The Next Trillion Dollar Commerce Opportunity Is Local with Chaitra Vedullapalli

Brent (00:06.347) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Chaitra p Chaitra, go ahead and do your why I was go ahead and tell me. Explain your Sorry, let's start over here.

Chaitra, go ahead, give us an introduction, tell us your name and your last name, because I was about to just butcher it horribly. Tell us your day-to-day role and give us one of your passions in life. Chaitra (00:30.366) Brent, thank you.

Many, many folks do the same thing. It's but my full name is Chaitra Vedalaphalli. and I go by chai, so hopefully for the conversation you can use chai. day to day, I'm an operator and I would say president and founder at Women in Cloud, with a mission to democratize a billion dollars of economic access in the AI economy.

I do by creating economic pathways around workforce development, economic development and leadership development. Brent (01:05.185) That's great. And passions in life?

Chaitra (01:08.204) Passions is life, I c I call myself as a multi-potentialite. So I like to take any project and I enjoyed it from dancing to cooking to cycling to water sports, you name it. I enjoy all of it because I feel the life needs to be lived with full vitality.

So you should not leave any passions or any experience out of your life. Brent (01:31.327) Absolutely. And you should have a work some work life balance, right?

I'm a big believer and just not working a hundred percent of the time. There's a there's a time to work and there's a time to play and time to spend with your family, things like that. yes, Isaac, go ahead and introduce yourself. Chaitra (01:44.

664) Absolutely. Brent (01:50.517) You're muted. You're still muted.

Isaac (02:05.017) Testing, testing. Brent (02:06.186) There you're back.

Isaac (02:07.949) So I'm Isaac Mori and as you can see I'm a technical wizard. I am often you may have seen me if you watch the live talk commerce episodes because I do interviews at conference floors, but oftentimes behind the scenes, so excited to be joining in today. Brent (02:25.

076) Yeah, good. and Isaac p you have any passions in life? Isaac (02:30.099) I guess you could say I have, you know, one or twenty, but music is definitely one of my passions.

I'm a piano player and a guitar player and a singer and I like to street perform in Chicago. Brent (02:42.09) That's awesome. All right.

So let's well before we get started, and and I've I've already wasted a ton of time and I apologize, Chathro, but before we get started, I do this thing called the Free Joke Project. And all you have to do is give me a rating 8 through 13. So here we go. My friend just started a job fixing ladders.

It looks like he's working his way to the top. Chaitra (03:08.046) I would say ten. Brent (03:09.

11) Right. I didn't say they're gonna be funny. Yeah. usually you have to think a little bit.

All right, so let's let's let's jump in and and tell so tell us a little bit about some of what you're doing. tell us yeah, tell us about what you're advocating for and what you're what what you're doing. Chaitra (03:29.46) Brent, for me, the the philosophy is economic prosperity should be the default, not an exception.

So what it means is I would love everyone around me to have access to economic opportunities at all times. And I really focus a lot day to day thinking about what are the economic pathways that can be created, because now AI is here. and what are those opportunities, whether it is commerce, whether it's skilling, whether it is human connection, what does it take for us to adopt the new experiences to create new economic opportunity? That's what I spend most of my time thinking about it at Women in Cloud.

from a workforce development, we ensure that women have access to industry certification. Get them access to capstone projects to build an AI workflow and then get them into the jobs that are 70,000 and higher. And we operate in 120 countries. If it is a work, if it's an entrepreneurial experience, how do we ensure the founders are building an offer that they can co-launch with fortune brands or hyperscaler brands, or get them access to the board members?

or access to the investment fund so they can actually accelerate their business much faster because we have unlocked the access for them. Brent (04:59.752) t yeah, explain more about women in cloud to explain how how what you do with that and and and some of the benefits people get from that. Chaitra (05:07.

638) Yeah, it started with the idea that when cloud economy was there, as women founders were getting like were not able to get access to the hyperscaler marketplaces. And that means is all the transactions were happening with enterprise companies with hyperscalers and the marketplace was the pathway for them to get access to it. So we said as well, there is a very few representation of this technology solution. What can we do?

So we kind of wrote it on a napkin with a very moonshot idea saying, let's go unlock a billion dollars of access. Because we have come from the enterprise background to get the attention, to get the partnerships. we needed to put in a very bold mission statement. But at the core was a go-to-market infrastructure that we create where we can actually unlock visibility, get the offers in the market, get the right storytelling, and ensure that the right programming happens with the hyperscalers and fortune brands so that everyone is well represented in the cloud and AI economy.

