The web is turning agentic. And an agentic web changes everything from shopping to search to SEO.
In this episode of TechFirst, John Koetsier sits down with Dave Anderson (VP at ContentSquare + host of the “Tech Seeking Human” podcast) to unpack what happens when browsers and AI assistants don’t just answer … they do stuff. For you. On your behalf.
From Atlas and agentic browsing to the growing backlash from retailers (hello, Amazon vs Perplexity), we explore who benefits, who loses, and what the internet becomes when agents are the default user.
You’ll hear why retailers are nervous (security, margins, coupon hunting), why agent-first experiences might create “headless” retailers (like ghost kitchens, but for ecommerce), and why search is shifting from SEO to AI visibility. Plus: real talk about trusting agents with your credit card, hallucinations, and what it means if your agent can look indistinguishable from you.
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Transcript: the agentic web
Note: this is a partially AI-generated transcript. It may not be 100% correct. Check the video for exact quotations.
John Koetsier
What changes when the web becomes agentic? Hello and welcome to Tech First. My name is John Koetsier. You probably noticed: I just launched the Atlas browser maybe a couple of weeks ago now, and I’ve been using it. Maybe you’ve been using it. It means you’re taking ChatGPT with you wherever you go, and you’re adding some agentic functionality to your web experience—hey, you know, just do stuff for yourself. Good, right? Brave has done that too. Other browsers are working on similar capabilities.
It’s not without controversy, though. We saw recently—and I wrote about it on Forbes—Amazon called out Perplexity for allowing its agents to shop for people on Amazon.com. Where’s all this going? What does it mean? Is it good for us? Is it bad for us? Is it good for retailers? Bad for retailers? Bad for the web? Good for the web?
I want to get into all that. Today we have Dave Anderson. He’s a VP at Continent Square. He’s also a podcast host—he hosts the Tech Seeking Human podcast. Welcome, Dave.
Dave Anderson
John, nice—thank you for having me. What a start. I’m a podcast host, and there’s a podcast host that can’t even introduce himself. It’s because you flipped the roles and you threw me, and I love it. I love being on the receiving end. It’s good to be here, mate. Thank you.
John Koetsier
There’s the fun cast. Love it. Just so you know, Dave, you are the cast today. I’ll play the host and we’ll see how it goes. We’re going to have a wide-ranging conversation. We’re going to talk about what’s going on, what’s changed. We’re going to talk about why retailers like Amazon care about this, and what happens with AI and agents—and all of a sudden, what it changes about the web for us. A lot of stuff.
Maybe let’s start super broad. Thirty thousand feet, Dave—what’s going on? What’s happening here?
Dave Anderson
Well, it’s just turned on its head. I think the first answer is: yeah. Everything changes so quickly. And in the space of a year… I think at the start of this year I was like, “What is an agent? Why does everyone talk about agents? What’s this agent thing?” And halfway through the year it’s like, “Oh, that’s an agent.” And then you’re like, “Wait—it’s going to do what for me now?”
And then you’re like, N8N’s coming out of nowhere. I’m using Lovable and all these tools. And you’re like, “Agents—I get it.” And now it’s like, okay, so they can shop for you. And of course, like what you just said—ChatGPT comes out with its own browser and we’re trying it, and you’re like, “This is different.” This is not how we used to search. AI search has changed. And now all the marketers—every time you watch a video, it’s about AI visibility. It’s not SEO anymore. And I’m like, as a marketer, I’ve got to go back to school. I’ve got to relearn all this stuff.
But thankfully we’ve been around the block and we’ve seen technology changes before. So I think it’s exciting, and it’s just new, and it’s going to take a little bit of learning. And I think we’re all learning at the same time—which is why I think it’s incredible that retailers and major brands… like, we had Microsoft at our event. We had the head of their .com at our event when they announced their Atlas browser—no, they announced Instant Shopping, actually. They learned about it at the same time we did.
