Latest / Retail Media Breakfast Club / Mary Meeker Is So Back: My Notes From Her 340-Page AI Futurecast
Transcript
- Mary Meeker AI report === [00:00:00] Mary Meeker is a renowned venture capitalist and former Wall Street analyst, known as the Queen of the Internet for her influential annual internet trends. Reports ~that have forecasted, ~that have forecasted major shifts in tech, commerce, and consumer behavior since the 1990s. But she stopped putting out reports in 2019 to focus on her new investment firm bond. [00:00:23] ~So I was thrilled to find out that she dusted off the big deck format again yesterday. ~So I was thrilled to find out that she dusted off the big deck format again yesterday ~I was thrilled to find out that she dusted off the big deck format again yesterday.~ [00:00:28] ~My reaction to this year's 340 page tome, there's not a whole lot of surprises here. If. My rea, ~my reaction to this year's 340 page tome is that there's not a whole lot of surprises here. If you've been following AI news even casually, there's lots of establishing data here showing. how AI has been adopted faster than any technology in history, how it's being used by consumers and organizations alike. [00:00:49] How the big AI companies are growing rapidly. But what the report does do really well is tell the story of ai, not just how [00:01:00] it came to be everywhere, but also why we should continue talking about it, because it is. Irreparably changing the course of history as we know it. ~There is.~ [00:01:11] ~It's a really great, ~it's a great reference to pull out when you need to convince someone, whether that be your boss or your mom, that AI is not just a fad. [00:01:21] Today I am sharing my highlights from the report that I think are most relevant to us in the retail sector, whether you're a retailer, a brand, or on the agency side. [00:01:33] Let's jump in [00:01:34] [00:01:36] number one from chatbots to ~Ag. ~Ag. Agentic. Copilots. ~Thankfully, from my point of view. ~Thankfully, from my point of view, at least we're bustling past those clumsy chat widgets that nobody really likes toward long running agents that can reason act and complete multi-step tasks on a user's behalf. [00:01:55] report shows mainstream launches that are happening right now. We have [00:02:00] Salesforce Agent Force, Andro.~ Andro. ~Anthropics ~clawed, ~computer use agent, open AI operator, and drum roll please. Amazon's Nova Act, and these are all targeting slightly different use cases and users from consumers to programmers to commerce. [00:02:16] It's all in here. Why this matters for retailers. Well, brands and retailers have to start thinking about integrating with whatever AI agent your customer is already using. So instead of building a chat bot on your website, you need to be thinking about new protocols, like Model Context Protocol or MCP and Google's agent to agent. [00:02:38] And these are systems that will allow AI agents to. Directly pass your product catalog and take actions directly rather than a bot type experience, which is very clumsy and expensive. Getting a agent to crawl the front end of your website is really inefficient. This is the path that Walmart is already pursuing, and I spoke about [00:03:00] this a few episodes ago. [00:03:01] If you wanna go check that out, they are adopting this agent to agent route. There's also implications here for the future of. Onsite sponsored product ads. Sponsored product ads are really the backbone of retail media as it currently stands, and so this business model is really in question if a lot of our consumer actions in the future are going to be directly with our preferred [00:03:24] AI companion agent, [00:03:26] You can read more about this in an article I just wrote for Forbes over the weekend titled Why AI Search Advertising Could Reach $25 billion by 2029, and that is based on some brand new analysis from E-marketer sharing that very forecast [00:03:42] implication. Number two, lightning speed consumer adoption ~Every tech. Yeah, ~every tech cycle seems to be halving the time it takes to reach 50%. Household penetration chat, GBT crossed 365 billion annual searches in just two years, which was five and a half times faster than Google's [00:04:00] climb the same milestone. [00:04:02] Mary Meeker's report points out that this is the first tech cycle to debut globally on day one, which compressed the initial diffusion curve. Unlike the tech rollouts of the past, there wasn't any gradual rollout. There was no waiting for international expansion. Everyone across the world got access to these tools. [00:04:20] At the same time. Why this matters in retail is The whole world has mass AI literacy all at the same time, and emerging shoppers, whether those are the young generations. Our generation, a alpha, I think is the, the newest one, um, or people in emerging markets who are only just starting to get access to the internet. [00:04:42] They're all going to arrive expecting natural language search. Personalized discovery and these buy for me type agents and ~Pote ~potentially even expect to be able to engage with voice commerce right off the bat. Highlight number three. Marketing gets the AI treatment [00:05:00] first. the report picks up on some research from Morgan Stanley, which found that 75% of global CMOs are already testing or using