Felix Hoffmann has been inside Zalando's pricing engine. Now he's building the tools retail brands need to survive the AI.
We talked about what agentic shopping looks like these days, why European platforms are dangerously slow to react, and why asking "how do I use ChatGPT in my company" is completely the wrong question.
In this episode:
- Why 30–50% of online purchases already start with an AI conversation
- The real reason OpenAI paused agentic shopping (hint: Amazon)
- How product decisions — not just pricing — will be shaped by what AI assistants recommend
- Why Zalando is losing to Amazon
- The offline retail impact nobody's talking about yet
- Why predictive pricing beats LLM-based pricing for explainability and trust
- The chess computer analogy: why specialized AI beats general AI for enterprise use cases
- What a €500M investment commitment would actually look like for a European platform to win
Felix is one of the clearest thinkers on what AI actually changes in commerce versus what's just noise.
Timestamps:
00:00 - The Future of AI in Shopping
03:47 - The Role of Discoverability in Retail
06:47 - Personalization and Production in Fashion
10:58 - The Impact of AI on Consumer Behavior
13:59 - 7Learnings: Optimizing Retail Decisions
16:48 - Consumer Readiness for AI Shopping Assistants
19:35 - The Offline Shopping Experience and AI
22:50 - Luxury Brands and AI Integration
27:43 - The New Gatekeepers of Retail
28:57 - The Competitive Landscape of AI in Shopping
31:02 - Opportunities for Independent Brands
32:14 - Navigating Uncertainty in AI Adoption
36:14 - Strategic AI Investments for Retailers
37:56 - The Risks of Inaction in Retail
40:55 - Pricing Strategies in the Age of AI
46:28 - Trust and Explainability in AI Systems
51:07 - The Future of Decision Automation
Felix - https://www.linkedin.com/in/felix-hoffmann-7learnings
7Learnings - https://7learnings.com/
─── sounds good. — a podcast with Anna Nadeina soundsgoodpod.com
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