And I’m like, that’s incredible. You guys have a lot of investment in OpenAI—you’d think you might get a heads up. But that’s what’s cool about the internet now: consumers… we’re all learning about it at the same time. And they sort of predicted it. That’s what teams need to do. They need to go, “Wait. All right. So what do we think this is going to do, and how is this going to change?”
So I think it’s exciting, and it keeps you on your toes. You wake up each week and go, “What’s happening this week and what can we do? What’s our advantage here? Do we have an advantage?” And we might. It gives people an opportunity to break into somewhere they didn’t have before, or work different.
John Koetsier
Exactly. This is brand new—we’re learning this. We’re not going to have 50 million answers here, but we’re going to intelligently explore this topic and figure out what’s going on.
I’ll tell you: I wanted an agent like a decade ago. I wanted a system where I could put in: “I want this, I want that”—all the things that were on my shopping list—and I wanted retailers to come and have some software that interacted with that and gave me offers. “I’ve got this, do you want this? It’s a little different,” or “This is my price, that’s his price,” all that stuff. I didn’t call it an agent at the time, but that’s kind of maybe what an agentic future might look like.
I’ve got some agents that are looking for some stuff. Maybe retailers have some agents, and they interact and talk. Right now, at least some retailers—Amazon—don’t want my agent going on Amazon.com and shopping for me. Why?
Dave Anderson
If we go back to the origins, having agents and synthetic bots on sites is really bad for development teams. They’re worried about it from a security perspective. If you go back to the origins of e-commerce, to a large extent, they’re like, “We’re going to prioritize humans over any bots.” These bots are new.
And it’s not just one agent that you can deploy. From a security perspective, you can deploy thousands of agents and get a competitive advantage on getting early access to tickets, or maybe even do malicious things and bring sites down. So I think the development teams and the security teams are a little bit concerned about it.
For you and me, we’re like, “This is great,” because I want a good price on a product and I don’t want to go searching for things. Some people like shopping and they want to do it. But if you can automate the mundane, that’s great. With any new technology, there are always going to be risks because there are people that look for opportunities to manipulate it.
And these big companies have to think through scenarios. They have to think about the worst possible scenarios—and what could happen probably does happen. Therefore they have to think about it. They’ve got to block it. I’ve seen it. I’m sure Amazon is saying it, but there are other companies where I’m seeing pop-ups occurring now that are trying to block agents from doing certain things.
I saw some things with Airbnb that wouldn’t let you plan holidays as easily as what you thought—because apparently when all the use cases for this stuff came out, we were all going on holidays. That’s what every use case was: “Now you can book a holiday.” And I was like, I can’t remember the last holiday. But okay—maybe. Sure.
John Koetsier
Do you remember—just to hit on that point—do you remember when Siri first came out? This was like… it’s got to be a decade ago. It was a small company that Apple bought, and literally in the announcement was like: you would tell Siri to go figure out a vacation for you. It would look at the hotels and the flights and all the other stuff and maybe book a dinner and a show.
Of course, Siri is the biggest joke, right?
Dave Anderson
Yeah. Now Siri can’t even tell the time. That’s a problem.
It’s funny because Adam Cheyer, the founder of Siri, was one of my first podcast guests. I spoke to him about this and he said their technology wasn’t new—it had been around for over a decade. And Steve Jobs believed that AI was the future of Apple. On the podcast, he shared with me that he got an email from Steve Jobs’ executive assistant saying Steve was literally hanging on to see Siri launched because he believed it was the future of Apple.
And what happened, of course—and I explored this in the podcast with him—is that the Apple executive team kept it as a walled garden and not what Amazon were doing with Alexa and making it an open ecosystem. I don’t think any of them really did a tremendous job at it, and it’s taken ChatGPT to come and really disrupt them a bit.
