Welcome to Retail Checks and Balances, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the bustling world of commerce and culinary delights to help you grow your business and win. Join us as we explore the fascinating stories, trends, and challenges that shape the retail and hospitality industry, from cozy corner cafes to sprawling shopping malls and everything in between. And now, here's your host, Kevin Welcome back to Retail Checks and Balances. We're here with a special returning guest, Nat Pavic from Kibo Commerce. Welcome back. Tell us what exciting things you have for us this week since you last met Hello, Kevin. Thank you so much for having me back. So when I first joined the podcast, I was just starting out at Kibo Commerce and I had, you know, a big vision and big dreams. And now it's been six months in and feels like two years, more like two years in. And so we have so much going on here at Kibo. And I wanted to tell you about our latest product launches, primarily Agenta Commerce, what that is, what that means. And then I was also hoping to go through our plans for dropshipping and marketplace, which I think are very Huge and ambitious, and I'm excited to share, um, as That's great. So let's jump right in. Tell us what's new. I'm excited to hear what you have to say. You choose which order OK, sounds good. So I think, you know, a lot of people are talking about agentic AI these days. And I just want to clarify some of the terminology and some of what it is. Misperception. Yeah, yeah. It's everywhere. Literally every single software vendor is talking about this. Every single brand or retailer out there is trying to implement it. But we've had this concept of AI, LLMs, and agents coming together. Agents don't have to be AI-based, but agents are, technically speaking, agents within a platform, not humans, right? are processes that execute on your behalf. You'll get some sort of inquiry and you'll be able to do X, Y, Z action within the platform or outside of the platform. They're able to autonomously do stuff for humans. We've added an AI layer to that. People are used to business processes or flows or rules, but now there's an interaction layer. LLMs are adding fuel to the fire where you can prompt an agent to do stuff for you. And so what's interesting is everybody's working on this, and everybody's working fast and furious on this. And we released a version of agentic commerce. We're calling it agentic commerce, meaning agents, AI agents focus on commerce use cases only. So not an AI agent platform. where you can build your own. I think a lot of vendors are really focused on creating tools for people to build agents for any purpose. And I think the reason that's there is because people don't really know what the use cases are. So what we're doing is we're talking to our clients, figuring out the biggest pain points in commerce right now, and then creating agents to solve those pain points. Our very first agent that was released in Q2 was a shopper agent. So this is an engagement layer agent that can talk to shoppers, help them add things to their cart. And we've recently since launched what's called a customer support agent. So within our customer support view, so that a support rep could ask an agent to do stuff for it. So this is not a customer facing agent, this is an employee facing agent. And I think we're soon to launch some, what we call the merchandiser agent. So basically the agent that's going to handle merchandising, you can ask it to write product descriptions, you may be able to ask it to generate promotions, et cetera. And so we had this sort of bold vision through, you know, our chief product officer, our engineering team, Sachin Sharma and Thomas Phipps. They've sort of really developed a really cool way to approach this. And I'm just sort of impressed with both how fast we're building. I'll tell you why we're building so quickly. But also I feel like how correctly we are. We're focusing on the right things. So I just think it's it's the technology is amazing. If you've ever interacted with our agents, you get a demo. So it's going to be a demo live on our website. And probably by the time this airs, it'll be on our website. So you can go ahead there and see it. But they're so fast. That's what's really incredible is how fast the agents are at interacting and responding and executing. And so, yeah, I mean, what should I what should I go into next? You My interest is piqued. So tell me how exactly, give me an example of how are they going to help the shopper make a decision on a purchase? Is it based on some sort of history that the customer has been shopping? They're That's a great question. So there's like, you know, when you're sort of on a website and I think a lot of people are interacting with chat GPT today. So then they have some experience with that. You may go on chat and you may say like, Hey, give me, this is like my recent product searches, like give me the best espresso machines out there. And it starts to compile it for you. And, you know, basically the way that consumers are doing product research is, is It's shifting. They're used to going on Google. They're used to looking at a million different blog posts, creating maybe like a matrix of scorecards. Shopping has become really complicated for shoppers. You used to be able to go into a store, go to see the appliance, buy it off the shelf and go home. And now that's not good