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EP 353 - Why Agentic Commerce Starts With Data: Eli Anselm of Ridge Ventures

from The Jason & Scot Show - E-Commerce And Retail News

27m 14s

EP 353 - Why Agentic Commerce Starts With Data: Eli Anselm of Ridge Ventures

This episode of the Jason and Scott Show, recorded live at the Retail Club AI Festival in Huntington Beach, features hosts Jason "Retail Geek" Goldberg and Scott Wingo interviewing Ellie Anselm, an investor at Ridge Ventures. Anselm explains her nonlinear path into venture, from machine learning in financial services to building software for VC and PE firms, and describes Ridge's focus on early-stage B2B enterprise software supported by its Ridge Revenue Network of CXOs and enterprises. She defines agentic commerce broadly as any AI-powered, autonomous part of discovering and purchasing products, not merely the final transaction. For that vision to scale, she argues the product data layer must come first, enabling agents to accurately capture SKUs, followed by AI-native advertising and dynamic, personalized offers such as travel deals. She notes the funding bar has risen sharply, with rapid growth now the baseline, and advises founders to listen actively, answer questions directly, and address risks honestly. On personal agents like Muse, Anselm sees real progress from better models and connectors but cautions that Silicon Valley adoption is an echo chamber and wider uptake will be gradual, similar to mobile commerce's decade-long rise. She also highlights back-end opportunities in demand forecasting and procurement intelligence, citing a furniture company that uncovered $4 million in overspend. The hosts close by noting this year's event shows more mature, measurable AI use cases.

