How to Actually Use AI in Your eCommerce Business

# Transcript — Cyril Golub (Jinnify)

*eCommerce Podcast · recorded via Riverside · 49.8 min · Matt Edmundson + Cyril Golub*

**[00:04] Matt:** Well, hello and welcome to the eCommerce Podcast. My name is Matt Edmundson. It's great to be with you from our brand new studio. We've only recorded a few podcasts here before, so I'm still trying to get used to all the tech and how it all works. Very, very different to the old one, let me tell you. Very, very different. A lot, definitely a lot more going on. But welcome, welcome to the show. We talk about all things ecommerce. Uh, as the sort of show describes in the title. Um, if you're new here, a very warm welcome to you. If you don't know me, uh, I've been doing ecommerce since 2002. Uh, and so like I love to say on the show, if you're a regular, you'll get bored of this now, but I'm a bit of an ecommerce dinosaur. Um, I've been around since the early days, uh, and I just love it. I've got my own ecommerce businesses just like you. And so I love to get great guests on the show, whether that's an expert like today, and I get to grill them on how I can make my own ecommerce business better. Or whether we get someone like yourself, maybe a founder on the show who just shares their story, and we just love to hear people's stories. So wherever you are, wherever you're watching it from, you're very welcome here. Thank you so much for joining. Of course, if you are a regular, welcome back. I do say this regularly, actually. If it wasn't for the regulars, I wouldn't be doing this show anymore. And it's because you do tune in and you keep, you keep subscribing. I just love that. Keeps us doing the show still. We've been doing it since 2019. Years. Man, that's a long time. And just loved every single episode we've done. We've— I genuinely go away with notes from every episode on how we can do this better. And of course, now we've got AI, so you can take the transcript from the podcast. If you're like me anyway, you take the transcript from the podcast and go, how does this apply to my business, Claude? And then you have a really fascinating conversation. Uh, and it, it's, it can be eye-opening. Um, but however you do it, however you consume the content, welcome, welcome back. Uh, it's great to have you here. So without further ado, let's talk to— oh, by the way, what I've not done is I've not said go to the website. The call to action, Matthew, you know, the lifeblood of every ecommerce website. Uh, our call to action is just go to the website, ecommercepodcast.net. You can find our entire archive of episodes there. You can find out more information about Cohort, which are our monthly sort of meetups. Um, they're all done online, by the way, and they're all free, but you get to meet e-commerces from around the world. Um, we've got on there stuff about the AI systems. We've got stuff on there about workshops, I think. Um, anyway, everything's on the website, ecommercepodcast.net. So go check that out there. Cyril, welcome to the show, man. Great to have you. How you doing?

**[02:53] Cyril:** Hi, Matt. Thank you so much for inviting me. And, uh, as you said, I can repeat that, uh, I have been building ecommerce software since 2003.

**[03:05] Matt:** Ah.

**[03:06] Cyril:** One year ahead of you.

**[03:08] Matt:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. So similar ecommerce dinosaur age, Cyril. That's what's going on.

**[03:13] Cyril:** That's it. That's it. And moreover, when you ask me what has been around and what changed since 2003, I can answer not too much.

**[03:29] Matt:** Yeah, it's all fairly similar. We've still got a keyboard, a mouse, and a screen. Nothing much has changed.

**[03:39] Cyril:** Yeah, sure. The only, the only thing I can recap right now, just what is the answer for the question, what should I do if I want to start selling online?

**[03:53] Matt:** Yeah.

**[03:54] Cyril:** And you see that, uh, for 20 years ago, let's say 20, 25 years ago, it was okay, I should rent a dedicated server and install a CMS platform and then tune it up and start selling. 10 years ago, it was kind of okay, I should register at cloud solution and start selling. But what's now? What's today? What's your guess here?

**[04:20] Matt:** Same thing, just go to Shopify, get a CMS set up, just call it Shopify and start selling eBay. I mean, it's a little bit more complicated than that, obviously. How would you answer it?

**[04:31] Cyril:** I'm quite sure that this answer is not true anymore. In the very short time, probably weeks, probably months, but not more than 1 year, you will start with that, or Claude Code, or Claude Code.

