Episode 11: Elastic Path and the Future of E-Commerce: Personalization, Composability, and AI

Podcast Description:

In this episode of the Discovered Podcast, Rachel Tonner sits down with Grant Deken, SVP of Marketing for Elastic Path, to delve into the evolution of e-commerce and technology over the past five years and look ahead to the future. They discuss the rise of AI, the importance of data in creating personalized shopping experiences, and the growing trend of composable commerce. Grant shares insights from his journey with Unstack and Elastic Path, highlighting the significance of enabling marketers with the right tools to drive engagement and business growth. Tune in to explore the exciting developments in digital commerce and learn how businesses can leverage these innovations for future success.

Guest BIO:

Grant Deken, SVP at Elastic Path

Grant Deken is a true innovator in the marketing world, currently steering the ship as the SVP of Marketing at Elastic Path leading the company’s product-led market strategies. He joined Elastic Path through its acquisition of Unstack, a company he founded to help e-commerce merchants create stunning, no-code customer experiences. Before Unstack, Grant was the Co-Founder and CEO of Grapevine, a top influencer marketing platform that was acquired by Ideanomics. With 15 years of experience, Grant excels at building high-performance product and marketing teams that tackle complex customer challenges. He is passionate about leveraging customer data to create engaging and enjoyable shopping experiences that drive better business outcomes. Grant thrives on helping entrepreneurs turn their visions into reality and scale their ventures. If you want to elevate your e-commerce game or need insights on blending marketing with product innovation, Grant is your go-to expert.

References:

• elasticpath.com
• elasticpath.com/klevu
• klevu.com/elastic-path

Podcast transcript:

[00:00:15] Rachel Tonner: Hello and welcome to the Discovered Podcast. I’m here with Grant Deken, SVP of Marketing for Elastic Path. Hi Grant, how are you? 

[00:00:22] Grant Deken: Hey, I’m doing great, Rachel, excited to do this. 

[00:00:25] Rachel Tonner: Really good to have you on here. So before we get started, I was on a webinar the other day, and they asked this question, and I thought it was brilliant. What was your first job?

[00:00:36] Grant Deken: My first job? I worked at a rock climbing gym. So I got to help people learn how to tie their knots, belay properly and learn rock climbing safety. It was a ton of fun because I got to rock climb for free every day. 

[00:00:55] Rachel Tonner: Do you still climb? 

[00:00:56] Grant Deken: Not so much these days, but we have a few gyms around here in Cambridge. So once in a blue moon, we’ll get out there, and I’m always very sore after.

[00:01:06] Rachel Tonner: That’s awesome. As for my first job, I worked at French Connection as a sales assistant. So I’ve been in e-commerce and retail since I was 16.

[00:01:15] Grant Deken: Very cool.

[00:01:16] Rachel Tonner: Yes. So you work for Elastic Path, but I know you have a bit of a career before that. Can you tell us a little bit about where you came from and how you got to Elastic Path?

[00:01:27] Grant Deken: Yes, definitely. So I joined Elastic Path about a year and a half ago through its acquisition of Unstack, which was a company that I founded. We were really focused on helping e-commerce merchants create better experiences for their customers, both in terms of the actual design and creation of those pages in a no-code environment. But also, and more importantly, and we’ll talk about this today, is how we can use the great customer data that we’re collecting across all the different platforms that we use to run our business to really enhance those experiences that make them more engaging and delightful for shoppers and drive better outcomes for the business as well. I worked on that for the last four years prior to joining Elastic Path and I really have a career full of passion for building things and specifically things that help entrepreneurs build their businesses. I like to think of myself as someone who’s out trying to arm the rebels to do their jobs really well, and also being a little bit of a rebel myself.

[00:02:30] Rachel Tonner: I’m definitely a rebel myself, but I love that. You’re kind of like the entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. You understand what their goal is and try to help them meet it – so, love that. You and I have both been in tech and e-commerce for quite a long time, but I just wanted to get your view on what’s changed over the last five years. What’s the momentum, where are we headed?

