EP378 - The Amazon Briefing, Pt 2

Welcome 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 publicist and Scott Wingo, co-founder and CEO of ReFy by here are Jason and Scott. Hey everybody. It is Scott from the Jason Scott show. We are we are split this deep dive into Amazon grocery into two parts. Hopefully if you haven't heard part one, you may want to go back and check that out because this part is going to be part two and we pick up the conversation. This was recorded live in Seattle after a multi-day session with Amazon top executives talking about grocery, Amazon Prime Alexa plus in their new drum program through Amazon Prime here. Continuing on from part one here in part two, we are going to cover why is Prime Amazon's ultimate mode, why are drones not only cool, but the real story is the AI behind the drone. Amazon versus Chatsby T, which is the new commerce or and who owns your live context wins the grocery shelf. Hope you enjoyed part two. We'll be back to you in our next episodes. We're going to be coming to you from the retail club show in Huntington Beach September 22nd to 24th. We're going to be recording a lot of podcasts there. We'll be a little bit of a gap between now and then, but don't panic. More awesome Jason Scott content is coming your way. We're going to be doing some live streaming more on that at the Jason Scott website as we get that all planned up. Thanks for listening to this two-parter. Hope you enjoyed it. Great time to leave us a five-star review. Yes, so in my mind, there's this graphic where you get your three columns and that's selection value and speed of delivery and that's like the core. And then the little icing on top of that cake, Mewu's and Jensen along, that's the three layer cake. The layer on top of that cake, the icing is the customer experience. So I didn't have dinner next to the lady that does customer experience and she was amazing. So they went through, when she came on the job, you know, she went through like thousands of customer anecdotes. And this reminded me of a, a, a baseless quote where he said, you know, he would famously, people could email Jeff, right? And they would, they would, you know, and he got a lot of emails with them. And Jeff and Jeff, and there was an assistant all, but he would go through a lot of that. He would answer all of them, his assistants would, but he would read most of them. And what he found was in something the scale of Amazon, most of these anecdotes are not anecdotal. So the commercialism is, if one customer has a weird situation, just ignore it. It's not a big deal. But what we define is when you're at the scale of hundreds of millions, you know, hundreds of billions and, you know, more or does how many transactions. So when Jason has a bad experience in Chicago, well, that could be, you know, 500 people or a thousand people and a lot of people just don't complain. So in that spirit, she's gone through these very anecdotal things and looked at all them, you know, tried to categorize them and then, you know, started to beat them back. One of the biggest ones that this came up with a lot of the folks we know is there was this massive confusion of you had your whole foods over here. It's kind of like pretty easy to understand. It's like its own store. But frequently this would always get me, you'd be buying your dog treats and you'd say, oh, I want to get my cart size over 25 or whatever it is to get the, you know, not pay the $299 to get the faster delivery. And then you throw, you know, something in there like some granola and suddenly it starts another car. Now you've got three carts, you get your whole foods, your general merchandise and then some grocery things and some others. So they've actually done a really good job of solving that two ways. They've kind of put more selection across. And to your point, perishables is one of the things that would trigger that, but even not perishable things for me would. And then they've created a new customer, a UI, a part of the customer experience, which is very green, so it's color coded Amazon version. And whenever you, it's very easy to find the search experience highlights these things, the, whatever you throw one of those things in, they kind of put you into that, you know, like let's start with like granola first or banana first or even something cold chain. It's going to now put me into that, you know, that set of inventory basically did send that SSD facility or closer type thing. What do you, any other customer experience things you want to. Yeah, I do think customer experience is super important and remember the scope of customer experience is super broad here, right? Because customer experience is both, how the mobile app works, right? And I think most of the examples you were talking about are the website and mobile app super important. Customer experience of how the delivery happens, the whole is super important and the packaging and is your bread crushed. And so they're there. I absolutely think user experience. This lady owns the whole can returns. Yeah, can win or lose any individual shopping occasion for a consumer here. So I, so I, I get your metaphor. It's on top of the cake, but I would argue I just want to point out it's super important. And