Connected Commerce: You Don't Have to Outrun AI. Just Your Competition.

Hai Mag 00:09

Welcome everybody, welcome to Connected Commerce Podcast. So here is your host, Hai, the CEO and co-founder of Eva Commerce. And today I have a distinct I have amazing guest, you know, and it's a distinct pleasure to have Erik from Hawke Media, who is the founder of Hawke Media joining us. So thank you, thank you, Erik, for joining our podcast.

Erik Huberman 00:34

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Hai Mag 00:36

So I mean you have amazing experience for years. You worked with the brands and the podcast is about really to hear more your stories, like where you feel that connected commerce is really helping. So I mean, it's you know, please tell us what you think makes sense.

Erik Huberman 00:58

In connected commerce.

Hai Mag 00:59

Absolutely. Like happy to hear from you, like any any stories very with the brands, any experience that you have and you know, like we can maybe start with a story and take it from there.

Erik Huberman 01:12

Sure, w I mean what what kind of story would you like? I can I do have

Hai Mag 01:16

Yeah, like I mean, maybe you know, like, you know, one of the most interesting things right now is all about this AI tools, right? I mean, and you can take it from different angles. Like one is the whole SEO is changing to AI visibility, all these chatbots doing shopping. I mean, might be like a good starting point.

Erik Huberman 01:41

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think the issue with a lot of innovation, whether it was the internet, the industrial revolution, and now AI, is people try to sort of boil the ocean. They're like, my god, there's this giant thing that we have to stay on top of everything. And, you know, my favorite metaphor to think about in this world is the joke about the two guys walking through the woods and a bear comes out and starts charging at him and one guy bends down to tie his shoes. The other guy goes, What are you doing? You can't outrun a bear. And he goes, I don't have to outrun a bear to outrun you. So same thing with AI. You just have to be better than the people around you.

Erik Huberman 02:11

Like we do call us spade a spade. We live in a competitive world. And your job is not to be on top of everything. It's just to be faster than other people and more innovative. And so I I think, you know, I've heard even people I respect say ridiculous things like if you're not spending three hours a day leveraging AI, you're gonna fall behind. And it's like nobody that's got s*** to do has three hours a day to spend on AI. So like, sorry, no, not the case as someone that's definitely on top of it. But Every time I do have a moment in some downtime to actually play with it, I'm blown away by the things you can do with it. So there's this funny balance where it's like, listen, AI is like an army of 17 year old interns.

Erik Huberman 02:49

It's not f***ing coming for everyone's jobs. And I I saw Elon Musk say something recently about how next year blue collar or white collar jobs are gone or something absurd like that. And it's like, no. Is it hyper augmentative? Yes. Does it eliminate some really remedial jobs? Yes. like good example. my A EA took another job in June. Great guy, but wanted to get back into the entertainment industry. And I've been trying to replace him, but I haven't found someone right. In the meantime, I got underwater. So I started messing with Grok Bot. And I'd say I've replaced half of what he did. And which by the way, isn't a statement to him. I had him doing a bunch of really dumb stuff. He's a really smart guy.

Erik Huberman 03:30

I I just had him doing a bunch of really dumb, tedious stuff. I'm not n now not hiring an EA. I'm just gonna hire an EA that's gonna leverage AI and be way more effective because back to the point of like you should spend three hours a day leveraging your AI. Well, now I'm gonna hire someone to spend three hours a day to leverage my AI. And the impact that that's gonna have on my life while I go do the things I'm best suited for and actually have to talk to people, like that's that's where this is going. And so I actually don't think we're gonna have I think is individual industries are gonna have tough times. I do think s a lot of you know, administrative assistants will lose jobs.

