Season 3 Ep 9 The Struggle Bus - Paula sees AI as history in the making

Welcome to the Struggle Bus. I am Vinny O'Brien, or as my friends love to call me, hey you in the bushes. Today I am with, uh, Paula McAdie, who is commerce royalty, I must say. Paula is the host of the Off Bands podcast, the number one podcast for e-commerce— or commerce leaders, I should say. Over 120 episodes, 30 countries, 6 continents. Paula, where do you get the energy?

Uh, honestly, I'm also looking for that answer. I don't know. Uh, I just like think I, I just love meeting people and that drives my energy, I guess.

I think it's really important to highlight to people as well that you're Brazilian. We're in the middle of a World Cup. I just want to understand, what does it feel like to be a Brazilian person Living in New York right now, going through the World Cup that is like being hosted there as well?

Uh, it's like going home at home. I don't know if that makes sense. It's just like both of my lovely places to be are converged, they're combined here in one place. So it feels, it feels it's the best experience ever, I guess. There's no better place to be than here.

And there's something about the color as well that makes New York kind of pop. So whether it's Brazilian fans, Scottish, The Dutch fans, as we just mentioned as well, it must be a really kind of cathartic moment for everybody who's getting together to watch games just as a crowd of random people, right?

Yeah, and I think like I've been to the World Cup in Brazil and it was a lot of like tourists coming to Brazil, but I think in New York a lot of like, we literally have people from all over the world living in the city, so we're actually talking to residents being so The same feeling I'm having with Brazilians here, they are having with their people here. So it's just, it's a very important moment for the city for sure.

So 24 years, I think, since Brazil last won the World Cup. Are you going to do it this year?

Well, you know, I'm always hopeful. I have faith. I don't think we have the best team, but, uh, we know how it feels to win. Like, I grew up, like, I remember winning. I remember having the feeling. So I think like we're always hopeful that it's coming again, you know, but I think like I'm more excited than everybody else.

I want to take you back in time a bit now because we spoke recently in New York, and I want to compare that feeling of hope and excitement and enthusiasm to the first time you arrived in New York with no language. And was it ambition driving you? Was it determination? What What was your overriding emotion the first day you stepped into your job?

Into my job or into New York? Because—

Well, either kind of counts, because when you said it to me, I was just trying to put myself in your shoes. And I thought, my God, that's an incredibly brave thing to do. But there must have been something way bigger than bravery pushing you. What was that feeling like?

I think, like, I've always had a drive to change. Like, I needed change. I needed, I needed something new. So when I left my, my parents' home, I could go to the university in my city and still live there. But I wanted to leave, you know, I wanted to try something else. So I went to São Paulo, big city, figured out São Paulo. And then I was like, I think I need something bigger, more, even more exciting. Learning how to speak English was always my, like, it was always a pain point that I had. Because just learning from the books is never gonna get you the fluency that you need. Uh, and so I bought 6 months, like I enrolled in a 6-month English as a Second Language course in New York and came with $2,000 to figure life out and learn how to speak English. But the goal was to spend 6 months and then go back to Brazil, which I never did. I found home here. Yeah.

Okay, found home. Like, if you fast forward now and you come to where you are interviewing C-level operators from NVIDIA, from some of the biggest brands all around the world in some of the best locations, do you think about that change much? Or is it such a natural thing for you to be doing right now, interviewing these people, that you don't even, you don't go there?

No, it's always unreal. I think like there's a whole level of being grateful Like, I am literally grateful by everything. Like, like, it's kind of annoying even to be around me because I'm always like, I'm so happy, we are so lucky. Like, you know.

You're like Alec Baldwin's character in Friends. I can't think of the guy's name, but remember, he was hooray for everything. Phoebe's boyfriend, he was like, this is the best chair I've ever sat in. Is that you? Are you the female version?

Oh my God. I guess. I guess. Yeah. Like, while my boyfriend's complaining that our elevator is too slow, I am happy that we have an elevator, you know?

It's a great disposition, but it sets you up well to be a good podcast host and a good presenter and a media personality because you've got this natural curiosity. And one of the kind of conversations that everyone is talking about now is this intersection of AI and human and where we all sit with everything. And then there's the Barfly conversation of this is an AI hype cycle or this is just a general hype cycle. You're talking to people who have moved past hype cycle and are in the doing side of all of this. How does it look at the other side? And what do you think when you hear hype cycle? Well, I don't know.

