Daniel Wagner Of Rezolve AI On The Future Of Retail Over The Next Few Years

I think this environment of creating a destination for the retail store is how the future is going to pan out for physical retail. Otherwise, we’re going end up with mainly food and convenience stores on the High Street, which I think would be a shame over time, but my job is to make the experience online as rich, if not richer, than engaging with the very best salespeople in a physical store.

As part of our series about the future of retail, we had the pleasure of interviewing Daniel Wagner.

Daniel Wagner is an eCommerce veteran and serial entrepreneur. Prior to the World Wide Web, at the age of 20, Daniel created the first online information service M.A.I.D. decades before the internet was commercialized and built the business into the global market leader, when it was sold to Thomson Reuters. Daniel’s second company (Venda) was a pioneer in enterprise eCommerce and was founded in 1998. Venda created a cloud or on demand commerce platform that went on to run major retail customers’ eCommerce sites (including Lands End, Tesco, BooHoo, TJX Companies, Nieman Marcus and many more) and was sold to Oracle in 2014 after becoming European market leader.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I started my first company in 1984 which was the pioneer in online information. At the time, it was the world’s first commercial online information platform. I was digitizing newspapers, trade journals, periodicals, and other materials to make it accessible through a computer for interrogation. At the time, most publishers still produced content using the old fashioned plates, versus word processing, with printers and ink. We would get the content (like the Wall Street Journal) at around midnight then retype it into a computer so it would be available to our customers by around 7:00 AM the next morning. We’d work overnight. Back then, there was no ecommerce technologies,there was no search technologies or data centres to rent, like Amazon Web Services. We eventually had large data centers including the biggest in Southern California in Palo Alto which was the size of a city block. We also had the largest data center in Europe, in Bern, Switzerland, and in Asia, in Singapore. In a way, we became a cloud provider host and infrastructure provider. We also developed our own search technology and invested heavily in it over the next 10–15 years, such that we could interrogate this large content library we created. During that process, we created some proprietary technologies including Infosort, where we applied a taxonomy, or a filing system, to the data. We licensed that technology to Microsoft, Fujitsu, IBM, and other big companies because we created something quite special.

Finally, we developed the technologies to take payment for our content, both via credit card and for billing purposes. We built the entire infrastructure for payments so when I sold that business to Thomson (now Thomson Reuters), my next business was a company called Venda, which was a cloud based commerce platform which enabled merchants and retailers and manufacturers to rent my infrastructure to run their e-commerce sites, which everybody does today. Back in the late 90s, everyone was thinking that it was kind of out there and why would we do that? We’d build our own solutions but of course, everyone’s moved to cloud or SaaS based architectures. I think I was ahead of the game and as a result, that business became the European market leader for enterprise e-commerce. In the US, we ran the sites for Neiman Marcus, Land’s End, TJX Companies, Under Armour, j.crew, L.L. Bean, amongst others. I sold that business in 2014 to Oracle and it became Oracle Commerce Cloud.

In 2003, I set up a company called Attraqt, which provided search technology. When I look back, my entire life has been commerce, search and infrastructure. Today, when we think about the development of Gen AI and the massive implications it has for our lives, it really is fantastic. I’m not as young as I used to be, but my energy and enthusiasm about this is off the scale because in life, all of your capabilities and your experience sometimes come together at the right moment, and it feels like that’s the case. The ability, the skills and the experience my team and I have developed could not be better placed for what’s happening today. When Gen AI became available, we immediately understood the implications, whereas everybody else has sort of caught up in 2022 or 2023, when ChatGPT made itself available. The moment those algorithms became public domain technologies, we jumped on it and what we wanted to do was create. We leveraged those innovations so we could use it in conversational commerce. We have these three products that use the fundamental capabilities that we created specifically for use in commerce, which is what we know. When you ask the question, “how did you get there?”, it’s just my life journey, and nothing opportunistic about this. I’ve been commerce, search and infrastructure from day one. I think search has been a fundamental part, probably more than the other two. Because we had to be really good at it when we have an information business, I believe where we are today is on the cusp of the most important technological development in my career. We have all the tools and we must take advantage of it.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

Missed opportunities. I’ve got a few of those. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay worked for me and his manager said to me, “You know Pierre is leaving to set up a flea market on the Internet and he’d like you to put in a million dollars.” I said we have to talk. That was $30 billion down the toilet. I had a few of those examples. Another one was when Jim Clark came to see me and said, “You know, we’ve got this new browser for the Internet called Netscape and we’d like you to be part of it because of your content and everything else. We’d like you to buy 1% for $1 million.” I said, seriously Jim, really? He said yes. It was worth much more than 100 million dollars within a matter of months.