**[04:45] Matt:** Yeah.

**[04:46] Cyril:** Let me start selling online and that changed everything.

**[04:50] Matt:** Yeah, it does. It does. And it's fair to say, isn't it? That's your area of expertise here. So for those that don't know you, for those that might not have heard of you, just give us a quick elevator pitch into all things your world.

**[05:03] Cyril:** A quick elevator pitch, you mean?

**[05:07] Matt:** Yeah. Yeah.

**[05:07] Cyril:** Okay, good. Okay, good. We are going to make the answer to this question, what should I need to start selling online? As I said, with just one phrase that you're typing or saying to your lovely agent, okay agent, I want to start selling online, and that's all. Probably it must be much, much easier than register to any kind of cloud solution like Shopify or something else. Human beings must focus on what they are doing the best, understanding what their customer needs, understanding how to fulfil your obligations and your promises to your audience, and do some brilliant packaging. That's all. All the rest will be done by AI agents, no doubt.

**[05:56] Matt:** Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be— I'm really curious, you know, to see where it, where it all ends up, because it does feel like a bit of a step change. The UK government today announced that they're going to perform, um, and I don't know whether it's going to be an early, uh, emergency parliament session, but off the wake of the head of Anthropic saying that AI development needs to slow down and Elon Musk actually agreeing, which shocked the whole world. So everyone's, everyone's sort of taken notice. Hang on a minute. Elon's saying the same thing as normal people. Well, hang on, we should probably listen. Uh, and the government's sort of going, yeah, we should probably have a debate about, uh, AI and what's going on at the moment. It's just a fascinating time, isn't it? A fascinating world in which we live. And obviously, but you have seen a lot of this. You work with a lot of clients over this space. What's the biggest mistake do you think we're all making right now?

**[06:54] Cyril:** Oh, we are all making right now, you mean? Yeah. First of all, it's quite a philosophical question, but I have very practical answer. Frankly speaking, we are To currently to rely on the general purpose agents and general purpose LLMs. You know that the special word of today, harness. Harness is what you have around the pure LLM agent that helps you to do the real job and to achieve the real result. Frankly speaking, at least half of the wisdom of AI agents we currently see is the proper harness. And, uh, probably also noticed that once the new LLM is out of the box and gets introduced to the audience, the previous generation of the same developer LLM became quite dumber, for example. Yeah. Let me say, I'm a longtime customer of Anthropic's and OpenAI products.

**[07:58] Matt:** Yeah.

**[07:58] Cyril:** And just 2 months ago, I have been using Sonnet Sonnet 4 and then Sonnet 5 for quite sophisticated tasks. But yesterday I ran the same task on the same Sonnet 5 just to crawl the list of attendees for the next conference I'm going to attend this week. And you know what? This agent spent much less tokens to process my request, but it returned much simpler and not so great answer back to me. And I start thinking, what's this? Probably Anthropic is forcing me to use their latest frontier model much more.

**[08:43] Matt:** Yeah.

**[08:43] Cyril:** For what reason? To make for this LLM more data to learn from or to force me to spend more dollars on each 100,000 tokens? I don't know the right answer. Probably you have.

**[09:02] Matt:** I don't know if I, I don't know if I've got the right answer, but I, I'm sat here and I'm intrigued actually by this concept that the same model of AI, um, 6 months later is producing worse outcomes. I, I'm intrigued to know if that's actually true, Cyril. And I, it kind of reminds me of the, um, Do you remember a few years ago we had this thing with, um, Apple on the iPhones? I don't know if it was ever proved or disproved where they, in effect, they made phones deliberately slower so that you would upgrade. So the older the phone got, the software was done in such a way that it would make the phone slower. So then you would be, you know, you would be forced to upgrade. And I, I think Apple denied it. I don't know. I don't want to get sued. It's just hypothetical. I'm not saying they did. I'm just saying it's an example. But at the same time, I'm kind of— that's what I'm thinking about as you're talking. It's like, it would make total sense, I suppose. It's not something I've really thought about, but for the frontier models like Anthropic, like OpenAI, to slow down older versions to make you use the newer versions so that there's more token usage, so that there's more revenue. It's a simple strategy. Yeah. I suppose in many ways, I, I don't know if it's valid, but I could see why they maybe would do it.

