For years, trends forecasters have been predicting the slow death of bricks-and-mortar retail. After Covid, Amazon and TikTok Shop, the latest potential threat is shopping via AI. But does it represent a fundamental shift in behaviour or just another step on the way on to a frictionless future? Ben Meakin and Alex Smith chatted over the practical and the principles with Collide.
BM: Telling an AI to do your weekly shop when it knows the things that you’ve cooked before and the things that you like and the state of your health and your income and the size of your family… If it can weave that into ordering just what you need to cook nutritious, but quick, batch meals for families who are short on budget, it could be a real change in how we shop.
AS: That sounds utopian.
BM: The future doesn’t have to be Black Mirror!
AS: I think it’s a huge change from a brand’s point of view. There are so many emotional and sensory moments that happen in a retail environment that you would completely skip. It’s already much harder to make an impulse buy in a big online shop. I’ll happily pop a bag of some new chocolate pretzels into my real Tesco basket. But if I’m not there to see them…
BM: We already prompt that behaviour online with in-app ads or promos.
AS: But there will be loads of opportunities that you’ll miss by taking that human element out of the buying experience completely.
Collide: We’re suddenly marketing to a new audience. As a new product developer, how do I get AI to notice me?
BM: This is why the death of the website has been greatly exaggerated. You need to publish your product in the usual places – supermarket websites and food blogs and through TikTok and Instagram. And that becomes your GEO, the idea of generative engine optimisation or effectively how we do search engine optimisation for AI bots. Citations are still really important, which in turn kind of makes PR really important again, and so you would make sure that your pretzels are being seen and being eaten by real humans. Genuine human recommendation is still the best.
AS: Of course you’ll have to pay someone good money for genuine human recommendation!
BM: I think what’s harder is – how much does an AI need to understand you in order to know that you’re going to want those pretzels? What’s prompting the AI?
AS: It’s that balance of how much autonomy we want to give to it. Do we let it decide all our wants for us or is it going to keep bugging us with questions?
BM: You’re not giving away your autonomy.
AS: At the extreme, you’re delegating your entire personality to the AI – it gradually learns more and more what you like and don’t like. It’s your Nectar card data, times… a billion! You’re reducing your persona to data.
BM: I don’t see a problem.
AS: It has so many implications.
BM: I think that battle is lost. Clubcard and Nectar and Google Maps have always been interested in everything you’re doing. And from a performance perspective, we’re always here for it. And it’d be interesting to know if younger generations even notice it as a thing.
AS: I think the wider public are still suspicious. And AI changes the rules of the game even further.
BM: I think there can be a misinterpretation of what data is. Your “personal data” gets bucketed into a big scary concept, but that’s just the stuff that allows the likes of us to do highly targeted advertisements. The fact that Experian knows that you’ve bought two cars in the past five years. Yes, it’s a personal data point but… so what?
Collide: Lots of people already believe their phone is listening to them. BM: But I think most people are more bothered about somebody hacking their bank account or their email address, or stealing their passport, than their shopping behaviour.
AS: Except over the whole course of history, people have rebelled against being monitored and controlled. Whenever it’s got to the point where they feel like it’s too much, there’s been a backlash. It would be odd if we hit a point like that because of shopping
Collide: But we all know shopping has always been more than just a transactional experience. The cliché is “Gen Z love experience more than things” but also… doesn’t everyone? When we buy things, we are always buying some kind of experience too.
BM: Maybe. Maybe we’ve just culturally not found what those new experiences are beyond transactional retail.
AS: We’ve had at least a decade of trying to redefine retail. The future of the high street can’t only be coffee shops and nail bars.
Collide: In the days before vinyl was only for hipsters, I would stand in a record shop and flick through the albums for pleasure. And now, I mostly delegate that to Spotify – an AI, in effect – and mostly it gets it right.
BM: It’s interesting how the rise of Spotify coincides with the return of vinyl. Now you have physical listening bars where people gather to listen to music. A listening bar could just have Spotify, but they rarely do. The physical format is part of the ritual. I think when technology changes something, we feel like it’s a format lost, whereas actually it could just evolve into something new.
Collide: We should think about the experiences that can’t be robotised… Ben. You keep bees.
BM: Oh, AI could do that. Probably a lot better than me. Collide: It could do the functional. The function of beekeeping is… farming, right? And yet for you it’s recreation. You don’t need to do it. You could just go to Sainsbury’s and buy honey.
BM: Well. I don’t really eat honey that often! Collide: You want to outsource your shopping to a robot so you can have more time to make honey that you don’t eat? That does sound like Black Mirror!
BM: So, yes, consumerism isn’t only about consumption. The reason why fast fashion exists in the fashion world is that people enjoy browsing and buying and all of that. Fashion is about the joy of novelty more than style. An AI that delivers all that to your door before you even know it’s in fashion doesn’t necessarily take away the joy of that.
Collide: You realise that’s exactly the sort of thing an AI would tell you to say.