I think like life and business and everything is about cycles, right? Uh, the fact that I can compare, like I just had a guest that we had before, the fact that we can compare what we did But where he was a year ago and where he is now, it shows the level of change that we are into at the moment. Like, it's just— I don't know, it feels, it feels great to be witnessing and registering the history that we are making. But don't you feel like that? You also interview a lot of people.

I, I'm kind of intimidated by it. I, I don't know what it is. Uh, that's why I wanted to ask you the question, because you seem open to all these changes. And you kind of described it really interestingly to say that we're now marking history. Is that how you feel we're going to look on this in 30 years' time?

Yes, yes, absolutely. I think the same way I think about, I was in New York when Knicks won the NBA. I would tell my kids and my grandkids and I'd be like, I was there in 1926, you know, like that old guy that talks about— that's going to be me. And I think It'd be the same thing for like, I remember when we were still chatting with, we had no idea what agents were and we were just trying to do things and we had no idea that we, that this profession would exist. I think producing content, it's a form of journalism and really like registering how we used to think. Imagine like if we watch everything that we're producing 30 years from now, How crazy it would be. Exactly how we do when we watch things from 30 years from now. I think that's, that's my feeling, that we are living a super change in history, and we're privileged enough that we have the means to record everything.

Interesting. There was a show called This Is Us. I don't know if you watched that at all.

No.

They have this great way of telling stories, but they documented COVID really interestingly, and they had this parallel story where it was a family I think it was an Indian immigrant arrived in New York and he met this South American lady and they fell in love. I think she was from Venezuela. But they were telling this parallel story while the cast and crew were like being filmed with masks on and they were doing the whole COVID thing, but they were filming the show as COVID. But the couple that they'd identified from the '60s was the guy who developed the algorithm for making video calls possible. And it was a really lovely kind of juxtaposition because you had these moments where people were FaceTiming grannies and granddads and grandparents, and they were able to have this connectivity because of this love story that happened. And they just marked it really, really well. And I wonder along the way, who are those people that are making history? Like, you've interviewed a lot of people. Is there— has there been an episode where you have felt the world is going to know about this in 5 years and it's going to change how we think about things?

I think we all have been through it. Like, I think like the first moments that we were talking about AI and like a chatbot or something, we were like, yeah, well, that, that was the most convenient part of what AI could do, right? Like, and now we're living through a whole supply chain change, a whole— I think every episode from 18 months ago to now has been like, oh my God, we are actually making history. The last one with Ricardo was a particularly interesting one because It was one guy and his agents who wrote 18, like 1.7 million lines of code and changed the entire way that the business operates after firing 4 of their tech teams, which is the whole tech team that he had. So like, you know, I think this is one step to history. I think he's one of the first, maybe the first, he's the first on my podcast and the first I know that have done it. Who knows who's gonna be next? But I think there will be many.

So, and the interesting thing about Ricardo's interview with you was he wasn't being like overly arrogant. He wasn't being really bullish. He was just saying, we made this decision and these are the outcomes. Compared to, I think he was episode number 51 the first time, I think is what you guys spoke about. Did you get a sense that he was worried about the decisions he's made, or is he really confident that this is the new future for them?

I think like once you start talking to agents and trying things out, you kind of lose— like you kind of see like the potential of it. You lose— you're not afraid anymore.

Mm-hmm.

And I think like he's also in a very good position that he's the CEO. He's not the CTO trying to convince the CEO that that's the best decision. So he could press the button and see what happens, right? Like he was taking the risk, but like he came from a company that was growing and now it became like a teenager and needed some structural change in processes and things like that to grow to the next level. And I think he made the right decision, but I think he was ready. I don't think he was hesitant.

There's going to be a lot of these stories emerging over the next 6 months, I imagine. What are the territory, the geography-based differences? Because you do a lot of travel, you take your show on the road. What's the attitude to the speed of acceleration in the different areas as you see it?

