Creativity at 200 MPH: Thriving in the AI Agency Era

Matt O'Daly joins Jamie to explore how agencies are adapting to AI. From changing team roles to delivering hyper-personalized experiences. Discover what it takes to stay creative and competitive at 200 MPH in today’s ecommerce landscape.

Discover what Ultra Commerce can do to bring your customers' experiences to the next level:
👉 https://ultracommerce.co/platform/experience-composer

And check out how SQLI masters customer experiences:
👉 https://www.sqli.com/int-en

Creators and Guests

Host

Jamie Schouren

CMO at Ultra Commerce

Guest

Matt O'Daly

Delivery and Strategy Director at SQLI

What is The Ultra Commerce Podcast?

The Ultra Commerce Podcast offers practical insights tailored for both B2B and B2C eCommerce operators and developers. Each episode features expert guests who break down real-world strategies and share success stories from the digital commerce space. The show places a strong emphasis on the operational side of eCommerce, focusing on systems architecture, fulfillment, and data orchestration, going beyond just marketing and storefront design. Hosted by Jamie Schouren, she invites guests to deep-dive into the complex world of digital commerce, exploring the strategies that power successful eCommerce operations. If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of enterprise eCommerce from systems architecture to fulfillment and data orchestration; this podcast offers smart and actionable content in an accessible format.

Jamie (00:00.152)
Hello everyone and welcome back again to already the fourth episode of our podcast for Ultra Commerce. Today we have a very special guest. We have someone you might know from Magento, from agencies, from the Shopify world, from many different worlds in e-commerce. His name is Matt Odali. And Matt, please introduce yourself.

Thank very much. Pleasure to be here. So as you said, I'm Matt O'Daley and I am the delivery and technology strategy director at SQLI. My background is all e-commerce. I grew up in the music industry, building e-commerce business with a record label, moved over to Magento, which became Adobe, and then did a brief sin over Spotify. And now I'm at SQLI and I've been there for about two and a half years.

Yeah, really, really nice. I'm sorry, just a chopper fight, but obviously it's Spotify. Music is in your heart. You're not building stores only, you're also building guitars.

100%. Yeah, that's in my spare time. I am a luthier. So I build guitars. I've made them for people all over the world. I've been doing that for about 10 years now. And I think it's good because it's like, you know, we live in like a 200 mile an hour world and building guitars is a 500, is a five mile an hour sport. Right? So it's very slow. It's very deliberate. It kind of just rolls, rolls off makes

It gets you nice and focused. it's a nice break from like 200 miles an hour agency world and then five miles an hour. Nice and calm, super fun, super focused, a world of building guitars.

Jamie (01:37.996)
Yeah, I think they're amazing. I've seen some of your work. Obviously our friend David has some of you, but I think it's absolutely beautiful work. But you mentioned like agency world is 200 miles an hour and it's going more faster every day. Of course, with all the AI stuff happening, agencies are also moving faster. We see them product world. We see so many fast things happening there. We see new product development showing up every day.

But sometimes I wonder like, how is this going in agency world? Like, are there really already e-commerce shops or contacting the agencies and asking like, hey, you know, what can you do for me? Or do they have a plan already? Like, how do you see this development going on?

Well, mean, good starting question really. To me, what I see in the landscape is I see a lot of customers who they know they need to, they just don't know how they should. Right? So they understand that there's an absolute need to keep up and that they know they have to embrace this technology. But a lot of them don't really know where they should apply it and where they should be, what they should be focusing on first. know, it's that horrible question when someone says to you, okay, you can do anything.

And then you, then you struggle to figure out what you should do. Right. And so we're trying to do is focus the conversation, right? So we want to focus in on things like personalization and increase in sales is like the number one top priority. think it's where you get the most bang for your buck. So things like AI optimization. So people are changing the way that they search things online. So rather than just going to Google and looking for something they're saying like, you Hey Siri, or you go to chat GPT and say, Hey, can I buy this thing for my mom?

