Despite headline-grabbing moves, such as Walmart’s recent partnership with OpenAI and the integration of PayPal Payments into ChatGPT, agentic commerce is still in its nascent stages.
But that doesn’t mean it’s too early for retail media networks to prepare for a future of AI-driven commerce, says Jeff Cohen, chief business development officer at omnichannel commerce media platform Skai, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Test everything, talk to everyone, dig into the data, scout new potential partners, and move fast, he says.
“Those things are not any different than how you should have looked at business before AI became popular two years ago,” says Cohen. “It’s just that the speed of business is moving faster and faster.”
Cohen joined Skai in September after nearly four years at Amazon as the “principal evangelist” for Amazon Ads, which involved explaining ad tech to marketers in plain English and building community among advertisers and partners.
That’s a prime pulpit, so to speak. Amazon is the largest retail media player globally.
So why leave a giant for something smaller and scrappier? Because, well, reality is omnichannel.
“We’ve been talking about the funnel collapsing for a long period of time,” he says.
Brands can’t afford to focus on a single channel. They need to connect the dots across search, social, video and retail to understand and influence the customer journey. In other words, down with data siloes.
The real advantage for marketers today is in combining their first-party data across channels, Cohen says.
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“When you look at [these signals] in aggregate,” he says, “you start to get a better understanding of what your customer actually looks like versus what you thought your customer looked like.”
Also in this episode: What marketers can learn from New Balance’s influencer-driven comeback, why being polite to AIs might actually matter and why so many AI assistants have human names (including Celeste, Skai’s generative AI marketing agent).
