English language Visionary Marketing Podcasts

About English language Visionary Marketing Podcasts

Visionary Marketing Podcasts in English

Publisher

Visionary Marketing

Category

business · news · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

28 Sept 2015

Latest episode

28 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

111 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   28 Sept 2026

   Future of Work: Making the Office Worth the Commute

   What if the future of work were about giving people a rela benefit for getting back to the office? On Thursday 24 September, the first International Workplace Summit (https://events.agoramanagers.fr/e/iws-2026) (IWS 2026) took place at the Campus Cyber (https://campuscyber.fr/) in La Défense, Paris. The audience was made up of corporate real estate directors, workplace and facility managers and HR heads from all over Europe, all there to tackle what sounds like a simple question. What needs to change in the way we design and run workplaces? It is anything but an academic question. Since Covid, the way we behave has changed, and society is shifting faster than ever. People now like to talk about a BANI world (https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2025/02/03/forget-vuca-bani-is-the-new-framework-world/) (brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible). The acronym is a blatant overstatement, but there is some truth behind it. The years before 2010 were fairly stable, and since then one disruption has followed another at breakneck speed. What we still need to give young people is a future worth working for, not just doom and gloom or a sales pitch for the latest tech. Here is my take on that morning in La Défense. IWS 2026: Making the Office Worth the Commute Future of work? On Thursday 24 September, the first International Workplace Summit (https://events.agoramanagers.fr/e/iws-2026) (IWS 2026) was held at the Campus Cyber (https://campuscyber.fr/) in La Défense. Artificial intelligence is at the heart of the future of work. We have been writing about it on Visionary Marketing (https://visionarymarketing.com/en/category/economy/ai-big-data/) since 2016, long before large language models came along and sparked something close to mass panic, helped along by the tech giants who keep telling us chatbots are about to wipe out humanity. IWS 2026: what does the future of work look like? And will the office be worth the commute? These predictions are overblown, as Forrester’s J.P. Gownder told us a few months ago (https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2026/01/28/ai-job-impact/). Still, something is clearly going on, and the IWS morning gave us three takes on it which, put together, paint a pretty full picture of the future of work. First a diagnosis, then a tech pitch, and finally a vision. And God knows we all desperately need such a vision. Future of Work at The Campus Cyber A pet project of Emmanuel Macron’s, the Campus Cyber opened on 15 February 2022 in La Défense. It sits in the Eria tower, easy to spot thanks to its petal-like shape, and is home to some 1,800 people, including teams from ANSSI (https://cyber.gouv.fr/), France’s national cybersecurity agency. Around a third of the building is made up of collaborative spaces open to the whole sector, where big corporations, start-ups, government agencies, schools and research labs rub shoulders. The interior was designed by Projective Architecture (https://www.projectivearchitecture.fr/fr/reference/cyber-campus/), which took care of client-side project support, space planning and design and build on some 208,000 sq ft (19,300 m²) of the tower’s 280,000 sq ft (26,000 m²) and 13 floors. That includes the restaurants, a library, event spaces, a showroom and terraces. A Former Labour Minister’s Diagnosis at IWS 2026 The former French Labour Minister, who spent earlier stints at Danone and 3DS, brought out a graphic novel on the subject in 2025 with journalist Mathieu Charrier and artist Nicoby, Travailler demain (https://www.amazon.com/Travailler-demain-Nicoby/dp/2344062823) (“Working Tomorrow”, in French). She asked the audience to “zoom out” from the workplace for a moment and look at the decade ahead. As she sees it, four waves are hitting us at once. AI, going green, demographics and our changing relationship with work. Fopremer French Ministry of Labour Muriel Pénicaud at IWS 2026 sharing her views about the future of work. Three numbers show how big this is. According to the IMF (https://www.imf.org/) and the OECD (https://www.oecd.org/), AI will affect 50 to 70% of jobs in developed economies over the next ten years, and by “affect” she means “destroy, create or transform”. The World Economic Forum (https://www.weforum.org/) reckons two thirds of the jobs our kids will do don’t exist yet. The third figure is the least known and the most striking. Since the late 1980s, the OECD has been tracking how long the skills students pick up in vocational higher education stay useful. A generation ago, the answer was thirty years. Today, it is apparently two. Muriel Pénicaud draws the obvious conclusion. The old model of studying first and working afterwards is dead, and we will all be learning for the rest of our lives. Mind you, I have a feeling the best people have always worked that way. Is it really that new? IWS 2026 host Lionel Cottin with Carole de Crozet and Jérôme Galletti. 10 trends showing us a desirable future of work What Is Really New What is genuinely new is who bears the brunt (https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2024/07/01/genai-impact-on-jobs/). Earlier waves of automation targeted factories. This one is aimed first at white-collar workers, back-office functions, finance, HR, marketing and middle management, which she calls “the glue that holds companies together”. She sees an opportunity here, getting rid of the drudgery, and a risk, losing sight of why our work matters. A large teaching hospital in Montreal shows how this can play out. It brought in AI to handle its logistics and saved around 25 to 30%. Instead of pocketing the money, management put that time back into patient care, and patients now get better faster. People came first again. Finally, some good news. Going green in La Défense, as seen from the Campus Cyber where IWS 2026 was held. Looks like there is still some way to go. The rest of her talk ran through the move to net