Transcription

6374 Words, 35010 Characters

English
Speaker 1Welcome to the Jason and Scott Show, your source for the latest news and trends in the e-commerce industry. Featuring host Jason, Retail Geek Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer of Publicis, and Scott Wingo, Co-Founder and CEO of ReFiBuy.
Speaker 2Here are Jason and Scott. Before we start this episode, we have an important announcement for you.
Speaker 3Hi, I'm Kiri Masters, and I'm excited to introduce AdGentic, a new show about advertising in the age of AI. I've spent the last decade analyzing retail media, and now I'm fascinated by what happens when more of the shopping journey moves into AI assistance and agents. What happens to advertising when there's no search results page? What will ads in AI actually look like? And where should brands, retailers, and publishers be paying attention right now? Those are the kinds of questions that we'll be exploring on AdGentic through video essays, conversations, and perspectives from the people actually building this new ecosystem. AdGentic is live now as part of the ReFiBuy media network. Find the show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. And subscribe. Subscribe to the AdGentic newsletter on Substack.
Speaker 4Welcome to the Jason and Scott Show. I'm your host, Jason, Retail Geek Goldberg. And as usual, I'm here with your co-host, Scott Wingo.
Speaker 2Hey, Jason, and welcome back, Jason and Scott Show listeners and viewers. Don't forget we have a YouTube channel, everybody. Check that out, Jason and Scott. Today, we continue day two of our live podcasting from Retail Club AI Festival in Huntington Beach, California. We are joined by. Our guest, his name is Ellie Anselm, and he is an investor at Ridge Ventures. Ellie, welcome to the show.
Speaker 5Well, Jason, Scott, thank you guys so much for having me on. Excited to be here.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah. You and I first met, I think you called, you inbounded to me and wanted to chat about Gentic Commerce like a year. It was a long time ago. I looked and it was like right when I started Retail Gentic. So I think it was like.
Speaker 4Side note, be careful what you ask for.
Speaker 2February of 20. Yes. And I was like, someone else wants to talk about this? I think it was like February or March of 25. It was super early in this journey that we're on. And then you guys invested. So that was a. I'm glad I took the call. Yeah. That was a good one. Tell us a little bit about your background and then what you do at Ridge Ventures, and we'll jump into it from there.
Speaker 5Yeah. So I'm also very glad and happy we were able to connect back then. A little bit about myself. So I kind of have nonlinear trajectory into venture, started off on more of the math, data science side of things. So in AI before God. Not sexy, traditional machine learning in financial services capacity. So it was with the S&P predicting crashing markets, essentially. Didn't last very long, given I have too much ADHD to stay within a research team. And as exciting as algorithms are, I had to do something a little bit more oriented around people. Jumped ship to the startup side of the world, ironically building software for venture capital and private equity firms. So built some thick skin dealing with people like myself on the other side of the table for some time. So built empathy for founders. Did the whole zero to one in building both. You know, product and go to market and that building, you know, company is still off and running. And I shifted to, you know, rage roughly three years ago now. I've been on the investment team focusing on, you know, hopefully investing in the best breed seed and series eight companies, a little bit about Ridge and kind of where we focus our time. So firm's been around for a bit. We're currently investing out of our fifth fund and primarily spend all of our time, like I mentioned, early stage. So really everyone from having in a deck and idea up until series eight companies that might have. So like, you know, what we like to call early product market fit, all of that is within B2B enterprise software, really like our best of breed across the stack ever from infrastructure to the app layer. And the reason we both focus on enterprise, not from an investment perspective, but also the way we are able to support our companies is what we've coined really is the Ridge Revenue Network. So think of a group of two to 300 CXOs in mid market and like 14,000 enterprises. And one of the main cohorts is actually our CMO council. So a group of. You know, CMOs from some of these companies where we, you know, wine and dine them, host events, stay very close, you know, to the nose in terms of what's happening on the ground, where the CMOs want to be investing, what they're looking for in terms of best of breed tools, where they kind of rely on us. And then that becomes a nice flywheel for our portfolio companies as well and kind of feeds our investment strategy.
Speaker 2Investors have a lot of different ways they kind of approach markets. Sometimes they'll they just take pitches and whatever is interesting to them, you know, is what they'll they'll evaluate. Other times they more. More proactively go out with the theme. Where do you guys fall in that spectrum?
Speaker 5I'd say a mix of both, but specifically within commerce historically have been big investors in like commerce and the more tech stack. So invested historically in, you know, Braze and then on the commerce side, you know, across that companies like Good Day Software, which is a native ERP loop returns, helping kind of the return system. And even like the CG brands like Chubby's, which is actually the former founder of Good Day Software. So have experience. In this space and me from like a thematic perspective, you mentioned, you know, reached out to you relatively early in this world of agentic commerce. I think before the term really became a thing or I was calling it agentic shopping.
Speaker 2Yeah, it was close. I got one word right.
Speaker 550%. It's OK.
Speaker 4You're right. You know, the leading thought both words wrong because a lot of it and a lot of what you do is not agentic. So it's true. Oh, boy. Here we go. Let's not open that can of worms.
