Chris Parsons spent 25 years across Walmart Canada, Ren’s Pets, and Home Hardware before moving to the agency side as VP of Partner Growth and Marketing at Hale. He sits down with Bryan Mahoney to lay out his AI Moment of Discovery framework, argue that the online-to-store cannibalization narrative is a myth, and explain why self-checkout might be retail’s biggest missed connection.
Behind the Expert
Chris Parsons spent twenty-five years in Canadian retail, starting on the sales floor at Mark’s Work Wearhouse and Future Shop before moving into Walmart Canada’s home office — where he was part of the team when the retailer first launched self-checkouts — and on to Ren’s Pets. He spent his last six years in retail at Home Hardware, a run that included the pandemic, when the company’s dealers improvised their own curbside pickup within days and the program was rolled out nationally. Along the way he kept making the same arguments to leadership — about online-to-store cannibalization, about what self-checkout does to the customer relationship — and eventually documented them in his first book, Retail Rewired, a project he took on in part to prove to himself he could do it after growing up with a learning disability that made reading and writing a lifelong struggle. He has since crossed over to the agency side as VP of Partner Growth and Marketing at Hale, drawn by an agency that was already holding itself accountable to clients’ numbers, and has recently published a thesis on what he calls the AI Moment of Discovery.
The Quick Hits
- Retail discovery has gone through three eras: Procter & Gamble’s First Moment of Truth at the shelf, Google’s Zero Moment of Truth with its tagging and keyword-stuffing, and now what Parsons calls the AI Moment of Discovery — shoppers asking chat agents about experiences rather than searching for products or visiting your site.
- In the AI Moment of Discovery, a shopper doesn’t ask for a jacket — they say they’re going on an Alaskan cruise and let the agent recommend everything they need. If your content isn’t structured for that, you don’t get discovered. Content is king, again.
- Parsons calls online-to-store cannibalization a myth — provocatively, he admits, because it’s real. But without a website you aren’t in consideration at all, and shoppers who want to buy online will simply choose somebody else.
- Self-checkout is a missed connection. A shopper spends forty minutes in the store, then scans, weighs and bags their own items before getting a credit-card prompt — the in-store equivalent of a guest checkout, something no retailer would accept on its website.
- Agency accountability should come first, not budget asks. When the numbers are down, the conversation should start with what the agency could have done better — not another hundred thousand dollars in market.
- Start AI with small, repeatable work: subject-line variants for A/B tests, mining replenishment data for hidden product affinities, cutting an eight-week flyer cycle down to two or three. Little wins are how change management actually happens.
- Fix the foundation before going big. If your data, quantities and measurements aren’t right, it’s garbage in, garbage out — and the retailers that came “late” to ecommerce often won by doing the foundational work first.
Retail as a career, not a stepping stone
Parsons started on the sales floor at Mark’s Work Wearhouse and Future Shop before moving into Walmart Canada’s home office, and his first piece of advice is aimed at people who never consider retail a destination. In his telling, few industries let you learn as much of the business at once — logistics, replenishment, merchandising, buying — without being boxed into a single function.
That breadth paid off at Home Hardware during the pandemic. The company had never offered curbside pickup, but within days its dealers were launching their own — taking orders by phone, email or the website and walking products out to customers’ trunks. Home Hardware ended up rolling the approach out nationally. Parsons also watched a generation of reluctant digital adopters cross over, a shift he joked about in one meeting as “a boom with boomers.”
The cannibalization myth and the forty-minute guest checkout
Retail Rewired grew partly out of arguments Parsons kept having with leadership over the years. The most persistent was cannibalization — the fear that online sales simply steal from stores. He calls it a myth, knowingly, to provoke: the effect is real, but the alternative is worse.
The other was self-checkout. Parsons was at Walmart when it launched a couple of self-checkout lanes for convenience; today he sees stores with twenty of them and maybe two traditional cashiers. At the same time, he hears retailers at every conference talking about loyalty, lifetime value and personalization — while the store experience does nothing to connect with a shopper during the forty minutes they spend there, then asks them to learn the POS system, weigh their own vegetables, and sign up for a credit card at the end.
