Welcome to a futuristic ride through the world of composable commerce and technology with our distinguished guest, Natalija Pavic, a senior manager of product management for Commerce Cloud. Natalija, with a remarkable background in coding, programming, physics, quantum computing, and biophysics, is currently navigating the path of innovation for Commerce Cloud. He unravels the concept of composable commerce and reveals how this new approach provides unprecedented freedom and flexibility to customers, revolutionizing the e-commerce landscape.
We delve into the realm of group shopping and digital experiences, studying innovative applications like Slack’s group dressing room. The discussion leads us to witness the transformative potential of VR and AR in enhancing online shopping efficiency. We close with an exploration of the growing trend of shoppable ads and their potential to revolutionize media revenue. Don’t miss this enlightening journey into the future of commerce!
Show Highlights:
- In-depth exploration of headless and composable e-commerce platforms, emphasizing the shift towards ‘commerce anywhere’ and the role of being an API-first company.
- Discussion on group shopping and digital experiences.
- Examination of the potential of VR and AR in the realm of online shopping.
- Analysis of the trend of shoppable ads and their potential to revolutionize media revenue.
- Conversation around AI’s potential in e-commerce, specifically in terms of predictive AI, generative AI, and their roles in enhancing shopping experiences.
- Case studies and practical applications of the concepts in various industries, including retail, travel, and the media sector.
Links:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/NatalijaPavic
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natpavic/
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud Innovations Podcast (Apple, Android, Spotify)
Episode Transcript
Nat Pavic:
… to caveat, I have recently had a baby. So one of the things that you don’t realize until you’ve had kids is how quickly you’ll spend money to solve problems.
Josh Birk:
That is, once again, Nat Pavic, a senior manager of product management over in Commerce Cloud. I’m Josh Birk, your host for the Salesforce Developer Podcast. Here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers for developers. Today, we’re going to sit down and talk with Nat about composable commerce and some of the various technologies we can use to make shopping more interesting. But we’re going to start as we often do with early years.
Nat Pavic:
Oh, man. I think it was when I knew physics wasn’t going to work out for me.
Josh Birk:
Oh.
Nat Pavic:
Yeah. So it feels like a long time ago. But yeah, at university, I loved physics and math, but I think once I got into advanced quantum, it was a little bit over my head and then I was like, “You know what? I’m going to do quantum computing instead.” Then I realized that because of my grades, I couldn’t get a job there. So I went into biophysics, and that’s how I got into programming ’cause I started to code bash MATLAB, doing computational analysis of MRI images, and then I was like, “Yo, this is amazing. Technology’s so cool,” and then that’s it. I’ve been in tech ever since, and it’s been more than 15 years.
Josh Birk:
You jumped into the way nerdy side effects. I love it.
Nat Pavic:
I’m nothing if not filled with hubris and overconfidence, so I find that I shoot for the stars and fall on the moon, and now I work for Salesforce, so it-
Josh Birk:
All right.
Nat Pavic:
… worked out pretty well for me. Yeah.
Josh Birk:
I like it. I like it. Well, specifically, how did you get introduced to Salesforce itself?
Nat Pavic:
So I was getting into Q&A, I was doing product, I’m actually back in product now, so I did a whole 360, 180, that’s not 360, it’s like the same, 180. Somebody along the way I was talking to IBM, said, “Look, love the technical side of you. I think you should be customer facing,” and it just really got into my head. So I went into sales, I worked at a startup, and then I was at IBM in sales where I was like my bootcamp. It was like I was learning so much and then I was being headhunted by Salesforce at the time. Finally, I came over joining the marketing cloud team. At the time, it was Pardot. Then from there, did a little stint in software engineering, and now I’m back in product after having gathered all of this information on my journey, my journeys, so here I am.
Josh Birk:
Love it. How would you describe your current job?
