Marco Zappacosta discusses how AI will transform services marketplaces. Natural language search will matter, but rich metadata and real-time inventory connections remain critical. Marketplaces with strong fulfillment capabilities will become more defensible, likely creating fewer, larger winners in each category.
Danny, do you wanna jump on? Sorry, raise your hand.
I guess really curious to hear what do you think the impact is gonna be with all these kind of new AI tools and technologies that are coming out on marketplaces, specifically on kind of service-based marketplaces? Do you have a view there?
So I think on one hand, these experiences will revolutionize or radically change sort of the customer experience of finding, shopping, hiring. I will say I don't believe that's purely a chat-based solution. I think there's incredible richness in these e-commerce, you know, deeply metadata-rich experiences. On the flip side though, the power of sort of natural language as a way to both express your need or refine your need or interact, I'm very bullish on. That said, I think one thing is clear is that these systems will still require last-mile API connections into real-time sort of inventory of various types, right? Like they don't, they're not going to know the stock ticker. Internally, they're going to API into the NASDAQ ticker to have that. Ditto with weather, ditto with hotel prices and airplane prices. Like these are, these are going to exist somewhere else and be exposed via API. And actually in some sense, I think this could be great for us because if we do our jobs right, we can leverage our fulfillment capabilities more broadly. by enabling developers to build us into their solutions and we can fulfill for their customers and not just ours. So I think by and large marketplaces are more defensible because the fulfillment side, that last mile side, I think is the core asset. And I think sort of these technologies don't change that. And if anything, it actually could make them more valuable because I think there's going to be fewer of them and they're going to be kind of like, you know, deeper and bigger and even more category sort of winning. But at the same time, it does probably change what consumers are going to expect and want and what will be the winning experience. And so that'll be a balancing act for folks and us.
