. Whatever part of it Google protocol, the app agentic purchase protocol, payment protocol. The names are so stupid. AP2 I think they call it allows you to delegate these purchase decisions so you have your agent that is authenticated that has access to your money and it can buy something while you sleep. Scary. I know but it's Halloween. This is the useful implementation. This is how agent E commerce should be. I don't want to look at my agent buy stuff for me. That is the dumbest possible way to implement agent E commerce in my humble opinion. I wanted to buy. David mentioned buy me toothpaste and toilet paper while I'm not even looking at it. Let's start with that. Let's start with toilet paper.

Kelly Wortham: I don't know. I'm very picky about my toilet paper.

Slobodan Manić: But you can pick.

Luiza de Lange: Levels of ply.

Slobodan Manić: You know four ply. Four ply. I know. Yeah. But that isn't that how agentic comments should work? Not you looking at it by like if you had a. If you hire an assistant, do you want to like micro manage everything they do and look at them like do you want to be Meryl strip what's her name in the movie Kelly? You know this. I don't. In Devil Wears Product do you want to be yelling at the assistant all the time? I don't. I wanted to do stuff while I do something else like that. That's to me that's the point of AI which is why I think what OpenAI has and has announced with this protocol, I don't see how it has a future while this other protocol does have a future where you can just give scary. Give agent access to your money and let it do whatever it wants with your money.

Kelly Wortham: Yeah, yeah. Like Mel just pointed out, having nightmares of my five year old niece setting up purchases.

Slobodan Manić: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kelly Wortham: Did you. Did y' all see what Namrata just pointed out? OpenAI partnered with the biggest telco in India to get the reach perplexity with another telco.

Slobodan Manić: Interesting. Yeah.

Kelly Wortham: Huh huh.

Slobodan Manić: Interesting.

Kelly Wortham: Very.

Slobodan Manić: Yeah. But they'll do anything but be profitable these companies. Right?

Carlos Trujillo: Or pretend to. I think the whole like toilet paper reference. We're still not talking about making shopping decisions. Like those are scenarios where you would have already figured out what your favorite product is which is normally not what. What we do when we do CRO and, and experimentation. So I think those far in this conversation, we haven't killed CRO yet.

Slobodan Manić: But it's more about branding. It's more about awareness. It's more about knowing that your brand exists. So both AI that's making the decision inside that agent and the human influencing that AI and setting up the agent will want your product. Like if I'm my foot is wide. I need New Balance to be able to run. Like, I feel good in New Balance running shoes. Because the front of my foot is wide, I don't need to worry about it being too tight. I cannot write in running Nike. My agent will know that and will never buy me stupid Nike packages.

Kelly Wortham: We love you Nike.

Slobodan Manić: Not for me. They're fine, but not for me.

Kelly Wortham: Everything else is great. I fully agree. I'm fully aligned.

Slobodan Manić: That's. That's how. I think that's how it should work. You should be able to tell your agent what you want, what your first, second, third, fourth option is. And then he can figure out the fifth option.

Kelly Wortham: Sean asks a really good question. He said, can you double click on that? What do stores need to be optimized for? To be doing to be optimized for an agentic shopper? And this is like the whole purpose. That's why we're here. Go.

Carlos Trujillo: Yeah, I have a hot take on that. I think nothing differently that what they should be doing today.

Kelly Wortham: Yes.

Carlos Trujillo: Like everything that we're supposed to do to be kind of like noticed by these agents. If you think about it, it's like you should be doing that regardless. You should be providing with the structured data that's kind of like not sure if it's the right word, but consumable for boats and humans at the same time. So that's kind of related to my point before. Like if you want to be discovered and you want to be kind of like Featured by these LLMs, everything you need to do for that to happen is something that you should be doing already.

Kelly Wortham: SEO. And for accessibility.

Luiza de Lange: And for accessibility, exactly. For both people. And that will help as well for the agent.

Kelly Wortham: E Commerce.

Slobodan Manić: Yeah.

Luiza de Lange: Yeah.