**[10:25] Cyril:** It looks, at least it looks like, and it's quite an interesting hypothesis here to think about and not just think about, but to understand how should we use these in our products, in our tools we are rolling out to ecommerce, to online sellers, to people who are selling through marketplaces. or standalone stores. For example, if you see the map or the chart of AI-native startups that are building something for ecommerce, you will be surprised. Most of them, I'm not sure about exact numbers, but probably not less than 75%, they are buying, they are building the buy-side agents. So something that are more B2C-focused that should help buyers to streamline their buying operations, but for what? To buy cheaper or to check the best bargain or I don't know what. And surprisingly, on the second hand, the field is not overcrowded with the companies. They are building the seller side or merchant side actions. Why is that? For me, it's kind of surprise because I have been building B2B solutions for decades and never built any B2C solutions. And all of us know that it's much easier to chase large B2B customers rather than thousands of small B2B users.

**[11:58] Matt:** Yeah, that's an interesting one. I don't know if I've come across— and now we talk about it, you watch, my Instagram feed will be full of said companies. Who will be offering me their services to use AI to buy product? I think it's an interesting idea, isn't it? I guess there'll be a race because I think people would look at that and go, well, if I want to be like the AI Amazon or the, maybe the AI eBay might be another good analogy where I'm not the guy holding the stock. I'm just processing the payments. There's money to be made in in that somehow, somewhere, if I've got, you know, if I, if I'm the first to capture the market in terms of buyers, I think it's an intriguing proposition. I don't know anybody that's doing it well, maybe Amazon. Uh, but other than that, I don't know anyone that's doing it well. Um, have you, have you come across anyone playing well in that space?

**[12:57] Cyril:** Oh, uh, not right now, probably. Uh, but I'm thinking about the different angle for this question, actually. When you are working on the ecommerce solution that must make the life of online sellers easier or much more important to increase their margin, to increase their profit, should it be created by a major, for example, an Amazon which sits on the terabytes of terabytes of data and hundreds of thousands of sellers? Should it be created by midsize player like Helium 10 or something like that? And is there any room for small third-party players that have not enough data and not enough audience to engage with? That's extremely interesting for me as a small company founder because I've been on different sides. I even spent 7 years in early-stage venture capital and you know that The main question that early-stage investors are asking to startup founders, what if, then put the title, the name, the trademark of the huge company. What if Anthropic, for example, or what if Amazon will develop it on their own, directly in-house, and then roll out to all of the hundreds of thousands of their customers?

**[14:32] Matt:** Yeah. It's an interesting one, isn't it? I, I'm with you. I, thinking that through is quite fascinating. I can't see it being Amazon. Um, but I think Amazon's a closed platform. I don't think they like— I don't think they play well. Maybe they will play well with others later in the day. I don't know. I would love the answer to be— I don't think it will be, Cyril. I would love the answer to be a guy sat in his garage who becomes the next unicorn. And they're talking about this idea, aren't they, of now with AI that actually the ability to create a unicorn company where it is just you in your garage is actually quite a possible scenario right now. I would hate for it to be Shopify. I'm not a fan of Shopify. I'm sorry, Shopify. I'm just not a fan. I would hate for it to be Amazon. And again, I think Jeff's had enough money, you know, to find Do you? You did well, dude. Just let someone else play. So I would hope it's the little guy. I would love that story.

**[15:34] Cyril:** Same for me. And which is much more important, we can see that it will come in place and it's coming every decade, every year and every quarter, for example, because in most cases, the old good major cannot create something really important because in most cases, it means that they must kill their own business in its current stage, for example. And I must say that for companies like, I don't want to name exact, but let's do that. You mentioned eBay already in our conversation today. And I remember those good old good times 15 years ago when eBay decided to build the entire vertical ladder of their solution, not just Not just as it was, okay, start selling something online. But what if they want to fulfil the ask from medium companies or larger companies? And for corporation, the obvious answer is start buying another smaller companies. And it was, it was in place. eBay have bought CGI Commerce, or sorry, GSI Commerce. I don't remember these exact 3 letters. Founded by cousin of Roy Rubin, the black box for huge brands that have been going to start selling online. It was, oh, it was 15 years ago already, probably 16 even. And on that time eBay have bought the PayPal company because if you're selling something, facilitating selling online, You must have your own in-house solution. And, you know, from the very strange moment, it appears that the entire valuation of the eBay corporation on the stock market is getting lower than the sum of the parts that incorporated into eBay.

