WEBVTT 00:00:03.000 --> 00:00:12.000 Alright. 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:21.000 Thank you to everyone who's hopped on so far for joining early - we're just going to give folks a couple of minutes to jump over from their previous meeting. 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:27.000 So hang out, get comfortable, grab some water, and we'll get started in just a couple of minutes. 00:01:38.000 --> 00:02:08.000 Just gonna give one more minute here for folks to trickle in from their past meeting or previous meeting. 00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:13.000 All right, I think we can get things kicked off. 00:02:13.000 --> 00:02:19.000 Thank you all for joining Beyond the Wave. Gen AI Guided Selling and the Future of Search. 00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:28.000 Emily, if you wouldn't mind kicking to the next slide. Just a few housekeeping notes before we get started. 00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:36.000 First and foremost, you're most likely going to have questions as we go, so please feel free to drop those in the Q&A pod. 00:02:36.000 --> 00:02:42.000 It is a different button than the chat pod, so just be mindful of that. Look for the button that says Q&A on your toolbar. 00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:48.000 So we'll get to as many of those as we can during the session, and we've also reserved some extra time at the end. 00:02:48.000 --> 00:02:57.000 To handle more as well. A recording of today's webinar is going to be sent out in a follow-up email, so keep an eye out for that. If you find the session helpful. 00:02:57.000 --> 00:03:01.000 Please feel free to pass that recording along to your colleagues, or use it for your own reference. 00:03:01.000 --> 00:03:07.000 {{CTA:Download the Forrester Wave Report|https://info.constructor.com/forrester-wave-2025-commerce-search}}And then finally, it looks like our team member, Chelsea, just shared a link to the Forrester Wave Report. 00:03:07.000 --> 00:03:22.000 for commerce search and product discovery, which just came out in September. So that's in the chat, you can access that link at any time during the webinar or after the session as well. 00:03:22.000 --> 00:03:31.000 So, who do we have speaking with you today? My name is Nate Roy. I'm the Senior Director of Product Marketing here at Constructor. Spent about a decade in Commerce technology. 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:39.000 Spanning PIM software, product content syndication, and now search and product discovery. So I'll be your moderator for today's discussion. 00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:42.000 And I'm really excited to guide what should be a really fun conversation. 00:03:42.000 --> 00:03:51.000 We've got two all-stars with us today. First, I'm excited to introduce Cat Flowers. She is the Director of Customer Success at Constructor. 00:03:51.000 --> 00:03:56.000 Some of you on here might know her already. She's been in commerce technology also for nearly a decade. 00:03:56.000 --> 00:04:07.000 with experience spanning technical success and operations. Across her career, Kat has worked directly with hundreds of retailers and customers, and indirectly supported thousands. 00:04:07.000 --> 00:04:14.000 At her time at Constructor, she leads Constructor Success across the Americas in APAC. 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:23.000 And she's personally partnered on initiatives that have delivered more than $30 million in incremental growth for our customers. So, Kat, please say hello. 00:04:23.000 --> 00:04:32.000 Yeah, thanks, Nate. Hello, everybody. Super excited to be chatting with everyone, and of course, sharing a lot of insights with Emily. 00:04:32.000 --> 00:04:40.000 Awesome. And then finally, I'm thrilled to introduce our guest speaker, Emily Pfeiffer. She is a Principal Analyst at Forrester. 00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:51.000 So, Emily covers the full spectrum of commerce technology at Forrester. She writes the waves for search and product discovery, for order management systems, and also commerce solutions. 00:04:51.000 --> 00:05:00.000 She advises digital business leaders on their commerce tech strategies, helping them make smart decisions about vendor selection, management, and long-term growth. 00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:06.000 Before joining Forrester, she spent years in the retail industry as a practitioner, which I think is really unique. 00:05:06.000 --> 00:05:16.000 Most recently as a VP of Marketing and Digital for the largest designer and importer of blankets and throws in the United States. And I think what makes Emily's perspective so valuable. 00:05:16.000 --> 00:05:27.000 is that beyond her research, she's lived the challenges and opportunities that brands and retailers face every day. So, if you've ever spoken with her directly, you know she's refreshingly direct. She tells you what she really thinks. 00:05:27.000 --> 00:05:35.000 obviously backs that up with data and experience. She doesn't sugarcoat things, which is exactly why I think her insights are so trusted in this industry. 00:05:35.000 --> 00:05:43.000 She's someone I personally admire and respect a great deal, so we're very lucky to have her with us today. Thank you so much for joining us. 00:05:43.000 --> 00:05:47.000 Thank you, Nate. That was an amazing introduction. I'm so glad to be here, thank you. 00:05:47.000 --> 00:05:55.000 Awesome. So we can kick things off. For folks in the audience, the questions we're gonna try to help you answer today. 00:05:55.000 --> 00:06:08.000 First and foremost, how and why did Commerce Search and Product Discovery emerge as a separate software category from commerce platforms. Is now the right time to start a search project, if you're thinking about it. 00:06:08.000 --> 00:06:13.000 How many of your peers might also be thinking about this in the retail space? 00:06:13.000 --> 00:06:20.000 what does the current market look like? How can you use the Forrester Wave Report to support an evaluation? 00:06:20.000 --> 00:06:26.000 And finally, how are generative AI and guided selling shaping the future? And what does it mean for the retail site? 00:06:26.000 --> 00:06:30.000 So, Emily, I will kick things over to you to get into it. 00:06:30.000 --> 00:06:44.000 Thank you. Perfect. So, I do want to talk a little bit about the role of commerce search or site search, whatever we want to call it, in that greater commerce tech ecosystem. And so to do that, we're going to go back in time a little bit. 00:06:44.000 --> 00:06:56.000 If you remember your kind of natural history from school, do you remember that the world was at one time all one continent, right? We called it Pangea, and it was this one thing, and all the land was kind of stuck together. 00:06:56.000 --> 00:07:07.000 And over millennia, very long time. Sorry, 8th grade science teacher. Things started to move apart, right? We got this continental drift. This is exactly what happened in commerce tech. 00:07:07.000 --> 00:07:22.000 So, back in the day when we all started doing this, there was basically one commerce solution, one platform, and it did all the things, almost all the things. You kind of had payments, maybe, like, email marketing separately, but for the most part, all the tech you needed was in one solution. 00:07:22.000 --> 00:07:33.000 And then as pieces of it got more and more complex, they started to kind of split off and separate into their own pieces. So, if you go back far enough. 00:07:33.000 --> 00:07:41.000 you know, some of those categories that you mentioned, Nate, order management, others like PIM, CMS, like, all of these different pieces were actually just. 00:07:41.000 --> 00:07:51.000 part of, not integrated, literally one solution. And so now we have these distinct different areas, components, pieces, categories of tech. 00:07:51.000 --> 00:07:59.000 that are separate and integrated. And, you know, there was a time when we talked about sweets, when some large vendors. 00:07:59.000 --> 00:08:13.000 tried to provide, they would say, end-to-end or all-in-one, which is very silly, what ends, what all, but okay, right? You can get everything from me, all of the different things, but the value proposition kind of failed. 00:08:13.000 --> 00:08:21.000 Right, this idea that you can get all the pieces from one vendor when some were built and some were acquired, and they're actually just integrated, but not really unified. 