Kelly Wortham: Louisa, can you talk a little bit about the accessibility side and how that helps with AI?

Luiza de Lange: I think we spoke with Sunny about that. Do you want to take that?

Slobodan Manić: No, I'll jump in if I need to. It's yours.

Luiza de Lange: I mean, so there are a lot of nwc, GE guidelines. There's a lot of things that are technically described of how your website should be set up. And I think if you kind of comply with all these standards and new accessibility law that just came into force. What is it now? Four months ago, right in Europe. That should already help you because it secures the structure of your navigation, the naming of all your components, the alt text of all your imagery on the website and just making sure that your website is understandable to everyone out there with also with disability or even temporary disability. So yeah, I think as Carlos said, it's nothing that we haven't done yet and especially now we're even kind of we need to obey the law and make sure that we, we comply with all the requirements. Which by the way, at least in Sweden there are organizations that started auditing, which is great news. So yeah, we're on that wagon and these things need to be done anyway for a good website experience.

Kelly Wortham: Yeah, and it's sad that we had to make laws to do it in the first place. Like common decency. Like I like I was saying Sonny, make things better for humans. And guess what? AIs prefer it.

Slobodan Manić: Like it's even more sad that it's going to happen now that AI is in play and not when the humans needed it, not when the laws required it or anything like. But now we have OpenAI and ChatGPT and we'll dance, we'll jump to the hoop. There there are two. We talk about how, how agents can do can can complete a purchase. So there's the protocols, there's the chat GPT and the API for agents basically. But there's also the why accessibility matters. There there's an agent running on a virtual machine, controlling a browser and pretending to be human. Scrolling, clicking. So if you look at ChatGPT agent sometimes it goes into this, this computer usage mode Agent CUA is what they call it and it will literally try to interpret the page, look at the code, look at the screenshots and snapshots of the page. Now visual sure it can understand but that is the far more expensive option for an agent. Sending a screenshot, analyzing the screenshot, getting the results back. It's slow, it's going to cost a lot more tokens and someone has to pay for those. If the code, if the front end code of your website is not up to all possible standards because these models are trained on code that's hopefully good at least the first versions it will have trouble understanding what your button, that's actually a span that you gave some classes from tailwind to to look like a button. It will not know that's a button. It's as simple as that. If the Page is not. If the elements are not accessible, don't have the labels, if the elements keep reloading and refreshing and being added to the page. So high front end rendering and react, goodbye. We don't need you anymore. Basically, if that is not all optimized and implemented properly, the agent will not be able to understand what the page is about. I had an experience when I tried to book a flight from Porto to New York earlier this month. It kept trying for 32 minutes and then it gave up. Perplexity Comet is the agent AI agent browser that I use.

Kelly Wortham: Maybe they just didn't want you in New York, Sonny.

Slobodan Manić: Maybe, maybe. But this doesn't work because the, the Internet it's supposed to work on doesn't work. Yeah, humans have learned how to use the broken Internet because we adapt. These dead creatures will not adapt because they don't need to. They'll find a website that works and they'll just go there and then maybe the next iteration of the model will know that's the shitty website, that's the good website and maybe that's going to be not a ranking signal, but a disqualification signal. So not the same as Google where you just ranked two places lower. No, you don't exist. So what? Just do the right things.

Kelly Wortham: Do the right things. That you sound like Jono. When I interviewed him I was like, so what are people supposed to do? And his answer, you know. Yeah, be better. That was his answer. I love this answer. How do you rank for AI commerce? Be better. That's your answer.

Slobodan Manić: But it's simple. How do you.

Kelly Wortham: It's so simple.

Slobodan Manić: Let's talk about ranking for AI. How do you influence AI rankings? AI is trained on the non AI world. Like the information it gets comes from non AI portion of the world. And how does it learn which brand is good and which brand you should be. It should be recommending people talk about that brand and say it's good. And it has a lot of mentions and a lot of links leading to it. The only way to influence AI to step outside of the AI world and just influence what people think of your brand. There there's no other way you can hack an LLM? It doesn't work like that.

