Retail eCom North Speaker
Retail Marketing Insights: AI – where performance marketing + CX combine
I had a great fireside chat yesterday at eTail North with Ben James on what’s working with AI in eCommerce businesses.
A few headline takeaways:
AI isn’t plug & play growth; it amplifies what already exists. Strong data + clear commercial logic = gains. Weak foundations = problems, faster.
The funnel is compressing and widening at the same time. Customers delegate more (“find the right part, delivered tomorrow”), while discovery expands across LLMs & new assistants/ surfaces.
The biggest AI enabled wins are often unglamorous. Forecasting, bidding, content ops, internal linking, onsite search, translation, etc. “Quiet” improvements that move revenue, margin, efficiency & speed at scale.
…Performance Max is a good example. It only works when feeds, availability, call to actions > margins are right.
If you’re thinking about being AI-ready for 3(2026):
*Fix (brilliant basic) data foundations
*Upskill & enable teams so AI is a daily tool, not a black box
*For the majority; prioritising high-ROI use cases over moonshots (70/20/10 still applies) is the way to go initially
Thanks to everyone who joined The Retail Bulletin excellent event.