generative AI tools, and marketing seems to be one of the first sort of battlegrounds for AI ~within large, ~within the Fortune 500. [00:05:15] Why this matters for retail. First of all, creative velocity. We already have lots of tools and use cases where we can auto generate hundreds of ad variants and product content and let the data choose which wins [00:05:30] highlight number four, infrastructure and supply chain revolution. Meeker's report flags, supply chain optimization, precision manufacturing, and multipurpose robotics among the next big AI frontiers. Innovation in autonomous vehicles is one big area here. She shows how Waymo has. Accelerated expansion and how Tesla's fully self-driven miles have been ramping up really quickly. [00:05:57] And this is the consumer first beachhead. [00:06:00] But of course, we're gonna see commercial applications following quickly, including shipping, logistics, trucking that are gonna be dramatically cheaper going forward. Why this matters for retail. We are going to see all of these very expensive and costly and time consuming aspects of the supply chain be made much more efficient. [00:06:20] Dynamic routing, demand forecasting, autonomous distribution centers, these are all going to cut, uh, speed to market cut stockouts and free up cash that's currently tied up in inventory and logistics inefficiencies. So this is gonna be a huge win. For retailers and brands, highlight number five, workforce reinvention. [00:06:41] ~US AI job re US AI related job postings have riven US AI related job. Post ~ US AI related job postings have risen 448%. Since 2018, while non-AI job postings fell 9%, and this is in the IT sector [00:06:54] we've all seen these reports, ~we've all heard of people of, ~we've all heard of companies making layoffs because of AI [00:07:00] efficiencies, . Where I think it's heading for retail is. The senior people, like a senior media media buyer or an e-commerce director is very soon going to be managing teams of agents who are trained and focused on specific outcomes. [00:07:16] And unfortunately, I think this means a lot less opportunities for junior people to come up through the ranks and learn by getting their hands dirty. And that's gonna require a big rethink of what the future of work looks like [00:07:29] highlight number six, the global internet gets a fresh start. 2.6 billion people or 32% of the world's population still aren't online. But what it means is, thanks to low cost, satellite driven internet connectivity, that's changing fast and ~we're going to, ~the world is going to get 32% more online consumers very, very soon ~as me as, ~as this report puts it, when these new users come online, they likely won't be met by browsers and search bars. [00:07:59] [00:08:00] They'll start with AI and in their native language. Just imagine a first experience of the internet that doesn't involve typing a query into a search engine, but instead talking to a machine that talks back. Meanwhile, real time translation and voice cloning tools are raising localization barriers. The report highlights companies like 11 Labs. [00:08:23] Which are showing hockey stick usage growth. What does this mean for retail? Well, cross border selling and localized content are going to significantly cut international expansion costs. Combined this with point number four about logistics costs getting cut, and we can see a future where it's so much faster and cheaper to expand to new geographies than ever before. [00:08:46] Likewise, reviews and user generated content can flow quickly back into local languages. ~Just think about, ~just think about how Amazon does this really well in their product review ecosystem. I can see reviews from consumers from Japan or from [00:09:00] Mexico, and it's all localized, back into English, so I can see what users in other markets have to say about that product too.~ uh, so I can see what user,~ [00:09:06] ~and ~bringing this all into land. I keep coming back to a quote that Meeker includes from Alistair Nan's engines that move markets, which distills two centuries of economic cycles. [00:09:18] And this is the quote. The winners of these competitive struggles are not always those who have the best technology, but those who can most clearly see the way that an industry or market is likely to develop. While identifying the winners from any new technology is often perilous and difficult, it's almost invariably simpler to identify who the losers are going to be. [00:09:41] And that last line hits hard for me. We might not know exactly which AI strategies will dominate retail in five years, but it's easy to spot the current practices and business models that are going to get left behind [00:09:56] the companies that are still thinking in terms of keyword search [00:10:00] when we're already moving into these more conversational interfaces, the ones treating AI as a nice to have, rather than rebuilding their core customer experience around it. Or the ones that think that AI is just a fad. [00:10:12] Mary Meek's return to her 300 page reports. feels like a wake up call. AI isn't just a productivity tool. It's changing huge swaths of customer behavior, economic fortunes, and even something I didn't get into in this podcast. Geopolitical Futures, and unlike previous tech cycles, this one isn't giving anyone time to catch up.