BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Welcome, everyone, and welcome to our retail panel. Thank you for joining us. 

In this session, we’re going to talk about what it truly takes to master omnichannel retail. We’ll hear two very, very different innovation stories from the leaders joining me on the stage today. And we’ll talk about the role of next-generation tech empowering in-store experiences, online and everything in between. Joining me on stage today are Rob Frieman from URBN, and Curtis Crawford from Wayfair, two iconic brands and companies that we’re so proud here in Stripe to partner with. 

URBN is a global specialty retailer with a portfolio of brands including Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People, and they have about 700 stores globally and growing. Wayfair, as you will all know, is one of the world’s largest home retailers, serving 21 million active customers and a growing store footprint, and an international presence. 

I am here today because retail has been the bulk of my career to date, but I’m hugely passionate about the space, but I’m mainly here because I am the target demographic for both these companies. I’m a woman in my 40s. I’m very, very busy. I like nice things. And I’ve just moved house. I have spent a lot of money in both of these companies… 

CURTIS CRAWFORD: Thank you.

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: … mainly because they’re powered by Stripe.

ROB FRIEMAN: Definitely appreciate it. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: So before we go into the omnichannel, I think every retailer always focuses on their customers. So I just want to get a little bit closer to both your customers. So starting with you, Rob, apart from me, who else shops with URBN? And tell us a little bit about your customers and how you connect with them. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Sure, sure. I mean, first of all, thank you for having us, having me. And thank you for being such a great customer. You are definitely an emblematic customer. 

We have a pretty wide range. Urban Outfitters includes—URBN, rather, includes Urban Outfitters, Free People, FP Movement, Anthropologie. Our newest business is Nuuly, which is a rental platform for a rental brand for clothing. And what we find is that our customer demographic is a very broad range. 

In many ways, that demographic ages across our brands. It’s not always a straight line. There’s a lot of intersecting Venn diagrams. But typically, an earlier-age customer will start with us with Urban Outfitters; frequently move into Free People as she begins her career, starts to develop a home, begins shopping at Anthropologie and engages across. 

In addition to the age range of our customers, we also have a very wide assortment. Everything from plants to apparel to custom furniture. So getting to know that range of customers is a pretty big task. We’ve had a lot of years of experience learning how to do that. Constantly iterating on it to try and get better. 

But I think one of the things we’ve seen more recently—you know, as we come back to the theme of today’s session—these customers are omnichannel natives. They’ll be on their phone in the store looking at the application while they’re interacting with the product directly. And so we’ve had to learn a lot about them. 

And I know the themes we’ll talk about today really talks about, like, meeting that customer where and how they want to shop. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Yeah, great. And I definitely was an Urban Outfitter girl in college, and kind of grew up to be an Anthro lady. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Yep, yep. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Curtis, very same question for you. Tell us a little bit about your customer. I know you have 21 million active customers, so it can’t all be me. But tell us a little bit who your customers are, and then as a brand, how you try to connect with them. 

CURTIS CRAWFORD: Sure, and thank you for the opportunity to invite Wayfair to the stage and me. It’s been lovely. 

You nailed it. So our average customer is a 30-something, 40-something woman, and she’s busy. She has friends, she has a family, she has a job, she has a career. And she wants a beautiful home, or maybe a beautiful entertaining space. And so our brand promise is really about just making it easy to create the home that’s just right for you. 

One of our key segments, beyond just our average customer, is starter families. So similar to Rob, as customers age and grow, and as families change and evolve, we want to be there for them all along a journey. So from a crib to a changing table—been there done that—to a toddler bed—wow, they start getting out of that—to the big-girl bed or a bunkbed.

So yeah we just want to make sure we’re there across all the touchpoints across life journeys. Yeah.

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Yeah. Now, your two businesses took very different paths to innovation, and that’s what I think is fascinating in having you both here with us. 

URBN started in physical retail and took that sort of surprise and delight from the stores through to your online experience and your app experience. Wayfair was largely born online and is now starting to move into physical retail. So let’s talk a little bit about how those two journeys have kind of come, and how you’re coming together through your full omnichannel offering. Rob, deep roots in brick and mortar. Talk to us a little bit about how that shaped your strategy. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Yeah, yeah. And I think our companies kind of did like a corporate high five as we crossed channels. 