[00:02:53] Grant Deken: I think so much has changed across so many different facets of tech. I mean, obviously even just in the last 18 months, AI has completely changed the way we think about most things in the business. Whether we’re actively using that or not, we were thinking about it, right? I think that’s obviously a huge one, but I think the fact that AI has only really been in the mainstream conversations the way that it is now for the past 18 months. Now, think about the last 5 years. What has changed? I think in the day to day, we don’t think about this as much because we’re so into in the business, and what were trying to do and get done, with all the emails and meetings. But when you try stepping back and look at what’s happened over the last year, and then you’re like wow, what has happened over the last five years. Companies like Gatsby and Nullify were just getting started a bit more than five years ago. Since then, there’s been so much innovation and change, especially in front-end infrastructure and AI. 

The way we think about data—capturing it and deploying it—has drastically advanced. The magic now is how all these advancements are coming together in a really interesting way to help businesses. It’s fascinating to think about what the next five years will look like as well, both in terms of what will change and also maybe like what won’t change. I think it’s also an important question to ask. I think a lot about those things. And then I think obviously just continued proliferation of digital as kind of a primary channel that we use to learn about brands, and to buy from brands. Obviously, omnichannel is still incredibly important for businesses and you see even new businesses continuing to invest in brick and mortar retail and things like that. 

But the way that digital also fits into the equation is, I think, more important than ever more prevalent than ever. And even 5 years ago, I think people were talking about that, but now it’s really here. So many moments are happening now that have been evolving and accelerating over the last five years. It’s a very interesting and exciting time to be in commerce and digital and kind of just riding along these like very massive waves that are happening right now.

[00:05:22] Rachel Tonner: Yes, I think it’s really interesting. You were talking about these different channels of evolution, like the super-techy stuff that maybe 3 or 4 years ago, ecommerce managers wouldn’t have cared about knowing what it was, what it was there for. And then the data stuff you were talking about and how that’s all come together in a usable way for retailers in almost a low code, no-code kind of way. I definitely think that’s where things are heading. It’s been this buildup in parallel tracks that’s now coming together in a really usable way for retailers.

[00:06:04] Grant Deken: And I would just say to add on top of what you sort of teed up there, I think you’re right. Those things are all coming together now. Now, what you’re seeing is people build sort of the presentation layer or that no-code layer on top. I mean, you guys are doing that at Klevu. We’re thinking about that a lot with Studio at Elastic Path. It’s like, okay, they’re all here. All the tech is here, how do I make it easy on me? How do I get to my end goal as quickly as possible with as little friction as possible? So that’s a big piece of what makes it all exciting. Absolutely.

[00:06:37] Rachel Tonner: Yes, definitely. And the value for retailers now being able to use data from different platforms and actually orchestrate something that is usable and valuable for the customer. I think every year since I began in e-commerce, it was the year of personalization. I think it actually is this year. I think it’s actually coming together in a way that’s actually easy to use. I know when we were having our prep call for this, we were talking about the data lakes and the BI teams of the past not being necessary anymore because, well, sorry, it’s probably necessary in certain scenarios – yes. But for the normal everyday ecommerce manager who has the right tech stack, the technologies are now more evolved to be able to get you the data that you need from point A and present it in the way that you need on point B. What have you seen in that area?

[00:07:31] Grant Deken: Well, I totally agree and I was looking at the Klaviyo website the other day. They have almost 150,000 merchants now on their platform. So what they and others have done is standardized how data flows for merchants, is organized, and is deployed. They have a subset of channels, but the data is structured really well there. So you can start to pull out in interesting ways and you can start using it in your search and merch, you can start using it maybe in onsite experiences… And so I think not only have they and others facilitated some of that, but also it’s shifted the expectations of merchants and retailers about what it should be and across the stages. From the early stage up to mid-market and enterprise, for larger organizations, those more advanced tools are also evolving. What’s available now via Snowflake or Databricks, there’s even more there. The benefit is, there’s a Horowitz article that came out around the composable data platform. It’s kind of rethinking the CDP a bit.

