Matt Britton | AI & New Consumer Keynote | Tapesty HQ | August 2025

And I asked 10 years from now, 20 years from now, and then I was like, well, what can I do about it? What am I doing wrong? It's like, well, what do you eat? How much do you, you know? And obviously to stay alive as long as possible, it's just like, don't smoke, don't drink alcohol, eat good, blah, blah, blah. But the specificity of this was incredible. And ever since then, every time I feel something's off, I go to that first. If I have a doctor's appointment, let's say an allergist, I asked it to create a personal health dossier for me. And I print it out and I send it to my allergist before the meeting so they know everything that there is to know. There is no engineers behind it, and it is incredibly impactful. And I started to think, okay, well, what other data and what other problems do I want to solve? Well, I don't want to go broke, right? So maybe I should create one for finance. Take all my finance information, take all my spending information, and now I have a finance bottom. Oh, I have to manage a lot of stuff with my kids and school schedules, and I have trust in the States, a family one. And so I have basically now these agents or assistants that are actually more connected to each other. And anytime I need to know anything about myself and what I need to unlock, I go to it for that. And it makes my life so much easier. Now I start to add agentic functions to it. What does that mean? Well, now it can actually just email that health dossier to my allergist for me. It could actually email my allergist for me. If I say six months from now, set up this appointment, it'll send the email out in six months. So everyone's saying, well, what does agents mean? And we'll get into it. That's what it means. But ultimately, the lesson I took away from my business, and we'll talk about the applications I'm doing now in the business front in a little bit, was it all starts with a problem that you need to solve. The reason that so many people, I think, have a hard time with AI is just. It's overwhelming. And everyone wants to play around with tools and see what everything does. And you're going an inch deep and a mile wide. Well, you really need to go an inch wide and a mile deep. And that means starting with a problem. So what I would challenge everyone in this room to do is figure out a problem. And the reality is, at most companies, and I've spoken in front of the biggest tech companies in the world. And even people who work at those companies are not able to use AI in an unencumbered fashion in the workforce. Because the reality is it's not like you guys can download any tool you want here and upload customer data. We get your hands on keyboard and learn AI in the workplace, I think it's actually nearly impossible. I think the game the play is figure out how to apply it in your personal life where you don't have legal and IT and data privacy getting in your way. And you can build something like a healthbot. Because going through that motion and figuring out identifying the problem is getting your arms around structuring the data, understanding what a solution is, and actually building the solution. Once you do that once, the world just looks different to you right now. The question I always get when I say is, well, how do I know how to build any of these things? Just go and chatgpt and say, I want to build a solution that helps me stay alive for as long as possible. Give me. If you just listen to it and you just don't stop by step 57, you're going to be like, oh my God, I can't believe I built this. And people are going to think you're a genius. When the reality is you just had perseverance and you just had focus and that's really all it takes. There's such a misconception right now that you need to be a tech whiz kid, that if you send out an invoice, there's a chance you just don't get paid. They don't teach you that during college. And that's ultimately what ended up happening. So I begged and pleaded and I got a company to, quote, unquote, buy us out of New York called Allaway. And they didn't really buy us. They just assumed my debt allowed me to pay back my dad. And I got a little bit of a signing bonus, which I put towards the first couple months rent of an apartment actually here in Herald Square, Herald Towers, of all places, on 34th and 6th. And I had no money in my bank account. I was not going to ask my parents for any more money. I literally had nothing except a jar of change. And I took the jar of change and I went to this coin place and I put it in and it gave me like $12 back. And on 28th and Broadway I had just enough to eat at McDonald's that night. And meanwhile, all my friends thought I was a millionaire, right? And I was Sitting there on a freezing cold night at 6pm on 28th and Broadway, just struggling just to even have McDonald's right. But to me, it was like a great moment for me. It was like a punch in the face. I think so many people need and I see the younger generation today where we are in the Internet age and everyone's on Instagram, seeing everyone else quote, unquote, killing it and doing amazing and lacking that patience. But even more so, we're in a world right now where people are not able to fail in private. I failed in private. I didn't have to worry about people commenting on that post on Instagram after maybe word got out that I didn't do as well as people thought. And I think that was a great thing during my upbringing. And I think the pressure that young people have today in a world of social media where they're pressured to do so much, they see this outside world, which is obviously everyone's highlight re changes their ability to have patience over time, changes their ability to kind of go with the flow. And I also think a lot of the parenting styles right now actually don't even allow kids to skin their knees and actually have those hits along the way. And there's a bunch of lessons from that time period. A, it was a boom period which allowed me to take my business from 0 to 5 million. There was no Internet and then Internet, Right. And if I played it a little bit differently, maybe I would still be running that business today. Right. But there's a lot of