I I think of your model and I think of the hands- on the wheel kind of metaphor with it. And when you get to that autonomous level, maybe it's not autonomous all the time, but it it it's autonomous when it matters. Like, I've got your back. I'm I'm your agent. I'm your gifting agent, your shopping agent. I know Mother's Day is coming up. I know you want to be involved in your wife's Mother's Day gift. And but, you know, maybe for your mom or for your aunt, send her flowers every year. Just take that off your plate. I've got you. Uh that's kind of the spirit that we're going for and you know even even within our tool it's specific buying journey might have a different level of autonomy possible like I want to approve every single purchase or I want to delegate this completely to you. I think that's definitely where the the future is headed. Welcome to the retail genic podcast where we explore the intersection of retail e-commerce and AI agents which we call retail genic. Our mission is simple. We are shining a bright light on the new Agentic AI shopping mega trend which will disrupt the trillion dollar digital retail market. The stakes are high. Google, Open AI, Microsoft, Perplexity, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Anthropic are all fighting to be the consumer AI shopping agent winner. There are going to be some tough decisions for online brands and retailers to make. What happens to checkouts? How should payments work? Should you continue to invest in retail media networks? What does the world look like when over half of your traffic is not from humans, but from AI agents? These existential questions are the tip of the iceberg. On this podcast, we're talking to industry experts, analysts, and influencers to get answers to these questions, identify trends, and best practices. This is Retail Gentic, your podcast partner in navigating our AI shopping agent future. And now here's your host, Scott Wingo. Welcome to the Retail Gentic podcast. On the pod so far, we've interviewed thought leaders, founders of Agentic payment companies, and today we're starting the first in a series where we interview founders building interesting startups in the Agentic space. I'm excited to welcome Kyle McGomery to the pod. Kyle has over 10 years experience in the e-commerce industry. He worked for retailers then for agencies working on the demandware platform that became the Salesforce commerce cloud. Most recently he was at Astound Digital as SVP of commerce where he led the agency's go to market strategy for Salesforce commerce, Shopify, Adobe commerce and the mock alliance commerce solutions across retail, consumer goods, healthcare and travel. Like many founders, Kyle had an acute pain point that wasn't solved by anything that was the kernel of his idea and inspired him to found generous. He's an uncle 20 times over. Uh I am an only child and I find that uh kind of crazy, so I don't understand that pain point, but I can imagine uh that's a lot of nieces and nephews. I'll pause there so you can hear directly from Kyle how that was the kernel of an idea that led him to found generous. Now, here is my conversation with Kyle Montgomery, founder of Generous, an Agentic gifting platform. Enjoy. Hey, Kyle. Welcome to the Retail Gentic podcast. Thank you, Scott. I'm very excited and honored to be here. Big fan. I've caught every episode so far. Oh, wow. Okay. So, you're you're a regular, longtime uh watcher, first time uh guest, first time caller. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, it was interesting to see your you you reached out through we connected on LinkedIn and it was interesting to see your background. Tell me a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey so far. Sure. Well, I'm very new in the entrepreneurial space. I'm a first-time founder and I went full-time on it just some months ago. Uh, just in Q1 of this year, 2025. So brand new following in footsteps of giants such as yourself who are many time founders and with successful exits and you know hope to hope to have some of that same success up until now I've been u on the customer side and technology in general and then was uh many years as a consultant spent some time at Accenture spent some time at fluid which was a very interesting company that did a little bit of product including AI agents before generative AI before it was cool um with customers like the Northface and 1800 Flowers doing some agentic commerce type things. So I've been exposed to this uh nearly 10 years ago but I wasn't part of that team building that I was on the other side. I was on the agency side of Fluid where we were building e-commerce websites for clients on a platform called Demandware and Fluid was then uh split up. The product was some of the product was sold to IBM and the IBM Watson team. Um and then some of the the company was sold to Astound Digital. I stayed at Estound Digital until just earlier this year. Um kind of moved up some of the ranks there and was last SVP of commerce at Estound Digital when I left. So if we think about normal functional areas, were you more product go to market operations? Like how would you kind of if we had to pigeon hole you where were you pigeon holed? I certainly started as a you know part of the delivery team went from developer to architect and from there found uh some success in kind of