What is AGENTIC AI? Bloomreach CMO Amanda Cole breaks down the future of AI and Ecommerce! | Ep. 310

0:08Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's do this, not that.

0:40we are back for do this not that podcast and today i'm very excited we're going to be talking about agentic ai i basically don't know what that is because i'm clueless and that's why i'm excited to have the person that we have here we have an absolute expert who we got we got amanda colt now amanda is the chief marketing officer at bloomreach if you don't know bloomreach you i don't know what planet you're on because they are literally powering the equivalent of 25 % of all e-commerce experiences in the US and the UK. They work with 1 ,400 brands globally. I mean, on a daily basis, all right, they're responsible for 250 million searches on all the different e-commerce sites that you shop on.

1:20I mean, they're a big deal. Amanda's a big deal. She won't tell you that, but they're leading the charge with all things AI. So we're going to dig into it. So Amanda, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Definitely not a big deal, but I appreciate the intro. That was incredible. I'm going to make it like my nighttime hype. Yeah, I'll follow you around. It'll be like a Michael Buffer in a boxing match or something. It'd be awesome. All right. I want to skip over all the boring stuff. I want to get right into it. Everywhere you go, not you, but all of us marketers, people that have different websites, shopping sites, whatever.

1:52We're all hearing about this thing. It's not just AI anymore. It's agentic AI. And for all the listeners out there, like, oh, my God, everyone has imposter syndrome. They think they're supposed to know what it is. They don't know what it is. I'm one of those people. So what does this even mean before we get into how it's applying to our worlds? Yeah. So if you think about ChatGPT, ChatGPT is an agent. It is technology that you are communicating with. And it is making decisions. It is finding information. It's acting autonomously. and it's conversing with you in a almost human-like way. So when you think about agents in the context of technology, like what Bloomreach provides agents, it means that we are creating technology that can act autonomously and make decisions and achieve goals without human intervention.

2:42The way that I like to describe it is, if you think about 20-plus years ago when I started my career in SaaS applications, started SaaS software as a service started to become like the way that you would buy technology. It's all very workflow based. So and you think about it in the marketing world, I want to send an email, I'm going to identify a segment, I'm going to tell it when to send that email, I'm going to build some if then branches that has it send follow up emails or do different things. And you create all of that in a workflow. Now, you can actually communicate with agents conversationally.

3:20So the way that we think about software as this, I'm in control of the computer through a set of workflows, that's gone. I now can communicate my desires, my desired objectives directly to the computer and the agents take that direction and go and actually make something happen. So are agents only where you're interacting with it saying, okay, now go and do this thing of a Bob, or is there also a consumer facing element of it? I mean, is this just for like within your business to use an agent to set up a workflow or whatever, or are consumers actually interacting with agents now, or will they be interacting with agents?

3:57Consumers absolutely are interacting with agents now, and it will only become more prevalent that they're going to interact with agents. Again, I genuinely believe that the technology industry is going to evolve from software into agentic. So the way that we interact with computers moving forward will be agentic in nature. And so consumers are absolutely interacting with agents. Bloomreach has an agent called Clarity that's available on if you visit a vans.com site, you can actually ask this agent questions. You can say, I am a skateboarder, but I like girlier shoes and I need support for my arch because I'm an older skateboarder.

4:38I don't, this is a terrible analogy, but instead of using filters and facets in a search bar, you can actually have a conversation and this agent will find products, surface them for you and help refine your preferences. So is it fair to say that the world of agents, like the first incarnation of them, besides for like us working with ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever, on a consumer facing basis has been really about customer service stuff. Like you go to a chat bot and say, where's my order? and you're interacting with like a customer service agent. Is that an agent? And is this now like the evolution out of that?

5:15Yeah, so that's actually a really good analogy. So when we think about chatbots of old, I think there was some study, I can't remember what it was, but I'm gonna make up a stat. Like 50 something percent of people would rather go to jail than deal with a customer service, automated customer service line or chatbot. But we all have hated those experiences. We don't wanna use chatbots. And the reason why when you think about a chatbot is it's very workflow based. So someone on the back end had to know what kind of question you would type, provide you with a series of answers. Those answers are very limited, you select an answer, and then you most of the time don't really get the information that you're looking for.

5:51That's workflows. That is the old world. Agents actually are trained on all of the knowledge of a company in this example, to find an answer and provide you with an answer without there being a workflow-based system in place. So that is where there's a very big difference between the control that humans have over the workflow-based automation and what you actually do to train an agent to provide, in this example, an answer in a customer service setting. So in my very simple mind, it's like if I was to go, let's use Vans, because I'm an excellent skateboarder, if anybody's wondering. I'm so bad.