things I didn't know. And there was a bust period because everything got overhyped and overinflated. But it was a period of change and it was a period of tremendous opportunity. And now here we are 25 years later and I see a lot of the same things happening again. I remember a couple years later when I started my second agency, which was a lot more successful than the first one. It ended up becoming a company called MRY, which got acquired by Publicis Group in 2003. I was in the offices of Hershey Company pitching them to to do a big digital content project. And they said we would never scoop to the level of advertising on people's computers. That's what the CMO of Hershey told me in 2003. So again, there are naysayers now about all the changes that are happening. So the digital revolution that happened between 1999 and 2002, that crazy period we are in all over again. I'm a lot older, but I would argue a lot wiser. Now, and I'm seeing these changes happening, but I can tell you, I've never been so excited about the promise that this era currently holds. But I think that the highs and lows are going to be even further apart. I think the upside that AI is going to create is going to be greater than so many of us realize. But so is the downside, so is the risk. So probably the number one thing driving me in my career right now is helping people. Future proof, future proof for the new age that's coming. Because no matter how old you are or where you're focused in your career, you really need to think about how you reinvent yourself, because everything we know as success and value in business is different. And I'm going to walk you through why and how. Today, my presentation's called A to Z. I go through every single letter of the Alphabet, and I correlate every letter of the Alphabet to a trend that's going on in business, culture, society, and why it matters to all of you. So I go through 26 letters. I go through it pretty quickly. We do have time for Q and A at the end, so you can hold your questions. And everyone's going to get a copy of this presentation. So you're welcome to take pictures of the slides, but you'll all get a copy of it as well. So we're going to dive in. And thanks all for coming and thanks for Tapestry for having me today. I'm really excited. So let's get started. So A is obviously AI. Duh. And during my day job, I run a software company called Suzy that actually does some work with your organization and does consumer research for leading brands. And when ChatGPT first came to the mainstream, a lot of people say, oh, AI has been around for a very long time. That may be the case. But it wasn't until ChatGPT came along that it really got commercialized to the mainstream, where I would say in the last month, I probably had 20 news interviews on national and local news stations talking about AI's impact on education, on parenting, on travel, on shopping, et cetera. It is now part of all of our lives. So while it has been around for a long time, it wasn't really part of society until a couple years ago. And when that happened, my first inclination with new technology is to give AI to my R and D team, to say, figure out how you can use AI for our software company, Suzy. And I gave it to them and I met with them and I waited and I waited and I waited and nothing was really happening. And the deeper I dug I realized that this is unlike any technology we've seen in the past because in many ways it's forcing us to kind of rethink humans relationship with technology. It's a completely different realm of societal evolution than let's say mobile, right, or social media. And because of that, I don't really think my R and D and engineering team even knew where to start. So I made the decision to bring it back to myself to figure out. And I think that's one mistake a lot of companies are making right now is they're just pushing AI to their R and D team to figure out where. I believe the leadership of companies really need to figure it out. So I made the decision, I'm going to figure out AI on my own, really understand what's capable and then after that I'll have a much more strategic lens in terms of how to deploy it for my business. And I made the decision to actually figure it out to solve a personal problem before a business problem. So I just turned 50, I have two young children. The problem I want to solve in my life is I want to stay alive as long as possible. So I made the decision that I'm going to create a solution that's going to keep me alive as long as possible. And I want to see how AI could help me. And I started to do a lot of research and I learned the biggest power of AI is decoding data and obviously uncovering insights that can help you make better decisions to get to whatever outcome you want to. In this case, me not dying, right. So I knew that data was at the core of what I had to build in AI. So I went through 25 years of past medical history. I've lived a relatively healthy life, but I've had doctor's appointments and blood tests and MRIs and X rays and I basically searched through Gmail, I went through external hard drive and I organized it and got my arms around as much health information about me and my body as possible. I even exported information from my Apple Watch, I exported information from my wifi scale that I had over time and I started to organize it. So I had blood test PDF and it was all my blood tests and I had X ray PDF. So I basically made sure it was organized. And then I started to create essentially my own personal healthbot and I trained it to act like a leading doctor from Johns Hopkins University with one job, to keep Matt Britton alive. And I optimized it over time and I started to play around with it and the first real question I asked it was, if I'm going to die in five years, what is the most likely cause? And it gave me an answer and it freaked me out. Right, because if you go on WebMD, there's one path we're all gonna die, right? That's what happens. That doom scrolling. But this actually knew everything about me and it was very contextual and it actually gave me reasons why, statistical reasons why if I was gonna die in five years, that was the most likely cause. And it wasn't what I thought it was the to understand