I mean, what was the thinking? Why the opportunity there? Why the pivot?

I think it boiled down to two or three factors.

And Ken, you played an important role in it, not trying to just compliment you on your own podcast, but I do think you played an important role.

But the first one was, you know, so I still believe that mobile app is a much superior experience, right? Whether you look at airlines, right? Like it's so much easier to use the United Airlines or American Airlines app than going to a website.

Same thing with, you know, nobody uses amazon.com on the browser.

They all have an app.

The problem with the apps was not that it's a superior technology or the latency isn't better.

What does unified commerce like really mean today? How do you see it on the consumer side and or on the brand slash retail side? What does it mean? Yeah,

Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Salesforce?

Yeah.

I joined Salesforce two years ago with the acquisition of PredictSpring.

Um, I was founder and CEO of PredictSpring, which was a modern point of sale company.

So Craig, if, over the weekend if you want to go to a Crate & Barrel store or an Under Armour store or a HOKA store, uh, or a LoveSex store, they all are powered by what was PredictSpring POS and now Salesforce, uh, point of sale.

And, um, then six months in this role, so I was trying to make sure the POS product is well integrated into Salesforce.

It was first foray for Salesforce to get into real world.

Yeah, right

Walk me through the customer problem to be solved.

Yeah, so there are two things going on.

The front ends were always important, right? The front end experience, you know, even back in the days, everybody needed a digital front end.

I still remember this is like the tail end of 1990s.

remember sapient and all the companies were doing and they are still around they're doing great sure everybody was trying to build their first digital front because there was no digital front right it was like maybe a static website at its best right so the front-end experience has mattered in the last you know the same 20 25 years of the commerce evolution Now, in the agent world, there's going to be two interactions, first of all, the way I think about it.

There's going to be commodity shopping, like my ascensions, my grocery shopping, my shaving creams, you know, those things.

I would prefer Nitin's agents or, in your case, Rick's agent to just take care of it.

Are they thinking migration project? Are they thinking evolution? How should they think about this?

i spoke to you that's correct yeah you did that after

Yeah, yeah, so that's been great.

So as you know, search is having a having a moment, right? Like it's a rethinking the entire search in the LLMs and the agent equal, right? Obviously commerce search has been around for many, many years and so we found these these founders Vivek and John.

They're based in Boston.

Amazing founders that several folks PhDs from MIT, Stanford, CMU.

top notch talent.

And I was just blown away when I looked at the product.

Download PDF.

What was that? But I guess you had had a little bit exposure to that from the supply chain side.

Yeah, it was, you know, like you always connect all the dots that you learned in your life, right? As you're doing the next thing you do is accumulation of all the hard work and pattern analysis and the domain knowledge you build up over the years, right? And so it was really connecting the dots.

And initially, so I did pivot just to kind of give you a full story there.

So when I started PredictSpring, my focus was trying to build the best mobile commerce platform.

Because back in the days, 2013, mobile was still a hard problem.

The conversion rates on mobile were still lower, even though iPhone had launched in 2007.

And so I was trying to build a no coding, no code platform to build both mobile apps and mobile web.

I'm sure that's not how it worked, but was that part of the negotiation or did you just kind of like work your way? It was in a year, so something very fast had to happen in there.