Welcome. Thank you for joining. My name is Juanita Oguin. I lead product marketing here at Coveo, and we are excited to have you join us today for a very relevant and exciting topic, which is fixing the broken customer journey, how GenAI and Agentic are transforming CX in retail. And we are very excited to have Richard Lim join us today. For those of you, joining us now, Richard is chief executive officer of Retail Economics, an independent economics research consultancy focused on consumer and retail. Previously, Richard held the position of chief economist at the British Retail Consortium before heading up retail insight and analytics. Richard has a wealth of experience in data analytics, retail insight, economics, and consumer research, and he was voted a top ten voice for LinkedIn for sharing his insights on the retail industry. He's voted a top retail expert by Rethink Retail for two years running. He's also a top global voice about retail. So the net is we are in good company, and we have a true subject matter joining us today. Richard, thank you for joining us. Thank you. You're making me blush. Well, we're looking forward to your presentation. Before we do get into the presentation, I just wanted to do a little housekeeping. We are recording today's session, and you will receive a copy of it within the next twenty four to forty eight hours. The format for today will be a short presentation delivered by Richard. We'll then have a little bit of a fireside chat followed by q and a. So as Richard's presenting and as we're doing that side chat, do please feel free to chat with us. There's a chat option on the right hand panel, but there's also a q and a button at the bottom. So we will have a q and a section towards the end of today's presentation. So as those questions come up, please feel free to submit those. With that covered, I think it's now time for your presentation portion. So over to you, Richard, and welcome. Brilliant. Thank you so much, and thanks for inviting me along to to speak today. Plan is really just to spend about ten or fifteen minutes talking about how we see the complexity of the the customer journey rising, how AI and this shift towards Agentic is going to transform, we think, CX within that retail space. And then really excited to get into that fireside chat just to discuss some of those some of those some of those deeper issues. So, I mean, I think the first thing to say for me is that, you know, what a time it is to work within the retail sector. There is just so much happening at the moment. So whether it's the explosion of marketplaces, it's social commerce and the disruption that that's having on how consumers are discovering, purchasing, and interacting with brands, whether it's the circular economy and pre loved, of course, Gen AI, There is so much that's happening within the sector that the it's making the customer journey so much more complicated. And the way that we see it transforming the way that retailers need to adapt and and and and cater for lots of different customer journeys, what we see is this variability in the customer journey is just so wide. And you've got retailers that are having to deal with customers that are buying the same products but really experiencing a huge variability in the customer journey right from that discovery research phase right through to service and potentially returns at the end. And it's that variability that I don't think that we've ever seen before within the within that customer journey. Just to bring that to life a bit, what it did make me think about is the customer journey of my mom. And so this is generally a picture of my mom. She's eighty years old. She just turned eighty, earlier on this year. But her customer journey has not changed in the last fifty years. It's very one dimensional. It's very revolved around the store. And so for my mom, a typical customer journey, for example, of buying a jumper would be that she'd be sitting at home. She'd be watching TV. She might see some kind of traditional advert that inspires her to think, well, actually, yep, I need a new jumper. And so the next day, she hops on the bus. She goes into town. She goes to M and S where she knows the brand. She trusts the brand. She wants to be in that physical environment to touch the product, go into a changing room, try it on. Inevitably, then she'll pop across the other side of town. She'll into John Lewis. She again, she wants to have a look around and see what they've got, and if they got anything on sale or on a deal. She'll try it on, go into a changing room, and then, actually, she buys it there and then. It gets neatly folded up into a bag, and then she hops on the bus, and then she goes home. And so that customer journey is very simple. It's very one dimensional, and it hasn't changed for my mom for over fifty years. The comparison, though, is her granddaughter. And her granddaughter has an infinitely more complex customer journey. So for the three hours a day or so that she spends on TikTok, she might see something come up on her feed, whether it's an influencer, content creator. It might be a personalized ad that she sees, and she sees something on TikTok. And then that might inspire her to go through to a TikTok shop. And she'll look at the different range of products, and she looks at the brand. But she's a gen zed. She still likes that physical environment. So she wants the physical environment. She goes into a flagship destination. Maybe that's Oxford Street, Birmingham Boring, Leeds Trinity. Maybe it's one of the Westfields, but she wants to immerse herself in the brand. But, inevitably, when she's in store, she gets out her smartphone. She searches for different options. It might give her an AI overview when she's searching for a product, and then that might encourage her to go to a marketplace where she can