THE 2028 GLOBAL COMMERCE IDENTITY CRISIS

Part 1

What follows is a scenario, not a prediction. This isn’t bear porn, AI doomer fan-fiction, or a Gary Vee NFT drop. The sole intent of this piece is to model a scenario that has been almost entirely unexplored, largely because the people who might have explored it were too busy building agent-powered checkout flows that auto-purchased seventeen kg of Himalayan pink salt on behalf of a 34-year-old product manager in Shoreditch who definitely did not ask for that.

I wrote this at the intersection of genuine concern and the very specific kind of humour that only people who have attended too many NRF keynotes can truly appreciate. If you’ve ever sat through a “phygital retail experience” panel and nodded along while something died inside you, this is for you. I had also just read that 2028 piece by the guys at Citrini, took my kids out to home school in our war bunker. Why we had the bunker was a mystery to me, still is, we live in Ireland.

The year is 2028. In ecommerce years, which, like dog years, run at approximately seven times the pace of reality, that makes it 2049. An era of grey muzzles, tired joints, and a profound inability to remember why we started doing any of this in the first place. An era that, in hindsight, had all the warning signs of a Golden Retriever who has just spotted a squirrel and has absolutely no plan for what comes next. That Golden Retriever, sadly, has not found the squirrel.

This is the ecommerce memo nobody asked for but for those who know me, probably should have seen coming.

The canary isn’t dead. It’s just been replaced by a bot that tweets on its behalf and is doing, frankly, a better job.