The Digital Shelf Institute’s Lauren Livak Gilbert - Impact of AI in Winning On The Digital Shelf

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0:50That's salesforce.com slash consumer goods. Hi, everyone. I'm Lauren LeVette Gilbert, Executive Director of the Digital Shelf Institute, and you're watching the CPG Guys podcast. Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys podcast set at the intersection of commerce and tech. Your hosts, Sri Raja Goplin and Peter Villas-Faughn, explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in a digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys. Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys podcast. I am your gregarious co-host, P.V.S.P. I also have been the latest head of industry engagement at Flywheel Omnicom's Commerce Acceleration Division.

1:36My co-host, he is the father of pop stars Rhea Raj, who is now the face of both Toyota EV and Mac Cosmetics. And of course, cat's eyes, Lara Raj. The fans call him Papa Raj. That makes a lot of sense. He's also co-founder of Think Blue Consulting. Please join me in welcoming the man known as Sri Sri. So this past Sunday, after getting back from California, it was good to see you in L.A., Nani and I were watching the Disney Legend Award show on Disney+. And they were recognizing a woman named Susan Egan. She's a singer that made famous. She performed Bell on Broadway. And she was also singing the iconic song, I Won't Say I'm in Love, which was from the animated classic Hercules.

2:23When who should come on stage to offer their rendition of it? But this brand new global girls band called Cat's Eye. That's right. So my question to you is, how proud did it make you to see your daughter, Laura, and her band celebrated by the biggest consumer brand in the world, the Walt Disney Company? That must have been a bucket list moment for you. Beyond. We were just at, as you know, we were just on Fallon. Then we got to go see both daughters opposite recording rooms at iHeart for different shows. Then I got to trail Rear to Vogue. I got to trail Ria to the Today Show. I mean, I can write a little thesis here, Peter, but we're lucky that these two are our kids.

3:09And we're barely warming up. I already know what programming is in store for fall for Ria, what the next big brand announcement, which is going to happen in the next two weeks. I don't know what to tell you, man. We're living it. I'm going through the motions every day. I'm honored that these two are my children. And I'm also honored that Bala came into my life. I can't forget Bala. She is at the top of the proverbial Raj Mahal chain of hierarchy. Your dog is the center of the universe for everyone in your family. But thank you, Sri Azal, for joining me. To our audience, if you're getting value from the conversations and bickering that Sri and I want to do on occasion, we have three quick asks.

3:52First, make sure you're subscribing to the CPG guys on whatever platform you're listening right now, whether that's Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or anywhere else you get your podcast. Hit the subscribe or follow button so that you never miss a new episode. Second, leave us a rating. It takes just a couple of seconds, and it makes an enormous difference in helping other CPG and retail media professionals find us. That's what drives the search order. It's not fundamentally different than a product detail page. We built this community one listener at a time and a five star rating is the single best way you can help us keep growing it.

4:28It's like when you think of pop music, Sri, it's not four for fighting, it's five for fighting, as you like to remember. So five is the number, smash the five. And third, make sure you follow us on LinkedIn between episodes. We publish a lot of thought leadership, industry analysis and content you're not going to find anywhere else. All built for the CPG and retail community they're already a part of. We've got great stuff like the Retail Media Minute. Our buddy Jeff Malmad produces every week. A lot of great content. So make sure you search CPG Guys on LinkedIn and hit follow or just click the link that's in the digital show notes of this very episode.

5:01Subscribe, rate, follow. Three simple actions that help us bring you more of the conversations that matter. Shreem? Did I hear, Peter, I might have accidentally eavesdropped on a conversation that the CPG guys had. Is there new programming coming sometime in the fall in November? Well, Sri, the CPT guys are getting ready to debut a second podcast platform. It will be coming up this November. Now, I'm not going to, I will tease a little bit, but it's going to be a different focus. It's going to be more on kind of the up and comers, the emerging brands and service providers and ad tech companies, really the entrepreneurial stories and what it takes to scale something from a concept into a real business.

5:47But more on that shortly, Sri. Absolutely. But let's get to our guests, shall we? Generative AI is rewriting how shoppers discover, evaluate, and ultimately buy products. And the digital shelf that brands spent a decade optimizing for human eyeballs and search algorithms is now being read, summarized, and recommended by machines. Today's conversation digs into what digital shelf readiness means in an AI-driven world, how brands should rethink content for AI intermediaries and agentic shopping assistants, and where AI is already moving sales versus where it's still more hype than actual results.

6:29Today, we are joined by someone who has spent her career at the intersection of digital commerce content and design and who now leads the organization defining what best-in-class digital shelf strategy looks like. Lauren Levack-Gilberg is the executive director of the Digital Shelf Institute, a global commerce community advancing the industry through research, content, and education. She spent years owning the digital shelf for J &J's Consumer North America business and worked with dozens of global omni-channel brands at Salsify before joining DSI, where she leads original research. And she also co-hosts one of our very favorite podcasts, Unpacking the Digital Shelf.