enough. You're doing all this mental calculus. And so what's happening is chat has introduced this new layer where people are now asking chat to do the summarization, to do the analysis for them, to tell them what the best XYZ is. And so it's really able, this agentic LLM layer stuff is really able to uh, summarize complex product knowledge. And so what retailers can benefit from is, you know, when you interact with a little chat window and I will say agents are not limited to the chat window, but the chat window is the first place where we're exposing agents and agent can be what I call multimodal. So they could say, have a conversation with somebody in a chat window and then follow up in an email. And then, you know, in the future, we're going to see it making possibly making even a phone call as voice. LLM gets better, right? It sounds more like a human. And so an agent can sort of be your like guide without having to leverage a human because we know humans right now, if we think about, you know, the personal assistant shopper at a store, those may not be available for online queries because there's so many online queries. And if you interact with a chatbot today, you know how irritating that can be. You're going down a tree, and then you just like, you end up just like hammering human, human, transfer to an agent as soon as possible. And so if you're interacting with an AI agent, that's not the experience you're going to have. You're able to have a conversation. It's not going to give you a tree. It's going to understand the context and respond. And it can pull from the inventory and the product categories and answer complex questions about the product. And so you start to have this experience that you would have with a store associate, basically. but on the website and it can be your whole guide. And now, you know, I think we're sort of focusing on the chat window. And I think the evolution of that is a little bit more broader. You could imagine an immersive agentic experience with a brand so much so that it could be it could spell the end of the website, really, if you think about it. Because if you would go and look at a grid and try to search and try to filter versus have a concierge that just guides you through a shopping experience. which would you choose? You know, probably a large number of people would go for this more Perfect. But, um, so you're saying that this is, it's, it's a personal experience. So is it that, um, I'm in a chat window or am I actually looking at some sort of Right now you're looking at a chat window. So our first release is really a chat base. And what's interesting about it is one thing that people are not prepared for is that there's this concept of deterministic and probabilistic agentic interactions. And brands and retailers, and most people are used to the deterministic one, where if you say something, it responds in exactly the same way every time you say that. And the benefit of that approach is you have brand security. You're like, OK, my agent's not going to say anything inappropriate. I know exactly what they're going to do. But the problem with that approach is it's limited. If you haven't accounted for a specific way that the shopper communicates, then that kind of goes nowhere really fast. So when we're introducing large language models like Gemini, which is what we are building on, and Gemini is great for a variety of different reasons, which I'll go into next. But one of them is the context window, meaning it can remember 10 times the length of conversation that OpenAI can, which is fantastic. And that has implications, which we'll talk about later. But when you're interacting with something like a Gemini, it's going to say something a little bit different every time. So because it's automatic, it's generating in real time the response. And so what's interesting is that brand adoption is now going to depend on whether or not brands are able to accept the innovation that it's going to bring given the level of variability. And what's fascinating is that we're building with the Google Stack. We're using Vertex AI. We're using some of the tools that Google has provided to build agents to configure them. And we're able to do things like change the voice or tonality with which the agent speaks or even like the vocabulary that the agent uses. Because you may say, be interacting with like, you know, this is just an example, but let's say you're interacting with Disney, right? A Disney persona or brand persona that represents Disney will have a very different attitude than say like, you know, a Starbucks persona, right? Or even like a Nike persona. Nike persona may be like motivational in nature. You might have like a barista persona that may be more judgmental in nature, you know, as a joke. So you may want to create these different personalities or overly friendly if it's a family type of environment or family type of brand. But what's great is that you can sort of change the tonality and the voice and the vocabulary. But right now, these agents are in chat windows. In the future, these agents are going to be able to, certainly with Kibo, traverse and move out of the chat window. So being able to, say, go into email. And this is all contingent on connectivity and modularity, which is what we're really focusing on, which a lot of vendors I know are not. building that base. But we understand that we're focused on commerce and we want to be