It’s Our 300th Episode - What Have We Learned?, with co-hosts Peter Crosby, Lauren Livak Gilbert, and Rob Gonzalez

Transcript

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Peter Crosby (00:00):

Welcome to unpacking the Digital Shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age. Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here with episode 300. I wish I had an echo machine on of unpacking the digital shelf. I am joined by my two brilliant co-hosts, Lauren and Rob, to squeeze out the lessons learned from our generous and brilliant guests and highlight where we think you want to put your energies to make sure you and your organization are ready for the opportunities to come during our next 300 episodes. Well, hello, Rob and Lauren. Happy 300th anniversary. Woo-hoo. At least 299 of those episodes were excellent. We'll see about this one. Okay, so folks, 300 freaking episodes in e-commerce is pretty substantial, and our first episode was an introduction to the podcast on October 21st, 2019. But the first interview was episode number two, was a week later, and it was entitled Marketing Silos Must Fall. It was with Sony Shaw who at the time was vice president of marketing and digital at Bosch Power Tools. So we were tilting at silos all the way back then. Rob, do you remember that conversation? I sure do.

Rob Gonzalez (01:26):

Yes. It was Sony's org at Bosch. That was the first that I had ever seen that merged marketing for in-store and online and just generally across all mediums including budget. So he was doing way back in 2019 budget shifts between digital and other mediums depending on what was performing better, and that was super early for that trend. Almost no other companies were over there and they were the first large organization that I saw doing that. So yeah, it was exciting to get 'em online and talk to him about it.

Peter Crosby (02:03):

I remember him also talking about how they had gone through because they had a ton of distributors at Bosch and they went through and figured out which of their distributors who, some of them were mom and pops and things like that, but they went through to figure out which ones actually had a digital strategy and they were going to prioritize. In some cases, they actually hold their distributor list to get it to distributors that they believed would sort of make it into this next era, which I thought was so fascinating to think about your business that way and who you're going to invest in.

Rob Gonzalez (02:39):

And these days we actually see a lot of distributors leading the digital charge, which is amazing to see. It's a big switch from five or 10 years ago where the distributors were mostly logistics companies. They were doing repacks and all kinds of stuff like that as their value adds. Now they're adding a ton of digital services on top of it. You see affiliated distributors, for example, in industrial supply distribution, really leaning in heavy in digital. You see Grainger leaning really heavily in digital, also in industrial supply. You see like southern glacier and alcohol leaning really hard into digital transformation. And in many cases these distributors are far ahead of the manufacturers that they're working with. I mean even in some cases farther ahead than the retailers and downstream distribution channels that they're selling through. So yeah, it's huge, huge, huge shift from back then. But I remember Sony at Bosch and a few of other of the digital leaders back then were really kind of pushing on the distributors to upgrade their capabilities. So big shift in the last five years, six years.

Peter Crosby (03:44):

Yeah, I was talking with Joe Siman, who's the B2B commerce analyst at Forrester the other day, and he was talking about how he'd written about this sort of silvering out sort of the aging out of a lot of the traditional B2B salespeople and that a lot of their institutional knowledge of how you put all these things together into a sale and things like that is just leaving the industry. And that digital more than ever is going to be important just because the next generation of salespeople don't really have all that institutional knowledge and they're going to have to have digital resources to be able to drive what they're doing, which I thought was super interesting.

Rob Gonzalez (04:23):

I like that phrase silvering out, which is not a thing that I'm going to experience unless, except for maybe my eyebrows.

Peter Crosby (04:31):

Oh my God, I can't wait to see you with white eye press.

Rob Gonzalez (04:36):

I hope mine are long and bushy. Anyway,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (04:39):

This podcast is going in a different direction.

