Talk Commerce

Jennifer Howard is the Chief Merchant at Forter. She spent more than twenty years on the merchant operator side at Gap, Levi's, ELF Cosmetics and Balsam Brands before joining Forter this year to bring the merchant perspective in-house. Talk Commerce talked with her on day two of Shoptalk Fall in Nashville.

In this conversation

• Muse reached two and a half million downloads in two weeks, and merchants moved from search and discovery to assistants that check out for shoppers
• Forter customers run from Priceline to Wayfair to Chick-fil-A, and Forter is agnostic to the protocol an assistant uses
• Agentic traffic is still a small piece of what reaches a site, so brands still need to connect with human customers
• Jennifer compares agent adoption to the questions retail once asked about buying clothes online, saving a credit card and shopping on a small screen
• In Jennifer's words, AI slop is "speed over accuracy or speed over authenticity"
• Her hot take, a Forter survey on whether shoppers will use agents to buy holiday gifts, and whether they will admit it

Forter forter.com

Talk Commerce talk-commerce.com

Rachel Hanson is the marketing manager at One World Direct, where she has worked for twelve and a half years. Amber Fullerton is head of sales and is in her twentieth year with the company. Talk Commerce talked with both of them on day two of Shoptalk Fall in Nashville.

One World Direct is a B2B fulfillment company for e-commerce brands. It connects to any shopping cart or marketplace, stores a brand's product, and picks, packs, ships and personalizes orders from warehouses in Ohio, South Dakota and California.

In this conversation

• Product personalization, from a grandbaby's blanket to pet products, connects brands with customers and brings repeat customers
• Brands set their own price for personalization, such as ten or twenty dollars for embroidery, to raise cart value
• One World Direct connects to Amazon, Walmart and any marketplace, with EDI for retail integrations and drop shipping
• Orders flow in automatically, so a brand can focus on growth instead of fulfilling orders
• The husband and wife founders still run the company, and Rachel credits the culture and the relationships with clients
• Personalization, launched about four years ago, is the newest offering

One World Direct owd.com

Talk Commerce talk-commerce.com

Colleen Barry is Chief Marketing Officer at Ketch, a data privacy and permissioning software company. Brent talked with her at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville.

In this conversation

• Twenty plus US states now have privacy laws, and AI models training on consumer data add new concerns
• State regulators started enforcing laws like CCPA in the last 18 months, with actions against Disney, Healthline Media and Honda over opt-out practices
• Ketch customers start with consent management, the cookie banner, then send permission signals to the systems, apps and AI models that use the data
• Stopping tags from firing leaves an opted-out consumer's data sitting in ad audiences, so that data has to come out too
• No US state privacy law requires the cookie banner pop-up, so brands can ask for consent in context, such as at checkout
• Colleen's hot take, marketers need to stop burying their heads in the sand on privacy and ask whether they want the biggest list or the best list

Ketch ketch.com

Colleen Barry on LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/colleenkbarry

Talk Commerce talk-commerce.com

Rahul Talari, co-founder and CEO of Relvino, joins Brent Peterson to explain how one AI marketing agent per shopper replaces the rule-based email and SMS flows brands run in Klaviyo and Attentive. In Rahul's words, Relvino is there to "email and text shoppers at the right time with the right content and the right channel."

Rahul walks through TOMS, where Relvino analyzed 26.77 million data points on day zero and found shoppers getting a 20% code each time they abandoned a cart, then cut that to 10% or no code and saved $16 on every $100. At POV Beauty, Relvino sent 50 SMS in place of 1,000, earned about $7 in revenue against $1.47 on the incumbent platform, and cut unsubscribes from 800 to 3. Arvin Goods moved off Klaviyo for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and handed its agency workflow to Relvino.

Brent and Rahul also get into how reinforcement learning lets each agent learn from the emails, SMS and pop-ups a shopper engages with, the non-AI QA layer and guardrails such as no more than two emails a week, how a CMO and CFO read the return, OpEx down by up to 50%, where the name Relvino comes from, and Relvino V3, which Rahul calls "Claude for Marketing."

Relvino relvino.com

This episode is sponsored by the B2B Commerce Trends and Opportunities Report, presented by Shopware and written and researched by Content Cucumber. Grab your free copy at contentcucumber.com/b2b-commerce-trends-report.

Praneet Chandra is the founder and CEO of Comergent AI, an agentic shopping platform that makes brands visible and shoppable across AI bots and AI search engines, all the way through checkout. Isaac Morey talked with him on day two of Shoptalk Fall in Nashville.

