The V Spot eCommerce Nearly News

Notes from the road - Agentic Skepticism and Hope

Vinny O Brien — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 11:50:56 GMT

0.39% the Agentic contribution to ecommerce GMV - September 2026. Shared by the brilliant Andy Mulcahy - insights director for IMRG . This was at the Growth Summit a kissing cousin to the ecomm expo. My over riding feeling over the last 2 weeks. UK ecommerce seems ready to widen its horizons again, while still being told that doing the basics is a growth strategy. It is like the old leg up programme that Bart Simpson was placed into - we catch up with everybody else by going slower?

Trust kept coming up. That makes sense. As more of the shopping journey passes through agents, platforms and systems a customer may never see, trust has to travel with them. I was reminded yesterday (not for the first time this week) that we have a collexctive responsibility to shaping the sort of future commerce we want. Bad agentic experiences will not outperform bad human led ones.

What I find harder to swallow is how often “get the basics right” is still offered as the route to growth. Of course the basics matter. But after twenty years of ecommerce, shouldn’t they be compounding beneath the business by now? If they’re still the strategy, what have we been building? Sharon Gai painted the art of the possible, from the front line.

The AI conversations were more interesting when they got past the usual promises. Global Orator Karl Lillrud was razor sharp in demonstrating vision - we cannot see past our own noses today because AI or agents do not have the same frame of reference as we do - yet, here we are.

Retailers are questioning what they need to keep paying SaaS platforms to do. Cheaper alternatives and building some capabilities themselves are getting a more serious hearing. Matt Truman’s Project Lemonade takes that thought to its extreme: an agent-run retail operation sitting above a robotic warehouse. I’m fascinated to see what it produces. Ask me via DM to hear more.

Anxiety and fear and hope mean we want the human at the centre. We need it. If you are a major utility company or telco an automated system for collections , dept recovery etc makes sense. Though Paul Sweeney ney would say this is around quite some time and is damn successful too. We keep saying the human element will matter more. Will it? Or do we say that because it’s comforting while the ground moves under us?

On the show floor, the practical conversations were about international growth and selling across channels. Brands are exploring, testing and keeping their options open. There were plenty of agencies, plenty of merch competing for attention, and Shopify was hard to miss.

I left thinking the industry has two jobs at once: make the existing business work properly, and get much more ambitious about what comes next. Calling the first one a strategy forever is selling ourselves short.

And then there are some emerging themes that signal the winds of change:

Self Regulation over full regulation - we will have to take the bad with the good.

Culture of experimentation - I listened to a panel with SpaceNK, B&Q and G Star Raw - the culture was not just about trying things, listening to them it was also about not knowing the answer or knowing what the output might be. The culture allowed these ideas to fully synthesise before deciding what to do with it. It is not something i thought about much before. A great session chaired by MARIA CARLTON in discussion with Lee Pettman-Felss , Tim Parker and Suze College.
Governance and Policies - said it before and I say it again. Get your policies down on paper, get them updated. Use risk as a strategic lever and not a reason to not do something. Your policy should document your risk tolerance levels and be clear about where they can flex.
Collaboration and partnerships is where the mid market should play. Not be afraid to do good things together. Find playgrounds for brand activations - customers are overlapping all of the time and in places and ways we might never expect them to. Daniel-Sean Huisman man of Morrisons shared, in our interview how their demographic for Morrisons Now skewed older and opened new motivations and behaviours they had not previously seen.
We need to all be builders. We cannot hold strong points of view unless we are builders. Vibe coding is no longer the dirty phrase it used to be. It is prime learning ground and it can provide a rich place to get curious again. That’s something I found for myself. It has made me better at my job. It requires you to think beyond the step you are looking to take and keep iterating - nothing is complete and everything is becoming as Kevin Kelly might say.
Shift, as a word was used more than trend. Words matter. A shift is a clear sign of change, trends are just what they are. In becoming more agile, channel agnostic and being available where customers are allows you to perhaps be benefit from trends, surf the wave for a bit.
Our lens for AI and its applications is limited to the work we are involved in. Were we something of a test bed for other, more industrial scale changes? I think so. With consumption still at the heart of economic activity, it is in governments interest to keep spending mentality high - agents look good in this space. But consider Christmas and you want to get the best gifts or buy yourself something nice. If you had the scenario where you gave ChatGPT your desires, your budget and allowed it to act when you threshold was hit, you would be happy, no? You wake and get those new boots you were waiting on in your size and a particular price point and it happened while you would otherwise be sleeping. Or the lego set on sale and it is a week before payday - ChatGPT acted because it could and you were not aware of the price change. I am just building some cases here - this is how we will be drip fed.