Nevertheless, I’ve been very fortunate in my career to have met and engaged with all the titans of the tech world and the publishing world, from Rupert Murdoch to Bill Gates. I’ve always found those interactions have been very stimulating and energizing. Successful people, successful entrepreneurs, are very driven and some to the exclusion of everyone around them. Because of their love for what they’re doing and not for the end game and or for some egotistic benefit and as a result, they bring everyone with them. There’s a different approach. I’ve always enjoyed engaging with those who are more collaborative with their team which is not always the case.

Are you working on any new exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?

I think what we have right now is a fantastic product suite that has been well honed over eight years and is absolutely timed perfectly for the market. I think, like my career, we’ve been ahead of the game and we just became a public company and our solutions are ready. The market’s ready. And we’re ready to push this out. This is unlike the other players in Gen AI. It’s a very interesting market right now. The majority of Gen AI players are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in training and infrastructure so that one day, they will be the winner and there’s a kind of money fest going on where companies are throwing enormous amounts of capital into training their models and preparing and trying to make their model the best. I don’t buy that. That’s all. I think that’s a waste of money. Based on where we are, I think there’s a winner and it’s open AI for that generic interrogation of things.

We’ve got our own model, but we’re focusing on a very specific vertical and we’ve productized it. You could go to open AI and build on their models and you could build on these other guys too, anthropic and cohere and Mistral and so on. You could spend a lot of money trying to do something clever and most retailers and businesses that are not technology businesses, are not good at it. They’re good at doing what they do. Nike is great at making shoes. L’Oreal is great at making cosmetics. But when it comes to creating technology, you wouldn’t make them the first on the list. My view is that what we’ve done is we’ve productized our solutions on top of our own technology. We’re not saying to the market, “here’s our LLM for commerce so go build something on it”. We’re going to market by saying “we’ve created a unique focused Gen AI proposition and sitting on top of it is a suite of products that solve real world problems for you today. Those problems are attrition on your website. You get 70% attrition on e-commerce sites, 7 out of 10 people drop out.” It’s difficult to bring people to your commerce site, engage with people and keeping them and giving them the answers they need to make a purchase decision. BRAIN Commerce. Closing that order again, BRAIN Checkout, tap tap and then when there is an issue, follow up using BRAIN Assistant. We have a suite of solutions that solve an existing problems for customers, and we’re not asking to go build anything. We’re just saying plug it in and get going. I believe that is our differentiator. We are here today because we started nearly eight years ago so we’re ahead of it, like open AI. Our proposition is we’re going to solve a big problem for you in commerce. The engagement with commerce is so old fashioned and difficult and unnatural. If someone says, I need cocktail dress for a wedding in the summer when it will be hot. Also I’d like to have it strapless. I just tell the commerce platform what I want and I get the answer to what I want and it’s descriptive and knowledgeable like a salesperson might be if you had the best salesperson in the store. We think we’re sitting in a unique position today with a solution that solves a very significant problem. The market is ready which is a unique situation because throughout my career, I’ve always been too early for that acceptance.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful, who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

I’ve been in technology for 40 years so there are a lot of people and businesses along the way that I’m grateful for. Early on, I relied on my non executive directors because I was only 20 years old when I started my first company and I knew nothing. I left school at 16, so I wasn’t educated at university. I learned on the job and I was fortunate to have some very impressive people who guided me. As I went through that learning process, I remember I stayed as CEO of my first company all the way through to the sale when I was 38 years old. I’ve also had some people who backed me, who turned out to be very difficult and created a lot of challenges for me. Generally I’ve been fortunate to have people who backed me because they believed in me and my ability to execute. They allowed me the freedom to do that. Those people who did right by me are who I admire the most because they took a chance and you can’t achieve anything without that. The real success comes down to belief and commitment. You can’t do it if you don’t totally believe and nothing will stop you from getting to the end game. That’s the hallmark of a successful person wherever they are whether they’re an athlete, an artist or in business. It’s the desire and the focus and the unwavering commitment to achieving their goal.