I think when you had dinner with was link right was that getting saying. And I think one of the interesting things is often you go, oh, we're going to either take this approach or this approach. And I think what Amazon has actually gone with is a choose your own adventure, right? So you can either say, hey, I want to shop in everything store with the complete assortment of all the perishables and everything things all in one cart and I just want to match it all together, right? And there's reasons that's convenient and helpful. It's an easier model to understand. It's an easier paradigm. The downside is when you type chicken in the search engine, you're going to get fried chicken and you're going to get chicken poops, right? And so if that's the best use case for you, Amazon, let you do that. But this new experience is if you know you're really just focused on food right now, just want to solve your food problem, you can drill down to a scoped shopping experience or constrained shopping experience that's just focused on grocery, right? So the interface changes from orange to green. And now when you type chicken in the search engine, you're only going to see edible chicken options, right? And so there's a bunch of UX things that can be more tailored to you because they know your grocery shopping. And so you may, you know, sometimes be shopping for apparently just want to throw in one food item that you know you need and you might use the everything UI and other times you might be building a list for dinner party and want to really be constrained to food and you might use the grocery UI. And so it's kind of cool that they've tried to let you seamlessly go back and forth and have a shared part between between those two different UI's. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to keep going my metaphor in. Before I go on, you want to say about grocery. I think that again, you touched on private label. I think that's super important. I think economic circumstances right now and changing customer preferences are making super important probably will used to just mean cheaper versions of the same stuff you're used to buying and trading down today. And then all these rosers make their own versions of products and they all have a huge brand love and loyalty for their own unique versions and a wealth of recent data to fill holes. Yeah. And again, if I had way more customer intimacy than the traditional man national manufacturers did so they get to why formulate these products based on customer insight of the data. And so I think Amazon Whole Foods are leaning into that as much as everyone and there's no stigma attached to it right like there's their own brands now that are premium, they're not the opening price points always right and so. So I think that's another interesting part of the GOP one and then again, the fact that such a large percentage of the population is experimenting with our own GOP ones and it it just causes a wholesale reconsideration. So whatever your old food choices might have been and your old providers might have been you're going to reconsider. So it's kind of like these retailers get a new bite at all the customers they couldn't win before great they have to defend all their existing customers that everyone else is trying to push not so great. So another disruption. Yeah, this is a good time to actually transition to another topic to talk about the Doug Harrington podcast. Yeah, so Doug is on the esteem and Walmart a report saying yes he is has over our responsibility for the retail business so the best coolest most important business at Amazon. And sure they WS guys would agree, but I may have some personal box. So Doug has started a podcast so far he's only interviewed other Amazonians on his podcast, which I think is the main intent. It's called thinking be curious, is that right? We're going to be curious, which is Amazon tenant to always be curious. And so he's interviewing these Amazonians and talking about their backstory and what they've done and I'd say they've all been interesting. Now I'll give you these cool insights into into the Amazon culture and the trickery matriculation. So we highly recommend that we'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, check out that that podcast is really well done. We zoom out a little bit, so grocery is a big wedge. - The pie of Amazon, now we've been from cakes to pies. - This pie guy is making me hungry. The circle that surrounds all that is prime. - Yeah, so this briefing was called Amazon Prime, I guess. So we spent almost the whole day talking about prime. So just to kind of tee that up, prime is now 21 years old and it's live in 27 countries. - It can drink? - Yep, it can drink. You can now have a beer. They're really driving a lot of, it's got a membership type program and they've always been the everything store and it's connected everything membership. You can kind of send that they're kind of, I think they've got so many prime users now that there's kind of like a, at some point everyone on the planet is prime, that's not where they are. But I think they're thinking a lot more, this isn't the quarterly data they release about the frequency of use and the value that people get from prime. Another famous