Nat Pavic:
You know what’s funny? I was going to say the exact same thing I said a few years ago when we had our first interview, which is, I talk about stuff that doesn’t exist. But I think what I would like to rephrase that is I talk about the future, but the very near future.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Nat Pavic:
So I work with our product team on long-term planning and how to bake innovation into Commerce Cloud. So I’m just going to do a little plug that I started a podcast ’cause I was really inspired by you, Joshua. It’s called the Salesforce Commerce Cloud Innovations Podcast. It’s just about all the things in e-commerce and around Commerce Cloud and the community that are very innovative and just things that customers are doing today, but also things that customers can do, because whenever we talk sci-fi, we’re always like, “Oh, virtual try on, da, da, da, da. That’s so futuristic.” But there’s so much that customers can do right now. They can use these building blocks, and I think composable is the key. It’s opening a lot of doors.
Josh Birk:
So, okay, let’s dive into that a little bit. When you say “Composable is the key,” what do we mean when we say composable commerce? Break that down for me.
Nat Pavic:
Okay. So I think the more known term is headless-
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Nat Pavic:
… and one of my favorite things to do is ask people who are not in my industry to define headless without any context, and it’s hilarious ’cause it just doesn’t make any sense, the term-
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
… so it’s kind of funny. So give it a shot, ask your mom to define it. It’s the best. Headless is this breaking of the paradigm because e-commerce platforms used to ship with the starter store-
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
So you would build on that front end, and you’d be locked into that front end-
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
… but that’s okay. That’s what you wanted. That’s what you needed. That’s how you were executing. But then when you needed it to re-platform, you had to rebuild your whole front end. If there’s one thing that merchandisers and e-commerce directors do not want to do is be like, “Ha-ha. So you know our website that makes millions of dollars? We have to shut it down to launch a new one. Yay!”
Josh Birk:
“Yay!”
Nat Pavic:
So headless is like baking the paradigm. It’s saying, “Well, forget one head,” right?
Josh Birk:
Mm-hmm.
Nat Pavic:
That’s the website, that’s one head. We have no head, headless, and now we have a whole bunch of microservices. But when we broke it, we discovered, “Oh, this is not so easy. Geez, there’s a reason that we had the monolith system because now we have to worry about our own hosting. Now we have to worry about our own services. We might even be buying servers.”
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
I used to sell servers, but I don’t know who buys servers anymore these days. I don’t know.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
So composable is like the iterative evolution of headless. It’s like, I think, I’m not sure if we came up with it, but it is the name of our philosophy, which is like, “Let’s take headless, let’s take that idea concept, but make it easier, give you the tools. We’ll host it for you so you don’t have to worry about that, but you can still have the freedom, flexibility of using any microservices you want, any combination.” It’s really enabling this idea of commerce anywhere. So we’re seeing a shift from buying from a site to “I want to buy from social,” to, “I want to buy online while I’m in store,” and I’m sure we’ll talk about this, “I want to buy from my game while I’m playing.” So you want to be able to buy anywhere you are in any endpoint. So composable is really allowing retailers and brands and other industries to create those experiences to enable commerce anywhere.
Josh Birk:
See, first of all, as somebody who used to work for a very large e-commerce site that shall go unnamed, unless somebody just wants to scroll through my LinkedIn, but anyway, it’s interesting to me because it is like old school ’90s, early 2000s. It’s like e-commerce and the idea of a website that was browsable that had a cart to it, those terms were synonymous. If I said, “Hey, I’m going to build an e-commerce solution,” back then, that’s it. You were going, “Oh, well, going to build something that people can buy stuff from.” Even then, it was relatively radical. I’m going to offer a twist, and let me know if I’m on spot or not. Because one of the things we did here at Salesforce, which allowed us to create things like Trailhead and offer solutions that walked back through our services in very interesting ways is we decided we were going to be an API- first company. I feel like when you say microservices and composable, you’re saying… when we say microservices, you mean API first and then build later, right?
Nat Pavic:
Yeah. But it’s interesting that you say that because in a lot of ways, that’s where Salesforce was born was this concept of AP…. so it only makes sense as an extension. Composable is really an idea that’s taking off within Commerce Cloud, but what if we made everything at Salesforce composable? That’s a possibility.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
For example, let’s say you wanted to launch an experience site, so you’d have a community, but instead of using the community builder, you’d build your own application and react and connect to every single Salesforce object. Then what you can do is limitless in terms of the experience that you’re creating-
Josh Birk:
Yeah, because why wouldn’t you want your experience cloud, for instance, and we’ll walk through this instance from your perspective, but experience cloud in something like Slack feels like it makes a lot of sense.