AI. But the reality is my mom, who lives in Florida, probably was calling me three times a week on how to reset her Netflix password. And I created something for her that's trained on all of her appliances, her TV and everything. And I begged her to go to this first and ask me questions before she goes to me. She calls me a lot less now. Doesn't mean I don't want to hear from her, but not necessarily about Netflix. So point is, you don't need to be technically proficient either. You just need to be curious, you just need to have perseverance. You just need to focus and you can get it done. And that's why I think we're in such an exciting time right now. The other A is for Gen Alpha. I kind of cheated here with two A's. Gen Alpha is currently age 0 to 15. And I wrote my book Generation AI on basically the convergence of Gen Alpha and the world of AI. But the fascinating things about kids who are 0 to 15, ironically, babies who are born next year aren't even part of Gen Alpha anymore. They're part of Gen Beta, which is kind of crazy to think about. They're the first generation, the only generation that will know no other world but a world with AI. And if you think about what that's going to do to their brains, just like how there are millennials who were the first generation to grow up with the Internet and they walked in, they're like, well, why do you have these holes on the side of your printing paper? Why are you still doing things this way? And they change the world. This generation is going to expect to be interacting with your business in a completely different way than prior generations, because they're just going to know no other world than a world where you can interact with technology like you do with a human. And that's just like a fascinating thing to think about. And we're not, we're, you know, six, seven years away from Gen Alpha. The oldest cohort of Gen Alpha actually coming into the workforce. And then I think you're really going to start to see dramatic changes. B stands for the barbell economy. And I think we're going to see this more and more in the age of AI, which is there were really two opportunities in business right now. It's people who actually go deep into luxury or people who go deep into value. But I think if you're in the middle, if you sell $100 jeans like just say the Gap does, there's not really a big market anymore. But if you sell $20 jeans at Walmart, there is almost like a limitless customer base in this world of rising costs and I think increasing job loss. And if you sell 250 or $300 jeans at a boutique down in Soho, you're going to have a growing market because of the wealth disparity that's being created through AI. And that's what the barbell looks like. Big opportunity on luxury, big opportunity in value, but not in the middle. And you're starting to see this play out in almost every category, whether it's automotive or airlines or retail or hotels and travel and hospitality. Online hotels can get away with charging $5,000 a night during Christmas period. Like prices you wouldn't believe. Who can afford it? Well, it's all these people who just got $50 million from stock at OpenAI. There is a tremendous boom of wealth right now that's occurring on the luxury side. But there's also a lot of people that are really struggling. And I think this wealth disparity, for better or worse, it's actually obviously for worse for the people who are on the wrong side of it, is going to continue over time. Because what I think AI is going to do is it's going to take the people who understand the power of it and 10x their income and the people who are on the outside looking in, it's going to automate them out of work. And I just think it's going to happen. And my goal is to make sure no one I'm talking to in any room I go to all around the world is part of that. But it's going to happen. And you're going to start to see businesses that pick a lane going to be the ones that are really thriving moving forward. And there's so much data that continues to support it. C stands for coding. One of the most tried and true ways to actually be successful around the world was understanding the language of code, understanding how to be an engineer, going to Stanford Learning how to write this computer language that humans can't understand, but computers can. And as it turns out, technology is much better at writing code computer language than humans are. Humans are much better at human language. I would argue that a great writer will blow away AI writing, and it'll probably always be that case. Right? But I would argue that a good AI model over time will write code far better than a human can. And you're starting to see this play out. This is software development, job postings in the United States for code jobs. And kind of the data speaks for itself right now. This is only one of many jobs out there that have thrived in the past, through the digital era, on what was called the knowledge economy. If you knew information like how to write a contract or how to read an X ray or how to write code, that was a specialized knowledge that if you could retain and apply in the form of a career, it was very lucrative. But being knowledgeable about a topic, I think is becoming more and more commoditized right now. Instead, it is about critical thinking, it is about problem solving, it is about creativity. It's those soft skills that are becoming even more important, which I'll get into more today. But this means a lot for companies like my company, Suzy, which has raised $120 million in venture capital, mostly to hire engineers to build a tool. And now we have competitors coming out of college that are building a tool that's nearly as good with two people in three months, because they don't need to to do all this. And that's how fast things are changing. So one thing that's good about this is it is kind of lowering the bar or leveling the playing field, if you will, for anybody to be able to create technology. There's a big real estate influencer here in New York named Ryan Sirhan, who you might know about, who launched a real estate software company called Sell It. This technology can be replicated and is replicated in thousands of other companies, but his company is