base of quotes is you should be, it should add so much value and you'd be, you'd be fiscally irresponsible not to take prime. Like how do we make it that much of a value? The, you know, this kind of cuts into the success of grocery because if you're on prime, the whole grocery experience just is so amazingly elevated. There are a lot of their health offerings which is like another wedge on this thing is, you know, also part of that. I'm going to talk a minute about both Alexa plus the devices. It's good we're in a room that doesn't have any original devices. - Yeah, I think we've got that. - Great, it's me. - Paul, don't listen to this on your speakers, put on their costs from this point forward 'cause we're going to say that they were a lot. Another handy thing is I always, you know, I prefer Rufus because Amazon for shopping is such a long phrase, but they call it AFS. So I'm going to start using that now. So that's actually a lot less words, especially typing words. So we did have a section on that. So the, you know, there is an analyst, he's a friend of the show, Doug Annemuth at JP Morgan. And he does this exercise where he picks a part prime and he looks at every one of the little pieces offered in there. So for example, a lot of people don't realize it, but with prime, you get obviously the video and he kind of comps that to like maybe a Netflix then you get a Dornash plus, right? So that's a note value and so on. So he adds all this up. He basically says, look, Amazon Prime has a, it would cost you $1,430 to go buy this and the current price is $1.39. Another thing speaking of value is, Amazon launched it in 90, 90 year and now it's $1.39. Now there's a monthly that's more, but if you get the annual, you get the, was it 10%, because I think it's 1499 month if you go up on it. So that's pretty amazing too, that they've held the line on that it's not quite the Costco outdog, but they're holding the line. I think they only change the price twice in the 20 years. Now Doug, I think every time he does his analysis, I think it's every six months, he does it. He then says, they should raise the price. And he does like a big calculation of how much money would fall out of this guy if they did that. But I get the sense that they didn't announce anything to us, there aren't any open price increases or anything out of where of. I think they've made a lot of moves. The monthly was introduced, I believe, so they could go down market. Because I think if you look at the bucket of people that aren't prime, it is the lower income folks. So I think that's the opposite. I almost counter, it would look the lower if they did. I don't think they want prime to be more profitable as a subscription subject. So I got, I know inside information, but I don't think they want the success story to be, look at all this prime revenue we're generating, right? I think prime is very annoying to me because I feel like at this point, it's in arguably the most successful customer and affinity program in the history of the world, right? And we thought they're crazy on their own. They're like, you're going to be killed on shipping. People are going to eat so much. Yeah, and you, you're going to eat all the benefits. You didn't even iterate, the market meant of it. Freefresh, big. Yeah, freefresh. Which by the way, the definition of fast, the prices wouldn't change twice in 21 years. The definition of fast has changed a lot in 21 years. I mean, we've gone from two days being a service promise that no one in the industry can match to now, they're 30 minutes, right? So it's just crazy. But yeah, I think such a large swath of America is members. I think a lot of people with very constrained budgets are still prime members. I think what Amazon wants to do is make that program so important to your life that you just give them way more of your wallet share. I think that's how they measure the net foot of prime. I don't think they want to talk about the revenue from prime subscriptions, particularly being important. Like, it's a data collection tool. All the prime shoppers are known. And so then they get to sell better and more targeted ads that are more effective and more appreciated by customers. And they get better data to help you with returning orders and talking talk about, wait, there's so many synergies to you being in the prime ecosystem. I think what they want more than anyone is everyone to be in the prime ecosystem and everyone to use more of their benefits, right? And so I bet you, I think I don't know. I bet you most of the executive there are a lot more focused on how do I jump them from benefit to benefit than how do I raise the price? I think they like that they're skinning the game. I think it's one of the strengths is that it's not a free membership. And like people, when they pay that money, they feel like I want to get maximum benefit out of that. So I want to use them for everything. And so I do think the one place where price gets tricky is new customer acquisition that all the easy customers they've already signed up. And so now the customers that haven't signed up have some rational or irrational resistance to signing up. And I think they feel like there's so many benefits that if you signed up and tried it, you'd