Amazon’s “Apple Move”: The Walled Garden Strategy against AI #LTM137

If this robots that text would not block them off.

They could even continuously crawl, right?

They could continuously crawl today, tomorrow after tomorrow.

So they would even see that developing stuff that data ownership Amazon has today about, you know, like who's searching for what, what is sold and what frequency speed whatsoever.

Let's talk marketplace.

The marketplace podcast with ingrid lommer.

Hello and welcome to let's Talk Marketplace.

A new year and a new hair color and some new lighting as well because I got a PR Christmas present with a nice ring light for my podcast, so.

But it's still your old host.

I'm Ingrid.

Great to have you back.

And look else.

Look who else is back.

It's Maltekastan, my favorite Amazon expert.

Good to have you in the show again, Malte.

How have you.

How have you been?

That's good.

I'm still there.

Yeah.

Good news.

So it's me.

Yeah, nice to be back.

Okay, let's go.

Yeah, great.

Yeah.

If you've been following our podcast for a while, you already know that I always invite Malte to join me when there is Amazon to be discussed.

And yeah, he's been here, I think three times before.

Malta.

Yeah, something like that.

So I will cut the longer introductions and just say he's one of the best and insightful experts on the Amazon universe in Europe.

I know.

And you should definitely follow him on LinkedIn.

Let's keep it at that.

But yeah, and of course I want to talk about Amazon today as well.

This is why you're here, Malte.

And normally I'd ask him to give up the latest gossip from some Amazon headquarters he's been regularly visiting.

But for today, I have something special in mind because it's the first episode of the new year.

So I thought we can be a little bit bold and a bit controversial and maybe debate a feeling that has crept up on me over the last month whenever I was doing research on AI and gentic commerce.

Yeah.

And that feeling basically boils down to Amazon is losing the AI game.

So this is what I put to Malte and he was not convinced, I think from my thesis.

And so I thought we could have a nice discussion on it.

So shall we do it in the proper discussion way, Malte?

I will present my case and you can answer.

Good.

Because I think, because as I say, I've been doing research and there's Microsoft with the OpenAI Halo and there's Google with Gemini and there's of course perplexity doing things, lots and lots of things in the agent e commerce universe.

And then There's Amazon and I don't see what they are doing in this agent E commerce era, apart from Rufus, which is their own AI and apart from what I read, shutting out agent E commerce agents from their platform.

So OpenAI and their colleagues are not allowed to buy on Amazon for now.

So yeah, I think they're not doing enough and they're losing it.

What would you say, Marte?

I hope we have enough time.

I mean that's indeed a bold thing, right?

I mean that's a general thing.

That's the question, like what you would do.

Or we come from maybe a different perspective.

We say, okay, what's the status quo today in terms of agentic AI, in terms of AI, right.

On the one hand it's already, let's say it from an Amazon perspective, it's already dangerous, right?

Absolutely.

If you would open up your platform to AI, we're not talking about agentic AI, let's open it up to AI.

They would be able to crawl, let's say at least status quo within days, some say within weeks.

So everything you have built up in terms of listings reviews, everything that makes Amazon Amazon would be, let's say an open book to everyone, to that particular company, like googlebot is doing it, a perplexity bot or whatsoever.

Whoever is doing it would have everything.

Even more dangerous would be if someone, you know, if this robots Txt like this, the storekeeper of Amazon, right, That's blocking off all those agentic AIs and AI solutions.

If this robots that text would not block them off.

They could even continuously crawl, right?

They could continuously crawl today, tomorrow after tomorrow.

So they would even see that developing stuff, that data ownership Amazon has today about, you know, like who's searching for what, what is sold and what frequency, speed, whatsoever.

Yeah, how are reviews developing, which items are trending, all that.

That's why Amazon is definitely purposely and from my perspective, correctly, blocking everything off.

That's agentic AI.

And what's AI?

That's today.

And that's the only solution for today.

Otherwise you would make yourself redundant within short period of time.

Yeah, some say, as I said, agentic AI would need days, some say weeks to get everything out of Amazon that's existing in terms of data.

So the disruptor is afraid of the disruptors?

Yeah, something like that.

