The FODcast

The Future of E-Commerce: Gen Z, AI, and the Rise of Unified Retail with James Brooke

• Tim Roedel and James Hodges

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The latest episode of The FODcast is here, and this time we’re joined by James Brooke, CEO of MAPP Digital, and a true industry veteran with over 31 years of experience in digital commerce.

Having witnessed the sector’s transformation first-hand, James shares his insights into where digital commerce is headed next, what businesses must do to stay ahead, plus a deeper dive into:

  • Gen Z who are rewriting the rules of online shopping, meaning traditional strategies no longer cut it. Social media is now the first stop on their buying journey, and brands that fail to bridge the gap between platforms and e-commerce sites risk being left behind.
  • What makes this generation tick, why authenticity and social proof are now non-negotiable, and how brands can craft seamless, engaging experiences that keep customers coming back.
  • The inevitable rise of AI-driven personalisation - from boosting customer engagement to building trust in an era of growing data privacy concerns.
  • The shift towards ‘unified retail’ as digital and physical retail continue to merge, where every touchpoint is connected for a frictionless shopping experience.

🎙️ This isn’t just a conversation about where e-commerce stands today—it’s an essential look at the trends set to shape its future. Don’t miss it.

Simply Commerce is the leading supplier of talent into digital commerce across technology, digital marketing, product, sales, and leadership.

Find our more about our approach and our services within digital commerce recruitment here: https://simply-commerce.co.uk/




James Hodges:

Welcome to the latest series of the Fodcast, where we bring you the latest insights into the future of digital commerce. In season six, we continue to interview some of the most respected professionals in the industry as we broaden the topics to cover what it takes to build a business within e-commerce, navigating through business change, as well as the future of technology within digital commerce. As we continue our journey to have one of the best podcasts within commerce, we ask you to like and share within your network if you enjoy our content james, welcome to another edition of the podcast.

Tim Roedel:

Thank you very much for joining us yeah, good morning tim.

James Brooke:

Great to be here. Um, here we are at the end of january and it's all sort of zooming along this year. So great to find the time and looking forward to the conversation yeah, crazy moves are quick.

Tim Roedel:

Um, apologies for the sign behind me, so we were moved out of the room we're meant to be. I've had to hang.

James Brooke:

Nicely done very nicely done, yeah using a plug socket.

Tim Roedel:

It may or may not fall down, but we'll um.

James Brooke:

We'll see how we go for a dramatic, dramatic interlude at some point.

Tim Roedel:

You know so it would be good if you could give a brief introduction, uh, as to who you are and what you're doing. Obviously, I know that you're recently taking on the role of ceo at map, but, uh, be good for you to give us a bit more detail yes, sure you know I was thinking about this this morning, sort of lying there in bed, sort of dozing away thinking what are we doing?

James Brooke:

today I'm speaking to tim and uh, that first question, I was thinking it's my 31st year in this industry. That was, that was my first conclusion. So I started my first internet business back in 1994, dropped out of university somewhere around then. So, yeah, so I've been doing this for a long time. Everything at the intersection of business, technology, marketing, commerce, content, you name it, um, so it's been been quite the ride. Um founded that business early on, sold that, you know, back in the sort of early 90s or late 90s, I guess by the time I got to that, did my time, tim, in the big consultancies. So, march 1st, sapient, lbi, desica, where you kind of learn your trade. So I had my 10 years of you know building, managing, delivering really big services, projects, lots of e-commerce, lots of digital marketing platforms, but, but you sort of learn, you know all the basics, so had a good foundation in in our industry. But then started a company called Ampliance back in 2008 and spent 15 years building that. So that was very successful, working with John and Rory and you know all the all the other good folks there to to create a really successful digital experience company which is really CMS and DAM underlying that, but very much focused on the e-commerce space. So we had 400 old customers globally and we did. We did very good business, particularly around all of the modern headless Mac and all of these sort of new, new ways to build really great and engaging experiences.

James Brooke:

Then I had a couple of years off, which was fantastic. Actually I was. I didn't realize quite how burnt out and quite how stressed stressful the whole thing was, you know, but we had a successful outcome. So that was great and it was a very tough two years, I think, for the market. So it was probably not a bad time to be watching a little bit from the sidelines, but I kept myself busy. I uh joined the board of story stream. So I'm an advisor on the story stream board. They're they're a very innovative social selling ugc business, um, so still still active with those folks, which is great, and they're doing a lot around the whole transition to gen z social shopping, looking at the whole intersection of really social and e-commerce. So that's an exciting topic in its own right.

James Brooke:

I spent a bit of time working with an old customer of mine, michael Robinson, at SWEFT, really looking at the whole back office operations around product workflow, in particular for e-commerce, and, frankly, learned a huge amount about really what happens from that whole sort of buying, merchandising, planning stage of the business. So that was. That was fascinating. But then map came along, which was a little bit out of the blue, and I was sort of just thinking about, okay, what am I going to be doing for the next sort of three or four years? And map was a business.

James Brooke:

I must admit at the time I didn't really know, um, but it turns out that, uh, map is, you know, probably one of the only reasonably sized independent marketing cloud businesses out there in the markets. It's a combination of the old e-circle business you might remember that from from many years ago, uh, a german analytics company called webtrek, which was acquired as part of a PE roll-up until 2019, and a whole range of different capabilities that the business has added along the way. But it was a great opportunity to get involved with a business that actually had data at the heart of it and really was the foundation for building some very sophisticated marketing automation and AI based solutions for our very sophisticated customers. So it was too good an opportunity to miss Tim and I dived into that and I'm three and a bit months in and it's been an absolute whirlwind, but very exciting.