like it, right? So I suspect that I have to figure out a lot of clever ways to make it really affordable to try prime if you're not. But I don't think like all deference to the analysts, I don't think they want to make that the new popular revenue stream at Amazon. - I think they have, they've put so much in there that the average consumer doesn't realize when all is available. - This is a trick. It's funny that this economist in Chicago that I love John West, and he did this study called Less is More, where sometimes you can put so much in a bundle that people undervalue the bundle. They're like, when you add more to it, they may get less valuable. - I don't know if that's necessarily the case with prime at this point, but I would say it is crazy. Like if I sat down 21 years ago and said, hey, here's what we're thinking. Free fashion shipping and our own unique word of the rings movie and a free telemedicine with a doctor, you would have said I was high and you would have likely been right, right? And yet they somehow have bundled all these things into an offering and made people love it. So props to them. The reason I hate it is because I feel like it's unquestionably they're most entrenched in competitive advantages every other merchant in the world. - Yeah, yeah, so we had some sessions about prime video which was interesting, not really a quarter audience. - I asked them very important questions about some editorial decisions and specific moves in what are the rings that a couple of idols on them. - Yeah, it did not get satisfactory answers or being honest. (laughing) - So one of the most exciting things is we got to go on a bus and there will be, we'll put some pictures in the show notes here on social media and we went to an Amazon Prime Air facility. If you're not familiar with Amazon Prime Air, this was not airplanes, this was drones. Jason and I famously in our F2014, 2015 got a drone into the big show. We could not fly it but we had a drone there. Oh, and then we had the guys that did that early, early delivery drone, they actually had a big one. We had our little ones, but they had a big one too. So we were showing people, we had our 3D thing, we had our ARVR, we had our drones, and then I think we talked about, I think you had an Alexa speaker pin. - So I think what you're trying to say is that we were early in the drone pin boys. - We were always ahead of her, that's what you get here at Jason's workshop. You get to look 10 years into the future. So this was really fascinating. So number one, they had a museum, and that's where we were able to take pictures. But number two, we got to tour the manufacturer so that we were not able to take pictures of them. They're making the drones there. They invented their own drones. This is not an off the shelf thing, our commercial products. - Yeah, yeah. - And there's been four or five versions. Everyone remembers the 60 minutes big reveal where they, you know, the nice, the poor black thing. - I think coincidentally it was on April fools. - Yes. - Yep, shows up on 16 minutes and things like, we're gonna, they are nice from being black-friendly. - No? - I thought it was like the night before black-friendly. - I'm pretty sure it was on April virus. I'm usually a bit of memory. - And you know, we're all curious what this big announcement is gonna be, and what new service or product they're offering. And he announced that we're gonna start delivering products via drone, which at the time sounded utterly absurd. - Yeah. - And I remember there was like a big thing covered and he revealed it and we were all about it. We're like, what is it? I knew it like so. It was like a drone, a new one, a guest drone. - Yeah. - So like, yeah, yeah. I'm on anyways, Bingo Kart. Super. and we go to the prime air factory in the museum. They have that V1 drone that Jim unveiled. - And OG? - Yeah, yeah. - Quite a bit smaller than the actual insurve drones. - It was in blast, so Jason could probably try it. - They're touching the drones. - Yeah, they touch a lot of them. - Total security. - Yeah, particularly. - If you get a delivery by drone, there's a good chance I touch the drone that testers. (laughing) - You're welcome. (laughing) - So this day's drone is big. It's probably what, like, six feet circular. - Yeah, about that five to six feet. - Five to six feet? - Yeah, yeah. - It has very big props. You do not wanna get around this problem. - And six of them, not six. - Yes, it's a set, set up, set the copter. - I defer to your geometry. (laughing) - It is big, carry. It drops the payload, which I thought was interesting. Some of them land and spit it out. Some of them will drop it, a safe distance, and then others will do a tether. So they're currently in a drop kind of mode. And yeah, so that was really, let's see, I had some more stats. It was very timely because the day we were there, they actually announced a bunch of things. So let's talk a little bit about that. So on August 19th, which was today, they announced that they're expanding air from, let's see, it was in how many cities? We know it's going to 500 cities in 11 cities. That's right, 11 cities and 10 metros. 