Nat Pavic:
Right. Exactly. Then once you throw Slack into the mix, then you say, “Well, Slack is also a platform and Slack also has a backend. So what if we want to use Slack as a UI? That’s one possibility, or we could create our own front end and use a combination of Slack and communities and CRM, any part of Salesforce that we want to create unique experiences.”
Josh Birk:
Right. So walk me through that when it goes through your brain as to what that looks like for commerce and what does that do to both the user interface for me as a shopper?
Nat Pavic:
So I’ll walk you through examples because I think we’re getting into philosophy, and I think when we start talking abstractly, it’s difficult to see the business applications.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
So I will frame this thesis in the perspective of three examples. It’s like an essay. I’m going to read-
Josh Birk:
Ooh, I like it.
Nat Pavic:
… you an essay. It’s going to be exciting. I’m just kidding. Point number one. Okay, I’ll give you one example.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Nat Pavic:
This is a concept of group shopping. So we all have the experience in Uber. Actually, Uber recently launched this. I claim that they stole it from me. But you go in Uber and you start your order. Let’s say you and I are eating and I share my order with you, but I want you to pay for your stuff and I pay for my stuff. So Uber does this thing where they allow you to both add from the menu and then split the payment afterwards, but you’re all ordering together.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
Well, the primary need for that is probably food, but that concept could be taken into any industry. This is where we can start to use Slack. So let’s say we use a Slack channel, but instead of the consumer getting an invitation to use Slack, joining a channel that create a group dressing room, a group dressing room that looks like what your brain wants it to look like. But we’re using Slack as a microservice in the back end for you to join a dressing room. Then from here, you can start to use the microservices from Commerce Cloud like a card to wishlist to say, you’re organizing maybe a wedding, and you’re shopping for a dress with the bride and the bridesmaids, and you guys want to up vote, down vote dresses.
You want to make a decision and you want to split payment. Maybe you want to chip in for the bride. So you need this flexibility and you can just use Commerce Cloud from a composable perspective. Maybe you want to use Mobify to actually build the UI to have the services, but then you can break down, use all the microservices and have this essentially group shopping experience. What’s great is it’s not limited to one use case. This is applicable in travel. This would be a great one. You want to organize a trip with your friends and/or your family. How complicated is that? “Where are we going to stay? What are we going to eat?” How many times-
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
… you have Excel sheets of things you want to see? Usually, there’s one project manager, hopefully, a project manager as part of your group that knows how to do all these things. But what if you create a group itinerary and you created the digital tools that allowed people to do this without getting into Excel?
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
Some people might say, “Well, Slack is a B2B software. It doesn’t have the scale for millions of online consumers chatting together,” granted. But this is where you can bring in things like Heroku and bring in your own scale services to completely decouple from the enterprise aspect of the platform and the products that we’re selling. So my whole thesis here is, why wait? If you as a brand, as a retailer, if you’re paradigm, if you live in the paradigm of, “I’m waiting for this product release,” or, “I need the perfect product to do what I’m doing,” that’s never going to happen. So why don’t you just go out there and start building and imagining what your customers want to do with your brand? And the building blocks are already there. A lot of these technologies are available today.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. Well, and so I think I’ll counter that point because yeah, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for a company like Amazon, let’s just take the big dog.
Nat Pavic:
Let’s take shots at Amazon. Let’s do it.
Josh Birk:
Let’s take shots at Amazon. Let’s do it. Bezos is definitely listening to the show, but Amazon’s second note, they’re not going to create the Slack Ohana, right? They’re going to create a Slack community group kind of thing. Maybe they would, but I think Slack’s response would be they don’t have to. Amazon could release an app in whatever Slack calls their marketplace. Then if you and I need to buy stuff for a trip, we could create our own Slack channel, then just use that app in our portion of the Slack world. It’s not scaling up to millions of people, it’s just scaling up to you and I.
Nat Pavic:
You’re right. Oh, my God, you solved my problem.
Josh Birk:
There we go.
Nat Pavic:
Right.
Josh Birk:
Personal question for you, do you like shopping?
Nat Pavic:
Oh, gosh. I shop constantly.
Josh Birk:
Oh, yeah?