Tim Roedel:

Nice. We will touch on some of the data stuff later on in the conversation. It's going to definitely be a hot topic. It's a conversation I'm having on a regular basis with other clients as well. But you're so you're. You've gone out, uh, you've moved on from ambulance and now you're effectively juggling three board advisor roles. Is that right? And map is the full-time gig map is full-time.

James Brooke:

I'm board advisor at story stream. I do a little bit of work helping out michael and the team who are making good progress over in the us, but given the time zone, everything else is a little bit of work helping out michael and the swf team who are making good progress over in the us, but given the time zone, everything else is a little bit difficult to do too much more than that. And I do a little bit of work as well with hatch who are. Patch was founded by a guy called scott weavers right who founded kitty care, and kitty care was one of our very early customers back in back in the early days of ampliance.

James Brooke:

I've had a long relationship with Scott, so it's great to be involved as an operating partner. I look after a couple of his portfolio companies but try and contribute overall to the strategy as a CBC. But it gives you access to the very early stages of company formation and there are some fantastic entrepreneurs out there that are really going to change the world that we know it over the next sort of five to to ten years and it's very nice to get exposure to the very early stage because you you really get a feel for what's coming next yeah, absolutely.

Tim Roedel:

That's something that certainly we want to hear more about from you as we uh go through this um, this podcast. You're going to be a busy man then, certainly, so we uh we taking the time out to spend with us if we, if we could jump into um. The first thing we kind of already spoke about briefly when we before the podcast is that cx, the customer experience piece, and that plays into the types of customers and gen z and them being digital first, etc. But what do you think? What are the main things you're seeing that are changing within cx at the moment?

James Brooke:

yeah, it's very interesting, isn't it? Because I think we've. You know, you and I have been in this industry for a long time and of course there was this magical phase when millions of new internet users just turned up and so your e-commerce boat was floated by this rising tide of organic kind of growth. And that's happened for a long time. But I think in, particularly in in western markets, we've reached that point of saturation that there just isn't, you know, millions of new cohorts joining to become new customers, for for most retail businesses it just doesn't happen that way anymore. So it's the normal.

James Brooke:

Rules of competition are beginning to sort of reapply or reassert themselves. So customer experience has gone from being something that you had to be just about good enough, but as long as the core offer was there, you probably were successful to being absolutely the key, in my view, to to winning and retaining customers for a long time and building much deeper and, frankly, more valuable customer relationships. So customer cx is absolutely the heart I think of, of what modern retail businesses and modern consumer businesses need to think about. But it's a challenging environment to work in because of course, it changes all the time, and I think what we're really seeing at the moment is sort of three key trends. The first one, I'd say is, is the rise of what I call the attention economy. So if you think about it now, you've got limited attention. A lot of that attention is being stolen, if you like, or being being taken by the social networks. I can't remember exactly what the stats are, but people spend 56 minutes on tiktok and probably six minutes on your e-commerce site, right? So you've got a challenge, which is you've got to build an experience that, frankly, tears people away from some of the screens that they're absolutely addicted to and sort of gives them a reason to spend time with you as a brand, evaluate your offer, you know, begin to engage with you and start to build an experience. But, of course, you're competing as well with everybody else in the market. So, even if your experience is pretty good, if it's not as good as they expect ie it's not as slick as an uber or as easy to to order from as an amazon, or as straightforward to find a product from, as you know, some of those marketplaces then you're probably going to lose as well. So the bar has been raised, I guess, and it's continuing to raise all of the time, you've got this very socially aware new set of cohorts arriving as well.

James Brooke:

So the gen z's of the world and the millennials, I think, now make up just about 50 percent of all internet users. So if you don't have a really clear, clear-eyed strategy about how to engage those cohorts who tend to do things very differently to to some of us, let's say, older folks, you know our world was all google. You know we're going. We use google for search. We end up, you know, finding what we want. We'll go and explore some links we'll drive into an e-commerce site. We'll evaluate the offer, whatever it happens to be. Uh.

James Brooke:

The challenge now, of course, is that, uh, gen z's don't even start their search in google, they'll start their search in tiktok. So if you're not, you know, if you don't have a really clear-eyed strategy around okay, what are we doing about all these social channels? Then your experience is kind of broken by default because you're not you're not engaging those users. The type of content they expect is completely different. So you've got this very interesting moment, I think, where you know brands are going to have to work really hard, that you know. Consumers expect fantastically personalized experiences that are really resonating with them. They want to build a relationship with you. They care about the values that you have as a brand. So you've got to be able to communicate your commitment to whatever it might be whether it be sustainability or, you know, diversity or whatever it happens to be, because some of those gen z consumers care about different things as well and, fundamentally, you've got to iron out all the wrinkles in that experience people talk about on the channel.

James Brooke:

We've been in this world for, you know, a long time using multi-channel on the channel as a moniker for things that need to be done, but ultimately, that's all about integration. You need to have a fantastically slick experience. When I go into store and I make a transaction there, that data needs to flow back into wherever. I'm bringing all my data together so that I have a single view of customer. I can understand that. You know tim doesn't just shop online, but he buys things in store and he returns things in different channels too, and if I don't understand that behavior in those channels, I can't really deliver you an experience which is consistent and coherent online. So yeah, in summary, it's absolutely critical, but it's also very hard there's so many questions off the.

Tim Roedel:

The first one, if I take you back to the start of that conversation, is you talked about ripping consumers away from the, effectively the social platforms, um instagram, tiktok, etc. And getting onto your commerce site. Yes, but can you explain that a bit more? Because, if the way I see it is, I'm actually personally being driven to look at more on instagram. I don't use tiktok when I'm buying product, not services, because I don't see a lot of service selling on the social platforms. Uh, so actually is that not true? You're not trying to just engage more on the social platforms rather than pull people away from them?