Peter Crosby (04:41):

Yes, it is. And it always will. So alright, Lauren, you take us back to where we belong. So, so much of this podcast, Lauren, has been about organizational transformation, what has to happen to show up and win a digital and now omnichannel? And I'd love for you because you've thought about this a lot and you've been at a brand, you've seen that you've fought those wars and you've won a lot of them. And I was just wondering about your thinking on how your thoughts around best practices have evolved since your first appearance as co-host way back on episode one 17. Great. And the introduction, actually, that was your introduction of your digital shelf maturity curve, you with Joe Gaudreau. So anyway, walk me through what's happened and where you think it's going.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (05:37):

Well, first, 183 episodes, I cannot believe that. That is crazy when you actually think about it. So really cool that we've come this far. But I think organizational structure, especially in brand manufacturers today, has been an evolution because if I think of episode one 17 when we talked about the maturity, it was really about how can you build this specialty in your org, get someone who knows digital, build out a COE, convince people that it's really important, make it separate from the business. And that was the main focus even when I was at the brand. We need to build out this COE, it needs to be a center of excellence. And now I'm starting to see this shift where it is more of a fundamental business change. It can't just be a one-off center of excellence where there's only a couple of people who are experts in the digital space after Covid, after the acceleration of e-commerce, after the introduction of ai, it's become very, very apparent that from an organizational structure perspective, you need to fundamentally think about your processes, your people, your ways of working in every single function.

(06:44):

And it can't just be the COE off to the side where two or three people know about e-commerce and digital and the importance of it. It really needs to be ingrained in what we are doing. And I think we're finally starting to see organizations accept that they need to change the way they've operated for the past 150 years and take that COE knowledge, bring it back into every part of the business, and really start to make some more fundamental changes around how sales and marketing work together, how you're accountable across the organization for digital, where it fits on the p and l. So I think we've really seen a big evolution from this specialty org to being more ingrained into the business.

Rob Gonzalez (07:26):

It was so interesting about that shift is it feels, at least for me, having worked with the manufacturers, it feels like the COE stage was a necessary evolution because if you were, I remember when you were in j and JA while, while back e-commerce, I always used to joke at a company like j and j was two people in a dog in a basement, and they just sort of would let you do whatever you wanted because no one understood Amazon. It was such a small amount of business for companies in 2000 12, 13, 14, it's high growth percentage, but low material dollars for these companies. No one really cared that much. You'd hear thought leaders talk about e-commerce being the future, but companies were not investing in it. So the folks that were, we used to call 'em the digital transformers, the folks that kind of understood the future and felt like, oh, we need to build digital competency into supply chain, into how we design packaging into how we manage our media spend into how we do all of these things like KPIs, department by department. No one listened to 'em,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (08:36):

No one listened to me. I knock on a lot of doors.

Rob Gonzalez (08:39):

It was just sort of like, oh wow, that person's smart. We should have them speak at our whatever. But would you do anything based on that? No, no, no one did anything. And so it felt like the COE was a way where if you're one of these large companies and you get to some threshold of digital sales where you start thinking, man, I should really start taking this seriously, but what are you going to do? Reform marketing and reform, supply chain and reform RD and reform? You're not going to do all those things. So you do the COE as a stepping stone almost to then this next phase of the most digitally mature companies where they've moved beyond the co. They might still have a COE best practices hub, but to your point, a lot more ingrained in the core business. And I don't think that anybody's completed this evolution yet that I've worked with. Everyone's still kind on this journey, right?

Peter Crosby (09:31):

Yeah,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (09:31):

Completely agree. Completely agree. But I also think, I've been doing a lot of research about this lately. I don't think that the COE should ever fully go away because there are some things that should remain centralized because you get more scale, you get more efficiency, you can operate at a different level like content creation. It doesn't necessarily make sense to not have that centered in some sort of center of excellence wherever that sits globally or regionally. But I agree, Rob, I haven't really seen it fully done, but I've started to see steps of people moving in the right direction. And I remember my days at JJI used to say, we don't want to say digital marketer and then in-store marketer, we just want to say marketer.

Peter Crosby (10:12):

And

Lauren Livak Gilbert (10:12):

That was a very foreign concept back then. But that is the mindset that people are starting to have. You are just a marketer and you are thinking about all of the different channels that you can use to reach your consumer. You're not just thinking in a digital realm or an in-store realm. And I think no matter what your org structure is, that's the mindset. How can we just holistically think about how we go to market for our consumer?