00:08:21.000 --> 00:08:34.000 didn't deliver. And so we've learned over time that we have to get these pieces from many different vendors to complete that commerce tech ecosystem. And a lot of the pieces that used to be. 00:08:34.000 --> 00:08:42.000 just sort of embedded, included in commerce, are not really good enough anymore. And we need the standalone solutions to replace them. 00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:52.000 So, because commerce was the Pangea, because it was this all-in-one and all of the pieces were kind of all that functionality was together in that one solution. 00:08:52.000 --> 00:08:58.000 there are these vestigial pieces of functionality that are still there. 00:08:58.000 --> 00:09:02.000 Because it used to be all-in-one. So sometimes good enough is good enough. 00:09:02.000 --> 00:09:09.000 Not usually, and not in certain areas anymore. And I kind of have the privilege, from the position that I'm in to say that with confidence. 00:09:09.000 --> 00:09:18.000 Because I am the analyst who evaluates commerce solutions and Commerce Search. So in this case, I can tell you that search in particular. 00:09:18.000 --> 00:09:24.000 it's time for most, most businesses to look at standalone solutions. 00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:35.000 In the commerce waves, which until now have been separate, B2C and B2B were separate, we've now combined them. But historically, I did B2C, I'm now doing the combined evaluation. 00:09:35.000 --> 00:09:45.000 So in the last B2C wave evaluation, I had a criterion called Personalized Search. We're gonna talk more about wave evaluations and criteria and how we use them. 00:09:45.000 --> 00:09:56.000 But for now, just know that a criterion is a thing that we evaluate. There are specific expectations that we as analysts have that we're looking for to fulfill each criterion. 00:09:56.000 --> 00:10:08.000 And in this one, the personalized search criterion for commerce solutions was looking for at least the most basic functionality that you might find in a standalone. 00:10:08.000 --> 00:10:18.000 So the only way to earn the highest score was to rival at least the worst of the standalone Commerce Search and Product Discovery solutions. 00:10:18.000 --> 00:10:32.000 I can't tell you specifically what the scores were, but I can tell you it's nearly impossible to find a commerce solution that has search functionality that can rival even the sort of lower end of the leading. 00:10:32.000 --> 00:10:39.000 search market. What's included is just not good enough anymore. 00:10:39.000 --> 00:10:55.000 So, as tech changes, as it gets smarter, as vendors put out new functionality, digital businesses have to evolve as well. They have to do replatformings, they have to upgrade, they have to sunset certain pieces. 00:10:55.000 --> 00:11:00.000 add new ones. You saw the continents. In Continental drift, right? 00:11:00.000 --> 00:11:11.000 Those used to be really big. And to this day, Commerce Solutions as kind of the core of that commerce tech ecosystem, are still really big, just in the scheme of things, when you look at your complete. 00:11:11.000 --> 00:11:17.000 commerce tech ecosystem. And so replatforming, a big thing is hard. 00:11:17.000 --> 00:11:26.000 As a practitioner, I like to say a recovering practitioner, I have all that experience, I have kind of the love and the baggage. 00:11:26.000 --> 00:11:32.000 That comes from having been on that side of things. Nobody wants to replatform. There are benefits to it, but it's the worst. 00:11:32.000 --> 00:11:36.000 And we're in tight times now, in a lot of ways. 00:11:36.000 --> 00:11:44.000 So, smaller changes are more appealing. We want to make incremental changes that bring us a shorter time to value. 00:11:44.000 --> 00:11:55.000 And a really clear ROI. So as those continents have drifted apart and split up in places as well, we've moved to, like, smaller pieces of tech. 00:11:55.000 --> 00:12:02.000 that make up that commerce tech ecosystem. So, it's actually possible to leave some of the bigger bits in place and swap out others. 00:12:02.000 --> 00:12:19.000 And sometimes those others are a complete category solution. Sometimes they're a module. sometimes they're an augmentative add-on, something that will move the needle, that will solve a problem that we have today. 00:12:19.000 --> 00:12:30.000 So, follow-up question for you on that, Emily. I think a lot of the folks on this call probably came in here with the question, do they need to buy search separately from their e-commerce platform? 00:12:30.000 --> 00:12:41.000 Sounds like you're saying yes, but I don't want to put words in your mouth. How do you see that decision evolving, and what do you think the trade-offs are that matter the most? 00:12:41.000 --> 00:12:58.000 My answer is usually. I do have some clients who have an extremely simple and small catalog with really clear purchasing paths, right? Where product discovery isn't really a thing. 00:12:58.000 --> 00:13:03.000 And it's more a matter of, I know what I need to buy, and I just need to purchase it. 00:13:03.000 --> 00:13:11.000 Right? So there are times I have conversations with my brands and retailers, and I'm like, you know what, what you've got in your commerce solution is good enough. 00:13:11.000 --> 00:13:25.000 But almost never. Anymore. Almost every single time the conversation is, yeah, I think it would benefit you to bring in a standalone commerce search and product discovery solution. 00:13:25.000 --> 00:13:32.000 I would never, like, it's impossible to generalize to an entire market, right? I would never say definitely for everyone. 00:13:32.000 --> 00:13:39.000 And every conversation I have is specific to what my clients need, but I can tell you that it's become extremely unusual. 00:13:39.000 --> 00:13:52.000 for me to say, yeah, no, what you've got is good enough for you today. It's also, these standalone solutions have evolved with a focus on that. Right, this is search and product discovery, that's the focus. 00:13:52.000 --> 00:14:02.000 And when vendors are focused on a broader breadth of functionality, it can be really hard to keep up with a very fast-moving market, and that's what we've got. 00:14:02.000 --> 00:14:09.000 that makes a lot of sense, and one of the other ideas that you brought up was this idea of, sort of, like, incremental. 00:14:09.000 --> 00:14:19.000 smaller projects that generate a return. For Kat, this is something that a lot of our customers actually bring up when they come on board with Constructor. 00:14:19.000 --> 00:14:33.000 It's usually perceived as a lighter lift and less costly than a complete commerce replatform, but it can add a lot of value and improve metrics. So, just from your standpoint, your side of things. 00:14:33.000 --> 00:14:40.000 How long does it usually take to stand up somebody on search and product discovery, and how fast do they usually start seeing results? 00:14:40.000 --> 00:14:47.000 That's a fantastic question, and really quickly, I want to just kind of button up the use case as well, something that Emily was mentioning was. 00:14:47.000 --> 00:14:56.000 you know, searches, the way searches evolve from, you know, just means for finding something to now it's actually a part of the product discovery process. 00:14:56.000 --> 00:15:05.000 people are different, and so finding a solution that's able to facilitate the difference in behavioral patterns and how people actually use Search Day is so important. 00:15:05.000 --> 00:15:13.000 {{CTA:Request a Constructor Demo|https://info.constructor.com/ecommerce-search-discovery-demo}}One thing I'm really proud about Constructor is that we have a really flexible timeline, and so whenever you're coming on board and you say, hey. 00:15:13.000 --> 00:15:19.000 you know, Kat, we need to be live within 2 months. Awesome, we get you live in 2 months. On that average 6 to 8 week timeframe. 00:15:19.000 --> 00:15:27.000 But we do have some really ambitious businesses, and I've worked with retailers in the past that have set really high goals for themselves, and are able to get live in a matter of weeks. 00:15:27.000 --> 00:15:32.000 You know, with a record being 9 days. So as an outlier, it just kind of demonstrates. 00:15:32.000 --> 00:15:39.000 the kind of willingness of a lot of these retailers have, once they discover the importance of a product discovery solution and partner. 00:15:39.000 --> 00:15:49.000 They can hit the ground running, and they can see value relatively quickly, because, well, you know, as the experts, we take over a lot of that manpower for them. 00:15:49.000 --> 00:15:53.000 That's amazing. 00:15:53.000 --> 00:16:07.000 So I wanted to talk a little bit about, kind of, this market. This is the mouthful that I've said a few times already. Commerce search and product discovery. Right? The market has come together, and I'll show you a little bit about how that happened, how it formed. 00:16:07.000 --> 00:16:17.000 At Forrester, we like to define, we like to clarify, we like to kind of educate about the state of things. And so the state of this tech market. 