Nathan Bush: Before we get into today's chat, I want to share a little resource that we've just released. As you might know, in our Checkout episodes, I ask our e commerce guests, do you have a book or a podcast that you recommend our listeners get into? Well, I've taken all of those book recommendations and there's over a hundred of them, plus the stories that go behind them and put them into their own book called the Book Recommendations of E Commerce Experts. Yeah, I know, it's totally original. You will never ever run out of reading ideas again. You can download that one now for free over on addtocart.com
[Voiceover]: welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday.
Nathan Bush: Here's your host, Bushy Today's checkout features Tim Warren, co founder and CEO of Ambit, a company that started building a conversational artificial intelligence platform way back in 2016. Way ahead of the game, or as Tim describes it, just a little bit braver than others. They went all in on Ambit GPT, a retail focused chatbot that provides deeply personalized automated conversations that delight customers. Kiwi born and bred, Ambit has clients such as the Warehouse Group, Glassons and Dermalogica and raised a million New Zealand dollars last year to accelerate expansion here in Australia.
Nathan Bush: Tim, thank you for joining us on the checkout. We've heard all about Ambit GPT and how you're helping retailers take their customer service to the next level, and I really enjoyed our chat around understanding how to train up a data model specifically for retail. But we're here to learn. I feel like we learned a lot about you actually on our last chat. We covered a lot of things from moisturizers to Harry Potter analogies. But we're here to learn even more about you. I've got five quick questions. Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Tim Warren: Yeah, thinking about that. Nothing very weird actually. But during lockdown because I think many of us did a few unusual lockdown purchases. I ended up buying quite a bit of art and the most unusual thing I bought was a laser engraved native wood skateboard to hang on the wall and it went missing because I ordered it right at the beginning of lockdown and it went missing for four months and I ended up getting it, which was very exciting. But that's about as unusual as I get.
Nathan Bush: Are you a skater?
Tim Warren: I'm not, but I really like skateboards. So I just bought it to look pretty awesome.
Nathan Bush: How good?
Nathan Bush: All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Tim Warren: So I had a good think about this one and I can't pull out a single name and also I shouldn't because I want to work with all of them. But I would say that the people that blow me away is when I go and I see a lot of retail websites, I see a new one every day and I meet hundreds of them at events that you and I both go to. So when I see something new that I haven't heard about before, I'm always so impressed by them. And if I want to list one particular thing, I think Glassons did a pretty cool thing on their website where they introduced a feature with your camera and you could take a photo of someone's outfit and it would try and look through their own catalog and build the outfit and I thought that was amazing.
Nathan Bush: That's pretty cool. Should come with a warning to customers though. Tell people what you're doing when you're taking random photos of people in the street.
Tim Warren: And also kind of weird because I'm a guy and Blessings is a woman's shop and so it dressed me well, but I've never worn that outfit. I gotta say, you had to tell people.
Nathan Bush: Oh seriously, I'm user testing here. I'm user testing.
Tim Warren: It's alright, they're a customer.
Nathan Bush: All right, number three, which E commerce practice do you wish was history?
Tim Warren: Oh, this would be anything to do with pop ups or telling me about cookies and tracking and anything like that. It's just become a mess, hasn't it? Like it has to be solved, it can be sorted. We're meant to be moving into a cookie less future. I've been hearing about that for years. I don't know if we've got any closer, but any form of pop up just kills me.
Nathan Bush: Do you think AI will have any role to play in that cookieless world and helping privacy and tracking it absolutely
Tim Warren: will if people care about their customer. Okay. Okay, good.
Nathan Bush: Can you recommend a book or a
Nathan Bush: podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Tim Warren: This is completely off topic so you might just ban it. So the one I would say my absolute favourite audiobook is probably called Seeing Like a State by a guy called James C. Scott and it's about how all of these plans of states and how everything should be ordered just doesn't work. And I, I highly, highly recommend it.
Nathan Bush: As in states like systems seeing like
Tim Warren: a state like the state seeing like a government kind of thing.