So Urban Outfitters was founded in 1970. So we’re 55 years old. We’ve built, I think, really strong brands, global brands over the years. So we have 55 years, decades of experience just iterating, finding out what works. I think we have a very creative and experimental mindset that’s a core culture. So we’re going to try a lot of things; and things that aren’t working, we’re going to jettison. 

So we, at a core area, have taken that same mindset when we look at our digital experiences as well as our store experiences. But kind of the through line is, we want a store experience to have really smooth flow. We want the customer to be engaged with really the sense, the visual environment, the assortment that they can explore and discover. And we really want it to be frictionless. 

So trying to take some of the best qualities of that experience and pulling it into the digital space, you know, one of those intersection points really is payments. You know, making sure that our payments experience is seamless. And also, you know, it’s an opportunity for us to have really strong engagement with that customer at a data level by having, you know, a consolidated landscape of DTC and in-store payments on Stripe. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Yeah. And we’ll get to this in a minute, but it does always feel very seamless when I go to your many stores. It does always feel like you know me wherever you meet me. 

ROB FRIEMAN: It’s a lot of work. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Yeah. 

ROB FRIEMAN: So, you know, I think one thing to note—and I’m sure there’s retailers in the room that share this experience—you know, when you have been in business for a long time, you make decisions, you pick technologies at the time that are available that meet your needs, meet what you can afford, you know, meet what you think is the right customer experience. 

So, you know, especially in our in-store experience, we have really bolted on a lot of different tools for both the associate and for the customer experience, for the in-store pickup, for ship-from-store, for ship-to-store. And behind the scenes, it’s not as frictionless as it could be. 

So we’ve really embarked on a lot of modernization efforts, a lot of investment over the years. I really hold Stripe as an example of modernization where we decided to identify that in-store payment terminal and partnering with a very tech-forward company. I’d love to be able to replicate that, but we’re in the midst of a lot of other modernization initiatives that I think are also gonna complement this omnichannel experience. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: We’ve loved the partnership, Rob. Thank you. And Curtis, Wayfair are an incredible online brand. Your platform is incredible. Just the assortment that you have is mind-blowing, but you seem to always know who I am. You recognize me and you offer things, always, that I want. But I find it fascinating that you’ve taken this beautiful online experience and now you’re moving into stores and to physical. So talk to us a bit about this strategy shift. 

CURTIS CRAWFORD: Sure. So what we all think of as Wayfair today was born about 20 years ago. It’s a whole bunch of microsites, things like bedroomfurniture.com, storageracks.com; and then about a decade ago, the Wayfair brand was born, and that made marketing a lot easier. It made Google search a lot easier for us. And then in 2022, the time was right to open physical retail stores. 

And there’s a few reasons for that. One, we had done a lot of the heavy-lifting of opening a store. We had supplier relationships, fulfillment networks, a really powerful brand. And so we wanted to be where our customers were. We wanted to be where folks wanted to engage with our brand and our products. And so we’re at 11 stores, and we’re really excited about what we’re seeing. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Great. And you both kind of touched on that, the importance of tech, both in the store and in, you know, kind of behind the hood. So as you know, Rob, you know, I’ve shopped in many countries and in various ways with you. But it’s very, very easy with you to check out in the app. You’ve got my Link details. I work at Stripe, so obviously I have to have Link. You ship the order. You mentioned some of that, that sort of you can click an app, ship to store, go to a store, pick up on another one. But talk to us a little bit about the role of tech that’s enabled those beautiful customers’ experiences. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Yeah, and just noting it, again, there’s a lot of different components behind the scenes. There’s a lot of experimentation. I think we probably don’t go more than a couple hours without acknowledging that, again, we really value creativity. So I think for us, technology plays a role all the way up the life cycle. 

We’re talking about that intersection of our store presence, our digital presence, and our customer, but it starts way behind the scenes as products are being envisioned. We’ve been really at the forefront of using any available technology to help visualize the next dress pattern or the next trend. And as you can imagine, like most retailers, we’re leveraging all the available tech now to bring that to the product creation process. And we bring it all the way through that life cycle. 

I think there’s big opportunities for us, you know, really kind of leveraging some of what you’re doing, Curtis, with Wayfair, where you’re able to take the digital experience and bring it into the store. Similarly, we’re deeply investigating how we want to evolve our point of sale for that in-store experience, and see a lot of benefits from building that unified commerce flow, so that we have better connectivity with our customer, we understand all the transactions, and it kind of builds on what we’ve been able to do most recently with customer match. 

