Future Commerce

The funnel most marketers grew up on – see the ad, click, browse, add to cart, buy – did not gradually erode. It came apart almost overnight, as shoppers got comfortable discovering, deciding, and buying inside social feeds and LLMs, often in a single moment. Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this is the close-out conversation for the series, a step back to ask what actually replaces the funn...

"Service is the new storefront" has been a slogan for the better part of a decade, usually followed by a promise to turn a cost center into a profit center that never quite arrived. What changed is not the ambition. It is that the plumbing finally exists. Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about what becomes possible when a brand can pull customer data from any channel and...

For years, the marketer's job ended when the campaign shipped. Hit send, check the numbers, measure growth, repeat. That model is changing, and what replaces it is agentic orchestration, where the system and the journey around a message matter more than a single send. Recorded live at K:LDN 2026, this conversation pairs the person building the AI with an operator running it at real scale. Gilbert...

Social is where discovery happens now, but it is rented land. You can build an audience of hundreds of thousands and still not own the relationship, because the algorithm decides who sees you and the landlord keeps raising the rent. Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about turning borrowed reach into something a brand actually owns. It pairs the person building the tooling...

Recommending the wrong whiskey to a loyal customer does not just miss a sale. It breaks trust, and once trust breaks, no amount of personalization copy fixes it. Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about the thing every brand now has in common. Everyone has access to the same AI tools. So what actually separates the brands winning with them from the ones just using them? Ph...

K:LDN 2026 opened to more than a thousand merchants and set a clear vision with several key product announcements: Klaviyo’s expanding toolset has become powerful enough to let a brand of any size operate at a scale that once required a full team. The promise of personalization, long marketed but rarely delivered, has finally become something all brands can ship. Phillip Jackson sits down live wit...

On this edition of After Dark: Spielberg's flop(?), GLP-1s are melting nightlife, Midjourney's health pivot, and why this is the Bad Place. this episode is exclusive to Future Commerce Plus members – sign up now at futurecommerce.com/plus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Phillip and Brian run the docket: why "proof of work" is the new luxury signal, what the AI export-control fight shares with a brand guarding its trade secrets, and how AI is flooding the patent office while quietly favoring incumbents.  But perhaps the most profound part of the conversation lies in two trends taking internet culture by storm. "Tasteslop" and Korea's "dopamine sites" appear as dis...

Resale is forcing brands to rethink product design, pricing, and customer acquisition from the ground up. Ryan Rowe (Archive) and Alison Buchanan (Lululemon) join Brian and Alicia to unpack how lululemon’s Like New evolved from a sustainability pilot into a meaningful commercial channel. We unpack messy reverse logistics, the AI agents now quietly running warehouse decisions, and the organizationa...

Dr. Mark Grether, SVP and General Manager of PayPal Ads, joins Phillip from PayPal's Manhattan offices to argue that the merchant storefront is migrating off owned websites and into LLMs. This may make the mechanics of customer experience and loyalty a bit murky, but Mark explains how PayPal's "transaction graph,”  built on real purchases across 30 million merchants and 400 million consumers, acts...

Snap Inc.'s Sid Malhotra makes the case that the platform most brands wrote off as "babies and teens" has quietly grown up. Now, commerce is migrating into these private, conversational spaces where nearly one billion users actually spend their time. We dig into why the traditional funnel no longer holds consumers’ nuanced behaviors, how creators and chat shape decisions long before the last click...

Get all After Dark releases by joining Future Commerce Plus: www.futurecommerce.com/plus .Future Commerce Plus members get 20% off STRATA: www.futurecommerce.com/strata . An AI agent burns $12 building a fake Android phone nobody asked for. From there: Pope Leo's encyclical, a tick crisis blamed on vanishing chickens, a website that's cookied Phillip into Spanish forever, and The Devil Wears Prada...

Recorded live at Google Marketing Live 2026, Phillip and eCommerce reporter Nicole Silberstein sit down with Ashish Gupta, VP & GM of Merchant Shopping at Google, who is behind the foundational commerce infrastructure powering the Shopping Graph and Universal Commerce Protocol. Gupta breaks down the GML announcements: UCP's expansion beyond shopping into hotels and food delivery, the multi-item Un...