In that context, it’s like, allow the technical folks, the data engineers and IT teams to build out what they need, but then equally, there are now great tools for business teams to then action on the data. At the end of the day, why are we collecting all this data? Why are we putting all these dollars into getting it? It’s so that we can take action on it. Whether that’s through reporting or through experiences, how do we get smarter as an organization and learn faster? At Elastic Path, we’re excited about how to deliver more informed experiences based on that data. Whether it’s customer segmentation, behavior, or folks we’ve never engaged with before, we still know where they’ve come from. We might have some metadata about them. We know what device they’re on. There’s more data than ever. Folks who think about how to use that to elevate the experience for customers will continue to see great results and continue to win in their space.

I saw an Instagram reel from an interview with Jeff Bezos, and I thought it was really interesting. He said, “So many people talk about what’s going to change over the next ten years.” He kind of flipped it and said, “What’s not going to change over the next ten years that we can bank on?” And I was like, oh, that’s like, really smart. I think what’s not going to change over the next 10 years is that customers are going to expect really great tailored experiences for them. I think that customers are demanding it and you see it in the data and engagement. There’s so much noise in the world. It’s easier than ever to start a business, and where you can differentiate is in the experiences you deliver, the brand you build, the story you tell, the differentiation of your products. It’s hard to do that when many people are using the same set of tools. Think about how to differentiate. You can do it by deeply understanding your customers and acting on that in a way that drives a more interesting, engaging conversation with them.

[00:10:58] Rachel Tonner: Yes, I think also that consumers have changed too. It used to be about the lowest price or fighting with Amazon to get it delivered as quickly as possible. But with the movement towards more sustainable shopping, people care more about what a brand stands for. Then loyalty can also come from that, and it’s that kind of hook, once you get them to trust you and they trust that you’re going to interact with them in the way that they like, and that you know them, I think consumers are more willing to be loyal. If they like the brand and they like how they’re communicating.

[00:11:38] Grant Deken: Yes, I completely agree.

[00:11:41] Rachel Tonner: So you mentioned composability and re-platforming. I love Elastic Path’s campaign around the “unplatform”. I think it’s really cool. I really love how you are able to start a re-platform basically from almost any point. I think that’s a really interesting USP. I don’t see that a lot in other ecommerce platforms. Can you talk about that and your experiences working with clients doing that?

[00:12:16] Grant Deken: Absolutely. In the composable commerce space, there’s been a binary conversation of either not doing something or doing a replatform. Most often, neither of those choices are great choices. And by the way, doing nothing is a choice as well.

We came up with this term as an alternative, a counter position to the conventional conversation around replatforming. Which is like: hey, replatforming is hard. We’ve all read or heard the stories of it costing more than expected and taking a long time to implement. There’s always some of that. In today’s market, we need to move our business forward and innovate. We cannot sit still. But we also cannot take a massive swing or it might not be the right time. So what do we do?

One of the unspoken benefits of composability and composable commerce is that you can look within your business, find specific challenges or hypotheses about how to move forward, and get started there. We often talk about incremental innovation. How can I start with something small? How can I address problems in checkout, whether it’s a performance issue or a complex use case. Start there. Introducing a new business model has been effective for branding. We’ve seen brands do well in subscriptions, membership services, even simple subscribe and save. If you’re not doing that, there are great strategies and proven playbooks that merchants and business teams know about and want to action on that, and we can help. I would definitely encourage marketers and business teams to think about where they can start and what’s the first problem they can solve. It’s a great way to move the business forward, put points on the board, learn and build conviction around strategies. We spend so much time talking, whiteboarding, and creating reference architectures. When you translate something from the whiteboard to reality, it’s often different. There are a lot of assumptions. I think that being able to iteratively move the ball forward by testing, trying, learning, and applying those learnings to the next thing is a great way to approach it. I come from the startup world. That’s how we think.

