We teamed up on the Master BB series for one very important reason, to cut through the noise. It's what we saw in retail. Just talk to Sears and JC Penney and Macy's and all these other big box stores and department stores that are suffering. The reality is this is a fairly new entrant into the B2B space. What can practitioners use in the field today? How do they make decisions about the right marketing, the right platform, the right channels to sell on? Nobody knows all the answers here, so we're gonna get to the truth by having the debate. Debates. Welcome everyone to master b two b, our predictions for twenty twenty six for B2B eCommerce. My name is Brian Beck. I'm here with Andy Hoare, my cofounder and partner in the Master B2B thought leadership series and community of digital leaders throughout B2B. Andy, welcome to our session. It's gonna be an exciting one today. Did you see us at the beginning there? Was that us? That that was us. And, yes, we looked a few years younger, maybe, I don't know, four or five years ago, I suppose, at this I know. Right? We're predicting who could have predicted this is what would look like in five years? That's right. Anyway, folks, we have an action packed session for us today. And as usual, those of you who have joined us in the past for our predictions, and I think this is year four we're doing this maybe, Andy, something like that. We, you know, we we we like to start by calling ourselves out on how we did last year. So, did the things that we did, we talked about in for twenty twenty five, did they, in fact, come to pass? And here's what we said. So, you see here last year's predictions and at the percentages on the right are what you all thought during our session one year ago, whether or not you agreed with us on that prediction or not. So let's talk through these quickly, Andy. Entry level roles will morph into apprenticeships. Did that happen? What do you think? Yeah. And I'm gonna add the word unpaid in front of it because I think this went even farther than we thought. The last year, it's become pretty clear that AI has wreaked havoc on the entry level job market, but it's certainly fundamentally shifted it. And I think it is really hard now for a recent college graduate to get a job because the model already knows. The AI models know what they know, right? So I think apprenticeships might be a a generous way of describing it. Well, the unemployment rate is highest now amongst the new college graduate community. So, yes, I think we can agree in our community agreed last year and probably would agree this year as well that this is in fact come to pass. The second one was customer experience will continue to be a hot potato in a carb free world. Who owns it? Who owns it, Andy? Seventy two percent said, you know, no one's gonna own it. It's still gonna be passed around. Do we think this has happened and consistent consistent with our prediction? Well, my answer is yes. I think it will continue to be passed around. Everybody owns it. Nobody owns it. But what do you think? Absolutely. I think, you know, we asked this question at our roundtables, our summit earlier in the year. You know, it's it's the who owns the digital customer experience, who owns ecommerce. It's it's again, I think it's still a a question. We don't have a prediction on this one specifically for this year, but I think we can probably revisit this in twenty for twenty twenty seven. The next one was analytics. We'll reassert its importance in B2B in twenty twenty five. I think this has completely happened. I you know, this is this is something that all we heard throughout the year, that analytics is a top priority. We saw it in our survey results and our polls as a top priority area across our practitioner community. What do you think? We got it right, and you're right. It was quantitatively proven out by the roundtable polling that we did through the year. Multiple different roundtables, so statistically significant. The next one was the generative AI tools will get B2B executives seventy percent of the way to solving a problem. I think we are completely wrong. Gen AI is still I mean, you may disagree with me, Andy, but and our audience disagreed with me, with us. But I don't think we're close to seventy percent yet. Are you? We aren't, but I think there's an important distinction here. I think most companies are going through maybe an AI metamorphosis. And for companies that have already embraced it, like we did a run table yesterday and one of the attendees said that their company said they have to use it on average eighteen times a day. Wow. So, it's come from an edict on high. They have to use it eighteen times a day. Well, that's a company that's more metamorphosizing into an AI based company. And I'll bet for them, they're getting close to the seventy percent of solving the problems. Again, ambitious then. But for companies that have not embraced AI, oh, absolutely right. No way seventy percent of the way to do Dude, where does the eighteen times a day come from? That's sort of arbitrary. I know. But it what had did they have a meeting to discuss that number? I don't know. But that was the number. It was, like, eighteen times a day. They have to demonstrate they've used it eighteen times a day. And and if you don't use it eighteen times, you'll be demoted to an apprentice and an and an unpaid role. Anyway Yes. Yeah. Next one was AI enabled e commerce will begin to noticeably steal share from inside sales. I don't think this has happened