00:16:17.000 --> 00:16:30.000 for solutions that serve these complete products. We find that it's established. So we look at emerging, established, and mature markets. This one is established, which means it's not brand new. 00:16:30.000 --> 00:16:40.000 as a market. It's weird, though, because a lot of the tech is. So, we have had standalone search solutions for easily a decade? 00:16:40.000 --> 00:16:51.000 But not in the form that they're in today. So it's established, but it's not yet mature. And what we see a lot of the time in an established market is a lot of M&A activity. 00:16:51.000 --> 00:16:56.000 Right? There's lots of acquisitions, there's lots of, kind of, things coming together, and we'll look more at that as well. 00:16:56.000 --> 00:17:08.000 So, in this established market, we find a trend, a primary challenge, and a top disruptor. The main trend is Gen AI, that's the trend in a lot of places right now. 00:17:08.000 --> 00:17:19.000 It's still difficult to prove the value in a lot of ways, and so I want to, like, grain of salt Gen AI all the way through. 00:17:19.000 --> 00:17:24.000 Right? This is an area where it's very cool, it's got, like, big cool factor, ooh and ah. 00:17:24.000 --> 00:17:36.000 But making sure that we know what's happening, making sure that we're measuring before and after we implement things. Making sure that we can evaluate the benefits, hopefully. 00:17:36.000 --> 00:17:42.000 of GenAI, we're still there. It's hard to prove the value. 00:17:42.000 --> 00:17:51.000 Yeah, this is super helpful, Emily, and we actually just got a really good question from one of our audience members that I'd love to run by you, if you don't mind. 00:17:51.000 --> 00:18:00.000 So, this attendee said, if a merchant is operating on a unified commerce platform, why split off search to a more specialized solution? 00:18:00.000 --> 00:18:12.000 While it might offer enhanced search, AI discovery. Doesn't this create unnecessary integration complexity and workflow disruption that can outweigh the potential conversion benefits? 00:18:12.000 --> 00:18:21.000 Okay, that's a great question. I think it's really smart to look at all of the potential. 00:18:21.000 --> 00:18:37.000 benefits and risks. Benefits and costs. So, if the additional integration, complexity, vendor relationship, right, that takes resources too. If it's not worth it, it's not a good choice. 00:18:37.000 --> 00:18:44.000 what I'm finding right now is that the vast majority, again, not always, but the vast majority of the time, it's worth it. 00:18:44.000 --> 00:18:55.000 And I sit in this, like, privileged position where I don't actually have to do anything. I sort of advise and observe and interview and research and analyze. 00:18:55.000 --> 00:19:01.000 But I have a view of the market, not just the vendors, but my brands and retailers that are making these decisions. 00:19:01.000 --> 00:19:19.000 And I don't see a lot of regret. You know, I don't see a lot of, it wasn't worth it, I wish I hadn't done it. I actually see search, and sometimes even just modules. Like, it doesn't have to be introduce this whole big thing, it can be. 00:19:19.000 --> 00:19:30.000 add a module or two from a vendor. I see them as an approachable way to evolve the commerce tech ecosystem in a way that actually brings. 00:19:30.000 --> 00:19:40.000 provable, measurable results. So, there are some organizations that are like, we're a vendor shop. 00:19:40.000 --> 00:19:47.000 Right? They say, you know, they want that end-to-end experience, maybe it's a procurement issue that they have permission to buy from. 00:19:47.000 --> 00:19:59.000 certain vendors, and it can be really hard to look outside the portfolio. I get that. But right now, the state of the commerce market and the state of the search, commerce search market. 00:19:59.000 --> 00:20:08.000 are such that the functionality that comes with commerce, by and large, does not rival what you get from a standalone, and so if it's good enough, stick with it. 00:20:08.000 --> 00:20:19.000 Absolutely. But it may not be good enough, in which case I think the investment is worth it. 00:20:19.000 --> 00:20:20.000 Not at all. Yeah. 00:20:20.000 --> 00:20:31.000 And this person actually just asked a follow-up question as well, if you don't mind. I think these are just really good questions. The follow-up to the earlier question, what specific search limitations or conversion barriers would need to exist in the current setup. 00:20:31.000 --> 00:20:36.000 before specialized search would become worth that integration investment. 00:20:36.000 --> 00:20:46.000 I don't know what to say to you right now, except I hope you're my client, because if you are, you should schedule a call with me, because it completely depends on which commerce solution you're using. 00:20:46.000 --> 00:20:55.000 how long you've had it, how it's implemented, whether and how you've customized it, right? It depends. It depends. Every commerce solution has. 00:20:55.000 --> 00:21:04.000 a different set of functionality around search. And so the gaps are different, is what I'm trying to say. The gaps are different. 00:21:04.000 --> 00:21:13.000 I can say that, just to sort of generalize about the Commerce Search and Product Discovery market, these standalone solutions. 00:21:13.000 --> 00:21:22.000 {{CTA:Explore Commerce Search Solutions|https://constructor.com/}}that generally what they bring, well, here. I'll come back to this slide. I'm gonna jump ahead one slide for a second. These are the core use cases, the required use cases. 00:21:22.000 --> 00:21:28.000 in commerce search and product discovery solutions. So as kind of an authority in the market. 00:21:28.000 --> 00:21:38.000 I'm telling you that if a solution doesn't have all of these things, it's not a complete category solution in the market. Right, I just expect this as baseline. So search configuration. 00:21:38.000 --> 00:21:51.000 is the ability for a non-technical practitioner, a user, not a developer, to configure how search results show, and this is extremely detailed, right? These are really high-level things, it's not all the little details. 00:21:51.000 --> 00:21:59.000 of feature by feature. But the ability to configure search results, and also maybe category pages. Any product listing page, PLP. 00:21:59.000 --> 00:22:11.000 Okay? Search personalization? Personalization is not a noun in a vacuum. It's a verb or an adjective, right? It's a thing that we do. So having personalized. 00:22:11.000 --> 00:22:21.000 product listings, personalized product recommendations. Okay, but personalizing search results to the user is also a functionality that I find is hard. 00:22:21.000 --> 00:22:25.000 to find, in a strong way in commerce solutions. 00:22:25.000 --> 00:22:34.000 Merchandising is pretty common in commerce solutions. This is one of those areas where the ability to assign products to categories and things like that. 00:22:34.000 --> 00:22:46.000 might be pretty solid in a commerce solution. I don't often see it automated within commerce. Meaning, I'm gonna create a category for all of my blue. 00:22:46.000 --> 00:22:52.000 shirts, automatically assign them to the blue category as soon as they show up. 00:22:52.000 --> 00:22:59.000 Right? Like, that level of automation. And then facet management. Facets are the filters on the side when you're searching for something. 00:22:59.000 --> 00:23:10.000 And so, every commerce search and product discovery solution has some level of facet management, which might be weak, might be questionable in a commerce solution. So this is just the basics. 00:23:10.000 --> 00:23:22.000 in-commerce search, but if these are gap areas, then it's an easy decision to add a standalone solution. 00:23:22.000 --> 00:23:23.000 Yeah. 00:23:23.000 --> 00:23:32.000 This is super helpful, and also just, like, a great lead-in to this slide and this part of the presentation, anyway. I was just wondering from Kat, like, how does this match up to what you hear from customers? Like. 00:23:32.000 --> 00:23:39.000 What are, like, the top 3 limitations when people come on with us that they typically tell you about. 00:23:39.000 --> 00:24:00.000 Yeah, that's a fantastic question, and I think at the highest level, the ask being, how do we know that it's time to make that jump, or what are some identifiers that our current setup isn't ideal? So, anything that is not decreasing or shortening the distance between your customers and the product they're looking for, whether in a discovery sense. 00:24:00.000 --> 00:24:11.000 or a utility sense, like, I'm just looking for something specific, and I have a hard time finding it, versus I'm open to exploration, and you have an opportunity to turn me into a higher converter. Anything that's not shortening that distance. 