successful. Why? Because of him. He's the distribution. I think in a world where there's no barrier to entry to create technology, the differentiation becomes brand and IP value. The same way we saw with CPG with Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner and George Clooney with Casamigos and people who come out Dr. Dre with beats. We saw that happen with CPG over time where the celebrity was a differentiator. And now I think we're going to start to see it with technology because there's no Longer that barrier to entry to have to raise a lot of capital to be able to create technology. So in a world where everyone can access it, the differentiation is brand. And brand isn't just people brands like your brands. And I think it creates a big opportunity there as well. D stands for data. So I talked about data and how my health data was so valuable at building a solution for me and AI. Well, data is almost like the secret ingredient. There's one restaurant here that makes the best burger and one that no one cares to go to. And the difference is the ingredients, right? And everybody has the meat and everyone has the bun, but it's everything else in that ingredient that makes one restaurant's burger different than the other. Well, that's kind of like the way I look at data is. Data is the ingredients in the AI dish that you serve. And if you can sprinkle in the right types of data into. Now, everybody has access to what ChatGPT has, which is essentially the open web. But there's lots of sources of data that aren't in the frontier large language models. For example, I have another friend who is one of my closest friends who runs a big real estate brokerage here in New York. And he was telling me how his brokers have a hard time finding information for potential tenants. And I identified for him something called NYC Open Data, which is an open API published by New York, which essentially has to visualize it for you hundreds of spreadsheets that have millions of lines each of data that continually gets published. So it could be air quality by city block, crime or traffic by city block, or every single time a home gets sold or a new building permit gets issued, it's all published by this NYC Open Data API. But this data's always been there. But no one's going to go through a million line spreadsheet to identify the data. But if you connect this to AI and their API now you have access to all of it. Or for brokers on a street corner and in Queens and the tenant wants to know if there's new building permits being open because they don't want to live next to a construction area, they can find out instantly. And there are instances like this that exist everywhere right now. There's census data, there's municipal data that is out there, there's data that's published on business and consumers and demographics that aren't read by the large language models. But if you can actually tap into these APIs, and of course sometimes you, you have to pay for it as well, because data is becoming more valuable than ever. That's how you can start to differentiate. Because in a world where we all can access these large language models, the differentiation is data. E stands for education. For a long time we went through a world of, in the height of the knowledge economy, memorization and regurgitation. When I was in college, I was a terrible student. But the night before, I would memorize as much information and drink as much Red Bull as I can. And next morning I would regurgitate the Red Bull any information. And I would never remember either of those things again. But I was playing the game because that's what it was about, retaining knowledge and spitting it back out. But in the world where you have any knowledge in any context you want, instantly, those are skill sets that aren't really going to be able to help inform tomorrow's leaders. And one of the big issues that's happening I think right now in America is I spoke last year in front of 700 professors for a company called Pearson and they're saying, well, we are teaching kids with textbooks for, by the way, up to $90,000 a year for college tuition that were written before ChatGPT ever came out. It's literally now like prehistoric learning. And how are these students who are getting into debt supposed to learn how to thrive in tomorrow's world if they're being taught by teachers? They don't even really understand it. And the rate of change we're seeing with AI, which is doubling in power and potency every seven months, really raises a lot of question in that regard. F stands for family matters, which is really an interesting kind of consumer trend I have my eye on, which is the average age of first time mothers has now surpassed 30 in the US for the first time ever. Which means that people are starting families later in life, which means they're popping bottles of champagne longer and popping bottles of baby milk less, which means they are ordering in for longer, they're staying in cities for longer, they're shopping for clothes for themselves instead of their kids for longer. Which means the age of the single American that has more discretionary expenditures, that don't have to worry about taking care of kids yet is extending. And I think that's a big thing for brands to actually think about because when you see a shift like this, 1975, the average age of first time mother was 21. Now it's 50% longer of a lifespan. And this doesn't feel like it's changing anytime soon. Obviously biology at some point is going to have to make it stop. But there's more two income households again, more people that are staying in cities for longer and I do think is a big driver of the changing consumer, especially here in America. G stands for Google. How many people in the last 30 days have used ChatGPT or Claude or another LLM for a query instead of something you used to use for Google? Wow, right? So that's about 50, 60%. If I asked this a year ago, it'd probably be 20%. Yesterday I was in that agency in Minneapolis, it was probably 80, 85% of people that raised their hand. This is a big deal. Think about how many times in the customer journey people are frowning about your brands through Google, through SEO, through paid search. The big term right