Agentic Commerce - Who's side is agent on? EP 60 - with Nik Sathe - Blackhawk Network (BHN)

So let's start with a basic assumption that UX is going away.

People are using UX less and less.

They're talking to their agent, and agent does something in the background, and the task gets completed.

And people are using US- UX less and less.

They're consulting their chatbots for everything.

So commerce is changing, and the way that people perform actions is changing as well.

No, for sure.

I think that is one of the challenges, and you've seen this play out in the industry as well, where many of the leading e-commerce websites have been very challenged with the advent of these chatbots, where, where consumers are doing a lot more of their comparison shopping, their consideration, looking at what the chatbot thinks about the product, uh, which in some cases is based on a, a much broader net than just what the, the, what, what the brand is able to do.

And, and some of the largest platforms have had to go and block crawlers from crawling their sites because they feel like the data on their sites is proprietary, and you've seen some lawsuits as well.

And I think the, the interesting challenge there is that there is a lot of really valuable information that is trapped in these proprietary systems today, and that is their competitive advantage.

I mean, the ability for a, a, a large e-commerce platform to do recommendations based on what other people like you have purchased is one of their value adds.

And the question is, how do you actually make that available to the agents in a way that works economically for everyone, right? Um, at the end of the day, you don't want, uh, the, the, the leading chatbots to now start charging a toll for, uh, those transactions that are being routed over to the, uh, t- to these platforms that have made the investments that, that they have.

Uh, and that's one area I feel like the, the standards that we have have not evolved to the extent that they, they need to.

So if you look at, um, what was ACP, which was the, uh, OpenAI and Stripe joint initiative, they had a very, uh, uh, uh, you know, quick way and, uh, an easy way to integrate.

But their catalog API was just your catalog products.

There was nothing more about those products that you could add.

Uh, there was nothing about the recommendations that would be, you know, honored and not used outside of that, uh, that platform's ecosystem, et cetera.

And I think UCP has some ways that, that, that those standards are gonna start to be, uh, incorporated.

Uh, but it is absolutely a challenge where without the UI, how do consumers get to benefit from the insights and knowledge and capabilities that these other platforms have? And as a platform builder, how do you expose those things in a way, um, to evolve as consumer preferences change? I mean, it's-- you can't ignore it.

You can't say, "Hey, I'm just gonna avoid, um, uh, you know, uh, working with these, uh, with these platforms," um, w- with the chatbots, the front end, the, or the new front end.

Um, but we have to be very careful about, uh, you know, how much investment do we make in the back end and how much we, we expose programmatically, uh, so that these channels can, uh, can take advantage.