How Retail Media And Loyalty Connect In Store

Your next grocery “deal” might not be a discount at the register and that’s exactly why it works. We sat down with Sean Turner, co-founder and CTO of Swiftly, to unpack the real mechanics behind digital promotions that change behavior in brick-and-mortar grocery and convenience stores, from customer acquisition to retail media monetization.

We get specific about how retailers can find and bring back shoppers using one-to-one targeting across digital channels like social, open web, connected TV, and location-based screens, then convert that attention into app downloads and repeat trips. Sean explains why the mobile app has become the default digital home for loyalty programs, personalized offers, and a smoother shopping experience, and why that same app is the most practical place to build a retail media business without needing a massive content team.

Then we go deeper into measurement and incentives: how to prove incremental ROAS for in-store retail media, how alcohol rebate compliance shapes offer design, and why cashback can create a bigger basket lift than instant redemption. The details matter, from clear qualification reminders to making payout fast and trustworthy so shoppers actually feel the value.

We close by zooming out to the modern grocery technology stack and the next wave of change. Personalization is no longer optional when attention spans are shrinking, and AI agents are starting to influence meal planning and product discovery. If your store inventory and pricing aren’t connected to the wider digital ecosystem, you risk being invisible when shoppers ask for recommendations.

If you found this useful, subscribe, share it with a retail leader, and leave a review so more grocery and retail media teams can find the show.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Setup

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You see a bigger basket lift on the cashback versus if you did it as an instant redeemable. Um, and we have some pretty good tests for this because there are some states where we we are allowed to do instant redeemable on uh alcohol. And I think that there's some sort of consumer psychology around knowing that I'm gonna get that money back later that makes consumers more comfortable spending more in that existing trip. And that sounds kind of counterintuitive because you're like getting the money back later, but you spend more. Um, but I think people appreciate that idea of like banking um uh a currency that they're gonna get back at a later time.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

Today on Adventures in Customer Land, I'm with Sean Turner, who is co-founder and CTO of Swiftly. And if you operate in the grocery space, specifically more in the regional or maybe even the C-Store space, um, you're gonna be very familiar with what Swiftly is doing. If you don't operate in those spaces, there's still something here for you. Because what Swiftly is doing and deploying in those spaces has application throughout vertical after vertical after vertical of consumer uh touch points. So with that, uh Sean, thank you for braving the scheduling and rescheduling we all had to do to get to this point. I'm I'm glad we finally made it.

SPEAKER_01 1:32

Glad to be here as well. Thank you. Uh uh, thank you for hosting.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Of course. So um maybe just to set a little context for the rest of this conversation, would you mind telling us what Swiftly is and does uh in your words, which would be way better than mine, and and your role there.

What Swiftly Actually Does

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Yeah, perfect. Uh so for some background, I'm co-founder and uh CTO for Swiftly. And a good way to think about us is we are a marketing and retail tools platform for brick and mortar grocery and convenience stores. We help uh retailers with everything from how do I find uh my customers, how do I acquire those customers. Then once I've acquired those customers, how do I give them a really great, engaging digital experience that can encompass everything from uh your website to your mobile app, your loyalty program, uh incentives and offers, uh a lot of the more complex uh offer types, things like multi-trip offers or challenges. Um and then how do I actually nurture that customer relationship along the way? Re-engage laps customers, um, how do I get customers to buy new categories of spend? Um, how do I shift customer behavior and provide overall a better service and experience for uh for your customers? So we have tools that kind of span that full, full gamut for retailers. And we work with retailers of all sizes, all the way down from uh single store independence all the way up to the largest uh enterprises in the country.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

So you painted a picture of almost every incentivized touch point in the customer lifecycle. Can you just talk a little bit about some of the I don't really have the right language here, but but I'm sure you'll correct me. Like the nodes in this in this platform, like what are some of those touch points? How do they work? If you are, and let's just pick something out of out of thin air here. If you're a mid-size regional grosser, how would you deploy swiftly?