So that's what how we were born, and we are in operation for six years. we have already democratized over $600 million worth of opportunities. Our media exposure is close to 800 million impressions through the work we have done. And we have touched over 150,000 members in 120 countries.

And along with that, we have Oscar qualification on a movie. We are an Amazon bestseller, we have a few patents. And there are much more accolades and we are also part of the G twenty summit representing the W twenties around the policy work. Isaac (07:07.

46) It's an incredibly impressive list of accomplishments. The most in the most thing the thing I'm most curious about, what movie was the Oscar nomination in? Chaitra (07:18.72) the movie is called as icons.

It is about 18 women. They told their story around how do you show up in the world when all the access is pretty much not available? How do you still rise? How do you still help each other?

How do you show up better? How do you take collective action and really collaborate with all parties around you to really create value for each other? And that movie was created by seventeen year olds and we took through the entire festival circuit. We got the funding raised and then we got them through the Oscar qualification.

yeah, but the goal is one day we'll probably hold the Oscars in our hand. Isaac (08:05.218) Yeah. Even more impressive those made by seventeen year olds because I remember fooling around with my siblings recording home videos as a teenager and I don't think we made anything Oscar worthy.

So very cool. I wanted to ask before our before we started rolling, you said something kind of striking that the next trillion dollar opportunity is local. Could you could you elaborate on that a little? Brent (08:05.

46) That's that's amazing. Chaitra (08:16.878) And they were surprised too, I think. Chaitra (08:32.

118) Sure. if you look back the last ten, twenty years, everyone was changing like in a global scale. Let's go local you know global. But what we are seeing with the geopolitical scenario, with the tariffs and all the changes that are happening, the next trillion dollar commerce opportunity is going to be actually local because consumers are overwhelmed by the fragmented apps, rising cost, generic experience, and digital fatigue.

So, what people are looking for right now is meaningful saving, trusted local discovery, there is a human connection, there are economic opportunities to keep the local area more safer, cooler, and richer, and also the experience that improved the daily life. So the companies that solve at scale will define kind of the next era of commerce. Brent (09:25.27) Do you think that's so I with with like Target and Walmart you think that truly local scale can happen?

Chaitra (09:36.099) I would say is I think it's I wouldn't say we have to have like a global brand or a local brand. I think the conver the the piece that is going to create the re the real value is when the hyperscaler brand or like a fortune brand connects with the local brand and you create co-launching experience. Because to make the local commerce happen.

The consumer trust has to go local, right? Because you have to be you're connected to the communities, the neighborhoods, the creators, and recommendations that has to come local. So the future of commerce will look more hyper-personal, local, as well as intelligent. The second piece that is where most of these things have to solve is the economic pressure, which is reshaping the consumer behavior.

I have seen that my spending has changed. Instead of just going online and spending, I actually go to a local store, which are supported by the global brand, because that means both of them are working together to make my local community more thriving. So the next loyalty program that comes together will be a bundled opportunities, a side income opportunities. So the next loyalty program will be more economic empowerment.

is what we are seeing. And then the third area which we are seeing is also the AI makes it things very personalization, finally scalable, because now the local commerce can operate intelligently at scale. So the offers can be personalized, partnership can be orchestrated automatically. And so the AI turns the local commerce into a scalable ecosystem strategy.

Brent (11:27.35) In in some of the show notes you had put in community powered marketplaces. Explain a little bit about what you mean by that. Chaitra (11:35.

575) So what it means is right now the fortune brands are still thinking silos, right? So one of the missed opportunities is that the major brands still want to operate loyalty programs in isolation instead of an ecosystem partnership. So let's take American Express. They did the small business Saturday.

They did try to do, but they just like randomly Created all the businesses and say, please put American Express that I can do business with it. But they never taught the small business how to create the right offers, how to create the right engagement. So you missed the opportunity. You forced people to use American Express instead of really activating saying, Let me unlock all the customers to come to you.

And while you're doing business, tell them to shop with American Express. So we can give more incentives, more you know, relationships and more distribution. So they didn't really take that one. So the future will be, let's say, T-Mobile brings like, let's say the World Cup is happening.

They bring all the small businesses together. And through their you know app, people can find all the local businesses. Now that is the ecosystem orchestration, which one will become the new moat for the bigger brands. It can happen for MasterCards, it can be happened for Regal Cemas.

