The World Wide Web is unhealthy right now.

Most of the things on the internet are crap, and they're crap, and we know that they're crap,

but they SEO optimized crap.

So how do you de-crapify that?

AI agents can direct people to things if people start their purchase activities there.

Like Google, they kind of are a tax on GDP.

Consumer spending is a huge part of GDP. They get

a percentage of all that spend because they're charging per click. That tax might just shift

elsewhere. Why is this system so complex? What are the different types of purchases where

AI can play a role? And what are we hoping to see as we think about the broader market?

Today, we're talking about the future of commerce and the age of AI.

The web is flooded with SEO junk.

But what happens when AI agents start directing how we search, shop, and buy?

Joining me are Alex Rampel, general partner at A16Z, and Just Steve Moore, partner at A16Z.

We discuss how AI could disrupt e-commerce from impulse buys to big-ticket per partner at A16Z and just Steve Moore, partner at A16Z.

We discuss how AI could disrupt e-commerce from impulse buys to big-ticket purchases and what it means for Google, merchants, and startups.

Let's get into it.

So you guys have both been thinking about A&Commerce for a while.

Alex, what inspired this piece and how did this all determine for you?

Well, so I had started a company called Trial Pay a long time ago. And actually, I'd been selling stuff on the internet for a very, very long time, even before the internet. And I was just trying to think, well, number one, what happens to Google? Because a lot of people, this is on their mind? So, like, is search volume going up or down? So I have my own personal experience of like,

well, my search volume's going down, but not for commerce, but clearly for everything that is not commerce. So that was one thing. But also, this company that I started trial pay, we were one of the biggest affiliates in the world. And affiliate marketing is basically you send somebody, this is the oldest business model on the internet, if you will, it actually predates AdWords and AdSense by a bit of you just get a share of the, you get a commission, basically. If you send something there, it was all, this was started, apparently apocryphly, it came from pornography, because that was the world's oldest business model on the internet. Like, how do you track? So that eventually made its way to commerce, and it's all based on cookies and pixels. So you drop cookie on the person's computer, and then on the confirmation page, you have a little like invisible one-by-one tracking pixel that reads the cookie, and that's how you know to say, Eric sent me the customer. So what we did at trial pay, we were one of the biggest ones there. Like, is that really going to be what powers this new realm of commerce? And then is it even relevant for a lot of things because impulse buys are huge. And with impulse buys, like almost tautologically, you're not going to use AI to tell you to buy something. Like, you shouldn't buy anything that's an impulse buy. Like, you go to the supermarket, you shouldn't be buying, like, Coca-Cola, like, in the checkout line. They actually charge you more at the checkout line than they do if you just buy in the Coca-Cola section. So, like, all of these things are designed to, like, tug at your emotions to get you to buy and spend money that you don't want to. That's not going to be AI. On the other hand, it's like these very, very expensive items. You're researching the heck out of them with AI, but like there's no affiliate model, like, how do you then commerce and transact? So, like, number one, it was like the

ontology of, like, number one, it was like the ontology of like commerce was very interesting. And then number two was this whole like affiliate thing, is it still going to be relevant because it seems like that's what chat GPT and others are getting into. And then number three was just my own personal behavior. It's just like I probably use chat dbt like three orders of magnitude more than I use Google

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