Salesforce: Agentic commerce, unified commerce, and why you can’t fight TAM

[00:00:00] Nitin Mangtani: When you look at the data, and you're like, well, the TAM is not big, and it's not growing, those are two negatives, a big negative. Because you can execute, you can do a lot in life, but you cannot fight with TAM. It's the laws of physics, right? So, you cannot fight with the laws of physics.

[00:00:14] Kailin Noivo: Hey, folks. Really excited for you all to hear the episode today with Nitin. Nitin is not only an ex-Googler, but he's an entrepreneur. He ran his business for 10 years. You'll hear a little bit about how he had a very dramatic pivot 5, 6 years into the business, all the way to the point where they sold it into Salesforce, where he's now the SVP and GM of ecommerce. Very, very, very cool episode. We touch a little bit on entrepreneurship and a lot on commerce. We talk and break down about what agentic commerce means, all the buzzwords, all the actual tactical things that we're seeing in the field. And I think just overall, a really, really good episode, especially if you wanna understand a bit more about the Salesforce ecosystem.

[00:00:56] Kailin Noivo: Welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Toolbox Expert's Perspective. Joining us today, we have the SVP and GM of Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Retail Cloud, which just recently went through a rebrand, and we're now gonna go Agentforce Commerce. So, welcome to Nitin Mangtani. Welcome, Nitin.

[00:01:15] Nitin Mangtani: Thank you. Thanks, Kailin. Thanks for having me on your podcast. And I know it's Friday evening for you in East Coast of Canada. So, thank you for doing this on the later side.

[00:01:24] Kailin Noivo: Yeah. No worries. I couldn't pass it up. You're a busy guy, so we're really excited. Honestly, listen to some of your talks at the recent Salesforce, some of the other content you've done. So, I think our viewers are really, really gonna like this. And as you know, because you listen to the show, we always like to start off with the same question. For people who don't know you, maybe walk us through your career journey. You've actually gone from supply chain to Google Shopping, and then starting your own company, and now you're running commerce at one of the biggest platforms. So, maybe talk us through your career journey and how you ended up in your current role.

[00:02:00] Nitin Mangtani: Yeah. Thank you. It's been a very rewarding journey. And I'm just thankful with the companies I worked with, the people I worked with, the leaders I worked with, and most importantly, the founders I got to work with. I mean, you know, you're a founder and, you know, the founder energy is just very vital and special. And, you know, one of the motivations when I started PredictSpring was seeing other founders in action. As far as my journey is concerned, I started in the early days, kind of, almost 25 years ago at i2, which was a supply chain company. And they built this amazing retail and manufacturing supply chain software, which allows you to do optimization. Think about predictive and machine learning before those words were still mainstream; you know, we were doing some really fundamental stuff back then. From there, I went to BEA, which was really the leader in Java technology. They built WebLogic, which was the market-leading product. And I built a product there called Liquid Data, which was around data federation. Think about the current version of data cloud at Salesforce, which is obviously way ahead, but we are doing some initial work around zero copy and data federation back in the days with the, it was a product called Liquid Data. And then, from BEA, I went to Google. I spent a year or so in the enterprise team at Google, and then the last 6 years in shopping and commerce. And we scaled that product when I was at Google, I think we had like less than maybe a couple 100 merchants, and we were almost at a million by the time I left. And that business is tens of billions of dollars. That's a huge kind of, you know, business for Google. And then I left Google in 2013, so 12 years ago, and then started PredictSpring. And PredictSpring was the leading modern point of sale software. We powered some of the largest brands and continue to power some of the largest brands in the world. We are live in 25-plus countries with our POS product. Some of our biggest customers were Crate and Barrel, Under Armour, Lovecsac, Herman Miller, and so it was really just an amazing kind of product, and that's where Salesforce acquired PredictSpring 15 months ago. And early this year, Mark asked me to bring all of our teams together, and that was the biggest runner, you know, getting a call from Mark and bringing our B2C product, B2B product, order management, Salesforce Payments, our focus on shopper agent and agentic commerce, and then POS all under a single umbrella. It kind of logically makes sense, you know, like we are going towards agentic era, but the foundation of unified commerce is still critical. You still need those core pace pieces. And so that's where we are talking to you today. And, obviously, I'm very thankful for you guys being a very important partner for the commerce team.