The events are so well put together now - every nut allergy catered too, every expensive drink and food you can imagine. And the sheer volume of them. As an industry it is quite hard to believe how we keep this moving. Just this week we had Retail Club, NRF Europe, Ecomm Expo, Growth Summit, Vision Summit, Amazon Day, DMEXCO and many many more. Retail and brand leaders are getting more and more overwhelmed. Michelin star dinners, as much as they are a privilege, are something of a chore at times too. But, we need ways to connect and talk. How do you sell without selling? Shopify do a good job of giving out the sexy in-differenece vibe. Call us cos we won’t call you? Don’t sell Shop Pay, don’t bother selling. Payments is where it’s at though, right. Amidst all of this, there are many making these micro communities work. For them it must be part therapy sessions as much as it is building relationships. Not everyone can stick to their values, but a real nod to Jason Nyhus in Shopware - he is making hard yards and making them count. I have nothing but admiration. For the group at IMRG they managed the tables brilliantly, mixed the content well and host with ease. More of this please.

From my travels, the personal anxiety was real - it is hard to avoid. The faces and stories are still the same. The platforms we all love to hate still dominate what we do and why we do it. Commerce is HARD, very hard but we are continuing on a path of compounded activities that we have been doing for 20 years getting the same results but expecting something different, we are surely on a path to more of the same?

And so what is the solution - compounded gains - savings, productivity, channels and customers. Creating new cultural elements where not having the answer is the starting point and not knowing where to start is ok. There are floods of younger people entering the markett without the incumbency of legacy. It is in this type of group where we will see the first billion dollar brand emerge run by 1 person. We will be skeptical, we will ask questions but, it will happen and I won’t be surprised. They will probably have a channel focus and smart sourcing strategy from social listening or something and have an efficient path to the doorstep. They will love their channel and the community in it. The brand will shut down and they move onto the next thing. Brands will come and they will go - that is the true brand economics today. Attention economy, pah.

For me, it is about frameworks. All about frameworks. A recurring word from all the biggest brains I listened to. Frameworks are the key. My AI policy framework, my diagnostic framework - my day in the life framework. It provides guardrails and opportunities, quick implementation from a strong knowledge base, grounding and values and much. A framework is a connectivity tool and a skill that can be refined, open to change and expanded. When I think about my role beyond 2027 it is framework by design and culturally led. Curiosity can now be matched by much greater access and as I mentioned before a little bit more time to think. Sometimes doing nothing is the best action of all.

Footnote:

2027 will see me growing 2 know totems for myself - CampTralee - the 2027 bootcamp. IYKYK.

Have I got news for you - helping make the news and the ecomm news becoming whelming again, not overwhelming.

Where was I?

Vinny O Brien — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 09:59:19 GMT

Another crazy week ahead. I will be at a Shopify workshop tomorrow in London and then onto the excel for the Growth Summit with IMRG where I will be in discussion with Daniel-Sean Huisman of Morrisons and Will Lockie with Embassy of Beauty and something that will be fascinating. Looking at the customers shifts occurring now and in front of us.

Thursday I am the host of the Main stage all day at the. eCommerce Expo - My first return to London for a number of years for this, despite some attempts. And at the end of that day, I will be speaking with Millie Bright and Ellen White where we will be talking about No One Wins Alone: Building High-Performing Teams Under Pressure - Panel Session.