James Brooke:

well, I think that's true. So product discovery is moving into those social channels, for sure. Instagram is fantastic for that, tiktok is also very good for that. The question then is so so what do you do with a consumer once they've found a product? So what is that? Handoff back into your e-commerce site.

James Brooke:

Because I think the challenge for retailers is you don't necessarily want to lose the consumer to make a transaction in those channels themselves. I'm sure Meta and TikTok and all those other social channels they've got great plans to expand their range of commerce offerings. They're trying to get the retailer or the consumer certainly to transact with the retailer through that. But as a retailer, you lose all the data, you lose all the context. You're not merging records, so that's not a great situation to be in.

James Brooke:

Really, what you want to do is bring them back into your, your, your experience. But if you're going to do that, you probably have to land them in a different way, because the expectations of those consumers having browsed content in that you know very rich kind of for you type experience typically means that they've got different expectations of of what they find when they come back to you as a retailer. So the big problem I see at the moment is that that Segway is poorly managed so you get lots of bounce. You can spend all this time in social channels, you can get really great content on there, but ultimately if you can't tie it back to the experience and you can't bring consumers back into a transaction where they feel comfortable and they understand what what's happened in that segue and they're seeing the product in the way that they expect to see the product, uh, if you don't do that, then I think you know you're you're losing out on a lot of opportunity and that explains why the the general customer journey is instagram.

Tim Roedel:

See something, click on it. Do you want a discount? Put your email address in so they can start to track. That's right, yeah, yeah that makes sense.

James Brooke:

You're trying to do this join all the time. You're trying to. You know, I know, I know that you were in my database, tim, but I don't know if the behavior that I, that I, that I tracked in my analytics over here, was you, until we've done that joint. So, yeah, those sort of segues are very important I tell you, social selling is dangerous.

Tim Roedel:

I've bought several things recently, but I've seen it gone ah look through one click, apple pay, job done.

James Brooke:

And it turns out I forgot I bought that waste of that I have all sorts of medical implements that I've bought, you know, for knees and various different. You know strains and injuries injuries I've agreed over here and half of which don't necessarily work for me anymore. But yes, it's very easy to do, isn't it? So I think transacting in the channel makes sense. If it's that kind of impulse purchase where you don't need to understand stock availability, where you don't have to look at lots of options. So fashion in particular requires you to find the right fit, the right colorway. You know the right style. You may have lots of options to do that. That doesn't generally translate well into a transactional experience on another channel because you can't flow through all the context that you need to make a good decision as a consumer. But of course, if it's a one-off purchase for an item which, uh, which really doesn't have much to configure, then it, then it is very compelling and of course you do end up buying things you don't want yes, you do, yes, you do.

Tim Roedel:

And what's your views on product versus services um and selling on these social, social channels?

James Brooke:

so I think uh, yeah, it's an interesting one that I think it's hard unless you can package up your service in a, in a sort of software wrapper, and it's delivered through that. So I think a good example of this. I bought something that was. I found something that was actually a very good physio site the other day I can't remember the exact name of it, but it was but it's essentially selling you, you know, a range of different sort of physio videos and all of that sort of things. That and then some online consultation that would help.

James Brooke:

Off the back of that, I did sign up to that through through social, and that's probably the only example I can give you because generally, um, that services wrap it doesn't translate into, excuse me, something you can buy immediately. So, yeah, I think it's at the moment, it's typically products. I think it really works very well for fashion, uh, and other very visual categories where you know it's very much a, you know, rich media experience, isn't it? You're interacting with beautiful galleries of products or videos of products. So so I think typically brands that are that are doing the social thing very well are working hard to translate their content strategy so they can get that type of content into those channels yeah, certainly makes sense, and we we did touch on customer expectations, uh, from previous generations, and you said gen z is roughly 50% of the target market.

Tim Roedel:

Gen Z and millennials together and it was together. Okay. How does their engagement for the or the customer experience differ from previous generations in your view?

James Brooke:

Well, I think their expectations are different. Sorry, the type of content they want to interact with is different. So if you look at um, gen z and millennials, they tend to um expect a different content strategy, by which I mean the typical funnel that retailers have optimized in e-commerce over the last 15 years is very much. You know product discovery. You then sort of narrow your choices through search or you or you sort of browse categories. You narrow that down into a single product, or you find the product directly on google and you come into that landing page. At the landing page you may have lots of different content types, like like ugc so ratings and reviews, but also visual ugc, where you're looking at other people like you that have bought that product and that sort of gives you permission to buy that product in your own mind, because you know I have this sort of social proof. What the millennials and the gen z folks want actually is that social proof right at the top of funnel. So it's a completely different experience. They expect to see people like them influencers and others that are talking about the product much earlier in the journey. They're less interested in the merchant's perspective on that. So you might be sitting there.

James Brooke:

As a category manager, you know optimizing your category landing pages for you know, the, the, the, the gen z, the sort of gen x's of the world. But that doesn't really work for the gen z's, because they come in and they're looking for look, I want much more social proof, I want it to be much more visual. They're looking for short form video, they're looking for all these different content types and that's where something like a story stream really comes in, because it really helps customers to to build those type of experiences and then personalize those experiences so that you're not putting the same set of content in front of the same people all the time. You can really begin to optimize and learn off the back of that. And I think it's really important for retailers to get their heads around this big change in the market. It doesn't affect all of them equally because of course, they all have slightly different demographics, but I think over time this will be the sort of dominant trending content.

