AI is transforming commerce, but if you think most people are ready for agents to shop for them, well, not so fast.
“I do think [agentic] changes everything,” says LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. “But I’m not a big subscriber of, ‘Hey, we’re all going to buy agentically.’”
Instead, Howe anticipates a gradual shift, with consumers using AI to inform their decision-making rather than trusting agents to make purchases on their behalf without supervision.
But even if most shoppers won’t be surrendering their wallets to autonomous agents anytime soon, AI’s influence on the shopping experience is showing up in other ways – like the growing presence of ads in search chatbots.
OpenAI’s recent announcement about bringing ads to ChatGPT grabbed a lot of headlines, partly because CEO Sam Altman has been so publicly ambivalent about introducing advertising to the platform.
Other large language models, like Perplexity, for example, have stepped back from advertising, for now, at least. But there are still potential business applications for the behavioral data that an LLM generates — such as, hypothetically, combining it with CRM data from brands to help produce more useful answers.
In that way, a chatbot can be genuinely helpful without feeling intrusive or overbearing, which Howe sees as the key to making ads a positive part of the user experience, rather than just more noise.
He advises clients not to “boil the ocean,” but rather to “think about the moments that really matter.”
“If you can take a moment of despair where the user is having a terrible experience – so often that might be customer service – and enhance it with AI to deliver a better experience,” Howe says, “then, all of a sudden, the customer is much more satisfied.”
Also in this episode: Why data needs to be “agent ready,” staying on the right side of privacy regulations and earning a spot in AI-powered search results. Plus: Why Howe can (technically) call himself part-owner of an NFL team.
Story updated on 1/28 after a Perplexity spokesperson reached out to deny the existence of an official partnership between LiveRamp and Perplexity or the existence of an alpha program set to launch this quarter that will test combining its behavior data with CRM data from advertisers. “Although we do enjoy speaking with and listening to leaders in every industry, there is not currently any partnership between Perplexity and LiveRamp,” according to Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s chief communication officer.
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