**[17:41] Matt:** Yeah.

**[17:41] Cyril:** Yeah, because you cannot focus on just one part of your business and say, okay, and all the rest will come I don't know from what way. So it must be the clear focus. And second part for our audience, it must be the clear shift in the entire environment around you. Today, it's quite obvious and quite clear. Today is that the general purpose agents are the point of contact between the customer, the business, and their data. That's, uh, quite obvious. So the next question is, if you are using cloud solution or if you are selling on Amazon, uh, who owns your own data, your information about your buyers? You or probably the platform itself?

**[18:33] Matt:** This is, uh, this is the age-old problem, isn't it? In, in many ways. Um, I mean, just going back to eBay, eBay I think are stuck in an old business model, aren't they? And they can't really seem to get themselves out of it. They're sort of like the first major player, it feels like, to be like Blockbuster. Do you remember Blockbuster and its sort of— eBay feels like the sort of digital equivalent. But yeah, going back to the data question, who owns what? And it's such a murky field now. Yeah. Um, like when we sell products on Amazon, I don't own any of that data. Uh, yeah, I'm— at least I'm not aware of any data I could potentially pull out of it. Um, there may be a few reports. I don't— I certainly don't own the customer data, but obviously I, I do on my own site. Um, and so you've got the— on one hand, the proliferation of these marketplaces, but on the other hand First-party data is becoming more and more important, isn't it? And so how do we balance that? And how do we balance that in the age of AI where it seems to all be changing yet again?

**[19:46] Cyril:** It seems so. And I'm quite sure that there are a lot of newcomers on this field, including myself, including the company we're currently building. Let's see this from the following angle. For example, for decades it was quite obvious that if you're selling something, you must have a storefront. That's obvious. And, uh, you see, if you start thinking about that, it came from the real offline world. When you're coming to a brick-and-mortar store, you see the goods, the products on the shelves. Actually, today it completely reflected in an idea of the storefront. Yeah. But is it necessary actually? Because your traffic, your visitors, and your prospective buyers, probably they might don't want to see the storefront itself. You probably know these 2 different concepts of female buying and male buying. In most cases, when the gentleman is coming to the online store, it's for clear purpose to buy something very specific. And the main task and the main challenge for online seller is to let this customer to find this in your inventory quickly and to make less friction in 2 or 3 clicks, went him to checkout. Yeah. But when a kind of female buying visitor is getting there, probably without even a clean intention, probably she wants to see what's on the shelves? Should I try this? Should I consider buying or not? Or just have a look? And you feel that these 2 types of customers, not necessarily men and women, but they must be treated differently. Hmm. If you have clear intention, please, I want to give you exactly what you need. If you want to understand the entire picture, the entire inventory, okay, I'm ready to show up. But today, online sellers in most cases have no understanding what it's all about. Probably just the channel where this buyer came from or the particular ads that led to this visit, but probably not to the final purchase. And that's the problem. That's what I'm talking about when I say you're not owning your data. And when we are talking about Amazon sales, it's much worse because your buyer is just one click away from buying from your competitor. That's a huge problem.

**[22:31] Matt:** Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is one of the many problems, isn't it, of Amazon? So how do we deal with it?

**[22:42] Cyril:** Good question. First of all, my own intention and what we are building now is the idea, okay, try to get from your platform or from the marketplace you are selling on, try to get as many data, as rich as possible access to API. So you can connect, as I said, your agent, doesn't matter from what provider, and start asking clear question, asking not only for advice, but for actionable insight, let's say. For example, What, what I can say here, if you see the new tool on the market, in most cases it's not a help for you. It's kind of a new burden. You have to learn how it works. You have to learn how to work with these outcomes, how to make exactly your profit higher and increase your revenue. So the next point Working with AI agent and your data must be much easier to you and not creating new questions, but only providing answers. Next, what if we can provide the goal? Okay, I want to sell more, or I want to clear shelves, or I want to increase just my solid profit, but I'm not going to increase my operations out of that. Just put this goal to your agent.