So just as an example, prior to our move to Stripe, both our DTC and our in-store payment processing were on separate platforms in Canada. Now, we have lots of tricks, you know, up our sleeve, like everybody does. You know, there can be tokens, there can be addresses, there can be other sorts of signal to match that customer. But having a tool, having a platform that gives us a cleaner, validated set of data about the customer is just one more tool in our toolkit to present the best product offerings, to try and understand the affinities and other areas of interest for our customers. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: You’re pulling on a really interesting thread that we’ll pick up in a moment around personalization, because I think for many people in this room as well that are retailers, it’s just so hard to understand how you can marry your data together and really understand your customer. So we’ll pick that up in a moment, but Curtis, same for you. Tell us a little bit what it’s like shopping with Wayfair online, and then also in the store, and the role of technology in that. 

CURTIS CRAWFORD: Sure, yeah. I made my first trip—we have a brand new store outside of Chicago in Wilmette. It’s our very first Wayfair store. It’s a large format. It’s about 150,000 square feet. And it’s just honestly delightful. It’s a terrific store. And back to, we have 20 million active customers, plus. Most customers met us online, and they’ve given us their payment details. 

Maybe they’ve joined our loyalty program and have a rewards balance. Maybe they have a gift card balance. The expectation when they step foot in our store is that we know that, and that we have access to all of that information. 

On top of the store being beautiful, as you kind of navigate the store and find things that you like, you know, you can pull out your Wayfair app and scan a QR code, and it’s going to go right into your app. If that’s not the perfect item, you can find 10 things that are just like it. 

If you don’t have the app, you can work with an associate. They’re gonna do the same thing. They’re gonna scan a QR. They’re gonna access our endless aisle. They can help you shop. And if you’re not ready to check out, they can send it to your Wayfair account. You can check out at home if you want. So we really have brought a wonderful selection, a wonderful curated selection into the store to touch, to feel. Okay, this is a plug where I say—I’m really proud of this. 

They plumbed all the plumbing so you can see the shower heads go. If you have, like, a faucet and you want to see how the water really works—they’ve done a really great job with this store. And then on top of that, they’ve just made it really seamless with everything we know about you online. All your payment methods are there, your gift card balances are there, your rewards balances are there. If you have access to financing, that’s available too. So they’ve done a really terrific job merging the endless aisle with the physical experience. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: I’m just picturing my kids running around your store and turning all the showers on. And I love that—we’ve spent an obscene amount of money over the last couple of months on new furniture. But for big-ticket items, sometimes it can be, you know, quite scary to think about buying a sofa without having touching and feeling it.

When you’re explaining the story, I love the idea of being able to go in, touch it, but then have an associate or an app go through and, like, “Here it is in red,” or, “Here’s the cushions that you can have with it,” and really just get to touch and feel it and visualize it in a different way. You’re both really touching on knowing your customer deeply, and how can you take the signals that you have from your data and their shopping behavior to just better serve that person, and then also design for the future. 

So the bar for knowing your customer and their preferences is just getting higher and higher, and making smarter recommendations is becoming tougher for a lot of retailers to figure out how to do it. So, again, Rob, I’ll start with you, but talk to us a little bit about how you’re thinking about personalization and the kind of data that feeds that. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Yeah. I think, to frame it a little bit—and, you know, I think each retailer and their demographic and their relationship with their customers may be a little bit different, but I think we’ve really perceived a real swing in the pendulum, where five or six, seven years ago, you could say, there was a push towards privacy, which I think is a really important aspect. 

There’s also compliance for privacy, etc., but it was reflected in how we were hesitant to necessarily cross kind of a creepy factor where we know more about our customer than she may know we know about her—or him. And I feel that the pendulum has really swung. 

And especially, we kind of have that line of post-Covid, but I think that—you noted some really key pieces around recommendations and others. The expectation is there. What did I buy last time? What were the selections that I didn’t buy? That consideration space as well as the actual transaction space—obviously order history—I think there’s a big expectation that we surface all of that. 

