Shelley E. Kohan (00:39)
Hi everybody and thanks for joining our weekly podcast. I’m Shelley kohan and I’m very excited to welcome Jackie Swanson. She is the managing partner at Garner Consulting. So welcome Jackie.

JACKIE SWANSON (00:54)
Thank you, Shelley. I’m so excited to be here.

Shelley E. Kohan (00:57)
It’s so cool. Like your whole job is advising CIOs and C-suite executives, not only on digital transformation, but on one of the things I think is the most pressing in our industry and that’s AI strategy. So ⁓ it’s love having you here. You also have been consulting for over 15 years. were at PWC and Gartner. And what I love about you is you have strong opinions about what the industry is missing.

JACKIE SWANSON (01:12)
Absolutely.

Shelley E. Kohan (01:25)
with regard to AI brand strategy. And that’s where we’re going to focus our conversation today on. So the other fun thing you do, I love when people do a lot of different things. The other fun thing you do is you write a weekly newsletter called Shelf Life. And that’s where you put a signals through a consulting lens. And I loved your most recent post in LinkedIn, the invisible heist, how AI agents are stealing your customer relationship.

JACKIE SWANSON (01:32)
Perfect.

That’s right.

Thank you.

Shelley E. Kohan (01:55)
And I know we’re going to cover a few of those points today. And the first topic that we’re going to be talking about is what you mean by the invisible heist. So I’m excited about today’s conversation. let’s dive right in and let’s kind of start with like, let’s start slow and just kind of give some background about what is agentic commerce and why is it such a big deal in your perspective.

JACKIE SWANSON (01:56)
Exactly.

I love that.

Yeah,

yeah, definitely. So, you know, when people talk to me or any other consultant about AI, right, they’re usually talking about productivity gains or operational excellence. But there’s this whole world in retail that’s super exciting. And, you know, there’s a lot to uncover and to unpack today, but ⁓ it really is one of the most exciting times that retail has ever been through. So,

When we talk about agentic commerce, we really talk about AI working for the customer and as a result of that AI working for the retailer, right? So it’s kind of flipping those productivity conversations really to talk about the consumer. So there’s a lot of big announcements, you know, there was a lot of ⁓ hype about it at NRF. know you were there. ⁓ Big announcements from Walmart and Amazon and even Meta today.

Shelley E. Kohan (03:12)
Yeah.

JACKIE SWANSON (03:18)
⁓ So it’s the topic on everyone’s mind. It’s what I, you know, I always joke. was talking about this all day, every day, it seems like now.

So there are incredible opportunities that come with the Gentic AI, right? ⁓ And we’re really referring to the model makers, the chat GPTs, the Geminis, the perplexities, the clods, ⁓ shopping on your behalf. Right now we’re at a phase where they’re not making the actual purchases for us, but they are influencing those purchasing decisions.

So there are incredible advantages to that to retailers, right? You open yourself up to new customers, the funnel is completely different, which we’ll talk about. There is constant engagement, there’s new loyalty, there’s new ways of getting revenue that we haven’t even explored yet. There’s data and you know, which can also be seen as a challenge in this.

But there’s all this access to information that we didn’t have before. So it’s a very exciting time. But with that, with a lot of power comes a lot of responsibility. You could tell I have a six-year-old boy. As the funnel changes, the brand control conversation changes, which we’ll talk about today. That was my whole invisible heist kind of metaphor. And there are security issues.

exposing your data, whether it be your secret sauce or whether it’s your customer data, you’re ⁓ in a lot of ways exposing that and you have to do that the right way so that you’re not exposing anything that causes a data and security issue. you know, again, it’s a really exciting time, but it is a time where we really need to think about the steps to do this right.

Shelley E. Kohan (05:07)
It’s amazing. And here’s some scary stats. So I looked up some of these stats and I know you also use these stats in your LinkedIn post because it’s kind of amazing. And I’m trying to teach my students in class about agentic commerce, you know, but it’s interesting because McKinsey estimates that AI agents could mediate three to five trillion trillion in global commerce by 2030. That’s four years away.

JACKIE SWANSON (05:15)
Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, 2030.