yet, Andy. What do you think? I think it should, but it hasn't. Again, we're back to this thing. Digitally mature companies that have already embraced AI, I think they're starting to see that. But for most companies, they're not doing that yet. So this is more a commentary on the fact that companies have not warmly embraced AI in a business process sense. They love the idea of it in theory, but in reality, where it's going to change how they work, oh, that's a lot harder. And these are all predicated on that. Yeah. The last one is advancements in search will supercharge sales of long tail products. I mean, I think what we're learning is that a lot of these search providers, and we have one today to comment on as a subject matter expert about search in general and how AI is changing it. But I think this is happening that in fact AI is helping to surface these long tail products, and we are seeing some growth here. What do you think? I do too. And let's ask our special guest this question if we remember to do that. Yeah. We will. We will. Okay. Well, let's move into our our our predictions. So so as as usual, we have Nostradamus here with us to help us along the way. In fact, we have a special guest. Nostradamus is actually here with us today. We'll share more in a moment, but very exciting. So our twenty twenty six predictions is going to be available for download. We do, of course, publish this as a paper as well for everyone here, and you can read more. But we're gonna go through each of our predictions today, and and folks, we're gonna give you an opportunity to vote on whether you agree with us, and we'll reveal those at the end of each of our predictions whether or not you agreed with our prediction for next year or not. So let's go ahead and pop up our Nostradamus here and go to prediction number one. Prediction to kick one. So, Andy, I love that. I just it's so fun. Yes. Thanks, Chris Zimmerman. He's laughing. Yes. Yes. I'm I'm laughing too. The B2B search and discovery process will look completely different by the end of twenty twenty six. Completely different. Wow. What does that mean, Andy? So what's going on? Share some data, mister Data Man. Yeah. So Forrester published a really interesting report. It cited a couple of interesting statistics. So the next slide will indicate this. This one surprised me a little bit. Yeah. So we know that, you know, various levels of adoption are taking place in B2C and B2B companies. But what this data shows is that the adoption rate for Gen AI is much higher in B2B companies than is in B2C companies. I mean, maybe the point here about the person who's using it eighteen times a day is instructive. Right. But I think most people would have thought, oh, B2C is farther ahead on this than B2B. I don't think so. And Forrester says eighty nine percent of people they talk to in B2B are either using or plan to use generative AI tools in the purchase of products or services. In the purchase. So it's almost three to one. And the other piece of data that was kind of fascinating here is that the conversion rates are noticeably higher right now for early ChatGPT sales. So, if you can go to the next slide, you'll see that ChatGPT is holding its own. In fact, it's doing better than that. The conversion rate is better than direct, better than paid service. Eleven point four percent from ChatGPT. That's incredible. We're early This could vacillate. It'll probably regress to the mean and go down a little early indicators are that the conversion rates are high, which I think goes against conventional reason, which is now leading us to the last piece here before we have our special guest join us. Next slide, is that we believe that B2B sellers are going to have to really up their game around search. In particular, guided selling is going to be really important because the metaphor that's shifting here is people aren't just going to a box and entering something and waiting for a result. They're talking to chatbots, they're using facets, etcetera. So, we wanted to get a little more insight into this from somebody in the industry. So, we're really thrilled to have Sheerine Reid join us today from Coveo. So if we could bring Sheerine in, that would be great. There she is. So Sheerine is pro. She's been with us the last couple of years, and we should see how well your predictions have come to pass, Sheerine, if we're gonna hold everybody else to speak to the I'm scared, actually, if you go back and look at my track record. Hopefully, it's on point. Do you agree with us, Sheerine? That's the first question. Yes, always. Thanks for having me, by the way. So the next generation of guided selling. So what does that really mean? I always like to take a step back because I find, you know, that word AI is used a lot and it's thrown around a lot. So I like to kind of break it down a little bit and unpack it. And if we look at just AI, in essence, you know, machine learning algorithms that predict outcomes, using things like this is typically is for retrieval and ranking of products recommendations, maybe to deliver some kind of personalization. So typically, and hopefully, most B2B companies right now have that at least powering their search box, right? So that's kind of the basic one. If you look at you had a startup there around Gen AI. So Generative AI is really around you starting to use those large language models, LLM's, to create like new content. So an example that I like to give always is like, you know, if you summarize product reviews on a