Speaker 5But yeah, I know it was was lucky enough to kind of be excited about the space, have really good context from just where, you know, what's going on. You know, the value has been attributed historically and the way I saw the world going was there is just a and maybe I'll define like agentic commerce for people in the way we view it. Because I think a lot of skeptics come in and say, Ellie, like, this is a great idea, but I don't imagine ever like giving over my credit card, banking information to an agent and like it go buying a house for me. And I'm like, sure, you know, I don't know if we'll ever get there. But the way we view the world is anything within the experience of researching. Like, you know, discovering and then ultimately purchasing products from an AI powered and autonomous experience is really agentic commerce. So any part of that stack. So it could literally just be discovering new products is really agentic commerce. And then all the other aspects within that sequence are going to be developed over time. So I looked at the market and said, OK, for that vision to be realized of people coming in, having seamless experiences and really scaling with like agentic. Or AI shopping, what needs to be true? And the first thing is consumers are only going to use tools if they have good experiences and the good experience isn't going to come necessarily from better models. It's going to come from the merchants jumping on this train and saying, what do I need to do for the AI side of the experience to actually be good? And that's really where we landed within, I think, product cataloging. But I can talk more about the second kind of how we view it, if that's helpful. Yeah, I think Jason has a question.
Speaker 4I love your framing. I 100% agree. And you're going to miss the market view narrowly to find agentic as that autonomous transaction. But I always turn that question around on people that say I can never imagine buying a house. Like, could you imagine buying a house without getting agents advice? Yeah. Like, I mean, it's the biggest investment that most people will make. And increasingly, an agent is going to play a role in that transaction. Yeah. So I certainly agree. I'm sort of curious, though. It's funny in my world. One of the biggest problems with. This whole agentic thing is the pace of change, like things are happening so fast that our old models of how we select software or how we craft solutions or how we do change management. They're not designed for this pace in my mind. And you may tell me I'm wildly wrong. You're in the one industry where the pace of change is potentially an advantage, right? Because it's like you find out if you had a good investment philosophy quickly or not quickly. So, yeah, I don't know. Is it helpful for you that things are happening so fast?
Speaker 5Funny enough. In venture. It's probably a hard part of the job. You actually don't really know for some time. So, like, you know, maybe early stage. Yes, we get a write up on a company pretty quick, but there's plenty of companies, you know, like Groupon that goes off, raises hundreds of millions and then isn't a great outcome for all the venture capitalists involved. So hopefully, you know, all the companies I invest in have fantastic outcomes. But, you know, we'll continue to see past initial fundraise. But, yes, I'd say the rate of change actually creates an opportunity for investors like Rich specifically. Yeah. There's kind of like bifurcation in the market right now with the mega deals, you know, seed rounds getting done at a billion and the mega funds really taking a large portion of where you could say rounds and volume capital is getting attributed to. But now, given that the rate of change is so quick within all these industries, retail and commerce, for example, it actually comes down to funds like rigid or building expertise in this market can stay so close to the ground, understand this actually happening. And then we can underwrite and make investments. And then we can underwrite and make investments faster than like mega funds that are trying to capture the whole world.
Speaker 4Sure. Although, side note, I think you did just price a refi by a seed round. So just saying.
Speaker 2What are some of the areas that you're looking at now, you know, as you think about, you know, where things are going? You've kind of been thinking about this for, you know, two years now. What are some areas of interest to you?
Speaker 5Yeah. So kind of like I mentioned before, I think of it as a sequence, like to get to this world where everything is natively. Gentic for consumers and businesses and, you know, shopping, procuring things, what needs to be solved for be true. So the first layer I really found was to be the data layer where you guys are playing now and enabling all of the agents and AI services to properly capture the end products and SKUs and services that people might want to be purchasing. Then the next one, and when you talk about all the companies and infrastructure that's getting disintermediated by AI, the first layer is actually also advertising. And there's a lot of hype going on with ads showing up within AI services. So within ChatGPT, obviously, they have to generate some revenue to make up for the compute costs and their funding rounds and the dynamics. We don't have to go off on a tangent about their IPO getting delayed for safety, but I think everyone is picking up on the trend of what's really going on. But actually, AI-native ads and offers happening on other surfaces is something that I find super interesting. So travel, for example, has always been limited in mapping inventory, potential offers and promotions that they can give to consumers. By one aspect of latency, so to be rendered on, let's say, Google Search, for example, and all these other platforms, they have to have a set of, hey, this is what we're able to offer, we're going to push it out, super low latency systems, you can't actually dynamically offer anything, given those limitations, and people end up going on the sites like, oh, this inventory isn't true, the listing for the room is available. It's essentially perishable. And I think because of agents. And people's aperture to wait a bit longer for results has now opened the door where, hey, how can we create really dynamic, more personalized offers for all these consumers? So going on to maybe generic site, a side ad, not just being, hey, you know, we know you're looking for a hotel, here's a hotel for two with a hotel view, but they know that your search was oriented around a flight to, you know, this particular country, you're going with your family, and maybe, you know, they're throwing in a few nights plus dinner or whatever it might be. So going on to maybe generic site, a side ad, not just being, hey, you know, we know you're looking for a hotel, here's a hotel for two nights plus dinner, maybe, you know, they're throwing in a few nights plus dinner, but they know that your search was oriented around a flight to, you know, this particular country, you're throwing in a few nights plus dinner, and maybe, you know, they're throwing in a few nights plus dinner.
Speaker 2of the company formation side of things?