7:14If you want to understand how AI is about to reshape shell space and share of search, you really want to listen to this episode. Lauren, welcome to the CPG, guys. How are you doing? I'm great. Thank you so much for having me and for being a fan of the Unpacking the Digital Shelf podcast. Well, I think you should tell people, not only are we fans, Where did you get your very first piece of unpacking the digital shelf swag? Did you get it from Salsify? Did you send it to you or did you get it from someone else? It was from you, Peter. I got in the mail several T-shirts. I was very upset that you were not wearing your own swag.

7:54And I'm like, Sri, we've got to do something. And Sri said, well, why don't you just order her some swag for herself? And so we did. I love it. And you'll be happy to know we made T-shirts. Thank you. And we are going to be sharing out those T-shirts at DSS Europe to some of our fans. So thank you for the push. We love that. I appreciate it. We love that. That's good. I'm wearing CPG, guys. When will this say DSI? Well, I got one for myself, Sri. Yours must have gotten lost in the mail. I'll send you one, Sri. I will send you one. I want the Lauren Livak Gilbert original one. You want authentic.

8:24You don't want the pirate merch? You want the authentic stuff? Okay. All right. All right. And Shree and I go way back, too, because we worked together at J &J, which is a long time ago. J &J, before it was called all these fancy things like Kenview and whatever else. The artist formerly known as J &J Consumer North. I remember Lauren Livock's first day coming into digital. Do you really? I don't even know what day that was. I got introduced to her that she's going to be the one focusing on the digital shop. We're going to get more into that in a second. I want to say to our audience, please check out the digital show notes of this episode.

8:58You're going to find a hyperlink to Lauren's LinkedIn profile, to the DSI website. Check those out as we carry on this conversation, which I know you're going to enjoy. So let me get this ball rolling, shall we, Lauren? How, from your perspective, is generative AI changing the way shoppers actually discover and evaluate products online? And is search even the right term we should be using anymore? We're in a wild time in our industry, right? Like, it's a really exciting time to be in e-commerce, to be in commerce, because there's so much changing. But the way I like to break it down is you now have to think about three different shelves.

9:33So you had the traditional physical shelf. Then the digital shelf came in about 31 years ago or so. And now you have the agentic shelf. So you have three different shelves as a brand that you need to worry about. And each of those shelves are catering to different people and or robots, right? So from a physical perspective, you're talking to a human who is looking for emotional content and wants more visual. From a digital shelf perspective, you're talking to an algorithm who is looking at search and keywords and is matching. And then from an agentic perspective, you're working with an agent that's computing and reasoning and is looking at content in a machine readable way, which is very, very different from how we've created content and built out the digital shelf for the past 31 years.

10:22So to your question about search, I like to think about it as for the physical shelf, you're focusing on the human who's thinking. For the digital shelf, you're focusing on the algorithm that's matching. And then from the agentic shelf perspective, you're focusing on the agent who's reasoning and computing. And each of those buckets have a very different approach. Now let's talk to brands. The CPG guys personal belief. Brands are not ready because they've actually done a pretty good job of getting ready for SEO brand. You and I worked on this 10 years ago at Johnson & Johnson. It was a focus area.

10:57And I think brands have optimized pretty well. And then retailers have received it and have built great ecosystems. Now we're talking two different parameters here, AEO and then GEO. Do brands even know what those things mean? And then now I'll layer something on top of that. Maybe this is a two-part question. Do they know what that means? Are they getting ready for your experience and then with AI-powered shopping assistance, chat-based commerce emerging? How should they rethink the product content to really get ready for these three phases, AEO, GEO, and then agentic commerce? Talk about a loaded question there, Sri.

11:34So let me start with the first part. I mean, I think that the challenge is most CPG companies, most brands in general, are still going through digital transformation. So to your comment about them not necessarily being ready, I do see that there's a big gap, especially around data, right? Because it takes a long time for a large organization to figure out where does their data live? What are the systems? Who owns it? And a lot of people are still stuck in that digital transformation world where we're now entering agentic transformation that's happening in parallel to that digital transformation.

12:09So brands need to finish what they were doing before while adding this additional element of being AI enabled and getting ready for that world. So to your question about like AEO, GEO, I think brands know what it is because everybody's talking about. They've heard it. They understand the definition. Some of them, the more mature brands are actually taking action. So I work with brands day in and day out, and a lot of them have adjusted their strategies and they're thinking about how to build out their content playbooks and what machine readable content means and what to tweak here or there on an Amazon or a Walmart.

12:44But I think the challenge is that they're not actually fundamentally changing the way they work. And I think that's the gap. So when I think about AI in general, a lot of organizations are just tacking it on to a process that was already broken. So they're like, hey, let's add AI to step 339 and 150. And yay, we're scaling and it's becoming more efficient. Well, at the end of the day, you didn't really change anything. But they're taking credit for it, though. And Lauren, publicly, they're saying I'm ready because they've done exactly what you said. You've taken a half-broken process and you've bolted something on and all of a sudden you're ready.