do some further price comparison, see what's on offer, see the different range of products. She's also, though, created her own GPT. She's on ChatGPT a lot. She's a Gen Z. She's a student. She's created her own GPT when it comes to a stylist. So she can upload photos. She can ask some advice to GPT about style about particular styles of product. She then goes to Instagram. She wants more social approval. And then when she gets home, she's watching the latest the latest episode of Love Island on demand. She gets served a personalized advert that is tailored for her. And because she's a Gen Z, she buys three dresses with the intention of keeping one of them. She then gets them delivered to a local click and collect place near to where she lives in Bromley. And then when she picks up and takes it home, she takes a few photos, puts them on TikTok, takes the other two items of clothing back to a locker near where she lives because that's convenient for her. And she does all of that knowing full well that she'll probably end up selling the dress in six to nine months' time on Vintage to recoup some of the finance that she's already outlaid on that dress. So, actually, she might have spent more money than my mom on a dress because she understands and appreciates that there's residual value in that dress. She's going to sell it secondhand on vintage, and so, actually, she might pay more because she knows she's gonna get some of that expense back. That variability in the customer journey, we have never seen before. Is making it so much more complicated for retailers and brands to adapt their strategies, to create a cohesive customer journey across all of those different digital and physical touch points on that past purchase. The other thing about the granddaughter is that her expectations are much higher than my mom's. Her expectations of the user experience across discovery, across research, purchase, fulfillment, service, and returns is significantly higher than my mom's. And she expects the retailer to be able to meet those expectations because there's so much competition and choice. And if they don't meet those expectations, she'll shop elsewhere. At the same time, underlying all of that more complex customer journey is that AI is changing the the the retail landscape at warp speed. I think while consume while retailers are considering how to implement GenAI throughout their businesses, there's many different use cases. It might be supply chain optimization. It might be chatbots. It might be better demand forecasting. I think there's a bigger unknown when it comes to how Gen AI can potentially impact consumers, how they research products, how they discover products, and actually how they form new relationships with brands. I think there's a bigger unknown as to how that's going to potentially affect the customer journey. And it's just a quick reminder. We've been through so much change over the last few decades, And we've gone from single channel in the kind of the in the early nineties, mid nineties to multichannel when retailers were first experimenting with their websites, and it was very disjointed and very siloed to an era of omnichannel where retailers were trying to figure out the best way to create that kind of more cohesive customer journey to allow retail to allow consumers, their customers to bounce between channels, onto an era of unified commerce where where retailers are looking at all of the disparate sources of data sits around the business, whether that's sales data, whether that's data about their customers, whether it's product information data, to bring that all into one place to to to create a more cohesive customer journey. And I now think that we're moving on to this era of agentic retail, an era where unified commerce and building a really solid backbone in terms of a tech of a tech stack will then be overlaid with Gen AI that's going to take potentially personalization to the next level and bring in a different form of a customer journey. I think that there's going to be four main stages to this. I think the first stage is where we are already at today, which is AI assisted discovery. So this is where consumers are using things like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and many others to be able to assist their discovery research phase when it comes to purchasing. So there's plenty of examples here, I think, where you a consumer might go on to ChatGPT and start searching for things like, what are the best headphones I can get for under a hundred and fifty pounds. Or I'm looking to renovate my front room. I'm looking for a kind of a a chic style, neutral tones, and then have a conversation with ChatGPT to be able to outline some of the products and and some of the design features that consumers are looking for. So this is where I think we are today, rapidly moving on to this area of semi autonomous agents. And this is an area where, again, I think we're we're at the beginning stages of this already today where consumers are using platforms to try to automate some of that research phase and and and research approach to then come on to a stage that's just before transacting. The next stage, I think, is fully agentic. Retail where a consumer has an AI agent that is optimized on their objectives. Those objectives could be around price. It could be around free delivery, returns options, could be about carbon emissions that are embedded in products. But based on the consumers' objectives, it leads up to a position of buying and purchasing products without their intervention. Now I can think of many different scenarios around this. So car insurance might be a really simple example where I don't really enjoy redo renewing my car insurance every year. And, actually, I'd be quite happy to outsource that decision of buying car insurance based on the fact that I don't