Now you’re seeing Gemini. Google’s probably got a competitive advantage given that it knows the internet better than anyone. So it’s going to be very interesting. But yeah—you’re right. I think the use case for travel is few and far between. Now, of course, Apple’s playing massive catch-up and you’re looking at your Apple ecosystem and you’re going, “What’s going on? Why don’t they have a smart AI?” Yeah.
John Koetsier
So you bring up an interesting perspective from a retailer perspective. They’ve evolved to not want bots on their site because bots equal bad. Agents, of course, aren’t bots—it’s an evolution from bots—but they share some lineage. They share some characteristics, and they’re machine-based. They’re not humans.
The interesting thing is: if I have an agent and I create one, it could look very much like me. I could even tell it to browse like me—be slow, not instant—and all those other things. So I could make that agent theoretically indistinguishable from me.
Dave Anderson
It’s interesting because it would depend. You’d probably be building an agent that’s not based on your IP address, so it’s coming from somewhere else. It probably doesn’t really have your identity. Maybe it does have your logins—you’ve given it your login details and things like that.
But you’re bringing up an interesting legal perspective: if you create an agent, how’s your login? Is it a representation of you? And if you do something bad with it, then maybe that’s on you.
We’ve had automations forever. I used to do automations on website things many years ago—automated backups. You were using a shell script to run it on your PC, which essentially… it’s not an agent, but it’s a dumb automation that does a workflow and does steps and does things for you. The nature of something that can do things for you is not new.
So now if we come back to why a retailer is worried about it: it’s not just about security. I think it is a little bit about security, but I also think there’s an element of… coupon hunting. That’s one thing where they’re going to cut margins because these bots are going to go looking for the right price until they find the right discount, and then they get the discount.
Retailers are going to have to be really careful with pricing. Return policies too—like, you let your agent loose and you’re like, “Oh yeah, I forgot to tell my agent not to buy that this week.” It’s now bought 10, and I need to ship them all back. That’s a problem.
And we just don’t know yet. I don’t think everyone’s really using these agents yet, so they don’t really know.
I was using an agent and I wanted to buy this software. I said, “Tell me when it gets to a particular price—Black Friday’s coming up—so when it gets to that price, let me know.” So it tells me. I go to the website and I go, “What are you doing? It’s not even discounted.” And it went, “Yes, sorry.” And I go, “No, sorry—it’s not good enough. If you’re a smart agent and you’re going to buy something, and you have my credit card, then let’s make sensible decisions.” There’s still…
John Koetsier
Your agent had a hallucination.
Dave Anderson
Yeah. My agent was just like, “Let’s go. It’s on sale.” And I’m like, “No, it’s not,” on the site that I’m seeing. And it was like, “Yeah, my mistake.” And I go, “No—don’t make mistakes if you’ve got my credit card.” You know what I mean?
John Koetsier
That’s a very good point. When it has your credit card, when it acts as you—wow—you better be sure it’s right.
We do see that Amazon and other retailers are developing their own shopping AI agents, right? And obviously they’re going to prefer that because that agent is under their control, and it’s something they can program to do things that benefit their bottom line—to make you buy more, maybe to make you buy higher-margin goods.
Amazon in particular has a whole lot of backstory here: how things rise to the top, how important their ad business is for their actual revenue, and their sponsored results are very, very prominent. There are lots of reasons for them not to like other agents.
The interesting thing for me is that everybody thinks: “Okay, I get an agent, and it can go scour the web and find the best price anywhere.” It’s not just about price. Maybe getting shipped tomorrow—and Amazon has invested billions in doing exactly that—is the most important thing. So it’s going to be a combination of characteristics.
Dave Anderson
Yeah—they’re the masters of that.
There are two things. One: Amazon is dominating. Any disruption to their business model is a problem. Google’s thinking the same thing. It’s like, “Wait a second—we have like 90% of the search business and paid ads.” So it’s like: we’re on top, and this technology represents step change. Step change represents a threat. It brings opportunity for others to get in.