zero, which “HR is still barely dealing with” (how do you retrain Silesian coal miners in a country that gets 80% of its energy from coal?), falling birth rates, with 670,000 young people about to enter the French job market against 956,000 at the peak, and remote work. The studies she quotes show that working from home boosts individual productivity but hurts creativity, problem-solving and the sense of belonging. For her, whispering into a headset in an open-plan office to talk to Singapore is pointless. If you come into the office, it should be to do things together. All of this is spot on, well researched and pretty unsettling. Over coffee, quite a few of us were thinking the same thing. If there had been more young graduates in the room, they would have walked out believing most of what they just learned is already out of date. This kind of diagnosis, which well-informed people repeat at one conference after another, is not a vision of the future. It doesn’t make anyone want to get behind a project. Muriel Pénicaud admits as much. Young people aren’t checking out, they are just committing differently, to projects that mean something rather than to institutions. But somebody has to offer them those projects. Futureof Work: Tom Ryckaert’s Tech Promise at IWS 2026 The second take came from Tom Ryckaert, a director at Planon (https://planonsoftware.com/), which makes real estate and facility management software, and author of Disruptive Workplaces (https://www.amazon.com/Disruptive-Workplaces-Tom-Ryckaert/dp/9401405395). His argument boils down to one line. The question is no longer whether AI will help us work, but whether work will still happen in the workplace. Tom Ryckaert, author of Disruptive Workplaces, came over from Belgium to give his talk. He went through it at a cracking pace. Predictive maintenance, with 40% less downtime and 25% lower repair bills, a new generation of platforms, which research firm Verdantix (https://www.verdantix.com/) calls CPIPs (connected portfolio intelligence platforms), hooking building management systems up to the company’s IT. The air conditioning throws an alarm, a work order goes straight to the right contractor, and nobody in the building ever had to pick up the phone. The employee journey runs itself too. Your app warns you about a traffic jam, books you a parking space with a charger, offers you the desk next to your usual one when that is taken, and orders your Tuesday chicken poke bowl. It’s All Here Already All of this is already out there, Tom Ryckaert insists. Robots and cobots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobot) (collaborative robots built to work next to people without a safety cage) cost between €10,000 and €50,000 today and will soon come down to €5,000. He even dusts off “facility as a service”, an idea he was pushing ten years ago, where you call on services when you need them, just like software. Ryckaert also reminds us that 20% of a building’s total cost is locked in at the design stage and the other 80% over decades of running it. He says we should cut “the AI elephant” into bite-sized, practical use cases instead of trying to do everything at once. Above all, he quotes Tariq Chauhan, who runs the Middle Eastern service provider EFS and told him it will always come down to people, because they are the ones keeping the services going every single day. Yet all this accumulation of tech leaves a big question unanswered. You hear it at most trade shows, and it doesn’t really address the issues raised an hour earlier. A building that orders your lunch tells you nothing about why you are there, or why a young person who has just turned down a permanent job would ever come back. Many of the solutions on show make sense, and some are genuinely appealing. But they deal with running the building, not with meaning. The problem Muriel Pénicaud put her finger on is a societal one, almost a question of civilisation, and no connected platform is going to fix it on its own. Ten Trends Worth the Commute The third take came from the people who designed the very building we were sitting in. Jérôme Galletti (https://www.linkedin.com/in/j%C3%A9r%C3%B4me-galletti-52a124b8/) and Carole de Crozet of Projective Architecture (https://www.projectivearchitecture.fr/) came up with the Campus Cyber around ten years ago and fitted it out five years ago. Rather than give us a slideshow tour, they used it to pull out what Jérôme Galletti calls “ten or so desirable trends for the future of office buildings”. That word matters. The idea is no longer to put up with an uncertain future, but to spell out what we actually want to build, and to make the office worth the commute. Touring the Campus Cyber boardroom during IWS 2026. No pecking order around this table. From this project and our research, we came up with ten or so desirable trends for the future of office buildings. Jérôme Galletti, Projective Architecture The first trend turns an old habit on its head. Office buildings are too often fortresses that turn their backs on the street. At the Campus Cyber, says Jérôme Galletti, anyone can walk in without showing ID, whether they are passing by, looking for a job or studying. They can grab a coffee, work for a few hours, catch an event and ask questions about cybersecurity. Carole de Crozet explained how the building then becomes the hub of a whole sector, where private firms, public bodies, start-ups and schools gather around the same issue, so they can work together and do business faster. Getting people under one roof isn’t enough, you have to give them a reason to mingle. A typical office building runs a handful of events a year. The campus runs six hundred, two or three a day, with some thirty people working on nothing else. The lecture theatre built for one-way speeches gives way to a flexible hub that can host several stages, a hackathon or a dinner. The showroom full of products going back to the 1950s makes way for an innovation centre where in-house teams and clients work together on what comes next. And food is no longer just a lunchtime affair, with five different spaces that double up for client meetings, training sessions or brainstorming. Seventh desirable trend: digital has to earn its place. Couldn’t agree more. Digital is on the list, but it plays a different part. It is no longer stuck on the screen at your desk and should add something to every space. The cyber-experience room