When Algorithms Shop: How to Sell At the Speed of Culture

[00:00:05] Phillip: Brian, we had talked, I think, a few months ago at VISIONS Summit about the way that customers are changing. Do you remember that panel that we had where Daisy Alioto of Dirt Media was talking about the new consumer? But she wasn't talking about a human.

[00:02:16] Brian: Yeah. She was talking about AI as consumer for humans {laughter}.

[00:02:21] Phillip: Agentech. And I thought when she said, "There's a consumer that's not human," I was like, "You mean my teenagers?" That's what I thought she was talking about. Well, we had just done a piece of content over on the site and partnership with our friends at Logicbroker. And it's a good piece of research. And I really wanted to get into more depth about that, because I do think it covers this intersection of an emerging consumer, which is sort of Gen Alpha, Gen Z. But it does also cover how they're using technology in social spaces like, yes, Roblox and yes, in gaming like Fortnite, but they're also using technology that is agentic. So it is this intersection of technology and social and gaming, and it is changing the way that retailers, merchants, and marketplaces should think about this technology. So here today to talk about all of this is a twenty year veteran of ecommerce supply chain, commerce networking technologies. He is Steve Norris, and he's Logicbrokers' Vice President of Digital Commerce. Welcome to the show. Steve, glad to have you.

[00:03:25] Steve Norris: Thanks so much for having me. Big fan of the show. Longtime listener, first time caller.

[00:03:30] Brian: {laughter}

[00:03:31] Phillip: Hey. And we're a longtime fan of the work that you guys do over there at Logicbroker. We did this piece together, and I think I'm a firsthand expert of Gen Alpha. I don't know if you have firsthand experience, Steve. How is this consumer sort of changing and how are you guys thinking about it over there at Logicbroker?

[00:03:52] Steve Norris: Shopping behavior over the last five years and, like, over the last five weeks. It's really interesting to see how commerce is fundamentally kinda changing, and it's happening right before our eyes. TikTok Shop was a big thing and still continues to be a big thing. But now you're seeing a lot of these LLMs start to become transactable.

[00:04:17] Phillip: Mhmm.

[00:04:18] Steve Norris: You're seeing, you know, Brian, you could sign up for a Propel XD Pro account. Maybe you already have.

[00:04:23] Brian: Oh, yes.

[00:04:24] Steve Norris: Start shopping on there. And you hear Sam Altman talking about how ChatGPT is gonna become shoppable in the near term. And these are like agents buying, not necessarily people buying. And that's happening across many different platforms. I think you guys have talked a lot about kind of the speed of culture. And we've talked about them a lot together. That speed is just like so fast right now. You're seeing people change from shopping being an event to shopping happening at the point of inspiration. It's a lot of what we're seeing kind of future facing is what does that look like? Does that mean that people can shop inside a video game like a Roblox? Does that look like people can do the discovery and consideration phase inside an LLM? Does it mean like an ad becomes automatically shoppable? Does it mean like more surfaces? Like every surface ends up with a buy button in five years. People are now buying, especially in that like Gen Z, Gen A mantra, where they want to be able to shop as soon as they're inspired. And as a retailer or brand, you need to be where your customers are looking for you and you need to be able to deliver products in time to meet their needs.

[00:05:48] Phillip: We'll link up the piece here. So if you're watching on YouTube, it's going to be down below. You hit the show notes if you're listening. But the piece is called Commerce at the Speed of Culture. Maybe a little cliche, but I think it's apropos because I think that's just the truth of the matter is that we have to keep up with how cultural shifts are changing these demands.

[00:06:08] Brian: Yeah. And the thing is now the aisles at the checkout, the checkout aisle is infinite.

[00:06:21] Steve Norris: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:06:21] Brian: Like, the cashier is always sitting right there. Every buy is an impulse buy. I think the keyword in impulse buy is actually pulse. You're actually, you desire something, it hits your body in a way such that your heart pumps and you buy it. That's where we're at now, I think.

[00:06:43] Phillip: Agent doesn't have a pulse, Brian.

[00:06:45] Brian: I think that agents are extension of that, in fact.

[00:06:50] Phillip: That's true.

[00:06:50] Brian: They're out in front of our desire. They're out even, you know, they're actively trying to fulfill our desires and to help us push our boundaries of what we desire. So the speed is actually the speed of electricity, the pulse of electricity, if you will.

