Key takeaways from the conversation

1. AI is becoming non-negotiable for ecommerce

“At this time last year AI was this really cool thing… and now it’s really become a non-negotiable for survival in ecommerce.”
— Annie Soderstrom, VP of Digital Product at SKIMS

“This is really about needing to deploy and or scale and really get meaningful results and savings from the different AI tests. So this is really the year where I think they have to scale.”
— Mike Dupuis, CDO at Catalyst Brands

2. Cross-functional collaboration is key

“Smart ecommerce leaders are breaking down silos—AI use cases now span across marketing, merchandising, and digital.”
— Jason Seeba, CMO at Session AI

“The smartest companies are mapping AI across every customer touchpoint—and holding each initiative to a KPI.”
— Mike Dupuis, CDO at Catalyst Brands

“Education is one of the biggest opportunities in AI. Without bringing the whole team along, no company becomes truly AI-first.”
— Annie Soderstrom, VP of Digital Product at SKIMS

3. Practical AI applications are taking off

“Optimizing for AI agents is the new SEO. If you’re not thinking about your site this way, you’re already behind.”
— Annie Soderstrom, VP of Digital Product at SKIMS

“We’re preparing for a future where people might not even visit websites—they’ll shop entirely through AI agents.”
— Annie Soderstrom, VP of Digital Product at SKIMS

“First and foremost, really, really interested in how to optimize our site for LLM crawlers… We are in the process of connecting our product feed [to Perplexity] so that we can always keep the most updated information to those customers there…”
— Annie Soderstrom, VP of Digital Product at SKIMS

“[Last year] everything was about how are we reducing the amount of stress on the team and tickets… Now I think everything is switched to being proactive, revenue-driving—how are we getting the customer to check out faster, getting them to find the products.”
— Dan Kaparski, Head of Digital at Archipelago (OluKai + Roark + melin)

“We’re using AI and ML models within our CDP environment, for example, to do identity resolution.”
— Mike Dupuis, CDO at Catalyst Brands