able to sell the agents as a standalone without you having to buy our commerce engine. And so imagine buying a Kibo agent basically on its own. Well, that agent has to be able to use APIs, use hooks, be able to pull in from an external catalog that's not on Kibo. And so this will allow agents to peruse and act not only pull in data from different systems, but act in different systems, act and communicate in different systems. And so there are some companies out there that I know that actually build avatars for agents. Um, so they build a personification or personal representation of an agent and it's built on your agentic stack and it moves and operates like a CGI rendered person. So sometimes they even give them. you know, a certain personality, a characteristic, certain look and feel, and they may even do localization. So if you're, you know, logging in from a different part of the world, you might see an agent that represents what people look like in that world or what people look like in that neighborhood or what people sound like in that neighborhood. And so there's a lot of potential here. And I think the high-end sort of visual agents are really going to be interesting to certain brands that are visually dominated visually. Maybe some brands in the entertainment industry that want to create a unique experience or even just brands looking to upscale their in-store experiences or bring in avatars that people can interact with or potentially you know, the metaverse options that we haven't been taught, like the immersive experience options that we haven't been talking about a lot recently, which is where you might be creating an agent within a game. Could you imagine interacting with an AI agent in Roblox, right? And say, going to the store and being able to not only buy, you know, your Roblox in-game merchandise, but that it represents a physical good outside of the game. You could be mixing digital and physical goods within that card. I think the possibilities are endless, but I think that there's a lot of benefit, a lot of low-level lift that agents can do right now. like helping customers find and do research and pick products, add things to their cart. And we really believe in this integrated sort of commerce and order management kind of environment where you not only have the ability to add something to your cart, but you know if it's in stock at your store, if it's in stock online, you have that real-time inventory And I think that things get even more interesting when we talk about B2B. Because when we talk about a B2B agent, then you're talking thousands of SKUs, you're talking a very lengthy conversation about selecting all of your right project materials. And this is where that context window becomes very important. You know, and I'm going to pause soon, but I'm just going to finish this context conversation. You know, you may have heard that you can room GPT to be your friend. I don't know if you've heard this, but some people have gone and had real relationships with GPT and what they'll find. is that that only lasts so long. At some point, GPT resets because it only has so much memory. That's the context window. And OpenAI has a context window of 128,000 tokens, which is syllables. But Gemini has the longest context window in the world. It has 1 million and 10 million in testing. And so what that means is it can have a conversation that's 10 times longer. And within that context, it can remember everything you've said to it. And so it can begin to personalize based on information you've given before. It can remember that you were asking for these items. And so your cascading or follow-up questions are related to the items you were asking before, are part of the same purchase. And so that becomes even more important in the B2B transaction when the context window necessarily could be a lot longer and more complex in terms of selecting your items and building your order. So I'm going to pause here because I feel like I've talked infinitely. I'm going to let you ask a Oh, it's, it's, it's great. And I'm, you know, you remind me of, I don't know if you remember Microsoft had that paperclip guy that. Bring it back. I say bring it back Clippy, why not? It's, I think it's, they're using what, Copilot now One of the questions that sparked me out of what you just said is that you talked about adapting to different countries. What about, and I haven't seen this done very well. If a customer is irate and putting in a complaint based on how that conversation is going, how is AI going to adapt to That's an excellent question, I think. And that's what's great about using AI for this instead of humans is they're not going to get pissed off. I could be in a situation where I would be like, that's wrong, Mr. Customer. Don't talk to me like that. And an AI is just never going to say that. There's a real opportunity for AI to take that emotional load off of humans so that humans don't have to deal with irate customers, but also to always maintain that level of professionalism, never let that professional veneer slip. But it can also understand sentiment, right? So one of the things we've implemented is that when the conversation is recorded within the customer support screen within Kibo, you know what was the sentiment of the customer. Was it positive or negative? Were they frustrated or not frustrated? And certainly, we know that LLMs tend to be agreeable. If you've ever interacted