[00:07:11] Phillip: Let's take it stepwise here. So when we're thinking about the generationally, like when we're talking about these shifts, we're talking, you know, first about maybe the influence of these social aspects. Right. So, Steve, let's first talk about, you know, where are some of these social aspects happening? Where are some of these... Where are they happening? Is it gaming happens to be, I think, one of these big influences where decisions are being made. So I know LLM's gonna come into it. Everybody's gonna talk about Agentech. We'll probably get there. But gaming is still a really large aspect and a social aspect for a lot of this influence behavior.

[00:07:54] Steve Norris: Yeah. I think what I've generally seen and you have, it's really incredible if you look at the number of people that are using some of these video games like Roblox. I think they're reporting that there's 380,000,000 monthly users. That's pretty incredible. When you think about that, and I think you guys were talking the other day. I thought I heard maybe Brian talk about a child's average weekly expendable income now is something like $67.

[00:08:24] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:08:25] Brian: Crazy.

[00:08:25] Steve Norris: Isn't that wild? I got five dollars maybe a week if I was lucky and completed all the chores.

[00:08:32] Brian: Yep.

[00:08:32] Steve Norris: And where's that money gonna be spent? Probably on Roblox. And it's interesting to me that we've seen a little bit of this in the turning these digital channels into not just digital goods. Maybe I wanna buy a hoodie for my character or a new night outfit for my character. But it's taking that digital aspect and combining it with the physical. You guys are probably hip to this trend. Right? But there was like this Balenciaga Fortnite collaboration.

[00:09:10] Phillip: Mhmm.

[00:09:11] Steve Norris: It was really kinda interesting to see because what they did is they said, "Hey. It's not just about selling digital goods. We wanna take this and mimic this in real life so that you could get that Fortnite Balenciaga hoodie delivered to you and have the same hoodie as your character." Kind of an interesting concept. I think, foreseeably, could see more of that, you know, as time progressed because, like, if we're saying, hey, people are now shopping at the point of inspiration, well, there's 380,000,000 users that are on Roblox every month. There's a lot of inspiration happening there too.

[00:09:48] Phillip: That's right. And an influence of each other, right? So beyond just the inspiration, I think it began, you know, where a lot of brands we have a Roblox brand activation tracker and starting in 2022, which, by the way, is I think at its inception, you saw a lot of agencies that were driving a lot of this behavior and branded partnerships where the biggest brands in the world were creating branded activations where you would go and you would go to Nike's land or Sephora's land or Ulta's land, and you would go and behave at Gucci's Garden and you would have these branded activations. Those have slowed down tremendously. You would see one of those every three to four weeks where a branded activation would take place on Roblox or Fortnite. Now that has transcended to more entertainment based activations that are more games in unto themselves back to the actual sort of user generated content game creation. But the brands are integrating into the platform broadly. And so the brands still operate their own lands like Walmart still operates Discovered. But now the brands are just part of everyday life on the platform. And so you're seeing beyond just like, here's a timed activation. It's now just part of everyday life in the way that it's part of our everyday life. And I think that's almost transcendent.

[00:11:17] Brian: Yeah. I think that you're making a really good point, Phillip, which is we used to think of digital as kind of an echo of real life. We would see things in real life and try to create them in digital and use the language that we had to build digital experiences.

[00:11:35] Phillip: And go to a store. Right?

[00:11:36] Brian: Right. You check out in a cart. But now, we're actually originating in digital and then having that reflect back onto our physical lives. And it's almost like we're becoming the echo of digital. But I would add, I think digital, when best used, in many ways is a training ground. It's like we used to think of digital music as, you know, as the music that we would buy and own, and it would be sort of an extension of things. But what if the whole point of it all along was to teach us and use it as a training ground for our own experiences? And so I do wonder if that's how Gen Z and Gen Alpha or even more so Gen Alpha are starting to view digital as a space to experiment and explore and learn and train as opposed to reflect the life that they have.

[00:12:42] Steve Norris: Yeah. I think that's interesting. I mean, if you look at it, think about how much music discovery has changed. If you're like me and you're listening to music, like, a good portion of your time that you're not working, the way that you discover new music now isn't like to go find new artists. You just go to the Spotify Discover Weekly. And there's a whole curated list of things that it's looked at everything that I've listened and puts together here are my recommendations for discovery. I think we're gonna see a lot more of that happening across all of these platforms. Part of it certainly is people influencing other people, but it's also the algorithms starting to influence how people will shop or discover new things.