I mean you have to preserve what you got, right?

I mean it's this, that's that magic five, right?

It's those five steps, right?

Oh, I have to take the total off, you know, it's those magic five steps.

That are, let's say, worth defending, right?

It's this, maybe you've heard this in commerce, right?

It's this intent capture.

The first step, option construction.

Let's say in the first step, what is the customer searching?

In the second step, what am I showing to the customer?

Yeah, option construction.

In the third step, what am I really showing to the customer?

Let's say this decision logic and then it's transaction execution and all that data aftermath that five steps.

Amazon is saying we definitely want to own in future the last three steps.

But this is not working with agentic AI.

Agentic AI basically is designed to move some steps out of the platform.

Yeah.

What are you searching for?

Only the AI knows the prompt.

What am I showing to the customer?

Agentic AI is doing it.

They're picking from all across the web, from everywhere and are showing to the customer something.

And even the top pick the third step, what is the best choice for you?

Right?

I mean this is very powerful.

If an AI is doing it in future, even the AI is checking out itself.

It's not the customer buy me the best thing, the best batteries or something.

I don't need to be involved in the first three steps, Right?

That would mean that agentic AI in future is moving from the five important steps in commerce three steps out of the platforms.

Worst case scenario for Amazon, agentic AI does not want to be involved in step four, right?

Or this execution, shipping, all this, the messy stuff and remain with the platforms whatsoever.

Right?

Step five is becoming interesting once again.

Is all the data ownership, right?

All that, let's say, let's call it, they call it data exhaust, but it's all that.

What do I learn from that?

Right?

Customer bought this customer like this item got sold.

There are so many informations in that process.

This is indeed something agendik I would also somehow own, right?

I mean they know that this particular customer bought this and when and why and purpose and season and all that and so on.

So that means if Amazon would now say we come to the point like Shopify and Walmart, they say be my guest.

I mean agentic AI is at least driving some sort of traffic here.

I mean the sales, not traffic.

We have to differentiate here.

Turnover.

Yeah, turnover.

And Walmart says if agentic AI is today offering options, step two to a customer and Amazon is not involved in those options because Amazon's saying no, not this time.

Walmart says.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

A great opportunity.

I mean Walmart has to open up things a little bit aggressively.

I mean, let's come to the.

My conclusion in the first part here is it's from my perspective some sort of showing force what Amazon is doing.

They are saying no.

While Shopify and Walmart and others, you know that Etsy and blah blah and so on, while other platforms solutions are saying okay, we are totally fine with a future scenario in which we are just step four, the execute, we are the shippers, we are the executioner stuff.

We are the checkout platform where things are, let's say pick, pack, ship checked out.

Right.

So that's basically from my Amazon saying and we can move forward to the point why I think it's about showing force here.

They say no, we are not fine with a scenario where we only own one of the five steps in future.

We want more.

Yeah, well I can get that from dev perspective.

While you were talking I was just having this strange sense of deja vu because I'm from an industry that has been disrupted a few years ago in journalism and the things that publishing houses used to do.

When Google came up and started crawling their news websites, they tried the same thing as Amazon is trying now and as we know now, in vain.

It's really hard to stem against the tsunami of a real disruption as it's happening at the moment.

So okay, I get that you are saying Amazon is buying themselves a bit of time in a way.

They're pushing, they're closing the borders so that they can have time to do a counter strategy.

The question is just why aren't they there yet?

I mean what is Amazon doing in.

In tame.

In times or in terms of agentic commerce themselves?

Yeah, I mean, okay, there are two important things in there, right?

Your first question, let's say, or your first standpoint is they're buying time.

And that's true.

Question would be what are they buying time for?

Yes, I mean we can maybe talk, start with this maybe.

Right, so that's a valid question, right?

What the heck, what are they buying time for?

I mean, what are the possible scenarios?

Scenario A is agentic AI is becoming the main customer intake layer.

Let's say for, for E commerce, for commerce going forward.

Like browsers back in the days.

Right.

That could be scenario A.

Scenario B could be.

I mean that's going away.

It's not working.

I don't know.

Regulatory pressure.

Yeah, that worked really well with the Internet, you know.

Yeah.

And also with the browser.