with an LLM, you know that it tends to reinforce some of your ideas. You actually have to tell it to challenge you. So LLMs tend to challenge you on a regular basis. And so we know that they're actually possibly going That's great. I think controlling that would be a good idea. And as you're right, taking the emotions of a customer service rep out of it, at least in the beginning would be great because people are going to know I'm talking to a machine and he's not going to feel anything if I get pissed off or start cursing or stuff like that. a nice level conversation or trying to help and say, let's do this, let's do And you know what's funny, Kevin, is that the newer generation actually prefers to talk to a bot, which is kind of funny. Yeah. Like the older generation may say, well, just bring me to a human. I'm frustrated with technology. But how many times do you know a Gen Z, even your millennials, your younger millennials walking into a store being like, I don't want to talk to anybody. I don't want to have that interaction. But they're more likely to interact with something that's AI because they know that they won't be judged. They know that the AI will be impartial. It will give them an objective analysis. It won't try to sell them You know, it won't say like these shoes will stretch over time, right? Like that's my pet peeve buying shoes. They never stretch, guys. OK, just you heard it here. Just buy a bigger shoe. So and so people may actually be more trusting of A.I. because it doesn't have those. They're not sales driven. They're not they're not even paid. Right. They don't have a salary. They're not commissioned. And so they're not going to try and give you a sales pitch. And so they may be more likely to use A.I. to answer That's great. And I saw that the other day and I went to, I can't remember the, one of those brand stores, I shouldn't probably say it, but there was a young person with their phone and they were looking at the garments and stuff and just looking on their phone and the person, do you need help? No, I'm fine. I'm researching. And the only time they interacted with anybody is when they went to the register. And you know and then in some cases you go to stores now you can you can pay on a self-checkout now because you don't have to interact with people and you see like when you look at it you see more those younger folks going to the self-checkout and the lines are probably empty and you see a long skew of older people just skewing And it's so funny because I feel like that question of do you like or hate self-checkout is deeply polarizing because my friends and I fall in opposite. Like I will have, I will go grocery shopping and I'll have a full cart and I'm going to go through the self-checkout. And my husband's always like, are you crazy? Like, that's too many items. I'm like, nope, I want to scan. I want a bag. I'm faster. This is my thinking. I'm faster than the cashier who does this every day, right? It's completely irrational. But it's kind of interesting because we think about retail jobs and we think about the fact that retail jobs used to be very highly scaled. You used to go to the cheese shop and you talk to the person working there and they would know a lot about cheese and help you pick out the right cheese. And over time, what's happened is we've devalued retail jobs tremendously. And so now you have people that are coming in seasonal, temp, contract, part-time only. They barely know anything about the products. And so sometimes when you ask questions, they can't even help you. They can help you find the item, but actually don't know what the difference is with the quality of this backpack versus that backpack. And so You know, this will definitely impact how retailers, like if retailers start to engage and interact and allow more technology use, this will definitely impact staffing. But what it could mean is actually a move away from the minimum wage worker towards like the people that you have in store may actually be highly paid and highly skilled. And the people that you have in your call center, the same. So they'll move away from being run-of-the-mill, having to deal with every frustration, being basically the punching bag of the customer, to somebody who's a curator, a generalist, who's interacting with technology, who can solve complex problems, who can actually answer questions, who can tell you the dress looks good on you. And so this may mean the creation of a new type of job, both in the retail setting That's perfect. I mean, I've seen I didn't pay attention to it before, but recently, you know, you're buying something on Amazon and you would see, oh, what's the frequency of this item being returned? And you would say, oh, that's high. I'm not going to buy that based on that. I think that that I mean, you've opened, I mean, sorry, you've opened a kind of one of those rementioning returns. And by the way, we just launched reverse logistics as well. That's a huge one. What's happening now is we, those who practice commerce, as you know, we think that people will continue leveraging e-commerce channels more and more. And what's going to happen is as people buy more online, the rates of returns go up necessarily. Because I may have been doing a lot of research before. Now I'm buying more goods. I'm doing less research. So I'm just like sort of impulse buying. There's a lot of impulse buying now. And so returns are going