Accountability before the next budget ask
Parsons had good experiences with agencies as a client, but he names an elephant in the room: agencies often felt like an attachment to the team rather than an extension of it. When a Monday-morning leadership meeting revealed a down week or quarter, the response he usually heard was a new program or promotion — paid for out of hours already booked or new budget — rather than a hard look at what had gone wrong, like banner ads still driving traffic to out-of-stock items.
He’s careful not to put everything on the agency — shipments from Asia arrive late, the weather turns — but argues that meetings should open with the agency’s own accountability before turning to solutions like shifting dollars between months. When he began talking with Hale’s leadership, he found they were already working that way, which is what convinced him to cross over.
The AI Moment of Discovery
Parsons’ newest thesis frames today’s shift as the third great moment in how products get discovered. First came Procter & Gamble’s First Moment of Truth, when a shopper encountered a product on the shelf. Then Google’s Zero Moment of Truth, when brands recoded and tagged their sites — and stuffed them with keywords — to show up in search. Now, he argues, shoppers are bypassing both your website and Google entirely.
The agent answers with the jackets, the hiking boots and everything else — and only the brands whose content is structured for it get recommended. Parsons’ worry is that people will look back in five or ten years and realize they missed the moment they were living in. His conclusion is a familiar one: content is king, again.
Start small, and fix the foundation first
Parsons thinks AI has a branding problem: people are paralyzed because they imagine it in sweeping, overwhelming moves. He’d rather teams take it in bite-size pieces — three subject-line variants for an email A/B test, or an hour a week saved for an associate. The bigger opportunities sit in repeatable, data-heavy work like replenishment, where affinities between products were historically found by luck. He once spent months of research before stumbling onto the fact that the more tuna the store sold, the more toothpaste it sold; an AI agent could mine that kind of connection far faster.
He points to ecommerce as precedent. Retailers that felt late in the late 1990s and early 2000s often benefited: by the time they moved, Shopify had turned a two-million-dollar platform build into something that cost thousands, and many had used the wait to work on their content, data, measurement and product quality. His own target for AI is the weekly flyer — an eight-week cycle of mockups and item selection he’d like to see cut to two, three or four weeks, freeing up time to be strategic about what goes into it.
A premium for human judgment
Bryan pushed back on efficiency as the whole story, arguing that AI is most valuable as a thought partner that keeps humans accountable for the output. Parsons agreed, and offered a cautionary example from his own career: profiling expectant moms at Walmart by due date for the sake of convenience — without thinking through what a congratulations message would mean to someone who had suffered a miscarriage.
That judgment, he argues, now requires marketers to understand the totality of a business — merchandising, operations, logistics — rather than a single channel. AI gives you the surface level, and on its own it makes you sound like everyone else. The value comes from transforming that output and infusing it with the stories of your brand and your experience.
Sound Bites
- “You get to learn logistics and replenishment and merchandising and buying. You don’t have to just go into one area of the business. You really get to discover who you are.”
- “You do nothing for 40 minutes. You treat them like a guest checkout on the website. And you would never want someone on the website checking out as a guest. So why do you allow this to happen at your retail stores?”
- “If you’re not hitting those targets, it shouldn’t be the conversation about how much more money can we get from the client. It should be let’s take some accountability. What did we do wrong? What could have we done better? Where were the gaps?”
- “They’re searching through chat agents about experiences, and they might not even look for a jacket. They’re just saying, hey, I’m going to do an Alaskan cruise. What should I do?”
- “If you don’t have your content structured properly for the algorithm of an AI agent, you’re not going to be discovered.”
- “You have to make sure if you’re going to do something big that your foundation is right. If you don’t go back and make sure that your data is correct, then it’s going to be garbage in, garbage out.”
- “You can’t just rely on automation and setting up these triggers. I think where we’re going is we’re going to pay a premium for judgment.”