11 sites, 10 metros. Now it's going to 500 cities by the end of 2026. By my math, that's a 50x increase. - That's a lot. - Yeah, that is a lot. This is another area where they're in a bit of a race with Walmart. So, Walmart's are called winged dust. That's Google's. - Yeah. - Good. It was on there. Walmart. Walmart has a couple paths to drum. They have some partnerships for drums, and they have, they also have their own through the drums program. - And it's pretty broadly deployed now as well. - Yeah, and I think a lot of theirs, I've seen them as theirs, and they're out of the store, right? - Most of the ones that I'm aware of, the fabrics, they call them like aren't in the back of a store, so they take inventory from that store. - I'm not completely preppy to all of Walmart's drum. So, it's a very possible day of some kind of dedicated. I've seen a tester one, but then they have essentially a drone airport operating behind this door, and they go grab that bill from the shelf and launch it to your backyard. - Yeah, that's pretty well. Today, this 11 sites are, the tin metros are Phoenix, Tampa, Kansas City, Omaha, Bad Rouge, Detroit, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and we got a lot of Texas because anything goes in Texas. - Yeah, I think one of the many factors that influences where they do these drum things is where they can get regulatory approval, and I'm assuming that nobody's easy, but I'm assuming Texas is somewhat more, yeah, more friendly than some other states. - Some of the ones coming up, are you sitting down just, I have a Syracuse Cleveland Boise, Atlanta, and Chicago, you could be receiving the drum package soon. I gotta be honest, I'm trying not to get very excited about that because I would love to get some drone deliveries to my home. I have spoofed them. I have fake videos of me getting drone deliveries, but I kind of suspect that they're gonna be focused on more suburban parts of Chicago. You need a little bit of, most of the way these drone services work is you designate a place where you want the drone to deliver your packages, and you need a certain amount of open space, and in downtown Chicago where I live, you don't have too eager luck there. Well, you don't need that much space, but I think it's likely too tight. I think the main use case for these drones, they're quite fast, they're as fast or faster than cars, and they certainly get to go direct and don't have to fly around traffic. So I think it's a fast, efficient way to get to a slightly less dense home. I'm feeling the trucks are gonna be more efficient in the super dense neighborhoods where I live. So I think you're gonna likely get drone delivery, if they figure out how to navigate your various pools. - Yes. - Before I get drone delivery. - I don't want it to go into the side pools and stuff from the lower. - No, no, or the plunge tub or the ice path or whatever. - Yeah, so some more facts about these. It's free if you spend over $50. It's usually on average 30 minutes, but it can be as long as 60 minutes from when you check out. It has to be five pounds or under and fit in a shoebox type of size. It is a very specific package that the payload bay is designed for, that we get to see. This covers 60% of your most free polling purchase items, groceries electronics, cosmetics, medications, in the little museum, they had a list of that'll table full of things people have ordered from drone. My favorite was a giant bag of nerds, I thought that was like. - That would be high on my list. - So when was having a nerd in crisis, and they were dropped into some nerds, right? They were like, yeah, yeah. - That came in a funk data school and he had taken time off and gone to the store and bought the nerds, but he made me an arbor right now because he kept studying while the nerds came in. - They're targeting a million deliveries for this year as part of the scale up. And this was interesting. So this is another one of these things that they've been chewing away at for a long time, and they're starting to scale. They started in drones 13 years ago. So I guess it was 2013, was the 60 minutes. And now they seem to be getting pretty serious. We were in the manufacturing facility, and there were lots of drones being made. It was not a, I can tell that they were not it. This was not a casual, less build one at a time, kind of a situation. - Yeah. - And actually that was super cool. I think you and I just enjoy the idea of drones. And I have to say, I've had the privilege of being in that the Walmart and Amazon paddock, well they were functioning. So we were in the place where they're making the drones. I've been in the places where they're launching the drones. We got to see one kind of go through a test. - Yeah. - Which was, yeah. - I think it struck me more than I expected, right? 