I think there’s a brand consensus as well. They’re developing their own agent, and agents are only as good as the data they’re trained on. If the Amazon agent is trained on the products within their marketplace and people are already using it… I’ve used Rufus, their agent, and it’s great.
I was looking for a microwave and I don’t like shopping for microwaves. I didn’t care. I needed particular dimensions. Do I really care? It’s going to arrive tomorrow—one way or another, or this afternoon. I’m just looking for a particular size because it was a dimension. It was incredible. It was a pretty good experience. It does it based on reviews, and it’s only going to get better.
So if you’re an Amazon shopper and you like that, great. Did I want to go out onto the internet and use my agent to find a microwave? No—not really. But there are other products I might want to do that for. There might be clothes, premium brand things that I want to look at externally. And if you have an agent that can go looking for other things, then yeah, it’s a threat to Amazon.
John Koetsier
I’ll give you an example—and a thought just occurred to me. You’ve heard of ghost kitchens, right? That’s a phenomenon with ordering food. In fact, only a third of all meals that are ordered at restaurants in the US right now actually get consumed on premises.
So you have these ghost kitchens and nobody ever eats on premise—there is no premise. It’s just something for DoorDash, just something for Uber Eats. You order, you get the food. There’s no restaurant there—just a kitchen.
I wonder if something similar could happen in an agentic web for retailers: where they don’t really need a brand, they don’t really need a presence. They do need delivery, but that’s a layer. You could outsource it to Wing—Google’s drone delivery division—and other things like that.
Here’s an example of where I thought an agent might work for me. I was in Frankfurt airport about three weeks ago, on the way to Istanbul. Saw a great jacket—a Hugo Boss jacket—in the airport. And you’re thinking, holy shit, it’s in the airport. It’s like four times the price it should be, right?
So I do like five Google searches—maybe seven—and I use ChatGPT, and I find, oh, that’s actually a pretty good price. I’m buying it. So an agent to do that could have changed a 30-minute search—check, verify—into maybe a quicker experience. I’m not sure.
Dave Anderson
Yeah, I think it’s a new form of search, right? And you can get very specific with it because you’re getting very specific with that product. You could be like: “Hey, I really like this Hugo Boss jacket.” Take a photo of it. “This is my size. This is the price. It’s here. What alternatives are there? Could you give me recommendations? When could I have it arrive?” It can do research you would have spent time doing.
I used it for niche stuff. I do audio, and I watched a YouTube video one morning and I was like, “This warm audio compressor looks pretty cool. What’s that going to be like mixed with an SM7B… should I be doing this compressor?” Point is, it was very niche. It was going through Reddit and finding things. It did research that I would probably have spent most of my morning doing.
And I just did it all in one go. Then I had the confidence. I’m like, “This price is pretty good. Should I buy it?” And it was like, “Yes, you should buy it.” And I just think that’s ChatGPT’s bias because I was like, “Just do it, Dave. Just go buy that thing.” And I’m like, “What are you talking about? Are you sure it’s a good price?”
John Koetsier
You have to have the shopping agent talk to the finance agent—your personal finance agent—and they can have a conversation as to whether it’s a good idea.
Dave Anderson
Yeah.
I was thinking about creating an agent for myself to have conversations with the kids, but it would just be a pretty boring conversation because most of the time the agent would just be “No.” But it could elaborate as to why no—so it would have more patience than me with my kids. Like, “Dad, I was thinking about blah blah blah,” and my agent would be like, “That’s interesting. You could go down that path. You might not do that. Have you thought about this?”
John Koetsier
Would your kids be aware they’re talking to Daddy-AI or something like that?
Dave Anderson
So I did do a fake me using HeyGen, and I used it for conferences. I would do a different video each time and it got better each time—it got better at the Australian accent.
