How technology changes commerce.
I research AI Commerce, digital transformation, and the systems shaping how products are discovered, evaluated, and bought.
I've spent more than 20 years working across ecommerce, merchandising, marketplaces, Amazon, digital commerce, and technology. This site is where I document what I'm learning about how AI and other technological shifts are changing commerce, and what operators need to understand before the shift becomes obvious.
What I'm exploring
The questions I keep returning to as technology reshapes how commerce works, and how the pieces connect across disciplines.
AI Commerce
How AI is reshaping the way products get discovered, evaluated, and bought across marketplaces and retail. Rufus, Sparky, ChatGPT, and the agentic surfaces are the current front line.
Product Discovery
How shoppers, and increasingly their agents, actually find products. What surfaces a listing, what gets skipped, and how discovery is shifting from search boxes to conversations.
Digital Transformation
How commerce operations, tooling, and data systems evolve when technology moves faster than the org chart. What it takes for teams to keep up without simply adding headcount.
Search, GEO, and AI Recommendations
How search is moving from keyword ranking to AI recommendation. Generative Engine Optimization, Agentic Engine Optimization, and what decides whether an engine cites or recommends you.
AI Commerce 2027: From Experiment to Operating Model
A living outlook on what 2026 actually built, what it enables next, and what remains unproven. Updated through 2027 as evidence arrives.
Recent research
AI Shopping Assistants Are Becoming a Standard Retail Media Placement
Criteo now lists a retailer's AI shopping assistant as one of its Sponsored Products page types, live at Albertsons since June. The assistant translates the conversation into keywords and filters, and the existing auction, bids and reports do the rest. The keyword did not disappear in conversational commerce. It moved behind the conversation.
The RealReal Ask TRR: Why AI Search Works Differently for One-of-One Inventory
The RealReal opened Ask TRR, its AI shopping agent built with Gemini Enterprise, to all 45 million members. Its catalog is the interesting part: nearly every item is one of a kind and inventory turns over daily. Conversational search is worth most when inventory changes constantly and shoppers know their intent better than the terminology, and The RealReal's own case for it is about markdowns, not just conversion.
Personal Agent Protocol: How AI Agents Get Permission to Act for Customers
Sierra and Meta announced Personal Agent Protocol on October 6, an open standard in development for how personal AI agents work with businesses on a customer's behalf. The v0.1 specification is not published yet. The idea that matters for retailers is two separate grants in one session: the customer decides what the agent may do, and the business decides what it will accept.
This is not an AI news site. It is a public notebook for understanding how technology changes commerce. The goal is to compound knowledge, connect ideas across disciplines, and document the questions, experiments, and patterns that help operators make better decisions.