What if the biggest risk in the AI era isn’t falling behind the technology, but getting ahead of your customers’ trust?
Agility requires a constant feedback loop between technological innovation and customer sentiment. It demands that we not only deploy new tools like AI, but also actively listen and adapt to how our customers are actually experiencing them.
Today, we’re going to talk about the delicate balance brands must strike in the age of AI. It’s not just about implementing the latest generative AI tools into the shopping experience; it’s about doing so in a way that builds, rather than erodes, the customer trust and loyalty you’ve worked so hard to create.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Romain Fouache, CEO at Akeneo.
About Romain Fouache
Romain is as passionate about technology as he is about solving the customers’ biggest problems and brings more than 20 years of experience scaling category defining B2B technology companies. Most recently, he led operations and sales as COO and then CRO of the leading AI software vendor Dataiku. Romain is a graduate from Ecole Centrale Paris and holds an MBA from NYU Stern.
Romain Fouache on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/romain-fouache/
Resources
Akeneo: https://www.akeneo.com
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Transcript
[00:48:47] Greg Kihlstrom: What if the biggest risk in the AI era isn’t falling behind the technology, but getting ahead of your customer’s trust? Agility requires a constant feedback loop between technological innovation and customer sentiment. It demands that we not only deploy new tools, often incorporating AI, but also actively listen and adapt to how our customers are actually experiencing them. Today we’re going to talk about the delicate balance brands must strike to keep up. It’s not just about implementing the latest generative AI tools into the shopping experience, it’s about doing so in a way that builds rather than erodes the customer trust and loyalty you’ve worked so hard to create.
[01:26:50] Greg Kihlstrom: To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Roman Flaush, CEO at Akeneo. Roman, welcome to the show.
[01:33:04] Roman Floch: Well, thanks a lot for having me, Greg. It’s a pleasure to be on the show with you today. And I’m excited about the conversations we’re going to have.
[01:39:27] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, definitely. I mean, this is definitely a topic top of mind for for many here and and definitely want to dive in. Before we do, though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Akeneo?
[01:50:00] Roman Floch: Yeah, with pleasure. So as you said, I’m the Chief Executive Officer here at Akeneo, and I joined the company a little over a year ago. I actually have a background of more than 20 years working in the data and AI space. Not the retail space, not the e-commerce space, but the data and AI space, because I’m deeply convinced that at its heart and I’m sure we’ll have more opportunities to discuss about that, Akeneo actually is a data and AI company. And I joined the company for two reasons. First, to actually help continue to nurture that transition during data and on data and AI focus, as well as help continue the scale and the improvement of the operations of the company.
[02:29:08] Greg Kihlstrom: Great, great. And and for those that are not as familiar with what Akeneo does, can you explain a little bit, you know, what’s the core problem that you solve for brands and and who are your typical customers?
[02:39:69] Roman Floch: So Akeneo is from a space that is historically called PIM, product information management. What we do and what we’ve been built for is to help companies manage the complexity of the data related to their product catalog. If you’re a company, most likely you’re selling something. If you’re selling something, most likely people want to know what they’re buying before they buy it. And so you need to be able to describe your products. Whether it’s the length of a table or the description of the service you’re going to sell or the spare parts you’re going to be able to use with the product that you’re selling, you have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of of pieces of data that you need to understand about your products and you might have hundreds of thousands of products that you’re selling on dozens or hundreds of markets. So the sheer combination of it is crazy and to be able to make sure that you have the best data available for your customer and the best format possible, you need to find a way to manage that complexity. This is where Akeneo comes in to increase the discoverability, the conversion, reduce return rates and get you ready for AI.
[03:43:08] Greg Kihlstrom: Great, great. All right, so let’s dive in and I want to start by talking about this from the the strategic standpoint and this this concept of building trust in this AI-powered world that we find ourselves in. So, uh, research from Akeneo shows that once consumers try AI recommendations, the experience is overwhelmingly positive. The real challenge is earning that initial trust, so, you know, using it the first time, right? So from a strategic standpoint, what’s the most critical element for a brand to get right before they even launch their first AI-driven shopping feature?