Now, we leverage that in a lot of ways. Both of our companies have very deep catalogs. It’s not going to be easy to just sit there and hit “next, next, next” and browse everything. So having strong search with some personalization capabilities there are key. But I think there’s a full life cycle piece as well where there are a lot of, I think, the most forward-leaning and most established personalization channels are in outbound marketing. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Yeah. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Right? We’ve established affinities and other interest areas. We know what your most recent browsing history has been, what you’ve got in a cart. You know, those are those automated marketing components that are going to be the most one-to-one. Hopefully, they’re very well-timed. Hopefully, we didn’t send you an email about something you bought yesterday. But, you know, I think those are just some of the areas. 

I think you can’t, you know—I really don’t think there’s a limit, especially when you think about how AI is developing, and assisted shopping is developing. I mean, these are going to be incredibly bespoke experiences. And, you know, we’re working on how we can expose the right data for that customer to have a great experience in any channel that she wants to shop in. 

CURTIS CRAWFORD: Yeah, I think Rob’s exactly right on the pendulum swinging. 

And when we think about our brand promise about making it easier to make a beautiful home and a beautiful space for yourself, personalization isn’t just recommending things you might like; it’s hopefully helping you get to a better result faster. And it’s a loss of trust when it goes wrong. So if you’ve decorated, I’ll call it a beautiful neutral-palette home, and then we surface a ceramic duck lamp, right? So that’s not very helpful. Now, if you’ve decorated all ceramic duck lamps, then yeah, then we could keep going with that theme.

But personalization should help you get to your result faster. And that’s really an expectation that customers have now. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Yeah. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Yeah.

ROB FRIEMAN: Yeah.

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Sorry, it was just making me think about my last year and purchasing so much stuff for the house. It’s so overwhelming, how much things we had to buy and how many micro decisions I had to make. But whenever I hit your site, it really did feel like you understood the aesthetic. Because like, I bought one or two things, and then it just felt like every time it narrowed it in—because your assortment is huge. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Yeah.  

I think you know for somebody who did buy that duck lamp and then wanted to return it, I think that’s another area…

CURTIS CRAWFORD: Yes. 

ROB FRIEMAN: You know, prior we were talking about some of those aspects too in the post-purchase experience, where that’s another lane of—you know literally what they bought, what they want to reconsider. And like I said, I think each of these touch points are going to be huge opportunities for personalized interaction. 

CURTIS CRAWFORD: And then removing the friction, no matter—you know, did you buy it in-store? If you bought it online, can you return it in a store? Do you know the history? And it’s one entity, and the customer expects, “Hey, I bought this from you.” It doesn’t matter where or when. They just want you to know that they bought it. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Yeah. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Yeah.

ROB FRIEMAN: And they let you know. 

CURTIS CRAWFORD: Yes. 

ROB FRIEMAN: You know, like, I mean, we have a lot of customers. You have a lot of customers. 

CURTIS CRAWFORD: Yes. 

ROB FRIEMAN: You know, I’d love to say we get everything right every time. But, you know, hearing that direct feedback from customers is a big part of our jobs as well. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: And even as you both talk about the post-purchase experience, it gets so frustrating as a consumer when you have returned something. One, if I can’t return it in the way that I want. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Yeah.

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Very annoying. And two, if I’m chasing down my emails trying to see, “Did you refund me?” “I think I returned those shoes a month ago. I haven’t heard back.” So even that the payments—while we think about payments a lot of time at checkout, it’s also the post-purchase experience to maintain that connection with your customers. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Yeah, communication on updates and, more importantly, landing the refund. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: “Give me my money back,” yeah. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Yeah.

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: I’m going to shift gears a little bit because you both touched on data, a little bit on AI and agentic. And 15 years ago—I’ve spent a long time working in retail, and if you told me what retail would look like in 2025, my vision was at The Jetsons. I thought we’d all be coming to stores on hoverboards, and there’d be robots that would read my mind. 

And maybe three, four years ago, that vision was kind of starting to let us down in retail. I think there were so many opportunities to delight the customer, and it was still quite siloed. I feel like now we’re on the brink of something that’s really bringing that together. You know, I did come here in a robot car yesterday. It was very, very exciting. So I feel like we’re moving towards The Jetsons. But I think, in a way, that personalization is only going to get better through AI. 