on the third floor puts executive teams through crisis drills, with sensors that let the facilitators see how participants are holding up as the exercise unfolds. The last few trends are strikingly simple. Get rid of long corridors and turn the spaces in between into places where people actually talk and work, deal with acoustics everywhere (noise is the number one complaint in offices, and at the Campus Cyber even the ceiling decor soaks up sound), and build in flexibility from day one. The campus spaces change use as needs change, with no need to knock anything down. What makes this talk stand out isn’t so much any single idea as the approach behind it. Technology is just one tool among many. The starting point was how people actually use the place and what they experience there. We love saying young people are disengaged, and there is some truth in it. We are far less good at giving them an experience that makes them want to turn up. Galletti and Crozet showed, in a real building we walked around straight after, that it can be done. The Desk, From Object to Experience The workshop on workstations brought the same thinking down to the individual desk. Alban-Michel Moreno of Ministry of Makers (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alban-michel-moreno-5b758219/) pointed out that ergonomics is about how the body relates to objects, but it also covers acoustics and, beyond that, the whole office experience, right down to going for a lunchtime run with colleagues. Nobody comes to the office for the kit anymore. Crédit Agricole (https://www.credit-agricole.com/en)‘s project at its SQY Park campus in Guyancourt, just outside Paris, is a good example. Staff tried out six different monitor arms themselves, on a simple principle. The people who use them know best. Hot-desking has a catch, though. The desk doesn’t belong to anyone anymore. Everything looks the same. It is nice, clever, well thought out, and completely soulless. People don’t like using a keyboard or mouse that isn’t theirs, and Fellowes (https://www.fellowes.com/) says you can’t work properly on a laptop for more than two hours. These projects only work if people make the space their own. You have to leave room for the kids’ macaroni necklace and the holiday snaps, or the office will never be worth the commute. Future and Present of Work: From Global to Local The opening round table, with Kantar (https://www.kantar.com/), Tetra Pak (https://www.tetrapak.com/), Servier (https://servier.com/), consultancy Jaicost (https://www.jaicost.fr/) and Korus Group (https://www.korusgroup.com/) talking about running sites in several countries, had already raised the issue at nine in the morning. The speakers described a constant tug of war between global standards and local cultures, with shared rules on accessibility, sustainability and ergonomics on one side and each country’s own habits on the other. Work doesn’t look the same everywhere. And yet wherever you go, offices look strikingly similar, and the hybrid debate keeps going round in circles because nobody has really pinned down what is hybrid about these organisations. A multi-country round table on how work is changing around the world. The International Workplace Summit IWS 2026 is a hybrid event run by Agora Managers Groupe on the initiative of trade publication Anews Workwell (https://www.anews-workwell.com/iws-2026-on-vous-explique-tout/). Its organisers bill it as the G20 of the workplace and facility management, bringing together business leaders, policymakers, researchers, philosophers and industry players. Its tagline is “Experience the future. Now.” ESEIS and Korus Group are its Platinum partners, alongside Planon (https://planonsoftware.com/), Jaicost (https://www.jaicost.fr/), DEYA, Fellowes (https://www.fellowes.com/), MerciYanis, SaaSOffice, Smart Impulse (https://www.smart-impulse.com/) and Projective Architecture (https://www.projectivearchitecture.fr/), which also ran the building tours. Topics ranged from circular buildings and AI and robotics in smart buildings to employee experience and the regenerative workplace. The full programme is on the official website (https://events.agoramanagers.fr/e/iws-2026). What the Future of Work Is Missing: an Office Worth the Commute So the IWS morning gave us, in that order, a clear-eyed diagnosis, a whole lot of tech and a proposal. We need the first two. Muriel Pénicaud is right that uncertainty is now the only certainty, and Tom Ryckaert was right to remind us that the tools to run buildings on autopilot are here. But neither of them is enough to get teams on board, let alone a generation that puts meaning ahead of job security. And by the way, Gen Z doesn’t have a monopoly on wanting work to mean something. According to Apec (https://www.apec.fr/recruteur/accompagner-levolution-professionnelle/accompagner-levolution-pro/fiches-conseils/quete-de-sens-au-travail--une-responsabilite-de-lentreprise.html), the French executive employment agency, 95% of managers of all ages say it matters to them that their job makes sense. Another survey, by marketing research company Ifop in January 2023, found that only 21% of French workers see work as “very important” in their lives, down from 60% in 1990. That figure is 21% for 18-24 year-olds and 23% for 50-65 year-olds, barely any gap between generations (source: summary on Harmonie Santé (https://www.harmonie-sante.fr/sante-au-travail/organisation-evolution-du-travail/salaries-quete-sens-au-travail), in French). Blaming the kids is a bit lazy, and a convenient way of ignoring what most of the workforce quite rightly wants. What the future of work is missing is a positive, can-do vision, from people who can say what they want to build and then go and show it. That is exactly what Jérôme Galletti and Carole de Crozet did when they talked about “desirable” trends in a building they dreamed up ten years ago. Muriel Pénicaud said much the same thing with her Montreal story. Automation only pays off if the gains go back into what makes people valuable. Food for thought… Business leaders have all the data they need. Now it is up to them to make the office worth the commute. The post Future of Work: Making the Office Worth the Commute (https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2026/09/28/future-of-work-making-the-office-worth-the-commute/) appeared first on Marketing and Innovation (https://visionarymarketing.com/en/).