[00:05:07] Kailin Noivo: Amazing. Well, that's by the way, congrats on the career. Congrats on the acquisition. As you know, as a founder, some days good, some days not so good, is kind of how I explain it to my wife. So, that's amazing.

[00:05:19] Nitin Mangtani: Lows are really low. Highs are really high.

[00:05:22] Kailin Noivo: No. I'm with you on that. And it, I mean, it's really cool. SO, you've obviously built commerce from a few different angles, like the Google Shopping, you talked a bit about the POS, and now you're doing it from the Salesforce lens. Why did you guys go down the POS route when you left Google to actually start a company? Was that the initial idea, or did it kinda land there as a gap in the market?

[00:05:48] Nitin Mangtani: You're exactly right. Like, no, that wasn't my initial idea. So, when I left Google, I came from a very consumer mindset, and I started building a platform, like a no-code platform to build any mobile experience. Starting with mobile apps and then mobile web, right? And we were dabbling, back in the days, early days, we were dabbling with all the native code and Apple Pay. And then at some point, I made a decision. I said, “Look, the bigger gap is not mobile apps. While mobile apps are important still today, but only 10% of the retail brands really saw the value of a mobile app. Everybody else, you know, didn’t need a native mobile app versus everybody needed a point of sale. 100% of our customers, or 99% of our customers who have physical stores, you need a POS. And what we had built was very modern. It had four main tenets. Because we started with the mobile app platform, it was already mobile-first. Most of the POSs were built in the desktop era, and mobility was a patch or an add-on, versus we were native mobile. We were also omnichannel by design, because my initial foray wasn't stores, it was digital and online. So, all the capabilities I had built for ecommerce became very powerful enablers to do real omnichannel and unified commerce. Third was when you're building mobile apps, extensibility is very critical because everybody needs a lot of control on design and all ecommerce platforms either have a CMS or they partner with an extra CMS. But that's not true with POS. Actually, none of the POS's have a CMS system. We were the only point of sale system, and still today, which comes with a full CMS. So, you can completely customize the UI without writing code. So, that was another tenet. And the last tenet was customer centricity, customer 360. So in some ways, like, it was a blessing even though we had to do the pivot, but the core tenets that we thought in the consumer world became our biggest differentiation when we built a Modern POS, which was for the store associates. Without those core tenets, we would have been just another commodity point of sale out there.

[00:07:57] Kailin Noivo: Because that's interesting. It sounds like when you joined, it wasn't necessarily like the market didn't have options, right? Like the POS was, not that it was super saturated, but it was more of a mature market. It wasn't as, like, early and up and coming to your point because it was an older channel than online. No. That's really, really cool. What made you guys pivot? What was the ‘aha’ moment? I think every founder always remembers that ‘aha’ moment. Where were you? What were you thinking? What happened?

[00:08:25] Nitin Mangtani: You know, such a great question you ask, and, like, pivots are just, like, natural, like, majority of the companies go through pivots, even the most successful ones have gone through pivots. For us, really, we were looking at the customer engagement, right? And I think I would tell every founder that revenue is important. Look at your ARR, but you know what's even more important: it’s your customer engagement. That's your leading indicator. In some ways, revenue is the lagging indicator. The leading indicator of where the market is going, where the customer is going, is looking at the engagement. And we saw a slight dip in the engagement on mobile apps, which was counter to us because we were like, well, this is early days. This should be like, you know, 100% consumer engagement. Yeah. 100% not like, you know, and so it was clear that the consumer behavior had shifted. Consumers were not downloading as many mobile apps, right? Because, you know, the mobile app was getting more powerful. And again, if you're a larger brand, the mobile app still matters and makes sense. But when you are, like, a mid-size brand or long tail, the mobile apps didn't give any value. And we kind of saw this pattern across maybe 4 or 5 quarters. So, we are not knee-jerk. It's not like, you know, like, we woke up one morning, you're like, holy shit, like, really bad weekly, you know, because we are looking at DAUs, weekly active users, and monthly MAUs, all three, and or a period of maybe 9 months or so, it became clear that, you know, it's an interesting market, but it's gonna be very niche. It's not gonna be like a massive market. And as you know, like a VC-funded company, now whether you become a massive market or not, but honestly TAM is so important. You have to focus and make sure your TAM is massive and it's growing. And so when you look at, you know, the data and you're like, well, the TAM is not big, and it's not growing, those are two negatives, a big negative, because you can execute, you can do a lot in life, but you cannot fight with TAM. I'm like, it's a lot of execution.