But you mentioned agentic commerce, and I want to have just a broader conversation, not necessarily your corporate secrets and what you’re developing right now, but just thinking about your perspectives. And again, I’ll start with you, Rob, on AI agentic and how it’s going to shift how we shop, both from the retailer side and also from the consumer side. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s been some really phenomenal discussions on that here at Sessions. It’s obviously been top of mind. And we’re all a very close-knit group. We can share some secrets and know that they’ll be secure. 

I think there’s one theme that I’ve heard talked about, which I’ll put in there in terms of, you know, the way that agentic shopping may be similar—or may be different—is that in order to enable people to discover our products now, we’ve spent the last 10 or 15 years adopting and really following strong SEO guidelines. That exposes data so that, you know, our product can be indexed and searched and returned to a customer. 

There’s a lot of really interesting discussions around what capabilities we should be exposing for an LLM. If an LLM is going to be kind of a true copilot, if it’s going to adapt some of that stylist experience, what are the pieces of data, what are the APIs or other tools that we should expose? I think there’s some great discussions here this week. I think it’s one that’s going to really heat up. 

I think for us, looking at those core applications—contact center, support—you know, these are areas—and I think that you don’t need to even start from a point of view of labor savings. I think, for me, what’s really interesting is the common thread that companies that adopt and lean into agentic customer service end up with higher NPS scores. Why wouldn’t you do that? 

That’s going to be a better customer experience. And I think for us it’s one aspect of a couple of ways that we’re looking at AI, where we still want the human to be at the center. And I don’t know exactly how this is going to play out. We are—like I’m sure everybody in this room, especially the folks at Wayfair—we’re experimenting in a lot of different places, but I think in the contact center experience, there’s still at least two key humans involved. Right?

One is the customer, and the other is—in the event that the agent gets involved, how do we make it seamless for the data that came through that conversation to prepopulate, to surface all the right product information seamlessly, to understand the tone and sense of the conversation? Like, all these are pieces that exist right now, but to have it synthesized with a really strong agentic assistant—you know, that agent working with you, they’re going to sell you that sofa in no time. You’re going to love it. And so, they’re not only going to be a great support role, but they’re also going to be a sales channel. 

I think the other piece for us is looking at the product development side, all the different assistive components there, putting a designer at the center. And the last that is really top of mind—I mean, I love our products. I’m not a merchant, though. I run technology. So how are we gonna see AI change the landscape of assisted development? 

Applications like Cursor—every session that you’re in is talking about this. I spent time on the plane building an application. I mean, I’m a terrible coder at this point. But this thing was just cranking away on airplane Wi-Fi. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: It’s amazing when you see it in action, isn’t it? It’s amazing. 

ROB FRIEMAN: It’s crazy. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

ROB FRIEMAN: I mean, it was just blazing through it. And I’ll shut up in a second. 

But I want to just say that I think there’s this interesting inflection that I think about—maybe it’ll resonate for the audience as well—is we do our annual planning really based on scarcity, right? So how do we look at the omnichannel features, internal logistics features, supply chain features, everything of which is really tied to a level of scarcity for internal engineering, or even some external. That could radically change. 

If I have every single person who’s got an army of coding robots that they become an operator of, that’s a game-changer, and it changes the discussion with my brand leadership. The things that we want to test into become much, much more exciting. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: I think you’ve talked about this before, Rob, you and I, where you’ve said each of your engineers now becomes a tech lead of agents. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Yeah.

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: And they are now the team captain of all of these agents. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Yeah.

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: And it’s just incredible to think about what that could open up for you in terms of optimization and new features in your site. 

ROB FRIEMAN: It’s mind-blowing. It’s very exciting. 

CURTIS CRAWFORD: So I think Rob got it exactly right. I think the only bits that I can add is, you know, you talked about a couple of functions: engineering, customer service, right? So when we think about AI at Wayfair, it’s really every function. If you are marketing, if you are in finance, if you are in analytics, it doesn’t matter where you sit in the org. We’re getting tools in your hands. We’re getting training in your hands. We’re getting requests to use this as part of your daily life, right? 

Because I mean there’s just so many use cases that we want to make sure everyone on our teams are experimenting—even just doing trainings around prompt trainings; like, how do you write a prompt to get you exactly the answer you want, right? “I want a PDF.” Go ahead and ask for it. “I want a deck.” Go ahead and ask for it, right? 

So sharpening those skills to, one, get tools in folks’ hands; and then, two, set them up to use them as successfully as possible across all job functions in the org. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Yeah. A hundred percent. 