Recorded live at Google Marketing Live 2026, Phillip sits down with Nick Fox, SVP of Knowledge & Information at Google — the executive overseeing Search, Ads, Commerce, and geographic mapping products. Building on the prior day's I/O announcements, Fox unpacks how Gemini is reshaping Google's consumer and advertising products, why the Universal Cart strikes a balance between human taste and agenti...

At Google I/O 2026, Phillip sits down with Suresh Ganapathy, Senior Director of Product Management for Consumer Shopping at Google, to unpack the day's announcements: Universal Commerce Protocol's expansion into new verticals, agentic payments arriving in Gemini Spark, and the debut of Universal Cart. We trace what these foundational pieces mean for how a billion daily shoppers, and the merchants...

The Swatch x AP "Royal Pop" arrived after a week of generative AI fan renders, watch-Twitter speculation, and a 24-hour emotional rollercoaster from disappointment to "actually, this might be iconic." Phillip and Brian sit down with Michael Miraflor to unpack the speedrun spectacle, the high/low collab playbook, and why the purchase is just the tip of consumer participation. The Royal Pop Heard 'R...

Matt Maher, founder of M7 Innovations and the thirty-fifth member of the MIT Media Lab Consortium, joins Phillip and Brian to interrogate what really happens when enterprises leap from "zero to one" to "one to a hundred" with AI. The conversation moves from the productivity paradox (studies showing AI can add 20% to completion time even as users swear it saves them work) to the human hand-off in c...

The funnel’s compressing, content volume is exploding, and everything is quickly descending into AI slop. But the Miami heat and chilled coconut water hit just right, so everything is juuuust fine.  We’re unpacking our hot takes fresh out of POSSIBLE, Hyve’s sprawling beachside conference at the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc resorts. Between Walmart's "Who Knew" thesis, EMARKETER's no-safe-channels r...

What happens when a cultural figure with 20 years in the limelight decides to become a brand operator? Adam Domian, SVP & Head of Commerce and Audience at 11:11 Media, joins Phillip and Brian to break it down. From Walmart shelves to TikTok lives, Adam shares how Paris Hilton's portfolio balances licensing cash flow with equity-driven brands like Parive, and why "founder energy" is becoming a moat...

People will let AI be their therapist but not their partner, their assistant but not their manager. Gillian Katz of Hannah Grey VC joins Phillip and Brian to unpack the firm's newest Cultural Vibrations journal and the qualitative study behind it: a read on how people are actually negotiating AI's role in their lives, domain by domain, role by role; from anthropology to sommelier frameworks to Goo...

"There will be a lot fewer people employed doing existing work in not just insurance, but in all business." Phillip reports from the press pool at Semafor World Economy 2026, where 500 CEOs, a quarter of the US Senate, and 20 G20 finance ministers spent two days in Washington DC sketching out the next decade. Inside: why the AI race is really the electricity race (and why we may have already lost...

Furniture.com is a new kind of furniture marketplace: a single platform aggregating more than 3 million SKUs from 80+ retail partners, using standardized data and AI-powered personalization to replace the 15-hour odyssey most shoppers endure. VP of Brand & Creative Olivia Hnatyshin joins Phillip and Brian to unpack how the team is rebuilding the third-most expensive purchase of a person's life – o...

Evelyn Mora, founder and CEO of VLGE, joins Phillip and Brian to challenge how we think about AI training data, brand identity, and the coming era of individual-first commerce. We move from the mechanics of world modeling to the cultural philosophy of what it means for brands to let go, adapt, and become an ingredient rather than the star of the show.  PLUS: Strata Volume 001 is available for purc...

Andrew Youderian joins Phillip and Brian to break down the 2026 eCom Trends Report: a decade in the making, 300 brands surveyed, and a lot of conventional wisdom overturned. The data reveals a diverging landscape where gross margins are climbing but net margins are shrinking, Amazon's dominance is quietly unwinding, and AI's productivity promise hasn't quite arrived – yet. Key Takeaways: Paid adve...

How does a 76-year-old legacy retailer reinvent itself as a tech-powered ecosystem? Lisa Horton, Chief Communications & Creative Officer at David’s Bridal, dishes on the company’s grand modernization and how they’ve expanded to accommodate the next generation’s Gen-Z-sized aspirations.  Here Comes the Algorithm Key takeaways: David's Bridal's "Aisle to Algorithm" pivot puts AI at the center of eve...