to be a real issue for the industry. And it's something that we can both reduce and mitigate, but also handle post-purchase. And so when we think about our reverse logistics module, something that we're adding to it is what we call order routing in reverse. So basically, you ship something to the customer and you can have complex order routing, meaning you can decide based on their location, which distribution center to send it from, based on the inventory levels, where to pick it from so that people within that location still have access to that inventory. There's a lot of complex calculus that goes into getting the package to you. And what's interesting about that is, as people start to buy from agents, they start to buy from marketplaces, TikTok. Uber, I may order from my dollar store within my Uber Eats app, then the complexity of delivering that package increases because you've got all these new sources that you're selling to. And so what reverse logistics does is it's order routing in reverse. So you get the order, the return, where should it go and why? And how are you going to dispose of it? Is it in good condition or bad conditions for the ability of the warehouse manager to market or inspect it and then send it to the right place? And so one thing that people are doing, there's a lot of ways to reduce returns on the front end, like having more user-based content, having accurate reviews, having better pictures. There's a lot of people generating AI pictures. You have to be careful with that. Um, but having, you know, even like 3d interactive, uh, size scales, sometimes just having like a little, um, ruler next to the items so that people can see how big it is. So there's a lot of things that you can do. Accurate product information. Agents may have access to more product information that can help you understand that. So you reduce the, you improve customer confidence when they buy, you reduce impulse purchasing and reduce returns. But then on the other hand, what do you do with the item when it is returned and how do you dispose of it? Is there like somewhere you can resell it, right? So then you're thinking about resale markets. Is there a third party that you can sell it to? So then you're thinking about disposing it of that way. So you're trying to reduce the amount of garbage that you're creating. And it's definitely something that I think the e-commerce industry has to think about because obviously it's unsustainable to just continue throwing returns away. And so I think the way the returns are being handled is going to be a very huge concern Oh, wow. This is great stuff. I'm really excited to see where this goes, not only in the e-commerce side, but the retail aspect itself. I'm hoping that these technologies make it down to some of the brick and mortar stores now where you can really use AI inside the store because as you know I'm making the people more at an advisory capacity really take pressure off of you know dealing with the customer service side. Yeah, I mean, they could be using agents to upscale, to ask product questions that they don't know, to learn really quickly. So I mean, you're right, there's tons of opportunities in store for agentic AI to be helping and just all of this technology. And to your point, the division between e-commerce and brick and mortar is sort of disappearing. So we're seeing the E drop from e-commerce. We keep using the term commerce more broadly. And that may be reflected in the retailers that sort of win this battle are the ones that are going to figure that out and not have separate teams, one e-commerce dedicated one, but more like a commerce and a customer experience team. So that's exciting. Should we talk a little bit about dropshipping and marketplace because I feel like it's a huge... Let's go. Let's go. Yeah. Okay. I feel that's a huge announcement that we made, like casually launching dropshipping and marketplace. I will say marketplace is an interesting topic. And when I say marketplace, I mean the ability for a brand or retailer to sell third-party goods on their website. So for example, if you're on Amazon, Amazon is a big marketplace. Obviously, you can buy Amazon products, but you're mostly buying from other vendors listing on Amazon. Same thing with Best Buy and Walmart. They have two very well-known marketplaces. But what's happening now is that a lot of other brands are opening up marketplaces. And so I hear a lot from people in the industry that there's... I don't know if you were having these conversations, but there's a Yeah. So, I mean, our tariffs happening, our tariffs not happening, every month it's different. And so, all of a sudden, I have to pick a different supplier or have a contingency, have a backup plan for a supplier in a different region, in a different country. And that's creating a lot of chaos for brands. And so, one of the things that dropshipping helps with is, especially being able to find third-party suppliers quickly and easily, is being able to keep up with the market and with the musical chairs aspect of it. And so we're creating deep what's called EDI integration, so electronic data transfer integration, which is a very old world word for file transfers. And so you can take a file from a third party, right? And then in addition to that, we are not live yet, but imminently later this year, we're going to allow people to have their own seller and dealer portals so that you can