How AI Agents Will Rewrite Retail Payments - Spreedly CEO

Speaker A: The right answer should win. Not the most optimized answer and not the biggest budget. When you think about the shift from Yahoo to Google, of course, what everybody was sick of with these really busy pages in Google, you just put the thing in one click and it's almost like a return to that again. I think the challenge for retailers, they've spent so much time optimizing the experience for a human, and now they have to optimize an experience for agents. Agents who go very differently and think very differently. Today, the larger merchants, the larger platforms have this incredible amount of resources, and they can kind of not game the system, but optimize the system. Agents aren't going to care so much about where you're ranked on a, uh, search result or where you sit in a mall and retail space. So it does create new opportunities for the best product to win or the best solution to win.

Speaker B: You're listening to Retail Disrupted, a podcast that explores the latest industry developments and the trends that will shape how we shop in the future. I'm your host, Natalie Berg. Hello, and welcome to Retail Disrupted. On today's episode, we're going to hear from Justin Benson, CEO of Spreedly. Spreedly empowers businesses around the world to build, scale and optimize their payments. Today, we're going to get Justin's take on retail and how the world of payments is evolving as we move into this new agentic era. Justin, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker A: Thanks very much. Thanks for having me, Natalie.

Speaker B: No, I'm looking forward to diving into our discussion because there is so much happening in retail. There's so much happening in payments. I guess just to get us started, though, can you tell us a little bit more about Spreedly? And I will ask you right off the bat, because I'm conscious we have viewers and listeners who are maybe less familiar, uh, with the payment space. If you could help us define payment orchestration. So what is it and, uh, why is it becoming so important for retailers?

Speaker A: Yeah, so Spreely has been around for a little over 10 years now. Um, we began before the term payment orchestration was ever really coined. I think the best way for retailers to think about it, uh, payment orchestration is it's like an operating system for payments. So, uh, we work with merchants and we work with platforms, uh, and we give them the ability and the flexibility, kind of work with different pieces in the payment stack, kind of build their ideal payment stack without them being involved in security, doing lots of engineering work, uh, and being able to change and adapt.

Speaker B: Nimbly can you give us a real life example of what can go wrong or I guess what opportunities can get missed in if a retailer isn't using payment orchestration?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great question. I think, you know, you think about it sort of, you know, from a merchant's perspective, from a top line perspective and maybe from a bottle bottom line perspective. So uh, from a top line perspective, from, you know, generating revenue, incremental revenue, when you're using orchestration, you can, you know, plug and play, mix and match on the fraud side so that you're, you know, you're doing the right thing around fraud, you're making sure that you're not declining, uh, positive customers. You can think about it from the perspective of offering multiple APMs. Uh, you can think about it. If your primary provider goes down, you can still stay up and switch over to a secondary provider. Um, and then when you think about it from the back end, uh, from sort of operational cost perspective, you can definitely track, you know, your cost of payments, your acceptance rates, your decline rates and really optimize your transactional flow for the right providers in the right regions. A very common thing we see is that a, uh, merchant will, you know, naturally begin in one part of the world, pick a really good payment provider for that region, uh, have some success and look to expand outside of that region, uh, and their providers being great to work with until now and they've seen these really great, you know, success rates, the right kind of APMs being offered, but as soon as they do some expansion, they suddenly see, hey, we're not seeing the same performance in the next region, the new region. And so, so it's the ability for them to optimize in a situation like that.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I guess when we start thinking about agentic commerce, I imagine this just becomes part of the foundation. Right. So we'll, we'll come back to agentic. I don't want to, um, I don't want to jump too far ahead too quickly, but it's, it's a big topic. But let's start with the consumer because I think it's really interesting the shift we're seeing. I mean there's so much happening from the consumer side, a lot of it obviously being driven by technology. But I think what's especially interesting is how retailers have really spent the last decade empowering shoppers with things like reviews and comparison tools, seamless, uh, checkout. Now we're starting to see shoppers delegate and that's, that's a really big shift. You know, we're shopping inside Chat, GPT and Gemini. We're also starting to outsource some of our shopping to agents. So there is this huge platform shift happening. And I'd love to know, I'd love to get your take on the consumer. Like what do you think, what's, what's your take on this shift and how do you see it um, playing out in retail?