2. 

   10 Sept 2026

   AI and Creativity: a 2026 update

   It’s back to school and back to the blog too for the 31st time since 1995, and today’s topic will be AI and Creativity. The idea is to deal with the topic of artificial intelligence, not from a technical perspective, but from a more philosophical one, drawing both on my digital and artistic backgrounds. In 2026, the fourth version of my programme entitled “Content Creation in the Age of AI” will be delivered to all the students of the Omnes Education Group. A previous video was recorded in 2024 on that subject, and a serious refresh was needed. I have therefore gathered enough hindsight to learn more about the impact of AI, especially on music and the creative arts. And I decided to focus on just three things, to avoid getting lost in too broad a subject. First, the seeming popularity of AI artists on streaming platforms like Spotify, taking the example of an act called Breaking Rust. Second, the Stanford GSB study on visual arts and the impact of AI on creators. Third, my own thoughts and conclusions based on the above. Has AI Stifled Creativity? A 2024-2026 Perspective AI and Creativity and manufactured popularity, because such things exist as well. In 2024, I asked myself the question, “Will AI stifle all creativity?” as part of my Shift24 programme designed especially for Omnes Education Group. This programme cannot be shared online, but my colleagues at Omnes were kind enough to let me publish this wee piece for the benefit of my readers and followers, and I wish to thank them warmly for this as well as their renewed support these past four years. In this video dedicated to ‘creativity’, drawing on Merriam-Webster, I distinguished innovation from invention and chose to focus on the latter, specifically in music, a topic not yet covered in earlier courses. I then illustrated this with Suno, which could churn out up to 900,000 pieces of music a day as early as 2024 (far outpacing Bach’s 1,128 compositions over a 65-year lifetime). Hence, I shared a song I had generated myself, “The Dying Cyberspace.” I won’t say that I’m proud of this song, but at least I had great fun generating it, and it was instant gratification. All this was raising questions related to the value of musical creation, the risk of creative stagnation, and the thorny issue of intellectual property, since these AIs are trained on centuries of human-created music. So far, nothing new under the sun. Almost every other journalist must have written the same story for the past three years. However, I thought it lacked a bit of perspective. I then tempered the novelty of the phenomenon by pointing to historical precedents: Gershon Kingsley’s “Popcorn” (1969), Zoe Keating’s loop-based compositions (one example amongst many others), and Google’s Project Magenta as far back as 2016. These are mere examples. I decided to keep it short, but there has been no shortage of technology-backed creativity in music these past 50 years or more. Think of the late Klaus Schultze and his pals from Ash Ra Temple, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, and all the so-called Krautrock school of thought to start with, not mentioning the new wave movement from the 1980s. I also cited Wim Mertens, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and German artists like Nils Frahm, who blended electronic and acoustic elements long before GenAI. The real difference today, I argued, is one of scale: such tools are now in everyone’s hands. Be it to create music of the ilk of the Dying Cyberspace or more ambitious AI-produced work like this entire fake Pink Floyd album (https://open.spotify.com/album/0EpKUtT7GpjsSMIZlH1F5l?si=qDZxsadRQ22rDWp-iUjYEg), which didn’t sell as well as The Dark Side of the Moon or Wish You Were Here. Somewhat courageously, I concluded at the time that AI wouldn’t replace musicians but would become just another instrument in the creative toolkit, with real innovation coming from how humans use these tools. Since music remains fundamentally about human expression and emotion, I thought rather optimistically, if not naively, that AI music didn’t mark the end of musical invention but rather the beginning of a new chapter. Such were my thoughts from two years ago, now is the time to move forward and take a look at what happened in 2025-2026. As exmplained above, I focused this new research on three things. First, the seeming popularity of AI artists on streaming platforms like Spotify, taking the example of an act called Breaking Rust. Second, the Stanford GSB study on visual arts and the impact of AI on creators. Third, my own thoughts and conclusions. Breaking Rust Breaking Rust: a Spotify hit Let’s start with Breaking Rust (https://open.spotify.com/artist/3h9rLaviiFj1TeEhdIRpP5?si=0KioN2E8T7-5AYzXG9zEGQ). Breaking Rust is an AI country act which hit number one on the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales chart in November 2025, on Spotify. The numbers are seemingly enormous: over 2 million Spotify monthly listeners, and over 3 million streams in under a month. The project is credited to Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, even though very little is known about him. Rivaldo Taylor is apparently paid, I found out, on downloads only. How much is it worth? I tried to measure what this Billboard chart placement might actually bring to Mr. Taylor. Looking just at Spotify, and reckoning that musicians get paid anything between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream, the potential income was somewhere in the region of $9,000 to $15,000 for that first month alone. Extend that over a year and you probably reach something in the region of $100,000, assuming the popularity of the act does not dwindle, which it does tend to do, since it is already getting harder to find Breaking Rust on Spotify. Then I tried to understand what it would take to push a song like this to number one on the charts. Say I create an AI track on Suno or a similar application, post it on Spotify, and want to shoot it to the top of the charts. What I learned is that so few pieces of music are actually bought by listeners on these platforms that if you simply buy a thousand downloads, you will reach number one very easily for this kind of music. So my reckoning is that if Rivaldo Taylor did this, it would have cost him something in the region of a thousand dollars for those thousand downloads. That’s a cheap and easy way to tweak the results and a rather easy path to the top. Did Breaking Rust fake the applause? Sure lives on borrowed time (https://open.spotify.com/track/3fBLo7dnG5CSepoXgu3B53?si=eb5063700b10489b), so he says. Growth hacking What happens on these platforms is not just about the content. It is about what digital marketing experts call growth hacking, in other words tweaking the stats, and this domain is fraught with fraud. Bot-driven streaming is the starting point, with bots listening, or rather fakely listening, to tracks to make them appear more popular than they really are. On Deezer, one of the streaming platforms, it was found that 70 to 85 percent of streams are flagged as AI. This has reached a point where it now threatens the platforms themselves, because