want to pay more than I did this year. I want to be of reputable company that has good reviews over a certain amount. And so being able to outsource some of those decisions, I think, I I I think, you know, that's the stage that we will reach where when it comes to that fully agentic retail. And the final stage, think, is agent to agent commerce where consumers have their own agents. They're acting on their behalf and talking to retail and brand agents and and taking personalization to that next level where it's where it's based on real time information and high and and based on many different characteristics for consumers. So four stages of around AI assisted commerce to semi autonomous agents, fully agentic retail to agent to agent commerce, which will lead which will be driven by AI enablers, which will lead to different shopper behaviors, which will require a require a shift in strategy for for for retailers and brands, and that is going to be very disruptive across the piece. I think there's a huge question around how fast this will happen. And so this is a curve of a of a of a a typical technological adoption life cycle. And so you can apply this to something like smartphones and how quickly people people and consumers adapted smartphones. You had your early adopters followed by early majority and laggards at the end. I think that there's a possibility that we'll end up having an AI technology adoption curve that looks more like this for a number of different reasons. Firstly, I genuinely believe that AI is gonna touch every part of the economy and every part of the retail industry, And much of that is going to happen underneath the surface without retailer without consumers even knowing. So some of this might be product recommendations that are so personalized and attuned to your previous shopping behaviors. People will see that. It will influence their behavior, but, potentially, they may not even know that AI is driving that kind of interaction. The second thing is around education. So I think education is going to be a key enabler of consumers using things like AI agents. And so this generation alpha that are in the education system at the moment in university or approaching university will leave the will leave university being AI native. So I actually sit on the strategic advisory board of the University of East Anglia. We have many conversations around how how AI is affecting students and how they and how they research, how they should be assessed, and things like that. But one thing we all agree on, although there's many disagreements, is that AI native students will be leaving that university environment. Where we are today, I think, is in that kind of AI assisted commerce, and search is one of one example of that. So anyone you know, most people, I'm sure, on this webinar will know will be very familiar with AI overview, but it's only been around for less than a couple of years. But going on to Google, searching for something, being presented with an AI overview is the biggest change in search that we've seen for twenty five years. And so gone are the days of those kind of, like, blue links and a simple a simple page. That AI overview is taking a lot of real estate on that first initial page. Google data from Google shows that search terms are getting longer. They're becoming more conversational. They're becoming more intent based. There's more narrative that surrounds that surrounds search. And I think that's a really interesting development because it's a huge area of change. There's also a potential tie up between ChatGPT and Shopify, but a situation where consumers are on GPT searching for products, being able to transact and buy on GPT without ever lee without having to go to a retailer's website. So an example is Perplexity Pro in the US. For those of you who may not have heard of Perplexity, think of it as a bit of a mashup between g ChatGPT and Google. But, essentially, Perplexity Pro in the US allows consumers to search for products. It's be and then they can purchase, click you know, add to cart and buy products on the Perplexity platform without ever having to go to the retailer's website. So we're on that kind of trajectory now. In terms of what that means for the overall customer journey, I genuinely think that generative AI is going to reshape that customer experience. It's going to require retailers to really think carefully about how they adapt their proposition and how they adapt the way that they are going to be discovered by consumers. And so moving so so SEO is one clear example of that. So how are retailers going to ensure that their their platforms are discoverable by AI agents and not just optimized for that human level of experience? So I hope that was interesting. I'm just gonna hand back to hand back to Juanita now. But, yeah, really interested in getting involved into this detail. Great presentation. So many great things, Richard. You did have some of our our guests shout shout you out and and add to your the granddaughter customer journey story saying William said the granddaughter paid with her GoHenry card likely. Yeah. Absolutely. Or or buy now, pay later and other options like that. Absolutely. Also, another comment that, from a search perspective, there's also voice search, which could, could be the reason for those longer, more complex queries coming in. Yes. Absolutely. And I think voice search is gonna be one of those areas. Again, really disruptive. Still nascent stages, but anyone that's had a conversation with ChatGPT knows just the leap in advancement compared to, for example, talking to Alexa. So some really exciting developments. Absolutely. So so we'll move into the fireside chat portion. And just for those of you joining us, we will have a q and a, so not too late to submit your questions while we go through these fireside