“If you’re buying a bike for $3,500 that you’re going to use every day,” Moore told me, “and you have this AI coach who walks through with you exactly what you might need, based on all of these specifications, maybe you’re willing to throw an extra $50 that way, versus if you’re buying a $50 sweater, you’re probably not going to be willing to pay the AI.”
Another consideration is attribution. Moore relayed the use case of high school and college-age girls who subscribe to ChatGPT Pro predominantly to help them identify the outfits (or dupes) worn by celebrities or influencers that they’ve seen on TikTok and that they want to purchase. OpenAI likely isn’t getting financial credit for its role in that transaction, because the old ways of tracking purchase credit through cookies and last-click attribution largely don’t work in this new world.
But that could be a big startup opportunity too, Rampell said.
“If you actually conduct your shopping in ChatGPT [in the future], then no [webpage] is being rendered potentially,” he said. “So there’s an opportunity to completely rewrite this—for a startup to do that, partially because you can’t be a combatant and Switzerland. And what I mean by that is, sure it would make sense for ChatGPT or Gemini to [tell brands or retailers to] use our attribution system, but they’re combatants too.”
Data sets focused on product specifications and product reviews could also serve as a new battleground for innovation and competition.
“We’ve actually started to see startups say, ‘I’m going to have an agent look for every video…hashtagged with this thing,” Moore said, “and transcribe that video, pull out the product-related information…and add it to their knowledge base so that’s their differentiated layer to pull from when recommending products.”
At a high level, Rampell said that the VC firm is taking a patient approach on the consumer side, “kind of waiting for something to really show traction, as opposed to us trying to outsmart the market.”
“No matter how this takes off,” Rampell added, “there’s a lot of infrastructure that needs to change.”
We’ll see you next week,