SPEAKER_01 3:44

Yeah, good um, good question. Um, there's probably two main engagement points that are worth um uh discussing. The first is how do you acquire customers effectively? And we operate a platform called Audience Optimizer, which is a think about it as an advertising platform that's able to help you find your existing customers as well as people that are likely to be your customers and engage them with truly one-to-one personalized content to actually drive them into your store, drive them to download your mobile app, um, uh, advertise some of the best deals that you have in your store that are going to be interesting to those shoppers. So that's how you really start at the top of the funnel and go very broad in bringing customers into your ecosystem.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Can we talk a little bit about the what channels those get um moved out upon? Is this mostly an online effort or is it online, you know, uh virtual and physical?

SPEAKER_01 4:43

Um we we span all of the different touch points that you can target digitally. So that's going to include things like open web, social media, um, a lot of the connected TV uh platforms as well, Hulu and uh the ad-supported Netflix tier, um, as well as uh some of the targetable display screens that you might see at say gas stations or on billboards uh that could be in the vicinity of your store locations. So it's a sort of one-stop shop to be able to target very broadly and find a lot of your customers.

Why The Mobile App Matters Most

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Oh boy. So there's just an awful lot to talk about there, too. I'll try and keep this conversation onto some sort of a track. But one of the things that I want to talk about as well is your efforts within retail media, um, what that looks like from your perspective, um, how it has evolved in the short time it's been around and where it's going and how that's kind of being worked out in the grocery space. Um can we just talk about that? It's a little bit of a shift, you know, we're taking a hard dog leg left here off of you know what I think I can connect those two though.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

So let me um let me let me give you a stab at that. So when you think about it from your your challenge as a retailer, once I've acquired a customer digitally, then what I want to do is to bring them into a very well-connected high-touch ecosystem. And typically for most brick and mortar retailers, that means getting that customer to download your mobile application. And the reason behind that is for whatever reason, the the way consumers have been trained these days is when a consumer thinks about um digital engagement for a brick and mortar store, they think mobile app. And I think a lot of that actually kind of harkens back to um a previous life. I was at Microsoft as an engineer there. And when we shipped the Windows um uh app platform that was part of Windows 8 way back when, um, we had to build all of the initial apps. And I actually built the Starbucks app uh on that um uh platform to help shoppers find and shop in Starbucks stores. And the results that uh the retailer saw from having shoppers engage on their mobile app was just off the charts. Those shoppers spend a lot more, they come into the store more frequently, they're ordering bigger baskets. And, you know, some of the insight behind that was it's really about just erasing these microscopic pieces of friction. So for Starbucks, it was really about mobile payment, was really kind of a key unlock for them. And the reason is it's as crazy as it sounds, just getting rid of that friction of having to put your, because when you're in in a Starbucks, you're on your phone in line, right? And so getting rid of the friction of having to put your phone in one pocket and take your wallet out of your purse or another pocket, it actually makes a difference for how likely a consumer is to come into the store. And then when you add on top of that all the push notifications and the deals and the discounting that you can send them, you've got a really, really powerful platform. And everybody has kind of Starbucks pioneered that space, but everybody sort of followed suit. So now when you think about how do you engage in the quick service restaurant space, everybody from McDonald's to Chipotle to Panera Bread, it's all primarily through the mobile app. And those same techniques actually work just as well, if not better, for grocery and uh convenience stores. And so that really is where you want to drive your customers. And once you've got them in your mobile app, that is the best place to be able to monetize those customers from a retail media standpoint. And when you think about it, as a retailer, you don't have the huge content teams to go through and create a ton of content to keep it looking fresh, uh, especially if you've got the margins of your average grocery store. And so being able to lean on the brands that sell products, that their whole existence in life is to create content, then that creates a really, really good match to be able to showcase very engaging content that's going to keep your shoppers coming back, that's got a lot of the discounts and savings that they're not going to be able to find through other channels, and that keeps everything fresh for your shoppers.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

Thinking about um how retail media kind of exploded when it when it first became a thing, which really wasn't that long ago. Um, and you see just massive amounts of ad spend shifting over into this these new channels. Um one of the concerns was when in the early days that mid-size retailers might get left on the sidelines because they just didn't have the technology, frankly, the sophistication and budgets to be able to build uh what was needed to take advantage of this new idea. How has Swiftly addressed that? Because you deal with a lot of mid-size, you know, lower technologically savvy, lower budget entities.