website, if you see those little summary, so that's generative. If you then take it to the next level, which we see popping up on a lot of sites now is that conversational AI, right? So it's more natural language dialogue. It's in the realm of AI assistants, intelligent chatbots, those kinds of things that we see around up and around. And then related to that, we have the new term that probably everybody's sick of hearing already with all the hype is Agentic AI. So it's not only able to carry on that intelligent conversation, but it's also able to like reason and act on things. And so we take it a step further, right? So what a buyer is doing, wants to do research products, compare them, and then even buy autonomously. So that's in the realm of Agentic AI. So if you lump all this stuff together, definitely agree that product discovery is going to start to look a lot different. It's not just going to be about enabling you to go on a site and searching by SKU and finding the right products. It's really, I think, going to come down to two big factors. So the first thing that we see is that conversational interfaces are going to start to go native. And what do we mean by that? It means that right now, people are still in this kind of dichotomy where they have a disjointed experience. So they have, you know, your typical product search, box up there that you can go in and write a product. And then they have these side things, these chatbots on the, that you can go in and ask a question, or it's really This is incredible. You know, Google has to kinda eat its own business model in some ways. Right? What do you what do you Brian, be careful about one thing. Yeah. Google is actually not coming back. I know. I know. I know. Know. I know. Know. Go ahead. I'm with you. We can debate that one too. Justin, what are you doing about this? Yeah, across the board, we're focusing on how people consume our media and we're realigning our KPIs to play the long game because we've established that the best type of content for both the data scrapers and for our users is video content. We're focusing on attacking the short form and breaking up some of our longer content, we're getting more granular with the content we already have and trying to serve it, continue to build out the content. Pretty much we're looking inside out as what don't we have on our website that is not a trade secret that it's a data point and how do we get that out to the crawlers to have access to. Alright, Well, we gotta leave it there, Justin, for time's sake, but let's go ahead and pop the poll results to see if people agreed and did they agree? Yes. Eighty eight percent said yes that the appeal in organic search will catch B2B e commerce businesses by surprise. That's kind of no surprise because B2B ecommerce businesses don't exactly move that fast. So, Justin, congratulations on moving fast, and good work, man. And and thank you for your appearing with us today. We appreciate Notre Dame's being here. You've set the bar high for the rest of our guys. Alright. Let's keep going. Thank you, Justin. Alright. Let's go to prediction three. Prediction prediction three. Alright, Andy. This one's all yours, and it's also related to AI. Go. Well, it's all interrelated, but yes, B2B e commerce teams will own the questions and answers to product questions. Justin referred to it. Shereen referred to it. Are we talking about here? Well, on the next slide, you can see there's this acronym called EAT. You know what EAT is, right, I do. Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The point of this is that there's a way to create better AI friendly content. And the one I would highlight here is citing trusted sources, for example, trade publications, analysts like us, customers, and the number one one is product reviews. That's what this research has shown is the stuff that the AEO engines really like and want to ingest. So what we've predicted is that B2B companies will have to invest in things like newsletters. They have to create their own EAT content. And on the next slide, you'll see they don't have a lot of time because we polled this earlier this year and we found seventy six percent of the people polled said that AEOGEO was going to overtake SEO, sorry for all the acronyms, within one year. So they've got to do this sooner versus later. And, you know, we wanted to bring Sheerine Reid from Coveo, Search and Discovery vendor Coveo, back in to get her quick thought on this one because, obviously, data and search are all interrelated. If we could bring Sheerine back in. Sheerine, let's go ahead and the poll question right at the beginning of this to see if we can get some feedback from everybody. But Sheerine, what do you think? Do you agree? Yeah, I do. I mean, people are already starting to think about it ourselves too, internally within Coveo as well. But I think, you know, some of the short term things that you could look at doing is really understanding how people are searching on your site, because they might have already started using some of those longer, more complex queries questions and using that information to inform where you should be developing out your content and what kind of questions you need to be answering. And another quick and and good way to do this is adding an interactive or conversational search capability on your product pages, and that can generate answers. So it's almost like having a sales rep in front of you and asking questions about a product. And those types of questions are like