The Chord take
Parsons’ three moments of discovery tell a story about who controls the path to the product. At the shelf, the retailer did. With search, Google did, and brands learned to structure their sites for a crawler. In the AI Moment of Discovery, an agent assembles the answer — a whole Alaskan cruise kit — from whatever it can understand about your products. That makes the unglamorous work matter more, not less: structured content, accurate product data, clean inventory and measurement. The agent can only recommend what it can read, and it can only read what you’ve gotten right. The same logic runs through his advice on AI inside the business. The toothpaste-and-tuna affinity was always in the data; what was missing was a fast way to find it — and that only works if the quantities and measurements underneath are correct. Garbage in, garbage out isn’t a new lesson, but AI raises the stakes, because it will produce a confident answer either way. That’s why Parsons’ “premium for judgment” is the right counterweight. The due-date example is a reminder that automated personalization without human context can do real harm to a customer relationship. His self-checkout critique is the human version of the same point. Retailers invest heavily in loyalty programs and personalization, then let the forty minutes a shopper spends in-store go by without a single moment of connection. Whether the channel is an AI agent, a website or an aisle, the brands that win will be the ones with the foundations to be understood and the judgment to make each interaction feel like it was meant for the customer in front of them.
Put it to work
- 1Test how AI agents describe and recommend your products today. Ask them experience-based questions your customers might ask — a trip, a project, a season — and see whether your brand shows up and whether the details are right.
- 2Audit your product content for agent-readability: clear attributes, use cases and the occasions a product fits. The AI Moment of Discovery rewards content that explains when and why someone needs a product, not just what it is.
- 3Pick one small, repeatable task — subject-line variants, a weekly report, a flyer mockup — and use AI to shorten it. Measure the hours saved and share the result internally; small wins are what build momentum for bigger change.
- 4Before pointing AI at a big system like your CRM or ERP, confirm the underlying data — quantities, measurements, product records — is accurate. If it isn’t, fix that first.
- 5Put a human review step on any automated, personalized message that relies on sensitive life events. Ask what happens if the trigger is right but the circumstances have changed.
- 6If you work with an agency, agree up front that performance reviews open with what each side could have done better before anyone proposes new spend.
Full transcriptShow ↓
Bryan Mahoney
All right, well, here we go. Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Brilliant Commerce Podcast, where I get a chance to sit down with some of the brightest minds in commerce today. Normally this is the part of the intro where I say, brightest minds behind some of today's iconic or next-to-be-iconic brands. But I do have a special place in my heart for agencies that are helping those iconic brands remain iconic, or those next-to-be-iconic brands get to that next level. And today's guest, Chris Parsons, VP of Partner Growth and Marketing at Hale, is exactly one of those folks. So thrilled to have you here. Chris, thanks for coming on the pod.
Chris Parsons
Well, Bryan, thanks for having me on the podcast. I really appreciate it. And having the balance between retail, DTC and agency, I think, is key, because we all have to work together, and it's easier when you've actually lived in each other's shoes to be able to communicate. So after twenty-five years in retail, I've made that transition to the agency side, and it's been really fulfilling. I'm enjoying it right now, and I love being able to bring my retail side and my marketing side to the conversations I'm having internally with my team and helping them grow as well. We try to make sure that we support our clients the best, and having the inside seat to retail allows us to do that even better.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, our careers have been inverted. I spent twenty years on the agency side before switching to go in-house to brands, and now I'm running a platform where I'm still fortunate enough to get to work with brands. So maybe that's your next move. Before we get too far into what you're up to at Hale and what you were doing before Hale, I'd love to know where in the world are we finding you today? You and I, although we're dressed in nearly coordinated colors, are not in the same room. So where am I lucky enough to find you today?
Chris Parsons
Yeah, I've been fortunate enough to move over the last nine months to Edmonton, Alberta from Ontario. I've just started to get settled in. We literally picked up the home about a month and a half ago, and I'm in my new den, as it's called, trying to get it set up the best way for podcasting and work.
Bryan Mahoney
Looks good. Looks like a month in you're doing a great job.