Measuring Incremental Lift In Store

SPEAKER_01 10:53

Yeah, that's that's right. And so, you know, for a lot of those retailers, job one is just how do I get a really great platform? And that's kind of akin to, you know, when you open up a store, you got to have the furnishings, you got to have the right lighting, you got to have the signage in the store. You need a destination that shoppers actually want to go to. And a lot of your mid-size retailers really struggled with creating a very good um uh destination. And I think one of the kind of early insights that we had was when you think about digital, most people, especially back in 2017, 2020, 2022, were really thinking about e-commerce, right? Buy online, pick up and store, online ordering. And for grocery, that can be important, but that's still only about 15, 20%, depending upon where you are of your overall volume. And so when you think about how do you want to optimize a platform, you really want something that's optimized for your in-store shopper. And there isn't really another um uh platform out there that's sort of built with that philosophy in mind that a retailer can uh go acquire. And so we set out to build that so that as a retailer, you don't have to go build all of these capabilities in-house. You can uh really use it as sort of a toolkit that's that's pre-built to make it really easy to get up and running. And so uh, you know, we've got a product that we call App Factory and Web Factory that makes it very approachable and affordable for a retailer to kind of like Shopify, go set up your digital storefront, have something that ties into all of those kind of legacy systems that most regionals are still on. So you might be on a point of sales system that was last updated in maybe the 90s or the early 2000s. And so you have to have the right connectors and capabilities to be able to integrate with those systems so that you can have a great uh kind of digital modern extension for your shoppers that hides a lot of the legacy complexity that may be um uh lurking behind the covers in in the stores.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

I want to cherry pick a couple of of data points that your team had sent uh my way and uh just kind of unpack them a little bit because a few of these are pretty eye-opening. Um and I'm just gonna go a little bit randomly here. 38% of shoppers say they would switch brands if promotion saves them money. That in itself isn't that surprising. Frankly, I expected it to be a little higher, but the question it begs for me is when retailers deploy digital coupons or cashback or or promotions, what kind of economic impact do they actually see at the basket level? I mean, is that is that determinable up front?

SPEAKER_01 13:51

It it is actually. And um, you know, let me I think there's kind of actually two questions embedded in there. And so let me take um Yeah, sorry, that's my habit. No worries. Um, you know, so the the the propensity of consumers to switch brands given a discount, um uh and then um, you know, what what can we see at the basket level? Um, you know, first let's look at how you want to be analyzing these. So one of the the nice things about the platform that we built is, you know, back in 2017, 2018, we had um uh built and deployed our retail media platform. And at the time, retail media wasn't even really a term. We've been kind of in this space for a long time. My background, um uh the the Starbucks app I built at Microsoft was more of a passion and uh a labor of love, just because I drink a lot of uh a lot of coffee here. But um uh my day job was working on the Bing Ads team. And what we did was we took a lot of the measurement methodology that advertisers were looking for in e-commerce and digital ads, conversion rate, customer lifetime value optimization. And we thought, well, geez, what if I could actually apply that to brick and mortar shoppers as well? So rather than have my endpoint be an e-commerce purchase, can I have my endpoint be that in-store purchase? And so we developed the methodology to do uh incremental row as calculations. So for every dollar in ads or promotions that I spend, or every time I show a shopper an impression of a campaign, can I track does that shopper come into the store? Do they buy something in the category? Do they skip that aisle altogether? Do they buy the product I advertised, a competitor product, something else in the family? And looking on an exposed and unexposed basis, an A-B test basis, um, what is the difference between those two groups? And that really helps you to prove deterministically what impact was driven by media versus say I had an end cap or the sale was really good, or this happened to be on the front page of my circular, or there was a sign when I walked into the store that advertised this deal. You want to pull all of those other kind of data points out and be able to get a good, a good measurement. And, you know, it depends on sort of the discount that you're running, but you actually are able to really sway consumer behavior in some very, very meaningful ways. And I think one of the best examples of that is we operate a alcohol rebate and compliance platform. And so there shoppers can take advantage of very, very healthy, meaningful discounts on um beer, wine, and spirits. So for example, I just uh recently took advantage of a um uh discount on red wine and and um uh steak at uh Lucky Supermarket. And so it was uh a basket purchase where I had to buy steak, I had to buy a bottle of a particular brand of red wine, but my cash back on that was five dollars, right? On an$18 bottle of wine. So that's a really, really significant discount amount. And when you actually look at the kind of behavior that drives, what we see is that shoppers that end up redeeming one of these alcohol rebates spend 62% more than um a shopper that's buying the same alcohol product without the rebate. Wow. Yeah, it's it's incredible. Or you can just let that one hang in the air. That's that's a that's a big number. And and what's interesting about it is when you think about it, where somebody's gonna buy wine is ultimately gonna drive the rest of the dinner basket purchase. And so you're really pulling, when you pull that thread, you're not just pulling on you know random items, you're actually using a strategic pull to actually pull the rest of a dinner purchase, which is going to drive trip occasions in a way that you know helps you as a retailer really grab those from somebody else. And so there's a lot of those kinds of um strategic opportunities and how you think about discounting that I think are really important for retailers to consider.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