13:20But they're not seeing the ROI and that's the reason for it. So the word that I keep using a lot is just reinvention, where I use this term like the clean sheet of paper approach, where you just have to say, get everybody in a room, put up a whiteboard and say, what would this look like in an ideal state? And then back it in from there instead of starting with, hey, this is broken and this doesn't work and this person doesn't talk to this person. Like, that's not effective and it's not going to move you forward, especially in this next era. And then, Lauren, if that's the current situation today, what are we going to do about agentic commerce, which is setting foot upon us now?

13:58I want to define agentic commerce a bit. So I think the industry hasn't really decided on a definition. All of this is new, right? Nobody's really an expert. We're all kind of figuring it out. My definition of agentic commerce is fully autonomous shopping where an agent is purchasing something on your behalf. I think there's a spectrum of agentic commerce that is on the very, very far right of the spectrum. We are kind of, I'm air quoting, we're kind of there. We're mostly in the agentic discovery phase where consumers, shoppers, all of us are using LLMs, using agents to ask questions, discover products.

14:37And then we're probably going to our retailer of choice and purchasing it. Yes, there are some things with Google and what they've launched and other tools where you can have autonomous shopping. But I do not believe the trust is there yet from a consumer's perspective to have full agentic commerce. But the way I look at it, Sri, is it takes a long time to move a cruise ship in the ocean. And most of these organizations are large cruise ships. And so even if we're not in a world where autonomous shopping is happening today, it's going to take significant change in these companies to be AI enabled, to change your strategies, to make sure your content is machine readable, get all of your cross-functional partners on the right page.

15:22and there is a first mover advantage. And we've seen that. There's a lot of categories that are up for grabs if you think about ChatGPT searching specific products. And if brands can get in front of this and really focus on what matters, they will have that first mover advantage. All right. My big takeaway from your last answer is that agentic commerce is on the spectrum. We'll unpack that later. So Lauren, I was talking with the head of digital commerce for a very well-known global consumer brand the other day talking about digital shelf readiness. And I think what he said to me was, listen, I'm still trying to make sure that my thousand plus items in my catalog get all of their content updated equally as frequently across every marketplace that we're sold in rather than just the top 20 items across the top 10 marketplaces.

16:17If I could just get parity, it would help the tail of my industry. That's kind of like very rudimentary, but still very important objectives. So my question to you is, now we're in this world of AI-driven consumer engagement. My question is, what does digital self-readnness look like now compared to what we're still fighting with, which was kind of the demands of five years ago, just trying to get the basic block and tackling of content available? I mean, the truth is, to the point of that digital leader, we're still there. I think the difference in my answer today versus before is that I used to say, OK, 20 percent of your SKUs drive 80 percent of the value for your organization.

17:02Focus on those 20 percent. Make sure they're best in class. For the rest, have like images and a description. But, you know, don't really focus on them necessarily because you don't have the bandwidth. That is not the world we live in anymore because LLMs are also looking at your long tail products. So now digital shelf readiness means every single SKU is best in class, period. And that from a resource perspective is very challenging, especially if you have not built the processes and the teams to be able to support that. If you don't have a PXM, if you don't have a source of truth, if you don't know where your data lives, that's not even possible.

17:37So I think that's the challenging conversation I have with brands these days where it's that you need to have this perfect content. And then from there, you need to optimize on top of that, where it used to be maybe 100 SKUs. It could be 2 ,500 SKUs that have to have full enhanced content and videos and lifestyle images. And that's a really big challenge. Lauren, you used a term that I want to make sure we cover with our audience, PXM. Can you explain to them what PXM is and why that's important? Yeah, so product experience management. So think about all of the information about your product that needs to be shared with all of your retailers, from the images to the enhanced content to the supply chain specs to all of the context for LLMs and agents.

18:23It's your source of truth for all of your content, for all of your products in one place. And then that gets shared out to like an Amazon, Walmart, Lowe's, Home Depot, all of your channels. awesome so i'm gonna now jump into the other side of the equation that without which we can't really sell product which is the retail side so amazon's got its own wall garden walmart got its own wall garden but the rest of the retailers so far have not built wall gardens they're dependent on chat gpt they're dependent on claude they're dependent on google gemini yada yada yada but i'm pretty sure each of them is on the verge of building their own tools for their app, their website, things of that nature.

19:05So are their own AI tools? Examples could be retail media search, generative product Q &A, creating new data, visibility gaps that now brands will have to start thinking about, oh my gosh, how do I, you know, like in the old world, you have to create Amazon content, Walmart content, rest of the world content. Now do they have to create it for ChatGPT, for Claude, for Gemini, for Albertsons, for ADUSA, for Northeast Grocers, heck who knows? I think it's an excellent point. And I agree with you that retailers are probably all in the future going to have their own agents. Because if you think about it, so I'm actually presenting at a conference next week for regional grocers and having a lot of conversations with them because I want to understand where they're coming from and what their fears are.

19:50And obviously their fears are, are consumers still going to come to my website? Are they still going to come to my store? How do I be that selected store when they're purchasing their product? And if they're going through a chat CVT and they're not being scraped from a content perspective, what's another way to drive them there? Well, that's an agent on your site and a loyalty program. And so I do think to your point, Sri, there is going to be a gap in terms of the data that retailers currently have and what brands need to provide because retailers are all saying, hey, pick me, pick me, pick me.