[00:10:31] Kailin Noivo: It's gravity at the end of the day.

[00:10:33] Nitin Mangtani: Exactly. It's the laws of physics, right? So, you cannot fight with the laws of physics. And so I was just lucky enough. We had a phenomenal board, and they were just amazing leaders. And I had, you know, Ken Seiff. He's just a great leader, and he's been a retail executive for many years. And I had Aydin Senkut, who's the founder of Felicis and is a former Googler himself. And we all came together, and we looked at the data, and we said, yeah, you know what, let's think about, and interestingly, we have been talking about POS for two years, independent of this pivot, like, we are thinking about POS as an expansion for the last two years by the time we came to this decision. And all this time, it was like, well, we have this amazing technology. Could we use it in the stores or not? But then we are like, guys, we could only do one thing, and we could do one thing right. And that's one of the lessons, if I could tell anybody that once you know you're gonna pivot, pivot hard, pivot fast, and do just one thing. And even though it took us 9 months or something, we decided to pivot, and we said we're gonna do one thing. Now, the thing is, we did the right thing, which is we gave our customers enough time so that they could migrate. So, I still had to maintain two kinds of teams parallelly for a period of 2 to 3 years, and that's just doing the right thing for the industry.

[00:11:54] Kailin Noivo: That's a really, really cool story. And what year was that in? Like, and then from there to the Salesforce acquisition, like, how long was that, and how did that play out, just out of curiosity?

[00:12:04] Nitin Mangtani: Yeah. So, I founded the company in 2013. We pivoted around 2018, 2019. So, it's right in the middle, right? So, I was running my company for eleven and a half years, and this is a hard pill to swallow that you build a product and also a real business, right? Like, we had, you know, revenue and, you know, it was a real business with real customers. We had, like, on the mobile app business, we had Calvin Klein, Vineyard Wines, Tommy Hilfiger, Michael Kors, Ralph Lauren, Skechers, you name it. We had, like, all these amazing brands. And so from there on, pivoting after five years of founding the company.

[00:12:41] Kailin Noivo: That takes guts. That takes guts. When we did, we had no revenue, so we had nothing to lose. But, yeah, that's crazy.

[00:12:50] Nitin Mangtani: It was the right decision, and we were fiscally very good. Like, we had, when I was talking to my VCs, they were telling me that we had the highest capital efficiency to ARR ratio. So like, by the time I sold my company to Salesforce, I had done seed round, series A and series B; I had 100% of my series B money still in the bank. I didn't use a penny, and I had more than 50% of my Series A money still in the bank. So, like I had done Series A in 2016, I sold the company in 2024. So eight years later, I still had half of the money from the round I had done eight years before. And I think that's one of the things I do prescribe to this philosophy that startups don't fail, they simply run out of money.

[00:13:36] Kailin Noivo: It's true. It's true. You can only fail when you stop working on it, to your point.

[00:13:41] Nitin Mangtani: Or you run out of money. But as soon as you have money and you have the will, you can actually rebuild the company with just your resilience and focus.

[00:13:50] Kailin Noivo: No. It makes sense. And, yeah, as we look to pivot into the Agentforce and then the agentic commerce kind of future. Last question, like, when the day you got the call, what did that look like? I'm assuming it wasn't out of the blue. Was this something that you knew was coming down the line when someone made the strategic priority that somebody needed basic something new? I'm just curious how that actually played out.

[00:14:17] Nitin Mangtani: The acquisition or the founding of the company or the agent? The acquisition. Okay. Yeah. I mean, look, the acquisition is a very long process, you know. It wasn't like a binary switch like a phone call, right? Like, we were already partners with Salesforce. We were adding tremendous value to our joint customers because our joint customers were asking for a unified commerce platform, right? So it was a lot of value to have both ecommerce and POS, right? Both the piece of the puzzle and even today, we power a lot of our joint customers together, right? And so we were partners with Salesforce. We had joint customers. Salesforce was an investor. So, it felt like a very long dating cycle, right? So, it wasn't like the binary where all of a sudden I got a phone call saying, here's the acquisition, and that never happens, by the way, right? Like, I think that's just a reality, like, all M&A's are very long-standing relationships where both the companies come to the conclusion that, well, let's take it a notch higher from there and go on the M&A part. And it still takes a lot of time between due diligence and everything, so that's kind of really the journey there.