[00:15:00] Grant Deken: We think about what’s the smallest surface we can go after, learn something, and prove something, and then expand it. And then do it again, and then expand it. I think that composable commerce is so well-positioned to that. It’s not talked about enough. Composable in general is getting easier to build with, and adopt, and move faster on. We spent a ton of time at Elastic Path thinking about how to democratize composable so everyone with a problem has a path to get in. That path, in our opinion, is not necessarily the full platform but an unplatform to get started. We have seen that be an effective way to partner with merchants, both existing and new conversations that we’re having. It starts with a business conversation. What’s hard? What’s on the roadmap that you’re struggling with? We’re happy to talk about the whole picture but let’s solve something together, let’s have a great business case, a story to tell, and learn a bunch in the process.

[00:16:25] Rachel Tonner: What particularly makes you think that composability is getting easier? I was interested in that part that you said.

[00:16:33] Grant Deken: Well, so, one of the things that we’ve done a lot of work and I think you really have to understand your customer, your ICP, and their use cases. So we spent a lot of time thinking about that. I think that approach to pre-composed solutions and accelerators have varying effectiveness. We’ve spent time on things like our composable front end, which is essentially completely built out of end-to-end composable solution for brands. We’ve made prescriptive choices with different best-of-breed vendors. For example, you should use this for OMS, this for search, like Klevu, for visual merchandising and AI.

It’s kind of helping to design that solution with approach that covers 80-85 percent of what merchants need to be successful. Most merchants have the same 80 percent, and the magic of their business and the complexity of their business is in that final 20 percent. We want to spend as much time as possible on that 20 percent. And that’s your differentiation right there. That’s where you win. But don’t recreate the 80 percent, we’ve got you on that.

[00:18:00] Grant Deken: That’s where I see composable commerce getting easier. There’s a team I manage internally here at Elastic Path, and that’s really the remit of the team to focus on how to make things as easy as possible. What tools are we giving folks? How can we make composable feel more self-service and not a stodgy, enterprise-y thing? There’s a place for that. In my personal experience, whoever makes it the easiest wins. We’ve adopted that mindset at Elastic Path. It’s not just about our message being simple to understand and the actual products we deliver. We work closely with our product team on this.

[00:18:45] Rachel Tonner: Yes. Ease of use is crucial. I love what you said there about like those who make it easy are those who win. We adopt that too at Klevu. Something else you said before resonated with me when you were talking about picking the small thing, the MVP, and move forward. Something that I’ve seen from our clients is not necessarily pick the small thing, but pick the thing that’s going to deliver you the most ROI the quickest. And use that actual money that you get from the value that you’ve given from that project to plan the rest of your project. It’s an easy board sell to go composable that way. Many start by replacing search and merch on their front end. If you think about a website, everywhere where Klevu can take over it’s the search, the search overlay, product listing, and product recommendations. You can basically reskin your site using Klevu and the value that they get from adding AI search then produces the dividends. Paul Smith did that. We have lots of other examples. Have you seen similar with your composable solution? Like put this thing in and then move onto the next?

[00:20:04] Grant Deken: Absolutely. We see it with customers like Pella Windows here in the States. They started on a sort of more of a legacy monolith platform with complex products and configurations. They had a checkout problem. We needed to fix it imminently but doing the whole thing is a long-term strategy. That’s really common with larger brands. We saw a great opportunity to help improve conversion rates, and at scale, that adds up quickly to your point about being a dividend producer. Astrak Group in the UK, they do manufacturing parts and equipment and they expanding their business a lot organically and inorganically through M&A. In that context, having been through a couple of those M&A’s myself, I think that post-acquisition execution is so critical. How fast can you unlock value and do that really well? And I think them being able to spin up new markets quickly, not necessarily replacing the core .com that they have. But for example, launching something in the States quickly for new markets where they have presence. Or a totally new market like New Zealand. So I think that those are the kinds of things that play really well both in terms let’s start by chipping away some surfaces so you’re doing this effort versus impact kind of assessment on what services do you want to go after. So there’s that dimension of it. And there’s also the ability to move quickly outside of maybe your core day to day as you expand in terms of brand acquisition as you expand in terms of regions and geographies that you serve. Typically you might want a totally different site for that, you want to localize to the culture, customers, content, language and currency. So those are the things I think are really great, you know, just like really good jumping off points in the unplatform conversation.