who really wants to listen to that much slop? Breaking Rust is not that bad, actually I find it rather good, but I do not feel like listening to it day in, day out. I want to listen to real artists. The method that may have been used by Breaking Rust is common. It is hard to say for certain whether it was used here, but it is likely. The same kind of tricks turn up on other platforms, such as Instagram. An Instagram “photographer” named Joss Avery, supposedly based in London and shooting with a Nikon D810 camera, turned out to be an AI avatar posting machine-made photographs generated with Midjourney and Photoshop. When I looked at his Instagram feed, it was fairly obvious to me his portraits were AI-generated. Maybe Instagram users can’t tell the difference. AI and Creativyu : the cost of AI for real visual arts creators Looking at visual arts, I turned to the Stanford GSB study comparing 2024 and 2025. AI is growing overall platform sales, so the pie is getting bigger, but the creator’s share of it is shrinking dramatically. This is something we have seen across content, platform marketing and social media, and it is now happening with AI as well. It’s typical platform marketing. There is so much slop that the share of value going to content, and its price, is going down the drain. The impact on visual arts is significant. In a 2026 survey, 32 percent of illustrators reported lost commissions due to generative AI. The average annual loss among UK illustrators affected by this AI boom was around 9,000 pounds. According to the Society of Authors, 26 percent of members reported lost work due to AI, with an associated loss of income in the region of 40 percent. That is massive. So what we can say is that AI has probably not done away with creativity, but it has certainly done away with the value associated with it. I can confirm the same has happened in content marketing. Film photography revival has a cost and I’m not even talking abou that beautiful beast up there on the righthand side. But I think there is going to be a revival, much like what happened with film photography, and as you know, I am a photographer myself. I recently purchased a brand new camera dating from 1966, and I fetched my father’s old Canon AE-1. I have gone back to shooting film, even though I am in fact a digital photography pioneer, having started in 1995 and never having stopped shooting digital since. Yet I now find there is an incentive for photographers to go back to film. The first reason is to do away with the AI suspicion that has already hit text, where people’s writing has been rejected because it contained em dashes, even though everybody used em dashes before AI made them suspect. There is rising suspicion, and users and clients are keen to know where content actually comes from. Did you make this yourself, or did you make it with AI? And if you made it with AI, that does not necessarily mean it is bad, but it certainly means it is not worth the same anymore. If AI can produce something in a second, why would anyone pay a professional a thousand euros to do the same, possibly without even proofreading it? The rising price of film is itself a good sign of the increasing value of analog over digital. Film can run up to 20 dollars, or 15 euros in Europe, per roll, though it depends what you are buying: 6×6 film costs more than 35mm (24×36), which is cheaper and can be found for around 5 euros in France. But if I shoot a full 36-exposure roll and have all the prints enlarged, that can easily cost 60 to 70 euros per film, which is a lot, and if I make a mistake, which happens to me now and again since I am no longer used to it and have to relearn the process, it costs even more. But this very scarcity is proof that nothing has been synthesized. It is real, it is true. It is a bit like the revival of vinyl among young people, of which you are probably a part. Vinyl is not better than CD, despite what people think. It is actually far worse in technical terms, but it has an analog feel to it, something human. I believe more and more people are going to demand more humanity in creativity. Will (ordinary) content creators still make a living out of this? True enough, you can trick the charts, for now. Breaking Rust has proved that streaming is easy to game, but I do not think bot-driven fraud will last. Spotify, Deezer, Apple and the others, along with the EU AI Act, are going to shift the burden towards disclosure, just as is happening with text, as I discussed in another video. It may not seem obvious that you would get caught, but I believe that after a while people will want proof that nothing has been tweaked. In digital photography, that will mean showing your RAW files and the history of your edits, because otherwise it is too easy, especially with new image tools like Gemini or ChatGPT, whose results are genuinely outstanding. So I think creativity will survive. What is far less certain is whether people actually working in creative fields will be able to make a living from it. That is much more doubtful. About OMNES Education Group OMNES Education (formerly INSEEC U.) is a French higher education group. It’s the only group offering lifelong learning programs across Management, Engineering, Political Science and International Relations, and Communication and Advertising, through schools including ECE, ESCE, EU Business School, INSEEC, IUM Monaco, Sup Career, IFG Executive Education, HEIP-CEDS, Sup de Création, Sup de Pub and Créa Genève. The group trains 40,000 students, supported by 3,000 experts across 15 schools and 19 campuses, with 215,000 alumni. Campuses are located in Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Beaune and Chambéry, plus international sites in Monaco, London, Barcelona, Munich, Geneva and Lausanne. Source: omneseducation.com/en/the-group/about-omnes-education (https://www.omneseducation.com/en/the-group/about-omnes-education/) | omneseducation.com/en/the-group/governance (https://www.omneseducation.com/en/the-group/governance/) About the Shift Programme Shift is a unique and mandatory programme that is seamlessly integrated into Omnes’s students’ curricula. Its primary objective is to provide them with the opportunity to acquire knowledge and develop skills that complement their initial field of study. The program comprises four mini-courses, each lasting 12 hours, supported by the Group’s schools. Students have the freedom to choose one of four themes to enroll in, enabling them to explore a new teaching field. Depending on the school, students can select from three themes that are not part of their initial field of study. Among these four themes, one finds “Content Creation in the Age of AI.” This lecture was first delivered in 2023 and it is constantly updated and refreshed. In this course, students delve into the challenges associated with the usage of AI. Beyond merely exploring tools and technological capabilities, there is a strong emphasis on critical thinking and personal transformation. The post AI and Creativity: a 2026 update (https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2026/09/10/ai-and-creativity-a-2026-update/) appeared first on Marketing and Innovation (https://visionarymarketing.com/en/).

