Visa and the era of AI report cards for retailers

Good evening.

When I first conceived of The Aisle last year, I imagined this community eventually extending beyond laptop and cell phone screens into the real world. I just wasn’t sure how long it would take.

Well, thanks to friends of The Aisle at the venture firm M13, that time is nearly here. The first gathering of The Aisle community will take place on the evening of Monday, September 14, in New York City. More info coming very soon.

Paid subscribers will be prioritized, with those subscribed to Insider or Team tiers getting an early RSVP window.

This is probably the perfect time, then, to upgrade from free to paid if you haven’t yet. It’s also the only way to get access to all my reporting in the newsletter every week. You can do so in less than 60 seconds here.

Separately, I’d love to meet up with those of you who’ll be attending RetailClub on September 22-24 in Huntington Beach, Calif. It’s a new outdoor festival-style event, from the founders of Shoptalk, for anyone serious about leading in the new AI era of commerce.

Yes, I will show up onstage to interview top technology execs from Target, Salesforce, Sephora, and Fanatics. But I’ll also be conducting meet-and-greets and interviews beachside in The Aisle’s own media tent. Reply now to get on my schedule. I’d love to meet or catch up with as many of you as possible.

Now on to the good stuff…

For the last couple of decades, the way we knew if a retailer was winning online was pretty simple: how much stuff did they sell…and bonus points if they could turn a profit along the way. 

(Which of course reminds me of Amazon’s financial evolution over the years and this podcast episode I once hosted that explains it with the help of VC legends Mary Meeker and Bill Gurley. I digress.)

But I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what measuring sticks or metrics matter most at this moment in time. Basically, how retailers, marketplaces and brands should be thinking about judging themselves today.

How your brand or website does or doesn’t show up in AI search engines is definitely one that a lot of folks are concerned with. But I think there’s also a good amount of concern over whether an AI agent or AI assistant can even effectively navigate and use your shopping site.

One company that thinks it's helping create a way to better analyze the latter one is Visa, in partnership with a startup that the payments giant has invested in, called New Generation or New Gen for short. Together, they recently released an AI diagnostic tool for e-commerce sites called the Agent Score. Or, as one of the Visa execs dubbed it: kind of like a CT scan for AI readiness.

This leader, Visa’s head of global growth Rubail Birwadker, refreshingly didn’t pitch me on their solution as the end-all, be-all answer for online merchants. He was candid about all the uncertainty in the space—from competing AI commerce protocols, to browser-based agents, to future technical solutions that may not involve either. And still, he thinks Visa can add value and some stability through standards despite all the question marks of this time. Something that the company has done through past transformational moments in commerce.