20:22I want to be the one that you're purchasing my product at, but I haven't focused on my user experience. I don't have enhanced content. What are FAQs? Like, how do I go through this motion? And if I think back to my days from a digital shelf perspective, I remember very early on in my digital shelf journey, Costco was asking for content that was different than any other retailer site. And that was really challenging for us at the time. But that's a request that's coming from a lot of retailers more and more because they want to have the leg up. So to answer your question directly, Sri, I do believe that there will need to be a specific strategy for Amazon, Walmart, Chachibut, Claude, Gemini.

21:00But I do still think it takes this strategy I like to call the lowest common denominator approach, where you can look at the content that's required for your top 10 retailers and you can satisfy almost all of them if you really kind of build out a process and kind of define what that looks like. But Adobe just put out a study recently that said agentic commerce and the agentic shelf is going to require 5x more data than brands have ever created. Honestly, I think that number is conservative and I think it's going to be even more. And brands need to be ready for what that means, where they store it, how they get it, how they syndicate it.

21:41And we are a bit far from a reality where that is possible. And Peter is going to jump into the economics next, but I want to point something out, Lauren. So if brands have to create 5x the content, the issue today is they haven't even reached 100 index on existing SEO. And then I'm going to put money on it with the exception of a few CMOs and one we know very well, like Benoit Votter from Liquidat or Nick Hammett from Newell Brands. These guys are on top of what they're doing with AI. And they're certainly preparing for that volume of content. How does the average brand even fathom this? You got to fathom it first before Peter gets to the economics element.

22:21How do you even tell a CMO this is what you're up against, a robot that can multiply? I'm thinking of the Terminator thing now. There's so many movies that can depict this moment. I mean, what I say to them is that's why you need to launch agentic transformation and you need to be an AI-enabled organization because you cannot do this without AI. It is not possible. you can't add 15 more people. We've never been able to do that. But I also try to flip it on. That's why this is so exciting. You know how many times I would have loved when I was sitting at J &J to have an AI agent who could help write the initial version of titles when I had to pay X number of dollars per hour for a contractor to sit in a room and tag things and physically write out ingredients.

23:05It's so exciting because we can finally do all the things that we've been talking about for so many years, but it does change your perspective and how you approach what your organization looks like. We're entering this hybrid world where humans are going to be managing agents and working alongside agents, but companies need to be comfortable with that. And that means there's governance, there's approval, there's legal, there's everything. But hold on, Lauren, that very word governance, legal approval, right and the level of risk aversion that large market cap brands are this is going to be an achilles heel because you don't you're not going to get 60 days to create the program with the romance copy and 30 levels of approvals you need up and down the chain what do you do in that scenario but you're already well i agree this is what i say i say who's your biggest competitor challenger brand they created that content in two days and it took you 200 at the end of the day that's the kind of catalyst that I always refer back to.

24:04And they're already feeling it, right? All these challenger brands are nipping on the heels of these bigger companies. I'll leave it at this statement. I think if you're a large market cap brand, e-commerce was a choice. Being in SEO was a choice. And y 'all stepped up to some reasonable extent. I'm not going to give a single one credit for being an overachiever, but brands stepped up. It was a choice and they They exercised the choice. Some didn't. Some exercised it halfway. Some exercised 70 % of the way. And some have fallen behind. But the penalty you paid was deep, but it was not death. It's not a choice anymore.

24:37But in the AI world, you'll be invisible. You'll just be absent. You'll just be vanished from the ecosystem because AI search results give you five, not 50, like 100, like the source self or 50, like the Amazon page when you search on the search bar. That's my, it's a warning to brands. I agree. Peter. Economics, please. Lauren, have I mentioned to you Shree's building an AI assistant to replace me as the co-host of this podcast? That's got me worried about the economics. The only problem, Lauren, why I haven't triggered that is he opens every episode calling himself like the gregarious co-host.

25:16How do I replace gregarious with the robot? It's not possible. You refer to me as garrulous, Shree. I don't know if that's anything. I'm practicing the vocabulary, remember? You are working on the vocabulary. You are no longer a Luddite. He's the accoutrement on the show, by the way. You mentioned the 5X to data. That is actually, you know, in the current zeitgeist is all these concerns people have over data centers. How do you accommodate 5X to data requirements when you can't even get the town you live in to agree to build a data center? There's so much to unpack here. So much complexity. Let's talk about how AI is actually changing the economics and workflow of content creation, copy imagery, A plus content at scale across thousands of SKUs.

26:12And honestly, how agencies and people in our space are fundamentally having to change how they bill out the work they've done. And, you know, advertising for years is predicated upon FTEs in seats in offices. And that's something that they've clung to. And now it's being thrown up in the air. There's an enormous amount of tumult. What are your thoughts on the economics? Big word that comes to mind is value, right? Like busy work used to be rewarded and showing numbers and saying, hey, this was the output. But now it's about value. Like, what is the value that you are driving for me as my customer?