Without question, you need a lot of support because you don’t have the confidence to do that if you don’t have people around you tell you that can achieve that. When I had a job in advertising and left to go start my first company, I wasn’t like my brother who went to university and earned a degree. I dropped out at 16 and I was selling audio equipment in the West End of London and then joined an ad agency as a runner. Before I even got on my feet, I left to start a company and my mother was in floods of tears. She said I was throwing my life away. My father, on the other hand, offered to help build the business and plan it properly. My mom came round after a while, but the point is you need that support. I believe you can’t do it solely on your own but for those who do, it’s incredibly impressive.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Be kind to everyone. I think I’m a good person and have raised a nice family. I treat people around me well. I give back through charities and I always feel I can do more. I don’t step on the people around me. When things have been difficult for me, I’ve been very fortunate that people who I’ve been good to will reciprocate by supporting me. I’ve had some difficult times and during those stretches, I’ve been fortunate to have friends and family around me. Surprisingly, there have been people who are not that close to me come forward and offer to help.

I think there are plenty of people who became very successful, very easily and unfortunately took a different path. They don’t think anybody else is meaningful in their own right. I enjoy the people I work with and enjoy working around people. I consider the people who work for me as my friends because we respect each other and treat each other with kindness and generosity.

The Pandemic has changed many aspects of all of our lives. One of them is the fact that so many of us have gotten used to shopping almost exclusively online. Can you share a few examples of different ideas that large retail outlets are implementing to adapt to the new realities created by the Pandemic?

The Pandemic created a dynamic of complacency and I find it very frustrating. I’m a bit old school, but I think there is a workplace environment that provides a tremendous dynamic for competitiveness. In sales for collaboration, in creative industries for creative activity or in developing programming. Being around other people is conducive to learning and improving your ability to succeed because those dynamics are healthy and I think we’ve lost them. I think the younger generation, who went through a period of their first induction into working life and working from home and even studying from home, which I think has been an unhealthy output of the Pandemic.

The benefits we’ve seen is there was a period of time when people working from home spurred a massive spike in online activity and deliveries which makes sense because people couldn’t leave. I think the physical retail environment was already in decline and the Pandemic accelerated it. The reason retail stores declined was because they weren’t offering enough of an attractive alternative to the convenience of buying online. Now my job is to make the online experience richer than the physical experience. I don’t, but I believe the physical experience can be enhanced, but it’s not what I do right? I’m not in that space. I do believe, for example, Ralph Lauren, intelligently created Ralph’s coffee in their stores and what they’ve done there is brilliant because people visit Ralph’s coffee and you’re sitting there having a coffee and their clothes are around you so they draw you in to browse their clothing. I’m sure some people go there as a destination to buy clothes, but there’s plenty of people who go there as a destination to have a coffee or have one when they’re shopping around. I think this environment of creating a destination for the retail store is how the future is going to pan out for physical retail. Otherwise, we’re going end up with mainly food and convenience stores on the High Street, which I think would be a shame over time, but my job is to make the experience online as rich, if not richer, than engaging with the very best salespeople in a physical store. I believe that’s kind of what we’re doing with Brain Commerce.

The supply chain crisis is another outgrowth of the pandemic. Can you share a few examples of what retailers are doing to pivot because of the bottlenecks caused by the supply chain crisis?

It’s not an area that that we focus on, but what I can tell you is the supply chain crisis is purely a result of the constraints for having people who couldn’t physically move things around because of Covid. What has happened is similar to the complacency people got from working remotely at home. They’re working from home but there’s no Pandemic anymore. You have the same kind of inertia in manufacturing and logistics, where I think there’s a premium being charged that died during the pandemic and has not been removed. Obviously nobody’s going to remove that. Nobody has dropped their prices again, but you also have the same kind of inertia that we’re seeing across most businesses as a result of this Pandemic overhang.

How do you think we should reimagine our supply chain to prevent this from happening again in the future?

