Future Commerce

Ben Dietz convenes Casey Lewis (After School), Daisy Alioto (Dirt), and Erica Chen (Media Futures Group, WPP) on the collapse of the wall between editorial and commerce. Publishers are shipping perfume, brands are hiring writers, and the relationship forming in your inbox isn’t human-to-human anymore. 

What happens when the scenic route is quicker? When “wasted” time actually is the relationship? Your total addressable market now includes agents, and those agents are trained on the taste you are curating. After all – what you buy is who you become, but what you read is how you decide. 

Base Notes: Upper Lip Sweat and Hot Metal

Key takeaways:

Publishers now make products; brands now make publications. The wall stopped mattering.

Optimization is a process of reduction, and serendipity gets cut first.

Brands flame out at issue two or three without a point of view.

Taste-driven publishers have a new addressable market: agents trained on taste.

[12:48] "The best ROI does not necessarily give you growth, because growth comes in volumes." – Erica Chen

[21:15] "When your audience knows to expect you… you really have to stay true to that." – Casey Lewis

[28:50] "Our total addressable market now includes agents." – Daisy Alioto

[30:32] "Creators are the cure to the media fragmentation." – Erica Chen

Associated Links:

Casey Lewis – After School on Substack

Erica Chen – "In Defense of Serendipity"

Daisy Alioto – Read Dirt @ dirt.fyi

Tasteland podcast – Daisy Alioto & Francis Zierer

VISIONS Summit 2026 – November 3, 2026 at MoMA. Listen to today’s episode for 25% off

Check out Future Commerce on YouTube

Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print

Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world

Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The funnel most marketers grew up on – see the ad, click, browse, add to cart, buy – did not gradually erode. It came apart almost overnight, as shoppers got comfortable discovering, deciding, and buying inside social feeds and LLMs, often in a single moment.

Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this is the close-out conversation for the series, a step back to ask what actually replaces the funnel and what it demands of the brands trying to keep pace.

Alicia Esposito of Future Commerce sits down with Kelsey Capps, who leads Klaviyo's product work across analytics, personalization, and AI, and so has a front-row seat to the change. A shopper can now find a product in a TikTok comment, buy it, and post about it before the marketing team has time to react, which means the advance-planning window marketers relied on has all but vanished.

Kelsey's argument is that brands have to rebalance, away from a roughly 80/20 split of campaigns over automated flows and toward signal-triggered automation that can react in the moment, like a flow that fires when someone arrives from a ChatGPT referral. Underneath the tactics sits a bigger shift: optimizing your site and product data so the machines doing the discovering can actually surface you, and building an operating model around understanding customers rather than merely targeting them.

Her closing note is optimistic. The data advantage that once belonged only to enterprises is now within reach of the smallest brand, and because customer intelligence compounds, the brands that start building the model first are the ones that pull away.

What you'll learn

What replaces the linear funnel once discovery, comparison, and conversion happen at once

Why the advance-planning window has collapsed, and what to do about it

How to rebalance from campaigns toward signal-triggered automated flows

Why optimizing your product data and brand voice for machines is now table stakes

How a single wrong recommendation breaks trust, and why understanding beats targeting

Why customer intelligence compounds, and why first movers pull away

Pull quotes

"Customers don't want to be just targeted, they want to be understood." — Kelsey Capps [13:50]

"You can see when someone came to your site from ChatGPT. That's just a UTM source on an event, and a brand could automate a workflow around it." — Kelsey Capps [16:15]

"This conversation used to be confined to the four walls of industry events. Now your family and friends are having the same conversations about how their data is being used." — Alicia Esposito [23:01]

"Even your smallest mom-and-pop shop can take advantage of their first-party data in a way they just never could before." — Kelsey Capps [24:55]

Chapters

0:00 Cold open and introductions

5:23 Perpetual commerce and the collapse of the funnel

6:11 Discovering and buying inside a TikTok comment

11:43 Understanding customers, not just targeting them

14:46 Optimizing your data for the machines doing the discovering

15:40 The vanishing planning window, campaigns versus flows

17:08 Composer and orchestration pulling it together

19:03 Vision in the age of autonomy

22:00 The turkey-sub story, how a bad recommendation breaks trust

23:43 What Kelsey is optimistic about, and the urgency for laggards

In-Show Mentions:

Learn more about Klaviyo’s Composer

Associated Links:

Check out Future Commerce on YouTube

Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print

Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world

Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

"Service is the new storefront" has been a slogan for the better part of a decade, usually followed by a promise to turn a cost center into a profit center that never quite arrived. What changed is not the ambition. It is that the plumbing finally exists.

Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about what becomes possible when a brand can pull customer data from any channel and hand it, in real time, to a human or an AI agent.

Phillip Jackson sits down with Kelly Thacker of Klaviyo's product marketing team. Her argument is that the prize is democratization: taking the best in-store associate, the person who knows both the products and the customer, and making that experience available on every channel and to every brand, not just the ones who can staff a great team.

Kelly is candid about the failure mode too, the dumb bot that asks a loyal VIP for an email address it should already have. The fix is an agent that knows the business and the customer, with escalation rules the brand sets and widens as trust grows. The number that makes the case is blunt: where is my order is still the most common question to any agent, human or AI, and automating it hands time back to people for the work that actually needs them.

She closes by looking further out, to a world where marketing and service stop being separate departments and brands begin building for agent-to-agent shopping, where a customer's agent transacts with a brand's.

You Don’t Have to Babysit Your Agent Anymore

What you'll learn

Why the cost-center-to-profit-center promise is finally deliverable, and what specifically changed

What separates an agent that delights from the dumb bot that frustrates

How brands set the line between automation and human escalation, and widen it over time

Why where is my order is the single most valuable question to automate

How service data feeds back into marketing and the rest of the relationship

What agent-to-agent shopping is, and why it is closer than it sounds

Pull quotes

"You could be the most loyal VIP customer, and then a chatbot asks, can you give me your email address, and you think, you should just know me." — Kelly Thacker, Product Marketing, Klaviyo [TK]

"We meet customers where they are. You build for the future, and you help them slowly get comfortable with that change." — Kelly Thacker [TK]

"A poor experience with an agent feels worse than a poor experience with a human, so the human in the loop has to be so important to this." — Phillip Jackson [TK]

"This is the moment where people will either rise to the occasion or they'll be forgotten." — Kelly Thacker [TK]

Chapters

[TK] Cold open and introductions

[TK] Service is the new storefront, an old promise made real

[TK] Democratizing the best in-store associate

[TK] The dumb bot, and what a good agent must know

[TK] Human in the loop, escalation rules the brand controls

[TK] Where is my order, automating the most common question

[TK] Signals from a service chat that make marketing smarter

[TK] The future, one brand experience and agent-to-agent shopping

[TK] Brands doing service and experience well

In-Show Mentions:

Learn more about Klaviyo’s Composer

Associated Links:

Check out Future Commerce on YouTube

Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print

Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world

Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For years, the marketer's job ended when the campaign shipped. Hit send, check the numbers, measure growth, repeat. That model is changing, and what replaces it is agentic orchestration, where the system and the journey around a message matter more than a single send.

Recorded live at K:LDN 2026, this conversation pairs the person building the AI with an operator running it at real scale. Gilbert Hsu, who leads Marketing AI at Klaviyo, sits down with Alon Turchin, VP of Retention at Particle, a US-manufactured DTC self-care brand for men with a marketing team based in Israel.

That kind of scale brings real complexity, and this is where Composer by Klaviyo brings solutions at scale. Alon describes it today as the brain and the eyes, the thing that finds and frames problems he might not catch manually. His wish list is for it to become the hands too, trusted to edit filters, rules, and content, a trust he says has to be earned through testing first.

Closing advice for teams earlier in their journey: know your audience before you trust anyone's benchmarks, remember that selling is mostly psychological, and test your way to what actually works rather than assuming you already know.

What you'll learn

How Particle scaled from one million to ten million monthly sends in weeks, not months, while doubling revenue

Why "the campaign is not the product, the system is" changes what a marketing team actually optimizes for

How Particle segments customers and non-customers by urgency and lifecycle stage across 150-plus flows and 100-plus forms

Where Composer fits today (the brain and the eyes) and what Alon wants it to become next (the hands)

Why rigorous A/B testing is the gate that lets Alon hand more decisions to AI

Alon's advice for marketers earlier in their own orchestration journey

Key takeaways

Alon's operating principle: the campaign is not the product, the system is, meaning the journey around a message matters more than the message itself.