3. 

   4 Jun 2026

   Agentic E-Commerce, Could AI Become the Shopfront

   Agentic e-commerce is already reshaping how consumers discover and buy products online, yet it still accounts for barely 0.2% of total e-commerce traffic. BASE France is the French arm of Base.com, a Polish-born SaaS (https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2008/01/02/saas-predictions/) scale-up that has spent nearly two decades building operational infrastructure for online retailers. Its CEO, Ben Hamilton, brings a practitioner’s perspective to this emerging model: measured, practical, and refreshingly free of the hype that surrounds most conversations on the topic. Agentic E-Commerce: Could AI Become the Shopfront? Imagine an agentic e-commerce world where e-commerce happens on smartphone screens and robots deliver your purchases. We might be on the brink of this future. This image was created using Midjourney. Commerce as conversation: the oldest model in the book Before there were shops, there was conversation. For thousands of years, trade was oral. A buyer expressed a need, a seller responded with what they had, and the two parties negotiated until a deal was struck. The self-service retail store, born roughly a century ago, was a radical departure from this model. It replaced dialogue with browsing. It handed the customer a trolley and pointed them at the shelves. E-commerce then took that self-service model and, as Ben Hamilton puts it, “multiplied it by about 100,000.” The online shopper today faces a near-infinite array of products across dozens of marketplaces, with no guide, no-one to talk to, and no memory of what they looked at three tabs ago. It is efficient in theory. In practice, it is exhausting. Back to future? The agentic model, Hamilton argues, represents something of a return to origins. Instead of browsing, the consumer talks. An agent listens, asks questions, proposes options, and eventually surfaces an answer to a need that the buyer may not even have been able to articulate clearly at the outset. “back to the future,” Hamilton explains, “that’s what I’m getting at. The agentic model takes us back to something closer to how human beings have traded over thousands of years compared to the last ten, twenty or even a hundred.” My own experience bears this out. I recently found a diagnostician for a property I am selling. As a matter of fact, I didn’t find them through a Google search, but through a conversation with an LLM. I clicked through two or three irrelevant links before landing on exactly the right provider. I then completed the transaction on their website. The research was agentic; the checkout was not. That distinction, as it happens, sits at the heart of what Hamilton believes will define the next phase of e-commerce. Ben Hamilton on agentic e-commerce: “I can totally imagine a portion of that market occurring directly on an LLM”. Agentic E-commerce: Where checkout will and won’t happen One of the more grounded contributions Hamilton makes to this debate is his refusal to conflate two distinct phenomena: AI influence over purchasing decisions, and AI completing the transaction itself. Much of the media discourse collapses the two. Hamilton does not. “I don’t think we’re heading to a world where 20, 50 or 80% of online transactions happen on an LLM,” he says. “I would draw the distinction between where the checkout occurs and how much an agent is involved in the buying process.” For the foreseeable future, he believes, most consumers will continue to research via LLMs and transact on familiar websites and marketplaces. The inertia in human purchasing behaviour is simply too great for the checkout itself to migrate rapidly to a chat interface. This view is supported by the data available. According to research by commercetools (https://commercetools.com/blog/ai-trends-shaping-agentic-commerce), 73% of consumers already use AI somewhere in their shopping journey. Yet only 36% are open to AI agents making purchases on their behalf. In the US, the figure for autonomous AI purchasing drops to 14%. The gap between AI as advisor and AI as buyer is vast, and it will narrow slowly. The risks associated with agentic e-commerce are high The risks of handing uncapped authority to an AI agent are no longer hypothetical. In late May 2026, an AI consultant reported to Axios (https://www.axios.com) that one of their enterprise clients had accidentally accumulated a $500 million bill on Anthropic’s Claude in a single month (https://techstartups.com/2026/05/28/company-accidentally-spent-500-million-on-claude-ai-in-one-month-after-forgetting-usage-limits/), simply by giving employees unrestricted access to the platform with no usage controls in place. Agentic workflows, which loop through tasks repeatedly, consume tokens at a rate orders of magnitude higher than a standard chat query. The bill was not the result of malicious use or a system failure. It was the predictable outcome of deploying autonomous agents without guardrails. The case is far from isolated: Uber reportedly exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget by April (https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/uber-coo-ai-spending-tokens-claude-code/), with per-engineer costs running between $500 and $2,000 monthly. “You’ve got to be bold to give them no upper limit on transactions,” Hamilton observed, and the arithmetic proved him right. [Editor’s note: I misquoted a similar anecdote about the Davos Summit during the interview. I’d heard or read this story in traditional media but couldn’t verify it with facts. I suspect it might have been fabricated. I replaced it with the above, duly sourced information.] The check out must remain on the merchant’s platform OpenAI itself learned this lesson when it launched Instant Checkout in September 2025 (https://ecommercefastlane.com/a-retailers-guide-to-ai-shopping-protocols/), which allowed purchases to complete directly inside ChatGPT. By March 2026, the feature had been shut down. Brands rejected the model, citing the loss of traffic, customer data, and loyalty flows. Shopify’s own position makes the point clearly. At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in March 2026 (https://seekingalpha.com/article/4877828-shopify-inc-shop-presents-at-morgan-stanley-technology-media-and-telecom-conference-2026), Finkelstein noted that barely a dozen Shopify merchants were live on agentic commerce at the time. On the Q1 2026 earnings call (https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2026/05/05/shopify-shop-q1-2026-earnings-transcript/), he