Speaker 5I'd say in terms of volume of companies, probably within the same, like, pace that it's been historically, like, if you look at the number of deals that are going on, it hasn't significantly changed at the seed and series A stages, primarily seed, series A, where things have really changed is the bar for routes to get done now. So what was historically maybe when I started in venture 2024, you know, the typical series A is a company going from zero to 1 million in AR. And that's like, you know, right down the middle of the fairway for us. Very interesting. Let's go look at the dynamics of the team and the product and market. Now companies doing zero to three or five X growth in the year is like baseline. And we're, you know, really trending towards companies that are selling into kind of the AI stack, whether it be within inference, whether it be with indirectly to the labs, and the leading token consumers really going zero to 10, zero to 15 in a year is. On one side, like we're really trying to spend a lot of our time and then traditional SAS and I'd say like focus AI companies for call it niche verticals and sectors, you know, commerce, maybe historically also like legal, for example, is more of Hey, what dynamics do they have in terms of underlying data underlying modes, it's really hard as things evolve to pin what is the compounding value for some of these companies. And we continuously see that Harvey, for example. Put out their research work on a in house model, because they're not allowed to use any of their customers data, you know, questionable about the results and what they're doing there. So I think everyone is grappling around like, hey, even for the companies that are far along, what is really like resounding value. And for the most part, it's actually coming down to just teams execution and speed, like building an expertise in a particular market, getting enough, you know, deeply penetrated products within the largest consumers of whatever it is, this tool is and, you know, getting far and wide as possible. Within the industry, speed is the most.
Speaker 4Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious. I know there's a lot of listeners of retail gigantic that are entrepreneurs. I'm, I'm guessing when you you get approached about potential funding, there's some common mistakes that get made over. Like, do you have any sort of stock advice for entrepreneurs that are looking to get funded?
Speaker 5Hmm. Trying to think of like the most generalizable. Yeah. Yeah. For founders. I'd say, on one hand, coming into conversations. And first try to get an understanding of the investors view of the world and of the market founders sometimes come in with like, very deep thoughts, and it's great to be opinionated, but try to address what the investor is looking to understand. Like, if you see them leaning towards pay, explain to me like the competitive landscape. Don't just say, oh, you know, these competitors, they don't know what they're doing. You're completely different. Like, take a second, go a quick tour deeper in explaining like the components of either who you're selling to what you're. Building and how it's differentiated. So active listening and answering questions directly is something that surprisingly, like a lot of founders struggle with, because they're just so focused on, hey, this is the pitch I practice and I need to kind of sell the investor on as opposed to what can I learn from the questions this investor is asking, and like maybe gaps and holes in our narrative. And it's fine to have gaps, like no deal we're going to underwrite is going to be a slam dunk. It just doesn't exist. Like, there's always things we underwrite in terms of risk, but just like calling out the risk, being very direct. About it and then your ways of, you know, hindering that risk or hedging it in any way.
Speaker 2Metal launched Muse and then you have instinct. There's camp in the Silicon Valley world. It doesn't seem to have as much traction, though, that there's another one coming that has a human in the loop. I forget the name of that one. What do you think about this new category of personal agents? And are you starting to see people building on top of that already? Because you guys, Silicon Valley reacts so fast to these things. And in some ways, these agents are all kind of. Reaction to open claw, but they're all they're all derivatives of taking the open claw in a different direction type thing.
Speaker 5Yeah, I think it's all kind of like pulling back to the reality of like the sequence of things and what it's going to take to get to like, you know, native agenda commerce kind of experiences. Everyone wants to jump on these ideas, open claw and like the ability to build these tools and the personal agents with quasi shopping capabilities kind of existed some time ago. But the only thing that's changed is. With better models, better connectors, the experience is just better. So people are really jumping on it. I think it has some room to grow.
Speaker 2Cute animated characters.
Speaker 5Yeah, those those go a long way.
Speaker 2Don't underestimate the power of that.
Speaker 5They do. You know, myself included buying into it. But yeah, I think obviously people within the Bay Area and Silicon Valley jump on them much quicker than others. We do create a bit of an echo chamber in terms of, oh, everyone's going to jump on personal agents tomorrow and the whole world is going to change. But you go to like the middle of the Midwest and you mention Muse or. Even Claude and, you know, CIO from a random mid-market logistics company is going to say who? Yeah. So I think it's great. It's good signal for like what we're going to see over the next, you know, quarter of a quarter growth in both technological advancements and then also go to market distribution. So people are going to start, I think, adopting these tools as they get better, as the experience gets better, and that will ultimately uplift the underlying market for, hey, what's the infrastructure needed to actually enable these experiences? Enable like shopping. To be completely autonomous. A lot of the things I've seen pulling companies back with an agenda to commerce is actually like the lack of the full stack existing. You can build and you could see what a lot of the companies are on payments. We could build all the payment infrastructure for agents in the world. But if there isn't enough transactions or overall like agents and, you know, personalized tools for doing the shopping, you don't really have anyone to sell to. So, again, coming back to like the sequence of things, what tools need to come into place first? What kind of consumer experiences need to exist? And how is that going to scale out in terms of this market coming together? And that's why I think, like, really, you need to just give it time. Someone during the event actually mentioned this is a great, I think, like analogy for what we're looking at. And he's you mentioned like the comparison of mobile shopping to desktop. And in reality, like it took almost a decade for mobile to really surpass desktop or however you want to measure the start and end. But I think that is like a similar way. But we can look at this. It's not going to be overnight. It'll be. It's going to be a slow growing, you know, segment of how people experience their shopping. But it'll be significant. I think it'll take a large share.