Speaker A: Yeah. So when you think about the reasons that retailers, you know, made those changes, empowered the consumer, as you said, it's really the same dynamic but it's now happening within AI. And so what you're seeing is that consumers want to be educated, they want to have broad awareness, they want to make comparisons. And um, you know, merchants and their websites were doing as much as they can to kind of drive that comfort, uh, drive that knowledge and drive that awareness. For better or worse. That's now going to begin happening inside of AI and it's probably honestly a better place for it to occur. There might still be um, there might still be things that a merchant can do especially like reviews, practical reviews. Uh, as we know everything in, in, in AI today is really text based so video, you know, photos, things like that, they'll still be areas where they can help a great deal. But from a merchant's perspective, um, and we even see it, you know, it's brigly and from out, you know, from outside. The way we think about it is somebody showing up far more educated, far deeper into your funnel than they were uh, 12 months ago or 24 months ago. And so thinking about how that can impact their journey once they arrive, um, far more, you know, far more knowledgeable, have done a lot of research, uh, and they're arriving, you know, theory deeper into your funnel.

Speaker B: Yeah. And often you know, the consumer or the customer walks into a store or comes onto a website. Um, but if we look at physical retail for a second, you know, they often are more informed about that purchase, that decision than the store associate. So I think that's this challenge for retailers is that kind of, you know, digitally enabled, hyper informed and then AI is just going to take that to the next level, isn't it?

Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: So I'd love to, love to get your thoughts about um, all the complexity I guess that we're seeing when it comes to channels because I guess when we think about E commerce there has been this explosion of choice and I'd love to know whether you feel that AI is just going to become another channel or do you think it's fundamentally going to reshape E Commerce.

Speaker A: It's a great question. Um, I think we're all making educated guesses here. I do think it's a lot more than just a new channel. I think that also I think the really interesting thing is when we have technological changes, we tend to have an explosion in choice and um, availability and new opportunities. And then we also tend to kind of narrow down again. Right. Like over time. And so what does that journey, does that journey apply to AI and what does that look like? I don't think. I think the challenge for retailers is that they've spent so much time kind of optimizing the experience for a human and now they have to optimize an experience for agents. And agents are gold very differently and think very differently and so uh, and will act differently. So I think that you know, when you think about channels, you're still always optimizing for a human, you know, and so it's like what, what channel are you coming through? But you know, you sort of got unique channel issues that you might navigate. But your, your starting point still is human behavior, emotion, uh, brand trust, loyalty. I think that's the single biggest change. And the reason it doesn't feel like it makes sense to think about this as just a new channel, uh, because you really got, you know, you've been optimizing for humans and now you're really thinking about how, how agents are going to come and how they show up, this sort of explosion and opportunity. I think for certain it helps, you know, certain merchants because today, you know, the larger merchants, the larger platforms have this incredible amount of resources and they can kind of not game the system, but optimize the system, hijack the system. This, you know, opens up a new opportunity. Like the agents aren't going to care much about, you know, where you're ranked on a search result or where you sit in a mall and retail space. Um, so it does create new opportunities for kind of the best product to win or the best solution to win. I think there'll be really, really positive things like for that not just, not just overwhelmingly intimidating for small and medium sized retailers. Uh, the question is what does that kind of normalization and reversion to the mean look like when it comes to agentic commerce?