Erik Huberman 04:03

I think the VA thing. Could end up being a real problem. You know, a lot of outsourced back office teams, those are gonna hurt. but there's gonna be other things that they augment with. Back to the same point. I I talked about this with a friend that runs a BPO. I I won't say his name, but they're having the best business times they've ever had. People are scared about their industry, but like they're like, everything's great because AI makes us more efficient, makes us more productive, we're more valuable to our customers for the same price. Like it's what these I actually heard one of my sales guys say this to a client about us. They're like, well, why can't we just use AI to do marketing?

Erik Huberman 04:35

It's like, who do you think is going to use AI better, you or us? Because it's competitive. Again, you can use AI to do what we do. We're going to do it too, but we're going to do it better than you are. And I think that is a really important part when you're looking at how that's going. So how do what I see in innovation? Well, I mean, I had a I spent two hours with a friend that was early in xAI, like really, really ingrained in the AI space. I just spent two hours with him literally before getting on this podcast, where he just gave me a rundown of how I need to continue to build out my grok. But That that thing is incredible.

Erik Huberman 05:01

So I'd say like step one, just go if you don't have it, get it. And if you've gotten it, just start thinking about all the things you don't like to do. He like I and it ask it to solve it. The example I'll give is he's he's like, I can't remember the company that like exists that you can give it a phone number. So it can now text and make phone calls on your behalf. And he and he's like, just ask Grok. So I said, Grok Bot, I I want to have a phone number so you can text and make phone calls on my behalf. What do I use? And it goes, you do this, set this up, dah dah dah He's like, Yeah, that was it.

Erik Huberman 05:27

And so it just told me how to. solve my like you ask it to solve your problem, how it can solve your problem, it will solve that problem. And now, you know, I I it's I've gotten tons of refunds from Delta because it went back and looked at all the fights they screwed up for me. Cause I I am loyal to Delta. I do like the company, but it screwed up a few times. And I just got a bunch of refunds that I would have never taken the time to chase down. So on a personal level you have that to expand what he just talked about, which was brilliant. He has every employee in his company has a bot that he shares with that employee that keeps track of all their project management, the CRM, everything.

Erik Huberman 06:00

And they align on KPIs and OKRs. So it can see like, hey, this employee's getting roadblocked here. You need to remove that roadblock. Or hey, they're underperforming here. They might need coaching or training. Like it allows that in real time to be monitored. So you can literally have everyone has a little bot manager basically, but not a manager in like a s***ty way, more of like a how do we help each other way that Breaks down that line of communication and makes it much clearer that they can both talk to. So you have that. And so back to your point about like for AEO, GEO, it's kind of like SEO. It's changed the landscape's changing constantly. There's ways to optimize it for it. But I we've seen it like in one year, organic search has gone from 15% using AI to 50.

Erik Huberman 06:39

So like it's crazy how fast that's changing. The fun thing is if you're, again, back to the bear metaphor, if you're getting ahead of it, you're winning right now. And we've we've invested in a bunch of tools. Gumshoe AI is one of our portfolio companies on our venture side. They're crushing it on the AI side. So we're able to jump in and do stuff really quickly there. On the in in what you said about, you know, agentic commerce, you know, it I think that's gonna actually be interesting with how that can actually create an opportunity to compete with Amazon, because now Amazon just becomes a, you know. roster of products and a delivery tool. Now it could be harder to compete with Amazon because if it gets that the high rank and all the bots start just using Amazon, they're in trouble.

Erik Huberman 07:20

The interesting thing there is a lot of these companies that own the bots see like SpaceX owns X owns Grok AI or Grok Bot. They're competitive with Blue Origin. So they may not actually say, f*** that, we're not using Amazon and leave room for opening there. but so it's it's good for commodities. Like I literally used it last night to buy a t a TV mount for the wall. But like, hey, I took a picture of the wall, said, this is my wall, this is what I need this for, this is what size TV, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What should which amount should I? And this is my priorities. What should I buy? Boom, this one. And they gave me two other options and told me why.