Right, right.

Shelley E. Kohan (05:34)
That’s just, that’s amazing. And

chat, chat GPT handles 50 million shopping queries every single day. And I know you guys, yeah. Now I was gonna throw one more out.

JACKIE SWANSON (05:43)
So they’re saying that right, oh no, I

know we’re getting excited about the statistics, but it is, it’s really exciting.

About 23 % of Americans have already made a purchase through AI. That’s what Gartner’s telling us. And it grew 4,700%.

in 2025

So the growth is astonishing. I mean, we could do a whole other podcast of where we’ve seen AI and shopping growth versus the other shopping trends, but it’s really phenomenal and it is the future.

Shelley E. Kohan (06:19)
I know one of the things that you talk about, maybe you can kind of help our listeners with this is we kind of grew up in the age on SEO, SEO, SEO, but now your view is we should be really looking at AEO, answer engine optimization. So what is that and how should retailers be looking at that?

JACKIE SWANSON (06:28)
Right, right.

Yeah.

That’s right.

Yeah, great question. The transition really is about we’re no longer shopping by keywords, what SEO was. Now it’s really shopping by intent. And if you look at SEO was all about the standard things like where you are on a page. So you would ask Google, I want flat bottom shoes, right? And you would get four pages of shoes and you would search through and you’d spend 45 minutes and you’d pick which shoe you want.

Now it’s a very different conversation. Like I said, it’s intent driven, right? So you go into chat GPT or whatever your LLM of choice is and you say, I want a shoe that helps with my walking and ⁓ gives me support from my back and is a brand that all of my friends are wearing, but not the color that my friends are wearing. And this is actually a…

present for my mom and you know it goes on and on. But it’s really you can give chat GPT very complex things and it will transform it into an answer that is singular. Right. So this is very different. It’s no longer four pages of 65 blue links that you have to sort through on your own. It is it is about what is the answer to what you’re looking for.

So that’s from a front end, right? From a front end consumer lens, it’s super exciting, right? Because we’re getting the product that we need, you know, in theory, we are getting the answers that we want as fast as possible. Like how exciting is that? But if you think about it from a retailer’s perspective, that’s a completely, completely different way of thinking, right? I’ve spent so many years working with retailers talking about

how you optimize for the customer journey, right? How do we do omni-channel or unified commerce so everyone is a part of your brand and a part of your story? Like if you think about luxury brands, it’s all about, wanna be bought into this brand, I wanna be a part of this world. Now, you no longer have control over that story. So it’s very interesting how that happens. So when you’re looking at AEO versus SEO,

The LLMs prioritize things very differently than your Google search ranking does. So they prioritize really three things we’re saying. The first one is really based on context. So that’s what I mean by intent, right? Like you’re using it for a walking shoe. You’re using it as a present for your mom. You’re using it for something that ⁓ helps your back, right? I want something that’s made in the USA.

That’s all about intent, right? So in order for the LLMs to produce and give you the right answer to that intent, the retailers need to put in that data in the right way. And that’s a fundamental different way of ⁓ thinking that we’re helping retailers think through now. So that’s one. The second is content, right? You need something that is clean, structured.

They talk about ⁓ product now in terms of product cards, right? So you want your product card to fit a certain formula and mold so that everything is consistent and that the LLMs can quickly pick up the information that it needs to spit you out as the preferred vendor. And the third thing is authority, which is similar to Google.

However, they use different resources. So Reddit, you you heard about Reddit was all the rage when ChatGPT, you know, first gained popularity. Now it seems like YouTube video is getting popular, but even your site’s own reviews are really important to establish authority.

Shelley E. Kohan (10:23)
Yes.

JACKIE SWANSON (10:34)
So that’s the difference really between AEO and SEO. And it’s still evolving. Some people don’t even call it AEO. They call it GSO or AIO. So it really is, we’re at the forefront of this industry when they haven’t even come up with an acronym yet.

Shelley E. Kohan (10:50)
Yes, and Jackie, I think you should make

that acronym and name it and it’ll be yours. Get out there early.

JACKIE SWANSON (10:56)
I it! There we go, making

money on the spot. I love it. I love it.