Peter Crosby (10:38):

And it seems like a lot of the companies that we've been talking to that have the COE are making their remit be about getting the regions, the local markets to just use the practices as effectively as they can for them. So it feels like some of their KPIs are around making sure that their customers inside the business have what they need to be able to make it to achieve their numbers, frankly, in their region. And particularly as we think about how much, and Rob, I'd love your thoughts on this too. It feels like there's a shift happening right now, and AI is certainly a piece of this, but where I think you've talked about e-commerce now being 15% of GMVI think you've spoken about, it's really a just that business is really becoming a substantial part of it. The influence of e-commerce and digital on omnichannel sales is clear, but also it does feel like product content, product data, and particularly creative differentiated product data is the foundational fuel for the whole thing. The business cannot go forward without accurate, complete, constantly variable, verifiable, and then over time really optimized content. It's just that pipeline has to work for so many teams within the business to be successful. And I feel like that's a shift where it's now one of the main pieces that you need at the bottom of your stack to be able to sell products.

Rob Gonzalez (12:27):

I mean, I've agreed with that for 13 years. The industry wasn't so sure. So not news to me. I'm actually not so sure that very many companies agree with that mean. So the stat that I've got in front of me right now on e-commerce penetration is it's about 16% of US retail as of June in 24. So its number is going to be higher now, I don't know what it is more recently and of addressable retail. So there's just some things you don't buy online of addressable retail. It's like 23% in June of 24, which is big and it's still growing. And what underlies that is the product data. And what's crazy to me is if you're a digitally mature brand, you completely understand what I'm about to say, but the set of brands that really get this is maybe 10% of the most mature brands.

(13:21):

90% of the brands do not get what I'm about to say, which is that really, really great product data makes your retail media ad spend go further. And there's just a ton of data on this. The DSI and Strata have done reports on this, but also folks like PAC View or a profitero or there's just report on report on report that's out there, VML and media folks have looked at this. If you've got product detail pages that have great images and great content and convert at a higher rate, that means that every single dollar that you spend on retail media to drive traffic to that detail page is more efficient. And it means your ads go to more sales. It means that there's less waste in the funnel. And so you would think that given the amount of growth of retail media in the last bunch of years, that it would be a no-brainer for people that just take this wildly seriously and don't most, it's still kind of an operational task for somebody somewhere in the business to deal with.

(14:20):

And to Lauren's point, these are generational changes in these businesses where you've got folks that are in the executive band, most of which have grew up in the business that they're in, have been in the industry for 30 years and no disrespect or anything to them, but they're still thinking about the sales negotiation with Walmart in kind of an old school way. And there's a lot of that negotiation that is the same as it was 20 years ago. And most companies are not bringing to the table PDP quality or conversion optimization or digital category management or any of the things that could give them edge for the 23 plus percent market share that they can fight over. Now that's digital. So yeah, I agree with you. It should be more front and center. It's not in the AI world, it gets even crazier. So one of our friends from Endeca, a guy John Andrews, phenomenal guy, he's co-founded a company called Simulate that does AI search for e-commerce and it uses a whole bunch of different models under the cover.

(15:25):

And what they do is they suck in just stupid amounts of information into the search index and a typical search engines. If you go to an e-commerce site today, the search engine, you're just kind of taking the product attributes that the manufacturer sends you, you might enrich those product attributes with some that you develop yourself. Home Depot does a lot of this, for example, Wayfair does a lot of this, but at the end of the day, it's some kind of constrained set of product attributes that are driving search and navigation in the AI world. If you look at Amazon, rufuss sort of scraping your website, they're going to bosch.com and they're scraping every single thing about Bosch and then they're going to KitchenAid and they're scraping everything, single thing about KitchenAid. And then they're going, they're trying to get everything that the internet has to say about these products and they're using it to drive the search experience for a rufuss. And so in those worlds, product data matters even more because not only does your product data on the PDP have to be great on your website, you've got this opportunity to teach the LLM lots of additional stuff. And most brands are not thinking about it that way. And so I dunno, I think it's becoming more important. I think the supremacy of it and the AI world is becoming more urgent. But yeah, it's just seen I think from a lot of folks as an operational challenge, not as a strategic one.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (16:42):