Anyway, I created a version of myself that was talking complete nonsense. And I said to my daughter, “What do you think?” And she goes, “What’s the big deal? Did you get sponsored by this brand or something?” And I go, “That’s not me speaking.” And she goes, “What are you talking about?” I go, “Watch this.” I typed something in and I go, “See? It can speak French.”
And she goes, “That’s interesting,” and just had no idea. So yeah, I don’t think the kids these days have any idea what’s real, what’s not. So I could get my agents to do whatever I like. I think it would be another great representation of why the internet might be in trouble.
John Koetsier
Yeah. It’s a big question, right? What does this mean for the future of the web?
The web has been under fire for a long time. Obviously mobile has taken over in a lot of cases. We used to use the web a lot when we were doing work and other things like that. When we want experiences, we’re often in apps—especially for games and other things, and things that we want to get done.
It struck me that agents might be more corrosive to apps—the future of apps—than they are to websites. I’m not sure. I’m just thinking out loud.
Dave Anderson
As you were talking, I was thinking about identity online and how that’s a problem. I’ve done a few podcasts where we got into discussions and we were like, “The thing with the internet is weird: you can just be anonymous. You can troll people. You can be kind of an evil person.” You shouldn’t really be allowed to do that. It should really be a representation of you when you’re online.
Australia came up with the idea as well. They were really concerned about bullying and keyboard warriors. They were like, if you’re going to type something, you really need to identify that as you. It’s John, and John has a podcast, and he can be found, and he’s identified. It shouldn’t just be “Johnny C,” no one knows who this person is.
Anyway, the point is: maybe it will get to the point where your identity online needs to be a representation of you.
And if you did do that, that opens up some interesting dilemmas around agents. It could just be a scenario of: “Hey, we’re going to give preference to people coming into an online store.” They do that anyway with bots. When there’s a sale on for particular products, I know companies that will filter traffic and say, “I’m sorry—you’re not a member, and therefore you shouldn’t be able to get access.”
So with the increase in bots and agents and all these things running around the internet—and the fact that we still need to host it all and still analyze it—maybe this will get more human again. Maybe there’s an opportunity for brands to go, “I’m going to preference loyal members who navigate with their hands and their eyeballs and take the time.”
John Koetsier
I think you’re going to see bifurcation. You’re going to see some brands that absolutely do that. And I think you’re going to see some retailers that fully lean into this agentic future. They’re going to be like a ghost kitchen—this headless restaurant—this headless retailer. They just have stuff, and they get very good at logistics, ordering, delivery, and they don’t care a whit about brand. It’s just agent-first AI. That’s an interesting concept right there: what does that look like? What does that feel like? How does that change?
The other thought that came to my mind: you mentioned earlier about agents—they’re often not from your own IP. They might not report themselves as such. I think Perplexity’s don’t report themselves as such—they report themselves as a person.
However, if I have an agentic browser—maybe that’s Atlas, maybe that’s the Brave browser… actually, it’s Opera that’s agentic right now. I think Brave’s working on it, but Opera did it first. That is operating at my IP address, and that is right on my machine. So that has a strong likelihood of looking like me, as long as it doesn’t identify itself as non-human by speed or how it acts or anything like that.
Dave Anderson
Yeah, that’s spot on.
There’ll definitely be a rise in brands that take the opportunity to be agentic-first. It only took me to come from Australia to the US and see White Fox here everywhere. Kids are wearing the hoodies. I was like, “Well—I thought that was just a Melbourne brand.” It took Melbourne by storm. It originated in Melbourne. And I’m in Boston—kids are wearing White Fox hoodies. I’m asking the parents. That stuff spreads like wildfire through TikTok and things like that. Then they just make shipping available. They probably do drop shipping. They’re not big factories. They probably print on demand locally. They don’t worry about quality control. Literally their logo on a hoodie. I don’t think they have any physical retail stores.