Nat Pavic:
Yeah. Well, I’ll also, just to caveat, I have recently had a baby. So one of the things that you don’t realize until you’ve had kids is how quickly you’ll spend money to solve problems.
Josh Birk:
Right. Right. I bet.
Nat Pavic:
So I’ve bought every bib imaginable just to see if something works, and so I’ve become a prolific shopper. What’s interesting about what you said, I was just harking back on something earlier in the conversation, which was like, we’re in this linear e-commerce paradigm. We go online, we search, and then we look at a grid and we’re no longer inspired. One of the things I loved when I used to go places before having a child is walking into a store. Actually, it’s funny, I took my kid to Indigo. Indigo is Bookstore here in Canada, and she didn’t appreciate any of the design. I was like, “How could you not you seven-month-old baby, look at this beautiful layout and these really silken scarves?” But anyway, but that’s what we used to do. We used to go in the store and we used to be inspired, and now we’re looking at this 2×2 grid online. It’s very 2D. So what some brands are doing, and I think that shopping will go the way the games have went, we went from single player to MMORPG, right? So just-
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Nat Pavic:
… MMO, we went from shopping together in person, and then now we’re in e-commerce and somehow we’re completely alone. But what if we could put that back and have a digital experience? Of course, metaverse was the buzzword last year, this year is Gen AI, so we’ll talk maybe a little bit about that. But what if you could shop in the Metaverse and what if you could shop with your friends? There are tons of Salesforce partners out there doing that. Last year for the Dreamforce keynote, we created a concept with Unity where you could shop for a vehicle and you could see the vehicle. In the luxury segment, there might be some faster movement because let’s say you’re configuring your car. Right now, the way that you do your custom car, if you are that wealthy, is you get a brochure, you pick your door, you pick your color, you pick your material, and you hope that it all comes together in the end.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
It’s like $200,000, so it’s a big purchase to make with so little information.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
But what if you could visualize it, and the same thing with traveling? What if instead of going online and booking your resort and then pulling up all the reviews, sorting by the one-star reviews and wondering if you can live with those.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
What if you could just be transported to the resort and see what it was like to make a decision right then there without leaving the experience? So this concept of now the experience is back online, and we’re also able to have context, contextualize it and share it with our friends and be social again.
Josh Birk:
Well, and I think those specifically, those two examples I think are interesting because as I’m sure you’re very well aware of, one of the biggest blockers for VR to get into things like the realm of e-commerce and shopping and the non-gaming aspects of VR, because gaming is a huge driver for VR. But basically, the biggest blocker is that I need to have a device at home. Okay, I have one, but I’m a huge gaming dork, so that’s not surprising. But I think what’s interesting about things like travel and car shopping is that those are still to in-store experience… it’s common for people to go see the car.
So sake of full disclosure, a big commerce site that I used to work for, one of the biggest… First thing’s one of the reasons I got hired was to help them build out their furniture department on their store. I have this long list, I have a whole gig about these are things that I thought would fail on the internet, and I was so wrong about it. The first time I heard about YouTube, I’m like, “That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. Nobody has the bandwidth to sit there and watch videos all day long.”
Nat Pavic:
Oh, my God, that’s so funny.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
Can we have a podcast episode where we go through each of your predictions and then-
Josh Birk:
We should-
Nat Pavic:
… and then discuss what happened and how wrong you were?
Josh Birk:
How wrong was Josh with Josh Birk? It’ll be about an hour- and-a-half.
Nat Pavic:
Yeah. Yeah. We’ll have a scale-
Josh Birk:
Right. Exactly. It’s 11-
Nat Pavic:
… from unacceptable.
Josh Birk:
… almost every time.
Nat Pavic:
Yeah. Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Also, Twitch, the first time I heard about Twitch, like, “You’re going to pay people to play video games. Really? Really?” Yeah, they will, millions of dollars.
Nat Pavic:
Wow.
Josh Birk:
I’m like, “Yeah, I’m going to build this thing for you, but who’s going to shop online for furniture?” Turns out lots of people. Lots and lots of people will do it. But when it comes to things like buying a car, and especially what you’re talking about, the high-end experience, and the nice thing about that is a Mercedes-Benz shop, they have the money to pay for those high-quality VR goggles-
Nat Pavic:
Yes. Yes.