I think there's nowhere that is as fast as the US right now. I can't talk about China because I haven't been there, but I just went to Asia. I think the level of the conversations are very different. Like when here in New York, anywhere you go, you see billboards with AI signs, with a new AI technology. Literally, like, commuting to the studio, it's my AI discovery technology, like, my AI technology discoveries. Like, when I look, oh my God, this is actually very interesting. And when I went to London not so far, so long ago, I had— I didn't see anything. And I think, like, people are not talking as much as we do here. Any bar that we go Everybody's talking about their agents and everything. And while in Asia, it was all about— it wasn't about avoiding it, but it was about like, we can't just like go blindly in doing it. We have to be super secure before making this decision. And I think the US, just like, they're just, let's do it, let's try, let's figure it out, you know? And I think that's very powerful.

Who's doing better from your perspective when you consider those 2 Real different approaches to risk?

Well, I'm always going to be a big supporter of the risk takers. I think that's what drives process— progress. But I mean, I also understand how worried you should be about cybersecurity, right? Like, the models are becoming more effective and more everything. But if you, if you wait until everything is ready for you to apply first, then it might be too far from their competitors. I think like in the last 2 months, the US is like 2 years ahead of most brands that I talk to in other countries. Just because it was literally in March that everybody started playing with it. And now it's like we are seeing actually the change. And I think a lot of other places, change isn't there yet. Does it make any sense?

Yeah, it does. Like Ireland is quite conservative when it comes to technology adoption. We're a small, tiny island, yet we have an Irish company today, Finn, they were just acquired by Salesforce for $3.6 billion. But they went all in on American culture. I mean, Eoghan McCabe, their CEO, moved over. He's very public about his political views and becomes quite a controversial figure, but he's gone that full other side. But you've built your own agent, like you've built this entire news desk that sits behind you. And I wanted to ask you, how is it going? Like you've got this boss that sits alongside you as an editorial producer. You're laughing now, but tell us a little bit about your own journey with AI and what you've done and what your plans are for it.

Yeah, we, well, we have a pain point. I think all of us have, like, we can't read all the news and we can't be informed by everything by ourselves, right? And I think my goal with the podcast is to help inform and keep people aware of what happening around the world. So I think like it was very easy to understand that agents could do that. They could actually read all the news in the world to tell me what is relevant. So I now provide that to my audience. It's not as straightforward as you think. You just ask, hey, give me all the news. So you have to learn the system. You have to learn how they think, how they operate. And I think that's super, like, I think, I think that's the journey of learning how the agents work. It's actually what's going to pay off eventually, not necessarily the work that the agent does, but like understanding where you have to install this, what system you have to use for that, how to build a workflow with another agent, when we should build another agent, things like that. So how, how we can improve. The website breaks a lot. I'm learning as we go, like, what changed? What changed? Like, we didn't change the workflow. What is breaking? You know, like, oh, it's a little thing here, like, whatever. So it's a constant learn and fix. And I think to your point about risk, we took the risk to see if that makes sense, if that works. And it has been very good, a very good reception from our readers so far, including myself. updated and more aware of the industry since we got the agents working to curate what I should know.

I was going to ask you that, like, do you feel like you've learned in a different way since you've done it? But I want to counterbalance that because you had Patrick on the ground at ShopTalk Europe giving you like human insight and given the side of the industry that he's on, for people listening, Patrick's on the strategy side and on kind of technology development and very focused on At certain areas, was he able to bring you information that was different to what your agent was?

100%. Uh, I think like I read a lot more because I, I have to see if my agents are actually collecting the right information from articles, so I have to read them. So I end up like reading a lot more.

Yeah.

And the same from Patrick. Patrick has the on-the-ground experience with dealing with technology, so he can tell me more than anybody else the pain points that retailers have and why these technologies are better for them, or like what his view is as an innovation leader, right? And that's something that agents cannot do, not yet.

And they can't go for happy hour or cocktails after the show either.

Oh yeah, the relationship belongs to us, the charisma belongs to us. And like today, there was a— I will send that to you so you can share with your audience too. Satya Nadella posted on X how he thinks that we're going to work with our agents, that we're going to have to have the human capital and the token capital, and how this loop is actually what's going to add value and not necessarily just the agents or just the humans, because just the agents, they're just stupid computers working in loops. While the— yeah, like, and like, if all of us, all of us, 100% of us give everything to the agents to do, we are all going to be the same. The humans are actually what is going to drive research, like R&D teams better. We need the creativity and the insights that only humans can have. But I think like you never have that separate anymore. It's always going to be combined.