Shelley E. Kohan (11:00)
I know one of the

interesting things. So Walmart has Sparky, right? You know Sparky. That’s the Gentic AI, right? And so John Verner, the CEO of Walmart now, he talked about Sparky in his recent earnings call. And here’s some statistics that he shared. He said, customers that use Sparky have an average order value that’s 35 % higher. 35 % higher. That’s tremendous.

JACKIE SWANSON (11:06)
Right, I do, yeah.

Yeah.

Shelley E. Kohan (11:29)
And then they also talked about how they’re gonna take Sparky and they’re going to expand it into in-store and services, which I find really fascinating. So it’s gonna become like a voice and a helpful agent in the store. I don’t know how that’s gonna pan out or what that will look like. And the last piece, and this is a quote he said, is they’re trying to connect it to the physical infrastructure.

JACKIE SWANSON (11:29)
Yeah.

Shelley E. Kohan (11:55)
And what John said was when Sparky builds a basket, we execute it through fast delivery, pick up or in store, turning AI engagement into immediate physical outcomes.

JACKIE SWANSON (12:07)
Yeah, yeah, I mean a lot to unpack there and fully, mean Walmart is at the forefront of this transformation. Kudos to them because they’ve done such an amazing job in spearheading, ⁓ you know, this transformation. ⁓ I would say number one is absolutely ⁓ the fundamentals that you’re putting in place for Agenda Commerce right now absolutely translate to the store.

So a lot of retailers come to us at Gartner Consulting and ask, what is the store of the future, right? What are we looking at when it comes to what stores will look like five to 10 years from now? And there are many answers. Again, this could be a totally separate podcast, but the fundamental things that you need to do for a gentile commerce is what is going to fuel those AI driven services that we’re going to see in the store, no matter what they are.

Shelley E. Kohan (13:00)
All

JACKIE SWANSON (13:04)
So, you know, a lot of retailers are experimenting with this, but you’re able to inform retail salespeople in a way that really not only increases the average order value, which is, you know, an unbelievable statistic by Walmart, but it allows better customer service. It allows you to help the customer understand availability of items.

you know, you know, it offers a whole array of services that some retailers are experimenting today, but most retailers are not. So again, an exciting time.

Shelley E. Kohan (13:42)
think the other thing I want to go back. So you mentioned something about ⁓ using whatever, know, chap GPT and you’re looking for a product and you set, yeah, I think you called it functions. You know, what are, what are the functions that you’re looking for? And so I think what retailers have to kind of rethink and we had Sandy DeFelice, she’s the senior vice president of digital wave technology. I’m sure you’ve met her. But she was, she talks about attributions and you know, before

JACKIE SWANSON (14:05)
Yeah, I listen, yeah.

Yes.

Shelley E. Kohan (14:12)
When you talk about attributions, we as retailers, we have all this great jargon, like a brick red dress or a ⁓ mocha, coca color dress. But when the customer, what they’re doing is they’re saying, find me the best handbag. Well, I don’t know any retailer in America that ever has said, okay, here’s an attribute, best handbag ever. That’s not how we think. But that’s how…

JACKIE SWANSON (14:29)
Right.

Right. Right.

Right.

Shelley E. Kohan (14:40)
Agenda

Commerce thing, so we kind of have to re shift it. can’t imagine how many attributes now have to be kind of integrated into this model.

JACKIE SWANSON (14:51)
That’s right. So one of the things that I talk about a lot is, you know, this is not an IT problem solely, right? It’s normally up to IT to spearhead this because it has AI in the title, right? But this is a cross the value train, train the value chain.

Shelley E. Kohan (14:58)
No.

JACKIE SWANSON (15:10)
This is ⁓ an initiative that has to work across that value chain. You need merchandising to be function driven or to be intent driven in order for it to ⁓ produce those results that you want. You need supply chain to input the sourcing origin and all the raw materials and also for it to integrate with your ERP so that you’re able to give real time ⁓

information to the customer, right? You know, going back to what we talked about with these chat bots and the basic AI infrastructure, you know, everything needs to be infrastructure, everything needs to be integrated so that the information is seamless across these different channels and AI agents.