**[24:16] Matt:** Yeah.

**[24:16] Cyril:** And see what could be done with the data, not just with the data, state of the platform. But if your agent could put the actionable commands back to this platform and see this executed and see enough tracking of the results, because just for example, you know that Amazon is telling outside that their AI assistant, about 20% of its suggestions are confirmed and accepted by sellers. Okay, that's great. But in this case, how they are going to stand out of the crowd, stand out of the competition and gain more sales if they are accepting exactly the same suggestions that 90, 89% of your competitors are doing?

**[25:09] Matt:** Yeah, exactly.

**[25:10] Cyril:** So why don't you try the independent third-party solution to see if you can make this competition better for you than for your rivals?

**[25:20] Matt:** Yeah, it's a really interesting point. And I, I'm kind of— there's so much there, Cyril. I'm trying to figure out where to start. I guess just rewind, listening to you talk about AI and another tool coming out and not making life easier for you necessarily. And, you know, we're all entrepreneurs. We've all got shiny object syndrome, haven't we? I guess, is there a Is there a benefit to creating your own agents versus SaaS, for example, versus hiring in every month somebody's version of their agent, if you like? Like, where do you see it for founders and operators? Are they kind of, should we all be getting pretty good at creating these basic systems ourselves using whatever AI model you want to use, whether it's a Frontier one, whether it's sort of self-hosted or whatever it is, should we be creating things that connecting with various APIs? For example, the APIs which are obvious ones to me at the moment, like a Google, um, API which monitors, you know, your Google Search Console. For example, you can you can obviously connect into that. Um, there's a million tools out there, or I could write my own, but of course there's an opportunity cost to writing my own, but at least I own that information. What's your, what's your viewpoint on this? Agents or SaaS? Do I do it myself or do I SaaS it?

**[26:55] Cyril:** Yeah. Uh, my personal feeling here and, uh, my personal vision, uh, what we are building, uh, what we are building on right now, First of all, any improvement in the work of the agent, it should be in your favor. But anyway, in some cases, it might be like if you are hiring a PhD to just calculate simple numbers in your Microsoft Excel sheet, for example. You must choose the exact type of model that is quite enough, but not more for your particular goal right now. For example, we are constantly doing experiments and trying to understand what's the actual amount of data inside the midsize operating online store, for example, to understand the current context and how to map it to the amount of tokens you have to spend If you're connecting, for example, the frontier model like Fable made by Anthropic. And what's interesting, if you want, for example, to connect Claude to your Amazon store through SP-API, it will cost you about 4 million tokens, mostly input tokens, less output, when you're processing, let's say, an inventory of of 2,000 SKUs. But that's too simple and too dumb operation to do it with a Frontier model, or at least even Opus or even Sonnet. So it must be the layer. I don't want to name it SaaS because it's just, it's not a solution. It's just an intermediate layer between the wise, sophisticated LLM and the poor data. So your data must be, first of all, well prepared. Do it quickly. In most cases, it must be completely deterministic. So, you know, there is no way for AI agents, for LLMs, when the task is completely deterministic. It's just the question of software building, just an algorithm. But it must be done under the supervision of a simple model to decide what part of data is really important for your current goal. For example, let me provide a clear example. If you are changing any part of your product listing, you are doing it for purpose. You want in the same time to be more affordable or adorable even for your buyers, for your visitors, but it must still keep very relevant for search. I'm not just saying search engine optimisation, it's also relevant for Amazon Ads, for Amazon Search. So 2 players at once, your visitors and the algorithms. But the 3rd player is also in place, the agents. They are crawling your product listing to understand how to map what you put on listing and what Their customer, their human being asked to buy or to consider buying from you. So is it possible to fulfil all 3 in one time? I'm not sure about that. So you should decide what is more important for you right now in this current situation.