Josh Birk:
… that will show you the texture of the leather, of the interior of the car that you just select it. So it’s like people actually used to go to Best Buy to listen to stereos, because that’s all the only way they could do the audio file thing. It feels like we could have a return to that, but in various specific segments, and as you’re saying, the software already exists. We’re not talking about Teleporters and Star Trek here. They could be doing this right now.
Nat Pavic:
Oh, well, and our customers already are. Actually, one of our customers, Lucid Motors has a wonderful VR. I actually visited them in San Jose in California, and they actually have their VR headsets at the showroom. So you go in there and you put on the VR headset there and you experience the vehicle. I will say what’s interesting about that is one of the limits, if we could talk about some technological limits that we’re coming up against, is the verity of the image. So we’re still not there as a quality. Actually, one of the sort of last bastion of the virtual try-on, the elusive virtual try-on for clothing is a very technically difficult problem to solve. We have virtual try-ons for glasses. We have virtual try-ons for jewelry. We have actually a ton of partners in our ecosystem that are already doing this.
We’ve got Obsess. They’re doing this holiday sale with Coach Online. It’s a wonderful story that incorporates gaming. If you really want to spend a lot of money for the holiday season, go to that. We have the laBs, they work with our media companies and they create these concert experiences that are also shoppable. Then we have Threekit that creates the virtual try-on aspect of it. So we’ve got a ton of partners and a ton of brands are still doing it, but that quality is still not quite there. It’s not like I could transport you to the resort and you would see a photographic version of it.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
So we’re still a little bit a ways away from a true, “Do we live in a simulation at this point?” That kind of experience, we’re still not there yet, but it’s coming. There’s lots of companies working on it.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. Well, in another sector I could see, and I was just talking to a friend of my wife’s who’s a realtor, and it’s like if I needed to… in 3D walkthrough, we were talking to her about what’s the difference between hiring a good photographer to help sell a place versus doing one of these 3D walkthroughs. I think the 3D walkthroughs are also that uncanny valley aspect right now, because I’ve done the 3D walkthroughs and then I’ve gone to the house and I’m like, “You were mostly right. You were mostly correct.” But I feel like that’s one area where it’s like, even if it was close, if VR could give me… because I remember us looking at a house and the realtor asked us, “So what do you think?” My response was, “You got a really good photographer. He fooled me on every one of these rooms. Every one of these rooms is smaller and darker and worse than I thought, but your photographer did do their job.” But I feel like VR would be able to unveil that a little bit better.
Nat Pavic:
It would be, yeah. So you’re right. It’s not going to be exactly like… it might even be worse from a photography perspective, quality for real estate, but it could give you the sense of how big the room is, right?
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
Then with the other layer of it is because it’s digital, now we have a storytelling component.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
So not only are we showing you the place, but we can tell the story, the story of the brand, the story of the material. You can interact and engage with a story. You can have different moving parts. We even shot around the idea of what if you could get into the car and then you could play a little game where you’re driving the vehicle? So these are the things that you can get in a digital mixed reality experience that you’re A, never going to get in reality.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
Let’s do a shout-out to augmented reality before just talking about VR. What if you were at a store and you saw a tent and you could use your phone to have it unveil what the tent unfolding would look like and what it would look like under various conditions, and it could tell you a story of durability, quality, et cetera? So there’s a component of using digital tools, not just in and of themselves for re-representing the physical format, but the ability for you to experience the story of the brand and be inspired in a new way and have that, ’cause a lot of brands are hoping that you’re reading their story and understanding their story, but their story’s communicated in a text online and the about page. I’m just like, “I’m not going to read three paragraphs.” You know what I mean? Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. Yeah. Can I just say, I wish more physical stores did have a mobile app to them?
Nat Pavic:
Oh, absolutely.
Josh Birk:
Right?
Nat Pavic:
Yeah.
Josh Birk:
So that I can find the thing that I want because, okay, so to go back to my question. I hate shopping. I hate it. I’m bad at it. I once got asked by security if I was casing the joint because I was taking so long to make a decision about a digital camera-
Nat Pavic:
I can’t believe it. I’m like, “Who does love shopping? That’s crazy.” Okay, well, I want to go into why you hate it, but I’m not going to interrupt you. Go ahead.