the go to market and helping our salespeople you know pitch our services leading teams I was a manager of developers from the early days I was you know director of development at fluid and no VP and SVP at so leading those delivery teams and helping you know sell deals so that the team stayed busy and that meant I had to keep close to the technology Y the technology was always evolving. Of course, Demandware was acquired by Salesforce. It became Salesforce commerce cloud. Uh we also started doing a lot of Shopify work before Shopify really hit the enterprise scene or you know is trying to hit the enterprise scene. We were also doing you know some Magento, some hybrid, some others. And while I wasn't hands-on with Magentto or Hybrid, I was managing developers and architects who were. So staying apprised in of all of those different trends and different technology shifts was an important part of my job to speak to both customers and my colleagues my you know my team members. Cool. And then so SVP of commerce that mean you ran the commerce division of and I imagine that was like a was a multi-vertical agency of some kind and you were kind of running the commerce piece. Is that is that right? Yeah. If there was a delivery service where we were developing, you know, a customer's vision on top of Salesforce Commerce Cloud or on top of Shopify, the the foundation of that work was on the developers and architects of which I had responsibility, you know, making sure we were following all of the different processes and and best practices that we espouse and you know, we had a really good reputation. Our our biggest market was certainly in demandware and then Salesforce but our reputation was really good for well doumented code good code um good responsive team around the world and you know we were big enough at around a thousand people at Astound to compete and win against the extent and delights of the world but also to kind of have that boutique feel which was a strength of ours. How about pubist? Did you kick their butt? Probably. I I'm sure we'd win up against them more than once, but my uh my other podcast co-host is a guy at Pubilus, so I have to always rub that in. Um, so you've been working for, you know, companies that are pretty big. You're kind of an employee and then you decided to take the entreal plunge. What was that something you always wanted to do or walk me through that thinking? It's a great question. I'm not sure it was something I always wanted to do. I know I had an idea for generous which we'll talk about I'm sure but um the the pain I had personally is what what started this entrepreneurial idea and that seed was planted and it just nurtured and grew over time. I've had this idea for many years and it comes from my personal life. I'm an uncle 20 times over. Holy cow. I know I have six siblings and then I also of course got married and so my wife's three nieces and nephews add to that but most of it's on my family side certainly the six siblings. Um and I've always wanted some way to handle and manage the communication I have with them on their birthdays and on Christmas and why isn't there an app I can subscribe to just even send them a greeting card every single one of their birthdays. That was the pain that started it all. That was the seed that was planted and then just consuming kind of startup material. I read the lean startup that was a seminal book that you know of all the books I've read probably lean startup had the most direct impact on my life so far uh especially if this is successful because it really inspired me to build something ship something get customer feedback and pivot where before I read that book I was probably just paralyzed and thought well I have an idea but I don't have the money to build it how can I possibly build it how can I you know forego a salary right now I have a family so um it it gave me some courage certainly to give this a shot and I'm all of four months in full-time so far. So, we will see how it goes. So, so these things kind of like they just date, right? So, so you had this idea. Um I imagine uh you're you given the time frame we're in, you're you're kind of using some of the the vibe coding platforms for like the cursors and and replet and all that kind of stuff. Um and then um how long before you kind of like I'm sure you were working at your job and kind of like thinking about this, maybe working on on the side or whatever. Um, and then where did you get to that point where you're like, "All right, I I'm gonna do this obviously four months ago, but like what what was the signal that you kind of knew?" That is a great question because it was not an easy decision and it was, you know, overtime. Technically, I founded this company part-time in August of 2024, so almost one year ago, and I was working on it part-time. I let my company know astounded that I had this side project. I was obligated to do that and so I did and then shared with them that I wanted to move part-time and I moved and I moved to part-time for about three or four months before uh giving them notice that I, you know, wanted to pursue this full-time. Really, it came down to the fact that when I founded it in August, I thought I can keep my full-time job and I can work on this on nights and weekends. Uh I should have known better. I already work nights and weekends. I'm