'Cause we've been talking about this in the abstract, and it was the silly idea that, oh yeah, it's gonna fly a package over your house and drop it. And ha ha ha. But when you actually see these things running at scale, which they are, and delivering meaningful amount of packages, and people just using them as part of their everyday life, like it's like, oh my God, all the stuff we're talking about is real. Like it was weird. That being said, I don't think drone delivery is gonna be a game changer for anyone. I think it adds to the scope of delivery options that Amazon has available. And now we put something in that cart, and you go, what's a result that you want? You want 30 minute now, do you want, you know, one hour drone, do you want one hour rush, do you want three hour rush? All these choices are gonna be the right choice for certain customers and certain use cases. And so I can see the value. I don't necessarily think drones are gonna unlock, like, giant at scale, sales opportunity that none of the other delivery mechanisms that Amazon has don't also attack. So to me, unlike some of these other things, which I do think everyday essentials and the perishables is game changing and the lock-in of prime is game changing. The drones is cooler technology, but I suspect when we look back from our retirement, like we're not gonna talk about how that completely changed our own shop. - Yeah, so that was my favorite session. My second favorite, any more on the drums? - No, no, my second favorite section. And you probably put grocery in our managers, but I just do not like to eat. - Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It didn't make us hungry. Hearing all these delicious grocery, tails. And a bit of this strange craving for a history check in the middle. The, my, you know, my second favorite was, it was combined, it was Alexa Plus and A for AFS, which is who's known as Rivas. So, you know, as listeners know, we've talked about this, but just to recap, in May, they took Rufus in Alexa Plus, which is the device operating system, you know, system. They merged them into one. That's still kind of an ongoing thing, but they're getting there. And, you know, it was really interesting. So we got to, it was a joint session, which is probably, as your AI, it's just a conversation, actually. So I wish we'd talk a lot more, but I had talked to Regif previously. I've gotten a fair amount of that, but it'd be good to talk more about that. But they've sprinkled in, everyone talks about it, 'cause it cuts across the customer experience. But this was mostly about the device kind of stuff. And we talked a lot about Alexa Plus, and we've previously, in the Q2 results, we talked about how, what was it, like 20%, if you used Alexa Plus, you were 20% more likely to sign up for Prime, or something, or something. I think there's a bigger number than that. It might be about 30 something like that. So that was interesting, they've had over 350 million consumers use Alexa for shopping in the AFS in the last 12 months. So that was a metric that, you know, that's been up to 5X. So that's actually, you can argue, big growth off small number, but 350 million is not a small number, no. But here it is, Alexa Plus users signed up for Prime at a 25% higher rate. That was an extra bit to remember. There's 600 million active Alexa endpoints. That's the devices out there. I imagine, not all of them are on prime they might get the coolest speaker so that's an opportunity as they get smarter you can see people saying oh wow I really wish I had prime was I want to do the music piece or order from it or there's a lot of things kind of tied in there let's see what else was there they've moved a lot of the integrations it seemed like they were all bespoke like you know how you can have like Spotify door there's a lot of things you can integrate onto your Alexa it seemed like those were all kind of a hotness before we're like very individually done it's probably better we said it was a pretty long in the two platforms so some of those integrations are yeah I'm sure they're like you see yeah yeah yeah and for better and worse I feel like they've tried not to break any of the old things that people already have yeah yeah so all that's based on MCP now it's pretty powerful yeah so that maybe someday you'll be able to kind of like make it easier to add your own skills to Alexa I've never tried that seems like or I mean we should be able to buy the code yeah they talked a little bit about auto buying some of the trends are seeing that that's where you can kind of tell Alexa either the speaker or AFS and you can say hey if this Nintendo comes back and stocking the prices under that I want you to go ahead and buy that for me that's pretty cool and then they talk about some the new personalities are really engaging with people that you can put on to your Alexa Plus device yeah I actually used that because I had made my Alexa devices more hurt do you go so you're brief you don't do late back or sassy I haven't you was a sexy girl yeah I think sassy's fun ones and this wasn't personality but you used to be able to buy so many voices so I had like saving all Jackson person at me for a little while but yeah I just go for hurt because it's an important part of my home ecosystem we use them quite a bit of home automation and turning on and off lights and yet you just want that to be as snappy and short as possible you don't want it to cost you every single time now I don't want to have a long sentence I just want the light to turn on what did you have a takeaway wise from the Alexa conversation yeah there's a bunch of people working on it's a tricky conversation Amazon because I feel like AFS is both a horizontal thing it wasn't like oh the only time we