Cultural adaptation, change and agility are increasingly becoming focus areas for success, survival and developing the skills we need to continue in our daily work lives. And I would say that anxiety and coping are no longer the taboo topics they once were. It is interesting to note that team ethos, soft skills and awareness are some of the key components that we will need to get through.

Coming off the back of last week, you realise how important that the right conversatsions at events like this provide some insight on how you build your own way of working. The brand success stories last week talked about planned international growth, some tested international growth, range extension and drop shipping as market entry strategies. The range of ways that people are figuring out how to compound their marketing and advertising activities to try and move forward was very uplifting. And to wrpa that up on Friday night to see young Irish eCommerce talent driving forward without legacy or fear was magic to see.

I feel like this period of change is providing the most rich learning space I have been in since my career started. When you realise there is not secret sauce or things to hide, sharing by itself becomes that virtuous activity and the biggest compounder of all.

Inside out, up Side Down - Go Pro is a data center co now. Did you get the memo?

Vinny O Brien — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:54:26 GMT

Following the Open AI thread yesterday and I spotted something reading Time magazines “puff piece” on Open AI, the new new version. According to PR monthly. That $1BN in ads revenue is a useful lever.

“Early advertising results within ChatGPT have been promising enough that executives are increasing the number of ads, potentially subsidizing free access for the 92% of ChatGPT’s consumer users who, Friar says, do not pay for a subscription. The company is quietly testing sponsored agents—a format in which someone who clicks an ad can enter an AI experience presented by a brand.”

Introducing the Open AI leg-up Ads programme. You pay us and we pay the masses to stay onboard. Meanwhile, we are building sponsored agents. Processing and power capabilities is what Sundar Pichai said would be the only thing to slow this down earlier this year. And this is where the Jack Barker school of box building is coming to the fore. Google are subletting TPUs to other AIs and even funding rent roll (paraphrasing) to allow cash to flow. Apple has also been building Jack’s dream product for almost a decade - the Mac Mini. Unit economics now sitting in their favour with price no longer seemingly a thing. They could charge what they want for them. If the mini were to go bigger than the Airpods as a standalone product, Ternus will be on firm ground - Lake Ontario aside. (seriously, on your first day).

On the outside it seems like there is insatiable demand for compute but not in the way we think. This is the battle for control and distribution power. Go Pro, yes Go Pro have done an AllBirds and just pivoted to becoming a data center producer as part of a merger with Starman Optical. Historically stored video data no doubt a prime asset. But moving into defense is a heck of a side step.

Back to the article and a reminder we are moving into the Physical realm of AI now. How will it affect commerce - some hints at where.

“OpenAI’s road map becomes grander from there. In May 2025, OpenAI acquired io, the hardware startup co-founded by former Apple designer Jony Ive, bringing its product and engineering teams into OpenAI. Ive and his firm, LoveFrom, remain independent but have assumed broad creative responsibilities across the company. Altman says OpenAI is developing a “small handful” of devices, including “something that belongs on a table,” something to be placed in a pocket, and something worn on the body. People familiar with the plans say the first, expected early next year, is a small, pucklike device designed to sense its surroundings and speak with its owner using ChatGPT’s voice mode. “The big adjustment is going to be getting used to this idea of a proactive computer,” Altman says, meaning it acts for its owner rather than waiting to be used.”

All this is to say WOW. Where is anything now.

The Anxiety of Responsibility

Vinny O Brien — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:38:07 GMT

There is a version of the AI conversation where the bottleneck is always data. Your data is dirty, your data is siloed, your data is not ready, and here conveniently is a product that gets your data ready. It is a good pitch because it is half true, and because it is the half that can be invoiced.

I have spent four months inside an agentic build that did…

See you at the Growth Summit London?