Speaker 4Yeah, it's funny because I've looked at that exact progression and the like obviously everything in agentic is happening faster. Right. So it's fair to apply some acceleration factor. But there's an argument that the jump from non mobile to mobile actually like should have enabled more usage than the jump from non agentic to agentic. Right. Because agentic. I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing because it lets you do things that people are already doing better. It doesn't necessarily create a new audience that didn't exist before. But when you gave a bunch of people that like to shop online a mobile phone, they suddenly had way more hours a day where they had the opportunity to shop. Right. And so just to put that in context, the iPhone launch in 2006, there was mobile for like 10 years before that. But we'll pretend that didn't exist. The iPhone launches in 2006, 10 years later, 10 percent of e-commerce was mobile. And it was like 13 years to get to that point. to 30 percent mobile which we're not that we're about 50 percent
Speaker 5now yeah and i think you made a good point which is as you compare you know the agentic to non-agentic shopping you're not necessarily getting a new cohort of shoppers but you are getting a new segment of shopping you can do 100 like there is just certain type of shopping i would not have been able to do previously or would not have done previously if it wasn't for agents for example i went skiing with our group we have like you know with rich has like a annual kind of founder event and i went up i've been snowboarding for some number of years the you know guide who was taking us looked at the rental board i had he's like man what are you doing the rental board like you're clearly you know like an experienced snowboarder like i don't know i've never really bought a board i never thought about it and he's like you absolutely need to buy a board like you cannot go down this mountain doing
Speaker 4that yeah and it's always embarrassing to have the rental board on the hella trip yeah
Speaker 5yeah i was definitely singled out uh and i you know just didn't know what type to buy i knew that i liked like really tight straps i was you know some between intermediate to expert like all these nuances and i just don't have the time to go do the shopping but because of you know opening up a couple agents doing some deep search across hours of like review videos and explanations for like where you are and what you prefer you know i was able to buy a board and bindings and boots in like 10 minutes yeah otherwise we're
Speaker 4not at purchase yeah and to me that that goes back to your very first hypothesis that agentic is this broad thing that includes discovery you know not just the transaction because like you know we always joke e-commerce saw buying but broke shopping right so like traditional e-commerce got very good at transactions not so great at like discovering new products and the joy of shopping and so to me the big excitement about agentic is that it potentially unlocks digital joy of shopping and discovery yeah yeah great let's
Speaker 2we've talked a lot about the front end of shopping let's kind of pivot to the the back end have you talked a little bit about the supply chain or store management or any of those types of areas is that even interesting to
Speaker 5you yeah for sure so we've actually looked at in the bucket is like two one being actually demand forecasting so in terms of i'd say like the teams that are really using traditional machine learning algorithms that they would have taking in you know data points that i didn't even know existed in these types of forecasts like weather and you know foot patterns etc for different geographies and where they're going to you know both supply inventory and then on-season and off-season purchasing so on one hand allowing these teams to do those workflows much quicker taking very large scale teams into smaller ones and having much more accurate you know determinations for where they should be purchasing and then actually also we talked a lot about the consumer experience for agentic shopping but procurement for businesses is crazy and i will tell you you know anecdotally one business is working with think of one of the top like five largest furniture businesses they have you know non-strategic procurement so purchasing of things and maybe within their warehouses like pallets there was a company that took just pallets as a category and said let's go into market and understand like how you're purchasing across all these different warehouses and you know such as really mapped out they identified four million dollars worth of overspend went through to all their suppliers and said hey we got these better quotes meet them are going to drop you and then pass that once they actually secured new contracts and then they were able to get the new contracts and then they were able to get the new contracts and apart were buying from the same supplier at completely different skew prices and one of the renegotiated contracts the year following they tried invoicing them for 500k more than it was agreed upon and because they just don't have the bandwidth to really you know check the details and granularity across all these countries all this purchasing are just burning those dollars away so it's really going to see like intelligence on the spending side being able to structure all this data in a way that wasn't possible before that i find super
Speaker 4fascinating yeah yeah it's funny people don't talk about it but like worldwide consumer spending is about seven b2c is about seven trillion dollars then they were able to get the new contracts and then they were able to get the new contracts and and per your point like the and and per your point like the and and per your point like the amount of friction in them is shocking
Speaker 2amount of friction in them is shocking amount of friction in them is shocking yeah and the lack of of tying it all back yeah and the lack of of tying it all back yeah and the lack of of tying it all back together because it's been so frictiony together because it's been so frictiony together because it's been so frictiony you have the unique visibility of having you have the unique visibility of having you have the unique visibility of having been at this show both years so so i was been at this show both years so so i was been at this show both years so so i was there as well there as well there as well what's it how would you kind of describe what's it how would you kind of describe it to folks that haven't seen the it to folks that haven't seen the it to folks that haven't seen the progression over a year with this show of progression over a year with this show of progression over a year with this show of how it's changed and what are you've how it's changed and what are you've how it's changed and what are you've probably attended a bunch of the content probably attended a bunch of the content probably attended a bunch of the content where are some of the more interesting where are some of the more interesting where are some of the more interesting things you've seen on stage
