This article from Modern Retail about the retailer rush to develop and integrate their apps into the OpanAI & Claude ecosystems caught my eye.

Having worked in retail for more than a decade, I understand this rush because the industry is reactive. Most of the time it goes down this way: Target or Walmart or one of your competitors does something, then you rush to copy-cat as fast as you can for fear of getting ’left behind.’ This is exactly what’s happening here, especially when you consider the marketing narrative around AI these days.

Having products or services surfaced in ChatGPT or Claude, and then having those apps facilitate a checkout on your behalf is alluring for retail leadership because all they’re hearing is that this future is inevitable. (It’s not.) But if we pull on this thread and think about how this path might evolve, I think there’s a lot of risk associated with it. From the article:

Still, some retailers, brands and other app developers are hesitant to hand off customer information and payments to OpenAI, according to Bloomberg, which also reported that developers have complained about a tedious app approval process, a buggy coding system and the lack of usage data.

If the AI hype comes to fruition, we’ll be mediating our entire existence through these apps eventually. In my opintion, this is our generation’s version of the snake oil pitch. When it comes to retail, if we optimize for the snake oil we’re being sold we will have willingly embraced a layer of obfuscation between our customers and our products. We will have relinquished the most important aspect of retail: our customer experience. If we don’t control the quality and consistency of our customer shopping experiences, what differentiates us?

We will have also lost any position of control over margins & profitability because we will be at the mercy of our new LLM marketplaces. This would create immense market pressure on our business. Just look at Amazon for how this might pan out long term. How is that going for business owners other than Amazon?

I think retailers need to think critically about this rush to embrace a mediation of their shopping experiences and business conditions by LLMs. Curiosity is one thing. Curiosity should be always be encouraged to understand the potential for emerging technologies. But rushing to embrace the vibe-based future we’re being sold is a concerning play in my mind.