00:24:11.000 --> 00:24:33.000 is not the ideal solution for your specific business. So, typically, utility-wise, a lot of limitations that come through whenever my team starts working with a retailer is lack of functionality within the tooling. So, maybe they weren't in their previous solution able to slot things where they want to slot them, or they didn't have great. 00:24:33.000 --> 00:24:49.000 Visibility over why products were placed in a certain place, and then we have more technical limitations in terms of, like, something Emily was talking about just a minute ago, you know, anytime I need something done, I need to send this over to my engineering team for them to do XYZ activities on my behalf. And then further to that. 00:24:49.000 --> 00:25:11.000 The thing just not working, you know? Like, customers these days, whenever they're searching for something, they might be using 3-4 words outside of the actual product information, and so you need a partner that's able to support the way that people are changing how they search, and that becomes a more native functionality challenge versus, like, a utility challenge. 00:25:11.000 --> 00:25:12.000 Awesome, thank you both for helping out with that. 00:25:12.000 --> 00:25:26.000 Yeah. Those are great discussion. I'm gonna go back up just for a second. I just want to kind of complete the thought here, that in this market, the biggest challenge. 00:25:26.000 --> 00:25:42.000 Is visibility in AI, and this kind of supports the idea that GenAI is trending, it's very, very cool. Right? But the visibility into the control that the AI has, the impact that it has, when we want it to take over for human decisions. 00:25:42.000 --> 00:25:48.000 It's just early days, and we're still working on building the visibility and the results into the solutions. 00:25:48.000 --> 00:26:05.000 I can't believe I got away with this, as the top disruptor. I wasn't sure I was going to, but they let me publish it. So usually, when we say what a top disruptor is, it's, like, a thing that a couple of vendors are doing, and we see it really shaking up the market. In this case, I'm looking to the future. 00:26:05.000 --> 00:26:10.000 I'm saying, I think there may be a vendor or two that guesses right. 00:26:10.000 --> 00:26:20.000 how shoppers actually want to shop. When it comes to, like, Gen AI, agentic maybe, right? Those kinds of things. So I think we're sort of on the cusp. 00:26:20.000 --> 00:26:31.000 of vendors introducing new ways to bring a really generative, positive, generative shopping experience into the owned environment on a website. 00:26:31.000 --> 00:26:44.000 So, we talked about these core use cases. These are the extended ones. So where core was required, extended are the ones that any one of these vendors might provide. 00:26:44.000 --> 00:26:50.000 you know, some combination of them, but they're not required to. The core ones are required. These are still really common. 00:26:50.000 --> 00:26:58.000 So, product data enrichment is really interesting to me, too. If I were a PIM, a product information management system, this would be keeping me up at night. 00:26:58.000 --> 00:27:09.000 I see Commerce Solutions literally enhancing the product data in various ways. And they're not sending that enhanced data back to the PIM. 00:27:09.000 --> 00:27:18.000 Right? Like, they're keeping it there in the commerce solution. So it's actually improved for the experience, outside of commerce, outside of PIM. 00:27:18.000 --> 00:27:33.000 Product recommendations outside of search. This is maybe a carousel. You'll also like. Right? Maybe it's in an email. Guided selling processes are things that a lot of us have experienced as consumers, but maybe we don't know. 00:27:33.000 --> 00:27:42.000 what it's called, it might feel like a quiz. Right? So if you're shopping for parts for your car, and you choose the year, make, and model to make sure that they'll be compatible. 00:27:42.000 --> 00:27:50.000 If you're shopping for skincare products, and you put in your age and your skin concerns, right, those are guided selling. 00:27:50.000 --> 00:28:03.000 processes. Conversational selling, shopping assistance. Maybe it's agentic, but we're pushing it? We'll get to that. These are increasing in. 00:28:03.000 --> 00:28:11.000 popularity. Every vendor is building it or in pilot, or has it live. Every vendor in this market. 00:28:11.000 --> 00:28:19.000 But again, really early days. Testing is focused on literally the results of these changes. So, you saw in the core. 00:28:19.000 --> 00:28:31.000 use cases that, you know, search configuration, personalization, testing enables you to try things, see what the results are, set a goal. Does it improve our changes. 00:28:31.000 --> 00:28:43.000 toward the goal. And then content search, not just product search, and how that might sit alongside the product, if there's a website with a lot of content. It might be knowledge base, it might be manuals, it might be instructional. 00:28:43.000 --> 00:28:50.000 So, these are all the things that a solution might offer, but isn't required to. 00:28:50.000 --> 00:29:02.000 And it's kind of all over the place. Right? So I mentioned earlier that for, like, a decade, we've had some standalone search solutions. 00:29:02.000 --> 00:29:11.000 I love my metaphors, so I'm gonna tell you that commerce tech is a lava lamp. It breaks apart, and it comes back together in different bubbles all the time. 00:29:11.000 --> 00:29:19.000 And so, if our continents were bubbles and they were splitting apart, that's fine, but what happens in a lavalamp when you have a few little bubbles? They get near each other and. 00:29:19.000 --> 00:29:23.000 Right? That creates a new bubble. That's literally what happened here. 00:29:23.000 --> 00:29:35.000 So we had pieces that were maybe embedded in the commerce solution. Maybe they were considered sort of standalone and separate, or specialty. 00:29:35.000 --> 00:29:43.000 maybe they were add-ons, maybe they didn't exist, really, before. But they've all now come together to form this new market. 00:29:43.000 --> 00:29:48.000 and come together often means acquisition. 00:29:48.000 --> 00:29:57.000 So, the green boxes are the vendors that were in the original commerce search and product discovery wave a couple of years ago. 00:29:57.000 --> 00:30:05.000 And you can kind of see their evolution over time. 9 out of 10 of them had major acquisitions. 00:30:05.000 --> 00:30:17.000 the 10th, arguably, is the newest tech. So Acquisitions have, there are ups and downs. It's a quick way to gain. 00:30:17.000 --> 00:30:26.000 architecture, sometimes. It's a quick way to gain functionality sometimes. It's a quick way to gain expertise sometimes. 00:30:26.000 --> 00:30:37.000 But when you've got an existing solution that then acquires other actual solutions, there's always that awkward phase of integration. hopefully more than that, hopefully unification. 00:30:37.000 --> 00:30:41.000 But it makes for a little bit of a messy market for a while. 00:30:41.000 --> 00:30:50.000 Yeah, there's a lot of really good points in the last few slides that you presented, so I just wanna comment on a couple of things that you said. First. 00:30:50.000 --> 00:30:56.000 For audience members who are wondering how much of the core and extended use cases does Constructor cover. 00:30:56.000 --> 00:31:02.000 The answer is all of them. We provide tooling for everything that Emily listed on those slides. 00:31:02.000 --> 00:31:11.000 She made another really good point about Gen AI kind of being unproven, and I think it's worth pausing on that for a second, because she's absolutely right. 00:31:11.000 --> 00:31:18.000 There are a lot of vendors right now that are slapping generative AI and agentic AI labels on products that. 00:31:18.000 --> 00:31:24.000 look really impressive on the surface, but if you dig deeper, they're not actually solving real problems. 00:31:24.000 --> 00:31:36.000 So when you're evaluating technology, I think one of the fundamental questions you should be asking every vendor, especially for Gen AI, is what results has this actually produced? 00:31:36.000 --> 00:31:49.000 And one of the things that's really important to us at Constructor is that we focus our R&D only on purposeful applications. So, like, places where Gen AI or Agentic products are truly the best solution. 00:31:49.000 --> 00:31:59.000 for the shoppers need in that moment. And we don't just say that. We validate all of this through A-B testing. We talked about testing a little bit on the last slide. 00:31:59.000 --> 00:32:08.000 The last thing I just want to note is, if you see on the bottom of this slide, Constructor is the only vendor on this list who hasn't grown through acquisition. 