Vinny O Brien — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 08:47:04 GMT

Silly season coming up for a silly man. Having not been to many events in London over the last few years, I am thrilled to be back there a few times in the month of September. This year parrtnering with the team IMRG ... Every retail conference this year has a session on AI. Very few have a retailer willing to say what it actually did to their numbers.…

Prisoners of Compute - Part 1

Vinny O Brien — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 09:52:59 GMT

Musings of a madman. On Friday the seventeenth of July 2026, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company reported a 77% jump in quarterly operating profit and its share price fell seven percent. See, it is not just you, Shopify.

Sit with that for a second, because everything else in this disputation is downstream of it. I have been listening to Tim Marshall lately and he talked about the Age of Reason. I felt right in that moment last Friday. It spawned research to sit on top of the headlines, the side chats and the LinkedIn guff too. Markets are not my forte but they influence much of what we see and hear.

Kavanagh-esque. If you know, you know.Gloss of the author

Back to Taiwan SMC. The most strategically important manufacturing company on the planet, the firm that physically etches the future onto silicon at a resolution measured in atoms, delivered results that would have triggered a champagne order in any other decade, and the market marked it down like a bakery with yesterday’s bread in the window.

It was not alone. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 12.5% across the week, its worst run in more than fifteen months, closing more than twenty percent below its late-June peak and crossing, by the technical definition, into a bear market. Some $3.3 trillion in global semiconductor market value had evaporated since 22 June. SoftBank, which the market treats as a proxy for OpenAI the way a weather vane is treated as a proxy for the weather, dropped nine percent. Nvidia slipped enough to briefly hand the world’s-most-valuable-company crown back to Apple, which must have felt like being overtaken on the motorway by a man on a ride-on lawnmower. In Hong Kong the Chinese AI names got it worse than the Americans: Z.ai down thirty percent, MiniMax down sixteen.

The Nvidia move sparked Jensen Huang into action on Twitter, overshadowed only by Bernard Arnault and his letter of perfection.Marginal note

The trigger was a model. On 16 July, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, a Beijing startup called Moonshot AI released Kimi K3. Two point eight trillion parameters, a mixture-of-experts architecture, a million-token context window and, critically, open weights. The largest open model ever released. It benchmarked competitively against the frontier, it cost a fraction of the frontier to run, and Moonshot announced the full weights would go public on 27 July. Richard Hendricks would be proud.

Anyone could have them. Anyone can still have them, as of this week. Independent testing put Kimi K3’s hallucination rate at roughly fifty-one percent.

51%. I thought I was hallucinating. Dad joke.

A model that is wrong about half the time moved three and a third trillion dollars of capital in four trading sessions, in the same week that the world’s most important chipmaker beat its numbers by seventy-seven percent and was punished for it.

The result is a loud expression of doubt.

And this is the number I would tattoo on the inside of my eyelids. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, having lost a fifth of its value and crossed into a bear market and triggered a global panic, remained up more than sixty percent on the year.

As I mentioned, I am not even a novice in this field yet. But it is interesting.

See more below -

Nevermind - my AI journey with Brands

Vinny O Brien — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:45:59 GMT

How’s your AI imposter syndrome doing? From unknown, to Hype Cycle to deep reality and the overarching feeling of Anxiety, in all its forms. From kids, to job safety to now, learning and implementing. So. Many. Emotions. It’s like being a teenager all over again. Outwardly projecting confidence whilst crying into your pillow every night. Technology intr…

Welcome to Treasure Island

Vinny O Brien — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:25:24 GMT

When I worked for MicksGarage (car parts online), Ireland was known, by Suppliers, as treasure island due to the margin that could be made there - before a product hits a consumer at all. Worth some thought. Our retail is largely multi brand, reseller led retail. Not conducive to huge margins or pricing flexibility. An open economy ripe for the picking …

The rise, the fall, and the 340 TomToms. A V Spot Behind the Music special.