Speaker 5things you've seen on stage things you've seen on stage yeah so maybe to compare year over year yeah so maybe to compare year over year yeah so maybe to compare year over year was really impressed to come back and was really impressed to come back and was really impressed to come back and see the progression that seems like it's see the progression that seems like it's see the progression that seems like it's been five years in terms of everyone's been five years in terms of everyone's been five years in terms of everyone's like mental model for using ai in this like mental model for using ai in this like mental model for using ai in this industry where it actually has a industry where it actually has a industry where it actually has a measurable return i think last year it measurable return i think last year it measurable return i think last year it was much more like showboaty surface was much more like showboaty surface was much more like showboaty surface level of oh we've experimented with this level of oh we've experimented with this level of oh we've experimented with this and deployed that across whatever it and deployed that across whatever it and deployed that across whatever it might be like automated emails and such might be like automated emails and such might be like automated emails and such and now people are coming in with much and now people are coming in with much and now people are coming in with much more crisp questions and expectations more crisp questions and expectations more crisp questions and expectations for answers and how are you actually for answers and how are you actually for answers and how are you actually measuring your ai traffic are these measuring your ai traffic are these measuring your ai traffic are these numbers they're throwing up on the board numbers they're throwing up on the board numbers they're throwing up on the board like actual ai traffic or is it 20 like actual ai traffic or is it 20 like actual ai traffic or is it 20 consumers and 80 you know bad actors consumers and 80 you know bad actors consumers and 80 you know bad actors from like chinese bots so the i the one from like chinese bots so the i the one from like chinese bots so the i the one skeptical side of things and people skeptical side of things and people skeptical side of things and people knowing how to dissect a lot of the data knowing how to dissect a lot of the data knowing how to dissect a lot of the data and things that are thrown up on the and things that are thrown up on the and things that are thrown up on the board is pretty great because that is board is pretty great because that is board is pretty great because that is ultimately to adopt ai and you know a ultimately to adopt ai and you know a ultimately to adopt ai and you know a better form factor i'll also say from better form factor i'll also say from better form factor i'll also say from the content that i'm seeing really like the content that i'm seeing really like the content that i'm seeing really like how people are breaking down different how people are breaking down different how people are breaking down different layers that need to be implemented to layers that need to be implemented to layers that need to be implemented to open up some of these opportunities so open up some of these opportunities so open up some of these opportunities so for example stripe you know walking for example stripe you know walking for example stripe you know walking through one their agentic checkout you through one their agentic checkout you through one their agentic checkout you know saying how most of these agents are know saying how most of these agents are know saying how most of these agents are failing in the checkup experience and failing in the checkup experience and failing in the checkup experience and that's why you're really not seeing a that's why you're really not seeing a that's why you're really not seeing a lot of shift into revenues so they've lot of shift into revenues so they've lot of shift into revenues so they've actually just come out with ai native actually just come out with ai native actually just come out with ai native agentic experience that's embedded in agentic experience that's embedded in agentic experience that's embedded in anyone that has stripe checkout which is anyone that has stripe checkout which is anyone that has stripe checkout which is really impressive as well as like really impressive as well as like really impressive as well as like underlying policy and intent people underlying policy and intent people underlying policy and intent people talking about hey like where is all of talking about hey like where is all of talking about hey like where is all of the the the we'll call it you know we'll call it you know we'll call it you know if the the lawyers get involved and if the the lawyers get involved and if the the lawyers get involved and people start doing returns and people start doing returns and
Speaker 2people start doing returns and super tactical in one year we're crazy super tactical in one year we're crazy super tactical in one year we're crazy yeah very exciting yeah yeah very exciting yeah yeah very exciting yeah well we really appreciate you uh taking well we really appreciate you uh taking well we really appreciate you uh taking time i know you're busy you got a lot time i know you're busy you got a lot time i know you're busy you got a lot more to go see more to go see
Speaker 4more to go see you want to take us out jason yeah yeah you want to take us out jason yeah yeah you want to take us out jason yeah yeah so to sum it up the the main reason so to sum it up the the main reason so to sum it up the the main reason this year is way better is because i'm this year is way better is because i'm this year is way better is because i'm here this year got it of course and i'm
Speaker 5here this year got it of course and i'm
Speaker 4here this year got it of course and i'm invited here yeah and you know sadly invited here yeah and you know sadly invited here yeah and you know sadly that's all the time we have for today so that's all the time we have for today so that's all the time we have for today so we're gonna have to wrap up but thanks we're gonna have to wrap up but thanks we're gonna have to wrap up but thanks very much for uh stopping by and sharing very much for uh stopping by and sharing very much for uh stopping by and sharing some insights with us and until next some insights with us and until next some insights with us and until next time happy commercing
Speaker 1time happy commercing time happy commercing you've been listening to the jason and you've been listening to the jason and you've been listening to the jason and scott show for all the latest news and scott show for all the latest news and scott show for all the latest news and trends on e-commerce and shopper trends on e-commerce and shopper trends on e-commerce and shopper marketing subscribe to us in itunes or marketing subscribe to us in itunes or marketing subscribe to us in itunes or visit jason and scott dot com

