Bryan House

There’s a major shift happening in commerce, and it’s hiding in plain sight. You can see it in how people are starting their buying journeys and in how often they’re already using answer engines to make product decisions. OpenAI’s own data shows that more than 55 million messages every day in ChatGPT are about items…

Let’s be honest: most B2B commerce workflows weren’t designed. They just … happened. They grew layer by layer, like geological strata, each new approval, exception and workaround piling on top of the last. Before long, what started as a straightforward transaction morphed into a tangle of emails, spreadsheets, verbal approvals, and a “just-check-with-Janet” step no…

In just a few short years, generative artificial intelligence has done something most digital transformations couldn’t: re-patterned our behavior at an atomic level. We no longer search; we ask questions. We no longer browse; we expect answers. We no longer tolerate a delay in finding products; we want instant gratification. Generative AI has also changed…

Over the past few years, venture capitalists (VCs) and pundits have declared the direct-to-consumer (DTC) commerce business model all but dead. This much is true: The party is over for hockey stick growth driven by Instagram ads or the abundance of cheap VC money for retail startups in the ZIRP era. However, as one crop of…

The rise of commerce (or retail) media and the collapse of the attention economy go hand in hand. Case in point: The 2010s were good to direct-to-consumer (D2C) commerce. Most retailers experienced low customer acquisition costs (CAC) afforded through low-cost social media ads (mostly via Meta products like Facebook and Instagram). At the time, these…

Like the Gen Z version of QVC, livestream shopping is bursting in popularity. The trend originally took off in China during the coronavirus pandemic, and is quickly making its way to other parts of the world. While the medium of live shopping demos isn’t new, social channels like TikTok have democratized it and brought it…