**[30:36] Matt:** That's a great question. And I love this idea of thinking about it in layers. Because at the moment, um, it feels a, you know, very black and white. It's like, um, I can get AI to do this or I could get SaaS to do this. But I like how you've broke it down into layers. And actually there are things, there are layers which are so simple you don't need AI to do it, but it's going to burn through the tokens if you do. And so this is something I'm seeing more and more now as people are becoming more and more aware of the costs of AI. Um, this breaking down into layers. This is a complex task. Let me give this to Fable. This is a medium-level task. Let me give this to Sonnet. This is, um, this is deterministic. Let me give that to Excel, right? Or, or, or whatever. It's, it's kind of, um, it, it seems to be becoming more and more common now, thinking, uh, in these, in these types of layers. Do you think, do you think that's a smart move or do you think it's all gonna sort of even out anyway and we're just trying to make life more complicated than it needs to be right now?

**[31:43] Cyril:** I'm quite sure that it is a very smart move and that's moreover, it's the only way that the special purpose tools, AI tools, I mean, should be created. Once again, just imagine, You are hiring very sophisticated, probably wise PhD, but you must map this guy's abilities and knowledge and skills to the exact task you want to dedicate it to this person. And this matches with the modern AI agents completely. For example, you are going to get some data prepared. Okay, but don't forget that your context, context window is limited for understanding by AI agents. And which is much more important, it is moving. It is moving by the time axis, because what was completely true a week ago might become completely wrong on the next week. For example, if your agent has enough knowledge about the seasons, about the holidays and the special events that is extremely important in selling online. Everyone knows about Black Friday, Cyber Monday, everyone knows about Thanksgiving and Christmas season. Okay, but what about the local specialties? What about the local days, special days? Or what about your competitors? For example, if you are running the competitors' monitoring tools, most of them now are based on the algorithms. It's okay. But what about if we put some AI capabilities into this workflow? Just imagine in your store, apparently you've got 2 times less conversion for running sneakers. For example, what's going on? What's the reason? Nothing has changed in your store and in your traffic, for example, but 2 times less sales on this product category. As a human being or using the old tools, you have no idea about that. But what if you have AI tool for monitoring your competitors at scale? Not 2, not 5 direct competitors, but 100 of them. And what if your tool have insiders customer accounts at each and every of your competitors? The robots can locate and understand the internal loyalty campaign very quickly. They can map it to your own inventory because probably if you are competitors, your audience somehow intersects with those guys. And your AI agents can start almost the same loyalty campaign at the same time, even probably before the first email reached to the inbox of main part of the audience. It's a real game changer because you are not reacting. You are acting at the same time on the same issue, same field as your competitors are doing right now.

**[35:07] Matt:** That's super powerful. I love that. I did, going back to something that you said there, so do you, Robots, whatever language you want to use, you know, in terms of AI monitoring my competitors, you know, having AI actively sign up to emails and to social media accounts and to monitor them to understand what my competitors are doing. Do you see that happening more and more with AI, or do you think it's kind of Do you think it's kind of one of those things where we, we, I, I, what's the phrase I'm looking for? We might, I, I think when it comes to competitor research, a lot of us are very well-meaning, um, but very poor on the follow-through. Um, but now we've got AI, it, it strikes me that it be— it's never been easier to monitor your competitors. And therefore, if that's the case, should I be doing it? And consequently, how do I deal with the fact that my competitors are probably monitoring me an awful lot more now than they were?

**[36:16] Cyril:** Hmm. I do not have the direct answer, but I have the general one. If you see the new technology on the market, every time it is almost the same. First of all, a lot of people start using this technology in a very very straight way, probably even dumb way. For example, my LinkedIn, my own LinkedIn profile is quite popular. I've got almost 10,000 followers on LinkedIn and a lot of people are writing in direct messages to me. Today, I'm— my inbox on LinkedIn is overloaded with the same, very similar generic messages.