26:53If you're on the agency side, what is the value that you can drive for the business? And when you talk about like the economics of AI and content and processes and workflows, I like to say the math doesn't math when you look at it today. Here's a perfect example, right? Let's say, for example, I'm making this up. You have 3 ,000 SKUs as a brand. And best in class, I'm air quoting, is to update your content four times a year. that does not happen for most brands today. But, you know, best in class. For most categories, it's even faster. But let's go with four. You say four times a year? Four times a year.

27:25Let's go with that. It's honestly, it's faster. I like to smirk. I'm being generous. You have one channel. That's 12 ,000 updates to that retailer channel. Let's say it takes 10 minutes, let's say, to update that. That's 2 ,000 hours for one channel. For context for the audience, there's 2 ,080 working hours in a year. I had 32 channels when I owned the digital shelf at J &J. That is an insane amount of hours. If you're talking about with human resources, how you actually create that data, the math does not work. It cannot be done without AI. And that's where the processes and the workflows really come in.

28:09And to our conversation in the beginning, you actually need to fundamentally rethink the workflow. It's not just tacking on these things and fixing these little broken parts. I work with this brand who's very digitally forward. And it was a really great conversation when I was talking to them. And their content team, their digital shelf team is actually three people and six agents. So they have an agent that does the briefing, so works with the marketing team and understands the claims and all the information and what they want to target for the new product. That briefing agent then briefs the content creation agent who creates both the content and the imagery.

28:47that agent then briefs another agent that has synthetic focus groups for their specific personas to test out how that content will work. And then it goes back to the human in the loop to review it. And then there's an agent that's actually pushing that content out live. That is rethinking your process and your workflow versus tacking on AI. And that's the reinvention that needs to happen at every single level of the organization. Wow. I'm almost now smirking and scared to ask the next question. So this is what brands are going to really thump their fists about. And here's the question. You guys measure success in this space.

29:31So are there any early use cases in digital shelf analytics that we have where we can say, hey, it's move the needle on sale, share any other metric that a bronze wants, so that this is not regarded as just AI hype? I have seen some organizations be able to quantify it and say the impact on creating AEO content and focusing on our brand.com and citations and things like that. They've seen a lift on other retailer channels. The challenge with why you can't measure it, or there's a couple of different reasons. Number one, it's very, very new. So we're all kind of figuring it out. like early days of e-com when we were like, we know it's important.

30:12Please listen to us. Right. So there's a little bit of that. I think the second piece is the data isn't being shared from like a chat GPT or a Gemini or even necessarily from Alexa shopping. So we have some inclinations of things. And then the third being that most organizations can't actually tie together all of their data X AI. Right. Like there's a lot of people I ask questions to at brands where I'm like, okay, do you know if this content impacted this channel? And they don't have their data aggregated to be able to do that. So in test and learn environments and in specific pockets, I have seen a lot of data from brands showing that it is impactful.

30:52But the challenge is how you connect that to the broader business. The one example that I really love that I think shows the impact with AI visibility and AEO in general is there was a brand that had an influencer talk about their product and they were like incorrect in some pretty bad claims about what the product did and what it didn't. And the brand had a social listening tool and it saw what was happening. And they were like, okay, how do we fix this? We can't tell the influencer to take it down. They weren't someone that was affiliated with the brand. So they went on their brand.com and they created FAQs and blogs to say, hey, this isn't true.

31:32here's all the scientific information, here's the claims, like here's all of the correct information about the product. Within two days, ChatGPT was then sourcing them as the expert from a brand.com perspective versus the influencer. So to me, that's very, very strong and very, very impactful in a world where brands want control of their story and their voice out in the world. So that's one example I really like to point to because you can see the impact when you're focusing on. It's a great story on authorities and how information can be distorted and you can work to correct that. So thank you for that.

32:13Let me remind our audience that today, Sri and I are speaking with our dear friend and industry luminary, Lauren LeVette Gilbert. She is the executive director of the Digital Shelf Institute. Now the question that Sri and I get from so many brands and even retailers in the industry, right? Which is how should brand and e-commerce teams be restructuring roles or skill sets as AI takes over more of the manual digital shelf tasks? What do I do about my organization? This is my favorite question, just because I spend a lot of time talking about work structures and I've gone really deep with a lot of brands around this.

32:55The first thing I will say is that the differentiating factor for brands in this era of commerce is going to be how they're doing the work and how they're executing. Because every brand now has access to the same tools. Everybody can get Claude. Everybody can get ChadGBT. Everybody can get insert LLM here, right? But how you're actually executing that inside your organization and how you're structured is the differentiator. And I do believe that goes very clearly to your organizational structure. Now, you do not have to completely blow it up and change it, but you do need to take some very strategic moves.

33:35The first one that I've seen to be really successful is putting an AI task force in place. Sri, I think back to like our days at J &J when the digital COE came out because digital was new. And so you needed someone to focus on it and it needed to be kind of pulled out and then eventually got democratized back. into the business. Creating this AI task force gives accountability to someone in the organization to pay attention to this and brings in cross-functional partners. It has to be cross-functional because otherwise you might have like 200 AI pilots happening and you're spending all this money and nobody's talking or sharing learnings.