Nathan Bush: Ah, Gotcha.
Tim Warren: I'll send you the link. It's great.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, I'd love that. That's great. How did you get onto that? I.
Tim Warren: When everyone else is asleep, I don't really sleep. And so I. I find if I read books, I stay awake. So I. I turn on audiobooks and after a couple of hours I drift off. But then I find that I'm actually interested in almost everything. And then I don't go to sleep either. So when. Yeah, when everyone else is sleeping, I work my way through non fiction predominantly, and I read the most unusual things. At the moment, I'm reading the History of the Jet engine.
Nathan Bush: Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay, cool. You're like, you're. You're training your own AI system in your head.
Tim Warren: I'm like an LLM. But, yeah.
Nathan Bush: And then you said you had a second book.
Tim Warren: Yeah, second book. One of the most important books, I think, for a lot of people to read is Some Fooled by Randomness by a guy called Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Now, he wrote a book called Black Swan, and a lot of people remember that book because he wrote it just before the global financial crisis and then everything blew up and he said, I told you so. But the better book, in my opinion, was Fooled by Randomness, which is the one that got his name out into certain circles. And the fundamental thing that it talks about is that you're probably not smarter or better, you're just lucky. So there's a little bit more to it, but I encourage people to read it to get to the end. But, but fundamentally, the thing that you can do to change your luck is do more things and experiment more. And that's why people, you know, they say that Michael Jordan's missed more hoops than just about anyone because he tried more. You know, that's a bit of a basic example, but I've tried quite a few companies. I've been the founder of quite a few companies and this is the one that's progressed biggest so far. But some of them never got off the ground and some of them did. So you just have to try and be in to win. But it's a fabulous book.
Nathan Bush: I love that recommendation and it ties in so well to the story, how we were talking about how you started Ambit and how you took a punt on AI as a leading technology back in 2016 when people weren't thinking about it, and the bravery that goes along with that. So really good recommendation. Thank you. Last question I have for you. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is personal tailored
Tim Warren: and Intelligent
Nathan Bush: across everything. Not just customer service.
Tim Warren: If you call it customer, it's customer experience. Right. It's going to be across the customer experience. It's going to be customer service, it's going to be customer sales. I see. I think that software was a leader in this area. They stopped having support departments and they started having customer success departments. What a brilliant thing. And then I thought about it. Almost everything fits into the customer success department. Sales does as well. You want to sell to someone who's successful, so they keep coming back for more. The reason that software as a service had to learn this is because you can be cancelled at any time. So if you're constantly having to earn by delivering value, you're going to be at the top of your game. So I think that retail is definitely heading in that direction. Some experiences I have are just fantastic. And I think the world's going to move there. I think bricks and mortar becomes the pinnacle experience the average and the commoditized moves online. Why go to a store to buy something you can get anywhere? You know, if you're going to buy one of those books that I mentioned, you can get the same book from anywhere. But if you want to go and have a beautiful tailored suit made, where are you going to go? You're going to go to a tailor.
Nathan Bush: You know, you just said that in store experience is the pinnacle of retail. On an E commerce podcast, what are you thinking?
Tim Warren: It works together. But I love, I love that it's the customer experience overall. And look, people. That's a super interesting point. Right. So what if someone's e commerce only? The question is, how do you get them that experience? And people, they create that at home. In store experience, they buy three pairs of shoes to work out which one's right for them. And people are doing that today already. So sorry if I dropped you on that one.
Nathan Bush: No, no, that's okay.
Nathan Bush: I'm going to give up this podcast and start a physical retail podcast.
Tim Warren: I think you should do that. Maybe a coffee stand. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Thank you so much for joining us on the very last checkout and the very last episode of Add to Cart ever.
Tim Warren: Thanks
Nathan Bush: to hear more from Tim. Jump back into episode 320, where Tim unpacks the different types of data behind the platforms. He shares how retailers can get the best out of their chatbot and tells us how to stop the black hats from winning in the wild west of knowledge engineering. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