**[37:04] Matt:** Yeah.

**[37:05] Cyril:** Every time I have a special template, I'm answering Okay, man, what kind of AI suggester, AI copywriter you are using? Because it looks like completely relevant to my profile, but it's completely irrelevant in terms of your ask. Why don't you, why don't you directly say what you want from me and what you're offering, what you are asking for? That doesn't matter. So First of all, new technology is getting its usage at scale, but not in a good way. Then the markets start differentiating, differentiating, and solutions are dividing into 2 types: the cheap solutions that are affordable to any business, and more expensive but much more wise and targeted solutions. And online selling, it should be very similar. I'm not quite sure that we still should keep the term ecommerce. It should be transited to AI commerce because both sides, I mean merchant side and buyer side, will have their own agent almost any time, probably from the beginning of 2027. And in this case, we must understand how they interact with each other. As a human being, as a buyer, how can I be quite sure that both agents on the merchant side and my side are chasing the best win-win deal? I have no idea how to understand that. Should I buy the cheapest option or should I buy the most expensive? But my buying agent said, okay, Cyril, that's exactly for you and for your budget. Okay, come on, guy. You know everything about my budget because you have access to my Gmail and access to my payment solution for bank account, at least read-only account. But okay, you don't know anything about my intention. Probably I'm buying this good for my lovely wife and I want to buy it slightly over my available budget to make her happy in this case. Why not?

**[39:26] Matt:** It's an interesting one, isn't it? I am curious with AI commerce. Should we stop using ecommerce and go AI commerce? I think it's an emerging technology, isn't it? And I, I guess I see them intertwined a little bit more. Um, I remember when ecommerce became a thing, the whole world was going, you know, the high street's gonna die, right? And shopping malls are gonna be a thing of the past. And for a time they were. Um, and the high street, you know, many places is still dead and some of the shopping malls are still dead. Because you just couldn't compete as an in-person store, brick-and-mortar store with the costs of the online store. But I still want to go to the shop, right? I still want to touch, smell, feel. And I think with AI, I think there's going to be the whole convenience thing. And I think Amazon in some respects have to be the ones that do this because they've They're the convenience people. Like, why do I go to Amazon? Because it's convenient. I don't want to browse. I just want to go there, bang, buy that, dush. I want it next day and I want it, I want it, you know, easy as. Whereas I don't buy clothes on Amazon for a reason, right? And I, and there's got to be some part of that journey in there. And I think figuring that out is going to be The trick, it's going to be, are websites going to die? No. Are they going to become a bit more like the high street? Yes. Do we need to rethink it? Yes. How do these things all work together in a seamless sort of play? And the shops I think that do well at the moment are the shops that mix online and in-store really well, don't they? They, you know, you've got click and collect, you've got all kinds of things, go into the store, we'll deliver it to you and and so on and so forth. Um, I think that's a really good sort of— it took us a while to do the, the hybrid, um, thing well, I think. And I— it's part of me thinks, I wonder how that translates in the world of AI, right? Where— how do we do the hybrid thing well?

**[41:43] Cyril:** Oh, no one knows, at least now. Uh, this is once again, this is why I'm not, uh, dropping the idea of continuing my early-stage investing as angel investor because the main part of this game when you're investing into very early stage innovative solutions from younger entrepreneurs, younger generations of entrepreneurs, they are, they see this crazy world in a different way.

**[42:11] Matt:** Yeah.

**[42:12] Cyril:** For example, you know that for the quite recent time a lot of real stores offline was quite kind of a showroom. So a lot of people getting there, uh, looking around, touching the fabrics, uh, understanding how it looks like, but then later they are ordering online.

**[42:35] Matt:** Yeah.

**[42:36] Cyril:** That's good probably for online stores. That's, uh, really good in terms of the branding, branded stores that for a single brand only. But you know what? Recently I had a conversation with a young, young woman. She producing the lingerie and she had her own brand presented in several of regional stores. I mean real stores.

**[43:02] Matt:** Yeah.

**[43:03] Cyril:** And I asked her, okay, you are planning your online presence. Why don't you start with selling on Amazon at a European department, European marketplace? And you know what was the answer? I'm caring about my brand value and I don't want to be easily found on Amazon. For me, it's kind of controversial. I see no problem if your brand is presented on any kind of marketplace and especially at Amazon because for some kind of customers, let's say reliability in delivery may be much more important than recognising the brand or even the price. For me, it's really important. I will likely buy, let's say, a bit more expensive thing that I'm quite sure it should be, it will be delivered overnight via Amazon facilities rather than get some savings out of this order but without estimated delivery at all, probably a week later or something like that. And once again, That's completely important for sellers to Amazon to understand their market position here and their intention of their prospective buyers. What is more important for them? Delivery, price, keeping the value of the brand or something similar? Let's see.