was unambiguous: “LLMs do not bypass Shopify’s checkout.” The checkout, the payment flow, and the post-purchase relationship remain squarely on the merchant’s platform. A natural segmentation Hamilton sees a natural segmentation emerging by category. Low-value, frequently purchased household items lend themselves to fully autonomous agentic purchasing. “I can totally imagine a portion of that market occurring direct on an LLM,” he says. “Hey, I’ve run out of toothpaste, can you order me some?” High-involvement purchases, and anything with significant financial or emotional stakes, will retain human control over the final step for a long time yet. The death of keyword search, greatly exaggerated The brands Hamilton speaks with regularly are, understandably, worried. Most have spent the past two decades learning the rules of a game built around keyword search and performance marketing. That game has not ended, but the goalposts have shifted, and nobody is quite sure where they have moved to. Brands are understandably worried. Most have spent the past two decades learning the rules of a game built around keyword search and performance marketing and the goalposts have shifted, and nobody is quite sure where they have moved to. Gabriel Magalhães didn’t even need this to miss in the 2026 UEFA Cup Final penalty shootout. This image was tweaked with ChatGPT. The scale of the agentic e-commerce shift Key figures: the scale of the shift AI-driven sessions still represent below 0.2% of total e-commerce traffic, though they are the fastest-growing channel (Digital Commerce 360, 2025 (https://ecommerceguide.com/a/ecommerce-statistics/)) GenAI referrals to US retail sites grew 693% year-on-year during the 2025 holiday season (Adobe Analytics (https://elogic.co/blog/generative-ai-ecommerce-2026/)) Gartner forecast that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 as AI chatbots captured search share (Gartner, 2024 (https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-02-19-gartner-predicts-search-engine-volume-will-drop-25-percent-by-2026-due-to-ai-chatbots-and-other-virtual-agents)) By early 2026, ChatGPT reached approximately 17% of global search queries against Google’s 78% Over 60% of Google searches now end without a click, across multiple industry studies Retailers with AI agent integration grew 32% faster during Cyber Week 2025 than those without (Salesforce) Hamilton’s view on the fate of keyword search is careful rather than apocalyptic. Google will not lose its advertising revenues overnight. But the direction of travel is clear. Search queries will progressively migrate towards conversational interfaces, for the simple reason that we rarely know precisely what we want when we start looking. “We don’t necessarily know what we want 90% of the time,” he observes. “It takes a bit of a conversation to elicit exactly what we’re looking for.” Keyword search was always a crude proxy for intent. LLMs are, at least in principle, better placed to decode it. Agentic e-commerce by the numbers Agentic e-commerce by the numbers. Infographic made with Gemini The question for brands is what to do about this. Hamilton’s prescription is structural rather than cosmetic. Brands need to become machine-readable, which means structured data connected to the right protocols, not just well-written product descriptions. Three open standards now define how AI agents interact with merchants: MCP (Model Context Protocol, originally developed by Anthropic and donated to the Linux Foundation in December 2025), ACP (OpenAI and Stripe, September 2025), and UCP (Google and Shopify, announced at NRF in January 2026). Shopify activated a default MCP endpoint for all its stores in Summer 2025 (https://www.ekamoira.com/blog/how-ai-agents-are-changing-e-commerce-in-2026-open-protocols-explained-complete-guide). These are not optional extras. They are the new plumbing. MCP, ACP or UCP and the agentic acronym soup I raised with Hamilton the practical reality for most merchants, who have no idea what MCP, ACP, or UCP even stand for. His response was reassuring on one level, and sobering on another. Platforms like BASE are absorbing this complexity on behalf of their clients. A small or mid-sized retailer does not need to recruit data scientists or build protocol integrations in-house. They can, if they choose; the new generation of coding tools makes that more feasible than ever. But they can equally rely on an operational platform that handles those connections for them. The sobering part comes when Hamilton acknowledges a concern he is genuinely uncertain about. Even if the protocols function perfectly, will LLMs be able to surface smaller independent brands alongside the big players with their vast content libraries and tens of thousands of referring domains? Research from Airops (https://www.goodfirms.co/resources/seo-statistics-ai-search-rankings-zero-click-trends) suggests that brands are 6.5 times more likely to be cited in AI answers through third-party sources than through their own domains. According to SE Ranking’s analysis of 129,000 domains (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/new-data-top-factors-influencing-chatgpt-citations/561954/), sites with more than 32,000 referring domains are 3.5 times more likely to be cited by ChatGPT than lower-authority counterparts. Scale, in other words, confers an advantage in AI visibility just as it did in paid search. The field may level in some ways; in others, it may simply tilt differently. Operational excellence as the new marketing in this agentic e-commerce world What AI agents actually evaluate Unlike Google’s search algorithm, which can be influenced by ad spend, AI agents query real-time signals: live stock levels, shipping terms, return policies, and customer review aggregates. Structured data across these dimensions is now considered standard for AI visibility by the major platforms. Retailers with AI agent integration achieved roughly 7x better sales growth during Cyber Week 2025 than those without (Salesforce (https://commercetools.com/blog/ai-trends-shaping-agentic-commerce)). Perhaps Hamilton’s most interesting claim, and the one most counterintuitive to marketers, is that operational excellence is becoming a direct marketing lever. An AI agent evaluating a recommendation does not care how much a brand has spent on Amazon retail media. It will scrape ten thousand reviews in half a second and draw its own conclusions about delivery reliability, return handling, and product