Shelley E. Kohan (16:00)
That’s right Jackie, and the other thing that you talk about, and I’d like for you to really expand upon this, retailers are marketers, that’s what we do, we’re marketers. We market products, right? And we have this beautiful language and this great way of describing things, but you’re saying that we have to rethink this, right?

JACKIE SWANSON (16:10)
Right.

Well, I don’t know if rethink it’s the right word or maybe it’s the perfect word, but I think the first step is retailers need to understand what this means, right? So when I refer to the invisible heist, they’re right now, like I said, we control the customer journey.

Right? And we control all aspects of the brands from, you know, the initial conversation to those chat bots, to what the website looks like, to what the store looks like, to what the service KPIs are, to the packaging, to literally everything, right? We’ve spent our whole careers thinking about it, like you said, that everyone’s a marketer. But now you no longer have control of that funnel, of that journey, until you ship the product.

Right? So if you look at Agenda Commerce, right now we’re at the very beginning of this ⁓ road, right? And Walmart is kind of one step ahead with Sparky. Sparky is making some of these decisions for you. Like they can replenish some of your favorite items, right? Things like that. However, where we’re going with this is you will give your agent

autonomy to make purchases on your behalf. So you can say, want groceries as long as it goes, you know, not over $100. I wish my grocery bill was $100 a week, right? So, so you’re giving your agent autonomy to do that. In the future, that is going to be the norm. And these agents are going to make these purchases on your behalf. Well, when that happens,

Shelley E. Kohan (17:38)
Yeah.

JACKIE SWANSON (17:55)
you’re not going to see the brand’s website or the brand’s product or even make decisions upon which brand you prefer until it’s at your door. And that’s a very different way of thinking. So, you know, we’re advising brands right now to really think through that, right? Like for the first step, it’s,

How do you still maintain control of your brand so it’s not taken from you? And then the second thing is the aspects that you do control and what you have more ⁓ say in what your brand presence is, let’s rethink that, right?

The supply chain becomes much more relevant to marketers, right? The, you know, go back to the packaging, right? The way that it shows up on your door. Loyalty programs and how you train your agent to have preference for one brand over the other. Or how you even train social media or Reddit articles or YouTube videos to trust your brand.

All of those things are still going to be in the retailer’s control. So how do we think through those aspects is really, ⁓ you know, a whole topic in and of itself.

Shelley E. Kohan (19:09)
I want to jump into loyalty in a second, but I want to just go back. So you made this comment about, ⁓ you know, I love this about SPF and a beauty company. And I love how you said like, the AI agent doesn’t care that your moisturizer transforms your skin with the essence of renewal. That is so powerful when you really think about it, right?

JACKIE SWANSON (19:21)
Okay.

Right, right, exactly, exactly.

Again, like we spend our whole careers talking about the benefits of skincare, the benefits of like how beautiful it makes your skin, how healthy it is, blah, blah. But now, you know, with the intent driven.

AEO, it’s very different in terms of how they look at brands like Skincare and how they pick the one that best matches whatever criteria you put in. It’s a very different way of thinking for sure.

Shelley E. Kohan (20:07)
Definitely. Okay, so let’s jump into loyalty because I know this is a big conversation. You mentioned earlier about the search journey where someone is going to chat GPT, they’re asking for these products, whereas back in the day we’d go to Google and then on Google we’d go to the website. But now we’re kind of skipping the website, right? We’re just looking at our agentic commerce or agentic agent and we’re saying, here are the three best, I’m just going to get these three or whichever one. So…

JACKIE SWANSON (20:19)
Right.

Shelley E. Kohan (20:33)
What happens to loyalty? We just missed a whole part of the customer journey. Right?

JACKIE SWANSON (20:38)
Right, that’s right.