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[00:15:42] Kailin Noivo: Well, it makes a lot of sense. And now look, now you have the whole grand vision. As you mentioned, you got the call from Mark to take over this huge part of the business. Diving headfirst into it, really, how do you position agentic commerce beyond the hype? What is agentic commerce? How should the retailers, your customers, be thinking about it?

[00:16:07] Nitin Mangtani: Yeah. I mean, you know, to me, like, if you think about consumer behavior today, right, whether we have 900 million, or maybe a billion on ChatGPT, and I think it's a similar order of magnitude on Gemini, right? So, like an Anthropic. So, it's clear that the consumer behavior has shifted from, you know, typing in two keywords to having a full conversation. And the expectation is that you can have a full conversation and there'll be an intelligence which will kind of, you know, have a full response back to you, right? And to me, that's the leading indicator, right, so once the consumer behavior shifts, every industry follows. It doesn't matter what industry you are in. You could be in finance, you could be in travel, you could be in retail, you could be in healthcare, you could be in pharma, and so that's a much more broader kind of shift in the industry, right? And the way I think about agentic is that agentic has three kinds of surface points of, you know, touch points that you see. One is as a consumer, right? So whether I'm going to an ecommerce website like Pandora, which is one of our big customers, and I'm shopping for something, you know, I want to have a full conversation. Whether I'm going to Williams Sonoma, which is also a customer, and I'm trying to buy something for home, you know, I want to have a full conversation. So, that's the consumer side of the story. Then there is the employee side, which is the call center, the store associates, and the internal kind of, you know, optimization. That's where agentic also plays in, like merchandising, help with, like, recommending promotions, you know, enabling the setup with a few prompts, then clicks, right? It's literally the phrase I use, or industry uses, I would say, is prompts, not clicks. Right? So, if we can avoid 20 clicks and just give a prompt saying, “Let's create a 20% off promotion, which is active only for 48 hours and applicable only in-store.” That's a simple, like, three lines that a marketer can type in versus having to figure it out, you know, where do I navigate my admin console? And did I fill in the field properly? Did I click the right drop-down? And things like that. So that's the employee side, right? So there's the consumer side. There's the employee side. And then there is the, like, what I call it, background agents, which could be supply chain, replenishment. They're just doing their job in a fully autonomous way, right? And so I think in retail and commerce, we're gonna see the flavor of all three. The first one, we are calling it shopper agent, where as a shopper, you can talk to an agent, and you can both shop as well as resolve any support issues. So, if you don't know what's going on with your order or you want a refund, you can go to the same agent. Second is the associate agent. So, the associate can be productive in the stores as well. Bar terms associate themselves don't have all the knowledge, like, they don't know if this promotion is still active, when the inventory is coming, and if you can just make it conversational, and they can just speak to a POS, that's powerful. And the last piece of the puzzle is full automation, which is, like, the use case I always highlight, is replenishment, like the inventory replenishment can be fully automated, or testing, or, you know, finding the quality of your ecommerce. Like, those could be fully automated agents where, you know, the humans are doing the final review, but the work is happening in the background. It's almost like an asynchronous job that runs every hour or every day and kind of, you know, does its work. And so we're gonna see profound use of agentic, and we are, you know, we have launched, we did a big launch at Dreamforce with Pandora and Williams Sonoma on the shopper agent, and you're gonna see the flavors on merchandising as well as automation.

[00:19:47] Kailin Noivo: That's amazing. And how does that deliver different business outcomes? Like, if I'm a CIO at one of these brands, and we're like, okay, this makes sense, right? Like, okay, I'm gonna have a more personalized experience, whether it's online or helping the in-store agents. And then some of the automations, like, does this directly impact my TCO? Should I expect a higher conversion? Like, how does that translate directly to business metrics in your opinion?