working more than 40 hours a week as a leader of a consultancy, you know, with high stakes pitches and uh we need this RFP response by Friday and it's and it's Wednesday, you know, there there were there was already midnight oil burning and I didn't have a lot of time to put into this this other, you know, project. So eventually I just decided to move full-time on it. You've kind of hinted. Let's let's jump in. Tell us. So the name of the company is Generous and um you know, tell us what you're building. We are building an agentic shopping application, a web app for users to manage gifting and we're starting on the consumer market and on the personal side. Uh so my use case is one of the first, you know, I kind of think of myself as the ideal customer profile ICP, a busy parent, a busy millennial, maybe uh you know, plus or minus an age demographic that wants some way to get better gift ideas and to never miss another gift again. And you know, through our research, through my research of interviewing dozens, maybe even hundreds of consumers and retailers, we know there are a lot of problems around gifting. It's not just forgetting a nephew's birthday. People find it stressful. 30% of products um bought during the holidays are returned to retailers. Um consumers say that it's really hard to find gifts for people. And now AI is here and well, why couldn't that help with us with this uh with these series of issues? So that's our hypothesis and that's what we're building a vertical shopping agent to help you pick a great gift for your family and to manage all of that. Yeah. Just uh did a post. So in the Adobe data they said um 35% of people that use Gen AI for commerceoriented things do it for finding finding unique products andor finding gifts. So the the behavior is starting to happen like there's definitely you're not alone. Yeah. And I think one of your one of your first guests was Michelle Grant from Salesforce, wasn't it? Wasn't she? And I think she even said on your podcast that you know in their consumer survey the number one use case that you know at least from that qualitative survey response kind of data um the number one use case was gifting. Why would you use an AI agent to help you shop? The number one use case was gifting. So that that was exciting to hear these kind of studies. It's exciting to get that kind of um social proof that what we're building might have some interest and might be able to to find product market fit. That's the dream, right? So, uh there's interest. Yeah. And while the agents are good at at that, they're not going to remember, you know, who you're gifting for what you've bought them. Um, and they're not set up to remind you to kind of like, you know, you do a a like a teaser like a or a poke to say, "Hey, remember, you know, with 20 you've got one every, you know, every two weeks kind of just about." Yeah. There's probably some clustering in there that, you know, gets really complicated. So, um, yeah. So, walk us through a user scenario. So, so I'm going to go, you know, I've got a set of two or three people I'm going to buy gifts for. H how do how do I approach your platform? The onboarding part of it is really interesting to us because we're trying to provide some optionality while also providing a guided experience. So, there are people like me who have a ton of people they want to give gifts to, but not everyone has 20 family members. Maybe you're only interested in three to five. So, we're giving you the option. One thing we're like one feature we're working on is or that's already built is our contact syncing. So whether you log in via Google or Apple and in the future Facebook and a friends list, you know, we can sync your contacts and you can choose you can choose every step of the way which of these contacts you actually want generous to know about and to you know provide recommended gifts for. Um also just a really focused experience if you have a specific gift event in mind. So say Mother's Day is coming up and I need to give my wife and my mom and my sister something uh kind of an event-based journey. Let's check all the boxes and make sure you're fulfilling all your obligations as a gentleman this Mother's Day to, you know, all the important mothers in your life and kind of going out about it the the eventbased approach instead of the person based approach. What do I have to tell your platform about those folks? So, I have a niece that's uh 14. Do I need to tell you um all that information? Uh and then, you know, it it seems like the more context I give you, the better gift recommendations you're going to make. So how much context you're but then you don't want the customer to have to fill out 80 forms before you can make a recommendation. So another tricky thing to navigate I've been on on your side of the on this equation and that's why we're excited to launch like we're still building and we per lean startup we need to get something in customers hands and get their feedback and pivot appropriately. So what we're building right now is a light survey kind of a one pager where you are suggested some hobbies at this person based on what we know about it so far. It's a niece 14 years old. Are they into this this or that? Click the bubbles. But it's also frame form generative AI chat. You can just chat with your agent who's going to help you with this