Chris Parsons
Yeah, I'm just noticing now — which is inside baseball — but when you look at the fish tank there, I'm in the process of switching filters, and I realized that I left some of the media from the last filter in there. But it makes sense to anyone that keeps fish.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I love it. I think it's a little bit of an Easter egg that we'll leave for folks that are watching us instead of listening to us. I'm still trying to figure out when podcasts went from audio only to video and audio. I'm definitely a listener, but it does force me to think about what I'm wearing and my background. So I'm a work in progress.
Chris Parsons
I love it, because you can go from listening to the podcast, be halfway through on your drive, get into the house, turn it on, and then you can have that visual connection for the other half of the podcast. So I like the blend of it. And I love being able to have my choice — one day I'm just needing to listen to the great content from other great creators, and another I'm able to visually see them and maybe feel a little bit more connected.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I've never done that, but I'm going to write that down in my notebook of things to do. I think that's a really great insight, and a good reason why we go to the trouble of recording them. If I had my way, I would record everything in person, actually. I love the in-studio recordings, and — maybe this sort of hints at how old I am — I like working in person with people. Remote's great, don't get me wrong, but it is difficult to replace the connective tissue that you have when you're working shoulder to shoulder, or even within the same space.
Chris Parsons
Yeah, I agree. I would love to be able to sit down with each person and just share a coffee with each other. That's the way I would like to approach it. It feels like sometimes you miss that intimacy of the connection because we're on two different screens. But the reality is, if we were sitting with each other in a Tim Hortons or a Starbucks and just having a good conversation, that connection goes a long way. And I think people would feel that a little bit more than some of the ways we have to do it today. But regardless, I think we can bring the energy today, and hopefully everyone will feel that.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, we'll make it work. Well, we're going to have to try really hard not to out-Canadian each other. We are recording this a day before Canada Day. We're five minutes in, and you've already said Tim Hortons. So there's a lot of Canadian content coming for folks here. And speaking of Canadian content, you have spent a lot of time inside Canadian retail — some stops like Walmart Canada, Ren's Pets, and Home Hardware. That's just an incredible amount of experience, and I don't think we pay enough attention to the Canadian retail landscape. What sort of unique insight did your time at some of these brands give you ahead of jumping all the way in and starting at Hale?
Chris Parsons
Yeah, I think the biggest learning for me early on in my career is being able to look at retail as a career. A lot of folks get into retail — I started off on the sales floor at Mark's Work Wearhouse and Future Shop, and transitioned that into getting to go to the home office for Walmart, and then just continued to build off of all of that. A lot of people, when you go to school, never consider retail as your career. But I would encourage people to give it a real look and consideration as you're going to school for business or marketing. You can bring all of those learnings to retail, and it forces you to have so much more experience. You get to learn logistics and replenishment and merchandising and buying. You don't have to just go into one area of the business. You really get to discover who you are. And I think that's a really big learning opportunity for people, because a lot of folks early on in their career really consider retail as a stepping stone or a part-time job. And I've just been blessed with my career, especially with the folks that you've mentioned — Walmart and Ren's, and then lastly the last six years with Home Hardware has been a treat.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah. An exciting time to be at Home Hardware, too — going through the pandemic, and everyone was at home doing home improvements and building. What a wild time to be at a business that I imagine really needed to lean even more fully into digital than ever before.
Chris Parsons
The interesting thing, though, was with Home, our dealers were so responsive. While we never had curbside pickup available, within days there were dealers launching their own curbside pickup and allowing customers to either call in, email in, or leverage the website, place an order, and be served. They couldn't come into the physical location, but the dealers were able to walk that product outside, put it into their trunk, and the transaction would take place. It showed the innovation and creativity from a lot of our dealers, and we ended up rolling that out nationally. It's amazing how you're able to pivot and innovate when you need to, which was an exciting time. And then there were some of the stats that were happening during that period. Certain age groups don't like to do online banking or never embraced it. And I was just having fun in one meeting, saying that we're having a boom with boomers, because they all had to embrace digital, whether it was transactions at an ATM machine or online banking, or even doing ecommerce with us. So I thought that was great. Obviously the conversion was there, and the traffic definitely increased. Now some of that's tamed back, because I think a lot of us still miss that interaction at store level or malls. But at least it was a great way to overcome some of those narratives or fears that people might have had, and misconceptions in the industry.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah. That's why I say oftentimes we talk about brand building, and I think sometimes we forget in retail that it's not just about the physical product, but about the brand that is offering you this physical product and the relationship that you're going to have with your customer. That's a really excellent example of how you can pivot and find that opportunity and continue to build that relationship with your customer at a time when they probably needed you the most. Being slow and not being responsive wouldn't have been good enough. And I'll try to use this as a segue to the book that you wrote, but it's kind of like a rewiring in real time of retail, or of commerce. Speaking of rewiring, you published your first book, called Retail Rewired, last year. Writing a book is a real commitment — it's like a trust fall in a way. You're putting yourself out there. I'm curious what inspired you to write the book, besides all that experience that you'd accumulated over the years.