Tim Roedel:

So it gets quite complicated then, and that's where MAP can add that value. You're having to personalize the engagement not just for gender, which is a very basic time point, but for the age, demographic, as much as their buying preferences, both when they buy and what they buy, and you're trying to do that in real time effectively.

James Brooke:

Ideally, yes. So at MAP you may remember that we just bought dressipy, which is personalization ai platform for fashion retail, and one of the reasons that we bought dressipy is because of it. You know, fashion's a really big segment for us at map anyway, but fashion retail is is really cutthroat, very competitive, very hard to make money in. There are all sorts of things that you need to consider, from full price sell through to minimizing returns. If you can start to get that mix right, so you're putting the right set of content and product in front of the right customer at the right time, you can sell through at full price and that means that you're making great margin. If, on the other hand, you kind of miss that and you're putting the wrong product at the wrong time or you're not promoting them to the right segment because you don't have the kind of data that Map has, which is all of the segmentation data that you need to really understand, what customers have bought before, et cetera, if you combine all that together you can create a very fluid, very sophisticated experience which is always optimizing for the right view of the of the offer at the right time for customers. That's really the bar that we that has been set in the market. So that's what consumers expect. If you can deliver that experience, you can do that really in a really slick way. Consumers are going to buy more from you. They're going to come back and buy again because they love that experience.

James Brooke:

But it is hard to do and you need a lot of technology. You need great data at the foundations. You need, particularly in product data, fantastically rich and enriched product data. You need great ways to to take analytics and behavioral data. Combine that with your customer profile so that you really know what their behaviors are on site. Integrate the omni-channel stuff. So you need sales data, returns data, everything else. It's all got to come together in a unified customer profile which enables you then to to do the next best thing for that customer every time. But yeah, automation is the key because that's almost impossible to do if you don't have technology to support you yeah, and you've moved us nicely onto data.

Tim Roedel:

It's like a perfect segue. You've obviously done this before. I've got a client we're working with at the moment and they've got massive, massive amounts of data in several different streams and their big challenge at the moment is trying to connect those streams so they can use that data and they want to then package it to sell it at a point of use for the consumer. It's around stocks and shares, shares, data, that kind of thing. How, how are you seeing that whole data thing play out? What are the biggest issues that you're seeing your clients are having to try and overcome right now?

James Brooke:

I think one of the key drivers is is privacy and all the regulation around data. So, uh, life would be relatively straightforward and I say relatively if you didn't have to consider that. But of course it's very important in this day and age that, as a consumer, you have great confidence that you're buying from a brand that respects your privacy, that respects your preferences, that isn't going to share your data or do things with it that you haven't consented to. So, first-party data, party data, I think is absolutely critical. We've moved from a world where, you know, the cookie apocalypse didn't quite arrive in the in the really sort of doomy sense of that, but but the way that you can capture and and track user behavior across. You know, the internet is definitely changing and google's privacy center and pmax and all the rest of it are sort of doing all sorts of things around that to try and change the way that consumers interact with you, give you data, enable permissions and consent. But fundamentally, you've got to start from that place, because if consumers don't trust you, they won't share with you, and if they don't share with you, you can't market to them in a personalized way. So so I think, right at the core of it. You have to get your act together when it comes to privacy and GDPR and all those other things. At MAP, that's something we take very, very seriously. Indeed, we very much have a German heritage in the business, and in Germany there is a huge focus on empowering the consumer to take control of that, and I think that's a great thing. So we've built security and privacy and sort of the right data protections all the way through our stack, all the way out, so that anybody that deals with whether you're a retailer or a bank or a telco or however it happens to be, you know has huge confidence that they're not going to be exposed to some kind of data breach or consumers aren't going to come back to them around that.

James Brooke:

So privacy is key. That's the, that's the foundation. But then you need great tools to do the integration. You need to really understand how to do the matching in a way that is and by the matching I say you know take the customer profile data so who's in your database, those emails that you've collected as part of the journey how do you match them to all the other data that they're generating in the different channels, and do that in a way that respects their privacy.

James Brooke:

So we spend a great deal of time working on the joins and the identity matching, so, ideally, that you really understand not only who's interacting with you where, but you're making them visible to the organization in a way that enables you to then segment them in the right way, send them an appropriate offer, personalize things at the right point in the customer journey, whatever it happens to be.

James Brooke:

But yeah, and there's a lot of tools and technologies now, you know, from the snowflakes of the world all the way through to different integration frameworks and the iPath solutions, like Jim's at Patchworks, you know, all of this stuff is coming together to make it a bit easier and take away some of the actual sort of plumbing challenges, if you like, of doing that the actual sort of plumbing challenges, if you like, of doing that. But ultimately, I think you've got to have a really clear strategy around how you're going to collect the data, what you're going to do with it and how you're going to enable those channels with the right insights so you can build the sort of experiences that consumers expect.

Tim Roedel:

And you mentioned the cookie apocalypse. I remember when this happened and it was going to be a massive headache for everyone and we wouldn't be able to know whether the channels people are hopping across to buy a product or a service. And it didn't, I think. A lot of the time you kind of just click and go okay, accept, it's fine. If you know the website, you'll go yeah, it's fine. But do you also think that there is an element of people are now widely accepting that actually being fed appropriate content, appropriate products, is actually okay. It's kind of a benefit, you know, do you think that's playing into this?

James Brooke:

yeah, I think. So, I think you know. Again, I think it comes down to trust, doesn't it? If you, if you, if you're going to share some data, you're going to click that accept all button, I think most people probably accept all right, unless you really understand what you're clicking on. It's hard to actually unpick many of those, many of those privacy centers, sort of pop-ups that come up, um.