chat, topics. The first one I wanna start with, Richard, is, what you ended on, which is how AI is practically gonna be embedded everywhere is embedded everywhere, and one of the most common places or use cases is within the search experience. So you just showed us the Google AI overview, but Google is a third party channel. Right? Google is their own their own kind of ecosystem. So my question for you here is, are you seeing brands add this type of AI powered search and answers to their actual sites? What are you seeing out there? Yeah. No. It's it's a it's a really interesting area of development because, as you say, there's the the kind of ex external search, if you like, and where Google and Bing are creating those kind of AI overviews. And I take it as I can't help but just go on a little tangent for a second, but it's the first time that I've spoken to our clients about Bing as far as I can remember. And so Bing is is is, of course, you know, is a platform is a search platform, and what we're seeing is a is a fundamental reshaping of search, I would say. And so for the first time in a number of years, Google's kind of global market share of search data has dipped under ninety percent, and we're seeing that loss of market share shifting towards Bing and ChatGPT. And the fact that there's a relationship, of course, between Bing, Microsoft, and ChatGPT, ChatGPT is using the Bing indexation to be able to drive results onto the ChatGPT platform. So so it's just a kind of an interesting thing, and I forgot to mention this in my in my kind of customer journey, but it's interesting to see that that there's there's the the this is the first time I've I've for the twenty five years that I've been doing this, talking about Bing as a as a as a kind of a an interesting development within the industry. When it comes to internal search, though, I think that, again, we're seeing loads of technological advancements in this area. And so kind of those AI driven search tools within websites are bringing about an enhanced customer experience. So that might be better product recommendations. That might be faster conversion rates, a more seamless customer journey when you're on a website. But even things like stylists. So having a chatbot that essentially can give you advice on your on a particular kind of, like, style of products or something like that. So I know, for example, ASOS will use a stylist chatbot on their website, and what they can do is take a product and match it with a whole outfit. And then what they've seen is, like, really kind of, like, great success in consumers taking a product that they like, matching it with a whole outfit, and then consumers adding the whole outfit to basket and then checking out. So it's kind of like using that search in an intelligent way to provide a, you know, a really interesting journey. So and and, Juanita, you you know, you're you're dealing with with customers as well. So are you seeing some of those kinds of evolution within that in Yeah. Insight search? Yeah. I I would say, you know, we work with a ton of b to b and b to c companies, and we still see that the brand site is important. I know there's a big question in this new world of Agentic and how you can just transact, maybe in the future without having to go to a brand site. But at the end of the day, the site is, essentially a collection of the products and content that any of the the human searchers or AI searchers will need access to. So we absolutely see, brands bringing in generative answering, not even just to search products, but even on the support side as well. So it's AI for your brand side instead of it just being those advanced tools on third party sites. So we see generative answering. We see that personalization happening even if you're unauthenticated or logged out. We see that being implemented as well along with, again, product recommendations, content recommendations as you see. So we still do see that the brand site is important, and I think it probably also depends on who's buying or who's the shopper. You gave a couple of different, let's just say, you know, like, generational differences and and digital maturity. So it depends who's shopping that will impact who's actually going to that brand site directly. Because I think trust and loyalty is also important. Yeah. Yeah. No. Absolutely. Absolutely. If I could, just follow-up a a bit on on that topic and question, Richard. So we're we are seeing again, I love the granddaughter's journey because you you showed a lot of, again, different third party sites, TikTok and Google and several others that I I'm I'm not mentioning. Yeah. How do you see or are you seeing like, is a brand site still important? How are you seeing customers think about it? Like, should they put more emphasis there? Are they putting less? Is should more investment go towards the third party ecosystem and orchestration? Like, I guess in twenty twenty five, does a brand site website still matter in your opinion? Yeah. The I think the the the short answer for me is absolutely. It still matters, and it's really important, but it's understanding the role that it plays for your customers. And so for some younger customers, for example, that might have more trust in like, social commerce as an example, there might be you know, that can lead to incremental revenue through a different kind of channel, and they can use and grow sales potentially outside of the website. But for the majority of retailers, it's there might be new channels of discovery, but it's about using those channels to drive additional traffic to the website. And then once they're in the website, they're in their ecosystem. They can collect first party data. They can understand and measure the journey of the customer from that from that perspective. And I think the really important thing for me is that it's