[00:13:29] Phillip: Let's talk and by virtue of their behavior, the algorithm is taking their behavior in and people's behavior is now influencing other people's behavior. And I think that comes down to the next piece of it, which is these generations are probably more aware of algorithmic behavior than others. We conducted a study in 2023 about Gen Z at the time hiding their behavior from the algorithm, consciously trying to do things in incognito mode, consciously not listening to a song on Spotify because they don't want to taint their algorithm. This is the sort of behavior they do. So this self expression conscious behavior, potentially Gen Z, maybe Gen Alpha is, in our piece, we said that exchanges fandom as a form of currency. How do you think that brands are applying these tools to help align with cultural moments? And how do you track that as success and potentially as maybe like a form of loyalty?

[00:14:33] Steve Norris: Yeah, I think what's interesting about in specifically about loyalty is it feels like that's starting to become or already is completely being redefined. Before, you know, you look at five, ten years ago, what was loyalty? Loyalty was about like getting points discounts and things along those lines, building up these points and discounts to be able to cash them in at some point in time. I think we're moving from this, like, transactional loyalty to more of this operational loyalty, which is like a brand's ability to be able to flawlessly execute on their position and their story, really being able to drive that increased fandom of the brand. So if your brand is out there preaching... You're Patagonia, and you're out there preaching sustainability, you'll continue to have loyal customers as long as you can continue to prove that you are a sustainable company, right? And they're doing things like worn wear, where you can buy kind of the used Patagonia gear. They're measuring carbon emissions as a part of being able to make sure things are packaged in a way that it would cost less to ship, but also use less fuel to get there. That's a really good example of somebody that's moving from this transactional based loyalty and points earning to actually showing up and representing their brand in a way that they're getting loyal customers every day that believe in those sustainability claims and care about those things.

[00:16:17] Phillip: It sounds like there's a big shift from loyalty as a transaction, to we had an era where loyalty was performative to maybe loyalty being this sort of identity based, authenticity based. I want you to show me who you really are as a brand, and I want that to be values based. So it's beyond just what can you do for me? It's more like, what are you doing on behalf of everyone? And I want to identify with that. And that's when I give you my actual loyalty or I vote with my dollars. And I think that that's a really interesting aspect. People are trying to earn more with their dollar now, right? You've got credit cards that do that. There's ways to do that.

[00:18:08] Steve Norris: Yeah.

[00:18:09] Phillip: I love this reframing of loyalty. I think we've heard it before. What are the technological implementations for these shifts when you're speaking with your customers?

[00:18:20] Steve Norris: Yeah. I think there's a lot of things happening. At the end of the day, you can do all this advertising. You could gain these loyal fans. You could do some of these drops, you could have some of these things stood up inside of Roblox, but listen, at the end of the day, if you can't deliver on these viral moments that are happening, you're already in a pinch, and you've wasted a lot of time, money, and effort to drive this like one viral moment that you're about to have. But as soon as that falls over in the fulfillment space, and you can't get the products that these customers want in order to be able to participate in these viral trends that feel like they last less and less time... Although this Labubu thing has been around for a little bit longer than maybe all of us would like. That ability to be able to have that really flexible supply chain so that you can make sure that those products are getting to your customers in the fastest, most efficient way, while also being able to control some of the margin aspects of this... Because I think what people have lost over time, retailers and brands, is control of their margin. They started to like go out and end up on these various different platforms, but everybody is taking more of their margin. Shipping is getting more expensive. These marketplaces are starting to take a bit more of a cut in the overall commission and take rates that they have. Advertising is more expensive than it's ever been. There's a lot of folks looking to really optimize at a margin level while being able to meet these viral moments and viral trends.