CURTIS CRAWFORD: And then, you know, Wayfair is a data company. It’s a tech company. It was born online. And so we’ve been working with AI for a long time. And so now it’s just fanning the flames and finding the additional use cases. 

You know, 100% personalization is a wonderful kind of concept. Really taking every signal we get as you’re engaging with us and making sure we’re using that to help you—back to our brand promise. You know, make it easy to create that space that you want as quickly as you can.

ROB FRIEMAN: Totally, yeah.

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Yeah. And that’s a really great kind of overview of how you’re thinking [as] company-out. We started talking about your customers, of which I’m a demographic. I’d love to hear your perspectives of what agentic is going to mean for the consumer side. What will it mean for me as a customer? And how do you think it’ll change my way of interacting with your brands? 

ROB FRIEMAN: Yeah, I think we’re just going to experiment a lot and try and figure that out. But I think for us, we really do spend a lot of time curating experiences. The in-store assortment, even the online assortment, there are times where I’ll look at a category page, and it’s really beautiful. It’s like they took time, and they really made sure that the products that are displayed visually look well. The face-out images are great. 

But an AI doesn’t care about that. That’s another topic that keeps coming up in discussions, is—you know, for an LLM to consume and index and digest the information about the site to help you shop with it, it needs to consume the data differently. So I think we’re going to look for more signals to see it, just to answer the core question, which is, what does our customer want? 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Yeah, yeah. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Right? But, I mean, we have to skate to the puck. So, we have to keep experimenting across all channels there. 

CURTIS CRAWFORD: I’m going to talk about what I’m buying right now. I’m trying to buy a house. And ChatGPT—you know, “Hey, these are five open houses. This is when they’re open. Can you route me?” Right? And ChatGPT is saying: Yes, I can. And here’s a Google link that you can drop into your phone to make it easier. Would you like a PDF? By the way, real estate agents will stay a little late. So you’re arriving at the last one, right? 

So the experiences that customers are having, whether it’s on your site, whether it’s buying a home, they’re just completely changing, right? And so, the bar is being raised around personalization, how helpful can you be, how accurate, how robust is your answer, right? And so back to Wayfair’s vision, is—you know, we would love 100% personalization, shoppable images, dynamic layouts, all the things. And yeah. 

ROB FRIEMAN: No, it’s such a good point, really. I mean, that ChatGPT example is really, really key because—really similarly, I went way down the rabbit hole very recently and—basically, every day—but recently to buy some audio equipment. And, you know, it was going in deep. It knew about the home network that I’d set up, because I needed help setting that up. 

But tying those two things together is an example of something that’s very special. Like, no matter what, there’s still a boundary, even though we can buy data about our customers. The boundary is the stuff we sell and how we interact with that customer. I tell far more to ChatGPT than I tell to Amazon, even though Amazon can harvest all kinds of stuff about what I’m buying and whether or not we like to do live mousetraps or not, because we leave the doors open and they run in. 

But, you know, like, I tell ChatGPT so much more. So do you. 

CURTIS CRAWFORD: Yeah.

ROB FRIEMAN: So do you. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: In a full conversation. Yeah.

ROB FRIEMAN: So that set of data is going to create a very different kind of shopping assistance. I plan to be leaning into that because I want our customers who try and shop there to find our products. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: I think it’s just been absolutely fascinating to talk to you both, again, coming from those very different perspectives and kind of meeting in the middle in terms of that full omnichannel experience. And again, to your point, we’re so early in this journey, particularly in AI and agentic. I would love to have you both here next year and see what’s changed. 

ROB FRIEMAN: Oh my gosh, yeah. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Again, because the pace of change is so incredible. I wonder what the shopping experience will look like in a year’s time. So maybe we’ll… 

ROB FRIEMAN: A month. 

BARBARA O’BEIRNE: Yeah, a month’s time. We’ll see you here next year and see how it goes. 

Thank you very, very much for sharing your stories, both broadly from your experience in the sector, but then also in both your companies. We really appreciate you being here. For everyone else, thank you for spending time with us. We’ll be in the lounge afterwards if you want to talk to Rob or to Curtis. Check us out in the Expo in the unified commerce. We have loads to talk about, and we’d love to hear what you’re thinking, too.

ROB FRIEMAN: Thank you. 

CURTIS CRAWFORD: Thank you.