But Rob, I'm glad you brought up the retail media element because I think now that the retailers themselves, like the Walmarts, the Amazons, the targets of the world are asking for more retail media investment. And we all know on the brand side, there's massive budgets around retail media. A lot of brands are putting it together that if I'm running a retail media ad on a PDP that's incomplete, it's just wasted dollars. But to your point, and if I go back to org structures, that retail media team usually sits very far away from a COE or an e-commerce leader, and they don't report to the same executive on the C-suite. And that's one of the biggest problems. So the ones that I've seen to be successful, and if for any brands listening, you don't know who your retail media partner is, go find out where they are. And if you're running a campaign, prime day is coming up, make sure that your retail media ads are connecting to PDPs that you've actually built out and they have the right content and they're telling the right story and that they match the retail media ad. You'd be surprised how many times the branding is different or the messaging is different. So just to call out because Prime Day is coming up, this is something that you can actually go action in your org today.

Rob Gonzalez (17:49):

Yeah, there's a major US grocer, I'm not going to name names here, that does not give particularly good control to their brands for product detail page stuff. One of the major suppliers, like a top five snack food company, was spending retail media on a product where it turns out that the product detail page has no image.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (18:14):

Oh my gosh,

Rob Gonzalez (18:15):

Pains me. And so then the retailer has to sort of go back and make good on it somehow. This retailer is their retail media growth. The word of the day is incrementality. The retailers because of the price of buy online pickup in store and supporting the pickers and all that additional cost they have to make up that cost somehow. And the way that they're making it up is through retail media. It's the way that Instacart became profitable, meaningfully profitable was leaning into that because the cost of running a business with all the pickers and everything is tough. And so if you are a retailer and you need that money and you're not taking this seriously, you're not going to get that money. And this is a retailer that is underperforming peers in the growth of their retail media program. And so yeah, I think it's a major driver everywhere.

(19:06):

It is going to be interesting to see how it works with ai. None of the major AI providers have really created a pattern on where you insert ads if you're simulate for example, or whatever AI search engine that's people are going to be using going forward. And the AI is determining which products in what order get shown on a personalized basis to each consumer. Where do you inject the ads in that world? So I dunno, there's a lot that's at play here. But yeah, the focus on media and the focus on how content supports it in the traditional retail media search and navigation experiences and in the go forward AI search and navigation experiences, I think it's just massive opportunity for everyone around. And it's shocking to me that people aren't taking it more seriously.

Peter Crosby (19:54):

So speaking of ai, I asked chat GPT, how many of our episodes included the phrase AI and the title? And I was shocked to discover it's only five. So stop saying we're doing too much. No one's saying we're doing too much on ai, but I think that shows massive restraint on our part. But that said, it's probably come up in a hundred percent of our episodes in the last year or so. Yeah, I mean it's everywhere. And I think this is not a shocking revelation, but I think it's the next generational change in experience for everyone involved in making shopping or buying happen. And so it seems like a good time in your day job as chief strategy and innovation officer at Salsify to talk about this. So where do you think all of this AI foolishness is going? How do you make sense of the value curve of all? Where's the payoff, what's happening and how should they be getting prepared in your mind?

Rob Gonzalez (20:59):

So I'm not one of these technologists that is like, oh my God, it's going to change everything. I've never been that way. I'm more of a conservative, I guess a small C conservative at heart when it comes to these things. So I want to look at e-commerce before I jump to AI and just think about how that works in my life. And for context, I live in downtown Boston, right by Boston Common. It's a great area. And if I look at my shopping habits just on where my family spends money on groceries and household stuff, we buy a fair amount of stuff in store. There's a CVS that's 150 feet from my apartment. I go there all the time. CVS, just by virtue of being there, gets a decent amount of my money. We shop at Ely, which is, there's a location in the Peru that's just down the green line from me.