6:30I like had knee pads on. I was embarrassing. I feel like I knew you would not be a good skateboarder. I don't know why, but... I don't know. I feel very judged right now, but no, it's totally accurate. So I would go to the Vans website and instead of going into their search bar and saying, I want really cool sneakers or whatever, now I would almost be interacting with... The way I interact with ChatGPT, I give all this stuff. I ask a zillion things in one shot and it gives me the perfect answer back. Now we're saying the e-commerce experience is really going to be more about saying all these different things about particulars about me, what I'm interested in, the colors I like, the styles I like, what vibe I am.

7:10And it's going to give me back a shopping experience that is tailored to me. And it's like the chat GPT-ification of the e-commerce world. Is that basically it? Yeah, that's basically it. And what's great is that it's not limited to the chat bar. You can also do it in the search bar. we, we, you can all, it's also embedded in the page experience, but that's, yes, that's exactly it is that you get a, a hyper personalized conversational experience on, on bands. So now in terms of agentic, is it also going to be going to voice? Like, are we going to be getting out of typing and writing and whatever?

7:45Are we moving into voice and leveraging agents for voice activated stuff? Absolutely. 100%. So let's talk about an, on a more basic level, Let's say, okay, I don't have a big e-commerce website and all this stuff. Are agents going to be something that people are making for their own businesses to make their business more efficient? Like, is everyone going to be making like small agents to do different tasks for themselves? Is that where you see it all going with agentic AI? Yeah, absolutely. I certainly hope that people are building their own agents. There are tools like Huggable and Lovable that you can use to actually build agents.

8:23Um, there are the, the former founder of, of HubSpot started agent.ai where you can actually go and you can build agents to do things like automate your calendar. We use a tool called fixer that does, uh, email identification and organization and calendar, um, organization. So that absolutely we are going to, you, you will build your own agent workspace where you're like, I want to use these agents. Maybe I have a recipe and a dinner planning agent. Maybe I have a scheduling agent. We will manage our world that way in the same way we do with applications today. And then the technology applications that you buy at work will become agentic instead of software-based.

9:03So let me ask you a super random question. A lot of people that listen to this are in different marketing roles. And you are a chief marketing officer at a major platform and provider in the marketing world. When you are now considering, okay, you're looking to hire more team members and grow your team. and you're looking at, of course, AI is going to be something you want somebody to be proficient at. If you see that they understand agentic AI specifically, that's something that they're calling out that they become proficient in, is that like they move to the top of the stack for you? Is it becoming that important?

9:37I mean, it very much is similar to someone using the internet. I think it's going to be that ubiquitous. Like, do you know how to log on to Wi-Fi? Do you have a mobile phone? Like agent, agentic technology and AI in general is going to be that important to how we interact with the world around us. I do think we're still very much in the early stages. So it's less about someone saying, I have experience developing agents and using them in practical applications to drive business growth, because there's very, very few people who could actually claim that today. it's more about that i'm on the journey i'm on the path to understanding how this technology is actually going to change my world my job my team my my ability to to deliver outcomes okay so uh basically ai and agentic ai are going to become one like there's not there's gonna be like no there's gonna be no space in between the two because if you don't know about one then you don't know about the other and and that is how you wound up on the show today so let me tell everybody what's going on.

10:38So Bloomreach is putting on this event. It is free and it is virtual. It's called Innovation Fest and it's on May 7th at 11 a.m. Eastern time. So tell us a little bit about it. We're going to put in the show notes so everyone can register. But what is Innovation Fest all about? Yeah. So Bloomreach is going to be launching some of our new technologies. We're going to be taking the market through an example I just gave you was Clarity. So we'll actually explain to you what Clarity is and how it works as an agent. We'll also be launching our new marketing agents where we actually show how we can deliver personalized experiences for you on every channel automatically in a conversational prompt based way.

11:15And hopefully, even if you're not in the space or not that interested in BlimReach, you get some idea about where agentic technology is evolving. When I show you how you all were doing that, that's when I reached out to you. I want you to have on the show because I need to attend this thing. I need to figure out what agentic AI is. I personally need to be able to figure out how to search on websites. Like when I go on a clothing site, my wife thinks I'm a doofus. I look for the same thing. I like long sleeve shirt. She goes, that's not going to do it. You can't shop like that. So I need to know how to communicate with agents because they need to become my new BFFs.

11:48So I'm very excited for Innovation Fest. We're going to put it all in the show notes. Amanda, you are awesome. Anything else you want to share with the universe about anything? Oh man, that's a big no. I'm super excited and you jazzed me up. So thanks for, Thanks for the time. Well, this is all exciting. Amanda's great. You want to find Amanda Cole on LinkedIn and be at Innovation Fest. I will be there hanging out. It's going to be a blast. Amanda, thanks for being here. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers.

12:27And hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me. Guruevents.com. Check it out.