So that is the shift, which is you need to really think about the local engagement, the payment infrastructure, the distribution channel, and also the loyalty relationship. And once it's orchestrated correctly, they will actually be able to conquer the local economic ecosystem because the local businesses own all the relationships and the trust. Isaac (13:28.59) Wanted to ask you about AI.

you know, I in big surprise, one of the big topics of the last couple years, I would say. As a as a writer and an editor, I definitely have some mixed feelings about it. It can be very helpful for sure, but it can also kind of supersede the human element. And I've definitely come across some pretty bad writing, for example, in AI.

I think when it comes to like trying to promote local commerce, for example, there's also kind of some mixed challenges, right? There's some ways that it could really help small businesses and there's also some, you know, some ways that it might introduce challenges. I was curious what your thoughts are on it overall and, you know, what you think about like responsible AI use. Chaitra (14:14.

87) Mm-hmm. Well, AI is here, and right now we are in generative AI, and as people are moving from generative AI to agentic AI, trust is like questioned, right? And and everyone wants to do the workflow that it automatically does everything, but we know it's not gonna happen that fast because humans do bring in the trust and they will embed that into the commerce and the trust will become part of the infrastructure where human on the loop or human in the loop will become the new standards for responsible AI.

Now we can write copy, that's great, but when it comes to shopping experience and giving the credit card and you don't want autonomously somebody is just charging your thing. It's not going to happen. You will not do business. It'll only take one bad experience for people to say, I don't want to do business with this company.

Because they don't understand they're using AI without really having the right intent and the right experience activated. So my thing is I have a lot of faith in the humankind because we may have the most powerful infrastructure we'll create, let's say AI, but the adoption of the technology is still at the primitive state when it comes to commerce engagement. And I think the place where we'll start to see more work or more transformation is when we are going to activate digital currency.

That means even if you shopped and if you say it was not charged correctly on my credit card or whatever the tokens that we use, we have the right to reverse the transaction effectively. Unless until people have used the products and misused it. Like I can still. But those are a lot of the things that executives are thinking about is why was this recommendation made?

Is this fair? Who benefits? Is my data protected? And one thing that I'm very positive about is AI is accelerating people to have more questions asked about their data, their identity, their protection.

Chaitra (16:34.54) then I would say five years ago. People would not even talk about protection or s security or identity. Now everyone talks about it's like who owns my data?

Why do they need my data? Are they going to pay me for my data usage? So I I like those conversations in the network, which was not happening like five years ago. Brent (16:54.

344) One one thing that we learned, we were at a conference last week and they talked a lot about the race to mediocrity, about if you leave the human out of the loop, it is a race to just being vanilla and and all of the things out there the AI is doing is creating a flat line of mediocre content, right? That doesn't rise above or go below a certain threshold. And I had a debate with a with a marketing company today who thinks That AI is going to win over humans. And I I would differ from him by saying, how do you make yourself different if you don't inject yourself into the cycle?

What what's your opinion on that? Chaitra (17:36.559) As we race to Star Trek and Star Wars world, which is kind of how we it feels like, there will be some experiences which can be automated completely because those are manual day-to-day stuff, and you want to do. But when it comes to meaningful human experiences, there has to be another human to have your experience with.

You cannot be in the digital world. And hope that someone is going to laugh at after five minutes, you get bored about it. But humans actually bring the most unpredictable experience, which tech cannot do. It even if you want to mimic it, it will do to satisfy you.

But I don't think it will provoke you or inspire you or challenge you to think very differently. And only human and the human emotions are the only way we get to experience the world. So I am more positive and have faith because I have gone through the Y2K problem, then have gone through the cloud transformation, now the AI. I'm already working in the quantum and also future of quantum.

So when I look at all the stuff, we we have a long way to go. Yes, things will change drastically. and like the check-in at the airport will become much easier. there will be like friction points that can become easier.

But when it comes to money and when it comes to lifestyle and vitality and health, I think we are a long way back because a lot lot of them are making money because we are not ha they have to keep us unhappy. Does that make sense? If Brent (19:19.774) Yeah.

Yes, yeah. And I I I heard a really interesting interview this weekend on NPR about the AI is built as an to hit a number, right? It's it's built to hit a certain threshold, not for an emotion. So it's gonna give you the most predictable thing that it thinks you want to hear next, which is which isn't pointed, it's broad, right?