[00:20:17] Brian: Makes sense. Yeah. And I think the thing is if you can't fulfill, it's almost like that instantaneous connection is lost. You've broken the spell. And the reason why they made the purchase may move on. They may move on with that. That's not always true, though. I think there's a lot of purchasing that happens in context that, you know, will last for longer seasons. And while there are trends that come and go, there are things that people are gonna buy that are going to be meaningful to them for longer than the trend lasts. And so what's interesting, I think you pointed out Patagonia, there's some element and and Labubu, I think, falls into this category. There's an element of almost alignment, or you could call it fandom. You could call it you know, there's a lot of different things you could call it, but the idea is there are people who get really passionate about things, and then there's kind of an aura around that that people get caught up in. And participation starts to become the new premium. And I think this is where things get really exciting. In the article, it was the Minecraft movie was mentioned. The Minecraft movie, not for me. Not for me. Did not enjoy it. In fact, I hated it. I hated it.

[00:21:36] Phillip: We know how you feel about that. We heard the rant. Go back and listen to it. It's great, actually.

[00:21:42] Brian: Yes. But it wasn't really built for me. It was built for a certain kind of consumer who wanted to... It didn't matter that the movie was good or not good. They wanted to participate in Minecraft stuff. And whether that was criticize it, you know, throw popcorn in the air or whatever, it gave fans an opportunity to engage. And I think that's exciting. That's part of this idea that commerce is moving at the speed of culture. Commerce is moving at the speed of culture of fans and people and the aligned. And so I mean, I'm curious, Steve, how have you seen this out in the world? You talk about getting things to people in a timely fashion, making sure they have it. Is assortment part of this? How does that play a a role?

[00:22:38] Steve Norris: Yeah. I mean certainly. When you're a large retailer, right, you oftentimes have challenges where you wanna be able to meet your fans kind of where they're at, but you also wanna be able to get there before you've established these fans. So you're thinking through an assortment strategy that is yes, your core assortment, but you're also thinking through what can I bring to unlock new fans or new audiences based on what I already do really well today. So a really good example of this would be one of the retailers that we work with. You would generally find their target demographic is in kind of the 50 to 65 year old female range. And what they've been doing is they've been using some tactics like drop shipping, in order to be able to test ranges of products for younger audiences. They don't want to take that inventory risk when people walk into their store. Today, it's not necessarily a younger demographic that's walking in there, but they're starting to see, and you guys have, I think, talked about this on a previous podcasts, the mall's kinda coming back in some areas.

[00:24:12] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:24:12] Steve Norris: Right? It's weird to think that there were tumbleweeds blowing across them ten years ago. But now, it's becoming like when we all were in middle school and high school hanging out at the mall a little bit. And they're starting to see that and they wanted to tap into that, but not in a way that meant that they changed their entire brand identity. They're starting to create some fandom in this space that is really kind of this younger generation, like a Gen Z, without having to necessarily change that retail store footprint. They're using some drop shipping tactics to be able to accommodate for that. And they're also like several of other clients are trying to figure out like, hey, how could we more broadly participate in some of this fandom ourselves? We already have a large audience. But how do we sell those products that could possibly be or will be the next viral thing? And they're thinking through like a lot of retail organizations today, to add a new product into their inventory, it's gonna take like six months, right? So they're trying to figure out how do they move quicker and oftentimes using these drop ship and marketplace tactics are a way.

[00:25:34] Brian: So interesting. Yeah. I think it's time's getting all mixed up now. And so, you know, as you think about your assortment strategy, you never know exactly what kind of trend is necessarily gonna hit. Nobody necessarily I mean, there maybe there were a couple people out there in this inner circle knew that Taylor Swift was gonna bring back Orange, but she did. And so if you had an assortment strategy that was expensive enough and had been in spaces that you needed to be in, you actually could cobble together an orange strategy very quickly. Now I'm bringing this up as a very easy example where a good chunk of the audience might be able to say, hey. Yeah. I could've done that. I have orange stuff. I can cobble together an orange strategy. But things start to get really weird and niche. Orange is broad enough where, well, Taylor can...

[00:26:28] Phillip: You might say it's the new black.

[00:26:29] Brian: {laughter} Exactly. I don't know. Yeah. But yeah. I mean, I think you're onto something here. Having your toe in the water, being able to say that I've experimented in these places so that when they do land is, like, a really, really important part of of where people need to think about diversifying right now.