gift and have a natural language conversation about what this person might like. Um but one but one feature we're also working on and this is kind of stemming inspired by corporate gifting platforms which we will also target that corporate gifting angle is also reaching out to the recipient directly as well if you're okay with it as the giftter. You can even say reach out to this niece um if they're 13 or older. I don't want to go against child online privacy rules and all that. Uh but if they're of an appropriate age, reach out to them. Reach out to whoever the recipient is, mom, wife, etc. generous. Uh I'm the email might say, you know, your your friend, your relative Scott would like to give you a great gift. Uh can you let me know a little bit more about yourself too? He's filled out some information, but why don't you on board yourself? And our hypothesis is of course that will also provide some verality and and that recipient might convert to Gifter and start using the product as well. So, so at that point it kind of like could be almost like a wish list like so now they may have a wish list that they're going to share with the agent and we've avoided the problem of how do I know what you know uh nephew number 18 has or does not have and those kind of tools exist there are universal wish lists out there but for me and and other surveys show it just feels awkward to kind of publish to your family here's what I want like everybody buy me something that's just not the way we work socially And sometimes kids these days have them, but they're always changing platforms. They're like, "Here's my locker." And I'm like, "What's a locker?" Oh, forget that. I'm over on Pinterest now. Okay, I know that one. No, no, it's actually on my, you know, insert, you know, some other company number three, right? Tik Tok shop list or, you know, there's a million things you got to chase. If they're invited from somebody who already is showing that intent to give, you know, it's a more socially acceptable dynamic to say, "Well, yeah, here's what I want." or even share with them of one of a publicly available wish list. Here's a link to my Amazon wish list. Get inspired AI by the types of gifts and the type of brands that I like. So, I like this uh flow where we tend to buy things where we go through a research phase and we narrow it down to a skew or two. Then we go through a find phase. We're kind of like, all right, let me see what's available and what price and and you know, as the giftter, I want to, you know, I have a budget and that kind of thing. Um then and then the buy. So, research fine buy. I'm I'm very fond of that those three words. And uh so so now now we kind of get into the find mode. How do you help me at that point? What we're building right now, at least our MVP and our beta is purely agentic. And some of our early retail partners who have signed on have asked us this question pointedly. So there's no search page. There's no listing page of all the products you have. What if I want to see that? Well, we're going to ship without that and see how it is to have a purely agentic shopping experience where you need to go through a chat to get more ideas. The agent might send you three, it might send you 10. Uh there are product cards right there natively within the chat. Um give it feedback, say, "No, give me more. Give me more suggestions." And you know, we're going to we're going to see how people react to this kind of thing. Will we one day have a typical e-commerce shopping listing page and a search bar on top? Who knows? Maybe. I want to put this out in front of customers first and and see how they react and see and see what that buying funnel looks like if there isn't a shop page even for the humans. Cool. So, I'm going to see some product cards and I then I will say, "Okay, I think uh you know product number four is the one that we're going to go with and then um then walk me into the buy process. Are you actually going to agentically go and purchase that?" Yes, sir. So, the the place order button is right there within the chat. uh we've saved your credit card information during onboarding or if we haven't at this point you're invited to do it. It's actually all API based and it is kind of a check out in a marketplace solution which I think you talked with the Magento co-founder on a previous podcast kind of I think you called it the obvious choice like that's that's obvious if we're building an agentic marketplace just own your own checkout that's exactly what we were already doing and it put a smile on my face to hear that on your podcast a few weeks ago. By the time your podcast comes out we'll have one of the agentic payment companies out so you may have to share some notes with them. Yeah, the there's lots of questions. I I won't go into implementation details because that's, you know, your your secret sauce, but there, you know, I know you know this, but for for listeners and viewers, that's a hard nut to crack. So, congrats on being able to make that so easy for people. And I'm sure you spent a fair amount of time on that. It's a trade-off. So, we're choosing to make payments easy by adopting a marketplace model, but it's opt-in. We don't have the whole catalog of the internet at our disposal in order to support that. We have retail partners who have signed contracts and signed up for