Retailgentic | Consumer Behavior & Retail Trend

Kartik Hosanagar wears a lot of hats: Wharton professor, serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and now co-founder of an applied AI lab building simulation tools for AI search. Scot and Kartik land in almost exactly the same place on where agentic commerce is heading, but they get there from opposite directions: Scot on gut and operator instinct, Kartik on research. The result is a wide-ranging conversation about treating AI as a customer, the levels of agentic commerce, and what brands should actually be doing this week, this quarter, and this year.

Highlights:
  • AI is a new customer category: Once shopping goes agentic, Kartik argues you have to ask of AI what you ask of any customer: how do we inform it, persuade it, and what biases does it have? 
  • The driverless-car model: Agentic commerce has levels 0–5, just like autonomous vehicles. Level 5 is “buy the shoe and make sure it arrives in a week” hands-off; Instacart-style automation and AI-enabled discovery are lower levels and we’re already in the era.
  • The funnel got outsourced: Top-of-funnel work customers used to do themselves like discovering brands and building a consideration set is now done by AI, so shoppers arrive far later in the funnel. Discovery is “fundamentally transformed.”
  • 4 words → 60 words: From his CommerceNext keynote, average search went from about four words on Google to about 60 words on the first ChatGPT turn, then multi-turn. Nobody types “men’s running shoes” anymore; shoes show up on conversation turn seven.
  • UCP, ACP and the protocol wars: Kartik explains Google’s UCP (product feeds today, transactions later), why OpenAI backed off ACP instant checkout, and reads Amazon joining UCP as “testing the waters,” not a strategy reversal
  • Counterfactual simulations: Bodhium builds “digital twins” of ChatGPT and Gemini and spins up virtual worlds where your site looks different, testing a thousand hypotheses in minutes to find what makes AI answers more accurate and favorable. Market research, but for AI.
  • The today / this quarter / this year roadmap: Now: audit conversations, visibility, and which bots read your site. This quarter: build simulators and a UCP/MCP workstream. This year: scale it with agentic workflows. 
  • Two front doors: Kartik doesn’t think websites disappear, but “a website is not the right front door for an agent.” Expect a human web door and an MCP door for agents, plus omnichannel behavior where each feeds the other.
Kartik calls himself an "agentic commerce maximalist," and after this conversation you'll see why... the research and the gut instinct point the same direction. Enjoy the conversation.

Timestamps:
03:04 Welcome: the "renaissance man" background problem
03:49 Kartik's cocktail-party version: academic + entrepreneur, Yodle
04:36 The Yodle / Milo mobile-social-local era (and Fidji at OpenAI)
06:05 Wharton AI Center and what Kartik researches
07:37 The thesis: AI search is more than another channel
10:08 Defining agentic commerce: the driverless-car levels
12:34 UCP, Gemini, and why Amazon joined
15:55 Amazon vs. Walmart strategies (Rufus vs. Sparky)
16:29 Bodhium Labs: what it is
17:00 The AEO/GEO problem: guesswork and the Reddit trap
18:56 Research-led counterfactual simulations
21:02 The long tail: multi-turn conversations replace keywords
22:49 CommerceNext keynote: 4 words to 60 words
24:57 The "AI is just another channel" misconception
26:48 Shopper trust: high for discovery, not for checkout
28:15 You can't fully control what AI thinks about you
30:51 The roadmap: today, this quarter, this year
34:41 Rufus, Sparky, UCP, and MCP endpoints
36:37 Does agentic commerce grow the pie or shift it?
38:32 Do we still need websites? Two front doors
40:39 Where to find Kartik: LinkedIn and Substack

👉 Connect with Kartik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kartik-hosanagar-22272115/
👉 Learn more about A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0525560882?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback
👉 Visit his substack: https://hosanagar.substack.com/

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Creators and Guests

Host
Scot Wingo
CEO and Co-founder, ReFiBuy.ai

What is Retailgentic | Consumer Behavior & Retail Trend?

Retailgentic explores consumer behavior and retail trends to help brands and retailers innovate. Join Scot Wingo for expert insights, actionable news, and ecommerce innovation strategies to navigate the future of retail and agentic commerce.