[00:28:21] Phillip: There's something I think that's often missed too when, when you're talking about diversification, sort of like being able to test into new strategies, also testing new channels too. Drop shipping has unfortunately received a bit of a bad rap. Like pretty much every retailer has done this in some place, way, shape or form. I mean, how much of the Sears catalog was drop ship products, you know, for a century and a half ago? So the word drop ship might be something that I think folks might index something negative toward in the last maybe six or seven years as a style, as a certain style of business operator. But the advantages around a testing strategy for being able to become more flexible and to become more experimental in your business is a thing that we all recognize the need for, especially to be more resilient and especially to look at a changing demographic. Your customer is aging, right? And if you did your persona development ten years ago, and those customers are still loyal, you got to bring new people in. And the culture has changed. Let's look a little bit ahead too. We promised a little bit conversation around AI agents. How are you thinking about AI over at Logicbroker? What's your current conversations over there?

[00:31:16] Steve Norris: Yeah, we have quite a few interesting internal use cases that we've been using in order to be able to increase productivity across the Logicbroker internal operations. I think you're seeing that across the large swath of organizations now, whether that's around being able to more quickly survey customer with a response to a support ticket or things along those lines. You're seeing a lot of organizations do that today, certainly where certainly we look for opportunities there. But what we're really kind of focused on is all of the things that will happen over the next ten years and where the market's going, is you're gonna have, in my mind, there are multiple agents involved in this process. So if you think about like these LLMs becoming transactable in this concept of agentic commerce, right? That's an area that we've been focusing on a lot within, our customers are very interested in right now is understanding what's happening in that space. People are like, "We're in the early innings of agentic commerce," I would argue like we're not even on the field yet. How can we, as a technology company, along with the retailers that we're working with every single day, how do we advocate for them, when they're working in this agentic commerce world? But like when people are talking about agentic commerce today, they're really talking about the way people order. One of the things that we're focused on is there's this concept that nobody's talking about, about the agentic supply chain. So you have agents that are doing ordering for you. Why can't you have agents that are making decisions about order routing? Why can't you have agents that are making decisions about returns processes? Why can't you have agents that are risk scoring every order that comes in, in order to make sure that it can be delivered when Brian wants his particular product and the delivery date that we've shipped? So we believe that there are many opportunities to use agents in AI across a multitude of areas, whether that's on the commerce and front side, the ordering or demand side of things, or it's on the fulfillment and supply side of things. That's where I see us being in five to ten years, and things are starting to move very rapidly in that direction. You're starting to see Microsoft talk a lot about agentic commerce recently. You've heard Sam at OpenAI talking about it. There's a lot of people talking about the commerce part of it. There's not a lot of people talking about the supply chain part of it, which is arguably as, if not more, important. That's some of the areas that we're focusing in.

[00:34:22] Phillip: In fact, commerce part of it is like the de facto use case whenever they demonstrate a new technology. It's the thing they use the dog and pony. It's like, "Book me a train ticket." "Buy me something on Instacart." They never talk about how the Instacart products get on the shelf in the first place or how the driver was dispatched or how all those things, the world comes together in a specific way. And therein, I think, is the gargantuan use case for agenetic AI. I think you're making a really fantastic point there. The B2B use case is fantastic.

[00:35:05] Brian: That's how the world changes through technology. It's through enterprise contracts. {laughter}

[00:35:14] Phillip: Well, I mean, you know, either that or people writing content with a bunch of m dashes in it or so called on the Internet. We're looking a little bit ahead now. We're thinking about, you know, these changes. Are there any folks that you know, any customers that you think are really ahead of this? Anyone you can talk about?

[00:35:40] Steve Norris: I would tell you that we've had a lot of really good conversations in this space. You're starting to see people kind of dip their toe in the water in this area. But if you look at what Perplexity is doing right now, a lot of that's being driven by browser automation. So when you go on and you see the products on like, shop with pro, and you see a Best Buy catalog on there. A lot of that's browser automation. And if you dig a little bit deeper into that, the challenge you have is there's a myriad of different hallucinations that are happening there.

[00:36:20] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:36:20] Steve Norris: Right? Like, you guys know this. You guys have been in commerce long enough. It's very challenging if you were going to screen scrape a page to figure out all the attributes and variants and possible configurations of a particular product. Sure, there are Shopify templates that make maybe some of the stuff a little bit easier. But when you get to the enterprise side of things, it's very challenging. So like a lot of what people are doing is seeing how that's impacting their business. They're, in some cases, missing an opportunity for a sale. In some cases, there's some customer service issues. In every case, those scenarios are guest checkout, which poses a lot of problems. So like a lot of the retailers that we're talking to are thinking through how do we make our products more accurately conveyed on some of these areas like LLMs, but really on any surface that would be sellable? And they're trying to take control back of some of that that's happening. They want this to be more directly integrated into their technology stack and not just like somebody screen scraping and doing kind of the Chat GPT agent mode on their website to initiate a checkout.