And then your second point about the browsers—yeah. I was explaining the browser and the first time I used it I thought: using Google was a bit like playing baseball. You stand on home plate and you swing at it. You say, “I missed it.” You get asked what you were looking for. Then you go back and you go, “Throw it again.” You hit it again: still no good. Still no good. But you haven’t gone anywhere because you’re still back at home plate again.
But these new browsers like Atlas and Comet—it’s like playing golf. You swing and it takes you somewhere, and you go, “Huh—that’s interesting.” You’re in a different space now. It’s close, but what about this instead? And then it starts refining. It feels like you’re moving with the browser. So I found myself getting closer to what I want faster and narrowing things down.
It’s not just having ChatGPT on a side screen and then going, “Tell me what to do,” and then clicking a link out again. You’re already in that experience.
Ultimately, the brands that will win—whether it’s retail, apps, browsers—whatever: it’s the experience that makes it easier for us to do what we want to do. Does it save us time? Is it easy? Are we saving money? Was it fun?
Google was so good at the start because they provided a good experience for advertisers and a good experience for the consumer. So everyone was winning. That’s what I’m yet to see. I don’t know how they’re commercializing Atlas and Comet and Perplexity—how they’ll do rankings, how even Instant Shopping is going to work.
We had an interesting example with Instant Shop where we were able to do an agent-to-agent experience and purchase something. But then when we tried to send it back—because we were doing it as an experiment—we went, “Wait a second. I don’t think they know that we bought it, and I don’t know how we’re going to get it back. How do I return it?” We’re in a bit of a race. We’re building all this stuff, and I don’t think we’ve built the services around it.
Even ChatGPT sometimes does things like: when I was first using some features, it was like, “I’ll send you an alert,” and I go, “You don’t send alerts. You don’t even know how to send alerts.” And it goes, “Yeah, you’re right.” And I went, “This is weird.” And then the next day it goes, “I can send alerts.” And I went, “Wow—what is happening?”
My ChatGPT has started using Australian slang. I don’t know what I clicked, but it just goes, “I don’t think so, mate.” And I went, “Okay—can you not?” I don’t want you to do that. The other day it thought I was in the UK. Then I said, “I need help plastering a wall—can you give me some recommendations?” And it goes, “Yeah, if you’re plastering a wall in Connecticut…” and I go, “I’m in Connecticut now, am I? Why do you think I’m in Connecticut?” And it said, “Because you said you were in New England.” And I go, “New England is a big territory—Boston’s probably in the middle of it. I’ve told you Boston a million times.” So anyway, there’s still a little bit of learning to be done.
John Koetsier
A few weeks ago, ChatGPT started calling me Kevin. I have no idea why. I wondered: is this context confusion? Is it mixing me up with somebody else? That’s ChatGPT.
No, no—that’s egocentricity. It’s not just you. Many others.
I love the analogy you made: using Google is like baseball—trying to hit a ball, and every time you’re back at home plate. Whereas an agentic experience or an AI-driven experience with ChatGPT or others is like golf. Of course, I spell golf backwards: flog. And that’s sometimes how AI works—because you just go down the wrong place or you need to restart. But that’s innovation, right? The new innovation isn’t better than the old way initially, but its pace of getting better is faster—so eventually we adopt.
It’ll be a fascinating new world when agents are mainstream. ChatGPT is close to mainstream right now—close to a billion people using it. And agents are just at the very beginning of that.
I’ve made a few. You’ve made a bunch, obviously—you’re super high end. You’ve got N8N going, you’ve got Lovable, you’re connecting them—all that stuff. It’s a brave new world.
Dave Anderson
Yeah. I tried to explain that—my wife said to me, “What’s this Lovable on the credit card statement?” And I had to pull the website up to explain it to her.
It’s not just shopping. One of the simplest use cases for agents is support. Support is a cost. Using a chatbot has been really frustrating when you’re trying to talk to your telco to explain something like: my phone doesn’t work because I’m overseas. It’s a small use case they don’t understand.