So I live in New York. Um, New York has uh is one of those weird states where you can't buy wine in a grocery store. Um, but I think you just came up with a brilliant argument for making that happen. In fact, the legislature is debating it right now. I'll I'll I'll send them a recording of this of this conversation.

Alcohol Rebates With Instant Payout

SPEAKER_01 18:12

Um actually, we we have a lobbying team that um uh is is trying to open up more and more states for um uh wine, beer, and spirits purchases in grocery stores, um, as well as opening up additional states for uh alcohol rebates and letting consumers save money. So last year we had really big victories in Pennsylvania um and um Missouri. Tough state. Yeah, is uh we we opened them up. So so it's continuing to evolve, and at the speed of legislation, it's actually moving quite fast.

SPEAKER_00 18:44

Yeah, good for you. Well, you know, you you're talking about the the the size of the rebate, five dollars back on an$18 purchase is a significant amount of money. It's a it's you know, the psychology behind that's a little different than saying whatever it ends up being 24%, 26%, whatever that number is, off is still enough to catch your attention, but five dollars, there's a a directness to saying, you know, yeah, this comes right back to you. So um I think of you can absolutely see why that would increase uh basket size there, especially if you're able to shop for the rest of your of your dinner at the same time. Mechanically, though, how are those rebates delivered? And if we if we get too deep in the weeds here, forgive me, but it you know, um rebates are are a brilliant uh incentive mechanism, um, but they have had a tendency to come with some hooks and barbs that probably aren't optimal. How does Swiftly handle that?

SPEAKER_01 19:52

Yeah, good uh good question. Um so specifically, we're beer, wine, and spirits is a regulated industry. And so in most states, it's prohibited um by law for a manufacturer to offer that discount and for it to come off at the register. And that's because of the the three-tier beverage system that we have. And so, in order to be compliant with the law, what most manufacturers would offer um kind of before a platform like ours was mail-in rebates, where you might have a neck hanger on the bottle, and then you gotta somehow get the label off the bottle plus the receipt, put it in the post uh uh mail, and you get a check later. Um, and what we've done is digitized that experience where I can just uh clip a digital rebate in the retailer's mobile application or website, enter my phone number at the register, just like any other promotion that might run. And then usually it's by the time you actually get to your car in the parking lot, you've got a push notification and an email letting you know that you've got your cash available and you can cash out to PayPal or uh Venmo.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

Immediately, that's a big deal.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

Yeah. So there's some interesting things about the mechanics in there. Um, one is we actually do think that you see a bigger basket lift on the cashback versus if you did it as an instant redeemable. Um, and we have some pretty good tests for this because there are some states where we we are allowed to do instant redeemable on uh alcohol. And I think that there's some sort of consumer psychology around knowing that I'm gonna get that money back later that makes consumers more comfortable spending more in that existing trip. And that sounds kind of counterintuitive because you're like getting the money back later, but you spend more. Um, but I think people appreciate that idea of like banking um uh a currency that they're gonna get back at a later time. And um, you know, I don't really know why that is, but it's something that we see in the data that just, you know, consumers respond very, very well to it. Um, you do need to make sure that you're you've got a reliable platform and that when consumers are expecting to get that money, they're getting that money. So you don't want to disappoint them with, you know, oh, I forgot that I need to also buy the steak as part of that deal. Right. Um and and so those kinds of reminders and and helping the consumer to be really clear about what they need to do to take advantage of it, super important. But if that meets the consumer expectation, it's really, really sticky and they spend quite a bit more.