[00:22:21] Rachel Tonner: Yes, it’s about agility, flexibility, it’s about being able to make these decisions and then execute them well. I think that leads us really nicely to into the next thing we want to talk about, which is about CX Studio because it’s such a cool product—a landing page builder, A/B testing tool, personalization tool. You put all these elements into a page and make the best page for a campaign. I’m probably not describing it really well. Can you explain more?

[00:22:55] Grant Deken: Yes, you did great. And even end to end storefronts. Some of our great use cases around that are brands saying, and back to like the multi-region conversation for a second, like “hey, you know, we want to be able to spin up a totally new storefront very quickly for a specific region.” CX Studio is a great option for that. So it’s a very exciting product, kind of going even back to the beginning of this conversation today when I was talking about it, it’s two really important things, right? One is brand. I think marketers and merchandisers need the agency to be able to create things right. I think most marketers that I talked to, like they have a very clear vision for what they need to get done. They’re very organized. They have a marketing calendar planned out for the rest of the year. It’s all there. It’s the execution piece where I think friction gets introduced for a lot of teams. When you think about us versus, you know, maybe anyone else, like we obsess about how to enable ecommerce marketers to execute on creating these experiences. I think the first piece of that is if hey, I want to have, maybe a great visual experience with my products and content, I want to have control over that.

The second piece is, okay, now I’ve nailed that. Now I want to, I want to really make that every page of you that happens, I want to be tailored to the person on the other side. So you might be delivering tens of thousands of pages a day. And there’s one which like no two are alike, right? Based on who’s who’s viewing it. Maybe someone again that we’ve never met before, who’s coming from a Meta campaign or TikTok campaign or an event or something in store or you’re driving to maybe a post purchase follow up. It could be from your email and SMS and so there are all these experiences that that happen, and so on. We want to have the core experience that we develop design with no code. And then, we also want to up-level that with rules and things based on whether this person’s in a certain customer segment, based on whether they purchased before, based on whether they’re maybe a a fickle buyer you know, or someone we’re trying to win back, right? There are all these use cases that exist in the world and in a day in the life. We help really make that easy for brands. Both by creating the experiences, but then also, like we said, taking all that great data, which is such an important asset for brands – deploying it effectively into the experience is like where the magic really starts to happen, that personalization that’s so easy to implement.

And then to your point, going even further from there and saying, hey, well, let’s understand if it’s working. And how can we as an organization start to stack the learnings? Being able to run A/B tests or being able to piggyback on some of the great like A/B tests that maybe you set up in Klevu on one of our pages. That’s then running and there’s context there of like, what should be showing up to the end user, I think is really important.

One of the stats that is interesting to me, maybe not to others, but to me is one of the coolest findings is when you start using a product like Studio, the rate of experimentation goes up dramatically for the organization. And I think that is such an important and often overlooked thing is how organizations and marketing teams built a culture of experimentation. And so if you have tools like Klevu and Studio, and those two tools working together, the amount that you can learn is just you get this sort of compounding effect as an organization. The thing that’s really really cool is – let’s say you do that in like a landing page context and you have a really successful campaign. You’re like, wow, like, you know, the way we implemented the offer with PLP component and this A/B test like drove some really compelling results for us. Let’s now apply that everywhere else where it makes sense. Let’s put that on the homepage. Let’s put that in the emails. And all of a sudden you’re like, okay, now I’m like really unlocking the value from this one thing that I did. And it’s like, this learning is now the ROI and the learning, I think organizations don’t always quantify very well, or maybe it’s really understated. You then take that learning and put it in all these other places as an organization, just up-level everything. That’s the kind of stuff that we think about that we’re after. And I think it’s like so cool about the partnership that we’re working on is like bringing these things together, learning faster, both the marketers learning faster, the AI is learning faster – it’s just compounding. I think it’s again, kind of where we started, like there is a really cool moment here. I think like this too is like a part of that bigger moment. 