Speaker B: Yeah. And I guess just to build on that, if we think about the checkout page, I mean, I think this is where it can get a little bit uncomfortable for retailers because they've spent literally decades optimizing for things like upsells and bundles and um, like those loyalty nudges and that moment is very much being rewritten. So I'd love to get your take on this. Like, how do you see this evolving and if that's no longer the place where retailers can influence shoppers, if it's no longer sort of a merchandising and loyalty touch point, how else can they reach their customers?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, I mean it's a, it's a legitimate concern. You know, first things first. Like, I think checkout is going to change dramatically. I think that in the payments world, I think that we in payments tend to uh, miss or not understand the value of checkout to merchants. You know, we think very much in terms of like, present the right payment method, do a quick conversion. Yeah, that's what checkout is. Um, but as you've alluded to, and one thing I'm always struck by, when you start with merchants, they have so many agendas happening in checkout, you know, and so sometimes they're selling a loss lead product and they hope to make it up through, through loyalty, through upsell. And so their whole business model might be built around that. Um, you know, that might be that they're thinking about offering their own payment method, their own, you know, credit card brand loyalty, bnpl. So, um, so I think that when we, a lot of the early conversation around the gentic commerce and how a, you know, payment will occur really misses that this is going to be the single biggest thing that I think, you know, retailers think about in the immediate short term. I think that the, you know, we talked before about kind of optimizing for a consumer and for a human and the thing that they'll respond to, I think that merchants will have to kind of optimize for agents and the things that agents will respond to. So loyalty may not go, you not go away, but you'll be, you know, interacting with an agent inside of a different, you know, uh, a different paradigm than your checkout page. Uh, and they'll be assessing your loyalty program and the quality of your loyalty program. They'll be looking at your BNPL options and whether that's something that they're empowered to enact upon and what preferences they're, you know, that, you know, what sort of delegated preferences they've been told. I think, um, you know, we talk a lot about payments and agents, but the entire experience, end to end, it's not just like agentic commerce, it's agentic service, you know, and so do you. Are uh, you uh, able to manage refunds? How do you think about, you know, the, the Responsiveness of customer service. So there'll be all these, you know, trust loyalty brands. So I think that we might move away from sort of pure economic incentives, but, uh, there'll still be opportunities for merchants to really differentiate themselves, but maybe more across kind of like how they manage trust, what their brand's like, how flexible they are or how innovative they are across the entire journey. For a consumer, that might be what helps you win. But yeah, I think it's a real area of, um, legitimate investigation for merchants to think about what happens to the checkout experience now that, uh, some percentage and an increasing percentage won't be human initiated.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I guess I think there is this assumption that payments actually becomes less important if the agent is handling everything. But I think you're going to argue that the opposite is probably true and that payments actually become more important. Um, so what's your take on this? Because I guess, just before I let you answer, um, I guess retailers have been experimenting with AI when it comes to things like chatbots, and there is sort of a level of, um, you know, I guess, I guess consumers will tolerate some mistakes. Obviously our tolerance for any kind of mistakes or any kind of mediocre service or experiences is very low to begin with. But I think when it comes to a mistake in a customer service experience versus a mistake with the payments, obviously there's a big, there's, there's a, this huge disparity there in terms of what consumers will put up with. So I'd love to get your take on this. How do you see that sort of evolving?

Speaker A: I was just thinking about this, uh, this question. Uh, last night I was watching a video and Google had a big announcement yesterday about Android 17, you know, and, and uh, and a big part, of course, anything that's, that's Google related is Gemini. And in their video they showed an example of somebody, you know, walking up to a poster, I think, on the street in New York, and it was for a concert. Use Gemini, use their Android phone to take a picture of the poster. And Gemini is interacting with them. It's like, buy me two tickets to this concert. This is my favorite band. And in Gemini, it's like searching found two tickets. I just bought them for you. And appropriately, they were getting completely panned right in the comments, like, okay, who's going to trust AI at this point in time to make a purchase like that? Did they get the right dates? Did it get right venue? Did it get the right seats? We're thinking about where, um, where AI can work and, and what our tolerance is and you know, you know what when. And the other thing of course is humans make mistake. Right? So that's still a ground level for us. But it's where do we tolerate human mistakes and where do we not tolerate human mistakes? And payments is absolutely an area where we're just generally really, really risk adverse to mistakes. Right. Because of the, the financial impact on the merchant or just the, the massive break in trust on the consumer if it's you know, impacts that consumer side and, and can, can ruin your relationship with them. So it's a very long way of saying that like you know there's just very little room for error uh, in payments. And I think that'll be something that will seem very much around like they'll become more important, not less. We have to think through the entire journey of you know, uh, accepting a payment, managing a refund, uh, thinking about a recurring return payment. We get that wrong. We had a uh, great example uh, a few years ago, completely agentic independent where a uh, customer was using us and they turned on and they work with charities and churches to help. They're a platform that helps organizations like that uh, manage uh, their giving platforms. And so many of those customers are set up on recurring and, and they'll make a monthly contribution. So we have this thing called Advanced Vault that really helps like you know, maintain credit card data, talk to the networks, get an update automatically. If it's there, it's great. It's like ah, uninterrupted subscriptions. Well this company uh, turned it on and thought was going to be great and it turned out that you know, within a month several customers called them and said oh you know, our, our support lines are blowing up because I guess people whose cars had expired hadn't contributed for three or four months, automatically got turned back on, you know. And, and so you think in this world of giving and there'd be lots of trust and you know, and, and uh, but people naturally were kind of livid because their card had expired. So that was their, in their mind their subscription had expired and they were no longer giving to this charity suddenly four months later. And so they had to, they called us frantically. We need to turn it off, we need to think it through. And so you just think about like I think the key there is like these automated examples that are uh, completely independent from the initial sale, can still break trust, can still have a very negative impact on businesses. And, and it went from this, you know, this platform called us up, we got to make this change because they are customers and so on down the line. So I think that um, you know, when we think about AI, it's just, it's not just the initial transaction, it's how are they handling refunds, how are they, you know, how are they managing repeat purchases, recurring purchases there'. It'll be very, very important to get that right.