It's her 70th birthday and here's what the thing she likes. And then it's returning you the ideas and the suggestions that you should be maybe looking at. And what it really means now is that our customers have to really dive into that and say, well, how do we make sure that we are top of that result? So it's kind of like, you know, way back when people looking at SEO and wanting to be the top of the Google search is like, well, actually, no, now you need to be top of your chat GBT search. You need to be the one that's getting the first return.

Matt (03:44.102)
Why are you the best? Why are you the most relevant? So it's about enriching product data, telling us telling the right story within your product data online, and then making sure that that is then reflected out into the customer that wants to buy something. Right. So we're really focusing in on that direction as, just a start up because I feel like it's where you're going to get the easiest, not the easiest, I guess the we're going to get the fastest win and the most engaging win.

after that. then after that, think once you kind of looked at that, we start looking at, well, how can you make things more efficient for customers? can you make sure they are doing things in the, automating their workflows? How are you making sure things like returns or refunds processed without somebody having to go in and manually do it? Those kinds of things are the next part to work on is how can you make the workplace more efficient? And then it's about where do you see...

But then after that, sorry, it's where you then see what's the next layer down. Is it a product? Is it helping your people further or is it engaging your customers more? I'm starting at that top bit. How do you optimize for AI? And then after that, how do you optimize for efficiency? And then we'll see where we go after that.

So when you would look at your current, as an agency, your current portfolio, how many of these companies, like as in presented, is it like half of them, only 10%, 100 % asking about these topics?

100 % of them are asking and they all want to have the conversation. As I said at the start, they know they need to, they just don't know how they should be having the conversation or what they should be doing. And so they're looking to us for like really focused consultancy and help them build the strategy to deal with the evolving landscape. that, you know, when you're kind of deep in your own business looking at, know, how do I get more people to sell? Sometimes you don't have the time or the space to look at

Matt (05:43.306)
AI or new technologies and things like that. So that's why they come to us because we're, you know, we're going to be able to help them and then point them in the right direction.

So do you talk a lot like as an agency, of course, you your partner, your partners, your product partners are very important here because, you know, not all of them, all of them are building it. I mean, it should be building it at least all of them are working on it, but you know, it's not ready yet or they're not publishing it yet, you know, but they should be getting the conversation going with you because they should let you know like, Hey agency, my dear partner agency, this is what I'm building.

Because we all know implementing takes time and so, you know, it doesn't have to be fully ready today to be able to already work with a customer. Is it something that you see happening or product companies reaching out to you, letting them know what they're building or you're getting overwhelmed by it?

I wouldn't say they're coming to us like, hey, knocking on our door, this is what we've got. I mean, we get a few, but not as many as I would have thought would be knocking on the door. And I think that's because there's so much noise from that viewpoint, is that it's really difficult to then understand what's good, what are the products that actually work. And I think there's a hesitance as well to commit to a product or a service to do with AI.

Because sometimes you just don't know, that going to be the right one? Is that one going to fall away in the next six months, year, two years, three years? And so then you've invested the time, but then you haven't got the product any longer. As with anything, it's a boom at the start. And then you kind of need a lot of the noise to fall away in order for something to kind of make sense and present itself as the leader or the right solution. what I'm not seeing is like the leaders, I guess, in a product sense. There's lots of them.

Matt (07:29.048)
but who's the leader? know, if you look at just the AI agents, it's like, you've got Chachi BT, you've got Gemini, you've got Claude, Opus. There's so many to choose from. Well, who is the leader? Who is the best one? Well, it's difficult to tell. You can be using all of the services, but it's difficult to tell which one is giving you the best experience.

I agree. see, you know, I sometimes see this post on LinkedIn where they are, you know, comparing these that they also question to Gemini, to OpenAI, to OpenAI. And then they show like, hey, you know, this is the results and this is a better result. But it doesn't mean that, you know, when you ask them, let's say a question about geography and one cannot answer right. And the other one can, it doesn't mean that that is the, then, you know, by default, the best solution also to do commerce things. And we just had a podcast.