our commission rates and we're opting them into that which is the friction we'll have to that's the burden that we have to place uh that we have to overcome now is getting those retailers to sign up and say yes I want to sell my products on generous because you've shown that you have the users uh that are willing to do that. So on our side it made it really easy. I mean, we we're using just a a pretty basic payment provider, a well-known one, uh, and, you know, one that supports a marketplace model where we collect our commissions and and you know, settle with the retailers. Okay. So, so at that point, we're in a marketplace kind of mo mode. Got it. Okay. Awesome. So then, uh, so then you started this. Have you raised capital at this point? We have. We are in our preede round right now. And so that is is active and still ongoing. And is it so far just you working on this or the precede round is kind of there so you can start building out the team a little bit more type of a thing? We already have a team. We have myself and a co-founder. While I do have a technical background, I do have a CTO who's co-founded the company with me. Also have some founding advisers who I've worked with and all told the four of us while they're very parttime they're advisers. Uh you know we have over four decades of e-commerce experience among the four of us. So, um, pretty excited about that. And, you know, augmenting that with some contractors as well. So, the URL is generous.ai? No, sir. It's meetgenerous.com. That's right. Yes. Uh, meet generous.com. And then can I go sign up for a wait list or and then you'll let me know when you've launched? Is that you guys have something like that yet? Yes, we have a wait list there. We are getting ready to launch our beta soon. Um, so you can go to megenerous.com. You can sign up. Uh, it should be really easy. It just asks for your email. you'll get one or two welcome emails until we're really ready to launch and then you'll get notified when the beta is coming. So yeah, definitely invite people to sign up. Uh roughly a thousand people on the wait list by the time this podcast comes out, I would expect. And then is there a way to jump the weight list by sharing and getting more people on the wait list? Do you have that kind of gamification going? We do. So share with your friends and you will jump the weight list for sure. When you say beta coming soon, is that like Q3 or by the end of the year or like in the next year? I expect it to be by Q3 of this year. So that's what we're definitely aiming for. Our beta will be focusing. Yeah, it is. Our beta will be focused on gift cards. So, you know, we're building a marketplace and it's always hard to have that, you know, the two sides of the marketplace. How do we attract consumers? How do we attract retail brands to sell? Um, well, since we're dealing with gifts, we have entered into a partnership and we're also discussing a second partnership as well that has allowed us access to hundreds of brand gift cards. um, you know, brands like 1800 Flowers or Home Depot and things like that. So, for our beta, we're just going to support gift cards and get user feedback on the experience, on the onboarding experience, on the recipient onboarding experience, on the AI, and we want you to help us train our AI, of course, uh, this kind of vertical agentic experience. We need that user feedback from both the giftter and the recipient. How was this gift? Did this meet your expectations? Thumbs up, thumbs down, help us train our AI model. And that will, you know, hopefully attract a lot of users and, you know, and then attract more retailers. That's our that's our go to market hypothesis. Yeah, I'm a marketplace uh I love marketplaces. Have you read the cold start problem? I've read about the cold start problem, but if that's a book, I've not read the book. That needs to be on your bookshelf next to the lean startup. So, that'll that'll be my gift to you as for being on the podcast. will uh send me your address after and I'll I'll uh as one entrepreneur another I want to make sure you have that book so I'll I'll shoot I've gifted that book to many people and it's a good one and it's very appropriate for what you do. I think it it describes my problem started problem for marketplaces. Yes, it's yes it it uh it's a whole book about your problem and how to solve it. So yeah, I think you're going to love it. I I can't wait to read it. I don't know if I can wait for you to send it to me now. Thank you. Yep. I know a Seattlebased store that's pretty good getting things pretty quickly. So, we'll see the uh So, thanks for sharing that about generous. Let's let's pop up a level. And you've been in e-commerce for a while. Um, you know, what do you think like 10 years e-commerce? Uh, close to 15 now. 15. All right. Good. Uh, so we have kind of like similar uh, you know, long in the tooth in the e-commerce world. Um, what do you think? So, so you read Retail Gentech and you saw my five levels of uh, autonomous agents. What what do you think about that framework? Does that kind of pencil with how you think about the broader topic of agentic commerce? It does in many ways. I think I even left a LinkedIn comment on one of your posts publicly about it. Uh there are some nuanced conversations to have, but I love the idea of a framework and I think the way you