Erik Huberman 07:53

So you get that piece when it's a commodity. Shopping, frankly, what drives a lot of our commerce, impulse buys, emotional purchases, stuff like that. I don't think AI is gonna change. You know, I I even tried to, I just bought, I just joined a band for the first time since high school, which is super fun. But they asked me to play bass. Which I've gone to playing guitar, but I'm like, screw it, we'll play bass. I don't own a bass, so I went to buy a bass. I tried to use AI for a second, and I'm like, this isn't this isn't gonna work. And I just went to guitarcenter.com. So you know, it really comes down to if what you're buying is, again, just solving a problem, yeah, that's it's gonna replace what it's and that's where Gemini better get really good. Because that, you know, Google is that's all their business is when you have a problem and they have a solution. If that goes away, it's gonna hurt Google. But Google, Gemini has been good traditionally.

Hai Mag 08:37

So one of my friends is running SpaceX for APAC. And almost like five months ago, he's like, You need to use Grok Bot. And I'm like, Hey, why should I? You know, I I I have Codex, I have you know, Claude and all that stuff. But I mean it's getting really, really amazing, you know, the type of things that a Grok Bot can do because it has its own virtual machine and everything. And I agree with you. I think you know, like around me there were a lot of the assistants and everything. Right now that's only the Grok Bot because it's it's able to do all these things. But if you if there is strategy involved, experience involved, it doesn't work. you need to have that guy using the Grok Bot.

Hai Mag 09:21

Even the Grok Bots talking to each other in the company, that is like I think an amazing setup. How what do you think the brands should do? Because when I talk to the brands, especially the last Three months, I'm feeling that you know there is this idea that like they're gonna just get AI and then some internal guy. So they they don't need agencies anymore. Instead, the in turn the their own people, if they can get some Claude to them, and now they can build some dashboard. And it's so easy. Now they can show like Amazon, Shopify data together in in. what some some type of some sort of a dashboard and then they are like, you know, we don't need agencies anymore. I've seen some of them saying that.

Hai Mag 10:08

And then after a month or two, I feel like they are stuck. But what's your experience right now with that? What do you ex what do you also what is your recommendation to the brands? Like what how they should use AI?

Erik Huberman 10:21

Yeah, so what's funny, th the first off, I kind of covered it slightly with who do you think is gonna leverage AI better? My team that sees hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of companies marketing and knows exactly how to leverage AI and has to stay on top of it as part of our business, or your person you hired off the street. You have a chance of hiring a brilliant person, maybe one percent of the time, but like it's good luck. Like it's you it you're competing and we're gonna w if you don't hire us, we're gonna be working with your competitor and we're gonna help them beat you, basically. On top of that. It's what's really cool about our business. When I started our business, I talked about how we were kind of the navigator.

Erik Huberman 10:56

Like people are hungry because this was we started in 2014. People are like, what is this digital stuff? How do we do this stuff? What is Meta at the time? Facebook and Instagram and influencers and all this stuff. We don't get it. Around tw 2000, I'd say 2021, 22, it did it switched from like, we don't understand this stuff, how do we do it to like we need someone to handle this? So like we became an execution arm instead of a navigator. We're back to being a navigator because now it's like all the playbooks are broken again. And this it goes through these waves. Like then people figure out a playbook, it works for a while, it breaks again. So, like the days of just running meta ads with put a dollar in, get five bucks out, died.

Erik Huberman 11:34

And now we're back to okay, well, then what's the new frontier? What is this all this AI AI stuff? And our business and our culture is built to understand this stuff and to lean into it. So you just mentioned it. We're they can pull data from Shopify and Google and have a dashboard. Cool. We have 7,000 companies marketing media and revenue data running through our pipes in real time at point because our AI team is right next to me, very specifically. And so, yeah, you can have your own data. We have the entire landscapes data, which you can't have. You don't have almost nobody has that. And so, yeah, you can go run in a vacuum and try to figure it out, or you can have a team that actually sees how everything's changing in real time and does that.