gold, right? They can really drive your content strategy and the things that you need to then expose to something like for GEO and that can be indexed and then drive people to your site. If they're asking those questions on your site, chances are other customers out there are asking the same thing and want those answers. What about what Justin said regarding video? He said they're investing heavily in short form video to retain relevance. Is that something that you're seeing your customers investing in? Or is that a trend you're observing? Yeah. And I well, not so much, but I think that, you know, also short form video, you have the capability of easily creating the the transcript from those and having that transcript transcript then searchable. I know that we're doing that with at Coveo as well. Yep. So that's exactly true. We had a roundup yesterday and people are saying that the video itself is not as useful as the transcript from the video that is now textual and searchable. So let's see those since we've talked about the script. Yeah. So let's go to the poll results and see what they have to say on this one because we had a few conversations about this one so far, so we could, see. Okay. Sixty six thirty four. Yes. Wasn't it sixty six on the first one? What is this? Yeah. It yep. Yep. We we paid them. This is all rigged. Well, we can see the numbers. We can actually see the numbers behind it, which are state secret. But, yeah, the numbers are different. So I I I'm I'm kidding. But it's it's no. But that's interesting. Yeah. B2B e commerce teams will own this this process. Process of of product questions. So Well, and you wouldn't think this was you wouldn't think this is controversial. Right? But it is because the e commerce teams have been separated from this. So they're gonna have to start doing content marketing like the B2C guys have. Alright, Sheerine. Thank you again for making another quick update for us. We appreciate your support and input. Let's go to prediction number four. Prediction prediction. Alright. This is a big one. I'll take this one, Andy. This is all about Amazon business. I live this world in my with my firm in CEVA, as you know. We were just up in Seattle, Andy, and this is some exciting stuff here. It says Amazon Business will hit one hundred billion dollars in GMV by the end of twenty twenty six. One hundred billion dollars. They started this thing in two thousand fifteen. What the heck? So let's let's share some data. So the the latest data from Bank of America predicts, if we go to the next slide, shows that Amazon will, in their opinion, be eighty three billion dollars by the end of this year, twenty twenty five. Again, these are projections Amazon business last official number we have is thirty five billion dollars. That was a few years ago, twenty twenty two, I think. And so anyhow, this is you know, so that Wall Street thinks they're gonna keep on growing. And, you know, they started talking about this publicly, Andy, back about two years ago. Amazon was moot. They were not mute. They were not saying anything about Amazon business until their earnings call. I think it was quarter two or three in twenty twenty two. You go to the next slide, Andy Jassy was talking about, you know, they're now more prominent moves into Amazon Business. I won't read this whole thing, but the most important aspect of what he said, and Andy Jassy is the CEO, is the last part. We believe we've only scratched the surface on what is possible to date. Hundred billion dollars or eighty three billion this year is only scratching the surface, folks. That is four and a half times the size of Granger, everyone, for sanity for sanity check. And it's not just office products. It's industrial products, electrical products, HVAC, plumbing, blah blah blah, medical, go down the list. So, you know, they're also Andy, we we learned about this at the the ReShape Conference two weeks ago. They're also introducing trucks. So, if you go to the next slide, they have their own delivery trucks and then, of course, we've heard about drones and planes. Now, they have, you know, office supplies on demand, all kinds of other supplies. We had a chance to sit down with Natalia Monturi at ReShape. We had her as a guest. If you go to the next slide on our on our podcast, Friday fifteen podcast, and Natalia runs all of the vendor managed inventory programs, their supply services, their replenishment, as well as vending machines, Andy. We learned and we kicked the tires on some vending machines. This is the world of Fastenal and MSC and Ferguson and Hejoka and Granger and all the traditional distributors. Amazon business is now after managed spend, not just tail spend. So we think they're gonna cross a hundred million next year. Let's bring sorry. Hundred hundred trillion. Hundred quadrillion. By the way, just a quick note here. A hundred billion sounds like a big number, but it's only one percent of ten trillion. And in the US alone, B2B commerce is ten trillion. So when we talk about one percent, so these are not, like, unrealistic numbers. But you know, it's really true. I mean, if you look at Cardinal Health, it's a one hundred and thirty billion dollars business, right? So, there are very large players in B2B. So, as I was about to say, I want to bring in one of our practitioner and community members, mister Steve Francis. Steve leads ecommerce and the digital world at Diversitech. Steve, welcome. What does Diversitech do? Hi, everyone. We are a worldwide manufacturer of HVAC and