The one before this one, we talked about hyper personalization. And that is something that we as ultra commons are diving deep into now. How can we deliver the right product to the right person at the right moment? And actually giving merchants the tools to be able to do that, to really hyper personalize what is going on. Because I think that is where a lot of value comes in when you are like a...

a retailer and you know your customer now much better. People ask questions or tell their chats, let's say the chat bot so much more about themselves that they do. They sometimes even do that as a partner. We've seen these things in the medical field. People are saying weird stuff too. Not weird, but know.

I've seen people using it to like, you know, have conversations with their partner or treat it like a psychotherapist or something like that. They're using it in such deep ways that like, almost think there's an expectation now when you either use the tool or you visit a site or you want to do something online, that it is personalized, that it has to be. And you're almost surprised when it's not. Why is it not personalized to me? Why does it not know what I want? I think it's an expectation rather than a like a

Matt (09:29.452)
are nice to have, people expect it will, and I think that's fair.

Yeah. And I even saw this weird thing that people are doing and I'm saying it's weird, but it's actually, think pretty smart that people are like cataloging their house. So they'll like make a catalog of their like clothes. They send a picture of every item and they send it to chat. And then they ask them, Hey, I have like a business meeting or a lunch or it's, and this is the weather outside. What should I wear? And the chat, you know, gives them opportunities. even saw a person doing that with their fridge. So they made like all inventory and asked like, Hey, what

What do I have? What is missing? What do I need to buy? And I think these are amazing opportunities. When people are doing this, showing you what they have in the house, you obviously also know what is missing in the house, like cleaning products or all these kinds of things. And I think this hyper-personalization, really getting that look into someone's life and house is something that we tried before, but never has been there on this level. I think that is a true revolution that is happening. But how do you...

I mean, as an agency, think there's so many different customers that you work with. have different types of product. How do you navigate that world and not sell them all the same thing? Because then obviously, you know, they're going to compete with each other. what is, you know, how do you navigate that one? How do you keep up?

have you keep up? I think that's a challenge for absolutely everybody. I think to some extent you almost don't. You can't look at everything all at once. So the way that I try to do it is I'm just always asking everybody what tools do use? How are you using them? Why do you use it in that way? I'm forever asking people to show me how you've done this thing. built this AI chatbot or you did this. Show me how you did that. Walk me through all of the steps, what tools to use.

Matt (11:16.194)
To me, that's the only way of keeping up is because you have to see the real world examples rather than seeing like, like just kind of looking on a news article or something, or this is a new product or a product launch. I just, I don't think you get enough. You have to see the real world. So I think to me, it's about asking questions of, know, when you see it or you ask this, mean, how have they done that? And then getting them to explain that, it back to you. And then how could I apply that to my life? How could I apply that to my work or a customer, et cetera, et cetera.

But I think for when we, when we start to look at, how do we navigate that for customers? It's all about looking at what's their solution. What do they have currently? And then what are they trying to actually achieve? So much like you said, you don't want to offer them all the same thing. This isn't cookie cutter. It's about bring them personalization. And that goes to even goes as deep as to what we're doing with the customer. It's not about cookie cutter here, fire and forget. Here's a product, just go use this thing and everything will be fine. It's okay. Well, there's a nexus point of an idea and you got, okay, there's this thing.

How do we then make that work for you? How does it apply to your architecture, to your landscape, to your customer? And so we're trying to get really deep into the consultancy side of this, making sure that our customers feel like any solution is coming out, that based in AI or whatever product is unique to them, their customer, and their goals. I think that's more important than ever. In a world where you can just ask AI, we're all.

do everything for you. Like sometimes you forget to ask why or how and like you know kind of actually connect with somebody on a human level. So you can use the tools but it's understanding why they're there and what they're supposed to do for you.

So has your world changed then in the agency world? Like from a website builder and something to more like a new creative consultant?

Matt (13:01.326)
I think it's changing, I'm trying to think of the best way to answer the question because it is changing, but there's also a lag, I guess, in the agency world. And that lag exists, I wouldn't say necessarily amongst the developers or the technical people, but that lag exists to the business people where sometimes there's a fear of AI or a mistrust of it.