Speaker B: Yeah. Because once you lose trust with a customer, it's really hard to regain it. Right?

Speaker A: Yes. Right. And we know how much retailers and you know, spend to capture a customer, spend to build trust and loyalty and uh, to have a well meaning but at the end of the day still uh, an error, you know, and a break in that trust is. That's really, really tough.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And actually just to kind of build on that point, I mean I feel like there is this fear, at least here in Europe, this like palpable fear that retailers will lose the emotional connection that, that relationship they have with a customer if more of our transactions are taking place inside, uh, you know, ChatGPT, Gemini or as we've touched on, if, if they're outsourced to agents entirely and the customers completely opt out, opted out of the um, the transaction. So there is this fear that they just become like a box that ships stuff. Do you think that's a legitimate concern? Like, is there really this existential threat for retailers out there?

Speaker A: Uh, I mean, I think, I think the, the first thing first is thinking through the transaction type. You know, we, we always uh, and we're as guilty as anyone. Like we generalize, you know, the, the transaction type, you know, and so in some, some ways, you know, you, there are many transactions that you don't want to have a great deal of emotion around. You want them to happen automatically. But then again there are transactions, right, that are, that, that really elicit strong responses for us. And I think this is the whole question around shopping. And you know, like shopping isn't just a utilitarian mission for many people. It's uh, the culmination of saving money, researching for something, uh, and then making that purchase is, you know, it's a great, a great feeling. We all know what it feels like to get our first paycheck and be able to buy something discretionary. Right. Like it's val. You know, there's many, many ways that occurs. So I think if you're still, if you're in that space where emotion and, and brand and, and loyalty is kind of a key component to the consumer experience, there will be opportunities to, you know, maintain that, keep that you, you'll you'll be operating instead perhaps on your website or in traditional channels, um, happening, you know, you might be happening more so in, in an AI world where you're there, if that's critical to you. This is just a new paradigm that you have to operate in. I think conversely, for, for many transactions, it, it's not like this is the first time. Right. Like we've gone through search engines, we've gone through social commerce, we've gone through these aggregating platforms with their own agenda. Uh, and, and we have to operate and, and optimize for, you know, you know, combine their agenda with the consumer's agenda and ours. So I think retailers have, have a, have experience doing this, albeit that, you know, for some retailers this new paradigm might be ex. An existential threat because of something fundamental to their business or that they're late to move. Um, but I would, I expect that the, the merchants that are sophisticated and uh, and experienced, they're going to go back to their playbooks around, you know, search aggregators, social commerce aggregators and start there and say, okay, what's different now? And we know how to adapt and survive.