34:13So from an org structure perspective, that's a great way to start. Have someone accountable, have an AI task force and make sure that's set up so you're sharing learnings cross-functionally. The second piece I would say is rethinking job descriptions. So I think it was, was it JP Morgan that put out that study that said like 80 % of most people's jobs will be automated in the next X. Yeah, there you go. So that study came out and everybody was scared that they were going to lose their jobs. But I actually think it's exciting because it takes away a lot of the hands-on keyboard work that none of us actually liked doing.

34:49So when I'm working with brands, what I encourage them to do is look at your role, look at your team's roles. What are the things that can be automated? And then what are you going to use that time for that's more strategic or more cross-functional? Or maybe you can actually go talk to your retailer partner or go talk to your wholesale team that needs to learn digital and educate things around the broader space, right? So rethinking job descriptions on what can be automated, what can be taken out, and how can you create more of that collaboration. And then the third most critical piece, which was always critical even before AI, is creating shared goals.

35:28So Sri and I lived this. If the sales team and the marketing team have different KPIs and their bonus is tied to a different goal and objective, why would they work together? So organizations need to think about what gets measured gets managed. And if you do not have shared goals across your organization, everybody's not marching towards the same North Star. And especially in a world where every single second counts, every single interaction from a brand perspective counts. When you're talking about the consumer, you all need to have the same shared goals. And if you have not implemented something like that, it's going to be really hard to win.

36:05I look forward, Lauren, to the day where I walk in And just like George Jetson at Spacely Sprockets, I just sit down at my chair, push that one button and my job is done for the day. For those Gen Z and younger, I suggest you just Google the Jetsons. You'll understand. Well, everybody always uses up to is it is it up where they're all like like really big and they're in chairs and they're in space and they don't walk around. Like, are we going to become that? I mean, I think that's a little dystopian, but, you know, another reference. I'll be back. Well, that's it. That's it, Lauren. Let's go to a complete different piece of this conversation now.

36:43We've been very rah-rah, AI got to do brands. Now let's look at the side where AI does commit hallucination, some misinformation, maybe poor product claims, maybe a drift away from traditional old school brand voices, or maybe there's a time to rethink how brand voice is written. So when I put all of these in the mix, as AI generates more customer-facing content, Are there very early rules you all have thought of for your listening to brands or socializing or advocating for in the ecosystem? Yeah, I think it's an interesting topic for a lot of different reasons. One being there's a lot of regulations that have come out recently around disclosing that you have AI content or AI was used.

37:30So Amazon actually requires now for you to check a box that says this is AI generated or the model is AI generated or you used AI when creating this imagery. And then LinkedIn has that new feature. Now you can mark it as AI slop. TikTok has one. I think YouTube also has one. There's a lot of new tags that are kind of coming out around AI created content. And the reason why I bring that up is because I don't know where this is going to go as an industry. I think we can swing the pendulum way too far where everything becomes AI generated and then the differentiator is non-AI generated content. So I think you just need to be careful as a brand and need to be very intentional about where you use it and how you disclose it.

38:11But you also need to have social listening and monitoring to the story I just told around what people are talking about for your brand. And you need to make sure correctness, which is one of the five C's of the agentic commerce framework that I recently worked on with Azoma is really, really important. You need to make sure what you're putting out there is actually what's showing up. And you can do that with a PXM. You can do that with social listening tools. You can do that with an agent. And so correctness needs to be really top of mind for brands where social listening was usually thought of from the social team.

38:47Or maybe if you have a consumer care team, they were thinking about that. Now it's imperative because you can't control all of the places that it's being talked about. And it can really snowball if that information is incorrect. And you need to be able to quickly action those changes. So if you know something is incorrect, you can't take 30 days to go update a claim or go update your brand.com to dispel the myth that was out there. You need to have a process in place to be able to update that incorrect information. Do I have to put a tag on every CPG Guys episode now that it's AI because my co-host is an AI robot?

39:23Well, not yet. So no tags quite yet. But actually, Sheree, I think you make a really interesting point because people say they're not using AI. I'm air quoting it. But most people are using AI and they just don't know it. So where is the line that you draw? Right. Claude just put out that new watermark on the content that's written through Claude on the back end. but there's robots that can get around it, right? But I'm just, I don't know where this is going to go from a regulation standpoint, but I think it's important for brands to really monitor that. And for us all to understand that there's a lot of amazing pros to AI, but there's a lot of things that you can lose by using it, right?

40:03You can get further from the consumer. I was talking to someone the other day, they use like an AI note taker and they aren't retaining information as much. So I just think we need to be real about what you gain, but also what you lose when you're using AI. Lauren, from your perspective, how are you seeing AI reshaping, competitive intelligence gathering and price promotion monitoring on the digital shelf? I was talking about this yesterday with someone. I mean, I'm excited about it because from a scraping perspective, right, it's really challenging to get all that information. But I find that it's not always accurate.

40:40and a lot of the brands that I'm working with that are using it for like a price for price and promotion perspective the information that they're getting is very unclear and or inaccurate and so it's not super helpful I think it can be a great monitoring tool if it's trained correctly you're using it on specific sites that it is actually able to scrape that data and information I think from a competitive that's from like a price perspective from a competitive intelligence perspective, I do think it's really valuable. If I take Amazon, for example, if you go on any Amazon PDP, underneath the carousel, they have those like blue pills, like the circles, they call them.