This person's using AI for everything. I'm not sure if that's the right thing for me. And I think a lot of it comes down to how can you convince the business side of things to come along on the journey with you? And then once they're convinced, it's like an avalanche and it really works. But I think for us, like how we're adjusting is, is trying to get people to understand the tool first. You know, everybody says, we're AI first or people are saying you're AI first or whatever, but what does that actually mean? You know, I was listening to a podcast, the other

weeks ago with I think it's the the CTL at Shopify and you know they are an amazing AI first organization in terms of how they develop. Now one of the things that he said is we're not we're now expecting people to turn up with their LLM like if you just turn up as just you that's not enough if you just turn up with your AI that's not enough both of you have to turn up right and they're expecting you to like be there and use the tools and if you're if you're not using the tools they're seeing that as a failure.

And so the first thing as an agency is to get your people using the tools and to understand why they're amazing, why they're going to bring value. And the second part is, okay, how can you translate that to your customers? And then that's where the shift starts because then you start going more, okay, if I can deliver something 10 times faster, how do I monetize for that? How do I make that work for me as an agency? how do you kind of price that model up because you're now no longer perhaps developing. You're not really writing.

code, maybe you're 20 % of the code and the other 80 % is all being done for you. So you then start, it's like the problem, not problem, but the challenge cascades because it's like, okay, you've got the tool, it's now doing most of the work for you, but you still have to understand what it's outputty and you have to be able to challenge it and you have to be able to understand what it's doing at a line level code. then once you've got that, you're then like,

Matt (15:21.59)
Is my output what I wanted originally? And so your skillset is changing. You know, I think it's harder than ever to be a junior developer because you're lacking sometimes those scars that more seasoned developers have got and are able to use these tools and then quickly identify what's going on. It must be a lot harder to kind of get up to speed if you're just using the tool from the get-go because you may not have that deep level understanding.

Well, that's a challenge, but I think it's, know, you're the changing resource profiles, you're changing tooling, you're changing a way of working. Like there's so many things that end up getting changed and you can't just flip the table. You have to kind of start in one place. And I think that starts with enable the tools, like make sure people have got access that they understand his, how you work or how we would like you to work and then start from there.

Do you use LLM's in your daily life?

I am dipping my toe personally. started to get more into how do I make my life more efficient, especially at work. Using co-pilot, I scan my inbox every morning. What's the most important thing? Can you write me agendas or notes for meetings that I'm going to be attending? What did I miss yesterday? What did I miss the day before? Those kinds of things and trying to make sure, as soon as I get in, it's delivered to me. There's an overview and I can start building.

building a way of working. So I'm trying to embrace them from a more of a business perspective. I think once I start embracing it, my team then starts to embrace and starts to see. And then I feel like I'm like, this is how I'm using it. This is what I'm going to do. Like, why didn't you try this? Like, I'm definitely trying to do it. I think if you're not trying, you're probably going to get left behind. So you need to be involved and you need to be doing it.

Jamie (17:07.566)
Sometimes I think like, maybe it's a good thing, know, like the generation happens, you know, when everybody was switching to smartphones and apps and that kind of stuff. need like a new generation who hasn't done the old way, you know, to doing it because they can natively, you know, they natively learn and experience this. And I think sometimes I'm wondering like, hey, would the best way to, to enable this within a team and to speed things up is to just get a bunch of juniors.

know, juniors as in years that they have, but you know, they're probably much more experienced with the AI tools out there in maybe not today, but like in the next few months, maybe next year, you know, we're getting these, these kids that come from school that are natively, you know, they wrote a whole thesis with chat, nobody touched like a normal keyboard anymore, you know, and they, shouldn't we get them on? Shouldn't we get like their opinion there? And they, is that a way to enable them to fast track this within your teams?

I think that I think you're a hundred percent right. And that you're more junior level person is going to be, they're much more open to using the What's the, as I said, like the resource profile is changing, right? The experience is still required, but sometimes that experience comes with what I said about the lag is that they're reticent to use the tool because it's like, that's not my way of working. That's not what I do. That's not, that's not my value. I think you have to start with the people that are really willing to change and be like, yeah, cool. So if that's juniors, great, get them in.

