If You Missed Shoptalk, Read This

Phew! What a week for the Brandfuel team at ShopTalk Spring.

It was great to reconnect with a lot of familiar faces and meet a lot of new ones as we attended our first official event.

Here’s a few ShopTalk takeaways from the Brandfuel team:

1. Drinks in Vegas are pricey. Really pricey! We’ve got to up the entertainment budget next year.
   
2. AI was everywhere but there wasn’t a lot of concrete insight into how it is being used in really substantive ways. Technology companies are evolving much more quickly than online merchants. Lots of compelling functionality but ecom teams are still moving slowly along the adoption curve.
3. People understand, conceptually, how they can use AI. But NO ONE has a real plan for what their organization will look like in late 2027/early 2028. Big organizational transformation will be required, but what does that actually look like in the day-to-day ecom trenches?
4. Very few companies are hands-on designing for the new consumer shopping flow, where much more of discovery happens in AI. We know how to drop someone into an SEO flow. But what experience do we drop shoppers into when they are coming to sites much more knowledgeable and deeper in the funnel?
5. This is not like previous eras, where VC backed software startups were selling to VC backed D2C companies (startups selling to startups). This is startups selling to established, slow moving companies. This will favor incumbents for a while (AI-washing your product) where merchants stay with the existing vendor, until they are disrupted by AI-natives or AI-adaptables.
6. Related to the above, there were a lot of legacy vendors in the classical categories (search, adtech, martech, personalization, tax, shipping, customer service, etc). Some have rebranded and some spewing AI jargon, but it’s unlikely they are truly AI-native. Most of the new AI native players were buried in the Startup Experience showcasing a lot of novel solutions. We’ll see who gets traction.
7. Finally, with regards to the 1000 lb gorilla in the room (Shopify), there is still a lot of FUD within the ecosystem that Shopify will innovate, compete with, and eventually make obsolete these new players. We have seen this one before and believe it is unlikely any one solution will meet all needs.