now is geo, which basically optimization for AI models. I've done a lot of research on this and what I've learned is generally speaking, if you want to optimize to have ChatGPT recommend your brand, it's generally the same thing. You have to have great content on the Internet because that's what gets crawled. But the specificity of that content matters. So for example, in ChatGPT someone's going to be having a discussion saying, and the model's going to know that somebody's child is seven years old. And if they're searching, someone says I'm searching for a pickleball racket for my son. ChatGPT knows that your son is 7 years old and it's going to search for content of a blog article saying what it really wants to find is best pickleball racket for seven year old boy. And if it finds that, that's what it's going to push out. So it's not just best pickleball racket for kids. So if you actually extrapolate that towards the content you create, the specificity in content is what large language models are looking for because they have specificity and context. And I think that's how you optimize moving forward. So it's a little bit of a different game moving forward. And next year 100 people are going to be raising your hands. Now obviously Google's not sitting on its hands either. They have an incredible Gemini model, but the traditional search engine and the blue links. 10, 15 years from now, we're going to look at it like we look at a rotary phone today in terms of how we actually get information. H stands for housing. We saw what happened politically here in New York where we had a far left leaning leader that is likely to get elected as mayor. And I think what you're seeing here is really reflective of it, is that in many developed nations around the world, especially in cities like New York, people, younger people are being pushed out of the housing market. They actually can't afford it. They cannot afford to buy a home. That American dream of moving to the suburbs and buying a, a house with a two car garage and two and a half children and the white picket fence that's really no longer. And it's making people rethink how they plan their financial lives, how they spend, et cetera, which by the way is probably very closely connected to why people are starting families later in life. And you think about how much money people spend on housing when they buy a home, that's obviously really shifting as well, and it's ultimately changing the demographic profile. We had a big urbanization boom pre Covid where everybody wanted to live in cities where, which is why incredible places like Hudson Yards were created. And then all of a sudden everybody wanted to move out. And we saw booming secondary and tertiary markets like Charlotte and Austin and Boulder, Colorado really explode. But then Jamie Dimon says, sorry everybody, you gotta come back to work. Right? And now you have this return to office push. And now all of a sudden New York City's booming again and a lot of people were calling for the death of New York City. I actually never believed it, but, but that does mean that I think the urbanization boom is going to restart again. I believe we thought that we were all going to be zooming right now and it looks like there are 120 people on Zoom. So it has impacted the world. But I can tell you every hotel in New York City is full even in August. And I think that's reflective of the urbanization trend having a stock reversal here. I stands for influencers. And I think it's fascinating to think about the first time I was getting older, but for the first time ever this year, the average age of the first time mother is actually somebody who grew up with the iPhone in the household. Gen Z and I work with so many big brands and what I see them still doing is so many of them, when they're planning their media, they're looking at traditional media TV out of home, and at the end they're thinking about creators and influencers. But the reality is the CFO of the household, the people who are making buying decisions, the people who have discretionary expenditures, grew up consuming content like this on their phones. I dropped my daughter off at college. I have older kids and younger kids. That's a different keynote. But those kids don't bring TVs into college anymore. When I went to college, everyone had TVs. They are looking at their phones and when they're looking at their phones, they're looking at content from other people. That's where creators actually come in. We are being driven in our influence and our decisions by other people. We are no longer being driven by traditional media. Maybe some of us in the room are, but if you're looking at the new consumer that's coming in, it's really that simple. So I actually think the planning process should be reversed. Who are the people that are capturing the attention of your consumers? And start with that at the beginning of your Champagne Tower and then think about mass media because those people are not consuming it that way. And the world of influencers has changed because of AI. AI allows you to create content unlike ever before. And now you actually don't need to be somebody who's charismatic on camera to actually have influence. There's a wave right now of virtual influencers. People are essentially creating avatars of people that are almost indistinguishable, that are gaining big followings. And there's also a huge rise in text to video tools which actually allow you to create incredible creative without even being a designer, just by having big ideas. So I actually did this on the plane last night for your brand, Kate Spade. I'm going to show you a 30 second video of my vision of what I thought the Kate Spade brand is and actually brought it to life through some graphics through a tool called Google V03. And now I'm going to show this to you. This probably took me about 11 minutes to create. So 11 minutes to create that one person. How much would an agency have charged you to create that three years ago? 1000-003000-00500,000? A million? If I spent an extra two hours on this, you guys weren't paying me enough to actually spend an extra two hours on it. But if you did, it would actually be an amazing 30 second spot that would probably