[04:20:41] Roman Floch: Oh, I’d be very frank on that. It’s don’t even try if your data is not in the right place. You know, we we share a lot about AI trust, about hallucination, about all of these things, but to begin with, if you don’t know what your products are, AI is not going to make it up for you. So, make sure that you have strong data foundation. I mean, I’ve been hearing all my life something very simple, there is no good AI without good data. So, make sure your data is in order before you actually start to try anything with AI because if you get it wrong once, you will kill the trust of your consumers.
[04:54:67] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And and that that needs surely a lot of leaders are feeling pressure to deploy AI, you know, there’s there’s pressure even at the board level and and shareholders all all of that. How do leaders balance this pressure for speed to, you know, just get something out there with the more deliberate work of what you’re saying, you know, ensuring that the data feeding the AI models is accurate, consistent and and truly reflects the brand’s voice.
[05:24:14] Roman Floch: that’s for sure that there’s an AI mandate across all industries. I mean, I’m a CEO, my board is telling me I should use more AI, I tell the employees they should be using more AI. There’s no question about that. The question is how do you actually leverage AI? What is the best way to do it? So for companies today, on the e-commerce space, there’s a big question on AI, which is how do I make sure I’m present and visible on chat GPT and Gemini? That’s kind of it is AI. It’s AI as a new channel on which to be discovered. There is AI on how do you power your own e-commerce experience on your website. There’s also AI on how do you leverage AI to better operate yourself. At Akeneo, we cover all of these dimensions and I think it’s important to have all of them in mind. The first one is managing your product data is itself an AI-augmented task. You can use AI to actually better collect that information, better enrich it, better manage it, have people who manage your catalog, not be just managers of catalog, but managers of agents that manage catalog, so that you can go broader on your catalogs, you can on-board more product, you can have more trust in what you’re doing, you can have more depth in the descriptions that you have. So that’s, you know, as far as mandate of leveraging AI to be more efficient, something that can be directly addressed with software such as others. And then there’s getting ready for the new wave of e-commerce, which I think is indeed going to be extremely AI impacted. You can always already do things, you know, we’ve got customers that are very happy with their ranking on chat GPT, because their product page is well structured and well done, they actually get ranked pretty high up. So I don’t think that getting your data ready for the full potential of AI e-commerce is actually in contradiction with going fast. You can do it while leveraging AI and showing that you’re actually making the most of the new technologies in your role as a leader, CEO or even at the board level.
[07:28:44] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And so to to get a little more tactical then and talk about AI that kind of to your to your last point AI that’s enhancing, not necessarily disrupt. I mean, there’s there’s big and broad ways to use AI, but that can take take a bit of not only thought, but a lot of good data and and other things you you mentioned. But when we talk about AI in the customer journey, you know, where are you seeing the most effective low-risk, high-reward applications today?
[08:00:15] Roman Floch: So, it’s a very interesting question because I think there’s a common misconception on that topic. Today, we’re seeing a lot of companies that are starting to use to to generate large volumes of content, because you know it used to be complicated to generate content when you want to translate, when you want to do copywriting, when you want to do all of these things. While it’s a difficult task, it’s time consuming, it’s effort intensive and the rest. And so we’re seeing companies leverage to do that. I think that is one of the biggest risk potentially of the year or the next couple of years. It’s to think that AI is going to be autonomously able to generate large amounts of contents that have added value. Because ultimately, yes, from the title of a product, I can generate a 50 page description with open AI. But it’s just going to be AI slop. And the products you’re selling, you don’t want them to be slop. But the only way they’re understood is through the data you’re sharing with your end customers. So I think one thing to be extremely mindful of and where I think huge amount of risk is, is to leverage AI to generate infinite number of contents, because in the end it will only dilute your sales performance and your brand image. Where I think AI can already play a huge role is uh indeed on the on the discovery side, you know, we are seeing more and more traffic coming from chat GPT or from Gemini. So making sure you’re visible in these environments. Uh, I think AI by helping enrich product data is actually a great way to convert better and to drive more discoverability, so that’s also a big element. And then yes, at the tail end, doing translation of well-curated and understood content, uh or doing some slight alterations on the end copy can actually be something that is meaningful too.
