Hello everyone, and welcome back to your favorite (it is your favorite, RIGHT?!) newsletter about all things digital commerce.
This month, we’ve got a bit of a mixed bag:
Gartner has the numbers on customers reaching for their own AI assistant instead of yours.
Matt Klein went looking for the people who promised us the metaverse and found that nobody had bothered to follow up.
A Baird analyst walks through which platforms Wall Street expects to get the big bucks when agents do the shopping.
Also: we’ve got two new blog posts, a couple of events in NYC and LA we'd die to see you at, and a bunch of cool launches from our partners! (And a secretive update about what we’re doing when it comes to AI.)
Enjoy!
The things that matter
Source: Retail Dive
Your customers would rather use their AI than yours
A Gartner survey of 3,500+ B2B and B2C customers finds people are three times more likely to reach for a third-party AI tool than a brand-owned chatbot.
Third-party AI use doubled in the past year. Brand chatbot use has not moved since 2022.
58% of customers use AI to complete a task, not only to ask a question. Among B2B customers it is close to 75%.
Our take: We have been bearish on in-platform chatbots for a while, and this is the data catching up. ChatGPT and Claude forced every system of record to open up, and a customer who can point their own assistant at your catalog has no reason to learn yours. Brands should work on being more legible (structured data, organic presence, a catalog an assistant can read), not on launching their own chatbot.
Source: ZINE
Nobody goes back to check the predictions that missed
Gartner predicted in 2021 that NFT gamification would push a company into the ten most valuable in the world by 2026, and that half of public companies would build NFTs into their brand by 2024.
McKinsey put the average consumer at four hours a day in the metaverse within five years, and specified it would not just be gaming. Meta lost roughly $80 billion on that bet.
In a ZINE survey of 150+ cultural researchers and strategists, 68% say there is too much nonsense in trend work and 75% want accountability for bad calls.
Our take: This one is from March, and we are resurfacing it because you can hear the same engine humming along in commerce right now: THE STOREFRONT IS DEAD; SAAS IS DEAD; IT’S AGENTS ALL THE WAY DOWN. There’s a saying that pessimism is safe and optimism is risky, but I think it runs the other way: grandiose calls get rewarded and expected, and by the time one lands three sizes too big, everyone has moved on to the next revolution.
Source: Retailgentic
Wall Street has opinions on who will get rich from agentic commerce
Baird's thesis is that the model layer commoditizes. Differentiation moves to the platform and application layers, not to whoever ships the best model.
The economics accrue to whoever owns the authenticated consumer, the stored credentials, and the transaction. Amazon, Shopify with Shop Pay, and Google with Gemini Checkout are named as best positioned, and OpenAI is exposed as long as it stays out of checkout.
Investors are discounting Shopify on two fears: that autonomous agents make the storefront less relevant, and that they may end up routing around Shopify's checkout.
Our take: The Shopify anxiety is the interesting part here, because it runs contrary to our opinion: Shopify has never been in a better position to run commerce not just for their little corner, but for the entire Internet. Go figure. 🤷♂️
What we’ve been up to
A few things from our side before the rest of August gets away from us.
In September, we're hosting Commerce Symposium: This Is Water—Sep 8 in NYC at The Standard High Line, Sep 10 in LA at The West Hollywood Edition. We’ll have incredible speakers from brands such as Rainbow Shops, Away, Cometeer, and many others. Get your ticket before they’re gone! (Btw I'm moderating both events, which mostly means I get to be nervous twice.)
Also, two things went up on the blog since our last Commerce Outsights:
Our read on the Shopify Spring '26 Edition. About 150 updates, but only one thesis underneath them all: Shopify wants to be the commerce infrastructure for the entire World Wide Web.
A refresh of our guide to building account portals. It's the question that never stops coming up, and the answer still isn't the one your art director is looking for: you should only go custom if you expect your portal to impact retention, not for branding/design reasons.
Aaaaand one more thing I'm going to be annoyingly vague about.
Over the last few months, we've been digging into what it takes for a big, complicated organization (like, you know, a consumer brand) to adopt AI and get something real out the other end.
The question we are entertaining is this: how do you use AI not to enact some generic efficiency theatre, but rather to 10X the context and the workflows the brand already has? And once you’ve done, how do you distribute the goodness to hundreds of employees in a way that can be actually scaled and maintained over time?
So far, what we have is some opinions, a lot of Claude skills, and a couple of interesting tools we’ve built to orchestrate it all.
We don’t feel quite ready to share any of it yet, but ask me again in the fall and we might just have the thing for you.
News from our partners
Delivering the best digital commerce experience means working with the best digital commerce partners. Here's what they have been up to:
Yotpo: shipped a Discover MCP integration that connects Claude to your AI visibility data, so you can ask about citation performance in a conversation instead of a dashboard.
Gorgias: brought its AI Agent to Instagram DMs and Facebook Messenger in open beta, carrying over the tone, knowledge, and actions it already has.
Shopify: rebuilt collections so one collection can combine automated rules, hand-picked products, exclusions, and other collections, and target individual variants. And with that, our rants finally get an answer (kinda).
Klaviyo: launched Social Marketing, which turns Instagram comments, DMs, and tags into email, SMS, and WhatsApp subscribers and syncs the audiences out to Meta, Google, TikTok, and Pinterest.
Shoplift: launched Campaigns, grouping related tests under a single goal metric with a timeline of what is running, finished, and queued. (Campaign-level reporting is still on the way.)
That’s it for today’s issue. As always, thank you so much for sticking with us, and see you very, very soon! 👋