James Brooke:

But you know once, once you build a relationship with a brand, I think then it's up to the brand to to make sure that that relationship and that trust is built over time. So so I think you've just got to be thoughtful around how you do it. If you start bombarding your consumers with, you know, billions of promotions the minute that they sign up, you're probably going to lose that trust. So you're saying you have to take a slightly longer view. It's not just about this, this, you know, this call to sales. It's about building a very valuable relationship over time with that consumer and really starting to understand you know how your content and how your brand fits into their life. It's probably the way that I'd describe it better. You know you have a whole life cycle of relationship with a brand.

James Brooke:

Uh, if they're very thoughtful about when they promote to you what they're promoting to you. I think you want more, uh. If, on the other hand, you know it's it's not really high value content, uh, you know, you either check out and it all ends up in the other bit of the inbox that you don't have a look at, or the other part of the experience that you just don't bother engaging with, or that app that you installed that you never open again, or, ultimately, consumers get so wound up by it they unsubscribe and you lose brand equity as a result. But I think it all comes down to the brand at the end of the day. They've got to think about that really carefully because, yes, consumers will continue to engage with great experiences that are very thoughtfully curated, but they won't if you don't and, uh, interestingly, we we kind of touched on it briefly but the technologies they're going to help navigate this because it is complicated.

Tim Roedel:

So you've got complicated um approach to the consumer with um understanding the buying signals, or what they buy, when they buy, etc. And then you've got the privacy element. That also complicates the whole process. So how are you using technology? What technology are you seeing is going to help make this easier?

James Brooke:

Well, I think a lot in order for you to to build a really powerful and sophisticated set of sort of automations and database interventions in your, in your experience, that really mean something, and so a good example of this is is the way that Drecipy think about the way that you buy fashion. So the the question that Sarah and Donna, the two founders of Dressupy, asked which I thought was really smart when they first founded the company is is why, if I, if I'm a personal stylist, why can I dress you, tim, or me, james, better than I can dress myself? And it's because they really understand a whole range of different dimensionality about what works for us as an individual in terms of what we can wear, what we can wear with other garments, how those garments come together to build an outfit or contribute to a wardrobe, and they understand that better than you or I do. We can't make explicit why we make certain preferences, but they went through a huge process to build a really interesting taxonomy of different data points that really matter to how we think about and buy fashion. Once you've got that taxonomy, you can then enrich all the product data that you have in in the catalog with all of those additional attributes, as, as the consumer then begins to engage with your site, you're actually learning much more about them than they just like that green jumper or that pair of trousers or whatever happened to be.

James Brooke:

What you're beginning to understand is a whole set of preferences related to how you think about yourself, what you think style is all about, what's on trend, etc. Etc. And so what you're beginning to understand there is intent. You're really sort of starting to get inside the mind of that consumer in a more automated way. The better you can be at that, the more effective you're going to be in any of your, your marketing and your merchandising activity online, because you begin to understand the why behind the buy is what we call it. So why people are doing things is absolutely critical. It's not good enough anymore to just know who they are and what they're doing. You really need to understand why they're doing it. If you can do that, then I think you're sort of a long way to cracking the code, to creating these really rich and seamless experiences and using data in very smart ways to empower those consumers to make better decisions.

Tim Roedel:

Yeah, agreed, I think that applies to all of sales really, and often it's missed. If you don't understand why someone is doing something and what the potential implications are of having that or not having it, or doing or not doing it, it's very hard to then provide a solution.

James Brooke:

It is.

Tim Roedel:

So yeah, it makes sense.

James Brooke:

And when you state it like that, tim, it's bleeding obvious. Actually, it's taken us 20 years as an industry, I'd argue to kind of get to a point where we're beginning to see much better technology that can begin to do this. But it's not just the tech. As I say, you have to have a framework, you have to have a deep understanding of how your consumers think, uh, and that you know. It doesn't have to be just fashion. It can be homewares and beauty and everything else, anything where there's a sort of an aspirational purchase, where you're really. It's really about who you are as a consumer as much as it is about the brand itself. It's there that you can really start to make it a huge difference. So so, yes, you're right, but it has taken a while yes, yeah, as all good things do, right, there you go.

Tim Roedel:

Yes, so the big question for me and I think actually for a lot of people I talk to, yeah what is the future of digital commerce?

James Brooke:

That's not a small question, Tim, is it? Let's face it.

James Brooke:

Yeah but it's a very interesting question to speculate on. I think the future for me of digital commerce is that really the distinction between digital and physical retail will really begin to blur significantly and ultimately disappear. I think we're, you know, if you, if you, if we go back in time and we think about how did e commerce sort of first appear? It was very much an adjunct to retailers, businesses, and in fact it was really the catalogue businesses that had a direct model anyway that really got on the bandwagon first and because it was quite a straightforward segue from, you know, browsing a catalog like an Argos catalog, and going to an Argos website and buying from there. Physical retail, you know typical, you know traditional high street retail, if you like got in on the act but then found it was, you know, a completely different business model. You had this, this different cadence that customers would buy from you. They wanted to return in different ways, they wanted to browse products in different ways. You needed a different sort of team and different set of capabilities. But if you remember back in the day, you know e-commerce was another store almost in in the erp, so it sort of sat in its own little silo over there and you'd buy something online, you'd wander back into john lewis on a this back in the early days and they'd look at you blankly like what have you bought? Where did you buy that from? Why? I don't even know how I process this return. So things have come a long way from then, and I think this is sort of the trend, though, is that in a digital first world where everybody expects you know that that interaction is seamless, that you can walk in with your mobile phone, that you can buy online, you can return on store. You can do that, you know, in many different ways.