Josh Birk:
It’s boring to me. I’m the kind of guy who browses online while I’m doing other things. Even shopping on an Amazon or shopping, it’s almost never my primary task. I’ll tell you what, the pandemic did no favors here because-
Nat Pavic:
Oh, yeah. Then you were forced to shop online for you.
Josh Birk:
I was forced to shop online, and then I realized I can get anything delivered to my door and I don’t have to leave and I can spend… Okay, you’re going to like this story. I went to a local grocery store here. It’s called Mariano’s, but it’s like a jewel, right? It’s a big grocery store. I was on my way home from another chore, and I went into the store, and I saw the lines at the store. I literally had a shopping cart and I walked out, went home and ordered it off of Instacart because I wanted my afternoon back. That’s how much I hate shopping now. That’s how much I hate shopping.
Nat Pavic:
But see, but you must like online shopping then if that’s the case, or do you still hate it?
Josh Birk:
I enjoy aspects of online shopping because the nice thing, here’s why I like about online shopping, I can do it all afternoon long and still get three other things done.
Nat Pavic:
Yeah. I bet for you it’s about efficiency. This is a good point, and I’m going to skip over the gendered aspect of what we’re talking about. Is it any surprise a woman likes shopping, there’s different kinds of shoppers. I enjoy the hunt. I enjoy looking on even Facebook Marketplaces and finding special items. I save them, and I see if anybody’s bought it and then I low ball them.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
It’s like a whole thing, but you like the efficiency. So that’s the other thing about moving online and offline. I had this conversation with someone yesterday that BOPIS, buy online, pick-up in store. Oh, yeah, Elizabeth Kayla Schwartz, a director of Industry Insights.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Nat Pavic:
She said that BOPIS was the bridge, the omnichannel bridge that brought online and offline together. So moving online and offline and having your personal profile determine how you interact and how you shop, you like efficiency. So why don’t we create a place where you can reorder things you’ve done before or automatically pre-prepare your order? For grocery, what if you’re buying the same thing every week, why don’t you just have your card prefilled with those things and you change the quantities or swap items?
Josh Birk:
Exactly. Yeah.
Nat Pavic:
So it’s that aspect of personalization, that’s really important.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. Well, and to go back to your Slack concept, it’s like, to bring in the gender question, my wife doesn’t really like shopping either. So I had to go buy jeans basically. I hadn’t bought jeans since the pandemic. She’s like, “All your jeans are gnarly,” and of course, she doesn’t want to come with me because she hates shopping too.
Nat Pavic:
Wait, did you tell your wife that her jeans were gnarly?
Josh Birk:
No, my jeans, my jeans.
Nat Pavic:
Oh, your jeans. I was like, oh-
Josh Birk:
She told me my jeans were gnarly, and she was correct.
Nat Pavic:
Okay.
Josh Birk:
But if there was a Slack application that helped us group shopping, even if I’m in the store and she’s not, that’s compelling.
Nat Pavic:
Right. Yeah ’cause then you can be like, “Hey, what do you think of this? I got these two things.” I would not want my husband there ’cause he would be like, “Why are you shopping?” I’d be like, “You don’t have to know about this.” But I can see how-
Josh Birk:
He doesn’t have to see all the things that go in the cart.
Nat Pavic:
Yeah, exactly. No, I’m like, “We talked about this yesterday when you were ignoring me.” Anyway, well, Joshua, you’re going to love this. How about if you could shop from your TV?
Josh Birk:
So yes, because another phrase getting tossed around, shoppable ads. The first thing I thought of from that is the fact that we’ve reached an age of technology where people are offering people free high-definition televisions that have an ad bar on them.
Nat Pavic:
Right. Right.
Josh Birk:
So tell me a little bit about what a shoppable ad is and how does that play into this?