Chris Parsons
Well, there were about three or four different things that put me on the path of writing the book. One was a few years ago I had the pleasure of going on stage and introducing a friend of mine, Johnny Russo, who had just published his own book. I was able to ask him questions about the book and really bring it to life at a conference, and we had some great conversations about the process that he went through. Then I read a book from Steve Dennis called Remarkable Retail, and that book really impacted the way I was trying to communicate within organizations. I felt like that book really cleared up what I was trying to say, and I started to put into practice some of the themes and the thesis from his book. And I was actually fortunate enough to just have dinner with him in New York last week at another conference. So it was pretty fun to be able to find an author that you admire so much and then be able to actually engage. It was quite the treat.
Chris Parsons
I think one of the other things was that during my career there have been some really common themes that I would constantly have to go and present to leadership. Cannibalization — and I call it a myth. It's true, but I do it to be provocative — cannibalization from online to store sales. I'm always justifying that you need a website to be part of the consideration. And if you don't have that website, then consumers, if they want to shop online, will choose somebody else. So having that kind of ongoing narrative between myself and the CFOs was just something I documented so many times. Or the experience at Walmart — when I was originally with Walmart, we had launched self-checkouts, and the self-checkouts were just a couple of them for convenience. Now they've transitioned to, I don't know, twenty at some of the locations I go to, and there are maybe only two traditional types of cashiers.
Chris Parsons
And as you go to conferences like I do, you start hearing people talk about loyalty, lifetime value, all of these KPIs and metrics that they try to achieve, how they want to have personalization and engage with consumers. But when you go into a Walmart — and I understand, I love my Walmart. It keeps the cost of living low. It's allowing me to get as many groceries as possible. But I think about that experience, and I think I even write about this in the book: you spend forty minutes in that store going around getting all of your groceries. Then you have the pleasure of checking yourself out, and you have to learn their POS system. Then you have to weigh your own vegetables. And I forget my bags all the time, and when I forget my bags, that means I have to buy more bags. And all of that, just to then get a prompt about signing up for their credit card program and getting a few extra points. It's like, do we really need a loyalty program? And this is again me being provocative, but if you really want to connect with the customer, you would do that while I shop for forty minutes, versus afterwards just having a loyalty program or points program or whatever. How do you engage with the customers when you're getting the privilege of them shopping at your location? You do nothing for forty minutes. You treat them like a guest checkout on the website. And you would never want someone on the website checking out as a guest. So why do you allow this to happen at your retail stores? So those were some of the narratives that really made me want to document something. And then lastly, I think it was the fourth point: I grew up with a learning disability. Reading and writing has been a struggle my entire life, and I kind of wanted to just prove that I could do it.
Bryan Mahoney
You did it. Congratulations. I haven't finished reading it, but I've been through parts of it, and I think there's just a lot of really great insight in there. So thank you for writing it, and thank you for sharing that story. I do want to transition, speaking of stories, to the move from retail to the agency side. You decided not long ago to join Hale. You had the privilege of working with a number of really wonderful agencies while you were in retail, and you said something during our warm-up that I thought was really interesting: notwithstanding the great work that a lot of these agencies did while you were a client or a customer, they tended to celebrate the wins, and there wasn't always a ton of accountability. They would always explain around the reasons why perhaps there wasn't a great quarter. And I think one of the things that compelled you about Hale was the fact that you all approach things differently. So maybe talk to us about what you learned about agencies during your time in retail, and why Hale is different.