refrigeration parts, spares, and accessories based in Atlanta in Georgia and Milano in Italy. Oh. And you don't make women's shoes. That's excellent. So and Steve, you run their e commerce world, including Amazon. Correct? Yes. I do. Alright. So number one question. Do you agree with us? You know, I I think I do. I think I do. Oh, you have to say there's a nontrivial chance that we can get to a hundred billion. Andy, you said before, AWS is a hundred and seventeen billion. These guys have put a a lot of structural investment behind everything that they have done in the past. You saw the trucks. We all have our inventory in their fulfillment centers. I don't know. Forty to fifty percent compound growth is aggressive over this time frame, but I feel like if anyone can do it Then we're tripling these guys because they put all the effort into the infrastructure in the past. Right. And now they're commercializing it. Let's pop the poll question for everyone while we finish our conversation with Steve. Do you agree with us that Amazon business will hit a hundred billion, Andy, billion dollars? You know, it's an interesting point you made too that you mentioned the word infrastructure a couple of times. I think that's worth noting here. Amazon has its own infrastructure. These other companies have to borrow other people's infrastructure. There's nothing wrong with that, but I think there's an inherent advantage when you have your own trucks and your own planes, your own drones, and you have your own warehouses, etcetera, etcetera. That is a tremendous advantage, if you ask me. So, what do ahead. I think I think if Natalia and her friends are able to report the actual B2B spend, you know, we all buy stuff for businesses without a business account, and then business accounts buy stuff not for business. We get some favorable conditions out there. Twenty twenty six looks like a great year. So what are you doing about it, Steve? You guys are investing in Amazon. You have a fairly We are. Channel. Yeah. Yes. You know, one of the good news is that in our conversations with the Amazon business folks on the three p side Is that they are putting together some very large quotes inside their business that is relying on three piece seller inventory to fulfill, which I find very interesting, and I'm very pleased about that part of it. I certainly think that, as you said, Brian, tail spend is great, but, plan spend is where it's at, and, they they're coming for it. Yeah. Big time. That's the bigger part of B2B. Alright, mister Francis. Let's see if the world agrees with us. You agree with us. Let's see. Let's take a look. Do they agree? And the answer is yes. Wow. You guys are friendly today. You're you're you're agreeing with us on everything. This is very nice. Be as well because we did not do the best doctor evil with a hundred billion that we possibly do. Next time, Steve. Next time. Alright. Thank you everyone for for sharing your opinion. Thank you, mister Steve Francis, joining us and sharing your your support for our our our prediction. And let's move on now to prediction number five. Prediction prediction five. And guess what, Andy? This one has something to do with AI also. Go ahead. This one's yours. Well, yeah, somebody talks about AI checkout. There's been a lot. We mentioned it earlier, part of the shopping process, but we think something that's been overlooked is AI customer service. We think that's going be the real breakthrough. I think everybody on this call has had this experience. I know I have. We've had a conversation either by text or by phone, and you think you're talking to a human. In fact, you think it's a superhuman, and you would be right on the latter one. It's actually a robot. So, one quick statistic here. Amazon, I know we've been overusing Amazon today, but Amazon announced a couple of months ago that, you go to the next slide, that two fifty million of their shoppers are using something called Rufus, which is their AI chatbot, and that people who use Rufus are sixty percent more likely to complete a purchase. Okay, this is not insignificant, and it's added ten billion dollars for them. So, maybe we're right about this customer service thing, which by the way, would argue it's almost like quasi sales too. That's another discussion. Oh, sales service support, Right? It's the it's the chat application is what we're really talking about here and the and the intelligence. And so, you know, where is a highly practical use case. Right, Annie? And that's that's really the the the the the net of this is we think next year, we're gonna see a ton of this happening. And you won't even know if you're talking to a human or an AI. Right? Yeah. And by the way, it's not just for simple stuff. So the next slide, you know, we pulled this earlier this year and we said, hey, we're going to use this stuff for, you know, complex B2B products. Answer was unbelongingly yes. It reminds me a lot of e commerce back in the day when people said nobody's gonna buy online. And then it was people are gonna buy replacement things. They're not gonna buy new stuff. And all that stuff was disproven. And I think AI is heading down the same path. But let's hear from somebody who's a little closer to this than we are. So we wanted to bring in somebody who's an expert on this. So I'd love to bring in Kingston Duffy, who's the CTO at a company called Nauvoo, and he'll go ahead and tell us what that is. But they're in the chatbot business. So Kingston, welcome. Tell us about Navu and tell