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Ellie Anselm, an investor at Ridge Ventures, defines agentic commerce broadly as any part of the AI-powered, autonomous experience of discovering, researching, and purchasing products, not just the final transaction.
  2. Ridge Ventures invests early-stage in B2B enterprise software and supports portfolio companies through its "Ridge Revenue Network," a group of hundreds of CXOs and roughly 14,000 enterprises, including a CMO council.
  3. Anselm argues the first layer needed for agentic commerce is the product data layer that lets AI agents accurately capture SKUs and services, followed by advertising and dynamic, personalized offers.
  4. She suggests AI-native advertising, such as dynamic travel offers rendered through agents, could overcome latency and inventory limits of traditional ad surfaces like Google Search.
  5. The bar for funding rounds has risen sharply, with companies now expected to show zero-to-three-to-five-times or even zero-to-ten growth in a year rather than reaching $1 million in ARR.
  6. She advises founders to listen actively, answer investors' questions directly, and openly acknowledge risks and how they plan to mitigate them.
  7. Personal shopping agents like Muse are improving due to better models and connectors, but adoption remains an echo chamber concentrated in Silicon Valley and will spread slowly.
  8. Agentic commerce will likely follow mobile's slow adoption curve, while back-end opportunities include AI-driven demand forecasting and procurement spend intelligence, where one furniture business found $4 million in overspend.

