VP Shopify: "Your Future Customers Will Be Humans, and Agents"

What happens to your brand when AI buys for your customers, not them?

Mani Fazelli, VP of Product at Shopify, breaks down the biggest shift in commerce since the smartphone. In this episode, we go deep on agentic commerce: what it actually means, how merchants should prepare, and what happens to brand loyalty, conversion funnels, and the customer relationship when AI agents start making purchasing decisions autonomously.

Mani shares Shopify's internal "crawl, walk, run, fly" framework for thinking about AI-driven commerce, walks us through SimGym (their simulated AI buyer testing environment), and explains the Coinbase x Shopify Commerce Payments Protocol built on programmable USDC. This is one of the most grounded, executive-level conversations on AI agents and the future of retail you'll find.

What we cover:
- Who really owns the customer relationship in an agentic world: the brand, the platform, or the AI?
- The four stages of agentic commerce and where most businesses are today
- Why brand loyalty is not going away, and how the "human persona" vs "agent persona" changes merchant strategy
- Shopify's SimGym: running A/B tests with simulated AI buyers before going live
- How the Universal Commerce Protocol changes discovery, interaction, and transaction
- The Coinbase x Shopify Commerce Payments Protocol and why programmable money matters for global merchants
- Why decision-making, not execution, is your real bottleneck in an AI-first world
- How Shopify is using its merchant data advantage to stay ahead with Sidekick and Sidekick Pulse

Guest: Mani Fazelli, VP of Product at Shopify

Who this is for: Founders, C-suite executives, product leaders, and ecommerce operators trying to understand what AI agents mean for their business right now.

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