about trust. And so while places like social social social commerce, social media platforms could be a good discovery tool, there's lots of consumers that might discover things on those platforms but then want to come to a familiar website environment because they trust it. And so that and and and and that allows then retailers to be able to provide a better customer experience, whether that's around personalization, recommendations, live chat, give them delivery options, tell them about the products, build that story, you know, allowing them the the ability to build some brand storytelling within the website. I think that's yeah. I I think that's, yeah, really, really important for for retailers to be able to, yeah, to be able to do that. So and you mentioned b to b as well, Juanita. So, you know, I'm more familiar on the on the kind of the consumer side. But do you see lots of overlaps between that and kind of b to b in that post purchase experience as well? Yeah. I think there are commonalities for sure. I did wanna add to to what you were saying, though, that, you know, we do see a lot of investment, generally speaking, on external, you know, external ways of pulling clients or customers and shoppers into sites and often an underinvestment in that site and experience, which is important, as you said, because of the trust, the loyalty. I still if I'm even if I'm scrolling on Instagram and I wanna you know, I go to an interesting site to make a purchase, I still, like, go and try and verify, is this a real site? Is this a trusted site, right, before I make a purchase? Like, you still wanna make sure you're dealing with, you know, legitimate a legitimate company. So definitely important. And on the b two b side, I would say it's similar. I think the only differences would be on the b two b side, it's maybe not as high of a volume, and you are dealing with more sophisticated customers. So if you're a big b to b manufacturer, you know, you wanna be seen as sophisticated sophisticated and innovative. And so you want to ensure, like, your end customers who are enterprises themselves Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Get what they need. Right? And I think there's a bigger risk and and cost potentially in not ensuring your site is optimized or you have those seamless self-service capabilities where, again, your enterprise customers can find what they need because people wanna be self sufficient. People wanna buy, get service on their own. So so, yeah, it's still important on both ends for sure. Yeah. No. Absolutely. Taking a slightly different approach in topics, and then I see a few questions coming in, so I'll, try to sort through those two to, to address them. I wanna talk about back to a little bit of trust and interoperability. So we know Agentic, has so much enormous potential and value to bring. But, recently, I saw a LinkedIn post. It was about Google's IO conference and how, they launched Agentic checkout. I think, a few other tech giants have, you know, launched their kind of buy for me. I think Amazon might have been the one to do that. And so what they're essentially saying or showing is that you're eliminating some of those steps that you showed us on the the two journeys that, you know, rather than having to jump around, it's that, you know, you search, you get purchase options, and then you can click hit a click of a button and check out effectively eliminating a bunch of different steps. Mhmm. But that does require brands opening up, right, and sharing their information to these third party sites. So that that idea of interoperability and openness. Yeah. I think companies and brands are ready to play at that level of truly opening up and, you know, letting their products be freely searched and a one click checkout experience. Are we there yet? Are we there? We're not we're not there yet, and this is a journey and the evolution that's happening within the industry. But will we get there at some point? I think is I I think the answer is is dependent on the brand and dependent on the relationship that they want to form with their customers. And so those and and so and there's just so many factors. It depends on the shop permission. It depends on the price point. It depends on the category. Is it luxury? Is it discount? And so there's lot lots of considerations for retailers and brands to think about whether or not they want to open up all of their data to be able to access in order to do that and and and be able to control that. But then there's also a reality point as well. And the reality point for me is our businesses in a position to be able to operate with that kind of sophistication in terms of their technology and tech stack. And so they need to have, you know, best in class CRM system, best in class ERP systems, best in class, you know, CDP. So they know everything about their their customers and and be able to and be able to open that. And and I and I think the the reality is where I see the market and when I talk to my clients about this is that there's a huge gap between the sophistication technological sophistication of businesses. And some are in that space and are doing it well, but there's a huge gap. And a lot of the businesses that I talk to just need to go on a data transformation journey before they can even start thinking about how to leverage things like GenAI and and making sure that all of the data is there, accessible, readable for these different types of systems. I do think, though, that it does open up a bit of an opportunity for smaller, midsize brands that have deep enough pockets to be able to invest in this kind of stuff, but don't necessarily have the legacy systems to be able to, you know, really, in many in many ways, just just just create an environment where they can move much quicker. So those native those kind of, like, API