talked about AFS is when the AFS guy was there like it came up in every other conversation right and so it very clearly they're all thinking about how AFS makes their thing better how it's going to make grocery better the UX person talked a lot about AFS is rolling on mixed grind better grocery yeah it's a benefit of prime like that you you get this premium version of the experience of your prime member and it's this vertical thing is this new capability that that unlocks things that Amazon so it's kind of tricky to talk about as a thing in my I do have a little bit of a love hate relationship with it at the moment because I think it's gotten better I think the the vertical agent on the shopping pages is getting getting incrementally better and adding more capabilities I see what what's what's possible and I'm eager for them to get to what's possible and so I'm a little impatient with the the progress versus what what's possible but I my big takeaway for for AFS is AFS this year is what talking about every day essentials was last year with something they had done a much a foundational work on but it hadn't really changed the world at Amazon yet and Andy Jesse wasn't talking about it in the earnings calls so fast 40 year they delivered on all that hard work and now it's a super important thing on the earnings calls and it won't surprise me in the slightest if a year from now Andy's talking about how AFS is the most important customer experience thing they've they've added at Amazon and all of it these cool and improved points yeah it seems like the risk to Amazon it is so so you know we spent several days we kind of had our quarterly thing and then we had several days steeped in it you come away and you're like they're going to rule the world right but obviously they're not they're number two grocer right they're not number one they've you know they're constantly battling it out on all fronts I think it's interesting from my attempt to commerce world you know I think I think Jim and I Google has had their eye on what Amazon is doing for a while and I agree a lot about Amazon off of this Google because there's a whole thing about ads we've talked about that we was not part of our program but you know that that is either tam reduction for Google or you know pure taking of share from their their their their ad business and so I think they have kind of have this approach this is me this is not been saying this this is just me speculating and then I think 10 to 10 is seeing this opportunity to kind of come in Adam Sam Alton's actually said it pretty pretty bluntly that you know he's kind of like kind of joking said your heart is an opportunity of not like back it you know you can play that game coming I think they see themselves the AI folks see themselves being super horizontal so if I can become and I see this with my kids especially my my 19 year old she's been so much time talking to Chad it gets the entry point at the shopping piece before it's on us right and that could almost like jump prime in a weird way because it's like well I was just talking to Chad to you about my my skin thing that's going on and I really recommend it this is so convenient to order right that second and not even checking it was on yeah so so I think by having these conversations about non shopping related things non grocery related things you know even even meals and recipes is getting in front of grocery which I think is a little risk to Amazon because of you anger yeah you you can't really I haven't tried it like the last three days the last time I tried this is not really helping you with much on on recipes it's just kind of it will send you over to like some other site and then that's kind of it whereas the other guys are like doing really good jobs building the whole car for you and trying to get you like again so what do you what do you think about that is there a real attack vector there I do I think there's a very spotlight you you anticipate am a lot they're very smart they would see it you and I see it they see it yeah are they going to do it too and try to like go wide with AFS yeah I mean so hey I don't know I feel like what's more respect I feel like the this is so early like I don't even care it was waiting right now right because I feel like the the race is going to change positions multiple times it's not an indicator of future success now before it all settles down I will just remind everyone challenges come up and do disrupt like seemingly undisruptible in comments all the time right and just in our conference space I go Instacarp wasn't relevant they became pretty relevant in digital grocery team who wasn't relevant they became super relevant she and you know as if way more progress than anyone ever thought and TikTok shop is like are you the most disruptive thing out there in our our whole space what not over here doing video collectibles just raise some of the money their GMS yeah yeah yeah TikTok shops yeah so often they're in the end by the way they don't like bomb our names on our studio doing pretty good in spite of all those things but nobody's entitled to their position forever right and so well if I am very convinced that all of this agentic is going to create some new Google size players in the