[00:27:45] Rachel Tonner: Definitely. E-commerce marketers and managers now have the data, they have the tools to build and they have tools to test sites. Give them those things, and like you said, this culture of experimentation will come and that’s really cool. I was listening to a talk at Vervaunt’s Pulse conference in London last week. Someone said people are afraid of testing and conversion rate optimization because they think they don’t have enough volume to make a statistically significant observation. She was from the brand side and said, “actually, if you start seeing a trend, there you go.” CRO experts might disagree with that statement, but I actually thought it was a really nice way of explaining testing to an audience that might be scared to test or think that they don’t have enough data or enough traffic or enough time. Definitely don’t make an observation based on like, two days of data at a really short test, but trends are also really important. So just wanted to get that out there.

[00:29:05] Grant Deken: I completely agree. It’s like going to the gym, or let’s say you want to run a half marathon. I won’t even say marathon, but let’s say you want to run a half marathon, which is still a long way to run, don’t get me wrong. You don’t start out day one and be like I’m going to run a half marathon. You start and ask yourself can I do a mile? And then you do that a couple of times. Then you say OK, now I’m going to do a 5K, then a 10K. I think that’s something for marketers to think about who are maybe in the camp like “we know we should do this, we’re not doing as much as we should, we want to like it…” should know there’s no shame in starting small. I think tools like what we’re providing and you are too, are bringing the barriers down for one. I also think it’s important for people to know there’s no shame in running a mile like you’re doing more than 90 percent of other people by getting outside and running a mile, a.k.a. running an A/B test. You got to start there, and then you do a little bit more, and then you get better and faster. And it’s like most things in life getting started is 90 percent of the struggle. Overcoming that is the key for brands.

[00:30:17] Rachel Tonner: Yes, it’s going to be really cool when it launches. We’ll have a landing page builder that supports product listings and rules from Klevu, and A/B testing from within category merchandising. I’m excited to see how customers use this. I’ll probably get stuck in helping customers use it because I’m obsessed with UX and testing.

[00:30:41] Grant Deken: Yes, with the integration we’re building, you just drop your Klevu API keys in and have access to components, templates, and use-case and purpose built around what Klevu customers do. It accelerates their workflow, and makes it as easy as possible, whether it’s product recommendations or PLP listings. It’s immediately available on your storefront. There’s no DNS configuration, it’s immediately available. We’ve been thoughtful as a group about how to make this a big win for merchandisers.

[00:31:31] Rachel Tonner: It’s very cool. What are you looking forward to over the next five years in e-commerce?

[00:31:37] Grant Deken: Well, I think as much as we’re focused on, talking about the sort of unique experiences. I think that it’s here and there’s a lot more upside there. I think eventually we get to a world in which AI is really kind of always on sort of that like full time CRO analyst who is originating ideas around what to test, running the tests, implementing the outcomes. And I think we’ll see more and more of that in a world in which there’s more data, the AI is going be more effective than us as humans as how to deploy it in effective ways on and then run those experiments and then roll up the learnings and give those to us and then we apply them across the business.

There’s going to be a very interesting dynamic in how we bring that into our into our workflows as marketers and organizations. And the big unlock there is not just the sort of machine learning capabilities, but I think that the Gen AI side, that’s like, really, what’s new here – being able to really have a computer thoughtfully create content that’s contextualized based on what we already know and have learned. I think we’re very close on this. Like when we were talking about localization, maybe there’s a little bit more to go, but it has to be much more effective than me at figuring out what someone in Hong Kong wants or needs to see to make a purchase, and just the amount of information that an ML has. So it’s very interesting. So I think we’ll see a lot more there. I think we’ll continue to see the barriers come down around how brands can build and execute, around commerce, around composable. I think we’ll see that just continue to get easier, more effective. So it’s a really exciting time. 