Vinny O Brien — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:32:30 GMT

The V Spot | August 2026

Margin, Marriage and Stock Availability

Vinny O Brien — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:58:23 GMT

There is a version of the ecommerce head job that the industry has decided is a technical specialism. You know the archetype. Someone who can read a Shopify dashboard, manage a performance media budget, speak fluently about stack architecture and integration layers, and translate all of it upward to a leadership team that mostly wants to know why the co…

Reformation IPO - DTC brand files

Vinny O Brien — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:18:22 GMT

Reformation are filing for IPO. One of the DTC brands who have been getting things right. Around since 2013, maybe their maturity places them well to make better decisions. History tells us a different story for the brands who make this jump. and current category analysis suggests this could be really tought. Gymshark just bought back its outside invest…

The Age of Reason

Vinny O Brien — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:14:48 GMT

Prisoners of Compute

Geography, faith, and the mortgage on the cathedral. The numbers stopped mattering

Musings of a madman. On Friday 17 July 2026, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company reported a 77% jump in quarterly operating profit and its share price fell seven percent. See, it’s not just you Shopify.

Sit with that for a second, because everythi…

Scarcity is the New Currency

Vinny O Brien — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 08:53:32 GMT

Last time out, we did the arithmetic on a football match: eleven grand for a seat, thirty percent clipped by the governing body, and $450 patches of the pitch sold like relics of a saint. I filed it under one bad weekend for the wallet and moved on. Then I looked at what else happened while the grass was being parcelled up, and at what has been happenin…

MEANWHILE, AT THE STOCK EXCHANGE

Vinny O Brien — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 10:37:08 GMT

MEANWHILE, AT THE STOCK EXCHANGE... When last we left our story, a video game retailer had offered $56 BILLION for a marketplace five times its size. The marketplace said no. Any sensible villain would retreat to his lair. Not this one.

Holy shi**y takeover attempt batman

THIS WEEK: the stake DOUBLES to 9.8%! The pursuer renounces his own pay package! He …

How UpCircle Beauty Turned Coffee Waste Into a Global Skincare Brand | Anna Brightman | S3 EP6

Vinny O Brien — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:03:27 GMT

It would be too easy to mention Dragons Den performances, staritng a business with your brother for this epsiode. Instead, I will say that I came away from every discussion with Anna smiling. Purpose without pretense, an innate desire to leave our planet better than when they found it. The journey being the destination and not settling for the easy road…

Mandy from accounts and borrowed time

Vinny O Brien — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 09:25:20 GMT

Picture a merchant. Call her the kind of founder Shopify built its brand on: the rebel, the arm-the-little-guy hero of a thousand keynotes. She sells homeware, or skincare, or something your aunt bought at Christmas and genuinely liked. In early 2025 her landed costs went sideways. Tariffs due at the border before a single unit sold. Freight that never …

You can't out Amazon, Amazon.

Vinny O Brien — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:34:46 GMT

Spain 1, Argentina 0. Ferran Torres in the 106th minute, Rodri with the Golden Ball, and because FIFA’s commercial department has no fear of God, Madonna, BTS and the Muppets sharing a half-time stage in New Jersey. A month of football ended last night and this morning the whole industry is walking around in the haze, pretending to read email.

Before we…

Struggle Bus is Back

Vinny O Brien — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:13:05 GMT

A Struggle Bus podcast episode helped someone win a job last week. I only found out because they told me. A message landed in my inbox from a past guest of The Struggle Bus:

“I’m interviewing with a brand that is founder-led and really cares about culture and getting to know their leaders for who they are. They said a lot of interesting things that they …

I Predicted the PayPal Acquisition.

Vinny O Brien — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 11:20:56 GMT

There’s a specific kind of embarrassment reserved for satirists whose jokes come true. Ask anyone who wrote for The Onion between 2016 and 2024. In February, I wrote a piece of speculative comedy set in 2028 the Hindsight 20/20 universe, for those who were in the room, in which PayPal, after years of strategic drift and a market cap that moved like a m…

Believe the "No Hype"

Vinny O Brien — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 11:53:56 GMT

No hype. No frantic panic. Just pure, practical strategy. Massive congratulations to Mike Ryan for breaking down Google’s new Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) in his latest video. Smarter Ecommerce (smec) you know he is a gem.

If you look at the full UCP technical documentation, it is an absolute beast over 300 pages long. It’s incredibly easy for bran…