But now with agentic chatbots, most of my support experiences are incredible. It resolves most problems, and it’s very quick to escalate to a human if it needs to. It means the humans are there and they’re not being inundated by all the dumb questions people are asking.
Agentic support experiences—this isn’t a new thing. Amazon do it really well. If you ever have issues with theirs, and they have automatic refunds and things like that—they have models in place.
So while it might be new to consumers—agents doing shopping—there are still a lot of business processes that have been in play for years. They’re just fine-tuning them. They’re getting better. As ChatGPT gets better and Claude gets better, that’s the brains behind it. That experience gets better. Then we just keep getting better experiences, whether it’s support or shopping or personal assistant or whatever it might be.
So yeah—it’s exciting and it’s new, and we just have to apply these new use cases for how we’re going to apply this technology.
John Koetsier
I think maybe the Steve Jobs approach here—the best way to predict the future is to invent it—is what we need to go with. The future is going to be what it’s going to be, and that’s going to be based on what we make it. And it’s going to be different for different people.
Some people will never adopt agents. Some people have never adopted using mobile-first—they’re still on a desktop most of the time. There are going to be different levels for different people. It is super fascinating.
Dave Anderson
Yeah.
Apple’s interesting. I’m not speculating, but I know I’ve bet against Apple so many times in the past. And when you’re really only hardware… it’s not just about software, but I think maybe they’ll cook something up because they’re very good at reinventing themselves.
Maybe they’re watching. They’re looking and seeing how people are doing everything. The interoperability between a lot of what we use in our work and our phones is still not great. It’s still a bit of a challenge to summarize my notes when I’m using Apple Notes—yes, I’m using Apple Notes—but I kind of like it. And through email and things like that.
Maybe identity is something that if Apple’s the device at the end and it’s the hardware you need, then maybe they’ll come back with something.
But to your point: it’s going to evolve. It’s going to be different. We’re going to do things differently. People are going to come up with creative ideas.
There might be a pullback too. Maybe people are like, “Maybe I don’t want to play golf when I’m searching. Maybe I want to go back.” Or maybe I don’t even want to go online. Maybe I just want to drive to a store because I’m tired of online.
I don’t know about you, but when you can ask the AI anything you want, by the time you get to the weekend it’s like, I’m tired. I don’t want to talk to this AI anymore. I just want to go talk to a human.
John Koetsier
Yeah. We have to bring this to a close, but that’s actually near and dear to my heart.
There’s a big difference between me and my wife there. We’re in a place and we want to find a restaurant. I just want to go look and say, “Okay, let’s try that one.” And she’s like, “No, no, no—let’s check its reviews. Is it good?” And I’m like, those are gamed anyways, even if it’s real. And even if somebody likes that, they’re not you. What they like isn’t the same as what you like.
I just want to try it. So there’s room for humanity. There’s room for serendipity. There’s room for inefficient organic… organicity. Just try stuff, maybe.
Anyway, this has been a real pleasure. It’s been a fun conversation. I don’t think we solved agents. I don’t think anybody is. But I think we had an interesting conversation.
Dave Anderson
No one will yet.
Yeah, John—sorry about the start. That’s all I’ve got to say. It only got better, I thought.
John Koetsier
I think it’s great. I love it. It’s awesome.
Dave Anderson
It was great to talk to you. And yeah, you’re right. The only thing I would say is: this is an interesting new world. It’s fun to be part of it. It’s going to be really interesting to see how we evolve—the brands that take advantage of the innovation and really read what people want.
Whether it’s a retro experience—maybe we’ll go back to fax machines and direct mail or something—it’s like you only come in if you have Willy Wonka’s golden ticket, and then you can come into the store. Maybe that stuff will be the new brand experience, or maybe it won’t.
Maybe it’ll just be all agents and we’ve got bots and drones flying around—who knows? But it’s fun to talk about it. I really, really enjoyed it.
John Koetsier
Love it. Love it.
Absolutely—thank you again.