Summary:

This episode of the Jason and Scott Show, recorded live at the Retail Club AI Festival in Huntington Beach, features hosts Jason "Retail Geek" Goldberg and Scott Wingo interviewing Ellie Anselm, an investor at Ridge Ventures. Anselm explains her nonlinear path into venture, from machine learning in financial services to building software for VC and PE firms, and describes Ridge's focus on early-stage B2B enterprise software supported by its Ridge Revenue Network of CXOs and enterprises.

She defines agentic commerce broadly as any AI-powered, autonomous part of discovering and purchasing products, not merely the final transaction. For that vision to scale, she argues the product data layer must come first, enabling agents to accurately capture SKUs, followed by AI-native advertising and dynamic, personalized offers such as travel deals. She notes the funding bar has risen sharply, with rapid growth now the baseline, and advises founders to listen actively, answer questions directly, and address risks honestly.

On personal agents like Muse, Anselm sees real progress from better models and connectors but cautions that Silicon Valley adoption is an echo chamber and wider uptake will be gradual, similar to mobile commerce's decade-long rise. She also highlights back-end opportunities in demand forecasting and procurement intelligence, citing a furniture company that uncovered $4 million in overspend. The hosts close by noting this year's event shows more mature, measurable AI use cases.

FAQs

It is a podcast covering the latest news and trends in the e-commerce industry, hosted by Jason "Retail Geek" Goldberg and Scott Wingo.

AdGentic is a new show hosted by Kiri Masters about advertising in the age of AI, exploring what happens when more of the shopping journey moves into AI assistance and agents. It is part of the ReFiBuy media network.

The guest was Ellie Anselm, an investor at Ridge Ventures who focuses on early-stage B2B enterprise software and agentic commerce.

He defines it broadly as any AI-powered, autonomous experience within researching, discovering, and ultimately purchasing products, not just the final transaction.

Ridge is interested in the data layer that enables agents to capture products and SKUs, AI-native advertising and dynamic offers, and back-end areas like demand forecasting and business procurement.

Founders should actively listen, answer investors' questions directly, and clearly explain the competitive landscape and differentiation rather than just reciting a practiced pitch. Being direct about risks and how you mitigate them is also valued.

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