shared it was this models the autonomous vehicle framework of, you know, different levels of autonomous vehicles. How autonomous can our gifting get? Um I I pulled it up ahead of our podcast recording and I have it over here on this other monitor but I think um you know from stages one, two, and three which is research find by you know your namesake. Uh I don't have very many notes and I think it gets really complex and we're going to figure it out when it comes to levels four and five which is that advanced buy and full autonomy. There's a lot of nuance there. Yeah. Yeah. And I I think Roy and now you kind of this idea of do we stay in this agentic mode where the transactions happening on the website or does it get pulled up into the mark into the the whatever the buying experience is um to be more seamless which obviously is a path you've taken as a startup with a little hypervertical focus. Um you know I I think I think the bigger engines the broad the horizontal engines end up doing it for the economics. Uh there's kind of a slide that that's leaked of OpenAI's projected revenue and it kind of shows a smaller bar which for you and I is a huge bar, but that's the subscription revenue and there's this even bigger section that's like you know future revenue sources. If I'm kind of Sam Alman, I'm like that's a that's a really big bucket I've got to fill and um you know what are some big kind of honeypotss I can go get my hands into? And you know the the the Amazon eBay Walmart marketplace revenue stream is huge. Um startups like Miracle and even you know Channel Visor Rhythm. Uh there there's lots of activity there that you can tap into and you don't have to get too much of it to be a big number. I find it really interesting in the context of generous too because gifting is personal. Do I want to let an agent do all the gifting for me? Isn't that almost inhuman? Uh, our first core value at Generous is humanity. We want to make sure every decision we make is to nurture human connection. So, we're trying not to keep the human out of the loop. We're trying to keep the human in the loop, but also just be a helpful assistant. Think of like an executive assistant back or like in the movies like a trope. I don't know if you've watched Iron Man, but Tony Stark, you know, he has his he has Pepper before they, you know, became married. She was her assistant and um it was her birthday or something in one of the movies and uh you know, you got me a nice dress. Oh, yeah. It was a very nice dress, Tony. Thank you for the gift that you got me, but really she bought herself. That's kind of the spirit of of generous in a way. And I I think about that when he had Jarvis all along. Why didn't he get Jarvis to do it? That's a good question. Uh didn't think about that one. That's that's a plot hole. Um I I I think of your um I think of your model and I think of the hands on the wheel kind of metaphor with it. And when you get to that autonomous level, maybe it's not autonomous all the time, but it it it's autonomous when it matters. like I've got your back. I'm I'm your agent. I'm your gifting agent, your shopping agent. I know Mother's Day is coming up. I know you want to be involved in your wife's Mother's Day gift and but you know, maybe for your mom or for your aunt, you send her flowers every year. Just take that off your plate. I've got you. Uh that's kind of the spirit that we're going for. And you know, even even within our tool, a specific buying journey might have a different level of autonomy possible. like I want to approve every single purchase or I want to delegate this completely to you. I think that's definitely where the the future is headed. Um another partner in the Salesforce space and in other spaces uh Denu Merkel and Denu they predict that by 2030 25% of transactions in into the consumer space e-commerce transaction in the consumer space will be delegated to AI. So if that's true, we're only five years from that and so uh these agents have a lot of a lot of work to do and you know we're hope a part of that equation. Yeah. And then as someone that worked for and partnered with like the Demandwares Salesforce commercecloud platform, Magento and all these different platforms, you it was probably shocking for you to hear Roy Rubin kind of theor you know one of the founders of Magento theorize that that there's going to be these brands that go direct to consumer and don't have a website and then you know so that that has a lot of downstream implications. Number one, that's kind of wild. Like, do these websites just kind of atrophy and they're, you know, maybe there's a small percent of people that look at them, but mostly their agents kind of bouncing around doing things. Um, and then, you know, what do you think happens to the all the supporting tech stack that that's been built over, you know, you and I have played a role in in, you know, and we know really well. Does that even need to be there anymore? What do you think about all that? as innovative as it innovative and trailblazing as it might be to start one's own company, I still um maybe struggle with that. What does 10 years from now look like? I really can't imagine a billion dollar retail brand without a website. Unless unless they're doing 10 billion and the one billion of it is agentic. I still think there's going to be a majority of human