(21:56):

There's a Roche Brothers grocery store. Between my home and the Salsify office, there's a Trader Joe's that just opened up six months ago. That's across the Boston Common and Public garden. That's not too far of a walk. We go to, there's a Whole Foods in the south end. We go to all these places in store. These are all brick sales. But then we also shop online a whole bunch. Upton Tea Imports is a Massachusetts tea importing company. We buy online Grove Collaborative sells, more environmentally friendly consumable products, bamboo tissue paper and stuff like that. Thrive Market similar, but for food consumables, we do Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods for delivery. We've done Instacart for delivery. So we've got this mix of in-store and online for our house. And I'm not even sure what the mix is. I think it's probably 60 40 in favor of in-store for us.

(22:52):

And if you look at the just general household statistics that kind of plays out. It's not like e-commerce completely dominates in the United States. So e-commerce has become sort of an and to the retail experience. And for us, it fills gaps. It fills a gap in assortment. So a grove has assortment that you can't find at a Roche Brothers or a Trader Joe's or A-C-V-S-A Thrive or an Upton T. They all have a unique assortments. Sometimes it's inconvenience. So there's some products for Amazon with their ridiculous fulfillment network that we order for the home vitamins and stuff like that. We'll just order those from Amazon because it's insanely convenient. And so e-commerce replaced all of our shopping. It just sort of augments it with stuff that would've been difficult for us to buy before or is somehow a lot more convenient. Then I think about AI and how I used ai, and it fills a new type of need for shopping that e-commerce is kind of bad at, which is the discovery process.

(23:55):

So if you guys, I dunno, there's this joke on XKCD, I've probably referenced in the podcast in old episodes, but there's a graph on time spent thinking about a life decision and how important the life decision is. So the Y axis is how much time it is and the X ais is how important it for life is. And the time spent that the author said selecting a university, really, really high importance, not that much time spent thinking about it, just like, what's the best school I can get into? Exactly. And then he bought a backpack recently. The time spent researching the backpack versus life importance was wildly, wildly off base. And I feel this because I love my backpack. I've gone through so many backpacks trying to find the perfect backpack.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (24:46):

I just bought a backpack last night for this exact reason, and I spent so much time reading the details.

Rob Gonzalez (24:53):

And you end up in this world where you've got Chrome Open or Firefox and you've got Amazon and you've got 74 Amazon tabs and you can't really tell the difference between these backpacks. And then you're doing blogs, right? Alright. I get an adventure blogger to tell me about the backpacks and their durability. And then you find go down a Reddit rabbit hole where you're doing the Reddit one bag stuff. You've probably been to all these places. So it's crappy because you're not really sure how to even think about what you should care about with regard to a backpack. So AI has this awesome capability where you can go in there and say, Hey, look, this is who I am. I travel a lot. I don't like to check bags five, six. I'm a relatively short guy. You could say all these things. I carry a laptop around.

(25:46):

What are things that I should even care about in a backpack? I'm looking for a backpack. What should I care about? What are some kind of recommendations? How do I even think about this problem? And they can help you narrow it down. Or if you're just basically anything like that where you're not even sure how to express your desires, you're not even sure what to put in the search bar to begin with and you're trying to understand the space. AI is phenomenal at that. Another example, I mean this is the canonical one a lot of people use, but I've got two girls, they're eight and five. Honestly, I know what my girls are into, but we have to throw a birthday party every once in a while and every time we throw a birthday party, it's like, what the hell do we even buy? Right?

(26:25):

I don't know what to buy. But LM is like, Hey, what are the kind of things that you should buy for a 9-year-old girl's birthday party? And it's pretty good at that stuff. And so you can kind come up with a rough list and you can kind of go back and forth brainstorming with the LLM, and then I can go to my wife and say, Hey, look, here's kind of a rough idea. What am I missing here? And then you got your shopping list. And so it's really good at that stuff. Right now there's not really a clean way to connect that to a transaction, but there will be, people are going to connect with that. So I kind of see, see the Instore, the online and the AI all living in harmony in a way, and all filling kind of different shopping modalities depending on what I'm trying to accomplish in the moment. I might go in store, I might go to a traditional eCommerce search and nav experience and transact, or I might open up Claude and just try to figure out what the hell I'm even doing to begin with. So that's kind of where I think things are going.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (27:24):