SPEAKER_00 22:31

Interesting. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm super interested in the the deeper mechanics of the program because we we explore a lot of those, frankly, and um have a have a sense of the what's underneath the hood, how it's working, and uh would love to have a sidebar with you or your someone on your team just understand how Squilfie does that. Does so uh just to push that a little bit further, someone buys the bottle of wine, it qualifies for the rebate. Um, they check out, they get a notification in their phone by the time they get to the to the car. Uh the funds are already sitting there at that point, um, which is kind of a big deal. Like that's a differentiator for for what you're doing. Do they go into a Swiftly wallet? Do they go into the the merchant's loyalty uh program account? Or how does that work?

Modern Grocery Tech Stack And Personalization

SPEAKER_01 23:28

Call through the merchant's uh loyalty program account. So a great place for customers to try a couple of different um experiences that that we power. If uh you go to Target um and uh shop their um uh beer, wine, and spirits with their circle offers, uh we power all of the cashback offers there. And with Target, you're gonna be able to clip those offers, especially if you're doing a delivery purchase or a pickup purchase with um Target. The offers appear right next to the product, which makes it super, super easy to clip that rebate. Um, and then you're gonna um get that as soon as you either check out at the register um or you uh sign for your um uh your delivery. Another really good example, uh oh, and the way that you get that that uh rebate is you're gonna get an email that uh lets you know that your cache is available. Um another great place to experience it is with uh Circle K. And you can go to any of the Circle K convenience stores around the country, except for the four states where it's uh five states where it's prohibited. Um so sorry, Texans um and uh North Carolinans. Um but um uh there you're able to uh clip any of the rebates within the mobile application, and then there's a widget within the mobile app that's got your your wallet, and you can cash out to PayPal or Venmo right from within the mobile application. Right then. Retailers have some choice in how they um can express that back to the customer. But we think that's one of the things that's that's super important from the retailer perspective is ultimately that's the opportunity for retailers to really remind the shoppers of the savings and the value that they're delivering, bring shoppers back to their digital ecosystem, and have a really great kind of post-purchase uh delight experience. And you know, nothing is more delightful than uh you bought something and hey, here's the money back. Right.

SPEAKER_00 25:23

Right. Yeah, even better. So I want to zoom out actually way out. Um, because you're a CTO and um you probably have a view to this kind of thing, but the modern grocery technology stack, and and maybe I should remove the word modern because you know, as someone who deals with a lot of mid-size regionals, you see a lot of tech that's not modern. But but you know, let's uh if you could at a high level design what a modern mid-size grocery, regional grocer tech stack would look like, at least on the on a customer facing side, what would that stack what would what would be in it? And and what would let me rephrase that, what would be in it that's not there typically?