That's nothing for the future they said basically.

So let's imagine or let's be pretty precise somehow different intake scenarios, voice device, whatsoever let's assume agentic AI is powerful and is going to be the main consumer layer.

Let's say going forward.

If this is the case, what does that mean for Amazon?

What would that mean for Amazon?

That would definitely mean, okay, take step four and go right.

And be happy that you preserve something.

At least Amazon is saying, okay, we have 300 million customers.

We are too big, we are too big to simply say, like the others, to simply say we are satisfied with one of the five.

What would that mean?

I mean, giving away step two would mean you are killing your entire ads business.

Because all that, what is shown, what is decided in the background, what is.

Shown moves away from the platform.

The search results, let's say in step three to the customer is defined partially buy ads.

Yeah.

It's a portion of the best pigs, let's say the best choice anyways.

But also who paid the most to be a top pick today for this customer.

Right.

Which is why this is such an important topic for Amazon, because it's a huge part of their turnover.

Yeah.

I mean that's one of the two parts, I think, where they're earning money.

Right.

I mean, AWS growing exponentially still.

Yeah.

So would you, if you would be Amazon, would you now say step four is, okay, let's kill the ads business going forward purposely?

No, no one would say that.

At least you have to stem against that.

The other thing is, and that was your second question, why is Amazon not aggressively leaning into that agentic AI thing?

The problem is they can't.

I mean, they can't really.

Right.

If Amazon would create now, I mean this would be the logic.

If Amazon would create now an agentic, a bot.

And they would call it Satas medium here.

My, my drink here.

Yeah.

And they would call it Satas medium.

So this is the new cool.

It's an app and it's cool and handsome shape and blah, blah and something.

And I would say, oh, I'm using it.

Ah, it's from Amazon.

Aha.

It takes, let's say it like this in grid, pretty open.

It takes one day until the first forums are yelling.

Yeah, regardless what I'm searching for, it's always Amazon item and topic.

Go figure.

Well, we had that.

That happened with Alexa in a way, didn't it?

I mean we had this nice Alexa bots and everyone's going like, yeah, voice commerce is coming.

And then in the end it's still, it only stayed a device that you can ask to play your playlist and no one's really using it for shopping.

So voice shopping didn't.

But that's coming with Alexa now.

I mean that took too long.

I mean those Alexa guys, I don't know what happened in there.

I mean that's one of those stories that really took too long.

Saw those guys in the keynote in Seattle.

But basically that really took too long.

Let's put that to the side.

Alexa, we can talk about this because this is really also changing things.

But it's.

No one is as astonished as in this agentic AI case that Alexa is of course directing you all the time into Amazon.

It's not some sort of an intake device regardless its voice or whatsoever.

It's an intake device for your platform.

And basically if you break all that down, all the strategy, all the time, buying all that, we want more than just this and so on.

It should remind all of you guys of the Apple scenario.

It's basically the Apple world.

It's those iPhones, it's the itunes.

Is that you know, like Apple App Store blocking someone until he's willing to pay.

And that's exactly where Amazon.

I mean you can put this Amazon strategy over the Apple strategy and you will soon find out it's overlapping.

I don't want to say 100%, but it's pretty much overlapping.

And what Amazon wants now is buying some time until the API framework is ready to go capable of.

You have maybe witnessed and you don't believe in by chance scenarios like I do.

Amazon introduced the API fees two weeks ago.

One week ago.

I don't know, it's pretty recent.

So everything is prepared.

The field is prepared for announcing to the AI bots AI whatsoever agentic AIs and whatsoever.

Hey, I've reconsidered everything.

You are invited to join the party.

And if you pay.

Using my AI API framework, not in a crawling way, like aggressively uncontrolled crawling, whatever they want, but in a controlled way.

It will still be limited.

I mean this robots that text thing, right, that's determining everything will still limit, right?

They are not allowed to the APIs.

I mean you if you know APIs right there pretty much straightforward, funneled and exactly defining what you can get, right?

One API call gives you that.

And one it's not like that I'm saying okay, when I'm already here, I'm taking all the reviews out of the Amazon platform, right?

And if it's monetized, great, right?