I'm glad you said the mix of in-store and online, because I don't know if you both remember this, but there used to be a slide that was like, the malls are dead, stores are dying, we're never going back in store. And that was a theme that everybody was talking about for many years, but the store's not dead and it's not dying. It's evolving. And I don't think it's ever really going to fully go away. But I think what you're describing, Rob, is more we want to have different experiences in different ways. We're not just transactional anymore necessarily. We're having more experiences interacting with different channels in different places, both in the physical and digital world, but that makes it so much harder for the brands. If I kind of put my brand hat on, you are now working through the algorithm, the ai, the in-store shopping experience, your in-store setup. So there's so many different elements now that they need to think through. And if we bring it back to the beginning around silos, you can't have silos to do that successfully. It's just not possible. And I think that's the realization that needs to start happening now because it's going to take time to make the shifts internally to be able to support a shopping journey like you just described, Rob.

Rob Gonzalez (28:38):

Yeah, and there's lots of other interesting ideas that I and other people have on how this stuff could shake out. Once you start thinking about this stuff, you see opportunity everywhere. But I was at Roche Brothers this last weekend with my daughter and we had a shopping list from my wife who's just a phenomenal chef, and we're going through the Roche Brothers and she's got organic, some type of organic sandwich meat that she wants, but there's no organic sandwich meat of this type at this place. But

Peter Crosby (29:15):

You are expected to bring home organic sandwich meat.

Rob Gonzalez (29:18):

This is me having deep empathy for Instacart shoppers that have to do a substitution.

(29:24):

Now I'm in the middle of having to do a substitution and I call my wife, I'm doing the dial a hotline situation, and she's not picking up and I'm like, okay, look, I can't do organic, but is it the nitrates? Is it the antibiotics? I can probably find if you give me a stack ranked list of priorities on this meat, I could find meat that's good enough for the moment, but she's not picking up, so what am I going to do? And it's like I could imagine if I had a little shopping assistant where I could just say, Hey, look, I'm in a pickle here. I'm looking for meat. My wife wanted me to get organic ham, but there's no organic ham people who care about that. How do you stack rank the other things that matters? What's the substitute? I bet AI could be a decent job at that, right?

Peter Crosby (30:15):

Sorry. When you back into the data that's needed to fuel all of these different missions for all of these different types of people, and it does seem like this is going to need a huge amount of data and slicing of data into these niches or whatever you want to call them. And I think therein lies the opportunity of figuring out how does a company prepare to be ready to be in the data business That's so substantial as we're talking about here.

Rob Gonzalez (30:51):

Yeah, that's like two of the big AI winning companies that they don't really get a lot of press. Everyone's talking like Nvidia, Nvidia are Palantir and Databricks. And the really interesting thing about Palantir and Databricks is that their valuation, and Databricks was founded I think less than 10 years ago, and their valuation is over $60 billion right now. And what those two companies do is they house the data. It's like they house the unique data that you can use for post-training, tuning in the context of an enterprise or specific application. And so it's just an evidence that folks that really understand these technologies know that having a data asset that you can use to augment the models actually materially improves performance on what you're capable of. I mean, even at Salsify, for example, one of the things that we've done for grocery is we created a validation service.

(31:48):

And it used to be, if you go back five, 10 years ago, anyone who's setting up data for a major grocer in the US or in France or a lot of regulated environments, you've got to do hand checks on nutritional labels to make sure that the data's accurate. If the data's inaccurate, you're going to get sued. And so everything used to be done by hand and people would try to decrease the cost by offshoring some of the checks and all this sort of stuff. AI if you tune it and is really, really, really good at doing the checks, but it requires a tremendous amount of data to become good at it. And I think that folks that are on the brand side, you think about where does this data go?