[00:20:13] Nitin Mangtani: Yeah. That's a great question. And, you know, ROI is a big discussion in the industry, right, like, you know, if you're investing dollars, is there a quantifiable ROI? And the good news is we can measure in all three areas, right? The shopper agent, obviously, the most credible metric, which is an industry-wide metric, right, like, and your team, I know, does it, measure it, is conversion rates and basket size, right? So, the question is, okay, if the primary interface went from search to conversations or agentic on the shopping side, what kind of lift are we seeing in a conversion rate both on mobile and desktop? And what kind of a lift we are seeing in the basket size with a better recommendation and a better personalized agent, right? Because the vision I like is, like, take the analogy of your most knowledgeable store associate and the consumer who knows this associate and always goes to the same person every time they go to the store. So, the next time they go to the store, the associate knows them so well that when they say, “I'm looking for a new pair of sneakers,” They don't bring 100 sneakers to the customer. They bring three, which they think will be most relevant to this consumer, right? Based on their taste, past purchase history, price sensitivity, and a little bit of newness, right? If there's a new arrival, you want to kind of show it to the consumer. You wanna mix it up a little bit, right? So you bring in 3, maybe 5 pairs, but not 200, and that's measurable. Right? So, like, if you can increase the conversion rate with this personalized agent, tech and shares for every store associate, not just your top 1%, who have access to these, you know, associates. But now it's in the digital world, it's access to 100% and 24/7. So, I feel that it is the most quantifiable way. On the associate side is again tied to the revenue, but also the associate productivity. Right? And the same thing on the employee side, the merchandisers, right, like if instead of spending two hours creating a promotion, can I do it in five minutes? And that's a huge energy saver. So that's directly tied to employee productivity. And the last one is again accuracy, right? Like the replenishment agent, if the replenishment agent's job is to replenish the inventory, well, how well the replenishment agent is doing, right? Is the inventory replenishing every Sunday? Are you seeing any outages with certain products which are in demand or more seasonal, and so that's directly managed by knowing the accuracy of that particular agent, right? So, I think all three have different criteria, but they are very quantifiable.

[00:22:56] Kailin Noivo: This is interesting. And on a recent podcast that I did, I kinda got into this a bit with mutual connection of virus, Madhav, and I asked him, and I'm curious to hear your opinion. I asked him, what you just described makes a lot of sense. Now, at what part of the customer journey does this happen? Does this happen in Gemini or GPT, where it has all your search and purchase history? And that's where it's cataloged to say, hey, these three shoes from this person, or is this actually happening dynamic on the website? And do you have to authenticate through one of these systems, or is it just gonna leverage your previous interaction with that same website? So like, if you were to kind of place a bet, at what layer do you think this is actually gonna happen?

[00:23:51] Nitin Mangtani: It's gonna happen on both. It's just like channels. Right? So, like, I think we have a couple of good historical data points. So, when search came in, right, when I was at Google, right, everybody was very worried. They're like, well, would anybody even bother to go to a website? If you can just do comparison shopping on Google, why won't you go to an individual website? Right? And why go to a store? The reality is that didn't happen, right? Like, commerce happens on owned and operated properties, like your website, your mobile app. 77% commerce still happens in physical stores, right? So, these channels don't go away. It's just the boundaries between the channels get blurred, so, and same thing happened with social, right? Like when Instagram launched, everybody, including me, I thought, well, this is the best point of inspiration. If I can see my friend wearing a jacket and that looks cool, I should be able to just click on a buy button and buy it. Reality is the actual commerce on Instagram is still small, but they're a huge driver of referral traffic, right? So, the agentic will follow a similar, maybe something a little different, but it's gonna be not binary. Commerce will happen on ChatGPT, on Gemini. Definitely, referral traffic will come from Anthropic, Gemini, and ChatGPT. There's no two doubts in my mind about that, right? Just like the referral traffic came from search and then came from social, now agentic is gonna be double digit percentage of the referral traffic, right? And some other channels will rebalance themselves naturally. Right? So I think the search numbers are gonna go a little bit down, and then the agentic will kind of, you know, take over. But that story is very easy to actually predict because it's already happening. Like, people are already going to ChatGPT and searching. How much commerce will actually happen on ChatGPT and Gemini versus your own and operated property versus your stores? So, if the mix up today is 25% digital, 75% store, and out of that 25%, I would say 24% is owned and operated property, right? It's good today. Right now, so I'm saying right now, digital is, let's say, 25% and physical stores is 75%. Right? 25-75, and it varies a little bit if you are a big wholesaler, then you are selling through your partners or marketplaces. So, there's a little bit of variance, versus you are a very strong B2C brand. But let's take a simple heavy B2C brand, right? It's doing 25% online, 75% physical stores. Out of that 25%, I'm saying 23% to 24% is happening on their own websites and mobile apps. Only 1% is happening in a syndicated channel outside their own kind of thing. Unless with a caveat, if they're a big wholesaler selling to other retailers or they are participating in a marketplace, right, like Amazon and things like that. So, then the question is, okay, well, what would this mix look like 5 years from today, 10 years from today? Right? And I think in some ways, it's a good intellectual kind of, you know, data point, but in other ways, if I were a brand, my recommendation would be show your best self in all three channels, because you can't dictate the consumer behavior. And does it really matter where the final purchase happened? It's your consumer, right? At the end of the day, you want to sell more shoes or more handbags or more dresses or more perfumes, right? And so your job is to make sure you show up the best on agentic channels like ChatGPT and Gemini. Please don't give up on your website because, thankfully, you didn't give up when Google launched, right? Your website is still your most important, that's your home, right? So, like, your own and operated property is gonna remain the most important factor. Same thing with the store. Please don't give up on the store. Stores are fundamental. In fact, they are back now in action in the last ten years, right? So, please don't give up. And as a platform company like Salesforce, our job is to give them the tools for all three. So we launched a partnership with OpenAI, right? So, we'll make it easy to publish a product catalog. We are also, you know, we have endorsed the ACP protocol, the agentic commerce, which is instant checkout on OpenAI. We launched the shopper agent, which is powering the owned and operated property, the website or the mobile app, and then we have a POS product for the stores, right? So, the platform company, instead of trying to, you know, just predict which channel will grow, our point is let's give you the best tool for all three. And our answer to you, customers, is please don't give up on any of the existing channels.