Speaker B: Yeah. It's really interesting to get your take on this because I speak to a lot of retailers and uh, I often hear that it's going to reinforce the importance of the physical store and kind of service you get. And uh, I think it's just going to reinforce this idea that bricks and mortar retail is going to have to offer something you can't get from E Commerce. I think we have seen for a long time this kind of divergence between what I call functional and fun shopping. And I think the AI is only going to really accelerate that. Right. Because some things to your point, you don't want to have to think about. You know, I just want toilet paper and toothpaste and I know what brands I like. It's habitual and we just want it to turn up. Whereas other things are, you know, a little bit more of an emotional, maybe a bigger ticket, high, more highly considered purchase. And I think that that bifurcation is going to deepen. So really interesting time to be discussing, uh, retail.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, I think like you, if you look at the areas where, where maybe it will impact first, it will be things like, you know, multiparty. Right. Like when you think about commerce or retail, uh, things like travel, right, that have a digital and a physical component to it, you know, and uh, I think the ability to do this. So, uh, I would feel, I think something like airbnb Feels extremely vulnerable and also, like, a huge opportunity there, I think, you know, when you think about travel, like, what's Airbnb doing? They're trying to kind of, you know, drive that journey for you, right? Like the, hey, you found a house. Maybe they'll help you with airfare. Now they're leaning into experiences, right? Like, oh, help me find a, uh, yoga class nearby, or wine tasting. And I think all those will be really, really interesting areas. That AI is your companion that knows you really, really well. Could kind of build up over time. I think the other thing that's sort of interesting is the example you gave about, um, toilet paper and milk and bread. You know, from my own personal experience, I usually go into Amazon or Whole Foods or Walmart, and I rely on it to remind me, too, right? Like, I'm there because I'm out of toothpaste. And it's like, you know, you typically buy razor blades or you. As I get. And so, you know, what does that look like in. In an agentic world? Does that experience get replaced? Um, I'm not super excited to use agentic commerce to automatically buy what I, you know, automatically buy a commodity. Because actually, when I'm buying a commodity, I'm typically going through an engagement experience. And. And what sort of, you know, the precursor to AI is, you know, that app saying, well, this is the other things that you like to buy, and these kinds of cadences. So it'll be really, really interesting. And then the final thing is, like, a lot of new technologies, phase one is just trying to incrementally do something that we're already doing better, right? And so if you think about mobile, the initial version of mobile was a BlackBerry, and it was email on the go. You know, like, nobody really likes doing email on a phone. It was much easier to do it on your laptop. If you were sitting still, you would. But. But because the. The killer app was you were mobile, you're on the go. You can do it anytime you want. And so that's sort of phase one is taking existing things that we like to do and making them more effective across some sort of, you know, some sort of, uh, operational efficiency. And then the iPhone completely changes it, right? Like, the things that you can do on the iPhone, you can never do on a laptop. And you. You have a paradigm shift. So I think that'll be definitely with agented commerce and AI, where many of the. Many of the things we talk about, um, are just incremental changes, right? Incremental improvements. They're running on the Existing payment Rails, they're slightly more efficient. I think the really, really big unlock is when we start to have different ways to do commerce entirely because of this, you know, new parrot, new technology paradigm. I'm not saying I know what those things are, but that's what I listen for really, really acutely. I get less excited by this is a smarter way to buy milk or this is a smarter way to buy a ticket and more like what commerce am I doing because, because of this, that I wouldn't have been doing otherwise, you know.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, and I completely agree with you. I mean I often say on the podcast that when you look at, without going too far back in history, but when we look at the evolution of E commerce, it has mostly aside from, you know, the launch of the iPhone, to your point, it has mostly been a series of incremental improvements. Like, you know, delivery got a little bit faster, it became free, uh, the one click checkout, you know, everything just sort of gradually got better. And then the iPhone was this huge catalyst because it just democratized access for everyone. And now with this AI wave, I think the thing that really differentiates the AI wave is that it's being driven by the consumer, right. So retailers are scrambling to keep up because we're all using AI, we're, we're embedding it into lives. So super, uh, super fascinating stuff. I, I'd love to get your thoughts on search and discovery because that's obviously a big part of all this. Um, and, and so much disruption there. A lot of product searches still start on Amazon and I think that's because they have the assortment, they have the reviews, right. And that, that is still a very powerful combo. But as, as we've said, you know, we're getting more and more comfortable using these AI tools. Um, how do you see this evolving and what's the impact on retail here?