00:32:08.000 --> 00:32:17.000 We've built all of our capabilities natively. And I also think that that's really important, especially with the pace that this market is evolving at. 00:32:17.000 --> 00:32:35.000 Yeah, I would like to add commentary on top of that, too, Nate, that whenever we're thinking about constructor, our capabilities, the application, something that's been so crucial to so much of our partnership, especially being in such an evolving space where businesses are adopting a lot of this technology for the first time. 00:32:35.000 --> 00:32:48.000 It's one of the first times in retail site history that merchandisers are starting to take their hands off and kind of see what this technology does out in the wild. And it's interfacing with their customers. So, Constructor has eyes and ears. 00:32:48.000 --> 00:33:02.000 on every single part of the site. It sees every click, it sees every time something works or doesn't work, and it augments to make decisions based off of that, and that core logic from search spans to all of that extended functionality that we were kind of talking about in the previous slides. 00:33:02.000 --> 00:33:14.000 And so being in a position where we haven't, you know, acquired anything, we have so much history, and insight and connectedness with all of our products, because they're built in the same family. 00:33:14.000 --> 00:33:19.000 to support our family of retailers. And to prove that point of how valuable they are. 00:33:19.000 --> 00:33:29.000 We're huge proponents of A-B testing, and so we want to A-B test not just, you know, our product versus somebody else. We want to test our product versus nothing. 00:33:29.000 --> 00:33:39.000 You know, if customers are going live for the first time with, you know, a chat solution, we want them to test. What does it look like for customers with versus without that experience. 00:33:39.000 --> 00:33:52.000 So that retailers that work with us really know that any decision that they've made, any cool new technology they've brought on through Constructor, they know that it works, because the A-B testing doesn't lie. 00:33:52.000 --> 00:34:04.000 So, let's talk a little bit about adoption. And I want to start with, kind of, high-level software initiatives. This is not search-specific. But when we're asking digital businesses. 00:34:04.000 --> 00:34:10.000 about their software initiatives for this year. We're asking them in this year what they're focusing on. 00:34:10.000 --> 00:34:14.000 The top two are experience-focused, which I love to see. 00:34:14.000 --> 00:34:23.000 User experience, in this case, is the customer. Right? It's their experience interacting with the website and with the brand. 00:34:23.000 --> 00:34:34.000 Number two is employee experience. So, a few of us have mentioned today the tooling. Right? What a non-technical practitioner, a user who's not a developer. 00:34:34.000 --> 00:34:41.000 can do in a UI. I love to see this focus, and it's really exciting to me to see it so high on the list. 00:34:41.000 --> 00:34:47.000 I always encourage my clients when they're considering a new vendor, to bring the users to the demo. 00:34:47.000 --> 00:34:52.000 take over the mouse, right? Just be like, hey, you just showed that really fast, can I try? 00:34:52.000 --> 00:35:02.000 Right? Like, that usability, because it's not just if it's a few extra clicks, it's not just, oh, it's not that intuitive, but they'll learn. It's actually psychologically harder to do the work. 00:35:02.000 --> 00:35:12.000 Right? So, focusing on that experience, I think, is wonderful. I'm so glad to see it. increasing SaaS adoption, you know, moving to the cloud, moving to. 00:35:12.000 --> 00:35:20.000 subscription-based managed solutions, it's the way most things are going. There are exceptions, but for the most part. 00:35:20.000 --> 00:35:26.000 I really support that as well. Better personalizing customer-facing web and mobile experiences. 00:35:26.000 --> 00:35:34.000 So that can mean a lot of things, but we just talked a bit about personalization during product discovery and how important that is. So all of this is completely in line. 00:35:34.000 --> 00:35:50.000 With the recommendations that I make, and what I'm talking about, but look at number 5. Consolidating systems. Right? So also, to the question that we got in the chat a little bit ago, in the Q&A, right? This idea that I'm using. 00:35:50.000 --> 00:36:01.000 one, you know, an all-in-one, right? Or a unified commerce, or whatever, and it has all of this functionality for me. There's a real push to have fewer vendors overall. 00:36:01.000 --> 00:36:14.000 And adding more special to your point solutions, it's much farther down the list. I get it that we want to simplify. This is one of those places where, you know, if the search isn't good enough and you need to add it, look for a vendor that covers as much as possible. 00:36:14.000 --> 00:36:23.000 In search, right? You don't need to add many different solutions anymore because of that, you know, my sort of flower Venn diagram, right? It's come together. 00:36:23.000 --> 00:36:34.000 So, finding a vendor that checks a lot of your boxes is a way to add the functionality that you need without adding needless complexity. 00:36:34.000 --> 00:36:37.000 I feel like now it seems like that question was staged, I promise it wasn't. It was a really good question. 00:36:37.000 --> 00:36:39.000 I'd love to add something to that, Emily, can I? 00:36:39.000 --> 00:36:40.000 Of course. Yeah. 00:36:40.000 --> 00:36:49.000 So, something that, you know, talking about how important it is that a retailer find the vendor that kind of checks the boxes and meet the need. 00:36:49.000 --> 00:36:56.000 And I think something we all feel really strongly in this space, is that you even can take it a step further. 00:36:56.000 --> 00:37:08.000 And find the vendor that can teach you things, and they can tell you about your customers, and they can tell you, and keep you informed in the market, and how it's shifting, and what other businesses are doing, and so I would even just add. 00:37:08.000 --> 00:37:15.000 you know, another line under that says the most important checkbox that says, find the vendor that listens. 00:37:15.000 --> 00:37:19.000 the vendor that works with you and knows you, and can teach you a thing or two about yourself. 00:37:19.000 --> 00:37:26.000 I think that the biggest kind of sleeper criterion in vendor selection is culture fit. 00:37:26.000 --> 00:37:39.000 And not every vendor's culture is right for every business, right? The point of culture fit is it's subjective. But, yeah, finding the right vendor for your business, the kind of partner you want. 00:37:39.000 --> 00:37:46.000 Totally agree. Really important. So we know that this is an area where digital leaders are investing. 00:37:46.000 --> 00:37:56.000 we can see this really significant increase. 51% are saying they want to maintain, 43% are saying they want to increase. 00:37:56.000 --> 00:38:00.000 their investment in commerce search and product discovery in the next year. That's massive. 00:38:00.000 --> 00:38:05.000 Right, maintaining or increasing. And we're in a time where a lot of budgets are shrinking. 00:38:05.000 --> 00:38:11.000 So seeing this, you know, the vast, vast majority of the market saying, we're either holding on or we're adding budget for this. 00:38:11.000 --> 00:38:25.000 is really meaningful right now. And we can see why. Only about 26% of software decision makers say that they already have a commerce search and product discovery solution. 26%. 00:38:25.000 --> 00:38:37.000 And of the ones that don't, about half say what we're gonna, we will. And my guess that a lot of the folks in this room right now are part of that 49% group. 00:38:37.000 --> 00:38:52.000 One of the questions I would imagine someone might have is, like, you know, I think I know I need to do something beyond maybe my commerce platform, but a lot of people talk about building search in-house. What do you think about that, Emily? 00:38:52.000 --> 00:39:05.000 Please don't do that. Good gravy, please don't do that. There are a lot of areas of functionality that, over time, were not well served in the market. 00:39:05.000 --> 00:39:15.000 And so savvy businesses added it. This is not the time to do that in this area. 00:39:15.000 --> 00:39:26.000 There are now vendors that are really strong. And that allow you to make a lot of customizations if you need to, but please start with a little bit of a default. 00:39:26.000 --> 00:39:39.000 Like, only if you need to. Custom building at this point would be, I think, a long-term mistake. 00:39:39.000 --> 00:39:46.000 Because what you could stand up today might be really neat for a short time. But the market's moving so quickly. 