The supply chain is physical and requires logistics and movement of product from manufacturing to the store. If anything, it will be drones and remote controlled vehicles which we’re seeing and it’s an exciting area actually. Robots can go down the street, navigate to your home and then use a code or a lock key or whatever to retrieve your item and then off it goes to do it again. Those are impressive. They don’t require physical involvement, but we’re a little bit away from that becoming mainstream. That’s exciting and will happen, but it still requires people packing it and handling issues when things go wrong. I’m not sure how much it’s going to save or how much more efficient it will be.

In your opinion, will retail stores or malls continue to exist? How would you articulate the role of physical retail spaces at a time when online commerce platforms like Amazon Prime or Instacart can deliver the same day or the next day?

I think malls and shopping centres are destination areas where people go and wander around the stores.I think they need to be more engaging. In fact, I believe department stores and shopping malls have a brighter future than a stand alone store on a High Street because the problem with the standalone store is you can’t park your car outside. There’s traffic restrictions so then you have to find a car park and pay. If you visit a shopping mall, you can shop for a few hours so the concept of shopping malls and shopping villages, or outlet malls are very attractive to today’s consumer because they’re able to make that a destination visit where you can visit one store or multiple stores and spread your costs. When you see what’s happening in China, they’re building entire cities around the malls. They have the mall as the centre of an entire community. It has three cinemas, lots of restaurants, all the shops and there are events with a lot happening. You’ll have skyscrapers around and a hotel around the mall which is the centre of the ecosystem. We don’t see that in the West. We’re not developing our landscape in that way but malls are becoming more and more of a destination for millennials, among others, because that’s kind of like a day out.

The so-called “Retail Apocalypse” has been going on for about a decade. While many retailers are struggling, some retailers, like Lululemon, Kroger, and Costco are quite profitable. Can you share a few lessons that other retailers can learn from the success of profitable retailers?

I think retailers that do not move with the times have been caught out like Bed Bath & Beyond and JC Penny. They found themselves caught between what they were doing for a long time and how the market has changed with the mobile consumer and the digital consumer and they weren’t able to leverage their market position into that new dynamic. That’s not unusual in any business. If you had a horse and cart taxi company back in the 1900s and you didn’t shift yourself into the motor vehicles, you were out of business within a few years so I believe being on top of development and of course Gen AI is a huge development and massive impact and it’s bigger than the Internet and e-commerce was back in the late 90s. Those retailers who are not embracing change will be left behind. For example, somebody has a traditional website we are familiar with and their competitor provides a similar website enabled with something where I can visit that website and ask really intelligent questions of the product catalog like which is the better phone, the iPhone 14 on the Samsung S23? Which one has the better camera? Questions you can’t ask of a digital platform so why would I go to the other site? I’d never go to the other site once I’ve had that experience, and if I can do that in any language, whether I’m speaking Korean, Arabic, or Spanish, but I can’t do that on the other side. Why would I go to the other site? You end up with this situation where you’re at a disadvantage. An example of a retail store that can benefit enormously from this development is a department store in London called Harrods that’s world renowned. They have an extraordinary department store where everybody is an expert. When you go there, you get an extraordinary, high quality engagement with the store representatives. If you visit the cheese counter, the person knows every cheese and he’s not just there to serve you like in the supermarket. The person will know the provenance of the cheese and everything about it. The same would apply to the furniture department and the electronics department or any other area in the store. Why would you then go to the Harrods website? Where is the value in that website today? I think very few people would go there unless they’re looking to buy Harrods teddy bear or specific Harrods products. It’s unlikely they would make it a destination for themselves like the physical store. With conversational commerce, if you are embracing the expertise of everyone who’s on the department floor so that cheese person speaks into their mobile phone and says the new cheeses we have and where it’s from, etc. When I asked the question of the Harrods website, I’m looking for a cheese for a dinner party but I don’t want blue cheese, rather I like creamy cheeses, so what do you think? I can ask a question like that and get a brilliant answer because the person who knows all about the cheeses has given me the information.

The evolution of digital commerce is matching the experience that you may get in store and you can up that experience. Another example is let’s pretend there’s a small hardware store in New York City. People who are behind the counter know their product whether it’s the best varnish or the best hammer. That knowledge and the people who live in that two block radius will visit that hardware store rather than go online to Amazon because they think they’ll need to ask questions about the nails. If that information can be imported into a digital environment, suddenly, that small retailer has a real chance to be competitive in the world because you’re not going to get that knowledge and service from Home Depot unless they really invest in the knowledge of every product around their catalog. It’s an exciting time. I think it, I think it has the opportunity to draw out really new winners, how to in enforce the position of existing market leaders in the physical retail space to extend their position as market leaders in the digital space to overcome some of the other players in the market who have existing market leadership positions. I think I think it’s a very interesting time.