[00:37:46] Phillip: Because as much as that's already happening, we need something better than that. And that's I think we're already there. That's not the future. Something better than that's coming. I've been saying, Steve, to people that, you know, I used to hand code web pages and notepad.exe, right? That's how I did it. And I think we're in the notepad.exe stage of AI, And that's sort of where we are. The blank chat box, I think, is the notepad.exe stage. And the agents going out on behalf of us and sort of executing browser automation is still that rudimentary version of that too. Just speaking of Perplexity, have you had an opportunity to play with Comet or any of the automated browsers betas that are out there?

[00:38:38] Steve Norris: Yeah, I actually just installed Comet the other day, so I finally got access, put it on my system, and I've been working through it. It really is very impressive, some of the things that it could do. And I've been using it in areas like scheduling. I've found some really good use cases in scheduling and getting emails organized. So if you guys saw my inbox, you guys would probably all have a panic attack at how it's organized or it is not organized. So there's been some rudimentary use cases I've been surprised it's been able to solve for me. I'm looking forward to digging into a little bit further. But how about you guys?

[00:39:17] Phillip: I've been telling everybody I got it to pay our Virginia state employment tax. I just said, "Hey, go pay my Virginia state employment tax. Here's my employer ID." And it just it was working in the background. Then it popped up and it was like, "Credit card, please." I was like, "Woah, that's crazy." So that's nuts. And that's the future, I think.

[00:39:40] Brian: I think you're right. Hopefully, Chat GPT will eliminate a lot of the, what we think of as, like, busy work or bureaucracy steps, like 14 pages of documents that we have to fill out. Done.

[00:39:54] Phillip: As we're shifting ahead, Steve, it's been great having you here. Omnichannel gets brought up a lot. You guys work in that space. Your customers are obviously, you know, some of the largest businesses in the world who have omnichannel businesses. Orchestration is probably a big part of that. A lot of these retailers are struggling to pull together digital and physical experiences. Now we're talking about new channels. We're talking about maybe in the future gaming channels. It's not going to stop. What are the biggest blockers to that today that you see?

[00:40:26] Steve Norris: I mean, if you think about what the biggest blocker is right now, it is inventory visibility. Like, hands down.

[00:40:35] Phillip: Oh, yeah. Still.

[00:40:36] Steve Norris: Yeah. And I feel like we've been saying this for ten years. But I think what people haven't necessarily figured out is how do I get real time inventory visibility, which is more important now than ever, across my distribution centers, my stores? And then how do I get better visibility into what's happening at all of these supplier locations in regards to their inventory? Because if I know what they have, I can make smarter purchasing decisions. I can make sure these products are available for my customers when they need it. Part of this is like a technology problem. Part of this is like just a mindset problem. You can walk into a distribution center at a major hardware retailer, and you could see dust upon dust sitting on pallets of products there. Does it really make sense for that product to even be there? And in this true omnichannel world, couldn't I sell those products out of a channel that's not the store or my ecommerce site? That feels like a no brainer. But a lot of the technology that they have at these places aren't built to be that nimble. They're not thinking about it that way. Also, maybe customers do want those products that are collecting dust in a warehouse. They just don't want that many of that product or the demand's lower.

[00:42:16] Phillip: Mhmm.

[00:42:17] Steve Norris: So I think hands down, that's the biggest problem these organizations are still trying to solve. Some have solved like the, "Hey. I know what inventory is in each of my retail store," but nobody's really thinking about what's happening on the supplier side of things and how can they get products that are sitting that are aged in a warehouse out through other more creative channels.