I mean API costs something bots are firing like crazy.

I mean that's a money machine for Amazon as well and it's under control.

And that's the most important thing.

So.

Well, and it's basically just destroying the identic commerce idea here because I mean if, if my ChatGPT bot has to pay for every time they ping the Amazon API for my requests, that is not going to be a nice business model for OpenAI, is it?

Yeah, I mean that's the question, right?

I mean the question is whether you can, I mean when is the point in time?

And that's maybe also about this time buying.

When is the point in time where an AI as an LLM in the background is saying sorry mother.

To open AI.

Sorry mother.

I'm doing my job here.

Basically I'm recommending to the users permanently things.

But I have the impression that I'm not presenting every time, all the time, the best possible stuff because behind the mountains, mountain range there is someone who has prime that's obviously the most efficient, fastest, most reliable something in terms of supply chain, end to end, last mile and so on.

And there's someone who has a huge catalog, there's some someone, you know in terms of trust and all that and so on.

There is the point in time, definitely.

Amazon is hoping that it worked for Apple, right?

I mean imagine in the beginning everyone was saying hey yeah, no, no way, yeah, I have all the music here in my Napster or something, I don't want to have it once again in my itunes and blah.

And then Apple simply blocked off own formats.

Not comfortable, not working.

You know, you could not import export music.

It was all like stuck in this environment.

But then Apple was, you know, like firing more and more devices, more and more options, more and more things, you know, and then it was all harmonized and then changing to Android.

Ah, difficult.

And then my music and stuff.

This is a little bit in terms of forced power, regulatory demand.

Yeah, this, that's weakened a little bit.

Yeah.

Amazon, Apple had to, you know, like make everything a little bit synchronizable.

Now you can exchange music and you can order different formats and everything.

But the initial idea was bold and they really came from a small size being that bold.

Right.

Amazon is already huge and that's why from my perspective, it's fully correct.

Amazon is saying I want more.

That's a really interesting point that you're raising.

Yeah.

Saying that as, I mean Apple relied on, basically solely relied on the power of their brand when they created this walled garden and they said, you want my phones?

Well you have to take all this walled garden stuff with it because otherwise I won't give it to you.

And now you're saying that Amazon is basically not going for the brand but for this is the Amazon convenience that you will have nowhere else.

You will have prime and music and video and everything in one piece.

And if you want that, you have to stay with me.

So that's an interesting thing that you're raising here.

I see one problem with this.

Over half of the turnover on Amazon is created through the marketplace and by marketplace retailers for third party retailers.

And those retailers don't only they, most of them don't, don't solely sell on Amazon.

So what is stopping the aisle from just crawling?

All those Shopify shops out there, all those small shops, all those other marketplaces where those retailers might put their products out and then give the users the products that they are searching for, but not on Amazon.

Okay, let's wind a little bit back.

Right?

Let's go a little bit back in time.

Today we have Amazon, we have other marketplaces and we have D2C let's say Shopify as an example.

Right.

So they all started somewhen, somewhere, somehow.

And today we have a certain landscape in the U.S. in Europe, Asia, Africa.

Coming.

Yeah.

South America.

Yeah.

But I think let's say at least Europe and North America.

Bold.

Amazon is bold.

Amazon is owning it.

Yeah, you can say whatever you want.

Walmart, E Commerce 6% in the US and Amazon convenient 2 digit close to the 50 all around the 50 somehow.

So that's ownership.

It came somehow to that point today.

Why?

Because customer decided so it's not.

Someone forced them.

Customer decided.

So why?

Because it's convenient.

Because it's few clicks.

If I use agentic AI me personally and this agentic AI would all the time lead me for the checkout with the recommendation to a new webshop somewhere in Bulgaria this time and say it's the you save 10 cents.

I would say ah, but you know, okay, agentic AI.

Let me define some preferences here.

Yeah, let me define, you know, some framework preference.

Framework personalization.

Yeah.

Like Amazon also has a personalization AI.

We can come to the internal Amazon AI tools in a moment.

So and this, this would, I would, me personally I would definitely define when I look into China and we talked about this exactly last time I think.

Yeah, China, where 90% is marketplaces and 10% is D2C.