onboard somebody to list an item on your site. That's going to be important because if you, say, lose a whole product line because you just can't deal with your current suppliers, then you have to think about not only onboarding new suppliers, but potentially maybe you can't find a supplier and you have to open that up to a marketplace of people that can bring you goods or bring you different items that you can fill that gap that you have, because you had a certain line of business, you no longer have it, but you have your brand, you have your customers, they're still looking for the same stuff. So maybe you may be looking for like adjacent items. So the use case I use constantly is like a renovation use case, because I went through like a big renovation, which dominates my life. But like, let's say you're buying cabinetry, and that cabinet retailer, whoever sells the cabinetry has the opportunity to add fasteners like faucets and handles and all this stuff that comes with the cabinetry. And what's great is the potential for B2B to be improved here. Because B2B may, in some areas, have a saturation point. Let's say you become the biggest maker of woodcutting woodcutting tools. And then you sort of, that's it. You've won the market. Most contractors and renovators come to you and now you're at the whims of, is our renovations increasing or decreasing? You're at the whims of what's happening with whether or not people have, whether or not interest rates are low and people can renovate their houses or they're not. And so having a marketplace is a good way to hedge against that because let's say you're creating tools for woodcutting. Well, if people who are buying wood cutting tools from you could buy the wood, right? So they buy the attachment to it. And you may already, you know, in your industry have those relationships. You may already have suppliers that you work with that, you know, that the same contractors use. And what's also great is I know so many renovation sites that sell materials for renovations are in my mind so terrible. There's a lot of manufacturers there. I'm just like, what are you guys doing? And they put up a website with HTML. It's really ridiculous. And so for the brand that gets it, the brand that has a performant site or portal where they're selling stuff to B2B clients, they have the opportunity to bring along some of those smaller brands or niche brands that don't have the same website budget, that are not going to get into commerce the way that the big brands are. And so they have the opportunity to be that avenue for them. And so I think marketplaces is sort of resurfacing as a way to deal with this chaos that we're experiencing in market right now. And what's interesting is that we know the players that are in that space, the vendors that are in that space. Let's just face it, they're on the pricey side. And so what happens is, you're stuck between a rock and a hard place. You want to do marketplace, but the entry seems so far beyond reach of what you're capable of doing operationally. So what we're introducing is sort of like, right now, dropshipping marketplace lite. You can get started with not overcomplicating things. You can just start to onboard dropshippers and marketplace operators without having to have this whole long, complicated process that some other vendors may be asking you to. So more of like the entry level to dropshipping and marketplace. So I'm really, really excited about that and helping people with So are you saying that if my company wants to open a marketplace, then you create that platform and then you go out and look for the different people based on what I want to sell. If I don't sell That's a great question. It's more like right now, I don't actually know if we have a plan to create what's called a list of suppliers that are available out there, but we definitely are providing a company with the tools to, say, have an onboarding screen where somebody can walk through and list their items. There's a map to, say, your catalog, because they may have different product attributes. They may have color and size and you may have color and shape, you know, just as an example. And so there's an element of like, you have to match to your catalog in order to list it on the same website. And then there's the whole, they receive the order, they have to receive it separate for them so that they know that they have to fulfill it. So there's like a whole architecture basically of tools that are needed to even start running it. In terms of finding suppliers, I'm not sure. Quite frankly, I'm You're blowing my mind in the sense that I'm thinking I want to open a site. Let's say I sell only dry goods. I'm using a parking analogy. Let's say I don't sell produce or meat, but the meat market, like a couple down the street, and I want to say, okay, I want to bring that into my marketplace and sell meat for them. And we'll go to deal, customers from my side are now connected to you and some sort of subscription. And just like how you see on Amazon now, you can see SoChime, Apple TV, and you can subscribe within the Amazon app. right? On your TV. So I'm guessing there's some sort of Absolutely, there is. And that's a huge benefit is that if you're onboarding a third-party supplier, you don't have to bear the burden of delivery. So you're basically taking a cut of that sale. So you're not going to make as much margin as you would, right? But you're