Let's get them working in a slightly different way and then see how that affects the rest of the business and how many other people take on some of this work. We've done things like challenges to our development team to build things without writing a line of code, just prompting or using like Claude code. It's amazing to watch and see how these things kind of develop, where the mistakes are and how they deal with mistakes and then the output. And I think those things like trying to...

trying to change how somebody is going to go about building something, I think is quite big. And I think you have to give people a lot of latitude in that journey, especially the old experienced heads, the juniors not so much, I think they kind of dive in. I think those things of like just challenging yourself to do things is absolutely essential. Me myself,

Matt (19:27.79)
I built a website. I've never built a website in my life. Like from scratch or anything like that. Like I'm not a coder. I don't profess to be, but I challenged myself to build a website just using prompting. used lovable, which was really good. Made a website, was done in like a few hours. It was nothing special, but again, this is me. I'm not a coder. I didn't know how to do it. And it was a, it was a fun experience, but I think only cause I was really open to it.

Yeah, I saw this thing yesterday on someone on LinkedIn, I think mentioned that like, you if you, that project managers in the future and not in the future, in the very near future, every project manager should be able now with AI to make their own, to make their own proof of concept. So, you know, they should be able to make demos without needing that team now, because you can do that with AI now. You can just show a customer what you mean and what you're trying to achieve without having a full development team there.

So you were running a website, it's a bit different, but you know what I mean. Like you just have to get your hands dirty now. And project managers, pure managers roles are changing because we don't need that anymore. Pure coders are going to change because that's not something that we need. Designers, the same content writers, the same, you need to get above that level and trying to get a vision, a vision. And that's what you need to build because that is what is going to distinguish us from AI, which is actual intelligence.

You know, like AI is artificial intelligence, but for me, real intelligence is also about creativity and, you know, making new connections rather than just, you know, gathering a bunch of information and putting it together. And I think that is where we as humans, maybe more in general, win from AI for now.

I couldn't agree more. I love data and I love how AI works and how it uses data. But I think if you just look at data, you're only going to get what you've always got because it's based on the past. It's based on things that have happened. And I think if you're using AI and then the human is attached to it, I think that's where the creativity keeps moving forward. It doesn't stop. You then have access to all of the data that you could ever need. And then you can layer in your creativity over the top of that.

Matt (21:40.622)
without having to have understood and know about every single little thing that's come before you. So I think what it does, it ends up speeding you up. It speeds you to creativity a lot faster. I used to kind of say to my friends, like, is data killing creativity, right? I used to feel like that for a long, long, time, right? It was killing creativity. And now I feel like it's actually accelerating creativity.

because it's taking that learning curve and it's almost like slashing it and saying like, you don't know, you don't have to go through all that hardship. can just do. The only danger there is, as I said earlier, is that you kind of don't know how or why it's done something. So you kind of miss this like middle part, which, you know, maybe that's a really like old thing to say now in a year's time, maybe we'll just be saying, well, who cares how or why it's done thing, all that matters is what it did at the end and that's fine.

So you kind of, might miss the process, but do you really need it? I guess is the question.

I don't think so. don't think you don't need to understand. mean, you need to understand the customer, what you're doing, but you don't need to understand every single bit of it. You know, I can drive my car kind of fine, I think. Some people might have a different opinion about that, but I don't know, you know, how the mechanics work. But you know, I get there, I get to the destination. And I think, you know, these things are, and especially e-commerce, which is very competitive, we need to be result driven. We don't have time to experiment too much. We don't have time to wait until someone else has done it. We need to.

get things going. So what would be your advice as an agency? What is it that thing that you tell all your customers when they come to you and ask you what to do with AI?