be indistinguishable. That's fascinating to think about. And I think when I get asked a lot about what do I need to focus on? What should I teach my kids? Where do I focus? It really is about ideas. I often give the analogy of photography, where in the past, if you want to be a good photographer at first you need to know how to develop film and then you need to know how to use these cameras, know about ISO and F stop and all these knobs and dials. But now the best Photographers are just ones who know where to point the camera to. And the camera is the phone. Right. Because all the technology is now below the hood. And I think that's really where we're going to be heading with most things where I don't need to know Photoshop, I don't need to know graphic rendering or any of these things. I. I just need to have the idea. And yes, I do have some prompting skills and understanding how to actually structure a very sophisticated prompt to get something like that done. But the kind of technical skill set the bar is lowering, and it actually really does empower those with ideas a lot more. J stands for job loss. I'm going to kind of skip through these pretty quickly now, but job loss is a big thing. I believe that the stars in business are going to be able to 10x their output. And I think if you're an extra on the movie set or an extra in business, you're going to have a tough time. Because any job that's deterministic, that is waiting to be told what to do when you walk in every day, is at risk of automation. I think that we're starting to see it. Microsoft has cut about 25,000 people this year. And they say the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. But where it is distributed is with big tech. It is with Amazon and Microsoft and, you know, and Meta and these big companies. And what they're saying is that they can use AI to automate and cut costs. And I think you're going to start to see a lot of it. And I think the people at the same time that really dive in, that understand how this works, are going to be more valuable than ever before. And that's just the reality of what we're facing. It is going to be a downside of AI. And I agree with, you know, Dario Modi from Anthropic said we need to stop sugarcoating what's coming. I think it's coming and it's not a good thing. But there's nothing we can do about it because it's here. We're not going backwards. AI is going to. You are all going to be raising your hands next year to use AI to actually find something. And for that reason is the reason that every company is also going to be using AI to optimize their operations. And I believe that's where we're going to be going moving forward. And what are people looking for? This is a study that was done by Deloitte. The Things in the Light Green are things that companies want less of. The things in the dark. Green is actually one they want more of. So what do we want less of? Data analysis, prompt engineering, research, coding, application development. That's manual content creation. What do they want more of? Critical thinking, creativity. Right. These soft skills, resilience. Things that aren't really starting schools right now. But companies know they need for people to be able to adapt moving forward. L stands for live Commerce was huge in China. Coming here, you look at the growth in TikTok shop searches. There's a platform called whatnot that's doing billions of dollars a month right now in sales. The culmination of influencers and live content and shopping is here to stay. We saw what happened with qvc. This is the modern day qvc. But it's an area that I would definitely look at because it's the greatest way to kind of connect content to commerce, if you will, and really drive volume with this growing consumer set that knows nothing else but consuming content on their phone. M stands for mobile commerce. Shocking statistic in terms of the amount of commerce it's done right now on mobile devices versus desktop. So many companies are building for desktop right now. We live in a mobile first world. And this blue bar is only going to continue to grow in a differentiated way from the orange bar. M stands for music. I had a little bit of fun with this. Music is obviously such a big part of culture, it's such a big part of fashion, et cetera. And there are incredible tools out there right now that allow you to actually create music via AI. I actually created a song for you guys last night before I went to bed because that's what I do. That's how exciting my life is. This probably took me nine minutes to create. And it's essentially a song about me speaking right now in Hudson Yards in August to all of you. And I turn it into a music video just to show you what's possible with music and AI. Spotlight shining New York skyline We're gathered in the future and the Morris mine that brains and digital streams brand new playbooks AI in the scenes we're not just watching. Oh. So how much would it cost to create that song, create the music video? I mean, that's fascinating. Now some could say, oh yeah, they said tapestry versus Tapestry. It was very hard for me to get close enough. But today's the worst it's ever gonna be. Where's the thing gonna be seven months from now where this music creation tool is twice as good, where the videos are twice as Good. What does that do to actually empower the creative? What does it mean for being able to create a song for your wife for Valentine's Day or somebody who you just pissed off or for every product launch that you have? What does it mean for companies that make livings off of creating music, musical beds for movies and commercials, et cetera? This technology is incredible and I'm going to send out the link to the tool I use for this. But I always have fun with this because I show this to people and they look at me like I'm Steve Jobs when I create this. But I just took the time to actually learn it and it took me 11 minutes to create. It's moving so fast. But if you stay on top of it, you really start to see things again very, very differently. So it really is about the new creativity. Just some other big trends, obviously. Ozempic is a huge trend. GLP1s are impacting consumers. We're already starting to see our company, Suzy works