The most expensive thing in retail right now

The most expensive thing in retail right now is the attention brands are pouring into a future that isn't generating revenue yet.

Every brand I talk to is being pulled into the same script.

Optimize for AI answers, get ready for agents, prepare for a web where machines do the reading. Most of the discovery shift is real, but very little of it is moving a dollar this quarter, and almost none of it comes with a way to prove that it did.

Meanwhile the surfaces actually producing revenue today get treated like settled infrastructure that doesn't need attention anymore.

Teams fund the speculative thing and starve the working thing, because the speculative thing is where the conversation is loudest.

This is the conversation I want to have in the open.

At CommerceNext, I'm joining Ken Pilot and Noam Paransky for a session called “Search, Answers and Skepticism.” Ken has built some of the most recognizable brands in retail. Noam has driven over a billion dollars of online growth. Different seats, same low tolerance for a story that cannot be measured.

We'll get into what is genuinely shifting across paid search, AI Overviews, and answer engines, where brand still wins when a machine is choosing, and the question most people skip: how would you even know any of it is working?