Nat Pavic:
This is funny ’cause it’s like a 180 ’cause there are these channels, QVC that are selling obviously via the TV then you call them and stuff. But we’ve gone through this transformation to subscription. Media has moved from cable to intelligent boxes. We’ve got the Apple TV, the Roku.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
Well, now that we’re not stuck to the cable box, well now we are on a connected device, now we can do some amazing things. Since media streaming, and I listened to this actually amazing episode on Hard Fork about… was it Hard Fork Pop Culture? Pop Culture Happy Hour about how they’re having difficulty identifying revenue ’cause the whole revenue thing is changing.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
So well all as prices increase as they try to make more money to make more content, they’re thinking of offering ad supported services. I think Netflix has already come out with this, like you pay less, but you have to watch the ads. So we went through a period of no ads. Now we have reintroducing ads again, because it’s a good revenue source. Well, what if you could take the ad and add a shopping layer to it? So you are there sitting with your Apple TV, you’re looking at a skincare ad for L’Oreal Cream. It’s very compelling and you want to press the Buy button. So this is what composable is allowing us to do, is you can connect to your Apple Wallet, to your local user ID, they have your address. Without having to enter in your information, you can simply buy things from an ad.
Making that ad shoppable is an interesting concept because we can have the actual provider of the service is the advertiser. It’s not the brand. So it’s like a Univision to say Univision would allow, a L’Oreal would give them a spot, would federate decide when the ad was shown, and L’Oreal could have the option to be on Univision’s marketplace. So this is where you require a marketplace system, and it could be Salesforce’s marketplace or it could be one of our partners, Marketplace or Mirakl are two amazing ISVs that we have. Then, so L’Oreal would be the brand that would be onboarded on to the marketplace. They would list their product, and Univision would determine when their product was shown, and you would be buying that, order would go to L’Oreal and they would shipped directly to you. So we’ve got composable, we’ve marketplaces, and now we have a new revenue stream for advertisers. We know that media is going through a revenue transformation. They’re being asked to make more and more and more content-
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
… but you’re paying a flat fee. That doesn’t make any sense. So if they can use e-commerce ’cause they’re doing a lot of merchandising. Now, the Barbie phenomenon is really fascinating to me if we want to talk about Barbie for a minute, but it’s this concept that story and merch go together. If you have a movie, then you have an opportunity to sell more of a particular product because again, consumers are driven by the story. So it’s just a natural evolution of TV for it to become shoppable.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. Oh, yeah, we could do a whole other episode of the Barbie movie, I think.
Nat Pavic:
We could.
Josh Birk:
Have you seen?
Nat Pavic:
No. Okay-
Josh Birk:
Same.
Nat Pavic:
I’m dying to see it, but I can’t because of my baby. I was posting on Friday, “Great, Barbieheimer comes out today and I’m just going to-
Josh Birk:
Barbieheimer, I love it, yeah.
Nat Pavic:
… wait a few weeks until I can rent it.”
Josh Birk:
Yep, exactly, exactly. Well, it’s the year 2023 and I don’t think I get paid any more unless I talk about AI.
Nat Pavic:
Did we say AI? Did we not say it enough? We should go back and edit-
Josh Birk:
Yeah, you only mentioned it once-
Nat Pavic:
Oh, my gosh, we have to re-edit.
Josh Birk:
… so that’s only like a nickel. I get a nickel for that. I get a nickel every time we say AI. So where it actually spiked for me is when you were talking about, if we go back to Threekit, am I saying that right?
Nat Pavic:
Yeah.
Josh Birk:
Is it Threekit? Yeah.
Nat Pavic:
Yeah, you were. Yeah.
Josh Birk:
So there’s already this layer of the physical and the digital, and every time you say this try-on experience, it’s the digital trying to layer itself on top of the physical in a realistic way. How do you see AI affecting that kind of thing?
Nat Pavic:
It’s funny, my mind went into a different way. I think there’s lots of opportunity for AI to do image generation. I think for virtual try-on specifically, we do need verity of size because one of the challenges is all brands fit differently and everybody body’s different.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
So we could end now with the new Gen Z, we’re moving away from… I wouldn’t say we’re moving away from fast fashion, but there’s a lot of interest in sustainability in resale and slow fashion. So we’re going from manufacturer to tailor made. So there’s lots of opportunity for AI imaging, image processing to be able to understand your true size, your body size, and then do recommendations based on that, based on information about the product and processing. But there’s also a place for smart assistance. I know this is not where your question was going, but I’m stuck on this. I was talking to a partner called Soul Machines, and they create these physical manifestations of digital assistance. They’re actually even working with celebrities on farming out their images. So that you could have-
Josh Birk:
What?