James Brooke:

Um, it's. It's about the merging of the the physical and the digital into one very seamless experience. And I've heard what's the new term unified retail. I think it's kind of the terminology. That's sort of um coming along, and I don't know if that's a better or worse term than multi-channel or omnichannel or whatever, but I think what it's driving at is listen, there's only one brand experience in the consumer's mind. It's down to you as a, as a retailer, to to integrate the, the channels and the technology in a way that consumers don't think about it anymore, and that from a, you know, from a store experience perspective, it's as it's as easy to interact in there as it is online, and vice versa, and I think for me, that's very much the future of these things. It's all about creating that experience in a completely frictionless way that enables you to really get on and do what you want to do, which is engage with the brand, browse the products that you want, browse the storytelling, make an informed decision and, hopefully, buy.

Tim Roedel:

Buy great products and have a great experience I, I agree, and, um, I certainly found frustration myself with the returns experience sometimes, and actually also for frustration with some of the technology. Um, I think it was maybe h&m in spain where they had the tech which just scam what you were dropping in. It just really didn't work for me on the two occasions I used it, and so then I had to have someone come over and then they were manually doing it. I'm thinking this is not efficient, right? Um, what? What I would be interested to know specifically is with everyone having smartphones, or the majority of having smartphones, why are we not using smartphones to record the transaction and then enable us just to tap, tap to refund or tap to bring back products and services?

James Brooke:

isn't it? I think that there are still, you know, many, many challenges, I think, in sort of making all this work. Part of it is is comes all the way back down to data at the end of the day. You know you, you've got challenges around integrating the data in real time. You've got challenges around making good decisions around the data, around bringing the profiles and the consumer behavior to to bear in the transaction and making that that seamless. But even things like payments, uh, refunds, and you know all of that stuff, particularly when it involves money. You know there need to be a lot of guardrails around, quite sensibly, because you need to make sure that you know it's, it's fraud proof and you know it's not hackable and all that kind of stuff. And, of course, there are bad actors out there that I think retailers struggle with, in the sense that you know they will. They will defraud the company and they'll find the cracks in the experience that they can exploit in order to, you know, send product to you know the wrong address and claim that it hasn't been delivered and get refunds and all that kind of stuff. So I think what you described is an ideal scenario getting there and doing so in a secure way from a retailer's perspective, making sure that whole integration works from a consumer's perspective and and ensure it's you know it's private and secure and isn't susceptible to to bad actors. You know makes this stuff quite hard to do.

James Brooke:

But, yeah, over the years things have improved and I think the technology is getting better, systems are more open.

James Brooke:

Um, you know, initiatives like mac and composable, which I know sort of had their sort of ups and downs in terms of approaches, but fundamentally are doing the right kind of thing, which is make your experience something that you can continually upgrade, continually optimize the whole adoption of a sort of product mindset to the the whole retail experience. I think it's another great innovation which which means that you're thinking about the integration experience of a sort of product mindset to the whole retail experience. I think it's another great innovation which means that you're thinking about the integration experience not just looking at little silos of technology and sort of point-to-point integrations. You're thinking about, okay, end-to-end, what's my customer journey need to look like? How's I need to get optimized. All of these approaches are actually helping to build better and more seamless experiences, but there are still issues. And to build better and more seamless experiences, but there are still issues and I think it's important that we recognize that and it isn't easy to do?

Tim Roedel:

yeah, certainly not, and I I agree it will take time and the consumer absolutely doesn't really care about the various touch points, because they're just interested in the brand and how smooth it is. And do they get what they need? Yeah, to try and make some of this, uh, fix some of this quickly. Um, and obviously we have. We've gone almost 40 minutes without mentioning ai, which is unheard of at the moment. Does ai feed into this in terms of providing solutions, some of these technical issues we've spoken about, or technology issues?

James Brooke:

I think it does and I think, of course, you know, when people talk about ai at the moment, they tend to be very excited about all the generative ai stuff because it's kind of easy to understand, simple to interact with, it's kind of magical when it works, and I think so folks are looking at that going okay, if I've got all these very powerful technologies to that I can bring to bear on the experience, how do I deploy them and how do I make an experience which is better off the back of that. And I think a lot of focus therefore has gone into the benefits potentially, of using AI to optimize processes, to improve productivity in the back end, to begin to take away some of the drudgery in building those experiences, because ultimately, what you're trying to do is quite time-consuming and and difficult if you've got 50,000 products in your catalog and you're selling in multiple markets and you know the challenge and the complexity compounds very quickly. So you end up with small teams that are under a lot of pressure, trying to optimize certain parts of the experience but probably leaving other parts of the experience behind. I think AI, you know automation in particular, you know the sort of agentic AI that folks are talking about now, which essentially empowers AIs to be quite autonomous, to go away and perform tasks, to interact with other AIs. To bring all this stuff together has huge potential to completely transform the productivity equation within retail, and that enables you then to invest the time and effort in building better experiences, making it more seamless, sort of, you know, smoothing off the edges of those experiences and making that that vision come to life. But of course, it's quite early days and I think that's going through its own hype cycle as well.

James Brooke:

Um, you say we hadn't talked about ai already. I think we'd spoken about the machine learning, end of AI, which, of course, has been around for a lot longer, and machine learning is a very powerful set of tools that enable you to, you know, to enable the machines to learn and to do things that then enable the automation. So personalization, recommendations, intent, discovery, all of those things are very much machine learning based. I think what's very exciting is when you combine these two approaches together so you begin to drive productivity, benefit from the automation, but you can build much more autonomous experience generation, autonomous marketing platforms, and that's very much where we're heading with. Map is trying to do more and enable the teams that are under huge pressure in e-commerce and marketing to actually create the experiences that they want without having to, you know, triple the head count or whatever it happens to be. So, yeah, I think the intersection of gen ai with machine learning is going to be quite significant.