Erik Huberman 12:09

And it's their job to stay on top of it, meaning us. So the idea of doing it internally, it's like you you could also probably Google how to do brain surgery on yourself. You're really gonna Go that far. And I know that's an extreme example, but like if you're talking about, you know, your own life, let's talk about the life of your business. Like if your marketing's broken, good luck. You're going to have a very limited success window. And so that's where I think taking who you hire seriously, it's a problem with our industry because there is no accreditation or barrier to entry. So everybody says they're a marketer. But if you don't take it really seriously, who you're bringing in to do this stuff, like 99% of agencies are full of s***.

Erik Huberman 12:43

And the few that are good generally only want to work with the Fortune two thousand. It's the whole reason we exist is to be the dominant agency in the sub one billion revenue space because and we know what that means and what that takes. And I've got a team, thankfully, that loves that mission and is here to f***ing achieve it.

Hai Mag 12:58

Absolutely. Well, Black Friday, Cyber Monday is coming, and after that, that's the Hanukkah Christmas. So people buy, right? Like that's the right time. Like everybody buys. I'm sure that you're checking like what is kind of that consumer's behavior is changing, you know, in in which shape compared to last year, be Black Friday, Christmas versus this year. Maybe you can tell us a bit more, like how do you prepare for for these times?

Erik Huberman 13:26

It's a it's it's AEO GEO is the biggest shift. Like still TikTok shop's been great. It's a great place for impulse buys and doing that. You know, my experience is about eighty five percent of people buy for themselves in the holidays. That's when we've looked at different statistics. People are buying for themselves. They're using the holidays as an excuse. But so it's still about discovery. But then for the gift side, people are using AI a lot where it's like, Hey, this is the person I'm buying for. What should I Like, and so having great you know, content out there to give the answer to AI and having a good GEO strategy around that is really important. but again, that's also limited to the amount of queries it gets.

Erik Huberman 14:01

So if you really want to maximize your opportunity, you're still gonna have to buy media, get your name out there and get that 85% of consumers that aren't gonna be querying that, they're gonna go, you know, impulse buy, gonna go look for, well, that's fun. You know, like I I'm one of every year I make a note of the things I'm gonna buy for the holidays, whether it's for gifts or for myself. I always buy myself a pair of running shoes because Nike does a discount and I like Nike running shoes. God bless I they're not doing so well. I still like but they but then there's all the like random while you're sitting around for Thanksgiving, like Cyber Monday, Black Friday, like, I didn't want this, but you know, it's the holidays. Screw it. I'm gonna buy, you know, a Orion sleep cooling mattress or whatever it is.

Hai Mag 14:40

Right. Well, I mean I mean it's absolutely exciting times and everybody is using AI in some s form and shape. also like I have two Gen Z at home and and I'm also watching like what they do and how they do it. Like I I see that like they are more still into the TikTok shop, you know, rather than AI. And probably the Gen Z is like more obsessed, but not only them, but pretty much everybody's on t you know, the TikTok using leveraging TikTok shop. But any strategies like to capture the Gen Z intent, like are you also working on specific things like that?

Erik Huberman 15:24

On just specific intent from these

Hai Mag 15:25

Like a what like what Gen Z is buying, how to capture their interest, what is C.

Erik Huberman 15:30

I think any type of generational gen generalization, especially with Gen Z, is a fool's errand. They're all doing things differently. It's not about like trying to identify things by generation. It's trying to identify what your ICP is, who is buying yours, and then finding what those people are doing. But generalizing by generation, I wouldn't do. I would actually figure out like if you're brand new launched, you've got to go figure out who your ICP is. But once you figure that out, then you've it's about figuring out the details of those people. You can be a lot more granular these days. Like We were an investor and use a tool called Postscript. It's an SMS marketing tool that's awesome. And they now it's it's you know, gathering by permission, gathering data in terms of like asking questions about what drives them.