Kelly Wortham: No. And by the way, that was another thing we talked about is that it and, and this is true with AI commerce as well. When people are starting to use ChatGPT and perplexity and what, what not to start like shopping. They're one of the things that is going to lead to your brand mentions is your brand reputation. And that doesn't come just from SEO. That comes from people talking about you on Reddit, on TikTok, on whatever. So. And that's not just your customers talking about you, that's teenagers talking about you. That's your CEO and who they donated to in the last election. All of that impacts the decision that consumers are going to make with their dollar vote.

Luiza de Lange: And I think it's.

Kelly Wortham: Yeah, go ahead.

Luiza de Lange: I think it's what we talked about, right, about this repeat purchase. How can you position your brand to enable that repeat purchase? Like Sunny was talking about. What was it? Oasis Sneakers? Was that the brand? New Balance.

Kelly Wortham: Sorry.

Luiza de Lange: So New Balance, what's that toothbrush brand or what's that toilet paper brand that you will come back to, that you have that loyalty towards? I think that's what a lot of effort should be around to create a brand perception, brand loyalty that you would want to come and buy again and again from. But should we also talk a little bit about the money? We haven't spoken about the tiny little detail that OpenAI also released, which was the fee. There was supposed to be a small fee added on the site of the merchant on every completed purchase. Is that just the first attempt of OpenAI to start monetizing their product? Do they perhaps draw, drawn, are drawn in debt or what do you guys think? Would there be more things? We mentioned ads potentially coming already. What do we think about the small fee? How small is it? Even.

Kelly Wortham: Billions of times is a large fee?

Slobodan Manić: Yeah, that's fair. I mean, it's like anything that else OpenAI announces. It's vague by design. No, it's a fact. Either they don't want us to know or they don't know yet. And both options are fine. But we have to acknowledge that. When you go to your boss and say, I need a small amount to pay for some expense, do you look like an idiot when you do that? Yeah, it's kind of not a great way to communicate. So this small fee means nothing. It just like David said, they're testing how the public will react and respond to what they said. And it works for politicians. Why wouldn't it work for them? So I don't think we can talk about the money while it's broken and while we don't know how much money it is. But it's a. It's a great thing to mention because someone will pay for this in the end. Someone has to pay. Is it like China will pay for the tariffs and then we. Is it that? I don't know. But OpenAI is not going to pay for the tokens for their virtual machines being used for ChatGPT agent to buy something for you, someone else will pay for that. Either the brand you're buying from or you. But there's going to be a tax added and there's no way a company that's already losing money is going to give you more money. It just doesn't make sense. So yeah, we need to talk about the money, but they need to talk about the money as well.

Luiza de Lange: Yeah, I think there are some whispers where it's supposed to be single, low digit number, whatever that might mean, is it 1 to 5%. But I think as many people said in the chat, if you apply that 1 to 5% on, on many purchases then it starts becoming a big cost potentially to a small merchant that was chosen as an option to be recommended in the chat. So yeah, I think it's an interesting aspect and, and I think also another part of this whole generative AI industry if you would want our sector, is that a lot of them are burning a lot of money right now and, and I think it will be interesting to talk about that monetization part.

Kelly Wortham: They're making a lot of money. It's not a bubble.

Luiza de Lange: Yeah.

Carlos Trujillo: Just a quick note on the fee thing. I think we previously discussed why Shopify and Etsy, well both of them already charge a small fee to their merchants so it's kind of natural to make that connection either to eat that curse, which obviously I doubt will be the case, but it's like the system is in place. So I, I would say people won't really notice if the fee changes by I don't know, 10 cents per transaction. But of course when there are billions of them, it makes a difference. So like Desert tab is already in place with them. So if, if I were to guess, I think that cause will be kind of like added to that fee that they already charged to their merchants for every sale.