[00:33:37] Rachel Tonner: Yes, I totally agree with you on the copilot stuff. I think the surface has not been scratched yet, but use cases are endless almost. And it’s like, okay, what are we going to need approval on? What are we going to just let the AI do? Like those decisions are going to be unique to each technology that uses them or each product that the retailers are building. I think that’s going to be fascinating. 

[00:34:04] Grant Deken: What are some of the things you’re excited about?

[00:34:10] Rachel Tonner: I didn’t expect you to ask me a question. I’m excited about the personalization element. I think that it hasn’t been fully cracked thus far. I also think that there’s been so much research and consumers that I speak to and we just did a consumer survey that says that people are still worried about privacy, but then you’ll see that their behavior is different. They’ll go and fill out a 10-question quiz and give their email for 20 percent off on their order. There’s a disconnect between what customers say they want and what they actually want. And I think we’re going to see that start to combine as retailers get more comfortable with their data and more comfortable with presenting the personalization in the way that they should and that customers react to. I think we’re going to see more personalized websites, more personalized experiences, more loyalty programs, more ways of getting data from the customers and actually using it.

[00:35:14] Grant Deken: Yes, it’s an interesting call-out. I studied Economics in college, and I was always at the behavioral economics side of it. People saying one thing, but then behaving completely differently – whether that’s, hey, you know, my data is worth X and for 20 percent, you know what I mean so financially I’m happy to give it? The other interesting pieces, like consumers if you ask 10 out of 10 consumers would you rather have random ads showing up in your feed or would you rather have ads that are really interesting to you based on what you’re interested, maybe the sports you play or anything. Well, 10 out of 10 people would choose the latter because creative is becoming almost, I don’t want to say it’s as entertaining as entertainment, but there is a piece of this as marketers that we’re thinking about. Okay, like how do I engage? How do I delight? How do I entertain? And I think that is behaviorally the expectation that consumers will have over time. But you’re like, we can only do that if we have information about you. I do think if it’s contextualized on how the information is used and people are comfortable with the brand that’s capturing it, and there’s a transparency around what’s being done there. I think people are really comfortable sharing that information. So the behaviors don’t match, you know, what the newspapers are writing.

[00:36:45] Rachel Tonner: I think there’s also a test point of time. It’s like, “I’m going to give you all this stuff and then I’m going to see what you do with it, and then I’m going to decide if you deserve to be in my inbox anymore.”

[00:36:57] Grant Deken: I like that, I think that’s true. You have 30 days or I unsubscribe.

[00:37:05] Rachel Tonner: Something like that. For me I think it’s like 5 days. I’m really impatient.

[00:37:09] Grant Deken: Yes, you make a good point which is also in the point of time. There’s a big privacy conversation going on right now, but think about how much things have changed. I buy more things on my phone than my desktop now. I think that’s not unique to me. Over time, people acquiesce and accept it. They will be like “you’re just gonna have my data, but it’s a great experience”. So I think, over time consumers expectations will shift as well. It’ll be interesting.

[00:37:46] Rachel Tonner: Definitely. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed our conversation.

[00:37:51] Grant Deken: Yes, this was awesome. Always fun to chat about AI, personalization, and customer experiences. Can’t wait to showcase more of what we’re doing together over the next few months. Thanks for having me.

[00:38:06] Rachel Tonner: Grant, if people want to learn more about our partnership and integration, where can they go?

[00:38:13] Grant Deken: Go to elasticpath.com/klevu and everything you need will be there.

[00:38:21] Rachel Tonner: And you can find Elastic Path under our navigation in integrations.