Speaker A: It's, it's a great question. I think when you think about like sort of disruption, retail disruptive. When you think about disruption and when you think about um, expansion, you know, I think if you're Amazon, it's probably potentially a net negative, you know, so because you what, uh, take a step back. If you think about like what we're talking about with search and how it will change, people will be arriving far, will be far more knowledgeable, right? They won't be starting with uh, uh, let me think about, you know, I need this piece for, I needed something for my car, right? It's like, and maybe you know, or a home repair or do it Yourself, right. Like you're in search, you're going to be interacting with uh, before you put in like keyword searches and or you just start with Amazon because it might be easier. You're probably going to be engaging with uh, AI to do that and at the end of that you'll, you'll get these recommendations for pieces you want to buy, components that could be, do stuff, could be fashion. Amazon sort of has captured that. Right. Like it's like you talked about, it's this ease and, and what we're talking about before is really Amazon is like end to end ease. Right. Easy to search, easy to buy, easy to get delivered, easy to do returns. Right. Like so there's all these things and you trust it. And um, you know, and when, you know, you think about sometimes Amazon's gotten in trouble where they've lowered the quality of suppliers and some of the goods that are shipped aren't very and some it's Amazon's problem, right. It's like oh the. And so they have to be very. So you have this whole end to end thing. I think that they have this powerful position and they can use AI incrementally to cement that. But I do think that this is sort of m. More of a uh, tailwind for someone like Etsy. Right. Like so when you think about a platform like that, like I'm doing that same research, uh, I might find something that is unique to my experience, unique to my situation. You know, it could be a boutique, you know, component. It could be a uh, really interesting piece of clothing or fashion, could be something from my house. I don't have. That's probably more likely to be a long is it's very hard to find a long tail. Right. And I think AI in the short term and AI engagement should and, and is already really effective at, at unearthing the long tail. And so when I think about search, um, search today and search with AI that's the kind of, that I think that's where I think the most disruption will occur and the most interesting pieces will be uh, it should cut through and we talked about this before. It's like when you think about the shift from Yahoo to Google, of course what everybody was sick of with these really busy pages in Google, you just put the thing in one click and it's almost like a return to that again the right answer should win. Not the most optimized answer and not the biggest budget. I don't know how long that lasts. We've seen that pattern rinse and repeat. But I think in the short term, where short term is one to two years, I think, I think the incumbents have more to lose because of that. Um, now of course if I go to something on Etsy and if I have a bad experience like what do I tell if somewhere in that, that, that multi step we talk about like trust is broken? Uh, you know, I think that's kind of the risk, right? You maybe get this one shot at it. But I can say to my AI, like don't, don't shop there again, because that wasn't a great experience. They're, they're disputing my return or you like that. But I think what, that's what happens to search is people that go deeper into the funnel and they'll do the long tail. And so that's kind of this really, really nice, interesting opportunity for, for the long tail in particular.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that's the, the beauty of all this technology is that it does level the playing field for some of those smaller players. Um, and yeah, just makes, gives, gives customers more choice or, or helps them to uh, you know, to curate that selection and make uh, sense of all the choice I guess.

