AI-Powered eCommerce: Charlie Cole on Personalization & Innovation

1. Your career has spanned multiple industries, from startups to global brands. What key moments or challenges shaped your leadership style and approach to driving digital transformation?

This answer is really driven by two different paradigms: failure, and success.

When I was 26 years old I became the head of eCommerce for Lucky Brand Jeans – and I was fairly certain as a successful 26 year old that I was in fact god’s gift to the internet. However, I had never worked with creative people - and like most 26 year olds - I was not nearly as smart as I thought I was. We crushed it from metrics perspective, but culturally I was a fundamental disaster. However, it did teach me how to work with mentally diverse teams.

A few years later, I had the opportunity to work at Schiff Nutrition under a gentleman by the name of Tarang Amin. In one of our first meetings, Tarang, who had been the global head of Clorox and was infinitely more experienced and successful than myself, said: “You don’t know anything about the CPG world, and I don’t know a lot about the digital world. Let’s learn from each other.” Tarang transformed me into the leader I am today, and I am forever grateful to be able to call him a mentor.

The moral of the story: Digital Transformation is all about how you influence and transform a culture as much as it is the 1’s and 0’s of a P+L. If you don’t make the entire company a part of the transformation, you are doomed to fail regardless of immediate financial results.

2. eCommerce is evolving at an unprecedented pace. What are the biggest technological gaps you see today, and how can the industry innovate to bridge them?

For a function that is so technologically enabled, it’s shocking to me how little AI, particularly Generative AI, has influenced the actual shopping experience. Many companies have done things such as AI-driven chatbots in customer service, but very few are actually changing and optimizing how the customer experience adapts. The fact that many shoppers still experience ‘0 Results Found’ when searching for products is an indicator of just how far behind the industry is, because AI solves that problem in an instant. Or let’s look at recommendations. So many brands are using decades old segmentation methodology or content-based filtering to generate recommendations. Yet there are generative AI solutions on the market that understands a shoppers behavior in real-time and make hyper-relevant recommendations. This is the core reason why I joined XGEN — I want to make generative AI a key part of every eCommerce leader’s strategic roadmap.

3. With AI revolutionizing online retail, where do you see the biggest impact in the next five years—personalization, automation, or something entirely new?

The promise of ‘personalization’ has largely been a fallacy in the eCommerce world. The large asterisk besides personalizations is: as long as we have data on what you did in the past. 

Let’s look at shopping recommendations as an example. You go to your Amazon results, and what do you see for recommendations? You need more dog food. More diapers. More chicken strips. Why? It’s what you bought last time, and it has a fairly predictable consumption cycle, so the recommendation algorithm starts to react to your past purchase history.

For true personalization to happen, recommendations need to move away from reacting to a shopper’s historical data to predicting their next move. AI, especially Generative AI, can handle this with ease. The models are continuously learning from real-time user interaction. Every click, hover, and page view is a signal that helps the AI understand a shopper’s preference and predict a future need. 

The real beauty of AI though is that it’s engineered to handle this level of personalization at scale. Every shopper will encounter an experience that is truly unique to them. That’s a game changer for an industry that’s struggled to deliver this to-date.

4. Customer expectations are constantly shifting. How should brands adapt their digital strategies to stay ahead without over-relying on trends?

There is an underlying paradox here that needs to be addressed — customers want two things:

1. Hyper personal shopping experiences
2. To not give up more data than is absolutely necessary

Crafting personal experiences when knowing nothing about a user is hard - so what brands need to do is give customers a REASON to give them data and then deliver on the promise of hyper personal experiences, all while ensuring their security and making them feel safe.

Staying on top of customer expectations isn’t difficult when you make customers the center of what you do as a brand. I’m going to sound like a stuck record here, but GenAI really is the solution for this. Let’s look at the way search is currently deployed. If I want to find something in a brand’s product catalog, I have to input some form of keyword to get a result. If that keyword doesn’t exist in their product feed, I get a ‘0 results found’ message. Maybe I’ll get some recommendations. 

When brands deploy a GenAI search, the results are no longer tied to the data in the product feed. For example, I asked my 6-year old daughter to tell me a “look” she’s always wanted for me to look up in one of our brand’s eCommerce sites. She said (as most 6-year old girls do): I want to look like a unicorn. 

So I typed that into the search bar, and I got dresses that all had elements to them that resembled unicorns. My daughter was beyond thrilled! If you know the brand I’m talking about, you’d know that not a single person on their merchandising team would have thought to put a ‘unicorn’ tag on any of their exquisite dresses. 

The AI model intuitively understood a few fundamental things:

1. It knew what a unicorn was (hello trend of the day)
   
   
2. It knew what products closely aligned to the “look” of a unicorn (glittery, sequenced, colorful, etc.)
   
   
3. It did not need any additional detailed information to deliver the results that delighted my daughter 

When you’ve got a powerful GenAI solution like that in place, you can continually stay ahead of the curve. 

5. AI-driven automation is streamlining everything from inventory management to customer service. What’s the next frontier for AI in eCommerce?

Generative AI. Mic drop.

6. Supply chain disruptions have forced retailers to rethink logistics. What innovations do you believe will define the future of resilient and agile eCommerce supply chains?

Such a hard question because macro things out of our control can throw a wrench into this, but I think that is at the core of what retailers need to think about more and more — flexibility. We have to be able to make, distribute and support our products as location agnostically as possible, and build automated systems to allow for the macro disruptions we can’t control.

7. DTC brands are disrupting traditional retail models. What strategies should legacy retailers adopt to stay competitive in this evolving landscape?

Well, I think true DTC brands have a huge advantage and disadvantage at the same time. The advantage? If you are truly DTC you have a remarkable amount of control.  Control over the narrative, the pricing, the promotions, the product distribution.  However, you are also LIMITED by the fact that you can only market in a direct to consumer way.  

A legacy retailer needs to do everything they can to have that same level of control.  How are you making sure your wholesale partners and driving your narrative?  Featuring the right product? Not discounting you to death?

In a world where the internet has democratized the ability to FIND a product - controlling your brand becomes infinitely more important — and gets more important everyday.

8. With the rise of sustainable shopping and conscious consumerism, how can retailers balance profitability with environmental responsibility?

This is a tricky question.  A number of studies have come out with two factors:

1. Consumers want sustainability/conscious consumption
   
   
2. They won’t pay a significant premium for it

Brands that engage in sustainability as part of a key messaging need to embrace the fact that it is a reason to believe in a brand, not one that consumers in general will pay a massive upcharge for.

9. Charlie, as President and a leader in digital, data, and marketing, what are the key leadership principles that have guided your success in transforming businesses?

1. Build diverse teams — people that think differently and thus allow you to think of the problem differently.
   
   
2. Best idea wins - low ego, metrics driven optimization
   
   
3. Have fun. We are spending 10+ hours a day with each other, we might as well enjoy ourselves.
   
   
4. Winning matters. We are judged on results.
   
   
5. Innovation is a constant as opposed to one-off implementations.
   
   
6. Transparency is a full time job. Be honest with one another - even when it’s hard.

10. Looking ahead, what’s the one eCommerce trend you believe industry leaders can’t afford to ignore in 2025 and beyond?

If you are not utilizing generative AI in your day to day operations - ALL your day to day operations - you are going to fall behind. We have embraced it in a customer service/post sale world - but we haven’t even started thinking about what it can do on the front end of a customer experience, or even as a customer acquisition tool. I truly believe we all need to help solve this problem together and we will make our profession that much farther ahead of everyone else technologically and even more customer centric than it is today.