[09:51:71] Greg Kihlstrom: And so I also want to talk about, what about the the concept of the human in the loop and, you know, so there’s a lot of things that AI can do semi-autonomously, autonomously already, and and certainly plans plans in the works, I’m sure by many brands to do more. But, um, you know, what does successful collaboration between, you know, the humans, the marketing team and an AI system look like in practice, and how do brands ensure that AI augments rather than just creating that that AI slop or or a generic automated experience?
[10:31:37] Roman Floch: The the way the way I like to describe it, it’s uh you want agents to to work with and for you. And ultimately, I think any piece of software will evolve in a manner similar to have having the users become kind of managers of users. And you know, when you when you manage a team, uh you need to be able to explain them clearly what you want, you know, you hire a new team in your company, you need to say how the company operates, the type of tones that you want, the type of things that you’re selling, how you want to be able to frame the information that then you let them go about their work. And you know, we’ve got we’ve got agents to modify your data schema to adjust to that, to extract content from value system, to map it to other systems, to to write content, to translate, put all of that where it should be. And then, as a manager, you come back and you need to check some things. Some things you can be confident on because it was very clear rules, very easy to check if they’re there, you can have automated check. That’s going to be 80, 90% of the content. Five, 10% of the contents, the agent is not sure, like someone in your team would say, ah, you know, I’m I just did that, I don’t know, you know, maybe you should double check. So you’re here as an editor to understand what has been done and make some adjustments. And then there’s probably going to be a last mile where you want to have actually people do the work because, you know, I know some companies, I know I know some companies with a very limited product portfolios, the CEO writes every product description because that’s how much they care about the words that are chosen in what they do. So I think that’s how it’s going to evolve. People are going to become managers of agents that manage product information, and as a consequence, some of the work they can describe perfectly, they can have confidence in the outcome, some of the work needs to be double check, and some of the work still needs to be done manually, because in the end, you want to have someone you can trust on the most important element of your job.
[12:26:86] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So I want to talk about gauging the impact of of AI as well and how we can how we can measure this and, you know, one of the core principles of of agility is adapting based on on feedback. And so, you know, when a brand rolls out new AI tools, what what’s the most important feedback loop that they need to create?
[12:49:50] Roman Floch: I think when when it comes to AI in the e-commerce space, currently, the highest impact feedback loop is understanding how you’re ranking and being presented on chat GPT. You know, it’s it’s kind of SEO but for the A A G, GEO generative AI engine optimization. I mean, that’s that’s one of the biggest success at Akeneo this year. It’s being able to match for each of your product, how they’re positioned, which is not trivial because it’s not just keyword-based, you know, it’s intent-based. So you need to map intent, understand what your product are and the rest. And I think that’s the most important feedback loop. It’s is your product information actually driving higher performance on this type of media? And if it is, great. If it’s not, what do you need to adjust and optimize? That’s the feedback loop you want to put in place because on top of that, that’s actually a virtuous feedback loop with AI. You can retrieve with AI what’s good, what’s bad about how your product is perceived, adjust your product description so that you’re able to enrich it, so that it better matches the potential intense and then push it back.
[13:53:32] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, look looking out a bit, you know, a few a few years. I know it’s hard to hard to see uh but so far out, but you know, looking out, how how do you see the role of AI evolving from a feature in the shopping experience to something more foundational? You know, will every product interaction eventually be AI mediated and, you know, what what does that mean for brand identity?