Chris Parsons
Yeah, I love working with agencies, and I've had really positive experiences, but there is still that elephant in the room where an agency always felt like it was an attachment to your business or to your team, versus feeling like it was part of your team and an extension of your team. If I come in on a Monday morning and I have to start getting my data ready for a leadership meeting in the afternoon and go present the KPIs of how the weekend went or how the quarter ended up — it was at that moment, typically, that you were struggling to find real accountability from our agency partners. If the month was down or the week was down, they would often come back with new programs, new promotions. They would either erode the hours that you had already booked with them, or you would have to spend more money in order to get to the sales levels that you had already agreed upon. As you sign a contract with an agency, each year you go through annual operating planning and say, okay, we want to hit these milestones, these targets.
Chris Parsons
And for me, with an agency, I really believe that if you are going to take some dollars, you want to prove that return on investment. And if you're not hitting those targets, it shouldn't be the conversation about how much more money we can get from the client or from the retailer. It should be: let's take some accountability. What did we do wrong? What could we have done better? Where were the gaps? A lot of times agencies will be driving banner ads to items that are out of stock, and you don't change those banners soon enough, so a lot of dollars end up going to waste instead of being able to pivot. I never heard those conversations. It was for the most part always about, let's get another hundred thousand dollars in the market and we'll bring those sales in. So when I started having conversations with the leadership at Hale, I brought this balance up — if I ever go to the agency side, I want to fix this. But they were already doing it. They were already having that dialogue, those conversations. And it was at that moment that I said to Matt, one of the founders, I'm aligned to this. This is the way we should be working. And it's not to say the agency should be taking all the accountability, because there are tons of moving parts in retail that could go wrong. Maybe items didn't come from Asia like they were supposed to, and you didn't get enough stock. The weather turned on you. However, start off the meetings with your accountability and where you could have done better, and then say, okay, can we pull dollars from another month and ramp up, or just find a solution — without always going to, let's get more out of the retailer or the client. Because those dollars aren't there, especially if you're missing your numbers. So it's kind of counterintuitive to be asking for more when your numbers are down.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, counterintuitive, but it is certainly the go-to move. I think the trick is always how we align our incentives, and I think it starts with accountability. I want to make sure that we're aligned. It's one team — you have a job to do, I have a job to do. If we do our jobs well together, we will ideally realize a return on investment. And return on investment is maybe an interesting segue to one of the other things I wanted to pick your brain on, and that is AI. You know what that is, AI? I'm sure you've heard of it.
Chris Parsons
My parents said I had artificial intelligence growing up.
Bryan Mahoney
I love that. Bad jokes aside, it is pretty wild — the amount of time that I spend with brands, and on our own platform, just trying to understand what is really the best way to extract not just individual return on investment, but organizational return. How we can be leveraging these tools to do more with less, to align incentives, to demonstrate more accountability. So for someone that has been in retail for so long and across all of these different surfaces, whether on the brand side or now on the agency side, I would be curious about your point of view — your honest take on how AI is affecting the work in performance marketing these days. And maybe some areas where you all at Hale have been able to unlock some ROI, and maybe some places where you thought you could and you didn't, which would be really good advice for folks who are tinkering right now or wondering, is this the right thing to take the plunge towards? How can they learn from some of the things that you've learned across all of these different brands?
Chris Parsons
Yeah, first I have eight chapters on what I call the AI Moment of Discovery. I just wrote that thesis recently, so anyone that wants to take a look at it, please do. I believe we're in a moment of transition — we're actually in it right now — and I don't want people to look back five or ten years from now and miss the moment that we're actually in. If I can take a moment: we had really two other periods before this. There was Procter & Gamble's First Moment of Truth, where you would go to the shelf and discover a product, and that's where you would first see it. Then you had Google's ZMOT, the Zero Moment of Truth, come out. And you would have to code your site differently, tag things, make sure you were stuffing it with keywords to make sure that you showed up.