41:21Those are all the questions that consumers are asking about products. So if you go to your competitor's product, and you know what consumers are asking, you know, the claims about that product, you know, what is potentially a differentiator in your niche. So it's giving you information that you might not have had before. And I think that can be a leg up if it's used correctly. And also you can scrape competitive PDPs or imagery or look at things that you've never been able to do. So I do think it's very valuable if it's used correctly. Lauren, I used to think that some of those valuable information to scrape was actually product ratings and reviews because you get verbatims.

42:00You could run those through LLMs. And there was research done by a couple of professors at Northwestern and MIT that hypothesized that almost everything you get from an expensive focus group you can get by reading ratings and reviews. And they proved that out significantly. But the problem is, is that a lot of these big marketplaces understand that now and they're putting up mechanisms to prevent that content from being scraped. You can't scrape Amazon reviews the way you used to. Fundamentally, this is how most open information sources are now treating it. They are restricting the big LLM from being able to query their data.

42:39And that's putting a bit of a challenge into what's going on there. And LLMs don't read JavaScript, right? And so ratings and reviews on a lot of brand.com or even DTC sites are using JavaScript. So they're not able to actually scrape that information. So it's not being pulled into the conversation. So I think you make a really valid point. And I think that's also why Reddit became such a great source. I know this week there's been a lot of controversy about how much LLMs are actually looking at Reddit, but I do still think it has an impact. I think that's why it's been really important for brands to understand what people are saying about it.

43:13But also, Peter, to that point, I always say most large CPG companies have a consumer care center or have a call center or call line. People call and tell you about your product. Like if you've never met those people, go talk to them. They have so much data that you can use to share about what kinds of products you should be making next or feedback about products. You have a lot of that that lives inside your own company. I think about this and I was talking to one of our team members, Suzanne, this morning. And we were talking about this very topic about call centers and things of that nature and how calls come in about product complaints.

43:50Which CEO last looked or took a care of any large market company to really look at any of that stuff? They only care about it when it's become completely out of hand and corporate comms has to jump on something. I mean, but you're right. The data sits right there. That's where the future citations are actually going to come from. So I don't know. They were downstairs in our office. And I used to go down there and just be like, hey, can I listen to a call? And I was like, wow, these people are calling and telling us about our products. Like you have so much great data. Just go find it inside your own company.

44:25Ugly. Let's go to the future. So in the latest research done on behalf of Coca-Cola by ThinkBlue, we've kind of learned that consumers are voting saying, I want to co-pilot. I don't want AI to take over the world for me and make my purchase decisions on my behalf. But that's today. things might completely change 18 months from now where for certain categories, replenishables, maybe health and wellness, vitamins, pet food, but once you make a decision, you stick to the same product, the same exact queue again and again. This might be a perfect fit. I would love to kind of pick your brain on how you see it when it comes to AI agents, bots at shop, compare, purchase on a consumer's behalf.

45:07How's this headed? And if it is going to head down that way. First of all, let's ask you, you know, what do you think about that? And if so, who the heck is preparing for that world? I don't know when we will get to a fully autonomous world. And I don't know if consumers really want that. I also think it's easy for us who sit in our little bubble of e-commerce and talk about this all the time to talk about like people using AI and wanting a shopping agent. Right. But like if I went and stood in Times Square for four hours and I polled 500 people. I don't know how many of them are actually using ChatGPT to buy their groceries or using an LLM to discover products.

45:47Maybe all of them are, and maybe I'm incorrect, but I really don't think we are that far down the road. I think it is a potential in the future for specific categories. But the challenge is that there was a story the other day I was reading that someone gave their credit card to an agent to replenish their toilet paper and ended up spending like$500 on toilet paper because there was no guardrail for it. Right. So like those are the things that you don't really want to happen. So what I'm hearing from consumers, and we just did a research project on this as well, that most consumers do not trust an agent to purchase.

46:23They trust an agent from a discovery standpoint, but they then go and take that information, pick their specific retailer, and then go and purchase the product. I think the other piece there is retailers have still have a very strong foothold. If I have Amazon Prime, I'm probably going to use that. If I have Walmart Plus, I'm probably going to use that. If I have Target Circle, right? Insert name of loyalty program, I'm probably going to choose that retailer. So I don't know when we're going to get to that place. I think we're going to stay in the AI discovery phase for quite some time. And it will get much better in terms of the data we have to do that.

46:58But to all of our conversations today, most brands are not even ready for the discovery phase. So if that information is incorrect, why are you going to have an agent take your credit card and purchase something? And then the biggest question is, who's accountable? If they spent$500 on that toilet paper, are you going to go yell at your LLM? You can't, right? Can you return it? It gets really murky in terms of kind of what that looks like. And most organizations, we pulled, We did a study with NIQ and the DSI, and 66 % of them said they're somewhat ready for the agentic shelf, but most of them have data silos and they don't know how to get there.

