Latest / Retail Media Breakfast Club / The Back Channel: AI Is Replacing Devs (But Banned At Retailer X), Freudian Analysis Of Offsite Vs Onsite Retail Media
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- The Back Channel: AI Is Replacing Devs (But Banned Within Retailer X), Freudian Insight Into Offsite Vs Onsite Retail Media === [00:00:00] It has been exactly four months since I started Retail Media Breakfast Club, and it's been an incredible experience. I've received some really great feedback from listeners from the show, talking about how it's become part of their morning routine, getting on transport, walking the dog, getting set up for the day. And going into the day just a little bit smarter about something related to retail media. And if you've been listening for a while, you'll know that I've experimented with a few different types of formats, topics, et cetera, and trying to nail the right. Combination of formats to keep things interesting and informative for people. So I'd love to hear your feedback on this particular type of episode today, which I'm calling the back channel, which is where I'm [00:01:00] going to recap some of the interesting meetings I've had over the last week. Anonymized, of course. Summaries of those conversations as it relates to big trends in the retail media space and perhaps one or two LinkedIn posts that sparked my curiosity. So never reveal names, titles, or anything that lets anyone reverse engineer who said what. And the point really is to bring back those conversations to big themes that are happening in the industry. So I'd love to hear what you think of this. Let's get into it. So the first topic is around custom software built with AI and what I see as the future of technology, not just in our space, but everywhere. So I spoke with the CEO of the software provider in our space who has a new feature release coming up. Which was built entirely with ai, with no [00:02:00] coding from a developer at all, and in their words, the size of your dev team is not a competitive advantage today. This is incredible, the whole nature. Of software and technology is changing right under our feet, and I really think that what we're gonna see in the near future is custom software at the company level or even at the user level. I don't know if you've checked out tools like Replit or Vercel by Google, but I recommend go spend 30 minutes doing that. You don't need to be. Super techie, but if you try that out, you'll see where the future of software is going. For this company I spoke with, their solution includes a lot of analytics and dashboarding, and they have this opportunity to become the replit [00:03:00] of their category. They're building the capability potentially for their user base to make their own dashboards, their own mini apps that sit on top of, the fully built out technology, a rep style platform for retailer data. So every, every one of their client can spin up their own custom apps in weeks or even days. So that just got me really excited about where technology's going to go and how customizable it's going to be in a huge contrast to that discussion. Something, that, you know, is a complete 180. From that I spoke with a. Technical product leader at a major US retailer whose their company owned laptops won't allow employees to access chat GPT. So I asked, you know, we're [00:04:00] talking about AI and how, you know, how it's being used. And they, they said, oh, we're not allowed to use it. So, and then to underscore, this person is in a, in a technical role, and this is this perfect vignette I think of where retail and specifically retailers sit as an industry in terms of innovation. I don't think that retail is the slowest industry to adopt technology, but. Probably in the bottom 50%. And that's why I was, I had a good kind of laugh at this statistic from a Salesforce study. It is called the Connected Shoppers Report. It came out a few weeks ago. I've been meaning to do a piece on it. But, um, there was one particular stat where they're talking about to what extent retailers are using or evaluating AI. So retailers with no plans to use ai, 2% [00:05:00] makes sense. Retailers that are evaluating AI but not using it yet, 14%. Okay. Retailers experimenting with ai, 45%. And then the one that gave me a good laugh, retailers who have fully implemented ai, 40%. So I'd love to speak with these retailers who have fully implemented AI because I don't even know what that means to fully implement ai. Um, and I think it just goes to show that there is a lot more work to do here in terms of educating on what is possible with AI and what's next? A great use case is using generative AI to. Update product detail pages and resize ads. Perfectly good use cases, but that is not fully implementing [00:06:00] ai. We're looking at situations where Amazon has at least four different iterations of AI agents that they have launched over the last 12 months. AI has been, unfortunately a bit of a box checking exercise. But if we circle back to that original conversation I mentioned with the CEO of an ad tech company, creating their whole new next feature release with no code, that's where things are going and I, I really. I think that the best thing that you can do as an individual out there is to be proactive in learning about AI outside of your organization, because chances are within your organization, it might think it's a little further ahead than what it really is. Next topic is offsite retail media. I'm really pleased to announce, as of tomorrow, I guess I'm, I'm spilling. Spilling the beans a little early today, [00:07:00] but I've started to, contribute to the illustrious publication walk, where I'm going to be writing a series of explainer, posts about retail media. And my first article was on the topic of offsite retail media and unpacking in unpacking that world between offsite and onsite retail media. I've learnt. A lot. So a couple of intersections here. Offsite. Retail media is a lot smaller in terms of ad volume compared to onsite. So offsite is about 10%, but it is set to grow. And second, as I've learned from some really great interviews and other resources that I'll share in a second, offsite is often the first type of retail media that a retailer executes. I'd always assume that it would be sponsored products, but that is not the case. I interviewed Melanie Babcock from the Home Depot's, orange Apron Media recently, and that was how Home [00:08:00] Depot's Retail Media business was first established was with an offsite capability, and I was listening to an episode of the Middleman podcast, which is. Brand new to me at least, and has quickly become one of my favorites. And there was a little bit of banter on in the introduction about the evolution of offsite, relative to onsite. One of the hosts of the podcast, Todd Zewicki, said tier one retailers like Walmart basically started with onsite only and then are now starting to figure out offsite. And then eventually, hopefully they will get to in-store. But uh, for tier two and down because they don't have as much onsite traffic. It was all offsite and it was super easy to do offsite. And then onsite happened during the pandemic, and that really accelerated. And now they, to differentiate themselves, are starting to do in store. And this led into a interview with the CEO [00:09:00] of grocery tv, Marlow Nickel. So recommend checking out the middleman podcast. It's, it's very good. But that got me thinking about, offsite versus onsite and the different directions retailers come at. Establishing a retail media business could come from offsite, initially. Could come from onsite, and I think it really, dictates the focus of that retail media network. You can learn a lot about someone's psychology by looking at their childhood, right, their patterns from childhood. I think we can learn a lot about retail media networks from whether they established offsite or onsite first. So we may need to chalk this up as something that everyone but Kiri already knew about retail media. But that is what I'm here for, to dumb things down because we all come from somewhere else in this industry and we can't assume that everyone has the [00:10:00] same background knowledge. And this was one of those things that, uh, was a, today I learned kind of situation for me. I am gonna leave it there. Those were three big themes from my past week of conversations and some interesting tidbits I found from podcasts or LinkedIn. Let me know what you think of this format, and thank you for tuning in. If Catch you tomorrow.