Nat Pavic:
Yeah, you could have Jennifer Lopez represent your brand, but then you could ask JLo for the best outfit advice. You know what I mean? When you’re at the store-
Josh Birk:
Oh, my gosh. Okay.
Nat Pavic:
It’s so cool. It’s so cool.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Nat Pavic:
We’ve recently released Commerce Concierge, which is a smart, intelligent bot. There’s so much there. Especially with GPT blowing up, it’s not just about understanding context, understanding what the customer’s saying, but then being able to recommend products based on the data that we have about them on file, and being able to do small talk and sentiment analysis so that you can actually have a conversation. There’s so much from natural language processing to natural language understanding to replication, and then image generating an actual persona. It’s funny because people are more comfortable talking to robots than they are people. It’s funny, so if you actually know that you’re talking to a robot, you’re more likely to ask them questions. So there’s lots of places, there’s a ton of stuff you can do in that area. I realize I was going to give you three examples, now this is my fourth.
Josh Birk:
Well, and I think that’s interesting because the rise of chatbots is real. Prior to conversational AI becoming popular, we were getting to the point where all the words you were just saying, predictive AI was doing a pretty decent [inaudible] It was doing a de-
Nat Pavic:
Did I say enough buzzwords or should I add more-
Josh Birk:
Oh, yeah.
Nat Pavic:
… to this? Just tell me.
Josh Birk:
But it’s like they were getting pretty human-like. The last time we talked, you were even giving examples of bots that are very helpful in an online and even social kind of way. I think when you start spinning that into the realm of generative conversational bots, it can get interesting. It’s also one of the few places I’m pretty comfortable because if your commerce bot hallucinates and offers me a product, you know what I mean? I feel like the guardrails are so much better than-
Nat Pavic:
Hopefully, they don’t try to steal your wife, hopefully not, because now a program for that.
Josh Birk:
Fair. Group shopping went to a whole new level right there, because sometimes I don’t know what I want and sometimes we don’t know what the products are actually out there and-
Nat Pavic:
Yes, and sorry to interrupt you, but the only way that we have to look at products online is through search.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Nat Pavic:
So if we don’t know what we’re looking for, how effective is search at getting us to where we need to be? Right?
Josh Birk:
Right. The phrase I keep using when it comes to AI is jump-starting. It’s so much easier to jump in and get to that end point where if I describe what I need, you can grant me what I want. I was working with somebody on an AI demo, and I love their analogy, like predictive AI, so old school search, you could ask it, “What’s the current weather?” Predictive AI can tell you what the weather might be like this weekend. Generative AI could tell you what to put in your cart in because of the weather.
Nat Pavic:
I thought you were going to say generative AI will give you hallucination about what the weather should be better than… but I like that example.
Josh Birk:
It could do that too, right? But it’s like, yeah-
Nat Pavic:
It could if you wanted it to.
Josh Birk:
… it could get me to the product that I didn’t even know existed.
Nat Pavic:
That’s a very good encapsulation of what’s possible. I think the tools of the past, the way that we used to develop and ship B2B software was like, “Look at all these tools, look at what you can do with it.” But we really moved away from that to, “Look at these business results, look at the endpoint of this analysis,” and that’s what we try to do with all the Salesforce products is we try to package that up into a business result that you can use. So the more automated these tools are, the better for our customers, ’cause your right. You don’t need to know what’s inside the block box to start using and start AB testing and start to reap the benefits of it within your customer base.
Josh Birk:
That’s our show. Now as a repeat guest, I didn’t ask after Nat’s favorite hobby, I asked what hobby does she want to pick up?
Nat Pavic:
I used to make web comics. Yeah, I actually have a list of web comic ideas that I haven’t been able to materialize.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Nat Pavic:
I promise you, Joshua Birk-
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Nat Pavic:
… this is a promise that I’m going to make a web comic next year once I start going back on the road again, and I will use that airplane time to do it.
Josh Birk:
I want to thank Nat for the great conversation and information, and as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about this show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes, and have links to your favorite podcast service. Thanks again, everybody, and we’ll talk to you next week.