with all the largest food and beverage companies. Not having a good year, guys. You know who the companies are. And companies that sell sugary and salty snacks are getting crushed at the same time. The mid market has all these emerging companies. You know, we saw that Poppy got acquired by Coca Cola, there's Alipop, you know those are kind of sugar free or very low sugar sodas and it's happening in every snack category, etc. What this means is that when people lose weight and they feel better about themselves, they spend money, more money on fashion and less money on food and they spend more money on travel and leisure, etc. I do think it creates tailwinds for any business that's in the fashion space because when people feel good, they want to look good. So I think actually this has a trickle down impact on so many different categories and saying I think off and about PSANs or personalization, your ability right now. We've been talking about this forever, but now it's actually here. At the end of this I'm going to share a link for an AI agent I've created so all of you can interact with me and all the content that I talked about today. And after you enter your email address, you're going to see it's going to know everything about you because it's going to go to LinkedIn, it's going to look at LinkedIn, it's going to see who you are, what your title is and what you've posted about and it's going to talk to you differently. That's Personalization, but that can actually also be applied to email, could be applied to anything. The ability for AI to instantly scrape information about you that exists and then hyper personalize what it says to you is fascinating. It wasn't here in the past and it's here now. Q stands for quantified self. The same way that I wanted to take my health data and really be able to get a picture of my health, people are doing with their health nonstop. There's Apple Watch, there's the Whoop Band. There's so many different technologies because in the past everyone had data about their bodies, but they couldn't really do anything about it. But now with AI, it can tell you a story and we're gonna see a continued growth of this. Especially when you look at the trends of Post Covid health focus and GLP1s, where I think quantified self and the ability for people to look at data in this longevity push we're seeing right now is gonna be a huge trend in the years ahead. R stands for rayba Meta. And this is a product that we was built out of, a collaboration between Meta, which obviously is behind Facebook and Instagram, and Luxottica, which owns the Ray Ban brand. And Meta actually just invested. I think now they own 10% of Luxottica. We do some work with Meta Reality Labs and I was fortunate enough to get a couple of these products and I can tell you that I believe it's the future of what is the iPhone today. I think we're going to look back at times when everyone's holding up their phones at their kids soccer games or at a concert, almost at a Coldplay concert, which is obviously everyone's out for that. But what this is going to do as a next generation device is it already allows you to talk into it. It has incredible speakers. And the next version is going to have a mixed reality where I can look around and say, how much is that Hudson Yards apartment that I can't afford? And it'll say how much it costs. Or I could look at a food item in a supermarket. It's going to tell me the nutritional components of that. It's going to essentially give you a data layer to your world or show you directions or allow you to read your text while you're walking down the street so you don't have to pull your phone out. And I think if you think about a world where if you wear glasses, it gives you the sound, it already has cameras on it so you can take pictures, you can see the cameras and allows you to talk into it. That basically is everything that the iPhone does, and we just don't have to take it out of our pocket. If you combine that with AI and the personalization, you have the beginnings of what I think is a new revolution. And devices, we've all seen the iPhones kind of hit a wall. Every new iPhone device just is a little bit thinner, has a little bit better battery and camera, but they've had it kind of hit the innovation wall. The market is starving for the next evolution in personal devices. And actually it might not be this exact brand, but I think this is kind of the beginning of a change in the way that humans interact with their own devices. S stands for shopping with agents. I think people are underestimating the same way that you're going to ChatGPT to search for things. This technology is going to be such where people are going to be going to AI agents to buy things. This is a video actually from Visa, their intelligent commerce platform they just launched where basically it knows you. You have personalization, you ask it to find things for you. I question what this means for a company like Amazon, where ultimately, if it knows who you are, if it knows your clothing size, it actually might go source it from the manufacturer directly. So Amazon is the middle layer and a curation layer. You know, Amazon's not going away tomorrow, Google's not going away tomorrow. Right. But there was a time when we never thought AOL would go away either. Right. And we see what happens to these companies when innovation comes. Yesterday, a platform called Perplexity, which is a great AI tool, announced a partnership with OpenTable, where it'll book restaurant reservations for you, and it'll even have an AI kind of moderated person to call the restaurants and book restaurants. So you no longer have to search through these dashboard interfaces. And I think dashboard interfaces are going to go away. I think we're going to be interacting with technology like we interact with other people, talking in our language, and then the AI will translate what that means versus knobs and dials and doing searches. The way that we search for travel or search for restaurant reservations or clothing in a particular size. We're just going to be interacting with it the way that you'd interact with an actual store associate. T stands for the tiktokification of media. And what I mean by that is that