Matt (23:17.74)
I'm always like, identify the need. Like, do you understand what your challenges are? Like, what are those challenges? Talk to me about challenges. Talk to me about things you're trying to achieve, and then we can apply solutions after. You know, the technology is like the accelerator. It's the thing that gets you there. But if you don't understand what your challenge is or where you want to go, you're just, to use the car analogy, you're just driving around. Like, and you don't really know why.

you're driving, you're just kind of going, yeah, well, this seems great. I've got all these things, but like, I don't really know why they're doing anything for me. So the first thing is, I'm like, I'm always, I'm super happy. You want to do, you want to use these tools or you want to use these products and services, but tell me why, tell me what that is going to help you do. Like what are your biggest challenges today? Where do you want to be in the next like couple of years? What's on your roadmap? And then how can you extract some of those things on somebody's roadmap? Say this, there's tools that can accelerate this.

You think that's 18 months away. Well, actually, no, it's 18 days away. So how can I shorten that time to market for you using AI tools and using these things? that's the first thing you have to understand. And you have to understand your customer. I think that's what the agencies are doing, need to change to, is need to become much more consultative, much more engaged with the customer. the danger isn't that AI will take agency jobs.

It's that if the agencies don't use, sorry, I want to make sure I this one through. The real danger isn't that AI will take the agency jobs. It's that the agencies that don't use AI will lose the clients, the ones that do. And so that's why you have to understand those challenges and how you can apply the tools. So again, what I said previously is like, how do you enable everyone to use the tools so they understand them? And then how do you get your customers to identify their challenges, their roadmaps, their vision?

And then how do you marry those two things together? I think once you, once you do that, you're kind of cooking with gas. So you can cut, could start moving forward. All the tools, but you don't really understand the challenges and somebody will apply them much better than you. If you only understand, if you only understand the tool, but you don't understand any challenges, you've got a bag of spanners, but you don't know what to use them.

Jamie (25:36.13)
Yeah. And the other way around, know, if you know your challenges, but you know how to efficiently, you know, tackle them and just stay in the old way, you're to get behind. Maybe Matt, maybe it's nice, you know, now we're getting to an end of the podcast. I would love to see if we together, maybe, you know, based on this podcast, someone that's listening would like to say like, Hey, you know, this is my company and I have certain challenges. How do I...

you know, get there and, know, with our hyper personalization tools that we're building with AI and your expertise to guide this process and to find the challenges with customers. Maybe it's nice if we find someone who wants to go on this journey with us and record it. So we talk with them every week or every few days on a podcast where we say like, Hey, this is what we're working on. This is our challenges and this is how we're going to solve it. I think that would be great to, to record the very first live.

AI implementation and share that with the world. So if someone is listening or someone in your network or my network would like to take on that challenge and see like, what can Matt and Jamie with Ultra Commerce do for us? I think that would be really amazing.

Yeah, mean, almost a live consultancy. Like, I love that. That's really, really interesting. again, like the challenge there is like, well, how do you do it? Can it only be within AI tools? How do you make that happen, you know, live and engage on that level? I'd love to do it. I think that'd be really cool.

I think that would be really cool too. So for everyone that is listening, please reach out to us, either one of us and let's do this together. Let's figure out, you know, how we're going to solve that for you. Matt, as your expert in let's call it consultancy for now, but you know, like helping you guide through your challenges, find the right solutions and then us as a product really, you know, building the right products for you. think that would be absolutely amazing. Matt, thank you so much for your time. I think you gave some really interesting insights and you know, how the future is going to look for us.

Matt (27:33.358)
from an agency perspective, from a customer perspective. We call it customers, but obviously the merchants. merchants have their own customers. How are we gonna move there? Let's see if we can get a follow-up with someone actually who wants to do it and wants to dive into it with us. It can be anonymous. You don't have to mention your business name, but let's talk about real challenges and real solutions there. And then maybe Matt, when we move fast, when things are going fully automated, you have more time to build your guitars.

Please, that would make me very happy. In a world where I'm still here chopping bits of wood with a saw, so I'm happy.

Very nice. Well, thank you very much, Matt, for joining us today. We'll get to a follow up. I'm sure we're going to find someone. Okay, thank you. Bye bye.

Nice one, thanks Jamie.