Bryan Mahoney
Build a bunch of backlinks, shadow pages — things that no one was ever going to see, but all in service of informing the algorithm and trying to show up on the first page.
Chris Parsons
Exactly. And now I think we're in the AI Moment of Discovery, where people are not going direct to your website, and maybe they're not even searching on Google. They're searching through chat agents about experiences, and they might not even look for a jacket. They're just saying, hey, I'm going to do an Alaskan cruise. What should I do? And then it will make a recommendation of all the things you need — new jackets, different hiking boots, et cetera. And if you don't have your content structured properly for the algorithm of an AI agent, you're not going to be discovered. We're living that today. That's one of the big things we talk about. It's so funny — we go in these cycles where content is king, and here it is again, another reason why content is king.
Chris Parsons
So to expand on the question of where we are with AI: I think AI has a branding problem, first of all. It's making people nervous, and they're kind of paralyzed, because they're thinking about how to do it in these big, sloppy moves, and it becomes overwhelming, instead of taking it in bite-size pieces and saying, look, how can we leverage this for our email campaigns? Maybe somebody struggles with writing a new subject line every single week — or three subject lines, because they want to do A/B testing, right? So leverage AI to help you with that part of the process. It could save just an hour a week for an associate. Then you look at it from the standpoint of replenishment. It's really hard to understand the flow of goods in your organization. It usually takes a lot of manual intervention. It usually takes a lot of people saying, okay, this item is driving sales, but because we're selling a lot of this, we sell a lot of this other item as well. And it takes a lot of data to be able to do that, and it's usually by luck that these things are discovered. I had a great example of toothpaste and tuna, where the more tuna we sold, the more toothpaste we sold. I stumbled onto that after months of research. Now you could ask an AI agent to mine your data and find those types of connections easily.
Chris Parsons
So try to find those elements of your business that are more repeatable. I think if you start there, you can then start to automate some of those tasks, and then you can get into the bigger conversations: how does the CRM get impacted by AI? How does a website get impacted by AI, or ERP? But start with some basics first, because I really think the missing component right now is that you have to make sure, if you're going to do something big, that your foundation is right. If you don't go back and make sure that your data is correct — your quantities, your measurements, how your whole process is — then it's going to be garbage in, garbage out. So start off with some of these things that just make the little wins happen in the organization. That's change management. That gets everybody excited about AI.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, there's a lot in there that I want to unpack. First, maybe a slightly contrarian point of view, as someone who's sort of human-first. Maybe it was a slip of the tongue, but you said slop. I'm on an anti-slop mission. I think there's an awful lot of emphasis on AI unlocking these efficiencies, and perhaps it can help us write subject lines — you're absolutely right. One of the things I have seen that gives me an awful lot of encouragement about where we're going with these tools is when really smart operators use them as thought partners, amplifying the work that a human might be able to do. Maybe I'm struggling to write something because I have a bit of writer's block, but I can work through that writer's block by saying, give me five great ideas — but then I'm going to be the art director, the creative director over that final piece. For me it's two things. It taps into how we might use AI to unlock more creativity, because we can overcome these blocks — if it's writing or anything that's creative, I can get there faster. But I think crucially, the piece that perhaps we're missing — and I want you to debate me on this — is that by not fully handing over the wheel and going to this place where there's a rush to become autonomous, I am staying really connected to the output. I'm remaining accountable to the output of some of these assistants. And that is a way for me to police the slop.
Bryan Mahoney
Nothing breaks my heart more than reading copy that I know AI wrote that is soulless, or copy that has just been slopped out onto LinkedIn. That makes me want to run away — not just from using AI, but from the people that feel like that's okay to publish. So I get efficiency. I think that's the path of most immediate ROI. But the part that gets me most excited is how we can become even better brands by leveraging these tools to unlock human potential. That is a lot to unpack — back to you. Am I getting that right? Am I getting that wrong? Do you have to do the first before you can do the second?