Erik Huberman 16:10

They might meant like keep the example I heard them use recently is, you know, they might have a customer that has Celiac and it's a CPG company that launches a gluten-free product. It can actually say specifically that person, like, I you said you had Celiac. By the way, this product's gluten-free, da-da-da, and have these one-to-one messages. And why I say that is like again, it's not about generation anymore. I don't care about buckets. The same way for the past 15 years, anytime I heard someone say something like 18 to 34, which used to be a demo when you bought TV ads, it's like, the f*** are you talking about? Like you can target 24 to 25 now. You don't need to go to general audiences.

Erik Huberman 16:41

You can go right to who is your specific audience. And so I don't go generationally. I look at like what drives the people that tend to buy my stuff. And it by the way, it might spread across generations, it might be all ages. But people that have a specific ailment or a specific challenge or a specific hobby, like generation might not be the thing. It all neither, you know, it could be gender or it could age might not be a factor. Like these are all things we look at is what are the actual variables that drive our customer base?

Hai Mag 17:10

Makes a lot of sense. So any anything like Erik about you know back to the original Connected Commerce idea like we already talked about like AI and like the impact and everything. where do you see right now like the the the most like the the most effective strategy of connecting what and what like like what needs to be connected from your perspective.

Erik Huberman 17:35

So I'm proud to say I did a TEDx talk in twenty sixteen about marketing and AI. And I said, we're not far off from a time when your AI is going to be able to monitor I said it's it might be like meta, like at the time, but they weren't meta yet. It was Facebook. Well, knows where you're traveling, because we used to check in. I'm traveling from here to here. It knows your preferences on what you shop for, because all the like buttons and shopping through their ads. it knows what's in your wardrobe, because maybe you've you know it's watched what you've bought other years. So I I use the example of like You know, I live in LA. I don't own a a lot of rain jackets.

Erik Huberman 18:07

It might go, you're flying to Portland on you know on Friday. You don't own a rain jacket. We know your style. You're gonna like this one from Barbour. Yeah, do you want us to send it to you? We can have it arrive at your hotel there or overnight it to your house here, so you have it on the way. Like, I think that is coming with this type of you know, commerce. and when I say I think it's coming, I could tell Grok Bot to start doing that tomorrow. I think that at some point it's gonna just Do it because it's not gonna, that's where your that's where I think back to the commodity shopping becomes really interesting. There's gonna, if we're we're at a point now, as long as you set it up.

Erik Huberman 18:44

Now, this is the part that isn't there yet. You have to set it up still. It's not just automatic, like, here's all the solutions we have for you, just do it. But we're gonna get to the point really soon, but it's already set, you could set it up where it's like, watch, like I have it watching all my Amazon orders, which is where we order most of our stuff. So it watches, it's watching for patterns, it's watching, and I had them watch just for like watch for outliers, monitor credit card fraud, but also now start to learn what the stuff we buy and then like in how long we buy between, it can start just doing it for me. And soon enough you could match it with internal cameras in your house or whatever.

Erik Huberman 19:14

Again, this could get a little too big, brother. But yeah, you're running out of toilet paper. So I just ordered you some. you're doing this. So all of a sudden you start getting all these things off your plate. And all these thoughts, I mean, the amount of stuff it's just doing for me in the background now that I used to do, like random example, you know, I I had you max out on LinkedIn at thirty thousand contacts. I didn't know that, so I just accepted everybody that wanted to connect with me because I'm happy to chat with whoever, sure. I hit the thirty thousand many years ago. I have spent years asking EAs to figure out how to like clean it up because I know there's a ton of crap in there.

Erik Huberman 19:46

And I asked Grok Bot last week, like, yeah, this problem. Hey, how do I solve this? And it's like, I'll download your you download your contacts to a CSV. I'll analyze it to see if there's any obvious people you shouldn't be connected with with fake accounts, blah, blah, blah. And we'll start there. And it came back, it's like that was 3,000 people. I'm like, yeah, just start working through, delete those. And now all of a sudden I freed up and I'm no longer just accepting everyone. So I also have it working through all my requests of like, here's the type of people I want to connect with. And then what I had it do was go, like, you know, hey, do give me the categories of the cat that I haven't covered so we can start to more and more hone what type of connections I want.

