Fastest commerce marketing teams are using AI to move at unprecedented speed. Check out the latest @SuperpilotAI case study with ALICE + OLIVIA's NYFW campaign ๐ https://t.co/upCOMsarbm
Weโre at @salesforce Connections, its marketer conference - demoing @SuperpilotAI to brands & retailers. Itโs remarkable how natural the agentic messaging is now for Marketing Cloud given all of the Data360 investments, Flows, marketing on core etc. Great job @thatstokes & team.
"I do not think a chatbot is the right interface for travel or e-commerce." - @bchesky
"I think the future is not apps. The future is agents, but I don't think they're going to be text-forward. I think they're going to be really rich user interfaces."
"Imagine using iMessage to do everything, when in fact every other app has a unique interface."
"With e-commerce, you want a very rich user interface. It would be agentic. You can have a conversation with it, but the point is that it has to be more visual."
Second-time Founders is my favourite gender :
1) no deck until someone asks three times
2) first hire is a lawyer
3) distribution for the product before the product exists
4) "we don't need a big round" and means it this time
5) replies to every customer email personally because they know what ignoring customers cost them last time
6) sleeps 8 hours and ships faster than everyone else
7) the only person in the room who isn't impressed by the term sheet
Second-time founders are the best breed of founders
Apple's Vision Pro fiasco is even bigger when viewed from today's AI superhighway. "Who knew" that humans wanted less computer period, not a computer on their head.
Lightspeed's @buckymoore says the real opportunity in the AI app layer is in large industries far enough afield from where the model providers are today โ and where the context engineering to get customer data into the model is extremely nuanced and messy.
"I think this is kind of the elephant in the room right now โ whether post-training open-source models combined with the unique user feedback you get from being an application provider is defensible enough."
"That is going to be an inevitable challenge for any of these industries that hit a maturation point of AI adoption, like legal and software engineering have."
"But on the other hand, there are some industries where they're very large, they're far enough afield from where the model providers are today โ and probably will continue to be โ and the context engineering to actually get the customer data into the model is just so messy. It requires going across different business functions, it requires a lot of hands-on forward-deployed engineering."
"Those are the kind of companies that we get really excited about. Because I think being really good at that is not only defensible, but it also allows you to generate a feedback loop with your customers, where you hear a lot of their secrets. And those secrets allow you to feed that back into how you make your product better at the expense of anyone else playing in the space. Because if you're serving the customer, they're only serving you those secrets."
"I think Palantir is a good example of this in the pre-AI era, and I think we're going to see many companies ascend in that same way."
@Tuzoff It's all competitive, however different enough to create new winners too. Just like how database companies didn't automatically win in software or how many on-prem software winners didn't win at SaaS. YMMV!
One emergent effect of AI on vertical SaaS is an even higher degree of specialization. Itโs possible to go deeper, faster on features - while competition heats up, too. In the end, the customer wins.
@Tuzoff AI systems with real revenue scale compete with labor (existing or unfulfilled) more than with systems of record so itโs kind of like apples vs oranges. Very nuanced between verticals and incumbents, yet the $$$ TAMs are very compelling.
The #1 thing to get right is aligning the entire company to benefit from the abundant intelligence of agents. Itโs a harder & bigger shift for the enterprise than mobile or cloud was - a blue ocean opportunity for startups. h/t @edsim
Agents unlocked product velocity.
Engineering used to be the bottleneck.
Now the constraint is how fast the org can keep up
Messaging.
Launch decisions.
Sales enablement.
Customer comms.
High product velocity requires high organizational metabolism.
Every function needs to be agent red-pilled