With 69 days (!) until our BRXND NYC conference, I’m continuing our series of Friday buildup interviews with founders, technologists and marketing leaders innovating in the problem space around how AI is fundamentally reshaping the way consumers build preference and purchase brands. If there’s someone you think I should feature, please drop me a line at mike@brxnd.ai.
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On Agentic Commerce & Friction as Flame
“Life should be a feast. The algos have other plans.”
So begins Jess Graham’s Field Guide to the Age of Algorithms, a provocative almanac of phenomena at the intersection of AI, brands and culture. For my money, it’s the best resource for how marketers can navigate life after filterworld. In it, she coins terms like “the seamlessness paradox”, “discovery debt” and “beigeville” that now live rent-free in my vernacular.
Jess and I met serendipitously, two kindred spirits on a quest to push past technology into culture to consider what marketing looks like in a world where every decision is mediated by an AI model. Last month, I was doing the morning Substack scroll when a notification of a new follower and subscriber to BRXND stopped me in my tracks.
“I write about what happens when AI agents start making purchasing decisions for us and what is at stake for brands.”
Wait a minute, that’s what I do! Naturally, I reached out to Jess and we began to have wide-ranging jam sessions, one of which I bring to you all here.
By way of formal intro, Jess Graham runs Banquet, a practice for brands working out where their leverage goes in the age of brand disintermediation by platforms and agents. Prior to going independent, Jess held executive roles at Visa, Instagram and Meta and twice built consumer brands from zero as a CMO and GM. Jess spent nine years at Visa, running the consulting arm that worked inside banks and merchants making digital payments ubiquitous. At Instagram, she led the launch of Reels — working inside the machine that decides what people discover. At Meta, she wrote the first global data and privacy narrative after Cambridge Analytica. Not a boring career!
She now also writes The Feast on Substack for marketers, brand builders, and anyone who “suspects that efficiency isn’t the only thing worth optimizing for.”
Our friendly banter below is an amuse bouche of what she publishes regularly and has been lightly edited for clarity.
Mike: I want to start by having you answer your own existential question that you currently posit into the mean streets of LinkedIn as your profile headline.
What happens to brands when AI does the shopping?
Jess: When agents do the shopping, they are disintermediating people from brands. They are destroying relationships that consumers actually want to have with the things that they buy. They are removing all friction from the system by optimization. And that optimization has completely stripped out things like work, which creates dopamine, which creates attachment — just from a really fundamental biological human level.
Human centered design has never really been human centered design. It’s been lipstick on how do we make ourselves feel better about a commercial objective within an internet frame. If we were designing actually for humans, we would be introducing places where they have to think, where they have to do work, where they have to commit, where they have to raise their hands.
Having worked on a million different loyalty programs in my career, one of the things you learn really early on is that nothing is worthwhile unless I raise my hand for it. If you just hand me something, it’s not interesting and I don’t give a shit. But if I have to pay a dollar, or literally raise my hand, or put in my email or my phone number, then there are stakes.
We have created this system in which all the rough edges are smoothed away. And the reality is you can’t strike a match on silk. That’s not how it works. Friction is the point of flame. Friction is the point of interest.
It’s the point of commitment. It’s the point of most of the good things that come out of life, frankly.
Mike: This is why I cringe every time an agentic commerce demo is booking a vacation! That’s the consummate experience where the four or five hours of “friction” you spend doing research is the enjoyable part. It’s the silliest possible thing to demo.
Jess: One gajillion percent. And the research is all on your side. So much of the joy is the anticipation of the trip and the planning, not the actual trip itself.
Mike: Let’s back up and define agentic commerce because there are so many different definitions living under that umbrella term. What’s yours, as agentic commerce actually exists in the market today?
Jess: My definition of agentic commerce is a transaction that’s completed in a closed loop without a human.
Mike: Ah, so that doesn’t include the entire “zero-click” zeitgeist, where AI is effectively a semantic search layer. Do you think that trend is as important for marketers as the rise of true agentic commerce?