[00:42:38] Phillip: So, okay, so let's bring this back to the other conversation that we just had earlier about the... This is mostly for my benefit because I'm a dummy sometimes. So there's a conversation that we had around experimentation through sort of like drop ship, which I'm using with scare quotes here, where you have this ability to test and learn into maybe new markets, new demos. Now you're talking about this ability to maybe move inventory that you have that your customers may not want, but potentially others might. And so Logicbroker has this capability of potentially a network of exposing inventory to others in the Logicbroker network of being able to have real time inventory visibility to others who might be able to maybe turn on products like that in their systems. Am I right in saying that?

[00:43:34] Steve Norris: Yeah. Yeah. And then and you would think about that too is also how do I unlock people that are outside of a Logicbroker connected?

[00:43:43] Phillip: Right.

[00:43:43] Steve Norris: You see some platforms that are out there that kind of build this walled garden, And you can work with people as long as they live inside the walled garden. What we're saying is, "Hey, there's a world that maybe is much bigger that is outside of the walled garden that we should be able to allow people to participate in commerce with." Like the Amazons, the Walmarts, the TikTok shops, some of the LLMs. These are places that people can use to be able to reach new audiences because there's different styles and types and demographics of shoppers on those various different platforms. So when you think about it that way, like we mentioned kind of experimentation and testing around expanded assortment, it's also experimenting and testing around the sales channels that might be helpful for you.

[00:44:48] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:44:50] Steve Norris: Because I think a lot of times, you go back fifteen years, you are a retailer or you are a supplier and nobody was really both, right? And then you end up with like, okay, Apple's kind of this first mover in that space where they say, "Hey, we're not gonna settle for just being like a manufacturer and seller of phones. We're gonna open a retail outlet." Nike does that. Now that's like ubiquitous or pretty close to being ubiquitous. Especially with these new social selling channels, you're starting to see a lot of retailers say, "Hey, you know what, I need to dip my toe in the water on TikTok Shop," because there's new audiences to unlock over there where they may not have any other external channels today other than you walk into the store, you go their ecommerce site. Now they're experimenting out on the demand and discovery side of things.

[00:45:47] Phillip: This is fantastic. I feel like there's a lot that we've covered today from the report that we put together. Would love people to go check it out. It's called Commerce at the Speed of Culture. And again, we covered everything from Gen Z, Gen Alpha, places where they are challenging, where retailers are showing up in new channels and also new agentic capabilities where LLMs are shaping what we think about what we buy and how we buy it. And both of those generations are, I think, challenging us not just societally, but through retails and retail channels. I want you to go check that out. Then also check out Logicbroker. They're longtime partners and friends of ours, and we'd love for you guys to get connected to them. You can check them out at logicbroker.com. Steve, where can people connect with you?

[00:46:36] Steve Norris: Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. It's Steve Norris. The guy looks like on there... It looks like he has a face that looks like me, but maybe touched up a little bit more. So that's a good way to connect with me is on LinkedIn, or you can always send me an email. It's just [email protected], but would love to connect. We'll be out. If anybody is out at the Retail Club AI deep dive in Huntington Beach in a couple of weeks, we'll be out there hosting a panel session with the COO of Vitamin Shoppe, Andy Laudato, about the what you need to know about agentic commerce. So excited to be out there. If anybody's out there, stop by and say hi. We'll be out there.

[00:47:14] Phillip: Oh, that's awesome. Enjoy that too. I think that's sounds like an exciting event too. We're also going to be at Shoptalk Fall with you folks. We're doing an event together. Would love to see you all there. It's called Future Commerce After Dark. We're going to be at the California Clipper, and that's going to be a killer time. We're doing an After Dark event and check out the show notes. It'll be September 17 in the evening kicking off late doors at 9PM. Brian's going to close it down. I might have a bedtime, but we'll see you all there. So just been a pleasure. Thanks for coming on, Steve.

[00:47:53] Brian: Thanks, Steve.

[00:47:53] Steve Norris: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

[00:47:55] Phillip: Yeah, thanks for watching Future Commerce. And if this conversation sparks something for you, we want you to subscribe, follow, hit the like button, hit the bell icon, wherever you get your podcasts. And if it helps you, why don't you leave us a review because that helps us and it helps more people join the conversation. And if you want to bring Future Commerce into your world, you can do that. This is called Lore. It's our new book and it's over at our print shop at shop.futurecommerce.com where commerce meets culture with these beautifully crafted journals, zines and many more collectibles. You can get it over at shop.futurecommerce.com. Remember, commerce shapes the future because commerce is culture. We'll see you next time.

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