**[44:35] Matt:** Yeah, some really deep questions here, Cyril. Listen, I feel like this is going to be a fascinating conversation in so many ways. But I'm also aware of time and the quick departure of it. Let me, before we go further, let me get my question asked. The question that I like to ask all my guests, what's your question for me? This is where I go. I take your question, I'll go away and answer on social media. But what's your question for me?

**[45:04] Cyril:** Oh, my lovely question that I'm constantly hearing from prospective investors to Jinnify. Don't you afraid that you will be substituted by AI solution? I mean, you personally as a businessman or an entrepreneur. So Matt, what do you think about that? Could you be replaced by AI podcast host?

**[45:30] Matt:** That's one of my favourite questions. Could AI replace Matt as a podcaster? One of the things I would love, dear listener, is actually if you answered that question for me. Should AI replace me as the podcast host? Would it make for a better listening experience? There's probably a strong argument that it would. Anyway, um, before I digress too much, I will of course answer that question on social media. So if you want to know my answer, come follow me at Matt Edmundson. Now, um, so I had a— sorry, that question just tickled the back of my brain. Uh, how do people reach you? How do they connect with you? How do they find out more about what you guys are up to? What's What's the best route to you?

**[46:11] Cyril:** I like to keep connected to like-minded people over LinkedIn. So LinkedIn, Cyril Golub, it's very easy to find me. And don't hesitate to put some comments under the actual posting and reach out to me in direct messages.

**[46:27] Matt:** Fantastic. We will, of course, link to Cyril's LinkedIn and company information in the show notes, which are free for For you in your favourite podcast app. They'll be in the YouTube description. They will be on the website at ecommercepodcast.net. They will be in the newsletter that goes out every week. And of course, they will be in AI. So, because why would they not? So basically, there's no excuse for not finding them. So why not reach out to Cyril, ask him your questions and say hello, especially about all things AI. The man knows what he's— what he knows. And, um, I feel like we're just sort of— I, I do say this a lot, and I appreciate I say this a lot. We're just scratching the surface. You're starting to get somewhere. Um, and sometimes an hour is just never enough. But Cyril, thank you so much for joining us, man. Genuinely appreciate having you on the show. But before we go, I like to do this thing called saving the best till last. And so in the, in the sort of the few minutes that we've got together, um, Cyril, I'm curious. Someone's sitting here listening to the podcast. They are an e-com business, um, turning over maybe a million online, a small sort of e-com brand. How— and I think they're looking across the world of AI and feeling slightly overwhelmed, if I'm honest with you. They know how to get Claude to do a few things, maybe fix a few things on their Shopify site. How should they be thinking? thinking about AI right now, do you think?

**[47:56] Cyril:** Think about AI like your assistant that must be supervised and must be clearly set with the goal and the expected outcome. Don't think that it is kind of a magician or wizard that will, will do everything without you and without your supervision.

**[48:24] Matt:** Love that. It's not a wizard, um, as much as we all like to think that it is. Uh, but yeah, I'm sure Claude, when Claude listens to this episode, which we know Claude does, is going to go, hang on a minute, Matt, I am actually a wizard. Uh, I, I, I'm, I'm, I am. We'll see if AI responds. Uh, but Cyril, thank you so much for coming on the show, man. Genuinely love the conversation, really. Really appreciate you being here and appreciate you, man. Genuinely.

**[48:51] Cyril:** Thanks, Matt. Thanks for inviting me and high five to the audience.

**[48:56] Matt:** Yeah, high five, definitely. As it goes. So there you go. Another episode all wrapped up of the eCommerce Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us this week. Like I say, make sure you like and subscribe and do all of that good stuff because we've got more shows coming up. And of course, I don't want you to miss any of them. I do love doing this, podcast. Hopefully you get some value out of it. Like I say, like, subscribe, check out ecommercepodcast.net for all the back catalog archives and even the notes from today's conversation with Cyril. But yeah, that's it from me. That's it from Cyril. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a phenomenal week wherever you are in the world. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.