00:39:46.000 --> 00:39:58.000 And if you're not a software company, if that's not your area of focus, I think it would fall behind really fast. I think it would be pretty impossible to catch up in the first place, but even if you did. 00:39:58.000 --> 00:40:05.000 keeping up with this market right now is kind of impossible. There are some areas where I recommend building. 00:40:05.000 --> 00:40:12.000 Some areas of the commerce tech ecosystem where I think it's the smart thing to do. Not this one, and not right now. 00:40:12.000 --> 00:40:25.000 Speaking of not sugarcoating, don't do that. Okay. So, we're gonna talk about the Forrester Wave Evaluation. This is the thing that I do for 3 different markets, commerce solutions. 00:40:25.000 --> 00:40:37.000 Commerce Search and Order Management Systems. Forrester produces between 80 and 100 of these a year, I think. It's a big project. So it takes about 4 months. 00:40:37.000 --> 00:40:43.000 We use 3 primary inputs from the vendors, so we include certain vendors in the evaluation. 00:40:43.000 --> 00:40:50.000 They're notified that they're included, and we ask for their help with these three different inputs. One of them is reference customers that we can interview. 00:40:50.000 --> 00:40:59.000 And we have actual conversations with customers, which, by the way, we do all the time. That's our job. Right? But these are specific references provided by the vendor. 00:40:59.000 --> 00:41:09.000 Number two, we ask the vendor a lot of questions. And we ask them to answer our questions so that we can have concrete responses and compare them with the other vendors. 00:41:09.000 --> 00:41:25.000 And number 3, there's a demonstration. It's big. It's detailed, it's demanding. And it's specific. The purpose of having these three really concrete inputs is so that we can develop kind of an apples-to-apples comparison. 00:41:25.000 --> 00:41:33.000 We're asking the same thing of all the vendors. We're asking the same questions of all the customers. We're asking to see the same thing in the demos. 00:41:33.000 --> 00:41:48.000 And the evaluation, then, is relative. It's very detailed, and it's relative. So it's a snapshot in time. Evaluating the included vendors versus the other included vendors in that moment. 00:41:48.000 --> 00:41:52.000 And the result is a report that we publish. 00:41:52.000 --> 00:42:00.000 It has a scorecard. Which is extremely transparent, and I think this is really unique to Forrester. You can see exactly. 00:42:00.000 --> 00:42:10.000 how each vendor earned each score. And then exactly how it resulted in the major wave graphic, which is the tip of the iceberg, but the thing that folks look at. 00:42:10.000 --> 00:42:20.000 The most. These are the pieces of a wave graphic. I'll show you the actual one in a minute. But I wanted to kind of explain how to talk about it before you're looking at the positions of dots. 00:42:20.000 --> 00:42:29.000 So the vertical axis is the strength of the offering. That's the product and the functionality. All of those use cases that we were talking about, this is where we evaluate them. 00:42:29.000 --> 00:42:41.000 So, hire vertically is higher score on those specific criteria around the product. Horizontally is the strength of the strategy. We're looking at the strategy for this product. 00:42:41.000 --> 00:42:50.000 So, some vendors have a much larger portfolio, and other things don't care. We're not looking at the company strategy, we're looking at the strategy for this product in particular. 00:42:50.000 --> 00:42:59.000 And so as the dots move up and to the right, some of them make it into the leaders circle. These are, like, concentric circles that. 00:42:59.000 --> 00:43:14.000 with a center point up at the top right. So we have leaders, strong performers, and contenders. And then, optionally, sometimes, there are halos around a dot for a vendor, which indicates above-average customer feedback. 00:43:14.000 --> 00:43:21.000 So those are kind of the elements of the wave graphic. Here is the graphic itself for the most recent evaluation in this space. 00:43:21.000 --> 00:43:29.000 {{CTA:Download the Forrester Wave Report|https://info.constructor.com/forrester-wave-2025-commerce-search}}It's only the second one in this market. We've been seeing a lot of that, kind of, M&A activity, the acquisitions, and the. 00:43:29.000 --> 00:43:37.000 the combinations kind of settling out. The last evaluation, they were still happening during the eval, it was really kind of sloppy. 00:43:37.000 --> 00:43:50.000 just, like, all the pieces coming together. So, now we're in a place where vendors that have done acquisitions are trying to unify. Remove any overlap in the functionality, and kind of simplify their solutions. 00:43:50.000 --> 00:43:54.000 For the ones that had that work to do. 00:43:54.000 --> 00:44:01.000 And it's extremely fast-paced. these are the results of the evaluation. Again, strength of the offering. 00:44:01.000 --> 00:44:16.000 strength of strategy. The Forester Wave, if you think about the graphic, it's like the top right of the market. We publish a landscape before that that has much more, usually, much more vendors in it. 00:44:16.000 --> 00:44:20.000 And so there's more market. This is, like, the cream of the crop. 00:44:20.000 --> 00:44:24.000 These are the leaders that we see in the market. 00:44:24.000 --> 00:44:40.000 And so, you mentioned this halo as well, and I think this is something new that got added to the wave this year, this sort of, like, measure of customer satisfaction, so Constructor has a halo here, we scored highly in customer satisfaction. 00:44:40.000 --> 00:44:47.000 What do you think that comes down to? What do you think customers value most about working with us. 00:44:47.000 --> 00:44:56.000 Absolutely. I think that's something pivotal in our customer success strategy that folks might not feel everywhere with all SaaS vendors that they work with. 00:44:56.000 --> 00:45:03.000 is that we work for people. And our customer success team very much puts the people first. 00:45:03.000 --> 00:45:10.000 emphasis in everything that we do. So yes, we work at Constructor, we are here to help you use our product in the best way possible. 00:45:10.000 --> 00:45:14.000 But we're also product discovery experts, and we're digital transformation experts. 00:45:14.000 --> 00:45:24.000 And so, we have a personal investment and a personal interest in a business doing well, and every single person on this team wants to see our businesses succeed and shine. 00:45:24.000 --> 00:45:34.000 So, of course, does it change, you know, the money in my bank account? No, but it changes the money in the customer's bank account, and that's ultimately what we're shooting for. 00:45:34.000 --> 00:45:46.000 And so, having a team of winners CSMs. Collectively creates a, you know, a rocket ship where we are all aiming toward having every single business with ours not only succeed. 00:45:46.000 --> 00:45:52.000 and meet their goals, but go beyond that, and become co-creators with us in everything that we do. 00:45:52.000 --> 00:46:14.000 And something that I have found really interesting about here and seeing my CSMs work with their businesses is it's not like, you know, we just show up to a meeting once a week, we check the boxes, and we walk away. We're really getting into, like, war room scenarios where we're preparing with customers for peak season, or we're preparing to launch something really interesting and generative on their site, and it's new, and it's flashy, and it's interesting. 00:46:14.000 --> 00:46:23.000 And so, every one of us, I think, have the biggest standout is that we're all very personally invested. And customers feel that. Businesses feel that. 00:46:23.000 --> 00:46:38.000 me, as a customer, to vendors, I can feel the difference between somebody who sees me as a customer on the roster versus a business that they're interested in seeing succeed. And I think that's the biggest differentiator that our businesses know about us. 00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:44.000 And, you know, it's funny you brought up generative while you were talking. We just got another really good question in the chat. 00:46:44.000 --> 00:46:59.000 This person said, as AI emerges as a new discovery and purchase channel, do you see parallels to early social commerce? brands that launched on popular social channels gained significant advantages despite unproven ROI at the time. 00:46:59.000 --> 00:47:04.000 How do you evaluate the risk-reward of being among the first brands accessible through chat? 00:47:04.000 --> 00:47:14.000 So, Emily, I want to go over to you first, but before you say that, I do want to say, Gen AI, at least with constructor customers, is already proven. 