first native brands can move much faster, can scale quicker, and can adapt to some of these new technologies that are coming out where larger businesses just struggle much, much more. Thank you for that. Totally agree. We see the same thing, and, you know, I think AI has a lot of promise. However, there's still, the fundamentals data, as you mentioned, that matter in ensuring your house is in order. From our perspective, that data could be, you know, your your product catalog. It could be your your content describing your products or support articles and beyond. And so I agree with a lot of your points, Richard. I would add that we, we see a lot of, I would say, digitally immature organizations that, choose to partner with companies like Coveo because, Coveo can help essentially be that, kind of journey, if you will, to get make making AI work in in very out of the box ways by first focusing again on unifying that content product catalog, cleaning up that data, and then slowly applying AI on top of it. It's the only way to really, right, get that value out of the AI outcome. So agree with you on that one. I think what I'll do now just because there's a lot of great chats coming in is, I think I'll switch us to q and a for the for the next ten minutes or so. While we do that, I do wanna invite you all to connect with Richard and I. I'll, share our contact details here. You can connect with us, through email, our sites, but, also, you can find us on LinkedIn as well. So, feel free to connect with us any of those ways. I'll get started with a question from Jason, if that's okay. The question is, what should brands be doing to get ahead? There's a there's a lot of talk, in the industry. Is this really just an evolution of SEO or something much bigger impacting all areas of marketing? Yeah. I'm from it's it's it's it's kind of like a yeah. It's it's a it's a good it's a good question. And the conversations that I have with my clients are very, very varied in terms of where they are on their journey. And so what can they be doing at beginning stages, I think, is often just understanding where what the starting point is and then understanding that, you know, there's there's you can build out many, many, many different use cases when it comes to implementing this type of technology. But then understanding where to invest, what kind of ROI can be expected, what to prioritize, and then not getting paralysis in terms of being overwhelmed with with all of the, you know, all of the different options. And so I remember talking to one of our clients about them building out lots of different use cases in terms of the technology and then coming up with over a hundred and fifty different use cases across all of the different parts of the business, and they brought it down to focusing on four things. They're four things that they can do quickly, experiment, learn, and then roll that out to other parts of of the business. But do I think there's going to be a fundamental change? Yeah. Absolutely. I do think that this is this is a real point of and a real inflection point for the industry where the retailers that get it right, invest in the right places, build the right partnerships, have the right culture of innovation and embracing change and that have the ability to to kind of scale quickly and with agility, I think that, yeah, those those are the ones that are going to win. Awesome. Thank you for that. Just to, pick up on what you were just talking about, another question came in from Shirley around use cases, actually. Do you see any common or popular use cases where companies are investing in incorporating that AI internally or on their sites perhaps? Yeah. So and this goes from the really complex, I think, to to the to the low hanging fruit. And so some of the things some of the common themes that I I I hear about from our clients is around things like product information. So if you take, you know, just like take take take B and Q as one example. And so they've launched a marketplace in the last eighteen months, and they've gone from a hundred and twenty five thousand SKUs on their website to one and a half million in less than two years because they've pushed into that marketplace model. Would they have been able to do that without the application of AI? Well, it would have been much significantly more difficult, and it probably would have been a lot slower. But they are using AI to do things like product product information and being able to and and being able to search through their catalog of different products and have some kind of kind of, like, checks and balances around the marketplace to ensure product accuracy and things like that. So product product descriptions, I think, is quite high up on the list. There's a lot happening within CX in terms of the in terms of the call centers and customer service area. And so a lot of those types of functions are already outsourced from retailers using BPOs in South Africa and other destinations. And I see a lot of change in terms of utilizing chatbots to answer some of the most common queries. Wizmo, where's my order? How quickly am I gonna get my refund? Where are my refund? You know, some of the most common queries that clog up so much of that call center capacity and is really, really costly can be automated. So that CX and call centers is is is an area as well. Better demand planning better demand forecasting is their area and supply chains. I think those are kind of the main areas that I see being the being the biggest changes. Yeah. Great ones. We see a big a big interest in the product catalog management as well, as you mentioned, especially when you have thousands or millions of SKUs being able to manage those at scale effectively without, you know, doing it manually or trying to put manual business rules can be impossible. So I think, you