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Hello from 30,000 Feet!
I don’t know if many of you feel the same way, but focused airplane time is optimal for thinking, writing, and working. I love all three of these things, so I’m combining this trifecta to deliver this week’s write-up. On a special Brief shot outside Nashville’s Music City Center, we cover OpenAI’s endless hackathon (not the good kind), the resilience of kids in the digital age, and why Microsoft is simplifying CoPilot into one super-tool.
On to my 48-hour trip to Nashville to speak at Shoptalk Fall. It was the perfect type of speaking engagement…a 20-minute keynote, followed by a 25-minute interview with the CTO of a great DTC challenger brand. The best part? Thanks to the M7 team and our PR firm, I was so prepared for my speech and interview that I was able to spend the other 47.25 hours immersed in the conference. Here are a few of the insights I garnered that I’ll share with you.
Two Presidents of Estée Lauder took the Main Stage to talk about speed and agility in 2026. The speech included how this dynamic duo had an idea on a Thursday and completely changed their Times Square takeover two days later on Saturday. Sure, they have deep pockets and cultural sway, but the lesson was (put eloquently by Lisa Sequino) that even the largest companies need to have a startup, scrappy mentality if they want to succeed and move at the speed of culture.
I then ran over to hear the CMO of Ulta, Amiee Bayer-Thomas, who oversees 1,500 locations and has a knack for predicting what’s coming next. She mentioned CHANEL within the first five minutes of her interview (which also swells me with pride!) and spoke about how loyalty, identity, and the “experience” of shopping are what she’s laser-focused on. She predicted fragrance will have a large resurgence in the coming year, how identity driven it is, and how she has to place bets on meeting that demand as it rises.
There were so many other great speakers, from the Head of Agentic Commerce at Anthropic, to the Global Head of Prime at Amazon, to the CMO of Bob’s Discount Furniture who cursed a surprising amount on stage (I guess I would too if I had to run marketing at Bob’s Discount Furniture). The theme that resonated throughout was a tension between catering shopping experiences to humans while preparing for the inevitable wave of AI agents that will be deployed on behalf of consumers.
If you’re reading this, then you know I love to tinker with technology and have made around ~50 agentic purchases in the last two years, and a recent one I demoed for my on-stage keynote was the first time I was truly in awe on how an agent can ‘upsell’ you on a brand’s behalf. More on that in future Briefs. All-in-all, it was a great trip and it reinforces my belief that humans being together, talking, laughing, debating, and even cursing an inordinate amount, is so important and going nowhere!