So the idea of brands, I’m obsessed with this idea of brands and how it’s evolved through the years, right? So on one hand, it’s an incredible opportunity for smaller brands, ⁓ you know, not big conglomerates to step up, to reach a new audience, to ⁓

And you know between social commerce shopping and agentic commerce like it really is the an opportunity for smaller brands to gain popularity and to gain revenue. Right. So all of those things are very exciting. ⁓ But on the flip side you know there it does reshape how we think about our association with brands. Right. And if you think about

the different types of shoppers. You have luxury shoppers who have always associated brands with a certain price point, a certain experience. You know, that may or may not change, but it does need to be rethought for every step of the journey, right? And then you have value players, especially as AI gains more popularity and we’re all in a position where we need to think more price-conscious about our shopping journey.

You know, if one thing is just as good as the other and Chad GPT suggested it, that means that we’re going to go with whatever the cheaper option is, right? So, you know, there are always going to be different types of consumers that value different things and brand is one of those things that have really evolved over the past decade. ⁓ But it is, it definitely does put in the question, what does loyalty mean? ⁓

for a new age of consumers.

Shelley E. Kohan (22:30)
And it goes back to this idea, I we’ve always said unique value proposition’s key. You have to have a unique value proposition. But now, wow, that’s really, really becomes critical. Because you’re right, instead of my ability to search kind of taxes out at five, maybe three, I don’t want to spend days searching. with the Gentic agents, I could search thousands of things in a second. And so now we have to really understand as retailers,

JACKIE SWANSON (22:41)
It does.

That’s true.

Shelley E. Kohan (22:58)
You know, what is that unique value proposition for our product that is going to get the loyalty that customers put into the agent agents? I want this product. Show me the newest features or something like that.

JACKIE SWANSON (23:11)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think what people don’t yet understand is, Agentic doesn’t necessarily pick the product that is the best fit, right? It picks whatever is easiest for it to ⁓ understand, right? So clean, structured data that fits that product card model, whatever that is. And by the way, ChatGPT

⁓ Claude, Google, they all have different things that they prioritize. So, you know, when we do these assessments for companies, which we’re doing all the time right now, you know, it’s not fair to just look at chat GPT and say, I’m first in chat GPT, I’m done. It’s not that, right? Every model has a different set of priorities. ⁓ And it’s looking at what those priorities are for the different, you know, model makers. ⁓

Shelley E. Kohan (23:45)
All right.

JACKIE SWANSON (24:08)
that’s really important right now.

Shelley E. Kohan (24:10)
Definitely. Okay Jackie, before I’m going to press you to give us retail actions, what retailers must do, I’m going to ask you to tell the story of what does Spotify have to do with agentic commerce?

JACKIE SWANSON (24:24)
⁓

Well, so there’s a lot of transformation stories, right, that I was thinking about when, ⁓ you know, I was thinking about the agentic commerce evolution, right? The first thing I thought about was e-commerce overall.

right? When e-commerce came to play and everyone said, let’s wait and see, let’s wait and see, let’s let’s, you know, we don’t have to create a website right now. Our customers are always going to go into the store. This is irrelevant for us. So that’s the first thing I think of. And there’s so many parallels to that. And I can’t tell you how many engagements I did where we were trying to bring together the wholesale division with the retail division with the e-commerce division and how that all blended together. Right? So that

the first thing that ⁓ I think about. And there are so many parallels with that transformation, but at the same time, this is happening way faster. You do not have the ability to wait and see for this one, right? This one, first mover advantage is real. So when we get into, you know, what retailers can do, it really is something to consider. ⁓ But at the same time, it is

it really is fundamentally a different way of ⁓ thinking that we need to really consider. So when we think about transformations and we think about e-commerce and what we learned from there, Spotify comes to mind, and that’s a more recent transition, right? So if you think about what Spotify did to the music industry,

Years ago, labels controlled the discovery, right? They decided who got radio play, who got shelf space in the retailers. They decided all of that, right? Very similar to how retailers work today. So then the algorithms changed entirely with the invention of Spotify, right? So artists who understood how to optimize for this algorithm

built massive audiences without traditional label support. And that’s a great analogy to what we’re going through today and what the opportunities are specifically for smaller brands that are trying to grow. Right? So the same real structural shift is coming to consumer products. ⁓ Except in agented commerce, again, what’s different about this transformation is that the brands might never get a chance

to actually control and to be in front of the customer at all. So that really is a fundamental shift, right? So the brands that organize their entire company around this new discovery ⁓ mechanism, similar to how the young artists did with TikTok or whatever their mainstream ⁓ media outlet was, are going to win.