know, that's a good a big, use case we see as well. Yeah. And marketing. Marketing again. So, I mean, the the list goes on, but, you know, marketing again is another area that I see there being a lot of change. Some of that's around, you know, idea generation right through to content creation. So creating kind of turning flat images into three d images or, yeah, having video content from, you know, text to video content, things like that. So a lot of a lot of development in that area as well. Yeah. Absolutely. Another question here. How have you found the link between initial sale and the support offered from a brand? How are clients managing the two interactions since they are significantly different? So initial sorry. You have to Initial purchase of a product to then getting support on that after contacting support for Okay. As in from an from an AI perspective or just that I'll I'll ask you from a customer CX CX perspective. But, I mean, this is just about making it frictionless for consumers. I don't think that hasn't that that hasn't changed from twenty years ago is any kind of friction within the customer journey. You're gonna see kind of drop off in sales and unhappy unhappy customers, unloyal customers. And so just being able to use technology to create a more cohesive journey where there's consistent messaging right through from purchase through to sales and returns, I think, is critical. And I think it becomes much more complicated when the consumers are bouncing between different channels. So that could be, of course, online and store, but also across different devices and different platforms as well. So the ability for retailers to create that seamless journey, whether it's on a mobile device, whether it's on a tablet, whether it's in store, whether it's on social commerce, right through to that service and returns. But that consistency in messaging and the way that it makes the customer feel, I think, again, that hasn't changed, but it's just become more complicated. Yeah. Thank you for that. I agree with you. I think on our end, what we see is brands or or enterprises leveraging AI similarly across the journey. Whether you're a prospect searching, you you want to be recommended the relevant information. Once you become a customer, you want that company to know who you are and, again, understand your activity, your search history, the purchases you made, again, to use AI to serve up recommendations. And then when you're thinking about contacting support, I mean, I don't think many people want to actually have to deal with support if if they don't need to, especially on the retail side. They wanna, again, self-service. So there's case deflection models and AI to help surface the right information so shoppers or buyers can find what they need. But then should they need to contact the agent, again, there's that same AI that, you know, recommendations, again, to help that prospect or customer across the journey. So we do see companies starting to look at it end to end, but the reality, I think, is it's still a little siloed because different departments own different parts of the tech ecosystem as you were mentioning earlier. Yeah. No. Absolutely. Is it and I think the I think culture is a really important part of that. And so having the right culture within the business to be able to make sure that business, you know, business units aren't operating in silos, that they are actually talking to other. There's a common kind of north star in terms of what they want to do from a from a kind of customer putting customer at heart of the business. I think all of these things are, you know, absolutely critical. Yeah. I agree with you. From a time perspective, I may just ask one more question of you. So, and, William, thanks for your questions and chat here. So it's a it's a little bit little bit of a long one, so stay with me on this one. More than sixty percent of UK's eighteen year olds in twenty twenty four didn't go to uni. Arguably, this percentage is entering the workforce with greater spending power than indebted students. What sources do retailers use to track the evolution of shoppers of all demographics with regard to their implementation of AI initiatives? Okay. What sources of data? That's an easy one. Retail economics. So we do a lot of research in this area. So so we'll be more than happy to help you. But no. The the the I think there's the I think where where we're heading in terms of the the data pool and being able to kind of leverage different sources of data, I think, is really interesting because I think, you know, businesses are getting so much more sophisticated in terms of piecing together all of the pieces of data. I think so without kind of it's a very long winded very long answer to this question, but I think an interesting area for this is how AI is bringing about a more efficient way to structure and quantify unstructured data. And some of that unstructured data might be reviews. It might be it might be customer telephone conversations through customer service or whether it might be, but actually kind of, like, utilizing a blend of structured, unstructured, internal, and external data and bring it all into one place to be able to really drive meaningful insights. And some of that's anything from the economy right through to review websites. Absolutely. Thank you for that. We are now at time. So I do wanna thank you, Richard, for, an amazing and insightful presentation. For those of you that joined us, thank you for your time. You will get a copy of this, recording. And if we didn't get to your questions, because there were quite a few questions, but also insights shared, you will hear from a member on our team. So thank you for today. Hope you have a good rest of the day and that we shared some great insights with you. Thank you, Richard. Thank you so much. Thanks.