(32:31):

You've got to be thinking about how do I expose more of my data to not only the foundation models, but also to the data that's used to tune the shopping experiences afterwards. Like a rufuss. How do you get more data to a rufuss? That should be a question everybody's asking. And what data do I get to a Rufuss or Instacart or Uber? Some of the tech leaders, they're doing incredible stuff internally with AI and catalogs. How do you think about providing a lot more data to them to help out? And what does that data even look like? And having those conversations with folks, that's how I think the modern version of AI of category management is going to play in the world of AI if people are leaning into this stuff. So it's a long answer to go into your data is important point, but I am just vehemently agreeing with it. And I think a lot of other people out there are too.

Peter Crosby (33:20):

And if data is super important, everything that you're talking about is okay, once you have that data, how do you get it where it's visible or usable? And so much of that has to do with having an automated network that can get your data anywhere that it needs to be. And it still seems to me like now 300 episodes in so much of the trading partners in the world are still doing spreadsheets that won't work. It feels like we're reaching a place where it really won't work. You won't be able to play in this arena if you're that closed off. Am I being too hyperbolic?

Rob Gonzalez (34:02):

It's actually kind of interesting you say that AI is actually one of the use cases in technology is using it to smooth out some of the ETL process. So as a lot of people know, AI is pretty good at creating code templates. If GitHub copilot, for example, is the most famous one where it can help doing programming code completion at a pretty good level, philanthropics cloud is really, really good at this stuff as well. There's other models that are good at it. And so if you are taking something like a spreadsheet and trying to extract information out of it into some type of a structured form, AI is actually pretty good at that stuff. So we're looking for a world where the way that a lot of retailers had invested in item automation was to create a highly structured rest, a I like a programmatic interface to which you could post data that's conformant to the retailer's, data specs and ai.

(35:06):

Maybe you could post data that's not conformant to the retailer's data specs because they can kind of fix it in post and they can fix it in post. Because AI is quite good at taking fuzzy data and making more structure out of it. So we could actually be entering a world where spreadsheets as a mechanism for exchange for companies that haven't stood up an API could be totally viable, actually viable in a way that was not even possible four or five years ago. But what people are going to have to lean into is what data are you're collecting and what are you doing in post? How are you transforming it into something useful? How do you give instruction to your suppliers as to what you're going to accept? So I mean, these days with ai, whether it's a spreadsheet or whether it's an API or whether it's a PDF or whatever, it matters less than it used to, kind of in an amazing way. But yeah, the key though is automation though is if there's no automation available, then this is not going to work because the volumes that we're talking about are just insane compared to what people are used to.

Peter Crosby (36:06):

So in our traditional three-legged stool of process technology, there's always the people of really the most important leg in the stool, even in an era of ai. And this podcast has always been, I mean actually the DSI has always been about people and Lauren having been on both sides of the equation here at a brand and then building an organization that is helping a whole community figure it out. So our listeners and the members of the community, constant performance and efficiency demands, plus they're the change agents they often must be. What are the areas of growth you see happening in some of our best leaders? What are they leaning into to be prepared to act, to bully, to lead through the next 300 episodes?

Lauren Livak Gilbert (37:02):

I mean, in addition to agility and lots of deep breaths and patience, definitely. I would say the first thing being more data-driven. So we have the data now. If I think back to my time on the brand side, I had some data, but it wasn't really pieced together across the board with content and sales and retail media and how all of that was fitting together. We're now at a time where we have that data. Some retailers are giving you that data so that you can build out the right picture of your full omnichannel journey and you can use that data to go to your leadership team, ask for more resources, talk about how you need to think about your content and how it connects to all those different pieces in the ROI that it's driving. So I think data is a really big piece of that, and the leaders in the space who have teams that are thinking about data holistically from end to end are going to be more impactful and are going to have more opportunities to be more focused in their consumer targeting and how they're going to market.

(38:05):

So I would say that's the first one. The second one, not surprisingly, is being more customer-centric. When I say that out loud, I think it's funny and I laugh at that because that's really the goal of what every brand is trying to get at. How am I making sure, and I'm really working with my retailers as well as I'm consumer-centric and I'm giving them the products and the information that they need, but it's really easy to become siloed and have blinders on inside your organization to focus on just what your goals are and what you need to drive. But I think because there's so much competition, because we need to be laser focused on loyalty and keeping the customers that we already have, it's so important to say, what does my consumer want? How are they shopping? What questions are they asking? What content can I make sure that I'm giving them to understand that my product is better than a competitor's product? So really putting that consumer mindset on and focusing on how that strategy needs to evolve.