shopping, but I do think that retailers and merchants now and brands right now need to adopt their websites, adopt their infrastructure, adopt their marketplaces knowing that in a growing percent of purchases are being delegated to AI. It's small right now. It's single digit probably uh but it's going to get double digit before the end of this decade. And so if you're not adopting your website and other parts of your infrastructure and just your brand in general to be able to accept payments from an agent, you're going to be losing out to other brands who are. So that's the that's the the technology precipice that we're on right now that generative AI is is introducing as we get into e-commerce. And I think that that percentage will grow over time. in agency circles. Is this like a topic or they're not really they're so heads down implementing things that it's not really on their radar? Is this something because you could see agencies are good at pivoting. So I could see they're going to need to help their clients with this type of a thing just as just the same as like you know implementing a cool new feature or or a whole new website kind of thing. Are are agencies like thinking about this or where are they on that that kind of thinking curve? Absolutely. astounded was and I think other agencies are as well. Um, we frankly see it as an opportunity like there's a new technology and you need help, we can help, of course, but it's real, too. I think, you know, since OpenAI and Chad GPT hit the scene and hit the zeitgeist, um, I think just about every QBR I had with one of our clients, every customer advisory board we had quarterly with, you know, several of our clients, AI was a dominant topic. If it didn't consume 50% of that meeting, uh it was the exception, not the rule. So our our customers, retailers, brands, and merchants, they want to talk about AI. They want to hear from us what their competitors are doing with AI. They want to hear what Salesforce is doing. Is Agent Force real? Um what is Shopify doing? Is what is MCP? What does it mean to me? They needed our help digesting that, synthesizing that. And you know, it behooved us to be able to synthesize that for them. So that was certainly a big part of my job in my role the last two years. Uh and I think the agencies have largely adopted that consultative approach also internally as well like if there are code vibing tools vibe coding tools excuse me um what does that mean for developer shops in the future? That's an existential question that I think a every agency and every SI is asking themselves right now. Uh and is a really interesting question. We could do vibe agency. It doesn't roll off the tongue as much as vibe coding. It will eventually probably. Yeah. Any anything else you want to add before we wrap up? I think Agent Commerce is really cool. Um I have a lot of ambition with generous to be part of that equation and I hope consumers will consider you know trying it out trying to give a gift with an agent's help. Maybe the the recipient will like it more. Maybe the gift will like it more and then um you know see where it goes from there. And um but just overall I'm supportive of the whole ecosystem. supportive of what you're doing, Scott, uh, with refi by following what you're building. I'm on your weight list. I think there's also a social media aspect of it. Maybe I need to share it to bump up your weight list as well. But but thank you for this opportunity and excited to be part of this agent commerce movement in in this ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to have to check back maybe Q1 of next year after you've you've kind of launched and been through a holiday season. It'll be we'll kind of get you back on and see if you survived and you you'll have some fun stories to tell. I I also know from Channel Advisor, you've kind of lashed yourself onto every holiday being stressful for you now. So, so your last Valentine's Day will probably be your ba best your Easter like all the holiday calendar is going to be crazy for you going forward. So, I uh yeah, I I'm sure you realize you signed up for that, but I I don't envy you that part of what you've signed up for. Oh, well, we're just going to focus on making it easier for everyone else. We'll take on that burden to make it easier for everyone else around the holidays. Yeah, Kyle, thanks for joining us. If people want to follow you, um I've seen you're active on LinkedIn. So, uh you know that that's easy. We'll put a we'll uh you know, it's just Kyle Montgomery. We'll we'll put a link in the show notes so folks can follow you on LinkedIn. Um any other places you share thought leadership? LinkedIn is the most prominent. I'm once in a former life blogged about the Denver Broncos. Had a kind of a big Twitter following. I let that account kind of die over time, uh, for lack of a better word, but I'm kind of resurrecting it now in this in this context. So, I'm also on Twitter atkmont7, but the LinkedIn Kyle Montgomery is the best place to find me for sure. Gotcha. And for the weight list, it's meetgenerous.com. Meet generous.com. You got it. Awesome. Thanks, Kyle. Thanks for joining us. And we'll check back in with you in the first quarter of 2026. Thank you, Scott. Follow, rate, and share to stay uptodate with Retail Genenic, your guide to the future of AI shopping agents.