Right? And those that don’t embrace this change, kind of similar to the analogy I use with e-commerce, you know, they’re going to be left behind.

Shelley E. Kohan (27:41)
So Jackie, help us, help us. What should retailers be doing right now?

JACKIE SWANSON (27:45)
Hahaha

So there are three things that ⁓ I think are really important for retailers to look at right now. The first one is clean up your data, right? We’ve been saying it for years. ⁓ This is a conversation that everybody should be having. ⁓ And the conversation really is how do we make our data ⁓ structurally sound, ⁓ intent-driven, ⁓ consistent, and how do we involve

everybody in the value chain with creating data that will speak to customers. So that’s really number one. ⁓ Number two is this whole idea of first mover advantage, right? You want to be at the top of ⁓ chat GPT perplexity, whatever it may be. And in order to do that, you need to have data with ⁓

pricing and shipping time and costs and country of origin and all that in there in a way that’s prioritized by the different agents. So you want to be ahead of this first mover advantage because the model makers, the LLM agents like the data that’s consistent and that’s out there. So that’s really important. But on the flip side, there is a real strong

data security and cybersecurity issue that comes with exposing your data. It’s not just putting your secret sauce out there, which is very scary and you don’t want to do that. But there’s also this aspect of you have customer data that is going to now be searchable by these LLM agents. So you really have to come up with a strategy that

Shelley E. Kohan (29:13)
yeah.

JACKIE SWANSON (29:38)
⁓ is a balance between those two things. You don’t want to be the first mover that gets the first AI hack, right? But you still want to be upfront with your strategy so that you’re training the LLM agents in a way that will prioritize your brand.

Shelley E. Kohan (29:46)
No.

JACKIE SWANSON (29:55)
So at Gartner, we do a lot of work with brands in order to find that balance and to find the right strategy for that particular retailer. And it’s completely different depending on your maturity, depending on what’s out there, and depending on the state of your data. And the third thing is this should be a conversation across your organization. Supply chain should be in the room.

⁓ Merchandising should be in the room, cyber security should be in the room. It should not only be IT and it’s a very exciting time, but it really is a time where you have to be very thoughtful about the transformation. know, obviously have a third party there that’s helped other brands go through this. ⁓ It’s very helpful. They could tell you the pitfalls. You don’t want to get this wrong, ⁓ but you also want to

to embrace the change that’s coming. Because 2026 is going to be a very exciting and transformative year. So get excited, but do it carefully.

Shelley E. Kohan (30:56)
I’ve loved that. And I’ll ask you, do you think the consumer is ready for this?

JACKIE SWANSON (31:01)
the consumer is more than ready for it. I’m excited. ⁓ However, the retailer needs to really match the consumer where they are, right? If the retailer, if you shop on chat GPT and you don’t get the results that you want, then you’re no longer going to use it, right? So it’s the job of the retailer to make it easy for the customer.

⁓ That’s not different than it has been for decades, but the method in which you do that and you reach that customer is going to be different.

Shelley E. Kohan (31:34)
Wow, Jackie, we’ve packed a lot into the podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Is there any last-minute words of advice or wisdom you’d like to share?

JACKIE SWANSON (31:38)
Any time!

No, I would just say that the brands that are going to win in the next decade are not the ones that have the prettiest ads or the prettiest apps. It’s really going to be the ones that are very clean and easy to use and are implementing the intelligence that you have at your fingertips. I encourage, I’m always available to have conversations one-on-one with anyone who wants to pick my brain.

⁓ And I’m just excited to help as many people as possible go on this journey, because like I said, it’s a really exciting one.

Shelley E. Kohan (32:18)
I Jackie, I’m very excited by it too. So ⁓ we are aligned in that. So I’m very excited to have you here. Thank you so much and thank you for imparting such great advice for our listeners.

JACKIE SWANSON (32:21)
So.

Awesome, thanks so much for having me.