SPEAKER_01 26:19

Yeah, so let me take that from the customers the consumer experience standpoint first, and then the technology standpoint that it takes to get there second. Um you know, you made a comment a couple of episodes ago about personalization being, you know, a really big uh buzzword. And I think the reason is we see it in a lot of the data that it's necessary, and that shows up as shorter and shorter attention spans. The propensity of a shopper to go to your digital experiences and bounce is going up and up and up. And I don't know if it's TikTok or Walmart or what it is, but something has trained the consumer to really expect value that's relevant to them on the you know, first um, you know, couple of scrolls of uh the experience that they're launching. And so personalization is really, really important in being able to figure out is this the customer that's coming in for diapers and formula, or the customer that's coming in for six pack of beer, or maybe the new dad that's coming in for both, uh, or somebody that's coming in to make a really nice Valentine's Day dinner. So you need to understand that and you need to be able to show the shopper that relevant content. Um, otherwise, if you have to spend too much time hunting, uh, the shoppers don't have the attention span to do that anymore. And that's a big change from back in 2016, 2017, 2018, people had, especially your discount-focused shoppers, had a whole lot more uh tolerance um for a bad experience and hunting for the deals. But that sort of like treasure hunting experience is a lot less, um, there's a lot less people that do it today. And so from the the retailer standpoint, what does that mean? It means that I need to have the infrastructure that supports that kind of personalization. I need some way for my shoppers to be able to identify at the register. So if I don't have some sort of a coupon program or a points-based loyalty program, that is really an investment that I need to start uh looking at so that I can start to get individualized data on my shoppers so that I can deliver a personalized experience for them. That's the biggest barrier. If I can actually solve for that, then there's platforms like ours that once you've got that data, the personalization aspect can actually be quite plug and play. And what I would say there is, as you're thinking about that tech stack, you do want to find somebody that's got a lot of experience in grocery. And the reason is there's a lot of sort of personalization platforms out there, but many of them take a very um, you get a software application, not a solution. And what I mean by that is they are depending upon you as the retailer to build up all the data to deliver those personalized offers to shoppers. And so to that software application, Coca-Cola and um uh hint water are both just UPCs in a system. It doesn't know the connotations behind what's a hint water buyer versus what's a Coca-Cola buyer. And if you don't your personalization system should be able to look at those two products, understand what that means, what does that mean about the customer, and how do I deliver more relevant content based upon those purchase trends? And if you're a large enterprise that's got decades of purchase data, then you can train your own system from scratch to do that. But if I'm an independent or a regional, I probably don't even have enough data to be able to train that kind of a system. And so I need to be looking at working with a platform that's got a lot of that training already done. And I can take advantage of that output and really differentiate and excel on the things that make my store unique: the prepared food section, the meats, the produce, right? The perimeter of the store, um, the biggest discounts that I'm bringing back for each week that are gonna be the things that are unique to my store versus anybody else's.

SPEAKER_00 30:39

We do a fair amount of research with another company um gauging customer expectations across a bunch of verticals. And um each vertical has its own nuances, but you can say without any hesitation that there is a widening gap between what customers expect, because it's always growing and changing, versus where most companies um uh think their customers' expectations are. And um that widening gap presents you know challenges but also presents opportunities. In and we've spoken to a handful of uh I would say many uh technology providers that that uh have some component of their uh of their solution that offers personalization, but in light of the of the kinds of findings that we see in that research, a retailer really needs to be able to recalibrate what those expectations are on an ongoing almost real-time basis because customer expectations shift that fast. You know, introduction of a new product, introduction of a new service, introduction of how an adjacent competitor is servicing them. And uh, and those things aren't static. And I wonder, you know, I think as you said, uh a smaller or mid-size retailer uh probably won't have the wherewithal to pull that off. They won't have the historical data to pull it off, wouldn't know where to point the system. Um all of which is leading to another one of these compound questions, which is uh in in Swiftly's world, uh, how do you um account for that inevitable changing, shifting, growing of customer expectations?

SPEAKER_01 32:32

You know, you you really have to just stay at the forefront of what our customer is looking for. And I think one of our kind of um secret weapons in that is we have an internal uh customer experience research team. And so they um are always out in the market. They're working with our existing um uh retailers, as well as sometimes we do studies for retailers that are coming onto our platform. And they're surveying their real customers. They're doing usability labs in the actual stores with real shoppers and sitting with them, going through their phone, the different applications that they're using, understanding what works and what doesn't, what uh do customers actually appreciate, and using that to get a very, very boots on the ground, highly tactical view of what is it that shoppers like and what makes their day easier. And I think that's one of the things that's easy to get lost is it's really easy for a retailer to kind of go after the really whiz-bang flashy features, and then you know, forget things like gosh, when I'm in line, it really sucks that it takes four seconds for my loyalty card to load while everybody's sitting here waiting for me to scan my barcode.

SPEAKER_00 33:50

Right.