Erik Huberman 20:20

And like these are things that back to the commerce thing, the more people start to give it all that information and start to train it, the more it can take off your plate, including commerce, including the basic stuff you buy every day, water, you know, like, you like buying not usually Fiji, I'm more of a mountain valley is what my wife buys, the glass bottles. Like you buy this every month. Well, do you want us to just start ordering a few once a month? So you don't have to think about it. Like we're we're getting to a time and I this is what I hoped for yeah, and I've always been optimistic about. is like you can actually focus on a high and highest and best use.

Erik Huberman 20:51

Like back to the point of how I'm leveraging it, like email is my main source of to-do list, my main source of like work is like I'm constantly contacting people, playing traffic cop, et cetera. I have trained AI on how I run my inbox and it still runs it all by me. But now I literally just have to open up grok and just go, yep, yep, yep, nope, yep, nope, yep, yep, yep, nope, yep. And it's already teed everything up that like I'm now able to be way more present if I'm in the office We hang up and I have 20 minutes. I used to have to catch up on emails. Now I go and talk to my executive team instead because my emails are way easier to stay on top of and I'm doing more, not less.

Erik Huberman 21:27

It's so it's, I think again, going back to commerce, we're gonna all that helps train it on who you are, then it helps define what you like to buy. And I think we're gonna actually see an increase in consumerism too, because people are gonna feel like, well, if AI, and this is actually I can use this is statistically true, the average conversion rate in e-commerce across all traffic is about 3%. Just a global number. There's a lot more nuance to that. Global number 3%. The average conversion rate on AI driven traffic is 10%. So you you see an increase in conversion, you see an increase in commerce because people feel more comfortable buying because they trust their AI. And that is huge. So long-winded way of putting it, but hopefully it gave a lot of context to it.

Hai Mag 22:06

So my final question to you, Erik, and we are already a bit of ahead ahead of our time, but it's a very you know interesting conversation and I'm sure everybody will like it. But then, you know, you already touched it briefly. So there is Amazon in between. They like and it owns like fifty percent of the e-commerce, What they say is, the other AI bots are not safe. Even with your Grok Bot, you know, after like two or three attempts to, you know, go to Amazon listing, like it kind of blocks it. So you need to use some type of APIs or everything. So it still wants to keep the discovery to purchase inside the Amazon. But what is your view? Like what will change over the next years, you know, with that approach? Will that survive? And Amazon will continue to keep the fifty percent or even increase their share with this approach, or you think they will collaborate?

Erik Huberman 23:03

I think there's someone else that's I think there's a company we haven't seen yet that's gonna figure out the n AI version of Amazon, honestly. And Amazon's gonna try. I think listen, companies don't like that, don't go just disappear. They they may end up winning, but there's gonna be op there. This is going to create openings for competitors. Amazon might scoop them up, like the but you know, every revolution like this ha leaves room for the biggest the Amazon came from the tech boom. You know, same with Google, same with you know, Meta, same with a lot of these companies. This is going to be a new paradigm where some of those big conglomerates, because it's like we like when we we got Amazon, Walmart's doing great.

Erik Huberman 23:38

So like they missed some of that, but Walmart's still a great company. So it's not like Walmart went away. I think Amazon will be the Walmart of the AI boom where it's like they're gonna still do great as long as they lean into it, which they are, but there's gonna be room because of some it it creates an opening for another company. And I think that's gonna be interesting too.

Hai Mag 23:54

Absolutely. Well, Erik, thank you for being our guest. And it's always a pleasure to have you. And you know, I wish you a great successful be Black Friday, Monday and Cyber Monday, and hope that will continue to grow the brand's e-commerce business and the commerce. Thank

Erik Huberman 24:14

Thank you. Thank you for the time.