quality. No media budget can substitute for that data trail. “I think we’re heading to a world where operational excellence will count for more in the decision process,” Hamilton says, “and will be less easily brushed behind the curtains with a bit of ad spend.” This is, in theory, good news for consumers and for competent smaller operators who have always delivered well but lacked the budget to outrank wealthier rivals in paid search. Whether it will materialise in practice depends on whether LLMs can actually surface those operators when large brands flood the information environment with well-structured, high-quality content. BASE France sits at exactly this intersection. The platform manages what it describes as the “spinal column” of an e-commerce operation: product catalogue management, order handling, marketplace feeds, stock synchronisation, and shipping. These are also, precisely, the data layers that AI agents query in real time when assembling recommendations. BASE connects to more than 1,700 integrations globally (https://base.com/en-GB/integrations/) and serves some 30,000 merchants across more than 180 countries. In France, launched in early 2026 and operating from Bordeaux, the platform already counts 150 clients including Kiabi, Back Market, and Spartoo, with connections to around 250 marketplaces and partners. The platform’s value proposition in an agentic world, as Hamilton frames it, is straightforward: merchants who want to be visible to AI agents need to expose the right data through the right protocols. BASE does that for them, whether or not a checkout ever happens inside an LLM. The forecasts, the hype, and the rising tide McKinsey estimates (https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/themes/are-you-or-your-ai-agent-shopping-on-cyber-monday) that agentic commerce could redirect between three and five trillion dollars in global retail spend by 2030, with up to one trillion of that in the US alone. Bain puts the US figure (https://www.bain.com/insights/2030-forecast-how-agentic-ai-will-reshape-us-retail-snap-chart/) at 300 to 500 billion dollars, representing 15% to 25% of total US e-commerce sales. These numbers attract attention and, inevitably, scepticism. Hamilton’s response is precise. He notes that global retail in 2030 will likely be somewhere around 50 trillion dollars. On that basis, the McKinsey and Bain figures imply that agentic commerce will account for somewhere between one and ten percent of total retail within four years. That is plausible, he suggests, if the definition of “agentic” is broad enough to include any transaction where an AI agent played a role somewhere in the funnel, from discovery to decision, not just cases where the checkout itself occurred on an LLM. Physical retail is not exempt either: a consumer standing in a supermarket aisle, consulting Gemini on their phone about which of two products is better, is already part of this story. The honest summary is that we are watching a slow revolution rather than a tidal wave. “Maybe a year or two ago, some people made it sound imminent,” Hamilton reflects. “When it comes to retail, there’s still quite a lot of human behaviour inertia in the system. Things aren’t going to change drastically in the next twelve or twenty-four months. But over ten or fifteen years, it’s pretty difficult to imagine consumer behaviour and the retail experience looking anything like what it looks like today.” Three priorities For merchants wondering what to do right now, Hamilton’s three priorities are: become machine-readable through structured data and protocol connections, maintain high-quality content that reflects genuine expertise, and resist the temptation to flood the market with AI-generated copy. On that last point, he is candid. “Humans are starting to get pretty good at telling what is AI-generated and what isn’t. When you read things now, you almost have a sixth sense for ‘I think a machine wrote that.'” Good news, as I told him, for those of us who write for a living (https://agency.visionarymarketing.com). Three things merchants should do to score high in agentic e-commerce according to BASE.com’s Ben Hamilton. Infographic made with Gemini and Adobe Photoshop The winners: a scenario Hamilton wants to believe I asked Hamilton, as a final question, who he thought would win in this new landscape. Big retailers with scale advantages? Platform giants? Or the long tail of independent merchants who have always competed on product and service rather than budget? His answer was honest about the limits of his own conviction. He described the scenario he wants rather than the one he necessarily expects. In that scenario, agentic commerce levels the playing field by reducing the influence of performance marketing budgets and increasing the weight of genuine operational quality. “I like to believe that those who have superior products and superior service will get more and more traffic,” he said. Whether the reality will be so equitable depends on whether AI recommendation systems can overcome their own structural biases towards scale and data volume. I was reminded, hearing this, of an IBM advertisement from the 1990s that showed an Italian woman selling her homemade spaghetti sauce to the world via the internet. The vision was real. The timeline was not. It took twenty years for that kind of global reach to become genuinely accessible to small producers. The analogy is imperfect but instructive. Agentic commerce will likely democratise access to markets over time. That time will be measured in years, not months. Ben Hamilton and Base.com Ben Hamilton is CEO of BASE France, the French arm of Base.com (https://base.com/fr-FR/home), a Polish-born e-commerce SaaS scale-up founded in 2006. With nearly two decades of expertise and a presence in more than 20 countries, Base serves approximately 30,000 merchants worldwide and generated €50 million in revenue in 2024. BASE France was officially launched in early 2026, operating from Bordeaux with a team of 20. The platform covers order management, stock synchronisation, shipping, marketplace feeds, and AI-ready product enrichment. Ben Hamilton is a regular speaker on the strategic implications of AI for e-commerce visibility and discovery. The post Agentic E-Commerce, Could AI Become the Shopfront (https://visionarymarketing.com/en/2026/06/04/agentic-e-commerce-when-ai-becomes-the-shopfront/) appeared first on Marketing and Innovation (https://visionarymarketing.com/en/).

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