In this conversation

• Praneet sees a future where a couple of billion shoppers and trillions of personal agents shop together
• An agent can take on boring jobs like grocery shopping within an authorization limit you set
• Comergent AI works with fifty-six plus customers who gain orders from visibility in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini
• Agents do not see pop-ups or CRO work, so product descriptions, reviews and structured data come first, then content clusters
• A blog post that says 300 thread count next to a product page that says 200 tells an agent the site is not trusted
• Praneet's hot take, giving agents a card and a wallet will change retail in the next six months, and brands have a window of three to four months to move

Comergent AI comergent.ai

Praneet Chandra on LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/praneetchandra

Talk Commerce talk-commerce.com

Will Sanchez is managing director for CPG at Blue Labs, a company born out of politics that finds persuadable buyers for entertainment, government, CPG, apparel and retail brands. Talk Commerce talked with him on day two of Shoptalk Fall in Nashville.

In this conversation

• Blue Labs learned in politics that a swing voter and an incremental buyer look alike, so it targets persuadability, not propensity
• Step one surveys a couple thousand buyers and extrapolates to a consumer file of about 200 million US adults with more than 200 variables
• Step two runs a pre and post survey to find the persuadables, step three delivers personas, and step four measures lift against a matched holdout
• A test that shows no lift is still a good read, because it shows where to divest and invest
• AI lets Blue Labs package the work into an offer instead of a custom play, and opens new things to measure
• Will's hot take, retail media has a huge gap in measurement because everyone grades their own test

Blue Labs bluelabs.com

Will Sanchez on LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/william-sanchez-75176b25

Talk Commerce talk-commerce.com

Or Shahar is the COO and co-founder of Falcon Labs, a San Francisco company that gives merchants post-purchase offers, gifts and perks from partner brands, curated with a machine learning engine. Talk Commerce talked with him on day two of Shoptalk Fall in Nashville.

In this conversation

• The post-purchase part of the funnel is undertapped, both as a revenue stream and as part of the customer experience
• The Falcon engine uses LLM and agentic tools to personalize offers to a shopper's intent
• Merchants get transparency and control over which offers and advertisers reach their customers
• The thank you and confirmation pages catch a happy moment of intent, and lifetime value is the KPI
• Merchants can A/B test and mix solutions by segment, such as first-time and repeat customers
• Or's hot take, e-commerce is as creative as the gaming space Falcon Labs came from, so the experience is tailored to each merchant, not a cookie-cutter app

Falcon Labs falconlabs.com

Or Shahar on LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/or-shahar-51b55122

Talk Commerce talk-commerce.com

Ludovico Benazzo is Chief Revenue Officer of PixelModa. Talk Commerce talked with him at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville.

PixelModa produces visual content for PDP pages and e-commerce in the fashion vertical, combining traditional photography with generative AI, with studios in Milan and Miami.

In this conversation

• Precise studio images that capture each angle keep generative AI from filling gaps by inventing things
• PixelModa has no proprietary LLM and picks a different model for flowers, faces and body swaps
• Fashion companies carry from five thousand to a hundred thousand SKUs and need new views each year
• Ludovico defines AI slop as "a generation at scale of automated content that pretend to mimic some level of consistency"
• Ludovico's hot take, a commitment to develop watermarks on AI visuals and video as Europe moves to require them

PixelModa pixelmoda.net

Learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events

Sameer Nagpal is President and CEO of JK Tech, a New York based company focused on data, agentic AI platforms and customer experience. Brent talked with him on day three of Shoptalk Fall in Nashville.

In this conversation

• Sameer names five pillars of intelligent retail, customer intelligence, commercial intelligence for promotions and pricing, intelligent supply chain, enterprise experience and customer experience
• JK Tech's Ontologos builds one ontology across structured and unstructured data to remove duplicates and noise
• JIVA, Sanskrit for soul, pulls metadata from data lakes, CRMs and ERPs into a knowledge graph without moving the data, which also lowers token cost
• In Sameer's words, running the LLM against a knowledge graph "which has the context of the enterprise that you are working with, that reduces an hallucination to an extent"
• A retailer Sameer works with invested a few million dollars in agentic AI without seeing the ROI, so JK Tech starts with forecasting and dynamic pricing
• Orbiee, the JK Tech conversational commerce platform, carries a shopper's online journey into the store
• Sameer's hot take, CIOs now ask for the ROI on $10 million or $25 million of AI spend, and adoption slows until companies can show it

JK Tech jktech.com

Learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events

Kevin Goeminne is CEO of CHILI publish. Talk Commerce talked with him on day one of Shoptalk Fall in Nashville.

CHILI publish built the brand execution platform CHILI GraFx, which turns brand guidelines into a design system that generates on-brand content for online and offline channels.

In this conversation

• In Kevin's words, "AI slop for us is being off brand"
• The AI validates content against the design system, with the legal mentions each channel needs built into the rules
• Coca-Cola is the number one CHILI publish customer and uses the platform to release campaigns into local markets faster and spend less with production agencies
• CHILI publish rebuilt the platform from scratch three years ago when it saw the AI wave coming
• Brands that took three months from campaign to local market are trying to do it in two weeks or two days
• Kevin's hot take, AI helps with cancer research only if you know how to do cancer research, so put skilled people in control

CHILI publish chili-publish.com

Learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events