Jess: Honestly, in some ways it isn’t really substantially different than search. It’s worse, but it’s not substantially different.
When we go full agentic commerce and evaluation is compressed into a single API call and all of that is removed from human eyes, and the funnel has completely flipped — that is a different ball game for people and brands.
Mike: You’ve argued that all of performance marketing is a ponzi scheme anyway! Can you elaborate on that a bit further?
Jess: I’m shocked that the Ponzi scheme has lasted for 25 years. Last-touch attribution with promises of multi-touch attribution that never came, never transpired. And we all sort of have been in this collective hallucination that performance marketing dashboards give us a degree of certainty that the brand dashboards they denigrated when they came out didn’t. If Facebook does some holdouts and says you that you got 5% lift, but their dashboard would have reported 64% lift — that’s not even useful. That is actually the opposite of useful.
So that’s what makes it a Ponzi scheme to me. It also takes brand assets and depletes them. All of the work you’ve done to build your brand and your recognition — it harvests it, but it doesn’t place a lot of additional value into the system.
We all sort of have been in this collective hallucination that performance marketing dashboards give us a degree of certainty that the brand dashboards they denigrated when they came out didn’t.
Mike: Has that always been the case, or is it more true now than it was five or ten years ago, across Meta and Google and Amazon?
Jess: Back in 2016, when I was a brand leader at a startup, I started asking our vendor about who we were targeting and how we’d think about holdouts and testing, stuff that was part of my natural inclination having come from performance marketing back when it was direct mail.
And they looked at me like my questions were quaint. Like I was the old dinosaur in the room asking stupid questions. And they were like, Jess, the algorithm is going to tell us that. I was like, huh, fascinating. But the algorithm never really delivered.
The whole point of the Ponzi scheme thing is that it is completely hidden. It is a total black box and people keep handing us receipts that don’t actually add up to anything. And AI and agentic commerce is just going to make that worse, not better. We are going to make even more decisions based on data that we can’t audit, we can’t see.
Mike: But my cold capitalist response is..who cares so long as the arbitrage still works? When will the so-called Ponzi actually break?
Jess: So I don’t know when it breaks, because Wall Street is addicted to it. It’s addicted to the speed. But we’ve got a literal graveyard of brands that probably, if they had spent a little bit more time and money investing in things that compounded for them and actual relationships, might still be around. But who knows, because the projects never got funded or they were deemed failures before the end of the first year.
We never gave brand the grace we gave product.
Mike: So one other place that we’ve disagreed a bit in our banter is around how ChatGPT has laid the foundations for an agentic commerce experience.
I’ve been impressed at how “media literate” they are and how well they’ve been able to parse legitimate information about brands from pay to play slop masquerading as authentic product reviews. I’m pretty excited about this!
Jess: Why should I trust OpenAI to make those judgments for me? As a marketer, as a person — I don’t know whether I trust them to create an algorithm that accurately picks what’s relevant for a brand or for me as a consumer. I don’t know whether those are the right engineers.
It’s not just the data, it’s how the data is constructed, and how we prompt it and how we train it. That’s bias in the data and it’s bias in the engineering. I don’t know whether I want platforms any longer to be the arbiter of anything for me.
And it’s very unclear to me, having literally sat in rooms with Nobel Prize winners, whether we will have the sophistication as marketers to figure out what is going on in those black boxes when the people who invented them can’t figure it out.
Mike: It’s a pretty wild thought– the idiosyncrasies of a couple of engineers end up shaping what hundreds of million people see.
Jess: Yes. And they all look the same, Mike. And that is not a world I want to live in. The more we rely on these platforms, the more I live in a world that is dictated by singular ideology.
And how would I as a consumer even parse ChatGPT versus Claude? The platforms aren’t even honest about how they’re different. They’re truly in brand advertising and not product. I see them telling the brand story, but not at all the product story, and it’s the product story that’s actually interesting to me.
