Tag: AI-native commerce
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UCP Isn’t a Tech Standard — It’s a Business Survival Kit
UCP Isn’t a Tech Standard — It’s a Business Survival Kit I’ve been in enough rooms where someone shows a PowerPoint about a new technology standard and watches the audience’s eyes glaze over. Standards feel like infrastructure. Infrastructure feels like someone else’s problem. The CTO might care. Finance definitely doesn’t. Sales is already back on…
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The Payment Network Nobody’s Talking About
The Payment Network Nobody’s Talking About In 2023 I watched a $4,200 payment take six business days to clear between two domestic businesses. Both used major banks. Both used standard ACH. Nobody could explain why it took six days. It just did. That’s the payment infrastructure underlying most of American B2B commerce: slow, opaque, tolerant…
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Why Your B2B Sales Team Should Be Worried (But Not for the Reason You Think)
Why Your B2B Sales Team Should Be Worried (But Not for the Reason You Think) The conventional narrative about AI and B2B sales goes like this: AI will replace inside sales reps, automate outreach, handle routine deals, and force salespeople to “move upmarket” to complex strategic relationships. That narrative isn’t wrong, exactly. But it’s missing…
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I Tested Five AI Shopping Assistants. Merchants Won’t Like What I Found.
I Tested Five AI Shopping Assistants. Merchants Won’t Like What I Found. For two weeks I ran every significant purchase through five different AI shopping assistants — ChatGPT shopping, Perplexity shopping, Google’s AI shopping, a Claude-based agent I set up myself, and a commercial purchasing tool one of my suppliers uses. I tracked where each…
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What the Golf Industry Taught Me About Standardized Protocols
What the Golf Industry Taught Me About Standardized Protocols I run a golf league. Not as my main business — as something I care about enough to spend real time on. And when I started digging into the booking and scheduling infrastructure that runs most golf operations, I found something that perfectly illustrates why the…
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The Loyalty Program Is Dead. Here’s What Replaces It.
The Loyalty Program Is Dead. Here’s What Replaces It. I have loyalty cards for eleven businesses. I actively use two of them. The other nine are in a drawer somewhere, or in an app I haven’t opened since 2022, or expired, or require a minimum spend I never hit. The businesses that issued them spent…
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Your Checkout Page Is Broken for AI — And You Don’t Know It Yet
Your Checkout Page Is Broken for AI — And You Don’t Know It Yet I want you to do something. Open your website’s checkout flow and imagine you’re a piece of software trying to complete it. Not a person — software. You can read text, you can identify form fields, you can maybe execute JavaScript.…
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Every Contractor I Hire Is About to Have an AI Middleman
Every Contractor I Hire Is About to Have an AI Middleman I run a restoration company. We dispatch licensed contractors to job sites — water damage, fire, mold, the whole spectrum. For years, the workflow looked like this: I get a claim, I call a contractor, we agree on terms, they show up, they work,…
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The Day My AI Agent Got Outbid by Another AI Agent
The Day My AI Agent Got Outbid by Another AI Agent I found out about it in a text message. Our procurement agent had been trying to lock in a bulk order of restoration supplies — the kind of purchase we make six or eight times a year, predictable as the calendar. Except this time…
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Why I Stopped Trusting My Inventory System
Why I Stopped Trusting My Inventory System Three months ago I watched a $14,000 equipment order get confirmed, billed, and dispatched — for gear we didn’t have. The inventory system said we had 4 units. We had zero. Somewhere between the last physical count and the moment our AI purchasing agent hit “confirm order,” those…