So I've got 3 boys now aged between 4 and 8. How should I be helping them to prepare better to be what they call in Ireland agentic citizens? What are the sort of things I can do to help them figure out the world in the way that makes them happy?

Good question. I'm not a parent, and I would be so challenged if I was.

But you— I ask you not for the parent side, but you see how people are using it, and we have to relearn. Like, I spent so much time in the last 2 months in particular, as you've kind of given the timeframe as well, learning every single day. I find I'm sweating my butt off trying to learn things and, you know, understanding MCP and how it's going to affect things and the way that I work today. So it's more from that perspective. I think you've, you know, being a risk-taker and you meet them for the first time, what would you say to them? They're football fans as well, so you can make it about football if it needs to be, or soccer.

Well, I use it all the time. So yesterday I was asking that This can be a bit sensitive, but I was asking what are the chances of getting US and Iran to play in the World Cup? Like, that's, you know, like, that can happen. It's 20% chance according to my ChatGPT.

Wow.

Uh, so like, you know, I use that all the time. Like, when will Brazil play again in New York so I can go watch it? And it's basically just the finals. So, I mean, you have the questions in your mind, just ask. I don't think you have to start with a— especially for your kids, like, it doesn't have to be a work thing or like trying to change something. It's really like comes out of your curiosity and what you want to know, to tell your friends, to, I don't know, make a plan, and the conversation starts flowing. I think we just have to create a habit of Talking to the agents, but not more than talking to people. And that's, and that's the challenge.

That's a tough part. I don't even let my kids have headphones right now. That, that sounds a bit crazy, but I don't want them disconnected from the world, right? I, I want them speaking to people, which I think you've touched on. So getting close to time because I try to keep this to 25 minutes, but I want to get into that cultural side of it because you talk to people across different intersections of our industry, and culture to me is one of those areas that I find really interesting. What's the culture like for those brands that you find that are winning right now?

I think it's always come from the leader. If the goal is set, and it's like, because business is business, retail is retail, it's all about how you're going to serve your consumer better. And I think people forget that a few times. I think like, if you're not, if you don't have a clear vision of what you are, and what you want to give to your customers, this will never work. Everybody has to have like the same KPI, the same idea of where the brand needs to go. And if you don't have this clear vision— so I'll say the culture that we win is the culture where the leader can set the clear vision for everybody else and keeps reminding them. So nobody—

Yeah.

You have to know how to prioritize. That's the thing.

So with that in mind, who's the number one leader that you get asked to interview the most that you haven't yet done? You're at ShopTalk 2027 or NRF. Who would you like to be on the main stage interviewing and what would be your first question?

I love, love, love Fran Horowitz from Abercrombie. I think she is fantastic and like I'm a big fan. She just got the Fortune 50 Most Powerful Women, something like this, which she is. My first question would be how to set a winning culture, because she made it. In 10 years, she transformed a business from couldn't go worse to a fantastic, uh, that is paying off, a fantastic brand that is paying off. They just opened a beautiful flagship here in New York, uh, and they're just getting better and better. So I think it would be her, not necessarily about AI, but about brands and emotions, right?

Incredible place to take us towards the end of our interview. So final question before I let you go get your morning on and go enjoy some soccer. Are you going to be celebrating a Knicks and Brazil double at the end of this summer?

I already— well, I celebrated yesterday. It has been too much fun. I think I'm done. I will try to not party too much. It's been painful.

It's going to be hard for you, I'd imagine. But Paola, look, thank you so much for taking time out to speak with me today. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope people got to learn a little bit more about you. But keep doing what you're doing. You're such a treasure in our industry. I've said that to you before, and I look forward to hearing lots more from you. Anything else? Where can people find you? Anything else interesting coming up that you'd like to let people know about?

Absolutely. We are about to launch our Agentech newsletters. So if you can go to our website, offbounce.tv, put your email there. As soon as we launch, we're gonna make sure that you get what is the best news for you, not for everybody, but for you in retail.

Interesting. You might come back in a few months and let us know how that's going for you, will you?

Absolutely. Amazing.

And I look forward to hanging out with you again soon.