[00:28:18] Kailin Noivo: I think that's very pragmatic because it's interesting. I don't know, like, we have a lot of similar data and, like, yeah, I haven't really been seeing too many completion, like, there's a growing referral traffic is what you're flagging, I don't, like in a, it's obviously to come, right, with the ACP protocol and all of that, but it's gonna be interesting to see. Like, to your point, I don't know. And “does it matter?” is another question, but I don't know how much is actually gonna convert in those channels to your point. If you draw a complete parallel to Google Shopping, I mean, why would you have a website if everything went through that? Right? And that clearly is not what happened.

[00:28:55] Nitin Mangtani: Same thing with Instagram. A lot of people thought that the Instagram account they had is their website, right? They're like, well, do I need a website if I have a beautiful Instagram account? And I think that's where it's important to notice that, well, every channel has a value. And while on the surface, it looks like it's cannibalizing, in practicality, it's complementary each other.

[00:29:16] Kailin Noivo: Very cool. Pivoting a little bit, talk to us a bit about what you think the right to win is moving forward. Like, where's the focus coming? Where do you feel like you guys are best positioned to win in the market? Obviously, it's been a dominant platform for more than a decade now. But yeah. Like, what's the right to win? And then how is that folding into, like, the strategy and where you guys think you're best?

[00:29:41] Nitin Mangtani: Yeah. I mean, first of all, competition is beautiful. I think it brings the best out of everybody. So, you know, I think if you are a founder and a CEO, and if you have no competition, that means you are in a very small market, in a very niche market. Any large market will have 5, 10, 15 players, right? And they all will have their focus. And then we have different products, right? So we have B2C commerce product, B2B, OMS and POS, and each one of them has a different set of competitors. Some of them overlap, but some of them are just unique. So, like in the competitors we see in our OMS product, for example, the auto management are very different than we see in our ecommerce platform, and many times the overlap is very low. And for us, it's really providing the best value and the lowest TCO to our customers. So, we are a very composable API first. So, if you just want to use our auto management with one of our competitors who is sparring their ecommerce and the other competitor who is sparring the POS, we are very comfortable, and actually, that's our attempt at a ground reality. There are times when people just use our point of sale product with a custom homegrown ecommerce platform, and that's also fine. But if you want to use our products together, we are able to give you the unified commerce in a much more seamless way because now we have B2C commerce, B2B commerce, OMS, which, to me, is the glue between ecommerce and point of sale, right? And we have all these four products now, and I think very few people have the breadth of the products we have, which directly helps our customers with a lower total cost of ownership. But overall, like, you know, I'm a big believer that at the end of the day, you have to respect your competition, but it's really a lot about how you think, how you build your team, how you execute, and most importantly, how you serve your customers. A lot of the product teams, I think, get carried away with technology, and they're not obsessed with customers. I'm one of those leaders who's obsessed with customers, like, my day starts with customers, my day ends with customers. Product is important. Like, if you don't build a great product, obviously, nothing matters. But to me, like, a great product alone is not enough if you are not customer driven and, you know, you need to be in that mode, like, you know, like you're serving your customers and you're really listening to them very deeply everyday.