us whether you agree or disagree with this prediction. Yeah. Well, I think you guys are on the money here. Navu is a Silicon Valley startup and we just started a couple of years ago. And our belief is that in fact, we're coming in at the bottom of the market believing that it's not gonna be the classic adoption where the big companies do the complicated stuff first. We're starting with the view that it's actually gonna start from the bottom up. And our number one belief is just make the damn thing as simple as you can possibly do to get it out there. So what we've learned is just as you were saying is there's a lot of focus right now in B2B e commerce. I was talking to a guy last week in mid sized industrial and he's saying, you help me with, you know, product selection? We got ten thousand products. How is anyone ever gonna find the one they want? Even, you know, faceted search doesn't get them there. They need to have a conversation. It's a complicated sale. And we said, sure, we'll show you how we just tie straight into your ERP and your PIM. The AI is just gonna learn itself. You don't have to learn anything. You've already done all the work. And he says, oh my God, that's great. And I said, oh, by the way, what's what's your strategy for post sales? Like, how do you handle all this stuff? He said, oh, I'm going dead trying to deal with all of these stupid questions. Like, what does the green light mean? And and people are gonna come to the website. They're just gonna keep asking these questions. So the light bulb really went off for him is that if you think about it as three phases, presales, fulfillment, post sales. Post sales is just a big cost center. And if the AI answers questions, every one of those is a cash register of saved money. And if you think about presales, it's just what you were saying, the sixty percent number. If you get the answers you need without having to talk to a human, much more likely you're gonna go move into fulfillment. In the fulfillment stage, ironically, people have worked so hard on making websites really good at just that one step of getting stuff into a shopping cart. Sure, the AI is gonna be great. Some people are gonna say, oh, I'll type in a question of add this to my shopping cart. It matters much actually less than presales and post sales. Interesting. Kingston, hang on one sec. Why don't you finish talking to you? Let's go ahead and pull the pull the poll up and and and see what people think about this question, whether they agree with us, which is AI checkout is all the rage, but customer service will be the real difference maker next year. Go ahead and vote, folks. So, Kingston, tell us tell us more about this. I mean, you guys will plug into a website. In fact, we have your stuff on our own website on Answer B2B. If you go to our website, you can see it working. Of course, we're not selling a product, but but so it's interesting that you you you say it's really it's less about the maybe the shopping or the middle of the the fulfillment side, but it's more about the customer service side. So what are the other applications for B2B in this for our audience of distributors and manufacturers? Well, in fact, about two thirds of our customers today don't even do fulfillment on their website. If you think about a lot of B2B today, it's I gotta go tell you a long story on my website. I'm gonna try to get you in front of a salesperson. And what we're finding is, oh my god, people don't really wanna talk to salespeople, but they do have a lot of conversations about what what is the product. And, you know, we're just able to take advantage. AIs are so damn smart now. We can point it at your website and in five minutes, and I'm not exaggerating, in five minutes, someone can be having a deep conversation about the hardest, most complicated parts of your product. And when we talk to new customers, then we show them that, you know, their heads explode. What am I gonna do? I'm gonna have to change everything. So, know, there's some great companies doing some good work. I heard Sheerine talking about Coveo. Think they're doing some interesting stuff. There's companies, you know, replacing SDRs. There's all kinds of stuff happening. And we're playing our, you know, we're making our bet and our bet is we're just going to believe that two years from now, the corporate website's probably gonna look a lot more like ChatGPT than it does like an old fashioned website today. Interesting. Interesting. That's fascinating. Well, let's let's go ahead and see if the audience agrees with all of us. And let's oh, yeah. Look at that. They agree with us again. Sixty three percent said that AI customer service will be the real breakthrough. Only thirty seven percent said Boy, just no one likes to disagree with you guys. I guess Yeah. I'm beginning to think that the ring this is a ringer thing, Brian. I mean Maybe. You told me we had to pay these people. Oh, I was supposed to mention that. Right? Well, I think all of our all of our commentary guests here are very, very convincing. Kingston, thank you. We appreciate your comment and and and color on this, and we'll see how the year plays out. Thank you. Alright. Let's go to our last prediction. Prediction number six. Run it. Prediction number six. Alright, mister Whoer. This one, you are our special guest because this is your world. B2B ecommerce platforms will face a tough choice by the end of twenty twenty six. This you know, we have quite a few ecommerce platforms in our community, Andy. And and