space like will Google be one of them I think they have every opportunity I don't know who wins or loses but I do think there's going to be major reconsiderations right and I today like a simple thing but like the company that has most of your purchase history has a huge advantage for personalization right and so so like one of the advantages of prime is you spend more of your wallet there because you want to get benefit out of prime and then they get more purchase history and then they can do suggestive selling better than everyone else pretty convinced in the long run the company that has the most of my life context is going to be even more valuable than just my purchase history right so I want to buy some I want to see some recipes and then buy the food for those recipes that meet my exact health goals and I don't want to have to restate all my health goals so if you already know my health goals and you can do all this other stuff well enough you're going to win and so we we talk a lot about horizontal agents like Google and ChatGBT having a lot of broad context for users and that's going to be their competitive advantage and the the onsite retail owned agents the we call vertical agents like like AFS and Sparky they're going to have different advantages they know more of our comments purchase they know all you know and so it's really going to be which one can overcome their deficiencies the best right and I do think one possible play if your Amazon is I don't just want to be a vertical agent I do want to be a horizontal agent and how many devices did you say Amazon has out there and by the way 600 million it could be more because what if it's also all the fire TVs and all of them what do they like you could imagine they're having a big surface for a horizontal agent and and at the least competing in that space so it won't won't surprise me to see them run that kind of a play oh and since we last recorded the quarterly results it information leak from Bloomberg about this device that an AI has worked with [BLANK_AUDIO] I don't know what to say, and we all thought it was gonna be somehow wearable and it's now standing more like, it's a donut, it's a little more substance going on. But a donut that essentially is a direct competitor to an echo, yeah, and it's battery powered, so it doesn't have to be plugged in and it has some kind of movement to it, so a lot of people think it's gonna have a little face or something, some kind of any impressions. Yeah, so it's gonna be interesting to see when the device comes out, what's happening there. Yeah, Apple's taking it seriously, because they're suing the dude that left and it just comes down. And there are lots of interesting things that are happening in the glasses, but I think there's like so much opportunity for innovation and stuff, you're all I'm excited to see where all this goes. I'm definitely not gonna embarrass myself by picking any definitive winners and losers, because I think this is the very early innings of a race that a lot of people are gonna invest a lot of resources and unimaginable resources in winning, but I think the consumer's gonna win. I think like that I'm gonna be giddy how much less friction there is in a lot of these commerce experiences down the road as a result of all these new technologies. There's lots of silly hoops we have all mindlessly accepted jumping through that are gonna go away. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and we're actually gonna be together again at retail club, so make sure you come to retail club. I believe you can now bookings are open for our session. There's a very limited number of seats in our quote-unquote tent, which I think is actually a ton. So Jason and I are gonna be talking about really whatever you want to talk about. Yeah. So bring your sleeping bags. Yeah. I think we signed up for six hour session, so that's gonna be great, but we'll be doing lots of little sessions. So we're gonna do some life pods. If anyone out there is a retailer and wants to come on the pod, reach out. We would love to either Jason and I think LinkedIn is probably the easiest or email contact asking in your podcast website. Yeah. Yeah. Go to the Jason Scott show. Jason Scott.com, and you can submit to there and reach out through the form on that site. So we look forward to seeing everyone in retail club. Yeah. I'm gonna throw one of their plea in there, though, if you're enjoying all this new content and maybe you're enjoying the new video format, that's a perfect reason to leave us this review. Because more than ever, I need reviews, I need the podcast to feel like a success because now that Scott and I are traveling together a lot, I'm desperate to move beyond our room sharing policy. So I'm hoping if we get enough good reviews, we'll be able to start having our own rooms, which I. Jason stores like a chain sauce, so I wasn't gonna go there, but trust me, it's in everyone's best interest that Scott and I have our own rooms. So hopefully that's an impetus for reading our review, and until next time, happy conversing. You've been listening to the Jason and Scott show. For all the latest news and trends on e-commerce and shopper marketing, subscribe to us in iTunes or visit Jason and Scott.com.