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 Can Find the Small Retailer. It Still Recommends the Big One.
Vaer AI analyzed roughly 460,000 AI shopping answers for Lightspeed. Large and small retailers hold about the same share of citations, and large chains win the lead recommendation about two and a half times as often. Retrieval and selection are different achievements.
AI Did Not Kill the Messy Middle. It Moved It Into the Machine.
DoorDash reports that nearly half of restaurant orders placed through its assistant go to local spots the customer had not tried before. The visible consideration set shrinks while the searched set grows, which relocates discovery rather than compressing it away.
AI Store Builders Are Not Killing Themes. They Are Changing Their Job.
Shopify launched Canvas, a workspace where Sidekick writes real theme code from a conversation. Shopify's design director says generating the code was the easy part. The theme is becoming the contract that guides the agent rather than the finished design itself.
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.