and, of course, from a practitioner's perspective, there's a lot of implications about all these changes that are occurring with AI. And we're seeing a large amount of change in the platform landscape. You want to take us through of some of those changes? Yeah. So I think there's a couple of ways to look at this. One is that I think we've reached a maturity in the marketplace. I've been following this for fifteen years. Yeah. And it feel it just feels like we've reached this point where we're gonna have to start seeing some breakthroughs. Now there's an opportunity for vendors to embrace AI and really make them remake themselves in the image of AI. But I think there's gonna be a lot of vendors, sadly, a lot of ecommerce platform vendors who are going to talk AI but not do AI. Right. And, I think what's happening now is we've gotten to the point because it's a mature market, have to you have to differentiate or die. I mean, you can't be just a purely horizontal offering. You have to specialize. And I would say big commerce, which is not called commerce as an example. They've really leaned into B2B, but more specifically, they bought a company called Feedonomics and, you know, they're going down the path of data. By the way, sales, Salesforce, they acquired Informatica. Right? There's a there's a there's a kind of a through line here, But for other companies that don't do that, they're gonna have to get very specific or there's gonna be a reckoning for them. There's also the matter of the markets and how half as many companies are now public and that puts pressure on money. So can these companies get funding, especially if they're not growing quickly? So I think there's a lot of this that's going on and these are the tough choices. And I want to point out one example in a different space on the next slide, a company called PROS, which some people may be familiar with. It's a price optimization company. Public company. They went private. They were taken private. They were a public company. They weren't doing poorly. It's just that somebody came along and said, you know, we need to remake you guys. Probably in the AI image. I think that's a metaphor for what could be happening here. And then EA was another one that had to do this. That could be happening in in the ecommerce space as well. So my kind of quick take on this is I think we're gonna see separation here. There are gonna be companies that embrace this stuff, get funding and grow. They're gonna find their market, and others are gonna have to specialize, probably be acquired by others, maybe taken private or even be taken over by PE firms to get them on the straight. Interesting. And and this, Andy, has huge implications for our practitioner community. You know, they're trying to make decisions about who they should partner with. I mean, if a company is changes control, I mean, one of the things that I always was a VP of ecommerce would look at is how likely is this company to be acquired, and then all of a sudden, I'm not important to them anymore because they're gobbled up into something else. Now you run your combine, which is really, really a great tool to help with this. In fact, if you go to the slide, I think you're going to talk about a little bit about that. What's changing here? Yeah, so I evaluate all these companies and I've told them next year is going to be a different animal. I mean, no longer can I mean, so next year is going to be, I want to see how AI has finally made you because you can't be a tech vendor and not be remade by AI? I mean, has Microsoft not been remade by AI? Has Google not been remade by AI? I mean, if all these companies are being reinvented in an AI native kind of environment, how can platform vendors not do the same? And I gotta tell you, I hear a lot of rhetoric about this, but I don't see a lot of reality about it. So, I put them on notice. Next year, I need to see more than just happy talk about this stuff. And so, kind of last slide here, conclusions that I've drawn about this, what I call the atmospherics here, is that there's some solid choices, but I've not really seen anything game changing in the last couple of years. Think AI could be that. Time and complexity are just out. Mid market companies won't tolerate it at all. This has hurt Composable a little bit. Enterprise companies, they have a little more patience for that kind of thing, but not much. The biggest issue by far with all these platforms is cost effective customer acquisition. It's the go to market strategy. If I hear one more time somebody tell me about how great their product is, I'm like, great. That doesn't matter at all. If nobody's ever heard of you or if you can't reach them in a cost effective way, I don't care if you've got the cure for cancer. It's not going to work. Partners are really critical here. You know this. You've been an SI. If you're a platform without a partner, you're basically not much, especially now. And in the age of AI, it's particularly important. So like I said, next year, I wanna see AI in these companies. And I have a bad have a bad feeling we're not gonna see a lot of companies remake themselves in the age of AI. Well, let's go ahead and pop the poll question and ask the audience agrees with us relative to this. Will the change will this change occur next year? And, Andy, one final question for you on this. How does this change the game for the practitioner? What do they need to do as they think What advice would you offer to a VP of e com at a big manufacturer