It's gonna come up with the most predictable thing. Which is a broad scale rather than what you were saying earlier. I really like what you said about being unpredictable, where I might tell you a funny joke and then people may laugh, which if you know, if AI is gonna take over this program, it's gonna continue with the same jokes. But I assure you that I'm real.

Chaitra (19:48.672) Exactly. Exactly. Chaitra (20:06.

83) You know, Brent, other thing which I've also read is if you think about the AI is built on the past data, not the future state. He doesn't know what I'm thinking, what my next move is going to be, because it's based on my mood and some conversation that excited me, I'll change a very different decision versus which which direction. Because but AI is designed for numbers optimization, for executive optimization. But also, here's what I heard is The usage, the token usage of AI is causing a lot of the executives to pause for a moment because the meter is running so fast and they don't know.

It looks like it's going to be more expensive to have AI rather than a human working on a project. So I'm like, okay, that looks very interesting. Brent (20:56.094) Yeah, yeah, one small comment.

The the other thing that I remember what you just mentioned, the AI is looking backwards and it's pushing you sideways. It's not necessarily pushing you forward, it's pushing you sideways because it's not really introducing anything new. It's introducing something that's already been. Chaitra (21:03.

779) Yes. Yes, yes. Chaitra (21:12.876) Exactly.

Isaac (21:16.546) Well, I something I always like to ask my interviewees at the live events, on the on the whole topic of getting away from the predictable stuff is I wanna hear your unique opinions, your you know, your more your more out there thoughts. So do you have any hot takes for us? Chaitra (21:34.

776) Hot takes for you, Hard takes. That's a very interesting point. First is the geopolitical conversation is making everything local. Like, you know, you want to keep it as local.

So traveling to different countries, I always have to think much harder. Like I I have started to look at more tourism, local tourism, than actually looking at more global tourism, because I don't want to deal with all the the visa problems and the check-in problems. So it's just like from a personal standpoint. The second one is the economic opportunities that are happening are right now around is around the AI infrastructure.

How many people are getting access to the pre-IPOs versus the IPO? You know, very few people are getting access. So the people who are going to create the wealth in this per current Environment is going to be very different than people who are going to create wealth after the IPOs will happen. So that's a big shift and huge.

And everything is a trillion dollar IPO that is being talked about from Enthropic to SpaceX to Databricks to all these companies. And these are big ones that are coming. And everything is stacked around the AI infrastructure. The third one is around quantum, is making a huge up.

Take in universities across the world. So India, Africa, Australia, and other and China, they are looking at quantum as the new way, and there's a lot of investment going in there. So huge, big chunk of money is coming into the startup community and also the university community. The movies that you see is also very interesting.

Right now, they are looking at movies where Chaitra (23:30.787) They're trying to bring a human connection, even like from Toy Story to any other movies, is like how can humans actually interact with each other rather than interact with technology? If you looked at 20 years ago, it was like, let's have this tech that you know my kids can use. Now it's like, let's get the kids off tech.

What do we do? So a lot of the movies are focused on it. gender inclusion is being rediscussed in many ways. And Representation is being taught in a very different way than it was five years ago.

So these are kind of like the hot areas. I would say is the thing that we was taught at the Davos was the leadership because the adaptive leadership and the visionary leadership has to come together. And Isaac Brent, we are literally spending a lot of time on identifying what that iconic leadership looks like for. as people lead in the economy and what do they need to show up?

How do they need to care about people? And how do they take collective action instead of individual action? So those are kind of my takes. Brent (24:42.

346) That's awesome. Chatra, as we close out the podcast, we have a few minutes left here. I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like?

Chaitra (24:53.4) First is thank you for having me on the call. I enjoyed having the conversation with all of you. if anyone of you are thinking about building the confidence, unlocking an economic pathway, Woman in Cloud is here.

And if you're looking for areas to explore, whether it's a book project or a movie project, we would love to collaborate with you because we have the go to market engine. to accelerate your thought leadership in the market and help us help you to unlock a billion dollars of economic access. Brent (25:33.11) That's great.

And how do people get in touch with you? Chaitra (25:35.787) LinkedIn is the best way so they can connect with me on LinkedIn. Brent (25:39.

862) Perfect and perfect. All right, Chatra, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for being here today. Chaitra (25:46.

402) Thank you, Brent. Thank you, Isaac. Isaac (25:47.973) Thank you, Chad.

Great to meet you.