That's customer perspective and that's coming from the customer.

And agentic AI from my perspective won't change the number of clicks required when checking out all the time into new platforms and into new whatsoever landscapes.

And that's the problem, this is not solved by agentic AI.

It's maybe solved.

And that's of course what Etsy knew.

That's of course what Shopify knew.

They said we make it that easy that agentic AI will even be able to check out itself because they knew that's the main blocker.

That's why we are in position five, eight, I don't know in the ranking because we are not convenient enough compared to Amazon.

And they're trying to solve it.

Walmart as well in the US they're trying to solve it.

And OpenAI working with the likes of Stripe and so on to make all the checkout process easy, to make the general payment process easy.

And then.

Well, I don't know.

Do you really need Amazon and all that convenience for that?

Yeah, I mean AI is shopping for.

You if they're making it to close that gap, to make it really convenient or the same like neutral, it doesn't matter for you.

If you type prompt into an agentic AI and they're checking out, that doesn't matter for you.

Let's see, right?

I mean, let's see from a trust perspective and how long, how stiff the the AI, let's say the trust advance of Amazon might hold, whether it's enough to bring those agentic AI bots, force them into the situation that they need to use the API.

I'm not 100% sure about cost perspective.

You said this as a major blocker.

I'm not 100% sure.

I mean, for Amazon it's mainly about control, I think.

So let's say you are invited, but you have to use this door and only this door like we agree on.

And of course it's an issue because for example, the Google bot, the Google AI is partially allowed, for example, if you look into the robots txt.

And because it's not only, let's say, it's also bringing traffic.

Right?

So the problem with an agentic AI is it's not bringing any traffic.

I mean, it's bringing one sale, let's say, for example.

Right.

Or it's looking for opportunities, not bringing any traffic, not bringing any customer, let's say.

And no, no information about the customer either.

Yeah, it's totally, it's black boxing.

Someone, someone is running into and running out seconds later.

And I don't know what this was good for.

And with API you can track everything, you know what's going on.

And it's also limited.

Right?

I mean, in terms of the five steps we talked about in the beginning, I Mean, I think Amazon has written off this first step somehow looking into the future.

That's also why.

And you asked it.

That's also why Amazon, let's say or obviously from my perspective, my personal opinion.

Alexa took so long because Alexa and now Alexa is part of this first step basically like Rufus.

Yeah.

So they both are part of this first part of this commerce five fold, you know, like important journey description.

So.

And they are not so confident that they will in future really hold on.

To that first step.

And so like Alexa might be downgraded a bit in the priority.

Interesting.

So that's why.

And also Rufus, I mean came late and it's.

Yeah.

And it's mesmerizing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not really doing anything helpful most of the time.

So yeah, I mean it's collecting what's there and it's not.

Yeah.

Much smarter than I would be reading 10 reviews and then combining it to a opinion or to a recommendation or whatsoever.

So let's see.

But that definitely does not fit to Amazon's internal AI framework as such because that's really, really sophisticated.

Right.

And so the question is why two, let's say outbound facing, customer facing, let's say solutions like Alexa and Rufus are so, so basic.

Let's say.

Yeah, that's not really explaining it.

Right.

I mean sellers are facing this Emilia thing.

Right.

That's doing a lot regarding.

Regarding sellers and we talked about this I think last time and this is also pretty much involved in this journey.

Yeah.

And also in this order decision journey.

Let's say Emilia is in many, in many points pretty much involved and you have for the.

I mean same.

Amazon does not want that the Amazon staff is doing AI jobs outside of the Amazon world.

Right.

I mean that would be stupid.

Yeah, you block everything off and then all the Amazon guys are working in ChatGPT.

Please help me to write my something for tomorrow.

Coding or something.

They have Cairo.

Amazon has Cairo for the coding and it's really emphasizing if not pushing the Amazon stuff to use only this one, this internal one and not.

And laying off stuff because of that as well.

So that's crazy.

Right?

But it makes totally sense.

I mean that makes total sense.

And all this Amazon Q umbrella landscape where all those tools are underneath, it's also a pretty Amazon stuff is sometimes saying yeah it's not so convenient from an, you know like user friendly UX perspective and something external tools I worked previously with a little bit more convenient.