distributor that's starting the process of making a decision on an e com platform? Where do they start? Well, the problem is there's so many moving parts. But I think I always start with what are your customers looking to do with you in the next couple of years? Not today. Right. But fast forward three years. It's twenty twenty almost twenty twenty six. By the year oh my god. Twenty twenty nine. How do you expect your customers to be buying from you? Are they gonna be using a ChatGPT interface? Are they gonna be buying everything on Amazon? Are you gonna have a website? Right. Let's go there. Are you gonna actually have a Come on. But is it gonna be the prime we just talked about traffic going down. Are you gonna have a website that's the primary driver of what you're doing? I think for some companies, will still be the case. Other companies, it may not be the case. Right. I don't know. You better figure that one out. And that should drive what kind of technology you're going to buy. Because if you're figuring that most of your stuff let's say you're a B2C like B2B company and you expect people to be buying like consumers and more consumers will be buying through or researching through ChatGPT, for example. Right. What use is it to have a great website if you can't reach them, you know, with your content be listed in the AEO, right? It's the AEOSEO argument again. So, my advice would be figure out who, in a really clear and defined way, who your customers are going to be in three years and how you're going to serve them in a sustained, differentiated, competitive way? That's really the hard question to answer. Emulate Amazon. That's my answer. Because Amazon does that. Exactly what you just said. Well, they're driven by data too, which is another thing companies are doing. Yes. Yes. So okay. Well, folks, we've we've issued a number of predictions here. Let's go see if you agree with us on the last one, number six, If we strike a hundred here, eighty five percent said yes. They agree with us. Look at us, Andy. We you know, everyone agrees with thank you, everyone. Yeah. Yep. Everyone. These are real people, by the way. We got the numbers here. We can see. I yes. Yes. No. This is great stuff. Numbers were what percentages were piping in here. So That's right. Well, thanks everyone for voting. We appreciate those who are, on today, and we're gonna see in a year a year from now how we how we fared. I know we'll we'll go back and do the same thing we did at the beginning of this webcast. So thank you everyone for joining us today. We do have a couple quick announcements we wanna make you aware of. The first is, for those of you who haven't heard of this, this is our master B2B Nexus program. So if you go ahead and pop that slide open. This is a a paid service for practitioners, and it offers on demand expert advice exclusively for you. It helps you to reduce risk, make better decisions. It we have a panel of fantastic experts on call that are practitioners or former practitioners. We also have tools that match you to peers, find people. I mean, Andy, just just yesterday, we we had someone ask a question through our Nexus program. Hey. I need someone who has expertise in this particular technology. Within one day, less than a day. We had a number of people for them to talk to about a not a real not a really well known technology. So this is what we can do. You know, we we we're bringing people together with other experts and people with experience to help you avoid risk and make better decisions. So you can find out more on our website, master b two b dot com. Just look for the Nexus logo at the top. And then our we also wanna remind folks that we have announced our fourth annual summit. So if you go to the next slide. At the University of Chicago, you can apply to attend. We have a very limited window of complimentary tickets for practitioners still open. So go and register now. We have quite a few people already signed up. We're getting towards capacity. I think we're we're well more than halfway there. This is March tenth and eleventh, twenty twenty six. So I encourage you to check that out. You can find out more information on our website. Any potential, partners or sponsors that are listening, we do have a few sponsor spots also still available for that. So reach out to Andy or I. Love to talk to you about that. And finally, wanna remind everyone that we have our Friday fifteen podcast every week, on LinkedIn. We broadcast that. It's also available on your favorite podcast service or YouTube or on our website, and please give us ratings and reviews if they are positive. Thank you very much everyone for listening to that. We we've crossed a hundred one hundred episodes. We have thousands of folks listening to that. So really excited about the, you know, kind of ongoing, interaction there. So, Andy, any final words before we wrap our predictions for twenty twenty six? Just consider this. How much changed in the year twenty twenty five? When we started the year and where we are now, just with how many different models of ChatGPT have come What did the stock market do? What happened with tariffs? You know, everything. Yeah. Why would twenty twenty six be any different? We're in for a fun year. It's be interesting and exciting, and we'll be in the cat seat watching and observing and watching what you all are doing and learning from you as well. So thanks everyone for joining us on our predictions for twenty twenty six. We will see you soon on a Friday fifteen. Take care.