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Cole Casperson

Cole Casperson

Chief Data Officer and Partner at CrankTank, a digital strategy and e-commerce agency, specializing in AI search and semantic commerce optimization.

Jun 8, 2026

15:20
Yeah.
15:20
And so Amazon, within this contained sphere, has been able to really build a bunch of, uh, a nice infrastructure of machine learning-based retrieval, uh, that now, now we're seeing, you know, that looks and smells a lot like what now we're seeing with AI retrieval on the open web.
15:36
And, um, what Amazon has is that Amazon has a, a point where it can say, hey, you know, Amazon can make money f- two different ways, right? There's Amazon Ads, and then there's the referral fee on selling the product.
15:48
And so Amazon has had a, always had a choice to say, "Well, you know what? We can show the product that has the highest bid, or we can show the product that's going to get us sale." And Amazon, you know, again, whether you like them or not, to their credit they said, "The value proposition for us is to get the right product in front of the right consumer and not try to optimize for revenue." And given the highly competitive landscape out there-

24 MINS LATER

40:34
So what, what was that, when was that, and what was the catalyst for Scott to say, "Hey, who's gonna lead AI internally?"
40:41
Yeah.
40:41
No, I mean, 'cause obviously AI has been out there in multiple forms, and in our case, you know, so many of our clients are using, uh, Google PMax campaigns, right? So Google, Google, of course, is using AI as part of how it syndicates those Performance Max campaigns.
40:58
Google has their advantage, or sorry, Meta has their Advantage+.

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