Slobodan Manić: This is all hypothetical. Let's be clear about it. This is all still extremely hypothetical. Also it's a business model that's like from the movie the Office Space where if we take one cent on every transaction and steal it for us, we'll be billionaires. Like these are the geniuses implementing this. This is their plan. Who, who was the Corey said open AI is not profitable. Exactly. They lose money on, on paid users, on pro users. They lose money or plus whatever the.

Kelly Wortham: Number that was quoted that they would pro users would need to pay. Like Was it 10,000?

Slobodan Manić: Something insane.

Kelly Wortham: It's crazy.

Slobodan Manić: Yeah, which is why I think we talked about this, preparing for this call, which is why I think this is not the future of agent E Commerce. This, this makes no sense. But having something like an email you can send an email to and say, hey, I want you to buy my grocery and let me know what's available before you do for next week and toilet paper and toothpaste and whatever else. And that's an agent that some companies hosting, building it using an LLM, either of their own and some tools and whatever else. I think that's what the future of ajunt E commerce is. And LLM is not an agent. And a company that announced an AI browser agentic implementation with Shopify and Sex chat in the same week is not the company that's going to take us to the greener pastures, in my opinion. Yeah, but this is possible. Having an agent shop for you is possible today. We just need to avoid the hype and not really give them that much attention.

Kelly Wortham: Yeah, there's a 97 reply thread in the Great Content channel about OpenAI's restructuring for the for profit that you all should take time to read after this. It's very entertaining. Yes.

Carlos Trujillo: Carlos, I don't know how timely this is for the conversation because I mean we clearly have been jumping from one topic to the other, but I think one of the most exciting ideas about agent E Commerce to me is having your own agent working on your site for your customers. So you already brought the traffic, let them figure things out and explore your catalog with an AI agent that by definition doesn't have to be that crazy expensive to use in terms of tokens and API calls because the data will be limited to that spectrum. So that's one thing that I, I'm kind of excited about because I think that, I mean speaking for me, I think that that's something I would be more likely to use. I know a brand, I already like them referencing the. The not jacket. You mentioned something else for your husband before, but reference any kind of product that you would like. I think it would be a nicer shopping experience to maybe talk to an agent and figure what you would like from that specific brand. And in my opinion that could even have more traction in the future compared to just chatting with ChatGPT to figure out what you need to buy because in most cases you don't even know that you want a product. That's the whole point of obviously paid traffic or paid media and everything. So yeah, that kind of like in house, like private agent for a given brand or Vendor. It's something that I think would be more sustainable and kind of more realistic down the road. And it already exists. Some brands already have that to some extent. So, yeah, I'm kind of like curious about seeing the developments on that front.

Luiza de Lange: I think brands and marketplaces.

Kelly Wortham: Right.

Luiza de Lange: So we know that Zalando is going that direction. I think Amazon. Same, same thing. So, yeah.

Slobodan Manić: We didn't talk about what an AI agent is like. Do we need to talk about the definitions? What exactly, how it works, which components it has? Is that 100% clear to everyone in the conversation?

Luiza de Lange: Let's just cover something.

Slobodan Manić: No, but I'm serious. Understanding what an agent is not. Not shopping agent, just an agent and how it works.

Kelly Wortham: Go for it.

Slobodan Manić: Should we talk about that?

Kelly Wortham: Yeah, go for it.

Slobodan Manić: So an agent is literally a piece of software, whatever that has a brain, usually an LLM that has access to some tools, that has memory and it has a goal. That's how simple it is. Anyone can build an agent in 15 minutes and tell it what to do. And then what makes it an agent is that it uses the LLM to complete a goal and come up with the way to complete a goal based on the tools it has available. There's no magic. This is like saying WordPress is magic because you can publish your post. No, Corey. Corey. Yeah, exactly. That. That's. That's. It's insecure. Yes, that's a good point. The LLM part. The LLM part is what. What makes it probabilistic. And it will always be probabilistic as long as LLM is what's powering the agent. But once you know what it is and how it works. ChatGPT agent is basically ChatGPT, the LLM using a browser. That's it. And anyone can set that up with any of the free tools available today, including LLMs, you can run on your computer. And it's not going to be any worse. So once we understand that there's a lot of hype and we can do this without them, I think the world becomes a better place.