[14:18:31] Roman Floch: So, so there’s a a big question around agent e-commerce. I mean, at NRF this year, everybody was talking about agent e-commerce, which can represent many things, but in its full-blown form, it’s full disintermediation. It’s you don’t even have e-commerce websites anymore. You you go, you say, I want to look dashing tonight and it will ship a tuxedo to your place, that’s aligned with your preferences, your size and the rest. We’re not there just yet. My my feeling is first and foremost, there is no doubt that AI will have a profound impact on commerce. That’s a certainty. Now, what will be the impact? But if you look at the impact of e-commerce. E-commerce redefined a large part of commerce, but it didn’t kill brick and mortar. It did two things. It first, part of what was brick and mortar actually happened to be sold online, but even what is sold in brick and mortar was influenced by online and e-commerce. Now the vast majority of whatever you’re going to buy, actually part of the journey has been online. I think agent e-commerce is going to be the same. Yes, there is going to be parts of the market where it will just be agentic transaction. You won’t even think about it anymore. Uh it will go, it will buy, it will ship to you, you won’t go on another website and the rest. But that’s going to be a part of it. Still going to be a significant part that’s going to be on the brand or the distributor website and a part that’s going to be brick and mortar. But I’m deeply convinced that even if these two still exist, they are going to be influenced by what happens at agentic. The same way that brick and mortar is influenced by what happens online. And so I think it’s a it’s a new dimension of distribution channels that is coming through agentic, that is going to take a bit, but it’s going to influence everything. And so you need, you cannot afford not to be ready. And it’s not just B2C, it’s also B2B. We’re seeing a vast majority of B2B buyers now start discovery on chat GPT, Gemini, perplexity and this type of of solutions.
[16:17:47] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. It’s a, yeah, for for better or worse, they’re they’re not removing any channels. They just keep adding new ones, right? So, yeah, yeah.
[16:24:90] Roman Floch: Yes, indeed. It’s not making anybody’s job simpler, but it’s a it’s a great moment to rethink the connection to your customers. I do think that the ability to focus on intents and not just keywords, first gives huge opportunities for brands to actually better attract the consumers that are relevant for their products. But second, just turns completely on its head the full of the current e-commerce funnel because will there still be SEO? Will there still be search ads? Will there still be? I don’t know. And probably there will be there but maybe, you know, the same way that that display ads still are here, you know, it’s a small part of a small part of a small part of the business. I think the way we’re going to be driving discovery and ranking uh whether paid or organic in a year or in two years is going to be radically different from what we do today. And to be honest, at the core of it, it’s going to be one simple thing, your product data.
[17:24:06] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so looking at this from the the consumer perspective, as consumers already, you know, there’s there’s a lot of there’s been a lot of focus on consumer data privacy, but, you know, as consumers become more aware of how their data is used to train AI models, what’s what’s your advice for executives today to, you know, future-proof their brands to data privacy and transparency?
[17:51:39] Roman Floch: I think there’s going to be a lot, I’m not sure brands will have that much more uh to collect on users than what they do today. I mean, today there’s already vast amounts of information that are known on the users. I think significant part of the other information is going to be more on the on the Discovery channels. So I don’t think there’s going to be a huge impact on that. No, I think on the privacy elements, the big things that is going to be developing in the next few, maybe even weeks that is interesting is how this system actually integrates ads. You’ve seen the announcement that chat GPT started to say they were going to have ads in chat GPT. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Super Bowl ads from from Entropic on the on the inclusion of ads in. So I think that’s the heart of the debate that’s going to happen and that will define what’s the future commerce funnel looks like. If there are ads and you can pay to be on top, it will go in one direction. If there are no ads, then it means the business model will need to be different, probably transaction-based, you know, getting a few transaction, which does too, by the way. And if it’s transaction-based, it means the core currency that you’re going to be fighting for is not giving money to be on top, but making sure you’re the product that converts the best. And the only way you’re going to be to to you’re going to have to influence conversion is actually the product data, it’s comprehensiveness and its freshness that you’re pushing to the systems. So there is a world in which there is no higher impact on your performance than your product data because ads might not be there anymore and your website might actually be a secondary or tertiary uh channel because many of it is going to go through perplexity and Tropic, open AI and Gemini.
[19:38:21] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Well, Roman, thanks so much for joining today. Really enjoyed talking about this with you. A couple last questions before we wrap up here. First one, um, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
[19:54:19] Roman Floch: Well, I think that’s uh ad model and how do you get on top organically or paid of the generative AI engines is going to be something that’s going to be moving a lot over the next 12 months.
[20:04:47] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And last question for you, uh what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[20:10:65] Roman Floch: I listen to cool podcasts, you know, that’s the best way to go.