But all those Amazon tools are really, really customized for the Amazon purpose.

Really.

That's really, you know, like on point.

It's not working for X, Y that it's working for Amazon for the Amazon purpose and the tasks you have to do in the Amazon environment.

And that's.

I mean, I'm always astonished how secure and you know, from stabilization perspective how secure Amazon is indeed.

Right.

I mean, you've heard recently Shopify down and the booking.com league and everything like big platforms.

Right.

When was Amazon down the last time?

Years ago.

I remember it was still a seller and it was going crazy.

It was around Christmas.

Right.

So that's incredible.

And that's also part of that journey.

Right.

That's also everything thought through use guys.

You have to use A, B, C, D and all the different tools.

Right.

You are not allowed to use external tools.

Makes totally sense.

That's a security layer and that's a security measure.

And for me it makes total sense.

Interesting.

So if you're saying that Amazon is now going for this walled garden policy regarding AI, what does that do to the likes of OpenAI, perplexity, Gemini?

So how can they, or might they react to that?

Because as I agree with you, I think if you really want to get, if you really want to crack Agent E Commerce, you can't do it without the inventory that is at the moment stored in Amazon.

So they will have to react in some way to that.

On the other hand, I have a feeling that all of these AI platforms are at the moment really pushing for Agent E Commerce and all the.

Yeah.

The financial backup that comes with it.

So they have, they really need to, to get stuff working.

That's what I feel.

So are they having more pressure than Amazon is doing?

To me, I mean, it's a little bit like you said in the beginning.

I mean, you have heard maybe yesterday, this Shopify Temu new collaboration.

So everything around Amazon is no huddling.

Of course, it's not, you know, like moving together and.

Yeah, I don't know, Shopify is trying to create a relevance, convincing the agentic AI companies.

Yeah, you don't need Amazon.

Look, here we are, friends.

We've got it, We've got it.

Yeah.

If Amazon is 50%, we are also 50%.

But I mean, to be very clear, agentic AI won't fly without Amazon in certain territories, in certain environments.

Yeah, it's not a topic in China, it's not a topic.

Maybe in South America.

Yeah.

So there are different regions definitely where it would work without Amazon.

So it's maybe not a global perspective here, but I could also imagine, I mean we can talk about that next time.

I can also imagine in China it's not that much different.

Right?

I mean all those Chinese platforms, they're also not saying hey guys, come on, come on in.

Crawl a little bit around here in Alibaba or Taobao or something.

That's pretty clear.

I mean the agenda guys, they know that they are facing restrictions going forward from certain platforms that have a certain power level.

That's clear.

And in the end you are missing out on certain important players globally.

So they need a solution for that agentic AI and that's vice versa.

Amazon will not create an agentic AI bot that's then only recommending Amazon and that's crazy.

Doesn't make sense.

And that would definitely.

That would take half a year.

And then EU commission would say yeah, here you have to let in everyone and that needs to be democratized and blah blah and something.

So it's even not worth thinking about creating your own agendik AI thing.

In some ways they're doing this with Alexa and then the Rufus intake and so on.

Okay.

But then they will definitely call it different to avoid this enforced situation going forward.

This is my tool and my tool and that's it.

So.

But agentic AI guys, it's a little bit like you said at the beginning with those publishing houses and all that stuff.

Right.

The problem back then was a Google was able to.

This library thing was called.

Right.

Or something.

They were able to crawl, let's say scrape basically everything.

Yeah.

In certain territories.

And that was still once again this globalization problem.

Right.

Not allowed in Germany, but you can take the same book over the border to Slovakia and then you could simply do your stuff.

So that was crazy.

I mean this was putting pressure simply from Google and then also some houses I think in this environment.

I don't know who was first, but us guys, I think they then simply left.

Left the army, left the party.

Yes.

And said okay, we are collaborating.

Right.

They're paying something and I need the money.

So.

And then they can have our content.

Yeah, it's coming anyways, they thought or something.

And.

And then if you are then in Europe, in Germany, sitting as the last resort.

That makes no sense.

Right.

So and this is I think a similar situation here.

One agentic AI bot company, they are acting as users when approaching Amazon.

