Every two weeks in Zero Clicks, we explore the interplay of AI, media, and commerce. In each edition, we explore…

• The big picture: The chessboard of commerce is reset

• Job posts: Empathetic AI, Moderator empowerment & The Free Press

• The meme is the message: LinkedIn games are good, actually

Commerce everywhere

Everyone in the business of purveying goods and services online seems to have an opinion on where commerce is headed. Miraculously, it always dovetails exactly with whatever it is they are slinging.

The future of commerce is agentic! No, it’s the store as an advertising medium. Rent is CAC, SKU data is oil, something something hydrogen and the guillotine. With apologies to Timothee Chalamet, it’s a regular subterranean homesick commerce blues.

The road to cliche marketing ruin is paved with technology vendors declaring paradigm shifts in their industry. But for once, it truly seems justified.

Something just feels different about this wave of technology innovation. You can feel it when you run a search for the best standing desk in Perplexity Shopping. You can sense it when you make a purchase after seeing an AI ad, all without ever going near a merchant’s website or store. In a year, will it even be “you” making that purchase at all or logic you’ve programmed for an agent?

For the last two decades, online commerce has happened in the same controlled environment. More specifically, the point of purchase has been a discreet piece of real estate that exists almost exclusively on merchant websites. The last three decades have effectively been an era of siloed commerce.  

By nature, siloed commerce is a somewhat predictable experience. At risk of being obnoxiously pedantic, the goal of eCommerce websites is to encourage purchases and you do this by giving users a familiar baseline experience that puts minimal friction between their credit card and your coffers. Thus, the schema of shopping on every major online retailer and brand website or app built on Shopify has historically been almost identical. This was a feature, not a bug. Buying things online was long a pain in the ass so most innovation has been focused on making it less of a pain in the ass. But we’re rapidly moving to a new phase.

We’re mere years away from merchant websites and mobile apps looking like a quaint and almost nostalgic experience. “Agentic commerce” is the buzzword the investor-industrial complex has seized but it is really only one part of a much larger story that started years ago but is gaining exponential momentum.

Every day, a higher share of checkouts happens within shoppable ads, landing pages that serve as storefronts, connected televisions, airplane screens, large language models and a wealth of other surfaces that don’t look like conventional marketplaces. Commerce. Is. Everywhere.

It’s hard at this juncture to say exactly how but it feels inevitable that AI will continue to accelerate this trend. As a result, it’s never been a more exciting time to work in the technology ecosystem around commerce. Many of the advantages of the incumbent leaders will soon be rendered obsolete. The chessboard is reset. Brands, software providers, agencies, and individuals who work at any of those entities have a once in a career opportunity to lead the next wave of disruption.

Even Amazon is finally showing its first signs that it might not be totally immune from the innovator’s dilemma. For more than a decade, Amazon has made a litany of half-hearted attempts to be a true medium for product discovery, most invoking commerce publishers and creators. Nearly all were killed unceremoniously in favor of conventional product search with more ads. Winning purely utilitarian commerce was always TAM enough. 

But the dawn of the commerce everywhere era has inspired the largest and fastest experiments within Amazon’s core experience in recent memory. Their AI assistant, Rufus, was rolled out widely long before it was ready for primetime. It’s easy to be cynical about the early innings of AI  but I see Amazon as responding boldly to the quickened pace of innovation around them here.

In the face of seismic shifts in the market, it’s helpful to remember the Bezosism of anchoring on what won’t change in ten years. Shoppers–even the agentic ones– will still want delightful moments of serendipity as they look for things to buy. They’ll always want the confidence and psychological security that comes with knowing they’ve gotten the best possible deal on a product. They’ll always blazing fast, secure checkout infrastructure that just works.

And commerce, on whatever surface it takes place, will always be a small reflection of self.  

Sr. Product Manager, Empathetic AI, Pinterest

I’ve long argued (26 editions of Zero Clicks long, anyway)  that the best way to understand how a company is trying to differentiate itself is to look at where they are hiring product managers. In that respect, Pinterest zeroing in on “empathetic AI” feels just so impeccably on brand for the vibe the company has meticulously created.

It’s hard to look at this job and not conjure up images of the “Center for Tethics” from Silicon Valley but it’s still a hell of a business card to whip out.

Staff Product Manager, Moderator Empowerment, Reddit

Mods make Reddit tick and as the company has grown, the group has felt underappreciated. Reddit appears to be addressing this head-on in direct, non subtle terms. This is an awesome step.

Staff PM is a senior product gig at Reddit, likely bringing in a total comp package in the $500K+ range which is….well quite a bit more than mods.

Head of Search & Gemini Partnerships, Google

“As the Head of Partnerships for Apple and iOS ecosystem, you will support and lead engagements with Apple and other partners to advance product road maps on mobile devices across Search and Gemini App.”

Google’s initial deal to be the default web browser on iOS/Safari is casually just the most important partnership agreement in the entire history of the internet. If the AI age opens the aperture for Apple to think about alternatives, the BD leader for Gemini partnerships leader working with Apple will directly impact tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap.  

So uh…no pressure to whoever takes this job.

Head of Community & Engagement, The Free Press

Call it a vibe shift in media, call it the people’s eternal love of provocative content or call it a throwback to a bygone era of American journalism.  Whatever it is, The Free Press’s numbers are staggeringly impressive–1M subscribers and more than 140,000 paying members. Another nice middle finger to the media doom and gloom narrative.

Events are the essential next lever to maximize yield from this reader base but with so many readers, it’s a hard space to get right.  The job posting says that the publication’s “growing community is passionate about what we do, and many consider TFP their “new home” for both understanding the world and meeting others who share their open-mindedness.”

That’s a real stretch in terms of shared affinity. Without a clear niche, what kind of gatherings do you plan that appeals to such a broad audience. It’s a fascinating intellectual question; if you’re up for the challenge, few media companies are growing so fast.

Finally, only one person correctly identified that last week’s mystery company was OnlyFans. Make of that what you will.