00:47:14.000 --> 00:47:22.000 {{CTA:Read the Belk Case Study|https://constructor.com/customers/belk-constructor}}If you look at our website, there's a case study that just came out with Belk. They launched an AI shopping agent on their site with Constructor. 00:47:22.000 --> 00:47:27.000 And saw search conversions double for people who interacted with that experience. 00:47:27.000 --> 00:47:41.000 And we've had other customers using Agentic AI look at, or see increases up to 200% in purchase rate, add to cart rate, so there is definitely a first mover advantage there, at least with what we're seeing in our own customer base, but Emily. 00:47:41.000 --> 00:47:43.000 you know, tell us about your experience. 00:47:43.000 --> 00:47:52.000 We have so many words to say about this, and we don't have that much time, so I'm gonna try to go fast. So, basically, we have to separate the owned from the non-owned experience here. 00:47:52.000 --> 00:48:01.000 Right? So the owned experience is really what we're focusing on today. This is the brand or retailer website where you have control over the tech that you bring in. 00:48:01.000 --> 00:48:13.000 And potentially chat or generative shopping experiences. The non-owned environment, like answer engines, such as Perplexity and ChatGPT and Google Gemini. 00:48:13.000 --> 00:48:23.000 That's a whole other thing. I do think there are some advantages to being an early mover there. 00:48:23.000 --> 00:48:36.000 But just like social commerce in this part of the world, in the U.S, in North America, it's a tiny portion of the shopping. 00:48:36.000 --> 00:48:44.000 population that's using it today. I do think that's gonna change, I think it'll increase. I don't think it's gonna break everything. 00:48:44.000 --> 00:48:53.000 So, this is a sort of, in the non-owned environment, it's a proceed-with-caution moment. I think that it's gonna be expensive to do it well. 00:48:53.000 --> 00:48:56.000 And I'm not sure of the ROI in the short term. 00:48:56.000 --> 00:49:08.000 And so, it's kind of a risk aversion test, right? Like, is it worth it to make the investment up front. And the last thing I'll say about that is to watch product data really carefully. 00:49:08.000 --> 00:49:21.000 Some of the requirements for, like, user agreements with the answer engines is, turn off the filters that prevent our bots from hitting your website so we can scrape them and get your product data. 00:49:21.000 --> 00:49:27.000 But enough of that, and it's basically a DDoS attack, I don't love it. I don't know what else they're scraping. 00:49:27.000 --> 00:49:37.000 And it gives the merchant no control whatsoever over what product data is sent into these engines. I would really like to see integrations and optimization for those channels specifically. 00:49:37.000 --> 00:49:42.000 So I'm gonna put that aside, though, because we're really focused on the owned environment right now. 00:49:42.000 --> 00:49:54.000 And I'm actually gonna rush through a couple of things, because I have more to say about it, and I've got some slides for it. Okay, so the last thing I want to say before we move from this about. 00:49:54.000 --> 00:50:01.000 the wave in general is no forester analyst would say, oh, you need a new solution, here's the wave graphic, look up and to the right. 00:50:01.000 --> 00:50:10.000 We have a massive scorecard that we publish. We've got a whole report that's available. I see it showing up in the chat for you, that's great. 00:50:10.000 --> 00:50:20.000 So figure out what your specific needs are, look at the scorecard, figure out what you need. In the report, you'll find expert advice. 00:50:20.000 --> 00:50:25.000 Right? We sort of explain the way to think about the market and what you need right now. 00:50:25.000 --> 00:50:37.000 Review the portfolios and agreements. Right, in the report, you'll see my advice about how to do these things. Explore whether incremental adoption, that's something we've been talking about a lot today, right? Moving forward with. 00:50:37.000 --> 00:50:44.000 just sort of a module at a time might bring short-term relief and long-term gains, right? Somewhere to start. You don't have to do. 00:50:44.000 --> 00:50:50.000 everything all at once. Shorter time to value, get some ROI, get some buy-in before you move forward. 00:50:50.000 --> 00:51:00.000 And then identify the priorities in the functionality. look at the problems you need to solve, figure out what functions will solve it. But in this market, I've said this a bunch of times today. 00:51:00.000 --> 00:51:11.000 It's going so fast. Okay, and so this is the best way I can, like, give you a visual for what this market feels like. And when I say, please don't try to build, this is why. 00:51:11.000 --> 00:51:27.000 So, like, 11 years ago, there was this ASICS challenge. Asics was just sponsored a runner named Ryan Hall. He's a really, really fast marathon runner, and they set up this truck with a treadmill on it, and the treadmill was going at the pace that Ryan Hall kept up for 26 miles. 00:51:27.000 --> 00:51:34.000 It's really, really, it's a sprint for 26 miles. I can do that for about, like, 30 feet. So, okay. 00:51:34.000 --> 00:51:47.000 They set up the treadmill at that speed, they put people in a harness, and they lowered them onto the treadmill to see how long they could keep up that pace, and most of them had a great time getting flung off the treadmill, but it's fine they were in a harness. I think this is what it would feel like. 00:51:47.000 --> 00:51:54.000 trying to stand up a solution right now that can rival the standalone search solutions. 00:51:54.000 --> 00:52:07.000 Because a few years ago, they did their acquisitions or built from scratch. And now they've had a bunch of years to just slam functionality into it, and it's moving that quickly. It's really, really hard. 00:52:07.000 --> 00:52:12.000 So, this is a buy-don't-build moment, as far as I'm concerned. 00:52:12.000 --> 00:52:19.000 This is one of the graphics that appears in the WAVE report. It lists the products that we included. So the first column is the vendor. 00:52:19.000 --> 00:52:31.000 The second column is the specific products. So, in some cases, it's the entire portfolio. In some cases, it's a portion of the portfolio. In some cases, it's a collection of modules. 00:52:31.000 --> 00:52:37.000 And I want to make that really clear, because in order to acquire the total functionality that I evaluated. 00:52:37.000 --> 00:52:49.000 These are the pieces you need to buy. You don't have to buy them all on day one. I can't show you this complete graphic because it has scores in it, but I want to make the point that it is in the report. 00:52:49.000 --> 00:52:59.000 And it shows you every vendor that was included, and all the criteria. 30-something criteria that we evaluated. We also weight them, we, Forester, weight the criteria. 00:52:59.000 --> 00:53:07.000 But you can see the complete scores. Not every little detail, but at least the scores that each vendor got for each criterion. 00:53:07.000 --> 00:53:19.000 right in the report. And then finally, Forrester for clients has a digital experience that's really incredible. This is new within the past year, and it changes everything. It kind of moves. 00:53:19.000 --> 00:53:33.000 from a static report to an interactive experience. You can select the criteria that are most important to you, and literally, like, only show the ones that really matter, and it will actually change the score. Like, forget about my score for all of it. 00:53:33.000 --> 00:53:40.000 Right? Because the up and to the right, that whole thing, it's based on a non-existent hypothetical business that doesn't exist and isn't you. 00:53:40.000 --> 00:53:50.000 and somehow, like, needs everything. You don't need everything, you need what you need. So you can select the specific criteria that are most important to you, and it will actually give you a new score. 00:53:50.000 --> 00:54:01.000 based on only those criteria. It lets you compare up to 4 vendors, it lets you see the full scorecards, and the full scorecard means, What were the questions I asked the vendor? 00:54:01.000 --> 00:54:10.000 Which, steal it for your RFI. That's what I asked, right? And then, exactly which score did each one get? There were only 3 scores. 00:54:10.000 --> 00:54:20.000 Which one did they get? The middle, the higher, or the lower? And why? For each criterion, we define why. It's a level of transparency I don't see anywhere else. 00:54:20.000 --> 00:54:26.000 Okay, so that's all very cool, these solutions exist, you probably need one. 00:54:26.000 --> 00:54:33.000 But, we're hearing about GenAI, we're having all these conversations right now, and this is the question I keep getting. 