47:37So I just think we're far from that world. But there are some use cases for super users who are doing it today. Lauren, you pull 100 people at Times Square, most of them will tell you that they're there to look for the naked cowboy. So I don't know if I... That was the only example I could figure out. That's okay. Any major city. I used to go for the Nishin Kapoor Loodle Ramen with the little smoke coming on top of the one Times Square. But, you know, Ria and Laura have been on the billboard now. That's awesome. They have been. They are. I've been on the I was on the billboard of Times Square last year, Sri.

48:13I was going for a conference and they put they put my name up. Say more. How what? Say more, though. No, it's a company that's no longer in business. They just they they just they just went out of business, Sri. You know which one we're talking about. In any event, Lauren, you obviously have an opportunity to see brands and how they are operating in the age of. I would love from your perspective what you think is a big common mistake you see these brands making when they're adopting AI focused tools for digital shelf management, either too quickly or without a strategy in place. Yeah, I think the biggest challenge and biggest mistake I guess I see is they say, let's do AI without saying what problem are we trying to solve?

48:59What does this actually mean for our business? And listen, if e-commerce was on the lips of every executive the way AI was, we would be much further in this process. But I think that the challenge is that most people are getting directives from their leadership to say, we have to do AI. We need to be doing this. We need to fix this. And most people take that as, OK, OK, like we're going to go use Claude or we're going to go add AI to this process or we're going to go just do this this way. Instead of taking a pause, taking a step back and saying, what is the problem I'm actually trying to solve?

49:35What outcome can this AI help me achieve? and then going from there. And I understand it's challenging inside the organization. There's pressures from your leadership. There's all the hype around it. But if you can do that and really define what you are trying to do with AI, you will actually be able to see return. And if you actually reinvent the way you're working, it will be impactful. Wowza, wowza, wowza indeed. So I want to jump now three years out. What do you think just one single big way AI will change our brands, compete for shelf space and share of search? We've already seen it happen.

50:16The funnel is collapsing. So you used to maybe take 15 different tabs, read reviews, go on TikTok, do all these things to research a product. The work was done by the consumer. And now all of that can be done in five seconds with an agent. So I think less options for consumers, which is something that they actually crave, which means less brands are going to be showcased and recommended and the competition is going to get even more challenging. I think we're going to see a lot of consolidation on the brand side for large organizations to be able to compete. And I think we're going to continue to see more and more work done by agents from a discovery standpoint and less and less brands available for consumption.

51:03Wow. Thank you for this conversation, Lauren. Sri, what's your big takeaway? way? It's not one, Peter, it's several. But if I had to summarize it, say AI is already upon us. Large market cap brands, you have to act now. Your inspiration should be the challenger brands. You can't go back to the age-old story and make excuses of the challenger brands don't have this sort of regulations. They don't have that sort of governance. Make your own. Lauren put a very important fact out there midway through the show of the 5x or more effort and energy required, the amount of content required in an AI world versus where we are today, in a world where brands itself have not over excelled in content to begin with in the first place.

51:44I'm not saying that's everybody, but a large portion of the brands. Then the next thing is the disintermediation that could happen, Peter, which is if you're not present in the AI world, unlike the e-commerce world, you can half in, be half out, and you can limit which cues you are. You'll just be absent, and you'll never be found, and eventually you'll vanish, which is an extremely scary concept. And I'll give a fourth one as well, Peter, which is education. This needs to be the top. The leadership needs to get educated because the investments required have to come from a check from the board.

52:15This is not small 20K and 30K effort. You know, unless you have five SKUs, then maybe it is. But for most large market cap brands, they're in the thousands of SKUs. So education on AI, et cetera, needs to be right up top in the first place. Otherwise, good luck. I'll leave it as good luck. What about you, Peter? My big takeaway, Shree, is all around organizational structure. Lauren covered that. She said, listen, you need to build excellence around this, whether it's formal or it's a center of excellence and it's cross-functional. Everyone needs to be involved in this. If you don't do that, anything you invest against, any efforts you make are going to substantially less productive than they otherwise could be.

52:58So that's it. Lauren, way too long having you on the podcast. We're so grateful to have you join us. It means a lot to Sri and me to have you here speaking with us and bringing your incredible expertise. Congratulations again on the big news for Solstify, the parent company and the acquisition. We couldn't be happier for you and your colleagues. Please give our best to both Pusch and of course, you know, Peter, your co-host. And of course, let's not forget the second most favorite bald Cuban descendant living here in the United States, Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you for joining us, Lauren. Thank you so much for having me.

53:35This was a great conversation. And if today's conversation sparks something within you and our audience, maybe a new idea, fresh perspective, or just a reminder of why this industry is worth showing up for every day, share it. Tag us. Tell a colleague. The more voices we bring into this community, the sharper all of us get to our over 47 ,000 followers on LinkedIn that trust us to inform, educate, and entertain you about our industry. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your trust and encouragement. Until next time, keep pushing the conversation forward. I am, of course, PBSB on behalf of my co-host, Papa Raj.

54:13This has been the CPG Guys podcast. Goodbye.

54:22Thank you.

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