Particle scaled from one million to ten million sends a month in a matter of weeks, not months or a year of slow warmup, while revenue doubled, run across more than 150 active flows and 100-plus forms.

Segmentation isn't just more lists, it's urgency based. Recent sign-ups get reached while the brand is still top of mind. Older, colder contacts get reintroduced rather than ignored.

Composer today functions as the brain and the eyes, surfacing problems and opportunities Alon might miss manually. His wish list is for it to become the hands, trusted to edit filters, rules, and content, once testing earns that trust.

Alon's closing advice: don't assume you know your audience or trust someone else's benchmark. Selling is mostly psychological, so test relentlessly until you find what actually works for your own customers.

Chapters

0:00 Cold open and introductions

1:38 Meet Particle, and how the marketing job has changed

2:48 The campaign is not the product, the system is

3:30 From engagement to behavior-based segmentation

4:49 Why sending more, to the right tiers, doubled revenue

7:12 Managing 150-plus flows without losing control

7:55 Composer as the brain and eyes, and the wishlist for the hands

10:43 Keeping the brand's soul with a human in the loop

11:55 Advice for teams earlier in the journey

In-Show Mentions:

Learn more about Klaviyo’s Composer

Associated Links:

Check out Future Commerce on YouTube

Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print

Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world

Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Social is where discovery happens now, but it is rented land. You can build an audience of hundreds of thousands and still not own the relationship, because the algorithm decides who sees you and the landlord keeps raising the rent.

Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about turning borrowed reach into something a brand actually owns. It pairs the person building the tooling with the person living the problem every day.

Brett Bernstein, who came to Klaviyo through its acquisition of Gatsby and now leads its new social product, sits down with Kathleen Loftus, Marketing Director at Sculpted by Aimee, an Irish cosmetics brand with a 350,000-strong Instagram following. Kathleen runs brand, creative, PR, influencer, CRM, and paid under one roof, which is exactly why she can trace a viral moment all the way to revenue.

She walks through a campaign built on a piece of theater: teasing the discontinuation of a beloved cream blush. The stunt ran as a closed loop, from Instagram to the brand's broadcast channel to a website waitlist, and it sold roughly eight weeks of forecast stock in under a week. Brett and Kathleen then dig into the unglamorous problem underneath the fun: attribution, why the brand rebuilt its entire UTM structure this year, and how so many of the people engaging with a brand never actually hit follow.

The payoff is a practical view of what it means to own the social moment: spotting the commenters and lurkers who signal intent, and giving them a reason to move into channels the brand controls.

Why Rent Platforms When You Can Own Relationships?

What you'll learn

Why keeping social, CRM, and paid on one team is what lets social activity connect to revenue

How a brand decides what to post when every post has to earn its place, not just chase reach

The mechanics of a closed-loop campaign that turned a discontinuation stunt into a sold-out waitlist

Why social attribution starts with unglamorous plumbing, and what rebuilding a UTM structure buys you

Why most people engaging with a brand on social never follow it, and why following is the wrong metric to chase

How to move commenters and lurkers off rented platforms into email and SMS

Pull quotes

"Not everything needs a million likes or a million views, but it has to have a purpose to be on our channels." — Kathleen Loftus, Marketing Director, Sculpted by Aimee [~7:05]

"We sold out eight weeks' worth of our forecasted product in less than a week." — Kathleen Loftus [~9:15]

"Instagram is the landlord that keeps raising the rent every month." — Kathleen Loftus [13:23]

"You might think they're no longer an active customer, but then you notice their comments on your content. Those are signals we can now unlock." — Brett Bernstein, Klaviyo [14:36]

Chapters

0:00 Cold open and introductions

3:18 Meet Sculpted by Aimee, one team across all of marketing

5:46 Showing up on Instagram, posting with purpose

7:12 Reading the data, what social signals actually tell you

7:57 The Cream Luxe discontinuation stunt, a sold-out waitlist

10:15 From social to revenue, rebuilding attribution and UTMs

12:28 Rented land, why following is the wrong metric

14:36 Turning engaged non-followers into owned relationships

15:26 A campaign that nailed it, the Sculpted Society pop-up

In-Show Mentions:

Sculpted by Aimee

Learn more about Klaviyo’s new tools

Associated Links:

Check out Future Commerce on YouTube

Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print

Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world

Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.