Agency

Earlier this week, Alex and I spent our IntelliJAMS episode talking about the OpenAI/Shopify announcement on agentic commerce. 

We covered a lot there, but I think there might be a first-principle question that matters before anything else (and is also a question most people are skipping): Who does the LLM work for?

Yes, it matters whether we believe people will transact via LLMs. And while there’s plenty of expressed skepticism around it, we’ll skip debating this point. Let’s just stipulate that at some point in the future we’re all buying stuff via ChatGPT. 

If you’re a brand, then, your first inclination is likely to figure out how you can start showing up in more answers. (How do you improve your visibility with the LLM? How do you make sure that, when you’re visible to the LLM, you get recommended? etc)

You could dive headfirst into this, and maybe you start to find some “wins.”

But the “wins” might not be as obvious as they may seem at first glance. And if that’s the case, it’s likely because we didn’t stop to ask who the LLM’s customer really is. Does the LLM serve you, the brand? Or does the LLM serve the consumer?

Today, the LLM seems to so obviously serve the consumer that the question of who it serves is hardly apparent. Prompt asking for a discount and the LLM will do its best to find the best coupon. Ask about the best price and you might be (rightly or wrongly) advised to wait until the next sale.

However, imagine the contrary – the LLM serving the brand. It would be the LLM’s job to help find more customers. So, you’ll likely be able to get a lot of mileage out of “optimizing” your LLM visibility. (You might even be able to pay, eventually, for that.) It might also recommend products to increase cart size and customer value. A lot of people are starting to explore what that looks like, and I’m sure there will be a sorting out process just the way there was with search.

But if the LLM serves the consumer, those “optimizations” likely won’t get you as far. Because the LLM’s job will be to help the consumer find the right brand.¹

In that scenario, your site, and the content on it, likely won’t be the main resource for visibility, much less recommendations. The LLM is probably more likely to find what other consumers say about you first, then filter that content based on context that matches (or at least closely resembles) what the LLM knows about you and your use case, and more heavily weight that type of content to help the consumer find the brand. 

I think it’s most likely that LLMs end up “working” for both parties in commerce, and that first-party content (the stuff you provide) and third-party content (the stuff the LLM finds) will both matter. How it matters, and to what degree, will probably change by user and over time, but the reality is that what people say about your product is probably going to matter a whole lot. 

And the best way to get people to talk about your product is (mostly) the same way as it is now: Build a great story, ship a great product, and overdeliver on the promise of value.

A lot is going to change in the next few years, but it also feels like some of this excitement may run the risk of distracting us from that which won’t change: People will still buy from brands, and brands will still have the ability to influence consumer behavior. Where transactions happen (or how they’re prompted) might change, and some of the pieces that you can adopt to improve your growth will change, too, but the first things are likely to remain first.² 

1  I know footnotes are more Drew’s thing, but it’s worth noting that this is a distinction Ben Thompson called out in his newsletter, Stratechery, this week.

2  Turns out, footnotes are fun! This is reminiscent of the Bezos quote that starts: “I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two”