James Brooke:

I think it's it's one of these classic um moments in in ai where you know the short-term impact's probably been slightly overestimated, but the longer-term impact is probably underestimated. I think you know it's attributed to bill gates, but I don't think it was his quote. You know that most new technologies, you know that everyone overestimates the impact in five years and underestimates the impact in 10, and he said it about the internet very famously and he was quite right. You know everybody thought the world would change instantaneously. It didn't really. But the world that we now live in is completely different, you know, in many respects in terms of consumer experience, than it was 20 years ago, and I think that's that's very much going to be the trend with ai as well yeah, and a lot of people obviously talk about the, the pace at which ai moves, so maybe those timescales are slightly different, but I would tend to agree.

Tim Roedel:

There's two things, and I posted about this on LinkedIn this morning. Actually, the AI progress is going to be relevant to data access, which we've talked a lot about. There's a huge amount of private data and without access to the data, it's going to struggle to be able to do the things we need to do. But also, I don't know how you feel about this, but particularly from a sales and purchasing products perspective, I think personal engagement is going to become more in demand as it becomes less widely available, and so I think that if you can leverage ai to create efficiency, to drive human interaction, personal engagement that for me seems like a sweet spot, um, particularly what we're talking about with trying to get a product in front of someone and get them to buy that product well, yeah, I mean I think you know, I guess you know retailers everywhere struggle with this all the time, don't they?

James Brooke:

I, I mean you go into. I mean Courage is a great customer of ours at Ampliant and I know Andy Gamble well and he's done a great job of modernizing that experience. But a lot of what they've been trying to do is focus on the in-store experience and make sure that you know, when you're engaging with a store associate, that store associate is properly informed. They really understand the category of product that you're, that you're working in, but of course they've got thousands of products that they somehow seem to you know they've got to understand, they've got to know about, they've got to be able to, to talk in an informed way about and help you as a consumer, guide you through that, that sales process.

James Brooke:

And I think you know andy andy and co are using lots of ai sort of tools and technologies to sort of expedite that process. You know, enable teams to to get away from the drudgery, start doing things in a more um, sort of value-added way. So you're spending less time on the on the blocking and tackling, and more time on the value-added conversation. I think that's potentially the benefit, not just for pro curries of the world but all retail and all consumer businesses is if we can find a way to get rid of all the drudgery, take away the you know the stuff that you have to do, but it's really quite time consuming and often quite fiddly and you need to concentrate to do it. If we can get agents to do that work for us, it means that we can step up you know that sort of hierarchy of needs and get into the fun stuff which is typically more experiential and, may you know, human to human interaction, which is frankly what we all enjoy absolutely.

Tim Roedel:

The curry's thing is a great example because they have got thousands of products, but I don't want it to go in there and have to read up on printers. I want to go and speak to someone who can pull the data from an ai tool and then just present to me what I need to know, and that's kind of how I'm looking at it well, that's it.

James Brooke:

But whether it's printers, or you're buying a dress, or whether you're buying a, you know, buying a new piece of furniture, john Lewis, or wherever it happens to be, ultimately you want to. You want something to curate a set of choices for you that are thoughtful, that have spent time understanding your needs, that have done a good job of of sort of finding something that, from a brand perspective, makes sense from an assortment and then and then talk you through that assortment. I think I think that's really what great retail is all about, isn't it? It's sort of you go and you have that sort of magical moment where you're like, I think I kind of know what I want, but actually go in and like actually, no, I didn't realize that that was really important or this was really really interesting to me, or, in fact, this would work better. So you come away from that interaction, you know, having bought something, feeling great about that purchase, which means that you're much more likely to go back and have that interaction again. And and this is really important, because I think for most retailers, a one-off interaction isn't very profitable and in fact, a one-off online interaction is generally, you know, the if you take into account customer acquisition cost is an unprofitable interaction.

James Brooke:

So so retail has got to do a much better job of delivering you an experience that you want to repeat. You want to go back and buy one more thing, or buy another set of things in a different category, and for that to happen, I think you've got to do what you've just described, which is build an experience which which just feels personal. Forget personalised for a second, it feels personal. It's like. You understand me, I understand your offer. The segue between all these interactions is really slick. It really works very seamlessly. I get what I want at a good price. I'll come back.

Tim Roedel:

Okay, and so what would you say? And maybe this is it, but what would you say is going to be, if you had to pick one thing, the single biggest shift or change in digital commerce, in the next, I don't know. Whatever you want two, three years.

James Brooke:

Well, I'll go with this sort of personal agent angle. I think this is really what's evolving quite rapidly is that your phone will begin to know an awful lot more well. It knows a lot about you in, in a sense, and it has all the data, but it doesn't really know very much about you in the sense that it doesn't think about your data, create meaning from your data and sort of intervene in a kind of personal assistant kind of way. But I think we're going to get to a stage where our smartphones become essentially a sort of home for our, for our, personal assistant avatar. You know it's us, but in digital form we may begin to to ask it to do things. So you know, if you remember the promise of alexa from amazon's perspective, was it sat in your, in your kitchen and you could sort of add things to your shopping basket? I wonder how many of you ever really did that. I think I tried it a couple of times. It was all a bit clunky, didn't quite work, yeah, but at the end of the day, right, um, all the data around what I buy for grocery shopping is available. It's somewhere, um, and if you really know what I buy, my kind of preferences. Um, you can. You can have an ai agent sort of sitting there in the background going, okay, well, you know you're running low on this stuff. This is stuff you need to think about. There's something upcoming in your calendar that you're going to need to get prepared for. You're going out for dinner here, but you're cooking at home on this sunday. I think there's a huge universe of possibility there which will really change the way that that we interact with these technologies. And if you look at, I think, the new operator mode in open AI which came out very recently, essentially what it's beginning to do is sort of create that autonomy. You can sort of instruct it to go and do things book me, you know, book my travel. Go and buy something, you know, book me a hair appointment, whatever it happens to be all that stuff which is quite painful to do. You've got to phone up things. You've got to go on open table. You've got to go and find something, browse something, if to do. You've got to phone up things. You've got to go on open table. You've got to go and find something around something. If you can autonomously instruct an agent to do that for you and it will go off and it will start making some of those decisions, maybe initially come back with choices that you then transact on, but maybe ultimately make the transaction itself. Then it's going to completely change the way that you have to think about how you build and manage experiences, because you're going to be dealing with machine to machine interactions that will that will have to happen autonomously. So you're going to you're going to see a sort of big change in the way that you need to design and build digital sites and experiences and storefronts to make them readily accessible to other ais.