Speaker A: And I, and I, yeah. And I think too just like that depending on what you're selling, like how, how much deeper they are into the knowledge cycle, you know, and so there's, you know, there's sort of, there's interesting examples now where, where a startup may not even launch a website. Like why would I even launch a website? Like what education do I need to be doing? Someone's going to show up super educated and this is empowering to me. Like how would I rethink? Um, I think for, for, for merchants, whether it's coming into walking into a retail location or on their website. Like, and it's going to be really tough, right, because you're going to have this traditional 95% is probably for, you know, 95 going to 90 to 85 going to be a human going through the traditional Google search. So landing there off a click off a link and wanting more education, wanting reviews, wanting to do that and then you're going to have this like super focused hyper that's going to trigger things because you know, when we think about a way like the flow, right, like what you want to do. A lot of fraud is kind of built around, you know, that human reaction. So a huge fraud trigger is someone actually showing up, not spending a lot of time doing anything and immediately wanting to buy it. Like that's not normal behavior normally. And so There'll be uh. So this is where I feel for merchants. Is that old flows over here and they're clicking and then they click in. Now we'd love to see them scroll up and down. It means they're reading. Those are great signals. Like hey, I've done everything. I'm ready to go. You're the right person. I'm ready to buy. It's like, oh, that doesn't, that's a, that's a negative patent match. Um, and so yeah, so I think that that's where you could have. It's problematic because it's a completely different flow.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I guess, I guess from a retailer's point of view they need to be able to raise those red flags. If it's. If I guess how do they decide, how do they know if it's a human versus will they be using the same checkout? Like I'm just visually I'm trying to get my head around how this will actually look.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So, so I think it's, it's identity. It's, you know, it's identity. And um, in this. So the agent has to show up, identify itself and you have to have a whole different set of rules knowing that it's an agent. You know, first of all validating that truly is. But then you'll build behavior just in the same way we've spent many years building those models around human behavior and refining those models from around fraud. This will be a completely different talk track. Like velocity is fine. Like we expect that you're done the research, you're ready to move. There's then there's always sort of questions around um, what, what permissions do you have? Right. Like what have you been empowered to do? And like, which we don't have to do with a human at the most. Like when the payment's ready to go, we have to make sure that they have enough money in the bank to pay for it or otherwise they. It gets declined. But when you're thinking about agentic commerce, it'll be okay. Like um, we want to sell them this good. If we try and bundle something else in, it'll actually get too high in terms of the basket for the permissions that this agent had on a first time purchase and all that. So there's many, many. But yeah, it'll be uh, a very different flow with different decision points and different concerns. And that's why it'll be, it'll be like a headache I think for merchants in, in the beginning to, you know, because there's such different flows and decision making and identity matters and permissions matter and, and uh, um. So yeah a different, different like it'll be you know some you, you'll get help uh, from people in your stack but it'll still be real.

Speaker B: Yeah, I can just uh, I can imagine the retailers tuning in just trying to wrap their heads around this. I mean there's, they clearly um, inaction is not, not an option is it? It's ah, this is coming, it's here. So one final question. Um, you're based in the US and US Retail is clearly leading the way when it comes to all things agentic. However, I, I think there could be a little bit of a second mover advantage for retailers outside the US who can maybe learn from some of those initial mistakes and, and then they can move quickly and maybe with um, with less risk. So as a final question to you, what should global retailers do now to really prepare for this huge shift that

Speaker A: we're about to, to see flexibility. Right. Like they need to, first of all they just need to be able to make those changes, make those shifts. So when they look at their payment infrastructure and this is uh, uh you know this is where I start to do the infomercial a little bit. But like please do. Yeah to your point like optionality like just looking at their payment stack today and their payment providers. Of course we know many retailers are dependent on third party platforms, uh a big commerce, a shopify, uh, many have like their own and then they'll sell through channels. So really doing an inventory of their, their stack from end to end. How flexible is it going to be if and when they're ready to um, adjust to, to experiment with agentic commerce? I think that's the first thing they can do. I think the second thing they can do is start thinking about probably the right way for them to think about it. Start with their fraud teams but think about identity because identity is very different. Right. We're human versus agent and start to think through that identity flow because it will have its own unique dynamics and prepare for that. Like how ready or how ready or not are we for if we open up agentic commerce we will be able to identify that it's agentic commerce. Will we be able to interact with it and understand what its permissions are, what its capabilities are, what its constraints are. Uh so I think if you're, if you don't feel like you've got strong kind of fraud identity practices already like spending time there because you know as we've talked about that's really the, the biggest issue, I think. Um, we talk a lot about payments, but like catalog readiness, you know, it's like. And, and this is where I think and hope that the lessons from social commerce. You know, uh, if you're already strong in social commerce, you might have solved some of this already. But of course that catalog really needs to be AI ready and AI readable. And if for some reason your business wasn't that you weren't optimizing your catalog for the outside world, um, in social or some other way, you will for a gentic. So getting that catalog ready, getting everything on your site kind of like ready to be AI readable, those are things that you can definitely be thinking about right now, like optionality in your stack, thinking about identity, because that's where the biggest changes will come. And then like, uh, you know, you know, is your website readable? Is your catalog readable? Um, because they're going to be searching for and expecting it to be.

Speaker B: Yeah, because it's coming. Like it or not. It is. Ah, it's coming. Well, Justin, it's been great to get your thoughts. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for listening to Retail Disrupted. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to support the podcast, please leave a rating or review or share it with others. It really makes a difference.