Luiza de Lange: Good basics, Sunny. Did you. Just out of curiosity, did it come? Kelly, did the delivery come?

Kelly Wortham: I know, I was so excited, but no. Okay.

Luiza de Lange: All right. I thought that we would have a full circle with the Order 3.

Kelly Wortham: I know, I know. I was so excited, but no, those are. Those are my.

Carlos Trujillo: I thought we were going to. To disagree more, but it's. It's not the case. Like everyone. So on the same page, despite the old claims, right?

Slobodan Manić: You said zero.

Luiza de Lange: Are you.

Carlos Trujillo: I didn't say that.

Luiza de Lange: Would you like more disagreements?

Carlos Trujillo: Yeah, no, don't quote me on that. But I think at the end of the day, and I think if this be, if these brings any kind of peace of mind to the attendance today, like, like, like it's all about keeping the fundamentals in place. Like, there's no hacks, you know, like, you should just continue doing what. What you've been doing. And like, I think in this case, the AA agents, which are the main topic, will still recognize you and, and feature you, which is what a lot of people are trying to figure out just by doing the right things.

Slobodan Manić: That's how simple it is. That's really how simple it is.

Luiza de Lange: Do you think there was also this view that this is an opportunity for smaller merchants? Because so far there's no paid placement yet. But, but is it, though? Because when we're talking about making sure that your foundations are in place, usually it would be larger companies that cover all of those basics. So I think that's also an interesting perhaps question to answer. Is it an actual opportunity for small merchants or not?

Slobodan Manić: I think it is because they can do things faster than before. If you get into starts recommending your brand, there's a lot of good things happening for you, and you can do that simply. Let's say you focus on Reddit for 6 months and you build a community on Reddit and then those people start talking about you everywhere. Maybe that's all you need to do. Not just for ChatGPT to pick up Reddit threads, but people start talking about you on social media or wherever else. So may I? I think it's the same. I don't think the small brands are eliminated. The brands that are not liked are probably going to lose more. So that can be big brands or small brands. So maybe some big brands that people don't like will fail. Is that a bad thing?

Kelly Wortham: I don't think it's necessarily bad. Like, we ended the last interview that I did by saying that, you know, maybe it kills capitalism and is that a bad thing?

Slobodan Manić: Oh, no.

Kelly Wortham: Hey, we have two minutes remaining in this hour, and I would like to close it out by saying, number one, Sonny, holy crap, you're really good at this. There's a reason no hacks is so popular and people love being interviewed by you. So thank you, Sonny. I'm definitely gonna do another one of these and have you back because, like, holy crap. Not just like on AI, Although, like, I don't know, it's kind of the future, so probably more of those. But the Next time I have a panel, will you come back?

Slobodan Manić: Gladly. Yeah.

Kelly Wortham: Yes. This was fun. This was really fun. I really enjoyed doing it with you. Last time I had you come, it was because I was losing my voice and I was like, hey, come help me, please. And you saved the day then. But this was really fun. You do a great job and I really, really enjoyed you. So thank you. Secondly, Carlos, Louisa, thank you. Really, really loved having you all. This topic was timely and fun for Halloween and I hope everybody else got something out of it like I did. Thank you all. For those of you who didn't, I'm going to leave this up for a few minutes. You. I think everybody can actually download the chat if you can't. If you try and can't, I will download it because normally I tell everybody and I forgot to. To put your comments and everything over in the TLC slack and I just forgot because I was having fun. But I will try to download it and then I will post it somewhere that everybody can read because there were so many good comments and questions and commentary over there. So I'll. I'll leave it up for a second for everybody, but I hope everybody has a. For those who celebrate a lovely Halloween and, you know, happy shopping.

Luiza de Lange: Happy Halloween, everyone.

Carlos Trujillo: Thank you all.

Kelly Wortham: It.