Brian Anderson ran a Shopify agency where merchants bought expensive recommendation AI but ignored it constantly. He argues AI should inform decisions, not make them. Brands that let algorithms dictate strategy lose what makes them distinct.
When it comes to product recommendations, I remember years ago when I ran a Shopify agency, you know, a lot of our clients at the time were installing product recommendation applications, which were relatively new category back then. And to my surprise, they were certainly spending a lot of money on these product recommendation algorithms. But to my surprise, they all would like to override what the recommendations were. And, you know, maybe it affects the brand experience or, you know, maybe there's some distrust there. That's actually valid. I think someone who is just a data scientist would take the other side of that argument. But to me, I think the AI should be following or a tool for the human to use. And the minute the human is a tool for the AI to use, we have bigger problems in the world. No, I think it's really important. And I think what this comes down to is understanding the brands and understanding how to interpret the data. Just because a report says one thing, going one step deeper and understanding why that report is saying that thing, especially if there's an outlier or something interesting there, it actually is important. And so this is sort of the nuance of being a marketer in 2025. You have to balance these 2 things in a way that probably is still uniquely human. And so I would say that, you know, as an engineer and a data guy myself, I probably was pretty flabbergasted by this. I was. But I think as time went on and I learned about what makes a brand a great brand, I realized that it's the human that makes the decisions behind the brand and the data is used as an input, but not the only input.