Amazon is going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New Direct-To-Consumer companies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise to retail companies and e-commerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition?

I think the real difference here is to provide a greater depth of information about the products you have and using technology like BRAIN Commerce allows that interaction with a good human without you being there to be very rich and high-quality. Amazon represents nearly 50 cents in every dollar spent online now. They do everything so extremely well so why would you go somewhere else? You wouldn’t necessarily buy a suit from Amazon or a pair of trousers. I don’t know what their apparel sales are like but I’m sure they sell a lot of clothing but if it was a pair of work pants, I might buy it from Amazon. If it was a suit for a wedding, I probably wouldn’t. If I were buying a power drill, I’d probably go to Amazon, but I would like to think hardware stores can provide a better service, a better function, a better engagement than Amazon today by doing the things I just described so I’m encouraged to go there to learn about my purchase decision.

The idea that I can go to one place and that salesperson which is a digital Gen AI generated salesperson has all those answers. When I look for the best of a specific product, you know there are a lot of reviews online where they compare products. Being able to do this during the online shopping experience would save a lot of time so I don’t have to watch videos or read reviews.

Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a fantastic retail experience that keeps bringing customers back for more? Please share a story or an example for each.

I don’t have the answers for everybody. I don’t have the answers to create a fantastic retail experience. I mentioned Ralph Lauren as an example. What they did and what they’re doing by creating a cafe environment in a retail store is very clever. A driver for consumers in physical retail is what everyone around the globe is trying to improve. The user experience and the consumer experience in both physical and digital environments. If I had a store on a High Street with traffic restrictions outside, I would consider reaching out to customers and saying that you can order ahead and I can come out and deliver it to your car and you can drive off. I’d be thinking about ways to address the problem of customers not being able to park, but the person who runs the store is still able to serve them. If I had a digital storefront, I’d be looking to make it more interactive and capable of converting the 70% of people who drop away into a lower number because that will have an immediate impact on my sales and in all cases, I think that the experience has to be beautiful, engaging and positive.

I don’t know the answers, but I do think there is a tremendous opportunity to improve. I’ll give you another example. I visited a department store in London to buy a camera for my daughter for her birthday. We went together to the camera department and I said to the person behind the counter that we are interested in one. He picked up his mobile phone and said hold on a second and he continued on his phone. I’m thinking to myself that I don’t need him to look on his phone to compare products because I can do that myself. If you have a situation in the store where the salesperson isn’t knowledgeable about the products, then there’s no desire to go to the store, right? In the end, this person said the camera you should get is one that we don’t stock but you can buy it at this other shop down the road. He actually sent me off to buy the camera somewhere else. He didn’t sell me the camera that I was going to buy it. There are lots of areas for improvement, but the best thing to improve is in store. You must have fantastic salespeople who know the product inside out and unfortunately, the quality of the training of in store salespeople has dropped over the years which makes it less attractive to go physically to a store.

Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I had an idea around community which I called community credits. I tried to push it about 10 years ago to the UK government. It was an idea to rate companies on their contributions to society. We rate the company based upon its stock price, revenue or innovation but we don’t run a community rated company and there’s plenty out there that do great things. I came up with this idea of community credits where if I did something in my business such as contributing a percentage of profits back to the community or a company donated or sponsored books in schools, the company would receive community credits attached to that contribution because of the value it provided to society and as individuals we could create community.

It could work for individuals too. For examples, many people have old phones in a drawer. I could send them to be recycled or be sold somewhere but maybe if I had a website and somebody needed a phone, perhaps I could send it to the person and get some community credits for that. It’s a rating system and I’d love to see all the top companies showcase their community credits as well. I think this would motivate companies to give back more especially if they are being measured.

How can our readers further follow your work?

Best places would be at the Rezolve AI website which is www.rezolve.com or you can connect with me on LinkedIn.

Thank you so much for this. This was very inspiring!