[00:32:09] Kailin Noivo: I mean, I love that. I think there's so much to tease out of that, but I agree. I think a lot of people don't prioritize the customer enough. I think you need to solve customer problems and provide a lot of that flexibility. No. That's really awesome. Moving forward, could you talk a bit about some of the stuff that's coming down the pipe? I know you mentioned kind of the three different pillars that you're looking into. What are some of the priorities as you look to the roadmap next year?

[00:32:39] Nitin Mangtani: Honestly, it's literally two things in my mind. It's agentic commerce. We are still in, like, first innings, early days, we have taken the lead, and we are delivering to the market, both at the company level as well as at my division level. But we are early. I think this movie is gonna evolve a lot in a very beautiful way. And, you know, it's one of those areas where, after a long time, I feel like a PM in that area. In many other areas, I'm more like an executor, and I'm, you know, helping the team with meta things. This one, I'm super hands-on. I'm, like, going through every single markup, every single UI, every single thinking behind it, like, what does semantic search mean? What's the future of, so there's just a lot of you know, it's one of the most beautiful times to live in, you know, as we are rethinking the entire software industry. And I think, you know, we'll be spending the next decade on this, and then, so that's obviously my number one focus. The number two is unified commerce. Really providing this breadth of our products in the most harmonious way possible, so that customers don't have to pick and choose their channels from agentic, online to in-store. It's just one seamless journey.

[00:33:48] Kailin Noivo: I love that. And on the unified data front, something that we've spent a lot of time talking about is data transformation. So, as you start to build out you mentioned from clicks to prompts, right? A lot of people have the UI set up for clicks. But how many people have the UIs and the data infrastructure set up for prompts? And what I mean by that is data transformation, amalgamation. How do you think about that as people are starting to roll out AI products, that I mean, I personally call it the magic machine. It's like, you ask it this crazy question, beep beep boop boop, it comes back with, like, some crazy insight, right? Like, how much of that is unified data, data transformation, and how are you guys thinking about that for your customers?

[00:34:32] Nitin Mangtani: It's a great question. It's huge. I mean, you know, reflected in our recent acquisition of Informatica, you know, these agents have to be grounded in enterprise data, and the old age of garbage in, garbage out is still true. Right? That thing has not changed, which is if you don't have the data accuracy, if you don't have the data mapping, if you don't have the taxonomy, if you don't have the metadata, if you don't understand the semantics of the data, your agents are not helpful, right? Because all the enterprise agents are grounded in your product catalog. And a customer is saying, “I'm looking for dressier sneakers that go along with my dark jeans.” They're not looking for any random sneaker out there on the web. They're looking in your product catalog. So, well, if your product catalog is not enriched, it doesn't have the right categorization, it doesn't have the right images, it doesn't have the right attributes. Now you might use AI to enrich your product catalog, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with it because AI is gonna be, like, everywhere, right? It's gonna be in every single stream. But you still need a very good product catalog, which has clear semantics and mapping, data modeling, and everything. You need a very clean order data because if you don't have the purchase history, you are not able to do a lot of algorithms. You still need the click history, the consumer behavior, and anything you can derive from, you know, the engagement on your properties, right? So, you're absolutely right, like and this is where we invested a lot in DataCloud at Salesforce. So, Salesforce, the main data fabric, is the DataCloud, and now Informatica will just add so much more value to this overall data strategy and data integration. But yeah, I mean, you know, any problem you are trying to solve, because also one thing in enterprise, unlike consumer use case, like the consumer use case, and maybe answer is a decent answer, but in enterprise, if somebody is saying that help me refund this order and the agent says, “maybe you'll get the money back.” It's a really bad answer. It's not even 70% good. It's actually 0% good, right? So, the determinism in enterprises fund foundational. If I'm talking about my order ID 103, it cannot be 103 & 104. It has to be 103 and only 103, and if I'm only returning a sneakers out of the five products I bought, my refund is only for that one sneaker, not the full order, right? So, the data and the workflow, also the workflow is important here, right, like, those foundational pieces are critical in getting agentic work right.