James Brooke:

Now this sounds like science fiction but it kind of happens already in email land, because email land had a huge problem with spam. If you remember sort of 10 or 15 years ago criminal activity on it would say, hi, you're being bombarded with phishing attacks and all the rest of it. That hasn't entirely gone away, but it's gone away. A lot is because between you and the rest of the world are a whole range of machine learning algorithms that are trying very hard to look at the incoming email stream and strip out anything that they think is suspicious or is malicious in intent.

James Brooke:

So already machines are kind of dealing with machines you have to sort of when we do deliverability at, which is a key part of what we do make make sure the email that you create on the platform the campaign gets to the inbox. In effect, we've got to think about what does the machine learning algorithm need to understand about how this is put together to ensure it gets through the inbox. So there's already this sort of machine interface between us and the consumer. That's going to happen everywhere, tim, and so what we're going to end up with is a more autonomous world, a world in which you've got to think about agents as much as you think about humans, and I think that's going to transform practically everything, and we'll sit here in tennius time and have a good conversation about that, I hope yeah, I'm sure we will.

Tim Roedel:

So we're going with uh, the, the agents and and their impact on personalization experience for the next period of time.

James Brooke:

Personal agents, I guess Personal agents.

Tim Roedel:

Okay, so we've talked about quite a lot. And how could you, how would you suggest businesses, particularly retailers, can take some of the information and apply it practically within their businesses to stay ahead of the curve, I guess?

James Brooke:

well, I think the you know technology is key to doing this. I think it's really important that you think about, like I say, the who, the what and the why is sort of the way that I would characterize it at the moment. You're going to have great, great, great ways to store and aggregate data and build a unified customer view. You've got to have great, great, great ways to store and aggregate data and build a unified customer view. You've got to understand what those customers are doing in the channels that they interact with you. So it's really important to have the behavioral analytics and all of the data associated with that and be able to match that analytics data to those identities. But then you need the machine learning, you need the AI that sits on top of that to really start to infer the why.

James Brooke:

I think if, if, as a retailer, you can get to the why, the why behind the buy, why your customers are buying from you, then you've got a really good opportunity to start using those insights to create more profitable experiences. And you can do that right now. The technology exists, it's it's sort of a lot of it can be deployed relatively quickly and simply these days. The opportunity is there. I think it's just down to retailers to get their own strategies around how that customer experience should evolve to align with that new reality.

Tim Roedel:

And you know the opportunities are there to move the business forward.

James Brooke:

And what advice would you give specifically for those retailers trying to engage with the Gen Z of this world? Probably hire some that's really important and get those folks involved in your decision making process. I think there's probably nothing worse than you know. Let's think of it slightly different. You remember when mobile became a thing and everybody talked about mobile first. But you'd wander into design departments and it always sat there on giant wide screen you know 35 inch screens, designing website experiences, but we were all looking at them in these little rectangular boxes. You'd be thinking, well, so you say you're mobile first, but you're not really thinking first. Well, it's a little bit like that, I think, for the gen z bit, which is, uh, you know, if you really want to understand and engage with that demographic, you need to make sure that you thinking of first.

James Brooke:

Well, it's a little bit like that, I think, for the gen z bit, which is, uh, you know, if you really want to understand and engage with that demographic, you need to make sure that you really understand and engage with that demographic, which means you've got to start employing those people. You've got to start doing your user research, really understanding what's important to them. I think there's a sort of psychographic element to that. What they value is different, so you need to talk to them differently. How they interact and behave different, where they start their customer journey is different. There's a whole range of user experience challenges which really come back to research. You know, get your folks out there in the field really understanding that behavior, start to think about good strategies to accommodate you know some of those requirements in a new way and begin to evolve that experience such that you can personalize, because at the end of the day, you can't create 65 000 different experiences manually. Some folks are going to like it this way, others like it this way.

Tim Roedel:

You need to be able to automate that ultimately and, as you said before a couple times, that feeds back into the why. Right, if you've got some gen zedders in your team, you really can understand the why around purchasing Absolutely.

James Brooke:

You know, at the end of the day, that's all it comes down to, isn't it? So, yeah, I think it's a huge opportunity, but some will embrace that better than others, as usual.

Tim Roedel:

Yeah, absolutely. I think we've kept it under an hour believe it or not, we can't go through lots of topics we have. I really appreciate your time um really insightful and I think the uh, the audience we have, which is growing month by month at the moment across all the platforms, we'll uh we'll find this a really, really interesting and engaging um podcast. So thank you very much I hope so.

James Brooke:

Thanks for the opportunity great to catch up, as always, and speak to you soon. Yeah, speak soon.

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