making margin for not having to pay for that operation. And what's interesting is that you may say, okay, well, we're not going to be an Amazon or whatever. But the reality is, sometimes a brand's only avenue for growth, especially if the retail market's mature at this point, may be to introduce boutique designers. Maybe it is to introduce new people that might not have a listing at all. And so there's going to be a lot of cross-selling too, like maybe you can go direct, maybe you can buy this from a marketplace. So we are going to see the proliferation of, and this complete, like I would say, decentralization of the purchasing process. You may not even know if the person delivering it is even owned by the same company, maybe like another company is delivering it. It's like when you see those trucks coming by and they've got like, it's like a car that's delivering the package, right? Um, so we're seeing a complete decentralization and what's, what's great about it is that we're taking each of the parts of the process and allowing companies to move quickly, um, in grabbing a market or inventing a new product and being able to deliver it and go to market without having to build all the infrastructure because there's somebody else that specializes in a different part of the infrastructure. So bringing in those specialists to work together. Um, but that's going to increase. That's, that's, you know, we're, and the reason we're moving in this direction is because consumers expect to buy things the moment that they think about it, right? Like the moment it pops in their head, they want to like blink their eyes and get it delivered to their door. And so we're seeing this movement towards commerce anywhere being that commerce at the moment of interest or moment of inspiration. And we're trying to meet that complexity. And AI is one way to do that, right? So agents are one way to centralize and say, well, what do you want to get and where do you want to get it from? And dropshipping and marketplace is actually another way to deal with that complexity because it continues to decentralize the supply and purchasing process, right? And so it makes it easier for you to find that good in a variety of different places. And that's fundamentally going to impact how brands tell stories. So this is actually a theme that keeps coming up because if I don't If people are not coming to my site as a primary way of doing business and they don't get to read the copy that I've written, what happens to the story that I tell? How is it going to come across? And this is where brands have to get creative. A great example is CPG companies have done this forever because CPG companies used to buy through retailers. But think about those inspirational Mother's Day ads that make me cry about Tide. And it's like, oh my god, Tide pods, they're so inspirational. And it's having that brand tell that story so that when you go and you see a copycat, you say to yourself, oh well, but I know what's in these Tide pods and I know how they're made of, and I just don't know what's in this one because I haven't heard that story. And so you have this kind of gravitas towards the brand that successfully told a story, because what's also going to happen is lots of duplicates, right? People who are really good at operations are going to go out there, swipe whatever brand is out there, and start to sell because they're good at it, because they can distribute. And so this is also where brands are going to have to do two things. One is be better at storytelling, be better at storytelling in multiple channels. But also be good at delivering goods, right? Because if somebody can get a dupe to you faster, you might take that route, right? So as a company, operations and distribution and supply chain is going to be more important in this new world where you may not even control where the customer buys stuff, right? And so that's going to be an interesting, I think, next-gen transformation Fantastic. Wow. It's I think so. And I think sometimes people get a little bit glum because they're like, we're post-pandemic and they're like, oh, we had this big boost. But we're at an interesting point now where people are focusing on cost, people are focusing on supply chain. And that level of creativity is forcing us to get creative. is going to introduce the next level of innovations, which I think, you know, obviously we're thinking about here at Kibo. And to your point, we don't know what the shopper five years from now is going to look like, what they're going to look like, how they're going There's been a significant global change and this is so refreshing that people like you, your company is doing something different. Everybody keeps saying when you go to conferences, you see what Amazon is doing, you see what Walmart is doing. I mean, I know they're the giants and they don't care what my opinion is, but it's great that other people are stepping up and doing something different. I mean, I like exactly where this is going, especially, I mean, I think Keyboard World Commerce is a great company in terms of, you know, what's the strategic part to get customers to feel more comfortable, feel more generally Well, thank you. And I will say, I think we're in an interesting moment right now where we've had a few decades of certain companies getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And what's happened now is AI is going to change