00:54:33.000 --> 00:54:40.000 But should we even bother? Is the retail site just going away? Is all of the shopping just gonna happen somewhere else now? 00:54:40.000 --> 00:54:47.000 Nope. No, it's not. It's not going away. I don't see that happening anytime soon. 00:54:47.000 --> 00:54:59.000 Yeah, okay, so we're gonna have conversational experiences in the owned and the non-owned environments. It's Gen AI, it's generative. That means it's not a canned response, it's creating the response. 00:54:59.000 --> 00:55:06.000 from the training, it's been fed. Sometimes it's agendic. Agentic means autonomous. It's making decisions. 00:55:06.000 --> 00:55:12.000 If it's just, you know, do this thing that I've instructed you to do, please, bot, that's called assistive. 00:55:12.000 --> 00:55:19.000 It's not all the way agentic. So I'm being a little bit generous when I say that the ones in the owned environment are agentic commerce today. 00:55:19.000 --> 00:55:28.000 Because only just barely. Only where it's like, well, I'm choosing to show you these two or three products out of the whole category based on what I think you want, like. 00:55:28.000 --> 00:55:38.000 I guess that's an autonomous decision. I'm being a little generous because I know it's only gonna get more and more autonomous. If I publish saying, it's only assistive today, I'd be wrong by tomorrow. 00:55:38.000 --> 00:55:44.000 Because it's changing that fast. But in these current agentic. 00:55:44.000 --> 00:55:54.000 conversational shopping assistant kind of experiences. There are some common issues that I see kind of across the board. And when I say common, I mean they're pervasive. 00:55:54.000 --> 00:56:04.000 Because it's early days for these types of solutions. I see unintuitive responses to the prompts. The prompt is the thing that we type in as humans. 00:56:04.000 --> 00:56:08.000 Sometimes the answers we get are kind of nonsensical. 00:56:08.000 --> 00:56:12.000 I see a lack of clarity in the scope or usefulness. 00:56:12.000 --> 00:56:17.000 Right? So if it serves a certain purpose, we need to say what that purpose is. 00:56:17.000 --> 00:56:24.000 I see inconsistencies in how it's displayed. I see answers that are not in line with product data. 00:56:24.000 --> 00:56:33.000 literally making suggestions or asking questions that are irrelevant. Would you like A, or would you like B, when A isn't even an option per the product data? 00:56:33.000 --> 00:56:39.000 I see them sometimes adding friction to the shopping process. That's literally the whole goal, is not to do that. 00:56:39.000 --> 00:56:46.000 Kat said something earlier about, like, shortening the time to get the right thing in front of the customer. Yeah. 00:56:46.000 --> 00:56:51.000 make it easier, make it quicker. Sometimes they're slow, and sometimes they're just wrong. 00:56:51.000 --> 00:56:59.000 So, moving forward, if you're looking at bringing in these kinds of agentic, or assistive, or conversational experiences. 00:56:59.000 --> 00:57:11.000 First, remember that we need to ensure logical and direct responses to what the user is asking. And look, you're not going to be in control of this. The vendors and the systems are in control of it. Your job is to test. 00:57:11.000 --> 00:57:17.000 Sometimes it's impossible to test too much beforehand, test it live. 00:57:17.000 --> 00:57:28.000 Okay? If it's unclear in the scope, provide reminders, literally just saying, you know, I'm a bot, and I can help you do XYZ. Make it clear what the scope is. 00:57:28.000 --> 00:57:35.000 test hard for formatting consistency. I have seen the HTML just get stripped. I don't know why. 00:57:35.000 --> 00:57:47.000 But clickable stuff becomes unclickable. formatted pretty stuff with headlines and bold, and it just becomes wiped. And now I'm looking at a bunch of texts that I can't do anything with, short of, like, highlighting and copying and pasting it into a search bar. 00:57:47.000 --> 00:57:57.000 so much more friction. Right? Always limit their responses to the actual product specs. This is huge. It should not be that creative. 00:57:57.000 --> 00:58:03.000 make it better or don't bother. and test. Test, test, test, right? Things are changing, it's learning. 00:58:03.000 --> 00:58:06.000 Yeah. 00:58:06.000 --> 00:58:16.000 really, really check. And don't let it be wrong. Make it a trusted authority. Make it something that will actually improve the experience. And as a bonus. 00:58:16.000 --> 00:58:23.000 allow an easy in and out. Consumers did not decide that they would just like their entire shopping experience to happen in a chat bubble. 00:58:23.000 --> 00:58:29.000 Chat isn't everything. Look for experiences that allow you to refine manually using the facets. 00:58:29.000 --> 00:58:37.000 or conversationally by typing it. Look for easy ins and outs from those experiences. And then capture the preferences. 00:58:37.000 --> 00:58:43.000 Right? This is an opportunity to know what a customer is saying in their own words that they want. 00:58:43.000 --> 00:58:49.000 have a memory, remember what that customer looked for. It's amazing data to hold onto. 00:58:49.000 --> 00:58:54.000 {{CTA:Talk to a Search Expert|https://info.constructor.com/ecommerce-search-discovery-demo}}Yeah, I love this slide. I think it goes back to. 00:58:54.000 --> 00:59:00.000 some things we were chatting about a little bit earlier, where it's like, when you're gonna deploy these experiences, they have to be purposeful. 00:59:00.000 --> 00:59:06.000 You have to know what problem you're trying to solve, not just deploying AI for AI's sake. 00:59:06.000 --> 00:59:18.000 And you have to test it. I love that you said testing, like, 10 times, because we think that's so important. I mean, Kat, how do you see the folks that we know that have deployed Agentic. And keep testing. And then test some more. 00:59:18.000 --> 00:59:20.000 experiences navigating this. 00:59:20.000 --> 00:59:32.000 Great question. So, I have kind of two bubbles of experiences of hearing the leftovers from, like, the previous life versus, like, the new life now when they're gonna try it again and do it the right way. 00:59:32.000 --> 00:59:39.000 So something that can happen, and circling back to, I think Emily called it vendor culture, and making sure, like, you have a good vendor culture fit. 00:59:39.000 --> 00:59:48.000 A lot of solutions out there today, like, they have the product, and then a business can buy the product, but you can't really give somebody a car without them knowing how to drive a car. 00:59:48.000 --> 00:59:56.000 So I can give you this car, and you can either drive it into a brick wall, or I can give you the car, and you can take it out on the highway and go pick up your girlfriend, and take her to the movies, and it'll be a great experience. 00:59:56.000 --> 01:00:12.000 And so, whenever we are going to deploy this, you know, kind of, we could make it a chatbot. It could be something that's, like, Product Insights Agent, which is on the PDP, and it's very generative, and it's very, you know, self-led. 01:00:12.000 --> 01:00:17.000 something that has to be clear for the business, and for us, is what problem do you want to solve? 01:00:17.000 --> 01:00:24.000 How quickly are you trying to solve it? How are we going to test it? But we as the vendor are going to put that in front of the customer. 01:00:24.000 --> 01:00:29.000 So we're going to work with the retailer to help them define those problems and define the approach. 01:00:29.000 --> 01:00:40.000 And so, the solution is no longer to just buy the thing and then push it out, it's more of, like, a slow, controlled process to make sure that we're actually getting some value and will help you look for that monetary gain that you get out of it. 01:00:40.000 --> 01:00:50.000 And so it's kind of, like, 50-50, you know, from the past life, where businesses come over and they've got kind of these older solutions that they've tried and failed, and now they don't really know about doing it again. 01:00:50.000 --> 01:01:00.000 And then we go for it, but we do it the right way this time. 01:01:00.000 --> 01:01:03.000 All right, we are at the top of the hour. 01:01:03.000 --> 01:01:12.000 So, sincerely appreciate everybody who joined today. Thank you so much again, Emily and Kat, for joining and for sharing everything that you shared. 01:01:12.000 --> 01:01:18.000 I feel like I walk away always learning new things when I talk to both of you, so this was no exception. 01:01:18.000 --> 01:01:27.000 {{CTA:Connect With Us on LinkedIn|https://www.linkedin.com/company/constructor-io/}}For anybody who has additional questions that maybe we didn't answer today, feel free to connect with me or Kat on LinkedIn. 01:01:27.000 --> 01:01:31.000 Shoot us an email with additional questions you might have, we'd love to continue the conversation after this, so enjoy the rest of your day, and we look forward to talking again soon. 01:01:31.000 --> 01:01:41.000 Thanks, everyone