Chris Parsons
No, I absolutely agree. So debating you is going to be hard, because I do agree. It's the balance, right? Let's take someone writing an article for LinkedIn. I think it does help overcome the writer's block. You can do a query and say, every Monday morning, give me the top ten trending topics that people are interested in, and now I can go and write towards those topics. But the goal is not to let AI write the whole document about personalization for you. You can have it start an article, but you also want to infuse it with your own stories. That's where the human side of it comes from. Have you made a mistake in personalization? I know I did. We started profiling moms way back when with Walmart, and we were getting their due dates for having a baby. And you don't think about these things when you're in the moment — you're thinking, wow, I'm going to offer so much convenience. But what happens if that mom has a miscarriage, and then you send out a personalized message on their due date saying, congratulations on your newborn? Not that that ever happened, but it could have. So you can't just rely on automation and setting up these triggers and having that AI document go out. I think where we're going is we're going to pay a premium for judgment.
Chris Parsons
Human judgment, and that process, is going to be key, because as a marketer or a retailer these days, you can no longer just be siloed — I know email, I know social. You need to understand the totality of a business: merchandising, operations, logistics, all of it, and then be able to connect the dots. AI will give you a surface level. A lot of times you'll sound tone-deaf, because it's just the same thing that everyone will put out. But having the ability to take that information, transform it, and infuse it with stories of your brand or your experience — that's where I think the secret sauce is going to happen. AI is not there yet. AI can't add that emotion or that passion, or be able to debate things, because first of all, it's just going to reaffirm that you're right on everything you say.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, it's not a debate. That's a really lovely point, and maybe the perfect point to wrap up on: we know we're getting good ROI when we realize the premium to be paid for human judgment, and we leverage the tools the right way — which, done correctly, will ultimately get us closer to our customer and strengthen that brand value proposition, rather than a race to the mean, which will happen if we embrace these tools the way I think some people are, in a rush to just fully automate things. And sometimes there's also this feeling that we're behind — that all my peers have it figured out, but I don't. What's helpful for me in having these conversations is realizing that there's still an awful lot of experimentation, and perhaps automation isn't the goal. Efficiency certainly is, but I think unlocking those premium human moments is what will set the winning brands or agencies apart.
Chris Parsons
Yeah, I agree. And if you look back to the late 1990s or early 2000s, there were a number of retailers getting on board with ecommerce right away, and other retailers felt that they were late. But being late meant that Shopify came out, and instead of building a platform that cost you two million dollars to go to market and reach your customers, you were able to get it for thousands of dollars — and learn from being five or six years slower to adopt those changes. A lot of those companies did some foundational work to get ready for an ecommerce platform. They worked on their content, their data, their measurements; they worked on the quality of their product. So they did some foundational stuff versus just rushing to launch a commerce platform. And I think we're at that stage again. There are companies, gratefully, that have a big budget and can be the ones to go out there and experiment. But I do feel there are plenty of things in AI — a flyer process, for example. Just to mock up a wireframe of a flyer usually takes eight weeks of back and forth picking out the items. That's where I would leverage artificial intelligence: figure out ways to get that process down to a four-week cycle, or a three-week cycle, or a two-week cycle, and really start ramping up. Where I used to spend fifteen hours a week building out a flyer, now I'm down to five. Well, that's fantastic, because now we can really be strategic about what's going into those flyers.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, it's funny — the more things change, the more they stay the same. It's never bad advice to invest in that foundation, it's never bad advice to go slow so that you can go fast, and it's never bad advice to invest in content. We've heard it firsthand from you, someone that has built their career in retail across all of these different surfaces, and that's a great place to wrap us up for today. Chris, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing all of those insights. You've got the gears turning for me for our next conversation. And before I let you go — for the listeners that want to read more about these moments of discovery and your unique point of view on retail, where can we find the book?
Chris Parsons
Yeah, you can find the book at Indigo or Amazon. It's available online at both of those locations. And then you can stay connected to my newsletter, or just connect with me on LinkedIn, and I'd be happy to have longer-term conversations with any of your listeners.
Bryan Mahoney
I've been on your LinkedIn, and there's no AI slop, which I appreciate, so I'll happily endorse it. This has been a blast. Happy early Canada Day, Chris, and thanks again for being such a great guest.
Chris Parsons
Thanks, appreciate it, Bryan.