everything. AI is going to make it so that smaller companies can operate as if they're bigger companies. And so this is going to give an opportunity for smaller brands, smaller retailers to really jump in and say, hey, if we adopt this early, we don't have to wait for our competition, the big guy, because they may be slower to adopt things. And so it's an interesting and exciting transformation where the market may be shifting in the other direction, with actually small and nimble being a benefit to some organizations. And so we are here building products for everybody, big and small. And we're hoping that some of the bigger brands who wish to maintain their market lead will see the benefit of that technology. But I think the first, for sure, the people that use it first and experiment with it, first and foremost, will see huge gains if they And how do you think, I know you mentioned the word Gemini, that's going to blow Well, what's interesting about Google and sort of the approach they've taken and why we've partnered with them strategically is that we're using Gemini, but they already have built in the system where you configure the agent, the ability to bring your own LLMs. So actually, you're not forced into using Gemini. So if you do want to bring your own LLM, you can. And so they really understand this idea. We have the same philosophy in that vein of like, look, we have to, at the end of the day, give the customer options. They need to be able to bring their own data lakes. We don't want to lock them in into something that's overly expensive. And now they have to use 50 different parts of our product. And we know that the AI with the access to most data wins. And so the AI that wins is the one that has the most connectivity. Because if you limit an AI to a certain data set, you're like, okay, you can only access these three systems. Those three systems can only be as big as they can be. But if you make the AI so they can connect to multiple systems and have access to more data, then it becomes more efficient, more effective, more accurate, which is what we're seeing with our use of Gemini. is that it's lightning fast, first of all, because it's API driven. So it's asking for APIs, getting the answer right away and displaying it. It's not calculating through a slow UI or using some sort of business logic. It's not hampered by that. And then we're seeing that it's highly accurate and less hallucinogenic because of the A, context windows longer, and B, it has the facility of accessing more data. Like it's not locked in to certain systems. So we're really confident. We're really thrilled, honestly, with our partnership with Google and the approach they've taken. And we're looking forward to benefiting from some of those advancements. One of them is we didn't have to build our own trusted security layer. Google came with that. And so it allows us to focus on those commerce use cases. And it's so funny because when we built the demo, we actually had a few people from Google come and see the demo. And they were like, oh, wow, that's a really compelling use case of our technology. And we're like, yeah, because we're talking to retailers and brands just like you are. We're hearing their pain points and we're creating purpose-built agents to solve those pain points. Here's the Lego pieces. Go build your own. Good luck. Bon voyage. Bon fortune. Good luck on your voyage. So we're really directing people in a certain way and listening to what they're saying and building on top of that. And there's just so much grunt work in e-commerce right now. where sometimes people worry about reducing headcount, but e-commerce teams have for decades worked with not enough people, never had enough people to even do the stuff they want to do. And so for us, this is an opportunity to finally get commerce brands to the point where they're actually executing on their objectives. And there's so much work with the product. You think about product information, product descriptions, copy. product images. There's so much for AI to help us improve, which we're not even doing today. It's not cutting what we're doing today. We're actually not doing it as an industry. And I mean, this has been great. I mean, is there anything Yeah. So come look at our agentic launch announcements, get into it, learn about our agents. We have some stuff on our websites at kibocommerce.com. Also follow me on LinkedIn. I'm going to be launching our Kibo podcast, which is called The Commerce Order, powered by Kibo. So watch out for that. If you subscribe to my LinkedIn, you'll find the ability to subscribe to that in Apple. I'll have lots of guests that you may already know, Kevin. You may have some of the same guests, but we're going to have guests from Kibo, from our customers, our partners talking about this and more and exploring every Yeah, I still remember Ram's interview. He really blew my mind. Oh, I actually can't wait to interview Ram. And he's not he's not the first episode because I feel like we need to build up to that. But that's going to be you know what I mean? You got to kind of that's going to be your climax in the middle. Yeah. Well, thank you very much. This has been great once again. I'm always happy for you to come back again and spread this joy. I mean, this energy and Kibo, I Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. We sure do appreciate it. 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