[00:37:17] Kailin Noivo: There's so much to pull on that. It's very interesting. Do you think this problem can be solved horizontally? For example, I log in to ChatGPT, and it's like, connect all your apps. Can a retailer do that? And bada bing bada boom, they have it.

[00:37:31] Nitin Mangtani: I mean, I'm a huge fan of ChatGPT and now Gemini. Gemini has made a lot of progress in the last three months, but again, I think this binary thinking of everything will happen in ChatGPT will not happen, right? Now some head apps, like, will be connected with ChatGPT, right? So the consumer, you know, there'll be a few apps, which makes sense. Like, let me connect with ChatGPT. But when it comes to, like, you know, you got, whatever, a million brands out there in the world, like, consumers are not just, just like App Store, I'm not gonna download the million apps on my phone. I might download, you know, the head. So I don't think all these apps will just, people will have time to go and connect on ChatGPT, but they will discover. They'll just give a prompt to ChatGPT or Gemini and say, “Well, find me the best companies for hand baggage.” Right? And it'll kind of give the carousel and all. And then you might land on one of the websites, and you're like, “Oh, wow. Actually, I want to discover more.” Right? So, I don't think, I mean, there will be some, well, the platform companies will have horizontal answers, right? For example, our horizontal answer is DataCloud, right? So whether you are in pharmaceuticals, or you are in finance, or you are in retail, the DataCloud is the horizontal there. But the actual schema, the data mapping and the workflow are obviously unique to the problem statement.

[00:38:51] Kailin Noivo: And I think that's, yeah, that's gonna be interesting or else a lot of the lift is gonna fall on the end customer. And I think that could block some adoption. But no, that's…

[00:39:01] Nitin Mangtani: And that's a good point, what you just mentioned at the last point is what's the effort to build the agents? Right? Because the ROI is a combination of returns but also investment, right? That's why it's ROI, right? And so what, and again, I'm not trying to sell Salesforce here, but probably just saying that a lot of the industry is gonna invest in tooling and infrastructure to reduce the barrier to build agents. So, if you are building a replenishment agent, right, you're not going through hundreds of lines of code or thousands of lines of data mapping. And even that workflow, what we announced at Dreamforce, is becoming agentic. So, it's a beautiful recursive loop where you're building your next replenishment agent also by prompts and saying, “Can you pull my order history from this system?” Right? And the agent builder understands what that OMS system is, and instead of you having to manually go and map all that stuff and write code, it basically does that for you.

[00:40:03] Kailin Noivo: No. It's really cool. And you guys, I saw the Pandora demo when you guys did it. That was really cool. I've never really seen anything like that before. As we look to wrap up, maybe talk to us a bit about if I'm a CIO, CDO of a brand that's listening right now, which, in your opinion, what should be top of mind for me as I'm wrapping up my F'26 planning? Like, how should I be aligning my team to basically maximize the outcome of my company?

[00:40:31] Nitin Mangtani: Yeah. I mean, first of all, agentic is reality, right? It's happening. And sometimes we will overreact in certain areas. Sometimes we'll underreact in certain areas. Right? So a lot of times, it feels like everything is gonna go in one direction, which never happens, right? It's a lot more nuance like we talked about the traffic, right? The traffic is not gonna be just at one place. It's gonna be on your own and operated properties. Stores are still important, and now we have a new channel which is agentic. And by the way, social has not gone anywhere. TikTok and Instagram are still very important. Right? So, having that balanced perspective on being able to make sure that you're not sacrificing one channel for others. Like, that's the danger here, right? And this is exactly what happened to physical stores. Like, when digital came in, people kind of took their eye off the ball on physical stores, and if you look at any brand, literally any single brand, the moment they started closing stores, eventually, they shut the brand down. I literally have zero case studies where I can say, well, this brand, which had, you know, these amazing stores and online, decided to get out of stores and started thriving again. It never happens like that.

[00:41:43] Kailin Noivo: That is very true. No. That's amazing. Well, Nitin, I appreciate you taking the time. This was a phenomenal episode. Really, really appreciate it, and thanks again.

[00:41:52] Nitin Mangtani: Thank you to you. And, you know, as I said, I'm very thankful for your partnership with us, and you're building an amazing company. I get inspired by founders like you, and even this conversation was just, like, the most delightful conversation of the week for me. So, thank you.

[00:42:08] Kailin Noivo: Amazing. That's very, very kind. Thank you so much, Nitin.

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