AI Shopping Agents In Two Years

SPEAKER_01 33:51

And, you know, that's gotta be instant. And so, you know, getting commerce right is like hard because all of commerce is kind of like one big edge case, and well put you know, there's like a thousand of these little details that it's all about getting those things right. And so, you know, you really do want to have a very, very consistent pulse on your customers. Just like when you talk to a regional grocer, they're gonna know who are the up-and-coming brands, they're gonna know what are the things that customers are really interested in. They're gonna have their finger on trends like how is GLP1 shifting what consumers are are purchasing. You want somebody that's really taking that same approach to what are your shoppers looking at digitally? How many shoppers are actually shopping and buying on Chat GPT versus doing research versus going to you know a recipe site? What does that kind of consumer behavior look like? Because that's a space that's evolving incredibly rapidly. Um and you know, just because you did research a week ago doesn't mean that the same thing is true this week.

SPEAKER_00 34:55

No. Um, so you just you just gave me a beautiful segue into a conversation that will easily take us another couple of hours to fully unpack. But you know, um AI is changing everything, every single sector, every layer within every sector is being affected, uh, sometimes with brilliant results, sometimes with really scary results and everything in between. But from where you sit with a view to these technologies that are around and evolving right now, what do you think grocery retail technology uh is gonna look like? I was gonna say in five years, but that's ridiculous. In two years, what will be what will we will we be experiencing as retailers and then as customers in two years that we're not now?

Closing And A Part Two Tease

SPEAKER_01 35:45

You know, we're seeing greater and greater adoption of people leveraging um AI agents and large language models as part of their shopping and planning. And I think it's really important to figure out what are the trends that are gonna shift quickly and what are the things that are gonna take a little bit longer. And you know, I think there was an initial big knee-jerk reaction on, oh my god, Walmart and Instacart, they're all doing checkout through Chat GPT. So, you know, every retailer sort of felt like I need to be there. And, you know, what we're seeing from a data standpoint is um consumers are are a little bit struggling with that experience, and that hasn't driven the kind of volume. And I think there's even been a couple of articles um on the Walmart side about um about that not taking off as fast as they expected and the conversion rate not being quite as as uh robust um is when shoppers click out to their site. And when you think about that, like when you look at a chat bot, the chat bot sort of tells you what you're asking, right? It has a conversation with you. It doesn't tell you everything about the product. It's not the PDP, it's not the sort of branded manufacturer's merchandising and storytelling around the product. And when you look at how consumers want to shop and what are they looking for, in a lot of cases, they want to be pointed in a direction and then do a lot of their own assimilation of the information from there. You know, people want to be able to go back to that source material. And so, you know, when you look at where we're gonna be in in kind of three to five years, I think the paradigms of how people interact, there's still a lot yet to be settled. What's that gonna look like? Is that gonna be a window inside some sort of a chat uh box? Is that gonna be sort of a a video interaction that um uh we're all having? I I don't think anybody knows. But what I think is gonna be really important from the retailer standpoint is to have the right connections to be able to play in that ecosystem. Um, because one thing that's certainly true is if I've got a consumer that's using Chat GPT to come up with um a modified dinner recipe um uh or for meal inspiration or meal prep, um, I do want Chat GPT to know that my store exists, to know what's in stock, to know what the prices are, so that as it tries to help those consumer plans, I can be part of that conversation. And the the digital world remembered is that my brick and mortar store exists and you're not relying on the consumer to bring that knowledge to Chat GPT and to input that on your on your behalf. And so, you know, when you think about what does that mean for the regional grocer, you know, I would it's not so important to be at the forefront of every trend, but it is really important to make sure that you have the infrastructure that you're part of those conversations.

SPEAKER_00 38:50

Love it. Sean, this has been amazing. I um I easily could extend this, as I said, another couple hours as there really is an awful lot to talk about here. Um and and in fact, before I say a final thank you for for doing this, I I would love to do a part two where we can explore those topics because I think the the deeper we can get into them, the better everybody is, and you have a unique perspective because of where you sit. So love to. I'll be my people will be bothering your people. Let me put it that way.

SPEAKER_01 39:23

Very good.

SPEAKER_00 39:24

So Sean Turner is co-founder and CTO at Swiftly. It's uh it's a dynamic um organization. You can look at their news briefs and see there's an awful lot going on. But even beyond that, what they're doing in grocery uh for mid sized regional grocers, sea stores is pretty special. So we'll continue to follow them and encourage you to do that as well. And Sean, thank you so much.