Peter Crosby (39:05):

Go ahead, Peter. Yeah, no, I was just thinking because our folks have to keep two sides of the customer consumer. Exactly. When you were talking customer, I was thinking, oh, does she mean the retailers or the distributors if you're B2B? But it's also, you need to obviously know and understand, especially as the niche world continues to grow your consumers and your B2B buyers in a much more granular way than you have before. So it's an interesting balance to make sure that you're considering both while sort of managing the noise from inside the

Lauren Livak Gilbert (39:38):

Organization. And I think it's more important now to be a better partner with your retailer. And I think the retailers are realizing that they need the brands and the brands need the retailers. We need to collaborate together. And you both need to bring data to the table to talk about what the category looks like. To Rob's point, you both need to have a joint conversation to figure out how you're going to reach your consumer. So making sure that that is the focus for anyone on a brand in the e-commerce role in the digital role is super, super important. And I would say last but not least, an educator, I think that's always been the case. You need to help educate your organization, whether that's your leadership team, whether that's your cross-functional partners, making sure they understand the importance of digital, using data, telling the right story so that they understand how their piece of the puzzle fits into the broader omnichannel end-to-end journey that you're going on inside your organization. That'll just help you be able to get anything done because they understand why their work is important and what they're doing matters to the end result.

Peter Crosby (40:43):

It's amazing because I'm sitting here and I'm thinking as you talk, and I think about even just this episode, the research that the DSI puts out to be able to fuel our people to be able to be those educators by you asking a lot of questions of people out there and then turning it into research. So already you've talked about the strata DSI report. There's a new version coming out of that soon from the folks at Strata. You've got your joint business planning, which you were just talking about bringing data to the table. You've got the e catman research. And also I would say we started out talking about the digital shelf maturity curve and coming up in a couple months or so, you'll be coming out with actually the refreshed omnichannel maturity curve, some exciting new thoughts where people can lean in and where the competencies need to be. So one, as we close out, I just wanted to thank you, Lauren, for all of that that you're doing to drive future thinking and giving people the ammunition to be the leaders that they need to be at their organization. It's really pretty cool.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (41:55):

Thank you, Peter and I thank the community for participating and being a part of all those research reports and helping us really craft what those stories look like. And I'll give one more teaser, Peter. We are doing a report on omnichannel org structures that will be coming out in the next couple of months. So I'm really excited about that. We're going to deep dive into what the org of the future looks like. So another fun teaser for the audience.

Peter Crosby (42:18):

So I think all three of us, we've been doing this for a bit and it's a joy, but really the joy is I just wanted to end with gratitude to all of you listening and a challenge. Thank you so much for your support, your enthusiasm, your questions. And as I end every episode though, I'm sure none of you stick around for my closer. You've already turned your pod, your iPod.

(42:47):

Oh goodness. Oh my God, Jesus. I won't even cut that. It's embarrassing. You've turned off your device. Our thanks for being part of this DSI community. It is your energy, your passion, your smarts that got us here and will drive us through the next 300. So my challenge to you is if you ever find yourself sitting there during an episode wanting to offer an alternative viewpoint, share your experiences or offer an episode idea, please don't be shy. It's your voices that will fill the next 300 episodes as you generously share your knowledge with your peers. It's truly a gift to the industry. And no one that I'm aware of has died yet from being on the podcast. Right.

Rob Gonzalez (43:27):

Wow. It was

Peter Crosby (43:29):

Grim. Way closer yet. That yet is doing a lot. Exactly. Well, it's 300 episodes. You never know. And then with that, my thanks to Rob and to Lauren for the Brains, the laughter, the energy that you both bring to the DSI. It's a privilege. So thank you. And I'll see you all at episode 600. No, I won't. Thanks everyone. Thank you all.