Right.

They're called then users.

So to say one user will definitely try to get permission to enter Amazon.

Yeah.

Circumventing this robots tax by saying okay, I will use an API.

One will start the game once again.

Let it be anthropic where Amazon is invested.

Maybe.

So one will start.

Customers will think I have the most convenient recommendation experience when using this bot because obviously there's everything I can still use my Amazon app, like controlling my order flow whatsoever.

I'm collecting points, blah, blah, blah.

What Amazon's all doing now.

Yeah.

You can now collect what is mites and more on something.

So Amazon as you know like loyalty programs and Amazon is, you know, like.

Yeah, they're building it up all the time.

So just one needs to start and customers will think will come to the conclusion that there is the most complete recommendation set with this particular agentic ioBot.

Then the second falls the third and one day later somehow the last one.

I think this is a matter of time.

This is what Amazon is buying time for.

Until Amazon is like dressing the bride.

Yeah.

More and more and more doing everything, let's say what's attracting customers.

Also agentic AI.

Yeah.

I've written, I've written, I've read.

Written would be nice.

I've read some sort of a paper regarding agentic AI trying to understand prime and you know like the impact and for customers and, and for the order journey and trust and everything.

And something was very interesting and this is what's actually going on.

Coming back to the very beginning.

There's a lot to defend from a size and dimension.

Absolutely.

If there is one AI bot breaching this Amazon system could be the end some days.

Not detected.

A new AI bot created.

I mean this is a war, right?

I mean this is war.

Behind the scenes.

The guys who are updating this robots Txt thing, let's say the security guys who are checking permanently who is approaching our site.

Is there something that looks technical, that looks not human?

Right.

So and it's really important to say that humans are will always be able to enter the site even with pages that contain AI.

Let's say if you come, if you're coming from a browser that has the copilot AI feature in there, Amazon is receiving mixed signals when this human being is coming and they might throw in some sort of a captcha or something.

Right.

Are you human or so.

But they still will let them in.

So it's also defined in this robots text.

Like even if something is AI related that looks human, we let this in, but maybe control it a little or check this a little bit, enter a checkpoint into the journey.

So this is definitely from an Amazon perspective, my personal opinion, it's not smart, it's not clever.

From my perspective, it's the only way to go to replicate now this Apple thing.

That's from my perspective, what they're doing.

And it's, yeah, it's, it's a matter of survival.

Right.

It's a matter of relevance or I mean this is always the fallback thing.

The minimum, minimum, the bare minimum scenario is Amazon is maybe the biggest executional logistics facility in the world in some days.

That's maybe that's the, if they are.

Failing, that would be the, the strategy.

But as you said before, they are not earning their money with their logistics, they're earning their money with their, with their ads and.

Okay.

And aws, of course, which won't be affected by all of what you've been talking about today.

But still.

Yeah, that is, I mean, interesting times, isn't it?

There's such a lot going on and I, I take your points, there's very good points that you're making with the board wall garden approach.

I'm not fully convinced that this is, this will work in the end.

But what I have to say regarding my, my deja vu with publishing houses, the one thing that is different to that situation, and that is a big thing, is that when Google came along and attacked the publishing houses, they were much more pressed for money and resources than Amazon is now.

So Amazon, I think has, has a long, yeah, can, can hold out quite long against, against those bots coming up.

And I don't know if the bots can hold up as long because as I said, I feel some financial pressure there coming along.

Yeah.

But you know, anyway, Malta, I think I have to close down now because we're all way over our time.

But that was a very interesting discussion.

Thank you very much for joining me today.

And, and yes, I think we have to revisit this one maybe half a year or something and see how our ideas from today played out in the future.

Okay.

So thank you very much for joining me and thank you out there for listening to us and do let us know what you think about this and where you think our dear E Commerce is heading and where agentic commerce is heading with Amazon or not.

Yeah.

And yeah, make sure to come back to us next week and listen and follow and like us on Spotify, Apple, wherever.

So thank you very much.

Bye bye.

Thank you.

Bye bye.

You listened to let's Talk Marketplace, the Marketplace podcast with Ingrid Lommer and Valerie Dichtel.