right now the way media has changed is it really doesn't matter how many followers you have. It's a pure meritocracy. Both Meta, with its incredible product, Instagram reels that they rolled out and the TikTok platform and YouTube shorts. These platforms now don't really care how many followers you have. They care about the engagement of the content that you have. And a lot of people are still buying paid media on bad creative when the reality is if it takes off, you know that it's gonna take off in paid media, but it has to be really good. So there are so many examples right now of people who have very little followers and don't have a following, but having one piece of incredible content and millions and millions and millions of people see it, that was not the case in the past. In the past it was, if you had followers, you had a big distribution and those people become more valuable. It's not about people who can build a following. It's about people who can create great content. U stands for upscaling and I talked about this a lot. The upscaling need is here. I think the further you are in your career, the harder it is to upskill or in many senses reskill. But retraining your brain under the premise that the knowledge economy is ending, I think is a big deal. And leaning into your ability to be a critical thinker and to be creative and come up with ideas, I think is incredibly important. Being a storyteller, knowing how to communicate, that's what companies are going to be looking for. That's what I'm looking for as an employee. I look at my company, there's so many people that are doing things where I'd rather have people that are much more creative, that can actually move the ball forward than people who are just doing deterministic things every day. I think that's what most employers are looking at right now with all these changes. V stands for voice. So my software company Suzy, launched a product called Suzy Speaks, which basically is under the premise that people don't want to fill out a 20 question survey about catch up anymore. People hate surveys, especially younger consumers. But what they will do is have a conversation about anything. In the past that's called qualitative research. That was very hard to execute because you had to hire a moderator. That moderator had to schedule time with the end respondent. What Suzy Speaks is, is an AI powered moderator. You talk to somebody or some being that sounds exactly like a person. And at first we thought it's weird, no one's going to do it. People are spending 25, 30 minutes talking to an AI moderator, pouring their hearts out about things and they're willing to talk to it. And you don't have this especially in like health related issues where people might not want to say what's really going on with them. They don't have that with AI moderators. Voice is here. We've had a lot of struggles with Voice with Alexa and Siri over time, but now it's 99.99% accurate. One thing I do on long car rides is I have a two hour conversation with ChatGPT about the week ahead and it sounds weird. Try it. It transcribes everything you say. It's a great way to kind of click clear your head and if you tell it how you want it to act, it'll really help you prioritize and list things where if you talk to somebody, a friend, they don't really care about your life, they care about their life. Right. So that's not going to happen. But Voice is there and where it's a motive and understanding capability is incredible right now and of course only getting better over time. Wrapping up here W stands for wallet. I think we are in for a major consumer downturn ahead. What you see on the left here is the personal savings rate of Americans relative to their income. It's at an all time low. Credit card debt is at an all time high. If you go into Google Trends and you search for search queries for personal loans, it is now up 300% year over year. What happens when people run out of savings? They put money on their credit cards. What happens when they max out their credit cards? They get a personal loan. It's starting to happen here and I think we're in for a downturn. I think we've been saying it for a very long time, but I think with the job loss, with what's happening, with rising costs I do think are coming as a result of tariffs. I just think we're going to Right now the stock market's at an all time high and it doesn't add up. It's impossible to time it from an investor standpoint. But the data is kind of now there are some people that are going to continue to be able to spend $5,000 a night or stay at the Equinox Hotel right over here. But a lot of people aren't. And this is, I think what's really reflected in the data. X stands for the experience economy. Experiences are bigger than ever before. We saw the incredible numbers from Taylor Swift's tour last year. People. There's a revival of the experience economy right now coming out of COVID like we've never seen before in terms of the push and if you talk to companies that sell soda or beer, they'll tell you their fastest growing channel by far isn't Walmart or Target. It is Live Nation venues. It's people going out. People are really diving into the experience economy like never before. YouTube again is the new TV. People are not bringing TV. This is not new news, but it just continues to grow in terms of its power. Flicking through TV stations is just not the way that new consumers are going to act anymore. Everyone is cutting the cord. People aren't even know what is on what TV show. And if you want to reach people at scale, YouTube was for that, of course. Z is Gen Z. Gen Z is now becoming the CFO of the household. Gen Z grew up on their phones. If you want to reach them is on their phones. That's kind of where it's at. So that's my A to Z. If you want a copy of the presentation, you can scan the QR code. You'll get an email to access my personal AI agent. I like to walk the walk. So you guys will be able to talk to it, ask it any topic I spoke about during the presentation. If you want to access the deck or anything, you can do that. If you're not able to catch it, I'll make sure we send it out as well as everybody. And that's what I have. So I think we're going to do some Q and A now. Cool.