Because it’s not what I use it for. It’s how the answer shapes what I do next. And that’s not what anybody’s talking about in advertising or anywhere else.
The more we rely on these platforms, the more I live in a world that is dictated by singular ideology.
Mike: So if the Nobel Laureates don’t even know how these platforms work, my mind comes back to focusing on what you can control. In a world where LLMs eat the world but are going to largely be a black box, what should marketers spend the most calories on?
Jess: What the last 20 years has done is create dependency on platforms, a narrowing in what I can do and what I know of my customers, and a narrowing of the skill sets of the people I’ve hired. We are going into an era where narrative is going to matter more, where above-the-line, IRL things that are actually off platforms are going to matter more.
So many people are getting pressure from their boards to focus on agentic commerce that they’re going to miss the boat on the reality that when that box hits the doorstep, that packaging has to do so much more work. That experience has to do so much more work. That install has to do so much more work. Marketing now has a completely different job.
Mike: And that’s all harder the more you get disintermediated from your end customer….
Jess: But mostly? Own your data. Own your customers. Figure out how to get your fucking customer data. Period. End of. That is the game now.
Sometimes, in presentations, I have this Toast receipt next to a DoorDash receipt. What Toast gives the restaurant is my name — Jess Graham, full name. It gets my full address, my full phone number, and knows I live in Bed-Stuy, which for a pizza place six blocks away is meaningful. Saraghina, by the way. Great pizza. And then I place the same order with DoorDash, the restaurant gets back gobbledygook.
Absolutely no information about me. It was Jessica G. I don’t even go by Jessica. That’s how bad it is. So what are restaurants doing promoting DoorDash? You have another alternative called Toast. You should be doing anything and everything you can to direct your consumers there. It’s the same idea for larger brands.
Own your data. Own your customers. Figure out how to get your customer data. Period. End of. That is the game now.
Mike: Anything in current work you are doing with clients that makes this idea of where you can capture more customer data to own your destiny concrete?
Jess: One of the things that’s not getting much press is the GS1 2027 sunrise — brands putting QR codes and 2D barcodes on packages instead of EPC.
It’s not a mandate per se, but it’s an opportunity for CPG brands and others that haven’t had access to good data. Their data is complete junk. You’re a $100 billion company that doesn’t actually know your customers.
My suspicion is that most of them will use the barcode as a packaging exercise and won’t put together what it could do for the business. They’ll handle it in a silo. We’ve done smart labels and other stuff, and those things never launch with an actual campaign behind it. An initiative.
Everybody’s so busy selling their products. They’re not selling the stuff that could actually save them as an industry. If a new barcode that a consumer can get data off of, and that I can get consumer data off of, is going on every package, you’re going to need to talk about that really loudly and for a long time for it to be worthwhile. Not just how do I use this to sell product, but how do I use it to get data, how do I use it to create stickiness.
Mike: Take the last word. What’s the main message you’d give to a CMO to not be a marketing passenger princess simply wafting on the AI breeze?
Jess: Take some power back. Empower yourself.
I was pitching someone senior at a CPG company recently and I said, well, I don’t think you need to keep the status quo. I think you need to think about your mix in a completely different way and double down on ownership — and double down on the reality that anything you build is going to compound, and anything you rent is going to fuck you in the end.
Jess Graham is the Founder & CEO of Banquet, an advisory practice for the age of agentic commerce. For more of her thinking, check out “Route Around the Machines”, a list of 50 demonstrated tactics leaders can use to avoid the platform tax and reduce discovery debt. To get in touch with her, please email jess@feastwithbanquet.com
To suggest additional builders that I should feature in this series, please get in touch at mike@brxnd.ai
As always, thanks for reading.
— Mike
Great conversation!
Really great points. It sometimes feels insane internally being so skeptical of classical attribution, so it’s nice to see it unpacked like this!