I am in London this week for Ecommerce Expo, and I met Rishi for dinner before any of it starts.
He runs stores on Magento and Shopify. What he actually wanted to talk about was AI, and not in the way most people ask about it. He was not asking whether to use it. He was asking how to use it on his own site, for his own business, this month.
That is the conversation I keep having now. A year ago the question was whether any of this was real. Now it is what to do on Monday.
It was not only Rishi. Later the same evening I ended up talking to the founders behind Akyra Official, a streetwear brand. Different category, different customer, and almost exactly the same questions. How do you get found. What do you do with AI that is not just noise. How do you compete when the big brands outspend you on every channel.
Streetwear and a Magento store selling something else entirely are not supposed to have the same problems. They do. The platform changes. The question underneath it does not.
Why I do this before the event
The talks are the advertised part of a conference. The useful part is everything around them.
In a session you get one person’s view for twenty minutes and no chance to argue with it. Over dinner you get the actual problem, the actual budget, and the thing they have not told anyone else because it sounds stupid out loud. It usually is not stupid. It is usually the real issue.
I have built most of what I know from those conversations rather than from stages.
Two evenings this week
We are co-organising two evening events alongside Ecommerce Expo, one on 22 September and one on 23 September.
No pitches. Founders, operators and a few people who will tell you what actually happened rather than what was in the case study.
If you are in London this week, come along.
22 September: luma.com/b97s693x
23 September: luma.com/51dhq8tn
And if you are at the Expo itself, find me. I would rather have twenty real conversations than sit through twenty talks.