Drew Cashmore Speaking Topics

• The Second Order Effects of AI In Commerce: What Happens When...

  The pace of change in retail is accelerating • especially with AI. New business models, new customer behaviors, new ways of working. Our businesses are about to go through the most fundamental transformation in shopping ever, and we need to establish a new approach to creating focus and keeping up with this change.

  At Adaptive Retail Group, we spend a lot of time with industry experts scenario planning for the future and determining likely outcomes of a rapidly evolving retail landscape. Our efforts serve to identify the right areas of focus for commerce businesses today to prepare us for tomorrow. We care less about the technology itself, and more about what likely happens to our customer experiences, our team's ways-of-working, and our business models as a result.

  The Second Order Effects talk looks at five specialized use cases for AI in retail, and provides a multidimensional view into what we need to prepare for two to five years out.

  • Generative AI in Search
  • Customer Adaptive Retail
  • Dynamic Store Operations
  • Supply Chain Optimization
  • AI as a new Profit Center

  Essentially, if this use case takes off, what will be the result, and how will we need to transform our businesses or experiences today to be ready for tomorrow.

• The Leapfrog Moment in Retail Media: Applying Lessons from the Past to Leapfrog Competitors

  Retail Media has become fraught with fragmentation and conflicting narratives. The rapidly growing space risks further consolidation into Amazon, Alibaba and Walmart if something isn't done to change the trajectory.

  With all of the new and emerging retail media businesses, brands, agencies and vendors looking to dive into the space, one thing remains true • we keep repeating the same mistakes. Luckily, we're at a moment in time whereby new or growth entrance can leapfrog the incumbents by learning from the people who have lived it before.

  Having spent over a decade building and scaling Walmart Connect to a $2BN+ retail media powerhouse • focused on everything from general management to business model transformation, merchant change management, commercialization and in-store strategy • Drew knows how it works, how it really works.

  The Leapfrog Moment in Retail Media session is designed for retailers, brands, agencies and vendors who are looking to build from today, for tomorrow, and sidestep many of the mistakes we made in the very early days of this thing.

  We touch on topics including:

  • The truth about trade, shopper and brand dollars
  • How much is possible and at what stage
  • Architecting teams, finding the right people
  • Establishing a customer-centric approach vs. a pure profit centre
  • Managing change across merchandising and marketing
  • The biggest mistakes made

  This talk is about establishing the right foundation for today from someone who lived and scaled a customer-centric retail media model within the world's largest retailer.

If Everybody was a Merchant: How Video is Changing the Dynamic of Shopping

Leaning on his years' of experience developing the video commerce, influencer and livestream shopping space in the West, Drew talks about a not-so-distant vision for the future where everybody is selling to everybody, and where shopping become an organic part of our everyday experiences.

This talk is not about TikTok or influencers or live shopping, If Everybody was Merchant explores a very likely world in which everybody has a product to sell, how and why it will happen, and how our businesses can evolve to support this evolution.

Topics include:

• shifting consumer mindsets and behaviors
• how this new ecosystem will likely play out
• how other markets have evolved
• how brands can empower this evolution
• what technologies are leading in this space

The goal of this talk is to inspire the 'art of the possible', helping B2C businesses think about activating and building for something that will truly transform the industry.

Customer Adaptive Retail: Architecting our Businesses to Rapidly Adopt the 'New'

One thing remains true in retail, change is constant. But with all this change, how do our organizations know where to focus? Customer adaptive retail is the evolution of omnichannel, meeting a customer where they are, when they're in the shopping mindset, and where they can most effectively be influenced.

Specifically, it is a customer-centric approach designed with adaptability and resiliency in mind. Customer adaptive retail accounts for new technologies, tools and business models that might enter the zeitgeist in time, and allows us to adapt to those changes without the need for large-scale transformations.

Drew's experience in managing several large-scale transformations at Walmart for over a decade allows him to talk about the fracturing approach to 'new' that most organizations have today, and how to appropriately build for a much more adaptive model in the future. Think 'composable commerce' for customer engagement.

We look at:

• how innovation is reshaping customer behavior and our ways of working
• what makes this adaptive approach possible now
• a suggested framework for adaptability

Our goal with this talk is to inspire innovative thinking within our organizations while creating focus for the long term. We look at 'the art of the possible' but establish a framework on how to approach that drives efficiency and scalability.

The talk is for retailers looking to transform, and brands, agencies and technology providers looking to better understand how innovation works within large retailers.